Category Archives: Science Fiction/Fantasy

Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 24, 1968] Here, There, and Nowhere (August 1968 Galactoscope)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

The Cassiopeia Affair by Chloe Zerwick & Harrison Brown

In Redo Valley, Virginia, a radiotelescope complex in the late 20th century hunts for extra-terrestrial intelligence. One night Max Gaby detects a signal coming from Cassiopeia 3579. Inside there is a two-dimensional picture being sent out via binary.

Binary Code Puzzle from Cassiopeia
Can you solve the binary-code puzzle?

This provides proof of an alien intelligence.

At the same time, conflict is brewing between Russia and China, one that could plunge the world into nuclear war. Is this evidence of intelligent life among the stars the greatest hope we have for peace?

Yes, this is yet another story of Radio Astronomy. These are now becoming as regular in science fiction as space adventures and superhuman mutants, but this stands out as a wonderful example. I believe this is the first fiction from the pair, with Zerwick being primarily a visual artist and Brown being a scientist. Together they have created something masterful.

Although much of the novel is taken up by discussions of scientific theories or information on how to programme radio telescopes, it is raised up by excellent writing and a real understanding of character. Whilst Judith Merrill criticised it for being dull, I never found it so. It was a book I was dying to pick up whenever I got the opportunity. It is a testament to the authors that it never felt dry.

Regarding the characters, it is a huge cast, but one where they all feel considered and with depth, not merely props for discussion. These include Max Gaby as the wide-eyed believer, Barney Davidson the grouchy cynic, Rudolph Calder the Machiavellian hawk and Adam Lurie the disillusioned drunk who is secretly sleeping with Gaby’s wife.

Throughout there are little moments that make it feel real, such as Gaby calling Adam up at 4 am about a possible sighting and Adam grumpily insisting on having his shower and coffee first, or when someone tries to bribe Davidson and he threatens to kill him.

The characters are not perfect either, we regularly change perspective and sometimes see that they are downright unpleasant. But it is made clear we are not meant to sympathise with everyone’s point of view, rather to gain an insight into their motivations.

It also tries to consider the politics of the situation carefully. It demonstrates how different factions will react and what they will want to do with this information. A particularly interesting, if depressing, touch is that the hawks on both sides of the Iron Curtain distrust Gaby as he is a refugee from Hungary in 1956. This element gives it both a sense of excitement and verisimilitude that is often missing from these heavier works.

These kinds of harder science fiction stories are not usually the ones that appeal to me. However, I was enthralled. It may be even more enjoyed by fans of Clarke and Niven and I would not be surprised to see it on the Hugo ballot next year.

Five Stars


by Victoria Silverwolf

Assignment in Nowhere, by Keith Laumer


Cover art by Richard Powers.

This is the third in a series of novels dealing with alternate universes. The first was Worlds of the Imperium. The Noble Editor gave it a moderately positive review.

Next came The Other Side of Time. I thought it was pretty decent, if not outstanding.

Both books featured a fellow named Brion Bayard, a man from our own universe who went on to be an agent for the Imperium, a British/German empire that dominates another version of Earth.

Bayard plays a small but important role in this new novel, but the main character is a man named Johnny Curlon. He's also the narrator. Let's say hello to him.

He's a Real Nowhere Man

Johnny is a big, strong guy who lives in Florida and runs a fishing boat. The story starts off with some tough hoods trying to intimidate him, but he deals with them easily. At this point, I thought I was reading one of John D. MacDonald's Florida-based suspense novels, particularly those featuring Travis McGee, a big, strong guy who owns a houseboat.

(If you haven't read them, give 'em a try. They're really good.)

Anyway, we find out this is a science fiction novel when Johnny gets rescued from his floundering boat, which the bad guys have sabotaged, by our old pal Brion. He carries Johnny around in a vehicle that can not only travel between universes, but is able to pass through solid matter and become invisible. Mighty handy little gizmo.

Naturally, Johnny is confused by all this. It seems that he's the key to preventing lots of universes from being wiped out by something called the Blight (capital letter and all.) There are antagonists eager to use Johnny for their own purposes.

At this point, Johnny's knife, which is actually part of an ancient sword handed down to him by his ancestors, gets reunited with another part of the ancient weapon. That's our first hint that this SF novel is going to seem a lot like a fantasy adventure.

Johnny winds up working with a fellow who is very obviously the main bad guy. (Obvious to the reader, anyway, although it's quite a while until Johnny catches on.) They travel to a universe whose only human inhabitant is a stunningly beautiful woman, straight out of a sword-and-sorcery story. She even has a pet griffin, and there's a giant around.

(This middle section of the book reminds me of Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road. That was science fiction disguised as fantasy. This one is fantasy disguised as science fiction, to some degree.)

After leaving that magical place with another piece of the sword, the villain takes Johnny to the universe he wants to rule. It's a place where Richard Lionheart didn't die in battle, but lived to be a weak ruler. He wound up surrendering his kingdom to the French, so France is still in control of England, which is called New Normandy.

(Brion already told Johnny that he was the last descendent of the Plantagenets, so it all ties together, sort of.)

The bad guy's plan would come at the cost of destroying a bunch of universes. (You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, I guess.) Can our hero set things right? (Go ahead, take a guess.)

In typical Laumer fashion, this is an action-packed yarn that moves at a dizzying pace. It's not as tightly plotted as some, and I'd say it's the weakest book in the Imperium series. The middle section — you know, all that fantasy stuff — seems to come from another novel entirely. There's a lot of pseudoscientific blather trying to explain what's going on, and none of it makes any sense.

Two stars.


by Gideon Marcus

The Two-Timers


Cover by Leo and Diane Dillon

Nine years ago John Breton nearly lost his wife. Now, a decade later, he and Kate are drifting apart, their knives out at every opportunity, their marriage a fast cooling ember. John has thrown himself bodily into his geological consulting business, and his wife has picked a hobby John has no interest in, befriending Miriam Palfrey, an automatic writer. At a typical crashingly dull dinner party with the Palfreys, characterized by endless sniping, John decides only profound drunkenness will get him through the night.

Whereupon he receives a call:

"You've been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years–and I'm coming to take her back."

Because nine years ago, Kate had died. Two years into their marriage, a stupid fight had compelled Kate's husband to stay home, while she trooped through the night, headed for a party she would never attend, intercepted by a brutal rapist and killer.

John, calling himself Jack at the time, was devastated, wracked with guilt. More than this: he began to be unhinged from time, taking trips weekly to the scene of the crime. Jack resolved to stop Kate's murder, even if it meant rending the very fabric of space and causality.

Two timelines were created: Timeline A, in which Jack led a lonely, monomaniacal life, and Timeline B, in which a sleek and unappreciative John enjoyed his misbegotten wife, the fruits of the labor of his alter ego.

Thus, Jack hatched a plan–move sideways to Timeline B…and fill John's shoes, whether he liked it or not.

But the law of conservation of energy is a hard fact, in the multiverse as well as the universe. Jack Breton's actions threaten not only the rocky relationship of Kate and John, but also the whole of humanity.

According to the book's blurb, this is Shaw's third book, but the first to achieve wide distribution. I don't know what his first book was, but I read his second, Night Walk last year. Between that and his short stories, it was clear Shaw was a gifted author just waiting to grow out of his adolescence.

With The Two-Timers, he has done so.

I picked the book up just before bed and had to force myself to put it down. Eight hours later, it was in my hands again, and it did not leave until I'd finished the story come lunchtime (it was a welcome companion as I waited in the courthouse for a jury duty that never materialized).

The characters are vividly, deeply realized, all of them evolving throughout the story. We initially hate John and sympathize with Jack, but neither of the Bretons is wholly irredeemanble, nor sympathetic. And Kate is no prize to be won; she is an independent entity with her own virtues, failings, and feelings. Shaw reminds me a bit of Larry Niven, drawing people with quick, deft strokes. But Shaw has a sensitive style, working more with emotions than hard science. It's the people that matter in this piece; the SFnal content is exciting, necessary, but secondary.

The pacing in the book is exquisite, from the painful depiction of a marriage gone sour at the beginning, to the arrival of Jack, through the resolution of the resulting triangle. The interspersed scenes of the slow collapse of the physical universe around them are deftly handled, as is the closing in of Lieutenant Blaize Convery, the detective who knows Breton saved his wife nine years ago; he just can't figure out how.

As Lorelei (who picked up the book on my recommendation and tore through it in short order) notes, aside from the poetic writing, the real triumph of the book is that you get so many viewpoint characters, and so many changing perspectives on these characters, and none of it is confusing. It's just masterfully done.

It's a hard book to read in parts. The emotions here are fraught ones, and there are some rather unpleasant (though never gratuitous) scenes. Nevertheless, these are emotions that must be explored, and thankfully, the mystery and the brilliant writing carry you past them, as well as the satisfying resolution of the threesome's story. My only quibble is that the end doesn't quite work, logistically, though it makes sense thematically. And as Lorelei notes, it's a touch rushed.

Nevertheless, The Two-Timers is a terrific work, definitely a strong contender for my Hugo ballot next year.

4.5 stars.

Omha Abides

We Americans love a good revolution story. After all, our nation was founded by a rebellion, and the appeal of an underdog throwing off an oppressor has been popular since David threw a rock at Goliath.

C.C. MacApp takes a stab at the theme with his latest book, Omha Abides, a tale of the 35th Century. 1500 years before, the Gaddyl had conquered the Earth. The amphibian aliens did not succeed without a fight, but their advanced technology, particularly their craft-shielding Distorters, proved decisive. Human civilization was shattered, the population reduced to a bare fraction, many of them condemned to slavery. Meanwhile, the Gaddyl build their own fiefdoms amidst the ruins of the human cities and built an interstellar teleport transit hub in Arizona.

Now Earth is a hunting preserve, humanity largely quiescent. The North American continent is home to just 25 million people…and half a million overlord Gaddyl. The humans who are not slaves roam in bands or live in primitive statelets. They have no hope of taking back the planet, until a series of events precipitously brings success in their reach.

Our hero is Murno, a freed man who lives with his family in Fief Bay, once known as San Francisco. A new, cruel lord has ascended to the fief throne, and he has decided that no longer shall free humans be off limits to hunting parties.

At the same time, Murno is contacted by the underground. He is entrusted with three items, two of them Gaddyl, and one of ancient human make, which he is tasked to take east, beyond the Sierras, beyond the mysterious Grove, even past the mighty Rockies, to where the mythical deity named "Omha" waits.

If you had a subscription to the recently defunct magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, you may have read about half of this book. Victoria Silverwolf reviewed Under the Gaddyl Tree, which comprises about the first third of the book, and Trees Like Torches, which contains bits from the middle. Victoria gave both stories three stars and felt they were competent, but nothing special.

Often, the expansion of stories into a novel results in something less than the sum of its parts. The opposite occurs in this case. Now, instead of just being isolated, mildly interesting adventure stories, now Murno's encounters with Gaddyl, blue mutant humans, a giant grove of telepathic trees, and so on, gird a compelling plot. Humanity shouldn't have a chance against the Gaddyl. But neither should an electron, per classical physics, be able to jump energy levels. But thanks to quantum physics and the Uncertainty Principle, given a short enough period of time, an electron can possess abnormal amounts of energy.

Similarly, a confluence of circumstances makes for a successful rebellion opportunity. Because humanity had been waiting for its chance. The telepathic Blues had spies in pivotal places. There was an underground poised for action. There really is an Omha (and you can guess what its nature is early on, which will also clue you in on how to pronounce the word).

Add the trigger of the Gaddyl getting a bit too complacent and a bit too cruel, as well as the theft of some vital technologies, and a human victory becomes plausible.

The pacing of the book is a little off. Much of the human victory isn't even detailed until the last 25 pages of the book (though it turns out that's not really too short a span; MacApp pulls it off). Also, much reference is made to Murno baffling his alien pursuers with "trail puzzles", a phrase with which I'm not familiar, and whose meaning I still don't apprehend. Occasionally, the story does lapse into conventional adventure fare–more like a tale of the American West than the American future.

But, it's a book with real cinematic quality to it; the scenes in California were particularly resonant for me, a Golden State native. The Gaddyl are portrayed perhaps a touch too human, but I appreciated the range of types, from scoundrel to honorable enemy. And as an American, I suppose I've got as much a soft spot for overthrowing tyranny as anyone.

Four stars.


by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

Last year's pairing of E.C Tubb and Juanita Coulson's has gotten an encore. In fact, both novels are sequels. My esteemed colleague and editor had favorable reviews of both, so I was excited to read them:

Ace Double H-77

Derai, by E. C. Tubb

Earl Dumarest, the itinerant interstellar provocateur and do-gooder from The Winds of Gath returns in Derai, hunting news of Earth. On his way he takes a job escorting the Lady Derai of the House of Caldor back to her family on the planet Hive. He soon determines that Derai is a telepath. Her father sent her to the college of Cyclans to treat the constant fear and nightmares brought on by hearing the minds of those around her. Derai ran away from the college, where Cybers (once-humans with emotion and sensation excised who now can connect to a collective mind) wanted to use her genetics, turning her into a mindless vessel to bear telepathic children. Her home planet has its own risks – her uncle wants to take over the House, planning to assassinate her father and half-brother, and marry Derai to her cousin to gain legitimacy.

Dumarest keeps much of his thoughts to himself, both from the other characters and the reader, but cannot keep his developing feelings for Derai from her telepathic ability. He carries himself as a man who has seen too much. He inspires loyalty, and in those he has helped that is understandable, but it also comes from some who have only just met him. One man he meets through a mutual friend takes the chance of being burned to death to get a blade to Dumarest in a deadly maze arena.

Dumarest almost seems to resist the plot, needing to be pushed into each new quest. At times, his struggle as a character made him feel like a disparate individual, one side grim and withdrawn, another altruistic at great cost to himself; it's as if author Tubbs had two distinct directions for the novel in mind, and was unable to find the balance between them. Dumarest's staid demeanor only allows him to rebuff so much, and he is, if reluctantly, still prompted to aid disenfranchised travelers, save a gambler from himself, and compete in a tournament to prolong the head of Caldor House's life. Each time he intends to leave the House to its own devices, his feelings for Derai bring him back.

Tubb has a lurid, graphic style of description. It's equally evocative of beauty and violence. In a particularly unsettling set of scenes, Dumarest barely escapes being eaten alive like his companions by bird-sized bees. For how memorable the depictions of the insects were, I anticipated them playing a larger role in the overall story. The scenes stuck with me for several days due to the excessively grisly details.

Something else that ate at my brain: thanks to medical advancements and travel stasis Dumarest and Derai are chronologically far older than they seem, but Derai was described as childlike far too often for my liking. Tubb could have left it at one use of "nubile".

3 stars

The Singing Stones, by Juanita Coulson

Geoff is a member of the Federation, the galactic government introduced in Coulson's Crisis on Cheiron. He embarks on what could be a suicide mission to the protectorate of Deliayan, Pa-Lüna. Both humans and Deliyans have been exploiting the people of Pa-Lüna, tricking them into indentured servitude. When a man is murdered right in front of him over a stone, Geoff investigates, finding the stone in question has strange, enchanting properties. He and Tahn, a Pa-Lünan, set out for the protectorate, and they meet Nedra, priestess of a mysterious goddess.

From the outset, he is on a clock: a past planetary mission left his team dead, and him with the lingering impacts from a past poisoning that flares, causing him pain and debilitating him with growing frequency. The nature of his sense of duty and outlook, framed by his limited lifespan, is compelling.

Geoff is a skeptic, both of motive and means. He views the people of Pa-Lüna with a mix of respect and condescension, but Geoff witnesses the tangible effects of the stones of song. They induce a euphoria and they, or their "goddess", can heal the sick and injured and strengthen her followers over time. Does the Goddess bestow gifts freely or are her worshipers trading one form of servitude for another, framed in a softer light? Are the powers of the Stones and the goddess's telepathic messages divine or an advanced, but still mortal mechanism?

I appreciated the exploration of what is becoming a new trend in sci-fi–rejecting overt military intrusions and favoring a system that furthers a newly-contacted culture's sovereignty. It's not a bad direction to go, though authors vary in degrees of patronizing the native people of these worlds, from treating them roughly as equals to regarding them as "primitive" beings who need protecting. And it does say something that it takes someone from outside the system to truly put things in motion, no matter how long change has been brewing. Having the fight be against not just an alien threat but also a human, institutional threat asks if human expansion is truly helping, needs tempering, or if it is causing more harm in the end.

All in all, a solid book. Had I not recently read several other books with a similar premise I would have liked it even more. However, I can't fault Coulson for the trends of this year. She created a rich tapestry and I would be happy to explore her worlds and characters in future stories.

4.5 stars




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Comics, Movies

[August 22, 1968] Vive de Gaul– Asterix the Gaul Movie

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by Fiona Moore

At an event at the Institut Français in London recently, I was able to see the newly-translated animated film Asterix the Gaul (made in 1967, but only released in English this year). While it’s not a great adaptation, it is nice to see a series that’s only growing in popularity in the French-speaking world getting wider exposure.

Asterix the Gaul movie poster
Asterix the Gaul movie poster

In case you’ve missed the Asterix phenomenon, some background. Asterix le Gaulois, or Asterix the Gaul, is a Franco-Belgian comic from the writing and drawing team of Goscinny and Uderzo, originally serialised in 1959, with the first album coming out in 1961. Since then it’s only become more and more popular, with the ninth album, Asterix et les Normands (Asterix and the Normans) reaching 1.2 million sales in its first two days of release earlier this year.

On the face of it, Asterix might seem an unlikely hit. The story is a humourous historical fantasy, starting with a “what if…” premise to the effect that, after Caesar conquered Gaul and, as any schoolchild studying Latin knows, divided it into three parts, a small Gaulish village remained unconquered, due to their druid having invented a magic potion that gives the drinker super-strength. Our protagonist, Asterix, is a diminutive but sharp-witted warrior; his best pal is Obelix, a giant who has permanent super-strength due to having fallen in a vat of magic potion as a baby. Together, they have adventures traveling around Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, resisting Romans and meeting interesting, if frequently ethnically stereotyped, people.

Asterix' pal Obelix is a menhir salesman. He's barely in this story.
Asterix' pal Obelix is a menhir salesman. He's barely in this story.

However, if you have a chance to read the albums, you can see the appeal. The puns are thick, heavy and groanworthy (particularly as regards the character names: the Gauls all have names ending in -ix, meaning we get people called Assurancetourix and Abracourix, and the Romans in -us, giving us Humerus and Fleurdelotus), and the anachronism humour nonstop. Additionally Goscinny and Uderzo have a lot of affectionate fun with projecting stereotypes of modern European nations back onto their Roman past equivalents. The story of plucky, likeable people resisting an oppressor is one with relevance to all political stripes. The Romans are always comically stupid and the violence cartoonish, keeping the tone from getting too heavy for children.

Asterix and Panoramix resisting Roman oppression
Asterix and Panoramix resisting Roman oppression

The series has appeared in English translation twice before now, both times in English children’s comics (Valiant and Ranger) and on neither occasion faithful, transporting the action to ancient Britain in the apparent belief that British audiences would be incapable of sympathising with French characters. However, word at the Institut is that an approved translation by Anthea Bell is currently in production and should be released next year.

Our hero was described in one English translation as an "ancient Brit with bags of grit." No, really.
Our hero was described in one English translation as an "ancient Brit with bags of grit." No, really.

The film Asterix the Gaul is a 70-minute animation, apparently originally planned as a telemovie but instead winding up in cinematic release. The visuals are, for the most part, decently done, and it has a jaunty theme tune by Gerard Calvi. The English voice cast are for the most part adopting American accents (the main exceptions being Stopthemusix the Bard and Julius Caesar, who are both using British received pronunciation), which seems an odd decision as French comics popular in other markets, such as Tintin, don’t generally do well in the American sphere, and it might be better to try and sell to the wider English-speaking world.

The plot more or less follows that of the comic album Asterix le Gaulois, the first adventure in the series. Roman centurion Phonus Balonus (Caius Bonus in the original comic), wanting to know the secret of the Gauls’ super-strength, sends a spy into the village disguised as a Gaul. Upon learning that the secret is the potion brewed by druid Panoramix, the Romans kidnap him, with Phonus Balonus planning to use his strengthened legions to become Emperor. Asterix sneaks into their camp with a view to rescuing Panoramix, but, on finding his friend in good spirits and having fun winding up the Romans, Asterix surrenders and joins him, with the pair living a luxurious life at the Romans’ expense. Finally Panoramix pretends to give in, but in fact brews a potion which makes the drinkers’ hair and beards grow uncontrollably. Realising that they can’t keep the gag going indefinitely, Panoramix pretends to brew an antidote, while also secretly furnishing Asterix with a small amount of magic potion. When the pair make their escape, they run into Caesar himself, who has come to investigate the mysterious goings-on in person.

Julius Caesar does not approve of Panoramix' beard-growing potion.
Julius Caesar does not approve of Panoramix's beard-growing potion.

The decision to adapt the first book in the series, and without the input of the creators, is arguably the film’s biggest problem. A lot of the running gags and characters which have contributed to the series’ appeal, such as Obelix’s tiny dog Idéfix and the ongoing feud between fishmonger Ordraflfabétix and blacksmith Cétautomatix, were worked out in later volumes, and the story feels thin without them. Although Asterix has never exactly been known for its female characters (there are exactly two women regulars, both stereotypes and only one having an actual name), in the film the village seems to be a homosexual commune, with no women or children at all. Goscinny and Uderzo were reportedly very unhappy with this movie, and it’s a shame they weren’t involved, as they could have revised their earlier story to include this later material.

The translation is generally serviceable. The punning names are retained and even arguably improved, with the bard Assurancetourix becoming Stopthemusix and Abraracourcix the chief becoming Tonabrix. The narration has a few heavy-handed gags like “Caesar had a lot of Gaul,” and there are more subtle jokes for those who remember their classics, like Phonus Balonus proposing to his second-in-command Marcus Sourpus that they form a triumvirate (not knowing that a triumvirate is, by definition, made up of three men). There’s a long and rather unfunny sequence with a singing ox-cart driver that feels like it’s just in to fill time, but there is also a blink-and-you-miss-it moment where Panoramix appears to be gathering marijuana in the woods.

That's some suspicious-looking smoke. Panoramix.
That's some suspicious-looking smoke. Panoramix.

All in all, while it’s not the best introduction to the series, it gives English-speaking audiences a general flavour. It’s good to see a cartoon series where the main character lives by his wits more than his fists, and where bullies are shown as hapless incompetents who can be defeated by ridicule. Reportedly a new film is in production, based on Asterix et Cleopatre (Asterix and Cleopatra), with the creators’ full involvement, and I look forward to seeing if it is an improvement.

Two and a half stars.



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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 20, 1968] A tale of two issues (September 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Split Personality

There's an interesting piece by Ted White in May's Science Fiction Review.  He talks about how the magazines are on a slow, inexorable decline due to a number of factors.  The biggest is that SF mags used to be just one subgenre of the myriad pulps, all of which had their lurid covers prominently displayed at every corner newsstand.  Sure, the SF pulps weren't exactly of a piece with their mystery, Western, and thriller brethren, but Joe Palooka didn't care, grabbing the most attractive issues.  So, SF thrived, making a profit even if it sold just 25% of a print run.


Note Astounding (now Analog) in the upper left and Amazing in the upper right

Then the pulps died in the 50s, partly due to changing tastes, mostly due to the collapse of American News Company, the main distributor for monthly mags (and comics).  The remaining SF mags were consigned to lesser shelves, all by themselves.  The average schmo got his entertainment from TV.

The profit mark has now risen to 50%–in other words, at least half of the issues printed must sell for the run to break even.  This makes it very risky for the mags to try to expand their market by printing more issues.  If they, say, print 50K and sell 35K, well and good.  But if they then print 200K and sell 96K…they've lost money on the run.

Add to that even SF people are losing interest in mags, lured by paperbacks and the new paperback anthologies, and dismayed (as I have been) by the declining quality of stories over the last ten years.  The only thing that keeps us subscribing is inertia and brand loyalty.  That'll wear off unless the magazines manage to turn the ship.

The magazines have been around for almost half a century.  Assuming they are around in the 21st Century, and if this trend continues, they will service an increasingly small fraction of the SF-interested community.  They will be like the horseshoe crab: living fossils, unchanged for 300 million years, clinging to life in a wildly different environment.

But that's all speculation.  For now, enough good stuff still comes out in the mags to keep me buying.  Though the high variability of the latest issue of F&SF may cause me to revisit that policy…

Over Hill and Dale


by Chesley Bonestell—this is the same nebula featured repeatedly in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor"

Ogre!, by Ed Jesby

It's been four years since Ed Jesby offered up his first tale, Sea Wrack, which was so-so.  His sophomore tale, Ogre!, is an improvement.

Knut the Ogre takes a nap sometime in the Middle Ages.  When he awakes, covered in loam and with mushrooms growing in his ears, he finds he has slept clear through to the 20th Century.  There (then), the seven-foot beast befriends a timid bookie on the run from the Mob.  You see, Ogres are actually misunderstood creatures, quite nice and mild despite the calumny heaped upon them by humans.

Together, Knut and the bookie (and the bookie's seamstress pal) hatch a scheme to get the bookie off the hook and out of the business.  And of course, it involves horses:

To Harry the plan seemed to be basically sound: after all the way to make money was on the races; there was no better way. You took bets or you made them, all other ways of earning a living were mysterious, square, or the result of inheritance.

It's really a charming tale, and it put me in a charitable mood for the rest of the issue.  More fool me…

Four stars.

Butterfly Was 15, by Gilbert Thomas

A scurrilous German scientist has learned how to manipulate others with the judicious use of electrodes and remote transmitters.  He meets his match when he locks horns with a traditional psychologist with methods of his own.

This is supposed to be a funny piece.  I found its themes of mind control and Ephebophilia to be thoroughly repellent.

One star.

Sos the Rope (Part 3 of 3), by Piers Anthony

Once again, we turn to our friend, Brian, who will likely never volunteer for anything ever again…


by Brian Collins

We now find ourselves in the final installment of the latest F&SF serial, but unfortunately it’s so long as to encompass nearly half the novel. We run into trouble before we’ve even jumped into the story proper, as the recap section commits the grievous sin of telling us about things that we have not been able to read for ourselves. At the end of the previous installment you may recall that Sos and Sol are about to fight in the battle circle to see who takes custody of Sola and Soli, Sol’s wife and adopted daughter respectively. Apparently, between installments, Sos lost the fight, and is now journeying up “the mountain” to commit ritual suicide.

I do not understand how this happened. It could be that Anthony had turned in an early draft of the novel and had intended to write the fight scene between Sos and Sol, but all the same, this is such a glaring oversight as to show incompetence. I was confused at first because I thought I had somehow missed the ending of the previous installment, but no, I had not missed anything; it’s just that the fight and its immediate aftermath were kept “offscreen.”

Now up to date, we find Sos who, naturally, does not die on his way up this freezing mountain, but falls unconscious and is rescued by a small society of people who are somewhere between the crazies (the civilized people) and the nomads who roam the wasteland. We come across the second major female character of the novel (foreboding music plays), who, as you would expect, goes unnamed at first. She’s a short athletic girl whom Anthony repeatedly calls childlike and “Elfen,” but also attractive, which makes me wonder if Anthony might be appealing to a certain subspecies of male reader here. The girl steals Sos’s bracelet and makes him work for it, all but forcing him into taking her as his wife. As if the institution of marriage were not already filled with holes, the system presented in this novel may be fit for ants, spiders, and other small invertebrates, but not actual humans.

Since this is at least theoretically the last stretch of the narrative, in which we find our hero at his lowest point before he rises from the darkness, I need not go into great detail as to what happens next—except for one thing: Sosa (for that is her name now) reveals that she’s been desperate to find a husband, having gone through several men already, because she feels great angst at not being able to produce a child. Infertility is often sad news, to be sure, but in a world where contraception is presumably hard to acquire, I can’t imagine this strikes Sos’s ears as too sad; after all, he’s still committed to Sola in his heart.

Piers Anthony seems to understand women about as much as I understand the inner workings of a submarine.

Having given up his rope in his fight with Sol (another major detail we are not told about until after the fact), Sos has not only regained his confidence but taken up fists as his new weapon. I don't recall if we get his new full name (as men in the novel’s world have a monosyllable followed by their weapon of choice), but Sos the Fist sounds…….

Anyway, there is an inevitable rematch, and this time Sos is victorious. The ending here implies that there may be a sequel in the works, but I’m not waiting to see what Anthony does next. 1 out of 5 stars for this installment, and barely 2 out of 5 stars for the novel.


by Gideon Marcus

Faunas, by L. Sprague de Camp

Someone in the zines was complaining that magazines never run worthy poetry anymore, that back in the golden days of the 50s, most of the pieces were memorable.

Keeping up the trend, De Camp offers up a snatch of doggerel comparing the titanic beasts of yore with the primate beasts of now.  Pretty pat stuff.

Two stars.

Harry's Golden Years, by Gahan Wilson

It is amazing the lengths to which people will go to maintain a sinecure.  Harry Van Deventer is the richest man in the world, senile and filled with infantile rage and a teen's hormones.  His hangers-on can only manage him by keeping his surroundings perfectly controlled—a willing nurse here, an emergency surgery to fix a day's incaution there.  But even a 24/7 watch can slip up…

It's hard to imagine a man both so utterly terrible and yet so rich and powerful that so many would endure so much to keep him alive.  But I suppose venality trumps all.

Three stars.

The Evaporation of Jugby, by Stephen Barr

Wadsworth Jugby is a big zero, a department store Vice President-without-portfolio, mediocre in every way.  He finally gets the opportunity to live life from a different perspective when his friend, Dan Byron, invents a psyche-swapping machine.  Intoxicated by his exchange, he eagerly agrees to expand the scope of the experiment, round-robining with six other folks.  The end is…well, given away by the title.

Fluff, with one funny line:

"Jugby could suggest a puzzled frown without lowering his eyebrows-some monkeys can do this."

Two stars.

The Dying Lizards, by Isaac Asimov

Last month, the Good Doctor had a terrific article on the dinosaurs.  This month, unfortunately, he indulges in speculation, which never works out well.

The topic this time 'round is the sudden death of the dinosaurs.  He advances various climatic and medical hypotheses, discarding each one in turn.  He poopoos the idea of mammals being "superior" as we existed alongside dinosaurs for most, if not all, of their tenure on Earth.  Asimov leaves off with the suggestion that an external event caused it, specifically a nearby supernova that spiked radiation-induced mutations.

Again, I have trouble seeing how the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and icthyosaurs and pleisiosaurs could all have destructive mutations but not the birds and mammals.  I think Ike's cute idea that dinosaurs evolved intelligence and killed themselves with powerful weapons, which would have occurred in the blink of an paleontological eye and thus escape excavation, is more plausible.

Three stars.

A Scare in Time, by David R. Bunch

The demarkations of time, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and centuries, have met in their onion dome.  Tired of being measured and metered by humanity, they plot their ultimate revenge…only to have it foiled by human ingenuity.

A cute modern fairy tale.  Three stars.

The Moving Finger Types, by Henry Slesar

Twilight Zone department: Legget couldn't figure out what was wrong with his life.  It was like his every move was laid down in a script, and he'd lost the page.  Little did he know, that's exactly what had happened.

A fun bit on predestination told in Slesar's competent screenwriter fashon.

Four stars.


by Gahan Wilson

Mixed feelings

You can see my problem.  If you read from either end of this issue, you've got a good 30 pages of material (and you can count Merril's book column, too, though I rarely agree with her assessments, and her tastes are drifting far afield of SF these days).  But if you read through the middle, that's a lot of one-star territory to slog through.  A lot.

Is half a loaf better than none?  More importantly, is it worth fifty cents a month?

Only you can decide…




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Horror, Movies

[August 18, 1968] The Horror is Real (Targets)

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by Jason Sacks

I’ve reviewed some frightening movies in this magazine before – the existential middle-aged angst of Seconds, the gothic horror of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and the eerie uncanny feeling of Planet of the Vampires, among others. But I’ve never reviewed a movie that’s scary in quite the same way as the new movie Targets.

Targets is frightening because it’s so real. It’s loosely based on the story of the Texas Tower Sniper. This real-life horror happened on August 1, 1966, when a seemingly ordinary man, a Marine veteran named Charles Whitman, climbed the long stairs of the Main Building at the University of Texas with rifles and a sawed-off shotgun and then began indiscriminately opening fire during a class break on campus.

Whitman killed 14 people that day, students walking on the campus mall and people shopping along distant Guadalupe Street, people cowering and people walking innocently. 31 more were injured, stark and frightening numbers we all hope will never be reached again.

A news photo from that terrible day in Austin, Texas.

As subsequent news reports shared, Whitman was a man with a bit of a broken life. He was an orphan who was adopted by an exacting family in which the father was never satisfied. He served in the Marines but never saw battle, instead studying engineering. At the time of his shooting, it seems he was in an unhappy marriage and struggling with mental health. And though we might try to guess what caused Whitman to snap that day, in the end, the inner life of Charles Whitman will always be a mystery. And in that lack of closure lies perhaps the greatest horror of all, because Whitman is a Rorschach test, a person onto whom we can project our own confusion, our fears and our worries about the modern world.

The blurry line between fiction and reality

In Targets our killer has the banal name of Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O’Kelly. Thompson lives in the quiet and peaceful San Fernando Valley. He’s in his 20s, lives with his parents and seems like an ordinary young man who suddenly seems to get into his head to… murder his family brutally.

Director Peter Bogdanovich, in his feature debut, does a fantastic job of creating that shock value for viewers, as we are lulled into a calm, false sense of security. Everything at the Thompson house seems very calm and serene on the surface, very 1968 you might say, in which everything seems quite placid on the surface of things.

And just like in our terrible year of assassinations and wars and riots in the streets, below the surface of a seemingly peaceful existence is an unbelievable amount of roiling turmoil desperately trying to escape.

But in this movie, Bogdanovich also brings in another element, one that really gives this film a smartly designed feeling of tension. Because there’s another plot in this film. Boris Karloff essentially plays himself in this movie, in documentary-like scenes in which washed-up old horror actor Byron Orlok decides he is out of step with the times. Nobody likes his outdated style of horror anymore. His work and his style are no longer relevant, so Orlok has decided to return to London to retire.

Mr. Bogdanovich on the left, Mr. Karloff on the right.

But Orlok’s companion, film director Sammy Michaels – played by director Bogdanovich! – persuades Orlok to make one final public appearance in Los Angeles. They decide to attend a premiere of his final film at a drive-in in LA suburb Reseda and arrange his appearance there.

As the day goes on, we witness two parallel threads. In one, we see Orlok make his preparations to attend the premiere and hear him talk about the changes in modern society from his time in the limelight. In the other, deeply chilling thread, we witness Thompson on top of an oil tank in the San Fernando Valley, assassinating innocent people who are just driving down the freeway.

Those assassination scenes feel like they take an eternity because of the smart ways Bogdanovich, designer Polly Plott and cinematographer László Kovács compose the scene: with bland, sun-washed colors, an alienating sense of distance, the random way Thompson seems to be sprawled on the tanker floor. And his escape is also presented in an equally powerful, equally bland way. Though an oil company employee discovers him, that man is dispatched in an un-cinematic manner and Thompson’s escape does not present him in a light that makes the assassin heroic in any way.

Eventually Thompson flees to a movie theatre, the same theatre where Orlok’s film will be premiering. In an ironical fulfilment his own fears, Orlok’s is rendered irrelevant by the real-world horrors of 1968. We see a few scenes of the film. It looks like a Roger Corman adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, and ten years ago that film would have fit the times well. But 1968 requires sterner horrors. ‘68 requires Rosemary’s Baby and The Hour of the Wolf and the more existential fears of Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It perhaps requires a different type of horror as in The Devil Rides Out. And it requires the profoundly upsetting horror of Targets.

Targets is not a perfect film. It’s a bit fannish feeling, no surprise because Bogdanovch is a prominent writer for film journals and reportedly is working on a documentary of the great director John Ford. Orlok is named after the lead character in the classic 1922 German expressionistic vampire film Nosferatu – a film student reference if I ever heard one – and the slightly postmodern feel of the Orlok scenes take away from the horror of the massacre.

The drive-in before it was full.

But despite that, in this year of Kennedy and King, when Cronkite is talking over scenes from Vietnam every night at 6:00 and American cities are on fire, Targets hits close to the bone. I had real trouble overcoming my sheer personal horror at the events on the screen. In other words, I appreciated the artfulness of this movie but it took every force of will to keep myself in my seat and not walk out on it. Sometimes horror is too difficult to face, or maybe it’s too pervasive to face directly. Maybe we need something more indirect to allow ourselves to appreciate the fear. Poor innocent pregnant Rosemary isn’t like us. But Bobby Thompson? Any of us can snap, for no reason. That evil within every one of us is the most frightening thing I can imagine.

3½ stars – but again, be warned this is a very upsetting film.




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Horror, Movies

[August 14, 1968] The World, the Flesh and Charles Gray (the horror movies Torture Garden and The Devil Rides Out)

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by Fiona Moore

Courtesy of my friends at Royal Holloway’s student and staff film club, I’ve been able to see two horror films recently released in the UK, which will soon have their stateside debut. One is a little patchy but still provides entertainment for the horror fan; the other is already being rightly hailed as a classic of British horror cinema.

Torture Garden

Torture Garden is an anthology movie, a subgenre I quite like as it allows the chance to show shorter, more compact narratives along a particular theme. This one, also, is written by Robert Bloch, a master of short, wickedly pointed, stories.

Burgess Meredith as Doctor Diabolo. Can you guess who he really is?
Burgess Meredith as Doctor Diabolo. Can you guess who he really is?

Through the framing device of a carnival horror-show hosted by Doctor Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), who offers customers a glimpse of their possible sinister fates, this film brings us four narratives linked by a common theme of people being driven by desire or ambition to commit horrible deeds. In the first, a man (Michael Bryant), desperately in debt, murders his uncle (Maurice Denham) to get his hands on his inheritance, only to find out that his uncle’s source of income is more supernatural and sinister than he believed. In the second, an ambitious film starlet (Beverly Adams) learns that Hollywood is, in fact, run by literal immortals, and is given the chance to join them. In the third, a celebrity pianist (John Standing) becomes the object of a rivalry between his fiancée (Barbara Ewing) and a possessed piano. In the final story, a Poe collector (Jack Palance) finds that a rival enthusiast (Peter Cushing) has managed to capture the ultimate piece of Poe memorabilia—the undead writer himself.

As the above should indicate, the film has an excellent cast, and is produced by Milton Subotsky, whom readers of this journal should remember from the two Doctor Who movies. Amicus, the production company, has form on producing anthology movies, having put out Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors three years ago. The strongest segments are the first and last, with the first story featuring a credibly demonic cat, and the final one providing a wry metaphor for the way in which collectors—and fans—enter into exploitative relationships with writers.

Peter Cushing is of course one of the best things in the movie.
Peter Cushing is of course one of the best things in the movie.

The film unfortunately lacks the cohesion of the best anthology movies. While, as I noted, there’s a linking theme between the episodes, it doesn’t particularly connect to the framing story, and, while it shares the concept with Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors of people being shown how to avoid a disastrous fate, the “twist” at the end is nowhere near as clever as the one in the earlier movie. The Hollywood segment is poorly characterised, full of excuses to show women in their underwear, and has an antisemitic subtext that made me rather uncomfortable (I suspect that Bloch, himself of Jewish ancestry, was trying to satirise the idea of a Jewish cabal running Hollywood, but it doesn’t quite manage to convey the right tone). While I quite like the concept of a sentient piano becoming attached to its owner, it’s difficult to find its attacks on its human rival anything other than ridiculous. Two and a half out of five stars.

The Devil Rides Out

Based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley, produced by current kings of the UK horror scene Hammer Films, and starring Christopher Lee, The Devil Rides Out is a much more polished and focused production.

Lee plays Nicholas, Duc de Richelieu, who, together with his friend Rex van Ryn (Leon Greene) has come to the UK to visit his late friend’s son Simon (Patrick Mower), in whom he takes an avuncular interest, only to learn that Simon has fallen in with a Satanic cult. The story follows de Richelieu and van Ryn’s efforts to rescue Simon and a young female cultist named Tanith (Nike Arrighi) from the clutches of Satanic priest Morcata (Charles Gray). Adapted by Richard Matheson, the plot is a fairly straightforward one of (supernatural) good versus (supernatural) evil, without any of the twists and ironies of many recent horror movies, and, much as I enjoy those, I also found the narrative here refreshing and satisfying.

Christopher Lee is horrified at a Satanic orgy
Christopher Lee is horrified at a Satanic orgy

Simon is played by a newcomer on the scene, Patrick Mower, who is certainly one to watch; although handsome and strong-jawed, he has a sinister quality which makes the idea of him falling in with Satanists believable. It’s good to see Christopher Lee playing a hero for once, escaping his usual typecasting as a monster, even if the chemistry between him and Charles Gray isn’t quite as compelling as that between him and Peter Cushing. There is a very well-done giant spider effect at one point, and fans of vintage cars will be delighted by all the 1920s and 1930s roadsters on display. There are elements of the new folk-horror genre in the scenes of English cultists cavorting in the woods of Hampshire.

Less positively, the film draws some associations between non-White people and Satanism that left me rather uncomfortable: the heroes are all English (and upper-class), but the cult boasts African and Indian members, and, when a demon is summoned at one point, it takes the form of a grinning, pop-eyed and semi-clad Black man. The spider aside, some of the effects are rather unconvincing, and the cult has so many members that one wonders how it manages to keep itself secret. There’s a slight hint of the exploitation genre that seems unfortunately popular now, and the fact that the youth in question aren’t inherently evil but are being led astray by an older person (and need to be rescued by another older person) doesn’t do much to mitigate that.

Charles Gray as cult leader Mocata
Charles Gray as cult leader Mocata

Nonetheless, this is Hammer on good form, providing a strong narrative with a satisfying conclusion and a lot of credible shocks and tension. The combination of good source material with a competent screenplay and plenty of talent behind and in front of the camera is a sure winner. Four out of five stars.



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

[August 12, 1968] Galaxy's the One?  (the September 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Live from Miami Beach!

If you, like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (and me), soldiered through the four days and nights of GOP convention coverage, you saw the drama unfold in Miami Beach as it happened.  Dick Nixon came into the event a "half-inch" shy of having the nomination sewed up, his chief competition coming from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.  California governor Ronald Reagan, best known for his Chesterfield cigarette ads, coyly denied that he was a candidate…until he suddenly was, in a desperate bid to court "the New South".

The suspense was all a bit forced.  By Day Two, it was understood that the New Jersey delegation, which had been putatively firm in supporting native son Senator Clifford Case through the first ballot so as to be able to play kingmaker later on, was now breaking for Nixon.  On Day Three, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had expressed that his first and second choices were Ronald Reagan, suddenly declared his support for Nixon.

And so, after endless seconding speeches for candidates who had no intention of being President, like Governor Hatfield of Oregon and "dead duck" Governor Romney of Michigan, Nixon won on the first ballot.

After that, the only unknown was who would be his running mate.  The South made loud objections to any GOP liberals being tapped, like New York mayor John Lindsay and Illinois Senator Charles Percy.  The smart money was on a Southerner like John Tower of Texas or Howard Baker of Tennessee.  So everyone was surprised when Maryland governor Spiro Agnew got the nod at a press conference the morning of Day 4, overwhelmingly winning the ballot that night (though not without loud protest from Romney's Michigan contingent).

Why Agnew?  Here were a couple of comments from the NBC reporter pool after the convention:

"It's not that Agnew adds anything to the ticket; it's that he doesn't take anything away."

"Everybody loves Agnew–no one's ever heard of him!"

Agnew, who is kind of a Southerner, and kind of a liberal, but who has recently come out in favor of strong "law and order" (which means urging cops to shoot Baltimoreans if they steal shoes), will enable Nixon to retain his chameleon qualities while Agnew acts as attack dog.  And since being the actual Vice Presidency is worth exactly one half-full bucket of warm piss, it doesn't really matter that Agnew is brand new to large scale politics.

Long story short, Nixon is the One, which we've known since February.  God help us all.

Live from New York!

When Galaxy first appeared in 1950, it was also "the One", breathing fresh new air into the science fiction genre.  18 years later, it is still a regular on the ballot for the Hugo Award.  Last month's was a superlative issue; does this month's mag maintain that level of quality?


cover by Jack Gaughan

Nightwings, by Robert Silverberg

Silverbob presents a richly drawn future world, one in which humanity has soared to great heights only to stumble back to savagery twice.  Now, thousands of years later, Earth is in its Third Cycle.  The planet is an intergalactic backwater, and its people are rigidly divided into castes.

Our heroes are a Watcher, a Flier, and a Changeling.  The first, whose viewpoint we share, is an aged itinerant, hauling in a wagon his arcane tools with which he clairvoys the heavens three times a day (or is it four?  The author says both.) for any signs of an alien invasion.  The Flier Avluela, the only woman in the story, is a spare youth who is able to soar on dragonfly wings when the cosmic wind is not too strong.  And finally, there is Gorman, who has no caste, yet has such a broad knowledge of history that he could pose as a Rememberer.


art by Jack Gaughan

All roads lead to Rome, so it is said, and indeed the three end up in history-drenched Roum, where the Watcher finds the city overcrowded with his caste.  The cruel Prince of Roum, a Dominator, takes a shine to Avluela, compelling her to share his bed.  This incenses Gormon, the crudely handsome mutant, who vows his revenge.

Gormon has the advantage of knowing that justice will not be long delayed–the alien invasion is coming, and he is an advance scout…

There's something hollow about this tale, rather in the vein of lesser Zelazny.  Oh, it's prettily and deliberately constructed, but the story's characters are merely observers rather than actors.  The stage is set and the inevitable happens.  When the alien conquest occurs, it is our Watcher who sounds the alarm, but it is implied others were about to do so (why they did not cry out the night before when the invasion first became apparent is left an inadequately explained mystery).  It's a story that doesn't really say or do anything.

Beyond that, I object to the lone female existing to be loved and/or raped, depending on the man involved.  She is there to be a pretty companion, a object of pity, a tormented vessel.  I suppose the small mercy is she is not also a harpy, as Silverberg is occasionally wont to present his women.

Anyway, I give it just three stars, but I imagine it'll be a Hugo contender next year…

When I Was Very Jung, by Brian W. Aldiss


art by Brock

A weird mix of sex, cannibalism, and archetypes.  I found it distasteful and out of place.

One star.

Find the Face, by Ross Rocklynne

One of science fiction's eldest veterans offers up this romantic piece.  It has the old-fashioned narrative framework, with an aged tramp freighter captain describing the day he was contracted by a wealthy widow, and what ensued afterwards.  The widow's husband and family had been lost in a space accident, but somehow, his face remained, etched across the sky in cosmic clouds and star clusters.  The widow saw this phenomenon once, and she was determined to find from what vantage in the universe it could be reliably observed again.

The captain, meanwhile, was looking for Cuspid, the planet whence the green horses that sired his favorite racer came.  Together, they went off on their separate quests, and in the process, found the one thing neither had been looking for: new love.

It's something of a mawkish story and nothing particularly memorable.  That said, it is sweet, almost like a romantic A. B. Chandler piece, and I appreciated the two characters being oldsters rather than spring chickens.  Moreover, these were not ageless immortals, but silver-haired and wrinkle-faced septuagenarians.

More of that, please.  Three stars.

The Listeners, by James E. Gunn


art by Dan Adkins

In the early 21st Century, Project Ozma continues, despite fifty years of drawing a blank; even with the efforts of dozens of astronomers, hundreds of staff, and the entire survey calendar of the great Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, not a single extraterrestrial signal has been encountered.  Low morale and lack of purpose are the rule amongst these dispirited sentinels.

This is an odd story, with much discussion and development, but no resolution.  At times, the author hints that a message is forthcoming, or maybe even already being received, if only the listeners could crack the code to understand it.  But the climax to the tale has little to do with the story's backbone, and, as with Nightwings, the characters drift rather than do.

It feels like the beginning of a novel, not a complete story.  Larry Niven could probably have done a lot more with the piece in about half the space.

Three stars.

For Your Information: Mission to a Comet, by Willy Ley

Now this piece, I dug.  Willy Ley talks about why comets are important to understanding the early history of the solar system, and which ones could feasibly be approached with our current rocket and probe technology.  The little chart with all the astronomical details of the Earth-approaching comets was worth the piece all by itself.  I particularly liked the idea of Saturn for a "swing-around" mission to catch up with Halley's Coment from behind!

We truly live in an SFnal reality.  Five stars.

The Wonders We Owe DeGaulle, by Lise Braun


art by Brock

Newcomer Lise Braun offers up a droll travel guide to a mauled Earth.  It seems a French bomb that exploded in Algeria sundered our planet's crust, sinking half the Americas and turning the Sahara into a stained glass plain.

It's mildly diverting but Braun's clumsy writing shows her clearly a novice.  I think the setting would have served better as background than a nonfact piece.

Two stars.

A Specter is Haunting Texas (Part 3 of 3), by Fritz Leiber


art by Jack Gaughan

Lastly, the conclusion to Leiber's latest serial, a sort of fairytale version of a hard science epic.  The "Specter" is really a spaceman named de la Cruz, a gaunt, eight-foot figure kept erect by an electric exoskeleton, denizen of a circumlunar colony.  He has been the centerpiece of a Mexican revolution, which is trying to throw off the literal yokes (cybernetic and hypnotic) forced upon the Mesoamerican race by post-Apocalyptic Texans.  The spaceman's comrades include two quite capable and comely freedom fighters, Raquel Vaquel, daughter of the governor of Texas province, and Rosa ("La Cucaracha"), a high-spirited Chicana; then there's Guchu, a Black Buddhist, reluctantly working with the ofays; Dr. Fanninowicz, a Teutonic technician with fascist sympathies; Father Francisco; and El Toro, a charismatic leader in the revolution.

In this installment, de la Cruz finally makes it to Yellow Knife, where he wishes to lay claim to a valuable pitchblende (uranium) deposit.  Unfortunately, the Texans have gotten there first–and what they have established on the site finally reveals just what all those purple-illumined towers they've been planting across the North American continent are for.  'T'ain't nothin' good, I can assure you!

Last month, I read a fanzine where someone complained that this was a perfectly good story ruined by being turned into a tongue-in-cheek fable.  Certainly, I felt the same way for a while.  By Part II, however, I was fully onboard.  While this last bit didn't thrill me quite as much as the middle installment, it's still a worthy novel overall.  When it comes out in paperback, pick it up.

Four stars for this section and for the serial as a whole.


art by Jack Gaughan

Roll Call

Like the Republican convention, the outcome seemed certain, but a few twists and turns along the way did create a bit of doubt.  But in the end, if this month's Galaxy is perhaps not all the magazine we hoped it would be, nevertheless, it's one we can live with.

For the time being, Galaxy remains The One.  May it continue to be so for four more years.




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Conventions/Performances, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 10, 1968] First Trans-Oceanic Fan Fund Brings Fandom Together

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by Alison Scott

One of the most interesting features of Science Fiction fandom is the presence of 'fan funds', which aim to reduce the monumental differences between science fiction fans around the world by raising monies to help a fan from one part of the world to visit another. You may already be familiar with the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, known as TAFF. This is by far the biggest of the funds, in that rather than being an individual fund-raising effort, TAFF happens every year. It started off as a one-off fund to send the Northern Irish fan Walt Willis to America in 1952, but the idea seemed a good one, and now TAFF sends fans both ways in alternate years. The artist Steve Stiles came to this year’s Eastercon, British National Convention, as the TAFF delegate.

As well as TAFF, though, there have been occasional one-off funds to help people cross the Atlantic. Before TAFF, Ted Carnell travelled to attend the 1949 World convention, and since then there have been other one off-funds, like the one to take John Berry to the 1959 Worldcon and to take Ella Parker to the 1961 Worldcon. But these trips have all been to take people from Europe to America and vice versa.

TAFF winners, and some other fan fund recipients, often write trip reports about their activities. These can be sold to raise money for the fund, but are also a great source of information about local fan groups and their members, for other people considering travelling or who are just curious. The first of these was Walt Willis's magnificent report The Harp Stateside, but there have been several others. Not all fund recipients have completed their reports, often citing exhaustion or penury following their trip, but nevertheless the reports that have been produced are fascinating.

This year, however, will see the first ever Trans-Oceanic Fan Fund trip. This year’s Worldcon will be Baycon, at the end of this month, in Oakland, California. Baycon won the site selection comfortably at NYCon III last year, against the alternative bid, Pan-Pacificon. Although Pan-Pacificon was unsuccessful, it was an interesting bid. It aimed to hold the World SF convention in three locations at once – Los Angeles, Sydney and Tokyo, with a system of taped speeches and other international exchanges. As part of this, John and Bjo Trimble, who were on the con committee, launched the Trans-Oceanic Fan Fund, or TOFF, with the intention of bringing over the Japanese fan Takumi Shibano, and they started soliciting donations.

TOFF organiser Bjo Trimble speaking on a panel item while wearing a
Bjo Trimble, pictured at NYCon III wearing a Maneki-Neko badge (photo Jay Jay Klein)

The choice of Takumi Shibano has been questioned by some. Why support the travel of a fan that few of us are familiar with? But it turns out that Mr Shibano is by far the most prominent fan in Japan. He has been producing his fanzine, Uchūjin, (“Cosmic Dust”) since 1957. He was instrumental in starting national conventions in Japan; there have been several of these, both in Tokyo and elsewhere. It’s a measure of Shibano’s critical role as the primary mover and shaker in Japanese science fiction fandom that once his trip to the USA was announced, the other Tokyo fans wanted to move the national convention to a time when he would be there to run it.

I am very lucky in that Ella Parker showed me her copy of the first English edition of Uchūjin. I do not know if there have been any more in English. This is from September 1962. It contains a report of the national convention in 1962, and a detailed bibliography of Western SF translated into Japanese. Shibano explains, somewhat apologetically, that he had to put fiction into Japanese fanzines because there was no professional SF magazine in Japan at the time, and several short stories are reprinted here. I understand that since then he has been quite successful in helping Japanese science fiction publishers find and publish Japanese-written stories. Mr Shibano founded the Federation of SF Fan Groups of Japan and is serving as its chair. He is truly Japan’s #1 Fan Face.

So I think it is not too hard to accept that Mr Shibano is a great choice for a fund, though for British fans like myself, there is a question about whether we could reasonably be expected to donate to a fund that takes someone from many thousands of miles away from us, halfway round the world to somewhere else thousands of miles from us. However, it seems that US fans were also only somewhat enthusiastic about donating to the fund. A trip of this kind was inevitably quite expensive and although Mr Shibano was well known and well respected in Japan, SF fans elsewhere in the world didn’t really recognise the name. I am sure this reflects the language barrier, although I understand that Mr Shibano’s English is excellent. John and Bjo made a fanzine to sell, Maneki-neko, as a fund-raiser, but discovered that the amount of money you can raise from fanzine sales is quite limited. Maneki-neko includes detailed articles about the history of Japanese SF fandom; well worth getting your hands on a copy!

A fanzine cover featuring a three colour hecto illustration of a Japanese maneki-neko - good luck cat.

At any rate, although they had raised half their hoped-for funds by the start of NYCon, the Trimbles had decided to additionally extend the invitation to Mr Shibano’s wife, Sachiko, so the amount required had doubled. They had brought material for auction, but the fund-raising auction was scheduled for midnight! However, help was at hand. The Trimbles had become friendly with Gene Roddenberry, the producer of the television show Star Trek. Indeed, part of the funds already raised were from a successful auction and raffle at Westercon. Bjo Trimble had even managed to sell raffle tickets to James Doohan, who only afterwards learnt that the star prize was some of the sweaty Spock ears that were apparently available in quantity on set.

Nevertheless, when Roddenberry learnt that they were still struggling to raise the funds needed for the trip, he sent several large boxes of unique Star Trek artefacts from the show for auction at NYCon, including some of the Tribbles from “A Trouble with Tribbles”, which had not yet aired at the time, a script for that episode, and costumes and props from the show. The material was so exciting that many fans showed up to buy these rarities and all the money needed for Takumi Shibano and his wife Sachiko was raised at the convention. So the Shibanos will be at Baycon!

Did you buy one of Captain Kirk's tribbles at NYCon III? Let us know!

Shibano has also suggested that it might be possible to hold the Worldcon in Japan one day. Wouldn’t that be a marvellous thing! We are of course hoping that the Germans are successful in their bid for a convention in Heidelberg, which would be the first Worldcon in a non-English speaking country and moreover, the first non-UK Worldcon that I have a reasonable chance of attending, as a trip to America is way beyond my limited means at present.

Nevertheless, I know that many of the Journey readers and fellow-travellers will be doing their utmost to make sure they are at Baycon. If you are one of those, do please take the opportunity to meet Mr and Mrs Shibano and learn more about their fascinating parallel lives in science fiction. I understand that they both speak very good English, though are rather bashful about it.

I hope this will be the first of many Trans-Oceanic Fan Funds. Imagine if, one day, the possibility of fan funds from all parts of the world was a normal and routine part of science fiction fandom, so that every year we could meet people from around the globe?



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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[August 8, 1968] The Little Witch Girl and The Little Ghost Boy (Mahoutsukai Sally and GeGeGe no Kitaro)

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by Janice L. Newman

We visited Japan earlier this summer, and had a lovely time. It’s always interesting comparing how life is different in Japan from our Southern California home, whether it be fish and rice for breakfast or the excellent train system that got us around Tokyo quickly and easily.

Our hotel room had a television, and since we craved immersion whether inside the hotel or out, we often have the boob tube on. Sadly, Japan has a "vast wasteland", too. Between the sumo bouts, the soap operas, the game shows, and the period dramas, there wasn't much of interest to us, although the fact that everything was in Japanese was a plus.

However, we found that if we tuned in at the right time of the day, there was gold to be found. Indeed, we found them in the surprising form of a couple of children’s cartoon shows. They both echoed Western shows in familiar ways, yet also had elements we’d never seen before.

Continue reading [August 8, 1968] The Little Witch Girl and The Little Ghost Boy (Mahoutsukai Sally and GeGeGe no Kitaro) →

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 6, 1968] Treading Water (September 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The beat goes on at Amazing, after the brief syncopation that pushed its schedule back a month.  This September issue, as usual these days, boasts on the cover of all the new (non-reprint) stories inside—four short stories, 35 pages in all, less than a fourth of the magazine.  The rest of the fiction, three novelets, is reprints.  So is the cover—Frank R. Paul’s Great Nebula in Andromeda (“Andromida,” as this barely-proofread magazine has it).  It’s from the back cover of the October 1945 Fantastic Adventures, significantly cropped, and generally pretty cheesy-looking.  By then, Paul’s future was behind him, in more senses than one.


by Frank R. Paul

There is the usual collection of features, ranging from a startlingly inane editorial by editor Harrison, through another “Science of Man” article by Leon E. Stover (see below) and a Sao Paulo Letter by Walter Martins about SFnal doings around Brazil, to what has become the usual lively book review column.  Though this month it’s a little incestuous.  William Atheling, Jr., who is James Blish, reviews Brian Aldiss’s new novel, while Blish’s own byline appears on a review of Harrison and Aldiss’s Best SF 1967.  Alexei Panshin reviews John Wyndham’s new novel, while Leroy Tanner, who is Harrison, reviews Panshin’s book on Heinlein, and Harrison under his own name reviews William Tenn’s new novel Of Men and Monsters.  What is this?  The New York Review of Books?

And—speaking of “What is this?”—there’s a telltale development in the fine print at the bottom of the contents page.  Right under “Sol Cohen, Publisher” and “Harry Harrison, Editor,” is a new line: “Barry N. Malzberg, Associate Editor.” Based on past history (Harrison first sneaked into Amazing as a book reviewer before being named as editor), maybe there’s another change in the works.  That might account for the rather detached and phoned-in quality of Harrison’s editorial this month.  Mr. Malzberg is a recent arrival on the SF scene, having published several stories under the name “K.M. O’Donnell,” which might be said to be notable for their vehemence.  That could be just what this frequently uninspired magazine needs.

Where's Horatius?, by Mack Reynolds


by Jeff Jones

The issue begins with Mack Reynolds’s Where’s Horatius?, on the now-familiar premise of making movies of the past.  Our time-traveling rogues’ gallery of heroes is trying to film the action in 509 B.C., when the Etruscan king Lars Posena marched with his army on Rome.  Reynolds makes the most of his research into the events and the military technology and technique of the age, and generally seems to be having a better time than usual, in a slightly cartoonish way, without the often leaden style and dense didactics of some of his Analog work.  The ending is gimmicky and reads like a chunk of text got dropped somewhere in the last few paragraphs, but it’s readable and amusing nonetheless.  Three stars.

Manhattan Dome, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s Manhattan Dome is a perplexing story, sort of an idiot plot writ large.  (For those unfamiliar with the jargon, an idiot plot is one in which there is a story only because the characters act like idiots.) A dome has been constructed over Manhattan to keep out the air pollution wafting over from New Jersey.  However, the part of the proposal that would ban cars and cigarettes from Manhattan was blocked by the City Council after the auto, oil, tobacco, and advertising lobbyists got to work, so the air under the dome is worse than the outside air. 

To top it off, when Ed, the Chief Dome Engineer, encounters his girlfriend’s cranky old father, he is ranting about how the lack of rain under the Dome has ruined his garden.  It’s a disaster, and “Washington” (specified only as the “Public Health people”) has just announced that it’s tearing the Dome down.  All is lost!  But suddenly the light bulb goes on over Ed’s head, and back in the office, he starts turning on the fire sprinklers that are part of the Dome’s construction.  “Rains scrub the air, wash away the aerosols and float them down the sewers.  Air always feels clean after a rain, doesn’t it?” All is saved!


by Dan Adkins

What's wrong with this picture?  Let us count the ways.  Even an entity like the New York City Council (which has been described publicly as having the I.Q. of a cucumber) would probably not be so stupid as to allow the Dome while blocking the measures to keep the air clean under it.  And it’s equally hard to imagine that nobody would have thought about making rain with the sprinklers until long after the Dome was in operation, and about to be torn down.  (Ed says there’s plenty of water available.  I’d like to see the calculations.) And it’s also hard to credit that artificial rain alone would cure the air pollution problem in a giant city, since there are a lot of cities around the world that have terrible air pollution despite being exposed to the rain—notably New York.

Maybe there will be a sequel in which Bova will sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.  But there is one more thing in this story which bears mention.  In the lobby of Dome HQ, the chairman of the Greater New York Evolutionary Society and someone from the American Longevity Society get into it, the former supporting the Dome, the latter opposing it.  The Evolutionary guy is described as “a massive specimen, with an insistent voice and a craggy face topped by a bristling shock of straight white hair.  He had a Roosevelt-type cigaret [sic] holder clamped in his teeth. . . .” They argue, and Mr. Evolutionary declares at his peak:

“I know it’s rough on some individuals.  But evolution isn’t worried about the individual.  This Dome will foster the development of a superior race, able to breathe pure carbon monoxide, impervious to germs!  Magnificent!”

This is an obvious lampoon of Analog editor John W. Campbell and of his views in general, and in particular his opinion that smoking cigarettes is not a serious health hazard, but a boon.  (See his editorial in the September 1964 Analog.) This is interesting, since Bova has made a number of appearances in Analog in recent years.  We’ll see if that continues.  But back to the story: mildly amusing, depending on how high you can suspend your disbelief.  Two stars.

Idiot’s Mate, by Robert Taylor

Bova is followed by Robert Taylor (who, you ask?  He had a story in last month’s F&SF), with Idiot’s Mate, on the familiar theme of staged violence as mass entertainment.  This one features the Chess Tournament, held on the Moon, in which people in spacesuits are assigned to teams and given the names of chess pieces, and apparently given powers to match, though that idea is not well developed.  Mostly everyone just plays hide-and-seek and shoots explosive bullets.  Protagonist Rodgers, imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges, volunteers for the Tournament and is made king of a team.  Needless to say, matters end badly, though the story is not bad; it is a bit overwritten, but capably so, and moves fast.  Three stars.

Time Bomb, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell’s Time Bomb is a time-travel joke, deftly rendered, worth about the two pages it takes up.  Three stars, allowing for its limited ambition.

The Patty-Cake Mutiny, by Winston Marks

The reprints begin with The Patty-Cake Mutiny (Fantastic, February 1955), by Winston Marks, that monstrously prolific contributor to the mid-‘50s SF magazines, to remind us that they sure published a lot of crap in between the undying classics we all remember. 

The Patty-Cake Mutiny is a story of space exploration featuring crew members Slappy Kansas, Conkie Morton, Butch Bagley, Pokey Gannet, Sniffer Smith, and Balls Murphy.  Slappy is unofficial foreman because of his skill in slapping people around.  Sniffer is greatly talented olfactorily.  Conkie conks out under anything more than a gee and a half of acceleration.  Balls—calm down now—is so named because of the “pendulous little knobs of flesh” on his face, each of which contains “a submicroscopic parasite that had baffled Earth doctors” (but it’s OK, they’re not contagious).  Et cetera.  Their mission is to find and mine the incredibly valuable radioactive kegnite.  There is tension among the crew because Balls has won at craps their shares of any profit from the voyage.


by Tom Beecham

This motley crew lands on a planet with a resilient surface and tall grass-like stalks as far as they can see.  Balls goes out exploring and gets into trouble, and is retrieved in a state of “infantile regression”—literally—so they have to put him in a diaper and take turns keeping the baby occupied (hence patty-cake; the mutiny is separate despite the title).  But back to work: they cut into the surface and a red fluid—guess what?—gushes out.  Before the end, they are hacking steaks out of the giant organism they have landed on—Hairy Joe, as they call it.  And it goes on, ending with a fist fight (Slapper lives up to his name) and the explanation of Balls’s regression, which is as silly as the rest of the story.  It’s all too ridiculous and tiresome to be borne.  I’m demanding a raise.  One star.

"Labyrinth", by Neil R. Jones

Neil R. Jones’s Labyrinth (from Amazing, April 1936) is another in his seemingly endless series (22 of them!) about Professor Jameson, revived from his orbiting tomb by the Zoromes (from Zor, of course), and installed like them in a metal body.  Now they all go roaming around the universe looking for entertainment, though of course the author doesn’t put it that way.  The few of these I’ve read were mostly benignly tedious, but this one is a little more dynamic. 

The Prof and the Z’s land on a planet and investigate a city, which at first seems abandoned, but proves to be inhabited by strange beings with four legs and a dozen arms, who flee when our heroes approach.

“ ‘We must seize one of them!’ Professor Jameson exclaimed.  ‘They seem intelligent enough for questioning.’ ” Of course!  (So much for the respectful fellowship of sentient beings.) Once they’ve got a couple in hand, they conclude that their intelligence is “somewhat below the level of an Australian bushboy, an earthly type which lay in the professor’s memory, yet well above the mentality of the beasts he had known.” (So much for . . . oh, never mind.)

The Queegs, as they call themselves, are quite affable once reassured that they won’t be harmed.  They didn’t build the city but say they’ve “always” lived there.  They survive by hunting creatures called ohbs, using wooden weapons, even though they can work metal.  Why?  Metal doesn’t last very long, they say—which seems odd.

So the metal folks tag along on a hunting expedition to a seemingly barren area.  The ohbs prove to be giant gray slug-like creatures who apparently subsist on something in the ground.  A Zorome comes into contact with an ohb, which starts to radiate light and grabs the Zorome.  Another ohb joins in.  What’s going on?

“ ‘It is eating me!’ cried 47B-97.  ‘It is eating my metal body!’”


by Leo Morey

And now—“coming from every direction a vast legion of hurrying ohbs, their antennae quivering, slight radiations of anticipation suffusing their leaping-crawling bodies.  They were being called to the feast, a feast of virgin metal which the gluttonous appetites of their two companions had involuntarily revealed.” The author continues, waxing rhapsodic:

“With as much disregard for self-preservation as they had shown when hunted by the Queegs, the ohbs, fully half as large as the cubed body of a Zorome, seemed possessed of but one unquenchable desire, and that was to glut themselves on pure, refined metal, free of all impurities and unmixed with rock and other foreign material, such as they found regularly in their daily diet.  Nothing less than death stopped their mad charge.”

And a little later, a Zorome cries: “22MM392!  744U-21!  We are helpless!  They are all around us!  Wet, clammy juices they exude from their bodies are turning our metal parts to a fluid which they absorb!  If our metal heads are eaten through, we are doomed!’”

Electrifying!  But the rest of the story is a little anticlimactic, with the Zoromes fleeing into a tunnel mouth, which leads to the labyrinth of the title.  Soon enough they are lost, wandering aimlessly between dangerous encounters with ohbs, until they follow an underground river and are rescued, to resume their peregrinations around the galaxy.  Three corroded stars.

Paradox, by Charles Cloukey

The precocious Charles Cloukey (1912-1931) is back, or re-resurrected (see Sub-Satellite), with Paradox (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1929), another assuredly executed story, published when he was 17.  It’s a frame story in which the author is a guest at a club where a couple of members are arguing about the possibility of time travel, and the mysterious Raymond Cannes introduces himself as a time traveler and tells his tale. 


by Wally Wallit

Hawkinson, a scientist and old college chum, has received plans for a strange machine, done in Cannes’s handwriting, but Cannes didn’t write them and wouldn’t have been capable of it.  Later, Hawkinson builds the machine—a time machine—and invites Cannes over, and of course (in the usual manner of ‘20s and ‘30s SF), Cannes goes for it and travels a thousand years into the future.  After various adventures he flees home at a cliff-hanging moment to find that Hawkinson is dead and his laboratory burned.  Cannes throws his time-traveling gear into the river, destroying all corroborating evidence (also as usual for this period’s SF). 

The story runs facilely through several now-familiar time paradox themes that were new to the genre when this was written.  Unfortunately some of the plot developments I have passed over are fairly hackneyed, and Cloukey’s stilted style, though well turned, gets a bit wearing over the length of the story, keeping it to three stars.

Science of Man: Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover’s article, Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, invoking at least the title of Desmond Morris’s best-selling book, takes on the question whether, evolutionarily speaking, humans are naked apes or hairless monkeys.  Stover follows human ancestry backwards to conclude . . . nobody knows.  A key sentence: “The game seems to be, how much can we learn from the least evidence.” But he thinks he’s got a good guess: an apparently hypothetical animal that he calls Propriopithecus.  Conclusion: “So man is neither a naked ape nor a hairless monkey.  His line of ancestry evolved apart from the monkeys and apes.  He is not simply a depilitated version of either one of them.  Man is what he is—a nudist who made it on his own.”

I am reminded of the form letter that H.L. Mencken reputedly kept handy to respond to some of his more imaginative correspondents: “Dear sir or madam: You may be right!” And so may Stover.  In any case, it’s reasonably interesting and informative if inconclusive, but also pretty dense reading.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Amazing continues to tread water, capably enough this month.  Almost everything here is perfectly readable, with one shameful exception.  The new stories are pretty lively within their limitations.  But we wait in vain for something outstanding, and we’re not likely to get it when only 25% of the magazine is open to new fiction.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[August 4, 1968] Changing Tastes (The Year of the Sex Olympics)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Last Summer I complained about the growth of “flower music” onto the charts in the UK. Almost as quickly as it appeared, it seems to have vanished again, apparently being a phenomenon over here only as long as it was 1967. In fact, there is barely anything that could be described as psychedelic in the top 40 singles or albums.

Arthur Brown in makeup with lighted horns
Not the usual hippy scene

The only notable exception is “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, which is very different from the sounds coming out of California last year.

Chicken Shack and Rolling Stones Covers

So, what has been replacing it? Well, firstly there has been a revival in the heavier blues sound, in both established acts such as The Rolling Stones and John Mayall, or new acts like Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack. Others seem to moving towards a pop sounding rock ‘n’ roll with heavy degrees of satire, the kind pioneered by The Kinks, we are now seeing on acts from The Beatles to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.

Andy Williams and Don Partridge covers

There are two genres that were also popular in 1967 that continue to be so. The first is the kind of Easy Listening music which predominates on BBC Radio 2, with figures such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Val Doonican. The other is folk music, which has much more variety in the charts, from the poppier sounds of Esther & Abi Ofarim, the more traditional route of Don Partridge or the curious experiments of The Incredible String Band.

Supremes and O.C. Smith covers

But probably the biggest musical genre in Britain at the moment is soul music. Not just the continued success of American greats like The Supremes, The Four Tops or Ray Charles. But also newer acts such as P. P. Arnold, O. C. Smith and the orchestral sounds of Love Affair, along with established British Acts like Dusty Springfield, Lulu or The Mindbenders.

If anything, this goes to show how quickly musical tastes change nowadays. What was popular in the summer of ’67, ’66 or ’65 sounded decidedly old fashioned the next year. Where will tastes be in 1969? Only time will tell.

Whilst I was pondering this, a stunning new teleplay came on to Theatre 625 and gave us a glimpse into the entertainment of the future.

The Year of the Sex Olympics

Promotional image for The Road
Nigel Kneale: Last seen by The Road

It has been a while for Nigel Kneale as a TV writer, working on films such as The Witches or First Men on The Moon instead. His last teleplay was half a decade ago with the excellent clever ghost story, The Road.

His teleplays have been known to be shocking and to provoke debate, sometimes even in parliament, and this is certain to carry on in this tradition.

Opening Logo for Year of the Sex Olympics

In a future clearly inspired by Huxley, the world now exists at peace and without want. Society is now divided into two groups:

There are a small group of “high drives” who we observe work in broadcasting and control the TV programs we see. Most people, however, are “low drives”. These people do not work, instead live in automated controlled environments. These do not have any interest in working and are kept pacified by the television programs the high drives produce.

High-Drive controllers watching a couple having Sex in qualifiers for The Olympics
High-Drive controllers watching the “Sport”

This society seems to be set up in this way for two reasons. Firstly, it keeps people pacified with the regular mantra, “Watch not do.” Sex television was designed to stop population explosion and wars, people numbed to doing anything by just seeing it all the time.

Secondly this acts as a form of eugenics to promote more high drives. With the sexual impulse of the low drives suppressed they are less likely to reproduce and most end up dying by the age of 35. Further tests are also done to determine if any high drive children are low drives and they are cast out into the audience.

Chessboard in a glassbox with a machine labelled "auto-chess"
Why bother playing chess when a computer can do it for you?

We are shown two problems with this situation. Firstly, some of the controllers are getting disenchanted with this society. Most notable is Kin Hodder, a set dresser, who is trying to introduce his real art into the broadcasts against the will of the controllers. The other is that the computers say they need to add more humour into the broadcasts, a concept none of the audience seems to be able to understand. For example, getting groups of clowns throwing custard pies only generates boredom.

Both problems are solved at the same time when the artist falls from a rope and dies in a gruesome manner, resulting in huge laughs from the audience. Thus is born a new concept: a show where people live on a remote island without any modern conveniences and are constantly filmed. Viewers get the thrill of never knowing if the participants will live or die. Two controllers, Nat and Deanie, volunteer for the pilot of the Live-Life show and bring along Deanie's daughter Keten.

Life is going to be much harder than they thought and, unbeknowst to the contestants, it turns out that the island is already inhabited. However, it will make for excellent ratings!

Naked woman lying down holding a veil with the word "Artsex" imposed over the top
Fancy something a bit more high-brow? Try Artsex!

The dangers of television becoming more shocking for the sake of it seems to be a subject en vogue right now, for example Kate Wilhelm’s Baby You Were Great or the film Smashing Time’s You Can’t Help Laughing. However, having it on screen in this way is much more immediate and shocking.

The message is hammered home very hard throughout. Not just with the imagery but with the language as well, where we hear phrases such as:

“A censor stopped things from going too far. We stop when things don’t go far enough.”

This could seem as too didactic or curmudgeonly but it is a testament to Kneale’s skill that he manages to pull it off.

I have to wonder if some of this is also grumpiness at his own experiences of television. It is notable that “audience testing” is a big part of this future. Continuous calibration made to audience reactions and even the winners of competitions are based on this.

Two people throwing food at each other.
Other entertainments include “The Hungry Angry Show”.

One of the odder choices is to give many of the (all British) cast American accents, something it does not appear they had much training on. This combined with the use of futuristic slang did make it hard to follow at times.

One person thankfully not trying to do one of these accents is Leonard Rossiter, a character actor probably well known to SFnal fans for his recent turns in The Witches and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He is an excellent choice for Coordinator Ugo, as he is able to come across as very unpleasant at the start whilst selling the disgust he feels at what is happening by the end.

Nat holding an axe whilst seeing a native of the island
The Live-Life Show. I think the title could do with some work

We do have to talk about the ending, as it is worth the price of admission alone. However, if you would rather wait for a possible repeat showing, stop reading now.

So, on the island Keten catches a disease that would be curable in the city, however, with no help available she dies. After the funeral Deanie is then brutally murdered by another inhabitant of the island who is then killed by Nat in revenge. This delivers the effect the controllers were hoping for as we see the audiences in raucous laughter over the horrific deaths and Nat’s grief.

This is disturbing enough but Nigel Kneale adds one final twist of the knife. Throughout we hear little jingles, very much in the style of pirate radio. Rather than having dramatic music playing over the ending, we just have a continual repetition of “The Year of the Sex Olympics Jingle”. Forcing us to ask, are we the same as them? Did we learn anything from what we saw or are we just as much passive participants?

If you missed it and are in the UK, write letters to the BBC asking for a repeat. If you are outside, see if you can convince a local station to import it.

Five Stars




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