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[July 20, 1964] Dashed Hopes (August 1964 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

(if you found us at San Diego Comic-Con and can't figure out why we seem to be 55 years behind you, this should clear things up!)

Bad News Drives Out Good News

This month started off in a optimistic way, as President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, after a long struggle with Dixiecrats (segregationist Southern Democrats) and some Republicans.


An historic moment.

The very next day, restaurant owner and unsuccessful political candidate Lester Maddox, with the help of fellow segregationists wielding ax handles, drove three civil rights activists away from his Pickrick Cafeteria.


I hope he continues to lose elections in his native state of Georgia.

Not to be outdone, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, made an impassioned speech against the Civil Rights Act on the Fourth of July.


You can see the anger that fills this man.

Never before in the history of this nation have so many human and property rights been destroyed by a single enactment of the Congress. It is an act of tyranny. It is the assassin’s knife stuck in the back of liberty. With this assassin’s knife and a blackjack in the hand of the Federal force-cult, the left-wing liberals will try to force us back into bondage.

I don't think I need to point out the bitter irony of Wallace's tirade being delivered on Independence Day. If my disgust at his rhetoric makes me a left-wing liberal, so be it.

On the international front, any hope that United States involvement in the conflict in Vietnam might be lessened was crushed during the Battle of Nam Dong. North Vietnamese forces attacked a camp manned by three hundred and sixty South Vietnamese soldiers, twelve American Green Berets, and one Australian adviser. When the fighting ended, fifty-seven South Vietnamese, two Americans, and the Australian were dead.


Artist's impression of the battle

After such discouraging developments at home and abroad, it seems petty and selfish to concern myself with trivial matters of entertainment. Be that as it may, I couldn't help feeling annoyed when the upbeat Beach Boys tune I Get Around lost its Number One position in the USA to Rag Doll, another cloying melody from my personal bête noire, the Four Seasons.


I won't worry; your music is pretty good.


Silence would definitely be better.

The Issue at Hand

When nothing else pleases me, I turn to imaginative fiction to take me away from my troubles. Unfortunately, after having my expectations raised by last month's excellent offerings, the latest issue of Fantastic proves to be a disappointment.


Cover art and interior art by Emsh

When the Idols Walked (Part 1 of 2), by John Jakes

Brak the Barbarian, whom we've seen a few times before, returns in this new sword-and-sorcery adventure.

The mighty hero is captured when the Bad Guys invade a place he's just passing through and make him a galley slave. A raging storm threatens to sink the huge fleet of slave ships, until the traditional beautiful but evil sorceress calms the sea. Not all is well, however, because a sorcerer from the invaded land shows up in his own ship, and a fierce battle of magic results. After a lot of natural and supernatural violence, Brak falls into the ocean and is washed up on the shore of the next place the Bad Guys intend to conquer.

Things get a lot more complicated after Brak is nursed back to health by the beautiful (but not evil) daughter of a merchant. It seems that the merchant has an enemy with the power to control the spirits of two dead men. One was a strangler, and his ghost still possesses the ability to kill people with a spectral rope. The other was an informer and a libertine and, so we're told, even more wicked than the other. This one can inhabit statues, bringing them to life. (Yes, that's when the idols walk.) Besides all this, the Bad Guys are on the march, the brave ruler of the land is off defending the border, and an ineffective vizier is in charge during his absence. Let's not forget about the sorceress, who is out to destroy Brak.

As you can see, a heck of a lot goes on in this fast-moving adventure. The author writes vividly, particularly during the storm and the sea battle, and when a statue of a sinister, one-eyed god comes to life and attacks. It's too bad that the whole thing is so similar to Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan, and feels like it belongs in the yellowed, crumbling pages of a 1930's issue of Weird Tales.

Two stars.

The Scent of Love, by Larry Eisenberg

Human colonists on an alien world make use of the fruit of a local tree. Their problem is that a particularly large and nasty insect attacks the trees. A scientist obtains a substance from female insects that attracts male insects, so they can be trapped and killed. You won't be surprised to discover that this method has unintended consequences. What happens is predictable, and makes me wonder why the colonists didn't anticipate it.

Two stars.

The Failure, by David R. Bunch

Here's another strange and disturbing piece from a writer with a style like nobody else. It's very hard to follow, but as best as I can tell it has something to do with one character seeking ultimate knowledge, and the narrator reacting to the results of his quest. If it has a point, it may be the futility of all human effort. As usual for Bunch, the frenzied language of the story holds the reader's attention, but it's not a pleasant experience.

Two stars.

Family Portrait, by Morgan Kent

This brief tale from a new author starts off with a typical evening at home, as Mom and Dad try to get their young child to go to bed. Things get odd about halfway through the story, and the characters turn out to be something other than ordinary. That's about all there is to an inoffensive, if trivial, bit of whimsy.

Two stars.

Footnote to an Old Story, by Jack Sharkey

A meek little fellow goes on vacation on a Greek island, where he falls in unrequited love with a beautiful young woman.   After reading the Bible story about Samson, he grows his hair long. Apparently through sheer will power he changes himself into a muscular he-man and gains the attention of the woman. You'll predict what happens at the end, given the setting, the woman's name, and, unfortunately, the excellent illustration by Virgil Finlay, which gives away the whole thing. It's pretty well written, but way too long for a story with an obvious twist ending.


I warned you it gave away the plot.

Two stars.

Dangerous Flags: Another Adventure of the Green Magician, by Thomas M. Disch

This is a goofy fantasy, or maybe a mock fairy tale, set in an absurd version of the modern world. Coal gas emerges from underground mines in a Pennsylvania town, threatening the local population. The Green Magician (who, as far as I can tell, has never had any other adventures, at least in published fiction) fights the sinister English Teacher and her Rich Nephew. (The capitals are the author's.) A lot of random stuff happens. The English Teacher asks some inexplicable riddles. The Green Magician turns into powder. The English Teacher recites three poems. A Snow Fairy shows up. I guess it's supposed to be funny, but I didn't get much amusement out of it. I have the feeling that Disch is making fun, in a disdainful and superior way, of the kind of stories that appear in Fantastic.

Two stars.

Land of the Yahoos, by Adam Bradford, M.D.


Illustration by George Schelling.

If the Fates are kind, this will be the last rehashing of Gulliver's Travels from the pen of Doctor Joseph Wassersug, hiding under the name of his fictional narrator. As we saw three times before, he winds up in one of Swift's imaginary realms. This time it's the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, and the Yahoos, a clan of bestial human beings. He doesn't spend much time with the highly civilized Houyhnhnms, and most of the story is an obvious analogy between the Yahoos and modern society. The Yahoos are greedy for rocks, the way people are greedy for money; they waste time at social gatherings they don't really enjoy, the way people attend dull cocktail parties; and so on. As in previous entries in this series, the author wastes a lot of time getting the narrator to his destination. This story also drags on near the end, as the narrator completes a minor task mentioned in a previous tale. By making the Yahoos semi-civilized, with clothing and a language, Wassersug weakens the intent of Swift's misanthropic satire.

One star.

Look for the Silver Lining

After a particularly dismal bunch of stories, things can only go up from here. Maybe the next issue will be better. I can also look forward to a promising new film based on a classic tale by one of the pioneers of science fiction, as well as the latest novel from an author whose first book was nominated for a Hugo. Watch for my reports on these two exciting possibilities in the near future. Until then, remember to let a smile be your umbrella!


A scene from the new French film Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), not yet seen in the USA, in which all the dialogue is sung. I guess that makes it a fantasy film.

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Book

[July 18, 1964] Dog Day Crop (July's Galactoscope)

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by Gideon Marcus

Thank you for joining this month's edition of Galactoscope, where we plow through all the books that came out this most recent month of June/July 1964! Don't thank us; it's all part of the job…

(and if you found us at San Diego Comic-Con and can't figure out why we seem to be 55 years behind you, this should clear things up!)

Times Two

Time Travel has been a staple of the genre since before the genre had been formalized. H. G. Wells' The Time Machine is still a classic, and it was written last century. In the Journey's short tenure, we have encountered at least a dozen tales involving chronological trips, with notable books including John Brunner's Times without Number and Wallace West's River of Time, not to mention the stand-out tales, All you Zombies!, by Robert Heinlein (and his less stand-out tale, By His Bootstraps) and The Deaths of Ben Baxter, by Robert Sheckley.

This month, we have two variations on the theme, both invoking time in their title:

Time Tunnel, by Murray Leinster

As the specter of nuclear war threatens to manifest, a post-graduate student named Harrison is summering in Paris, waiting for school to resume. By chance, he runs across Pepe, a fiery Spaniard (are there any other kinds in books?) and fellow former student who reunites Harrison with Professor Carroll, late of the archaeology department of Harrison and Pepe's alma mater. It turns out that Carroll has made a tremendous discovery: he as learned how to bridge the gulf between eras. No special machine is required; one must simply find a sizeable hunk of cast metal that has been left alone since the time of its forger.

Carroll's private time tunnel goes back exactly 160 years to the France of Napoleon's time. Thus far, the professor has made little use of it, save to satisfy his wife's pecuniary avarice. She has enlisted her brother to start a little shop that sells perfectly preserved antiques pinched from 1804. But when the Harrison learns that someone from 1964 is undertaking to sell secrets of the future to the scientists of the past, he and his compatriots must stop the interference before history changes for good. In addition, they must complete their mission before rising international tensions instigate a nuclear war in the present, sealing off (and perhaps destroying) the time tunnel.

It's a great setup! We've seen fixed tunnels to the past, as recently as in River in Time, but they aren't common in the genre. I find them particularly compelling as they make points in the past more tangible destinations. One can't pick historical highlights at random; they have to soak in the local atmosphere one second at a time, just like the natives. I've even toyed with the idea of making a fanzine with that conceit, perhaps with a time shift of (to pick a length at random) 55 years. That would put me in 1909 with plenty of time to capture the pulp era as it happens.

Something to think about.

The problem with Tunnel is the same problem that has bedeviled most of his latest stuff — it's too long. Indeed, Tunnel is about three times longer than the story calls for, in large part because the author repeats everything he says several times throughout the book. Heck, Harrison's party doesn't even get to old France until halfway through the book, and then it mostly stays to the back roads and farms that have not significantly changed in "nearly two centuries" as Leinster insists on calling about a century-and-a-half.

It's too bad. There's an exciting novella here under all the chaff.

Three stars.

The Time Twisters, by J. Hunter Holly

The newest book by Ms. (the J. stands for Joan) Holly has the opposite problem: the writing is quite compelling, but the story doesn't work.

The time is present day, the protagonists the Garrison family — Rick, Lynn, and six year-old daughter Tina. We start with the family already ill at ease. A neighborhood boy has gone missing, and shortly before, a big brown patch appeared in his yard. Then, while touring an amusement park to distract themselves, a cluster of bright lights appear in the sky, eerie and menacing.

Over the course of the next few days, more children disappear. Tina longs to be allowed outside, affected by a sirensong the adults cannot hear. A monster appears on the block, terrifying the neighborhood. The Army appears and sets up camp around the small Great Lakes town. Throughout it all, Rick is suspicious of his new boarder, Marcus Jantz. That is, until Marcus helps defeat the monster, which turns out to be a tin-plated prop. Obviously, the alien invasion shtick is a ruse, a cover for something else. But what?

It turns out (as has been teased since the beginning, but it takes Rick a while to learn) that Marcus is actually an agent from the future. In this future, aliens have appeared, demanding millions of their children. But humanity of the future is near-sterile, thanks to an overabundance of nuclear energy. Their only source for children is the past, hence a series of raids throughout history. Indeed, the Pied Piper legend has roots in truth, a kidnapping strike from a century long distant. In the end, Rick follows the last child to be abducted, his own, into the future, where he makes a desperate plea to Marcus to let their children go.

The Time Twisters is a very quick read by a talented author (who, like Andre Norton, stays out of the genre magazines). The characters are nicely drawn, the situations nicely tense. Unfortunately, the plot is absurd. Any people with time travel have already won any war they might face. Moreover, surely the indiscriminate removal of ancestors must destroy countless future generations.

Still, I was entertained on my latest trip to Japan, and thus, I give this very flawed piece a full three stars.

And now, I turn things over to Mark Yon, who contributes the second half of this month's column…

Ace Double F-275: No Truce with Terra, by Philip E. High; and The Duplicators, by Murray Leinster


by Mark Yon

My latest read is one that I had delivered to me from my friends in the States. As it is an Ace Double, and being someone never to knowingly avoid a cliché, I must say that it is a book of two halves (although The Duplicators is a little longer than the other story): as befits a double book, they are quite different in tone and style.

No Truce with Terra

No Truce with Terra examines the premise of what might happen if Earth was invaded — not by the traditional all-guns-blazing War of the Worlds style invasion but instead by stealth. Written by Brit Philip E. High, it begins quite normally but soon becomes strange. Scientist Lipscombe goes home from work one evening to find that his fibroplastic home will not allow him entrance. All attempts to break-in are thwarted.

Furthermore, over the next few days the house changes shape and unusual objects appear to grow around the outside of the house. There’s some electric blue grass and a plant that gives those who touch it a near-lethal electric shock, for example. Impressions are that they are alien, a means of colonising the planet before taking overall control, a bridgehead before the full-blown invasion.

Michael Lipscombe and his colleague Peter Collard become part of the scientific observation group. Then the “house” is surrounded by the British Army and attacked, the house retaliates – “they have set the dog on us” is the summary from Lipscombe.

Lipscombe and Collard are evacuated to a research centre in the North of Scotland as the alien threat spreads. With their mentor Stanley Dyson, obviously “one of the greatest names in science”, they determine that the invading force is a form of “natural electronic life” which has evolved naturally on another planet.

The scientists create a contraption that warps the fabric of space time and allows the humans to be granted access to the alien world. They do so, believing that such an action would create an escape route for humans and also allow them to create a secret base that can organise retaliatory actions.

All of this is basically World War Two re-written, of course. It’s interesting, if a little predictable, beginning with lots of stoic scientists discussing things and then frantic battles between the military and the aliens.

What we also get is the alien perspective, that they are willing to discuss terms of future contact through Collard, who they select as an emissary between the two races. The aliens are odd but not the unholy terrors that other stories would have you believe, and it is this aspect that makes this fast-paced story readable.

Three stars.

The Duplicators, by Murray Leinster

The second story is longer (an expansion, in fact, of Lord of the Uffts), but I found it less enjoyable. This time around it is the humans doing the invading, in a faux- Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court kind of way. The Duplicators tells us of Link Denham, a non-too-scrupulous gadabout who, when he drunkenly signs himself up as an astrogator on the not-so-good ship Glamorgan under the equally drunk Captain Thistlethwaite, finds himself on the way to the mysterious planet Sord III. Thistlethwaite claims there are riches beyond compare there, which he is willing to share with Denham in return for his help.

On arriving at the planet, they meet two types of extraterrestrials. Firstly there are the rather sarcastic and oppressed pig-like aliens known as Uffts, who claim their ship on its landing, and secondly there are the humans, led by Harl, who live in Households and run the planet’s society using the Uffts as servants. Their response to Thistlethwaite’s arrival is to arrest him and agree to execute him for spreading sedition – for in offering to pay to send a message to his seller Old Man Addison he has caused great offense. Doing business, except with Uffts, is a major insult on Sord III.

Link’s attempt at rescuing Thistlethwaite – for how else is he going to escape the planet? – leads to Link also being arrested by Harl’s Household. Instead of being grateful, the non-too-stable Thistlethwaite seems annoyed, even betrayed, by Link for abandoning their spaceship.

By offering their spaceship and cargo as a guest-gift to Harl, Link manages to persuade the Householder to avoid hanging them, but the rather unpredictable Thistlethwaite, still determined to make a business deal and participate in the socially abhorrent activity of business, believes that Link has betrayed him.

To complicate things further, there’s a revolution brewing from the down-trodden Uffts. A deal is made by Thistlethwaite with the Uffts to arrange his escape and take advantage of the unrest felt by the enslaved group. Link is ‘fired’ by Thistlethwaite.

On a more positive note Link also meets Thana, Harl’s sister. She reveals the reason for Thistlethwaite’s interest in the planet, that the aliens of Sord III have the technology to duplicate objects with dupliers, something that Thistlethwaite believes would be worth a great deal. Harl disagrees, his reasoning being that such an invention would lead to the collapse of civilisation as societies become too lazy to bother working.

Thistlethwaite’s escape leads to a chase to try and recapture him before he makes a deal with Old Man Addison for dupliers. The dilemma of the novel then becomes how Link can manage to keep the dupliers a secret whilst not allowing Thistlethwaite to exploit the aliens on Sord III. It may not be a surprise that Link’s ingenuity saves the day, avoids an Ufftian Revolution, keep Thistlethwaite pleased and ends things happily ever after for Link and Thana.

The Duplicators is one of those heartily humorous tales, a story of manners and misunderstandings that is all about the behaviour of “strangers in a strange land”. It seems to be meant to be a lighter counterpoint tale to the Philip High story, a parody of politics and behaviour that is clearly meant to strike the reader as amusing but for me really wasn’t. In fact, at times there are places where it all becomes a bit silly. On the positive side, it’s well written, if predictable, but Animal Farm it isn’t.  2.5 stars.

Together these tales do what Ace Doubles tend to do – put on display deliberately different aspects of the genre. Whilst the two stories are undeniably entertaining, in the bigger scheme of things they are really minor league stuff. They are not the best Double I’ve ever read, but not the worst either and frankly neither story is the best work I’ve read from either author. File under “OK but not essential.”

Summing Up

I suppose one can't expect more from an average month than a bunch of average books. But, boy… it'd sure be nice!

We'll just have to wait for the next Galactoscope to see if our fortunes change (hopefully for the better…)

[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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Magazine

[July 16, 1964] Un-Conventional (August 1964 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

All Together Now

Out in San Francisco, in the humorously named "Cow Palace", the GOP are having a convention.  Their goal is to pick the fellow they feel most adequately represents the convictions of the party of Lincoln, of Roosevelt, of Eisenhower. 

To all accounts, they have settled on Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a nativist, opponent of the Civil Rights Act, and advocate for expanded use of nuclear weaponry.  Despite a last-ditch attempt by Republican moderates Scranton, Rockefeller, and Romney, nothing can stop General Goldwater from tilting against LBJ in November.

Whether or not Barry wins the general election (I don't believe he can), his candidacy has reshaped the Republican Party into something regressive, "Primitive".  God help us if someone with his platform actually ascends to the Presidency…

Politics takes center stage in the latest issue of Galaxy, too, and like the Cow Palace convention, most of the names between the covers of this magazine are heavy hitters, known to all.  Let's see if we get a better result from Mr. Pohl (editor of Galaxy) than we did from Mr. Morton, Chair of the GOP convention:

The Issue at Hand


by John Pederson, Jr.

The Dead Lady of Clown Town, by Cordwainer Smith


by Gray Morrow\

Over the past decade and a half, Cordwainer Smith has woven a tapestry of tales, telling the thousands year history of The Instrumentality, technocratic oligarchy spanning much of the galaxy (except for the longevity-drug-growing Norstrilia, the wealthy and proud remnant of the British Commonwealth).  This domain is run by true humans and maintained by underpeople, animals cast in the rough images of people but with no inherent rights.  In recent tales, we learned of the revolt of the underpeople that tore down the Instrumentality.  This latest story tells of the first abortive attempt that set the seeds for the successful rebellion.

At the center of Lady is Elaine, an embryo germinated and dispatched, by accident, from Earth to Fomalhaut III to serve as a physician.  The problem is that none of the humans there needed medical attention, thus rendering Elaine's life fruitless and frustrating.  But her coming was prophesied by Lady Panc Ashash, long deceased but imprinted on a Fomalhautian computer.  The Dead Lady introduces Elaine to D'Joan, a young dog person, who is to be the martyr who gives life, love, and hope to the underpeople.  Together, Joan and Elaine lead the first movement against the Instrumentality.  The measure of its success depends entirely upon the time frame in which its effects are gauged.

Lady presents a quandary for me.  On the one hand, I adore Cordwainer Smith, and his fairytale, off-center approach to science fiction is usually far more effective than it has any right to be.  This time around, however, I felt the format had gotten stale.  The story is laden with portentous language, like a tale from a religious text, but events are presented as overdetermined, inevitable, and none of the characters makes a conscious decision.  In particular, the "love scene" between Elaine and 'The Hunter', a telepathic human with mind control powers who sides with the underpeople is not only perfunctory but disturbing (smacking of rape).

In the end, this is a redundant story, one that did not need to be told.  And Smith's poetic style is more grating than compelling this time 'round.

2.5 stars (half stars being permissible for novellas and novels).

For Your Information: A Century of Fossil Man, by Willy Ley

This month's non-fiction is about the historical and current state of physical anthropology — the study of human fossils.  Willy is back to his recent mode: informative but brief and dry.  I miss Ley of the early '50s, the one who convinced me to subscribe to Galaxy in the first place.

Still, not bad.  Three stars.

Jungle Substitute, by Brian W. Aldiss


by Jack Gaughan

Deep in the heart of a decaying city, robots and humans live a symbiotic relationship of despair.  People no longer have meaningful jobs, their lives guided by endless superstition and taboo; the machines are slowly breaking down.  One young man, Robin, discovers a government project to declare him and his family obsolete — but is the Government Investigation Bureau what it seems to be?  And what can he make of the resourceful GIB agent, Gina, who seems to know far more about the city and its condition than anyone else?

With Jungle, Aldiss paints as good a dystopian vision of the man/machine world as I've ever seen, as exciting and evocative as the first stages of his Hothouse series.  This is the kind of quality that won him the Best Promising Author Honorable Mention in 1959.

Five stars.

The Watchers in the Glade, by Richard Wilson


by Jack Gaughan

Somewhat less effective (but no less vivid) is this story by pulp-veteran Richard Wilson.  In Watchers, four journalists and two medics are banished to an uncharted world after a ship's mutiny.  To survive, they must murder and feed upon the only edible matter on the planet — sentient, telepathic beings.

All six of them go mad in their own ways, living with their daily crime while they wait on the slender hope that rescue will someday come for them. 

A solid three stars.

Neighbor, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

Silverberg pens another intimate piece, on the most local of politics: the rivalry between two neighbors.  On a planet of vast holdings, old McDermott builds an enormous tower in full view of the Holt estate.  For decades, Holt amasses a huge arsenal, waiting for the chance to get even.  But when the opportunity finally presents itself, can he take it?

The author described it to me as "a pretty good character study."  It's told with a certain degree of style, anyway.  Three stars.

The Delegate from Guapanga, by Wyman Guin


by Virgil Finlay

Lastly, we have Wyman Guin's first piece in eight years.  It's really been too long — this is a wonderful piece.  Guin presents us an alien culture (if not an alien race) on the eve of election time.  Only the telepathically capable, the elite and the "cupra" half-breeds, are franchised; the two dominant parties are the conservative Mentalists, favoring peace, polygamy, and interbreeding of the telepathically gifted and ungifted, and the Matterists, who value work, monogamy, moral purity, and the invasion of Earth.

It's a most appropriate story for our politically fraught year of 1964, and the storytelling and worldbuilding are quite good.

Four stars.

Summing Up

All told, even with the inferior Cordwainer (and it's not horrible), I imagine you could get a lot more pleasure out of the latest Galaxy than a trip to San Francisco's convention.  It's cheaper, too. 

Anyone want to lay odds on the next issue versus the DNC convention?

[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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Magazine

[July 14, 1964] TO THE MOON, ALICE (the August 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Long Hot Summer, Barely Begun

So, we have a new civil rights law, one which should transform life in the segregated South—not to mention the less overtly segregated North—if implemented.  Note the last phrase.  Meanwhile, in Mississippi, three civil rights workers involved in voter registration efforts have been missing for three weeks, after being pulled over for speeding by a local sheriff, then released.  Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner: remember those names.  I wonder if we will hear them again. 

The Issue at Hand

This August Amazing features on its cover Robert F. Young’s The HoneyEarthers, on its face a depressing prospect.  After his tiresome rehashes of Bible stories and fairy tales, is Young now sending Ralph Kramden into space?  Fortunately, no.  This time, Young has actually tried to write a story.  It’s pretty terrible, but still, the effort is there.  Attention must be paid to this man . . . briefly.


by Richard McKenna

The HoneyEarthers, by Robert F. Young

Young essays a rather complicated plot, and if you have any interest in reading the story, you might want to do so now.  Okay, back?  It begins with an unnamed kid working as an ice miner in Saturn’s rings, and he gets into fatal-looking trouble.  Next, there’s an older man, Aaron, escorting a younger woman on the HoneyEarth Express to the Moon—his son’s wife Fleurette.  His son Ronny (Aaron Jr.) has left her and is fleeing prosecution for tax evasion.  The father is in love with his son’s wife, but this trip is to be entirely chaste, even though the voyage is typically for honeymooners, some of whose amatory antics on the flight are mentioned with disapproval. 

On the Moon, Aaron discloses that Ronny was the doomed ice miner, whom Aaron rescued in the nick of time and then adopted.  But Ronny experienced space fright and developed space fugue and can’t remember anything before the rescue.  And there’s more!  In the interim, Aaron went to the stars, spent a number of years on two different planets, and made a bunch of money.  Now, he says, Ronny (having fled to space) is about to have a second space fright episode, which will bring back his memory of the years he lost to amnesia from the first episode, while cancelling out his memory of the intervening years, including Aaron and Fleurette. 


by George Schelling

By this point it seems clear that Aaron and Ronny, decades apart in age, are the same person.  But . . . where’s the necessary time travel?  As mentioned, Aaron traveled to two extrasolar planets, then came back to Mars, and headed for Saturn to rescue Ronny.  Now I know what you’re thinking—this guy has confused time dilation from faster-than-light interstellar travel with time travel! 

But no.  Young has instead relied on that time-honored technique of the field: just making stuff up.  In this case, it’s called “circumventing the space-time equalization schedule,” a phrase that is not explained but which the author apparently thinks means he can bend time to his will and the needs of the plot.  And after Aaron’s long anguished confession of all this history to Fleurette, it looks like he’s going to get his just reward.

All this takes place in the overarching context of Young’s familiar overbearing sentimentality about beautiful young women, which reaches a crescendo, fever pitch, or something like that.  To wit:

“A girl stepped into the room.

“She had dark-brown hair. She was tall and slender. She had gray eyes and a round full face. The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had
already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves. Spring, summer, fall and finally winter in the snow-whiteness of her hands. . . .

“She came like a summer wind across the room and kissed him, and he knew the fields once again: the fields and the woods and the warm summer sun, and the red and succulent berries that had stained his lips and filled his mouth with sweetness.”

I believe the critics’ technical term for this is “icky.” There’s plenty of it.  There are also other comment-worthy items, such as the notion of space fright, which causes amnesia, but a second episode of space fright will bring back the errant memories, a height of contrivance equal to the “space-time equalization schedule.” But enough.  One star, with a ribbon for the labor this confection obviously required.

Selection, by Ursula K. Le Guin


by George Schelling

This jokey short story is in some ways the antithesis of The HoneyEarthers (by being jokey, for starters).  On a colony planet, marriages are arranged by computer, and there’s no appeal.  The protagonist, Miss Ekstrom-Ngungu, intensely dislikes her designated husband, Mr. Chang-Oliver, but in the absence of other options, they go through with it, and the bottom line seems to be that people get over things fairly easily in the face of a little danger and the need to get on with life.  The selection process is presided over by a Mr. Gosseyn-Ho; appropriating the name of the protagonist of van Vogt’s The World of Null-A seems to be a dig at the long history of pseudo-rationality in SF.  The story is a lightweight satire but is less cartoony than most of its type, with more density of detail than usual about the colony planet and the work of the colonists.  Le Guin is a very solid writer even in her more relaxed moments.  Three stars.

Valedictory, by Phyllis Gotlieb


by George Schelling

Phyllis Gotlieb, author of the rather overblown but underperforming serial Sunburst, is back with a miniature, Valedictory, in which a woman in training to be a time-traveling researcher thinks she needs to go back and comfort her younger self.  Like Le Guin’s (and unlike Young’s!), this is a story about getting over things, rendered with nice economy.  Three stars.

Furnace of the Blue Flame, by Robert Rohrer


by Robert Adragna

The precocious Robert Rohrer (b. 1946), who I would guess has just graduated from high school, contributes Furnace of the Blue Flame, but might as well not have bothered.  It’s a capably written but terminally cliched post-apocalyptic story—you know, the kind that refers to “the still-scorched fields south of Nuyuk . . . the rocky wastes surrounding Bigchi . . . the plains of baked clay north of Lanna,” and so forth.  Morg, a lone wanderer and apostle of knowledge, disposes of a local petty tyrant who keeps his people in ignorance. Morg uses the surviving nuclear reactor of the title to beat the bad guys.  Two stars.

Zelerinda, by Gordon Walters


by George Schelling

The last item of fiction is Zelerinda, a long and turgid novelet by Gordon Walters, said to be a pseudonym of George W. Locke, who has published a few scattered stories under the two names.  Zelerinda is a planet that is missing half the elements in the periodic table and has a temperature of 600 degrees F., so life on it is impossible—or so one would think.  There’s been a series of nuclear explosions, which aren’t exactly natural, are they?  So two guys are sent to investigate, one of whom possesses a poorly defined psi talent called delvining, or possessing a delvin, which he thinks he has to hide, though that idea is quickly forgotten.  It’s quite badly written and about three times too long, though the ultimate revelation is at least mildly clever.  Two stars.

Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profile is Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, which immediately raises two questions: who cares, and why bother?  Meaning no disrespect to that shallow debasement of the conceptual armory of science fiction—er, let me try that again.  While Superman in all his incarnations is no doubt of interest to students of popular culture, broadly speaking, one would think that Moskowitz would find higher priorities in this series on prominent SF writers.  That said, it’s a perfectly adequate summary of a low-profile brief career in SF leading to a more substantial one in comics.  Most interestingly, during World War II, the government found it necessary to suppress two Superman strips concerning atomic energy.  Two stars.

Summing Up

So Amazing continues to idle, with the occasional loud backfire from the likes of Robert F. Young, and intervals of smooth humming from, this time, the very competent Ursula K. Le Guin and the getting-the-hang Phyllis Gotlieb.  Next month, Edmond Hamilton and James H. Schmitz are promised.  Expect no sudden shifting of gears.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[July 12th, 1964] Mind Over Matter (Doctor Who: The Sensorites [Part 1])

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By Jessica Holmes

Can I admit to something silly? I am a little bit scared of mind-readers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually believe in telepaths. Then again, who knows what sort of freaky experiments certain entities get up to.

I just think the idea of someone reading my mind, or even manipulating it, is one of the most horrifying concepts out there.

And it looks like Doctor Who agrees with me.

STRANGERS IN SPACE

Before setting off on their next adventure, the companions take a moment to reflect on how far everyone has come, in the literal and metaphorical senses.

"Yes, it all started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, and now it's turned out to be quite a…great spirit of adventure!"
The Doctor

Nice quote aside, the conversation feels a bit like it was yanked out of a children’s television programme, where the viewer needs the moral of the story spoonfed to them. It doesn’t belong at the start of this serial, for another thing. It just feels wrong for the pacing. We should be diving head-first into an adventure, not cautiously dipping a toe.

After stumbling over that scene, we can at last slide into the next adventure. Where has the TARDIS landed? A spaceship! And what should they find but a dead bloke slumped by the controls.

Bodes well, doesn't it?

There's another crew member nearby, also dead. Both are still warm.

Sensing danger, the companions turn back to the TARDIS, when the dead man suddenly moves.

The not-so-dead man grunts out a request for an unknown device, which revives him within seconds. He tells Barbara to use it on the dead woman, Carol. The man, Maitland, explains the device is a heart resuscitator, and that they weren't dead, just very deeply asleep.

Maitland explains that they’re orbiting a planet called the Sensesphere. Its people have been preventing them from leaving this region of space. How? By controlling their minds. Whenever the astronauts have tried to get past them, the Sensorites have used the control they have over the astronauts' brains to put them into a death-like sleep.

While he explains, we cut away to see a mysterious hand probing at the keyhole of the TARDIS, before waving an unknown device in front of it.

When we cut back, Barbara catches a whiff of something burning, and by the time we return to the TARDIS, the device has managed to extract the lock, as the Doctor and company discover a few minutes later, when they attempt to leave before running into any trouble. That’ll be the day.

No time to worry about that now, as the ship begins barrelling towards the surface of the Sensesphere. It’s only with the Doctor’s intervention that the ship doesn’t go smashing into the surface of the planet, leaving Maitland to wonder why he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

The Doctor postulates that it was the Sensorites' doing; an exercise in fear, to remind everyone that they could take control of their minds and kill them with ease, if they wanted to. However, it seems that the Doctor and his companions are immune to their influence.

Puzzled, the Doctor asks the astronauts if they've ever seen any of these Sensorites. Carol informs him that John, the third member of the crew (who we have yet to meet) has. However, when the Doctor expresses his desire to talk to John, he’s firmly shut down by Maitland.

Susan and Barbara go off to look for a drink, but someone closes the door behind them, and it’s not long before they find themselves trapped with a man who we can only presume must be John. The fellow doesn’t look particularly well as he shuffles about, blank-faced and glassy-eyed.

When Ian wonders aloud where the women have got to, the astronauts dart for the doorway Barbara and Susan just went through, but find it locked. They remark that they should have warned them. That your crewmate is a zombie? Yeah, probably worth mentioning!

Carol admits to Ian that John's brain has been pretty much turned to mush by the Sensorites. He gets violent sometimes, and is frightened of strangers.

This doesn’t bode well for Barbara and Susan, who have just been cornered by him. Rather than attack them, however, he breaks down in tears and asks who they are. Barbara, he says, looks like his sister. Have they come to help him?

Oh, poor bloke.

He's clearly just frightened and upset, so being decent human beings Barbara and Susan do what they can to comfort him.

I sense a metaphor here for the treatment of the mentally ill. Think about it. The other astronauts have locked him away, they're terrified of him, thinking him violent, when the poor chap is just scared, confused and unhappy.

A god-awful noise distracts the others from their attempts to break through the door, probably for the better. The last thing John needs is any hostility. There's something outside the ship, approaching fast.

Here come the Sensorites.

A pretty good start to the serial, with a nice build of tension and dread. Interested to see where it goes from here. 3.5 stars out of 5.

THE UNWILLING WARRIORS

Everyone tries to remain calm, but the astronauts seem a bit too good at it. They're completely frozen.

John breaks down again and starts speaking in response to an unseen voice. He's refusing to do something for them. To frighten Barbara and Susan. But why do the Sensorites want him to frighten the women?

It seems that the key to resisting the Sensorites is not allowing yourself to give in to fear. Fear opens the mind up to their influence, and that’s why our companions have been able to resist the Sensorites thus far. With everything they’ve been through, they’re hard as nails.

Susan suggests that she and Barbara could try using their minds to help resist the Sensorites. They have to be thinking in unison, and concentrating hard. To my surprise, it actually works, but the mental exertion makes Susan faint. It looks like she was doing most of the psychic heavy-lifting, as the Doctor discusses with Carol, once they manage to get the whole group back together.

He mentions it might be possible for Susan's thoughts to resist the Sensorites. Now, it's interesting that he specifically singles out Susan, not Barbara. Does Susan have an increased level of psychic ability? Why? How different exactly are the Doctor and Susan from the rest of the companions?

Meanwhile, Maitland and Ian are worrying about John, and trying to figure out why he bore the brunt of the Sensorites’ attack. Ian suspects that, as the ship’s mineralogist, John discovered something the Sensorites wanted to keep secret.

And now it's time for the science lesson, because there is probably someone at the BBC who is paid to come into the production offices of Doctor Who every so often and remind everyone that the programme is supposed to be educational.

The lesson doesn't get far before Susan tells Ian that she knows what a spectrograph is.

The Doctor takes a closer look at the spectrograph, and has a eureka moment. John found molybdenum.

We get another science lesson as Ian explains the properties of molybdenum, mainly its very high melting point, which makes it highly valued in certain industries. And the Sensesphere is a veritable goldmine of the stuff.

At his proclamation, there's a psychic attack, rendering the astronauts helpless, and Ian and Barbara go to look for the attackers.

After a long scene of them walking through the ship that feels like it goes on forever, they find the aliens. However, the Sensorites don’t attack, and once everyone’s calmed down, Ian figures they were probably as scared of him as he was of them.

Susan begins speaking to an unheard voice. Apparently the Sensorites have made contact, and are asking if they can talk. The Doctor agrees, as long as the Sensorites do them no harm.

The Sensorites reveal that the reason that they won't let the astronauts leave the Sensesphere is that humans have been to the planet before, bringing with them a terrible affliction. They won't let it happen again. However, knowing that this isn’t an ideal situation, the Sensorites have prepared a place for the humans to reside on the Sensesphere, where they’ll be well looked after, and everyone will be safe.

To be honest I think that’s fair enough, though it would have been helpful if they’d just explained that earlier. You’d think people with telepathy would be better communicators.

The Doctor doesn’t agree, however. He just wants the lock to his TARDIS back. Or else. That’s not a threat, but it is a promise.

The Sensorites go away to think about it. While they're making their own plans, the Doctor figures that they probably can't see in the dark, because their eyes were fully dilated in the full light of the ship’s bridge. I’ll take his word for it.

However, the Sensorites have another mental chat with Susan, and to everyone’s surprise, she declares that she’s made a deal with them. She’ll go with the Sensorites down to their planet.

In return, they won’t kill everyone else.

The serial is continuing strongly. 4 stars out of 5.

HIDDEN DANGER

This is why you don't accept lifts from strangers.

Ian and Barbara promptly go into surrogate-parent mode and leap into action to try and rescue Susan. They offer to talk to the Sensorites, who are resistant; they've had bad experiences in the past where other species have come offering peace, only to turn around and deliver destruction.

With the Doctor also attempting to intervene, the Sensorites contemplate stunning the humans and making their escape. However, before they can do that, Ian kills the lights, leaving them cowering in fear as they’re completely blinded. It’s quite pitiful to watch.

The Doctor tells the Sensorites that he simply want his lock back and to go home, so the Sensorites, the poor, timid things, start communicating with their superiors on the Sensesphere.

Ian wonders if he and Barbara were to use the Sensorites’ telepathy devices, could they read each others' minds? Gee, Ian, that's a bit intimate. At least buy her a drink first. Ian wonders if the Sensorites hypnotised Susan, but Barbara says, (with perhaps a hint of pride) that no, she's just growing up.

The Doctor and his granddaughter butt heads over her decision to go with the Sensorites. I don’t think the Doctor is quite ready to face up to the fact that his granddaughter is becoming more independent and starting to make important decisions on her own.

The Sensorites finally agree to let the Doctor talk to their leader, and at last everyone’s happy. Ish.

Well, everyone except for John. He’s tormented by the voices in his head. He’s so unhappy, I desperately want to give the poor man a hug. Carol is dismayed to see him like this, saying that he might as well be dead. Gee. How supportive. Poor man's desperately unwell and his fiancée abandons all hope. Oh, yes! They were planning to get married!

Before heading down to the Sensesphere, the Doctor interrogates the Sensorites further on why they attacked the astronauts.

They explain that ten years ago, five humans came to the Sensesphere. The Sensorites welcomed them, but the humans' minds were closed off. In time, they quarrelled, and two of them took off, their ship exploding a mile into the atmosphere. The other three, the Sensorites assume, must have snuck aboard, and in their struggle for control of the ship, caused the explosion.

Ever since that day, their people have been dying in greater numbers every year. The situation seems similar to how Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas.

Barbara, Maitland and Carol stay with the ship, and the others go down to the Sensesphere.

Meanwhile, the ruler of the Sensorites argues with his fellow elders about his decision to invite the humans down to the planet. He explains his rationale to them, and it's perfectly sensible. The Doctor’s a man of learning. Perhaps he can help them.

I'd have them go through decontamination procedures and keep them in an airtight room, to be on the safe side.

One of the other Sensorites objects on the grounds that humans are ugly. For one, rude. For two, the ruler observes that ugliness really depends on cultural context. The Sensorites think humans are very ugly, but the Elder acknowledges that the humans could well think them ugly.

Not wrong there, mate. You look like a partially-deflated rugby ball with a bad toupee glued onto the wrong end.

No offence.

Still, the Sensorite leader seems like a nice, very reasonable chap. I like him. It’s interesting to see human-alien relations from the other perspective. It does a lot to underline that the Sensorites are just people. Weird-looking people who can read minds, but still people.

The others are rather uncertain about the Earth creatures, untrusting of them. I think both sides of this discussion have merit. They have perfectly valid concerns about potential aggression.

Well. One of them does.

The other doesn't think they'll be safe until all the humans are dead.

I'd argue with him but I’ve read history books and I know what humans are like.

Upon arriving on the Sensesphere, our companions learn that the Sensorites have a caste system. The Elders think and rule, the Warriors fight, and the Sensorites work and play. Everyone's happy, and some are happier than others, as Ian remarks. The Sensorites don't get his point.

Curious. I’d have thought they’d have a more egalitarian society, what with their advanced technology. Then again, technological advancement does not necessarily equal enlightened attitudes.

Also, is Sensorite the name of the species or just that one caste?

Unbeknownst to them (I do so love that word), one of the Sensorites is preparing an assassination. Once everyone is seated, the humans will be struck in the heart with a disintegrator beam.

Meanwhile, the other Sensorites say they can help heal poor John, who seems to be able to tell if people are good or not. Somehow. He's in good company…for now.

Barbara goes with him, and the others go to sit down. The suspense is killing me!

Before they can be assassinated, however, another Sensorite foils the plot, admonishing the murderous Sensorite. I do with they had names. It’d be much easier to keep them straight.

The Elder confirms the group’s assumptions about how John came to be the way he is. He found out about the molybdenum, got overexcited, opening up his mind, and the Sensorites caught him thinking about human mining fleets coming in to mine the resource, so they decided they had to imprison him. They didn’t mean to drive him out of his mind. They put the others to sleep, but his mind was so open, it was as if they hit him with the psychic equivalent of a bus.

The Elder notes that his guests have been brought different water to him, and orders that some of the better water be brought for them. Isn’t water just water?

Ian, not being too fussy, drinks some of the bog-standard water, and a few minutes later, begins to cough. As we all know, coughing in any story is a sure signifier of doom. Nobody ever coughs unless they’re about to drop down dead.

And I've already worked it out:

  • Fact the first: The Elders do not get the disease that plagues their people.
  • Fact the second: The Elders drink water from a different source to the water the common people drink.
  • Fact the third: Ian had some of this poor-people water.
  • And now Ian is coughing.

Something is polluting the water supply.

They don’t call me Holmes for nothing, you know.

I get to feel clever for figuring it out before the Doctor, who takes forever to notice that Ian sounds like he’s about to bring up a lung. The key to understanding the mystery plague is sitting right next to you, man!

However, he can’t fail to notice when Ian begins to choke, and drops to the floor, unconscious.

According to the Elder, there's no hope. He's dying.

Now look here, Mr. Newman. You are not allowed to kill Ian. I like Ian, and I shall be very cross with you if you kill him.

Some nice character moments in this episode. This is shaping up to be a very good serial. 4 stars out of 5.

Final Thoughts

So, that’s the first half of the Sensorites. Personally? I really like it. It’s already taken us to some pretty dark places, and I have a feeling it’s going to get darker before the end. Telepathy has no real limit to how disturbing it can be; it all depends on how brave the writer is feeling (or what the BBC will let him put on television).

I’m also enjoying the presentation of the Sensorites not as villains, but as people with their own problems and their own perspective. Can they work together with the Doctor and company to solve their problems, or will sinister forces hinder their efforts at every turn?

We’ll have to wait and see.

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Movies

[July 10, 1964] Greetings from the Red Planet (The Movie, Robinson Crusoe on Mars)

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by Natalie Devitt

Spacewrecked

According to the previews for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, the movie is "scientifically authentic. It is only one step ahead of present reality." This update of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is directed by Byron Haskin, best known for directing The War of the Worlds, which was produced by George Pal (The Time Machine (1960)). Haskin and Pal have also made another picture that attempted to depict a more accurate Mars: Conquest of Space (1955). Intrigued by these films and interested in Haskin’s more recent work on some of my favorite entries of The Outer Limits thus far, like The Architects of Fear and A Feasibility Study, I was determined not to miss Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

So, is the movie worth a trip to your local theater?

The movie opens up aboard a spaceship carrying Commander Christopher Draper (played by Paul Mantee, appearing in his first film major film role), Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West, an actor commonly found on television westerns) and an adorable monkey named Mona. Things take an unexpected turn when they detect a meteoroid and are "forced out of orbital velocity to avoid collision with planetoid into tighter orbit of Mars." As the situation worsens, the crew is left with no other option than to immediately attempt to land on the fourth planet. While fleeing the vehicle in their individual escape pods, Draper is separated from McReady and Mona.


Welcome to Mars

Draper adapts to the conditions on the red planet, while searching for McReady and Mona. Even though he is part of the first crew on Mars, Draper learns quickly what it takes to survive. He finds shelter in a cave. For heat, Draper discovers yellow rocks that "burn like coal.” Heating the rocks not only keeps him warm, but also produces oxygen, which he then uses to refill his oxygen tank. Throughout the film, Draper keeps a careful audio record about all that he experiences, which provides a useful narrative device when things happen off-screen.

After many days, Draper finally locates McReady’s pod, but the poor colonel did not survive the landing. Shortly after giving McReady a proper burial, Draper runs into Mona, who is happily alive. Reunited with her and assuming that they are all alone, Draper tries rationing what little food and water they have. Surprisingly, the reduced rations do not seem to bother Mona one bit. She "spends most of her days off somewhere." Finding this unusual, Draper devises a plan, which involves feeding her a salty meal without water, believing that she might be able to lead him to a water source. Sure enough, she does — an underground hot spring. In the water, Draper also notices some strange plant that his little primate pal is eating, which resembles seaweed on the outside, but once peeled, contains something that looks an awful lot like sausage. Draper calls it "Martian food." He soon finds that the plant has several other uses, because you can "eat it, weave it and you wear it.”


No happy sunset for Adam West this time


Martian hot springs

After more than four months on Mars, Draper longs for human companionship. All of his training has not prepared him for the extreme isolation he experiences while stranded on a strange planet, and his mind begins playing tricks on him. Snapping out of an episode in which he is visited by the ghost of Colonel McReady, he concludes that "a guy can lick the problems of heat, water, shelter” and that that loneliness is the greatest obstacle that he has encountered while on the planet. Around this time, he stumbles upon alien remains. On the extraterrestrial skeleton are strange black bangle bracelets. Draper believes that the being is a murder victim due to its skull showing signs of trauma and being charred.

Later, Draper's radio picks up signals of an "interplanetary vehicle.” Draper rushes toward the spaceship, only for its crew to shoot directly at him and narrowly miss. In the chaos, Draper runs into an alien bearing a striking resemblance to a man, dressed in clothing that looks straight out of some ancient civilization, with black bracelets on both wrists identical to the ones he found on the skeleton earlier. He soon realizes that the alien (played by Victor Lundin of Ma Barker’s Killer Brood) is an escaped slave who worked in mines on Mars, while other human-like creatures in spacesuits held the slaves at gun-point.


Hebrews building the Martian pyramids

Draper feeds the slave and offers him a place to stay. Draper believes that the slave owners are from a planet "other than Mars” and that they handle their slaves "electronically”, using the black bangles. He names the slave, who he presumes to be mute, "Friday, with apologies to Robinson Crusoe."

Friday, as it turns out, is actually capable of speech. Once Draper realizes this, he tells Friday, "You’re going to learn English, if I have to sit on your chest for two months.” The two eventually become close friends. Friday is part of an alien species originally from ”the center of the belt of Orion.” Friday shares with Draper painful memories of working in the mine. The alien also expresses concern that "the enemy" will use his bracelets to track him down, so Draper tries to help Friday remove them. Friday’s captors return for him, but Friday, Draper and Mona are determined to stick together.

Thus ensues a long trek to the Martian North Pole, mostly underground to avoid the slavers. This portion of the film is very scenic, although not much happens. Upon reaching the polar ice caps, Draper picks up a spaceship again…but this time, it's an Earth rescue vessel. The three will be saved.

A Mixed Bag of Oxy-rocks

Robinson Crusoe on Mars feels like two completely different movies in one, due to its changing tone midway. The first half of it is a much more serious and slow story about a man’s struggle for survival. But once Friday enters the picture, things speed up and get a lot sillier. To be perfectly honest, the transition from one part to the other is not as smooth as I would have liked. That said, screenwriters Ib Melchior (The Seventh Planet) and John C. Higgins do a surprisingly good job of bringing Defoe’s story to space.

The first half of the movie is not just slow, but also fairly quiet. Most spoken words are Draper recording himself or talking to a pet monkey. Draper seems like a person with good intentions, but I have to admit he is not the friendliest guy and often treats Mona better than Friday. Draper whines about not having someone besides Mona and when he finds someone kind of like a human, he treats him pretty poorly at first.


Single living on Mars is a drag

To the movie’s credit, Robinson Crusoe on Mars does seem to be much more rooted in science than many science fiction films that came before it. Most equipment used by the actors seems fairly realistic. The actors are pretty believable operating their spaceship and using different devices. Many of the characteristics of Mars seem a bit more accurate than you tend to see in the movies. Still, one has to suspend disbelief to enjoy the film.

My big issue with the film was the way it handles the planet’s lack of oxygen, which the characters deal with by consuming their pills that "bypass the lungs and produce oxygen right in the blood”, or using an oxygen tank as sparingly as once every 10-15 minutes. It's not that there isn't enough oxygen, but that there is still probably far too much compared to what we actually know of Martian conditions. There are also fires that manage to burn heartily on Mars’ surface, despite the lack of oxygen, though they did contribute to the overall look of the film.


Two ways to deal with the lack of oxygen on Mars

Visually, Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a stunning achievement. It is more than a movie, it is an experience with Winton C. Hoch’s gorgeous Technicolor photography, Matte paintings by Albert Whitlock, and auroras which dance in the sky to yet another memorable score by Nathan Van Cleave. The highly-saturated colors and all the Death Valley exterior shots look incredible on the big screen. Also, fans of 1953’s The War of the Worlds might be amused by some of the miniatures used in the film.


Alien craft looking…strangely familiar.

All in all, I am happy to report that I did not leave the theater disappointed. The movie is worth the price of a ticket, and I hope it gets the attention it deserves. Reportedly, the picture was made independently and distributed through Paramount. The film is superior to many movies with much larger budgets, which is why I am giving it a pretty solid three stars.

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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 8, 1964] The Immortal Supervillain: The Remarkable Forty-Two Year Career of Dr. Mabuse

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by Cora Buhlert

The Sincerest form of Flattery

Last month, I talked about the successful West German film series based on the novels of British thriller writer Edgar Wallace as well as the many imitators they inspired. The most interesting of those imitators and the only one that is unambiguously science fiction is the Dr. Mabuse series.

Dr. Mabuse is not a new character. His roots lie in the Weimar Republic and he first appeared on screen in 1922 in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse – The Gambler, based on the eponymous novel by Luxembourgian writer Norbert Jacques.

Post: Dr. Mabuse - Der Spieler

By day, Dr. Mabuse is a respected psychoanalyst and by night he runs a criminal organisation. Mabuse uses his position to infiltrate the corrupt high society of the Weimar Republic and then uses his powers of hypnosis as well as his talent as a master of disguise to commit crimes. Mabuse also employs science fictional technology such as an automobile that turns into a motorboat at the pull of a lever. Dr. Mabuse – The Gambler clearly reflects the fears of the early Weimar Republic with its hyperinflation which plunged many Germans into poverty, while the profiteers of the First World War were partying.

In the movie, Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a much more unambiguous villain than in the novel. And while Norbert Jacques' Mabuse wants to establish a utopian colony in Brazil, Lang's Mabuse wants to install a reign of terror right there in Berlin. In retrospect, it's obvious why the Nazis did not like the Mabuse films.

At the end of the novel, Mabuse apparently falls to his death from an airplane. In the film, Mabuse is captured alive, but insane, leaving open the possibility of a sequel. That sequel, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, was made in 1933.

Poster: Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

Mabuse, still played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, is now an inmate in a mental asylum run by Dr. Baum and spends his days scribbling plans for elaborate crimes onto scraps of paper, which he calls his testament. When Berlin is hit by a wave of crimes based on Mabuse's scribblings, this attracts the attention of Kommissar Karl Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) of the Berlin police. Based on the real life Berlin police officer Ernst Gennat, Lohmann first appeared in an unrelated movie, Fritz Lang's 1931 crime drama M. where he hunted down a child killer played by Peter Lorre.

Mabuse is the logical suspect. But he cannot have committed the crimes, since he is incarcerated in Baum's asylum. The solution to the mystery lies once more in Mabuse's hypnotic powers, which he uses on Dr. Baum. In a chilling sequence, Mabuse's spirit takes over Dr. Baum, while his body dies. The movie ends with Mabuse, now occupying the body of Dr. Baum, once more locked up in the mental asylum, madly scribbling away. With this film, the Mabuse series not only crosses over into the supernatural, but also opened up the possibility of a revival.

The film was supposed to premiere in March 1933, two months after Hitler had come to power. Joseph Goebbels, head of the newly established Ministry of Propaganda, found the movie very exciting, but banned it anyway for incitement to crime. But then, Mabuse's modus operandi bore some uncomfortable parallels to the way the Nazis spread fear and terror, while passages of Mabuse's testament were copied almost verbatim from Mein Kampf. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse became the first movie banned by the Nazis and remained unseen in Germany until 1951. Fritz Lang left Germany the day after the film was banned and went to Hollywood. Meanwhile, the evil Doctor was forgotten, as Germany descended into terror on a scale that would have exceeded even Mabuse's imagination.

But this was not the end. For Mabuse's creator Norbert Jacques sold the rights to film producer Artur Brauner, who also persuaded Fritz Lang to return to West Germany, not to adapt Mabuse, but to remake his 1921 movie The Indian Tomb.

Inspired by the success of the Edgar Wallace movies, Artur Brauner wanted to remake The Testament of Dr. Mabuse as well and asked Fritz Lang to direct. Lang, however, wanted to make a sequel. Norbert Jacques had died in 1954, so Lang adapted the dystopian novel Mr. Tot Buys a Thousand Eyes by Polish-German writer Jan Fethke a.k.a. Jean Forge. Mabuse was inserted into the storyline and the movie was released as The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960.

The Night has a Thousand Eyes

Poster: The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

Most of the film is set at the Hotel Luxor, a luxury hotel built by the Nazis and equipped with hidden surveillance cameras in every room (the thousand eyes of the title). The hotel is now owned by a criminal organisation headed by none other than Dr. Mabuse, who after laying low during the Third Reich (or did he?) is up to his old tricks again. He records wealthy hotel guests in compromising situations and then blackmails them. If compromising situations don't happen on their own, Mabuse and his gang engineer them.

But luckily, Kommissar Kras (Gert Fröbe) is on the case. Kras is basically Kommissar Lohmann in everything but the name and also remembers Mabuse's reign of terror during the Weimar Republic, linking the old and the new Mabuse movies and making it very clear that The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse is a sequel rather than a remake. There is only one problem. Dr. Mabuse very definitely died in 1933, so who is behind this new wave of crimes?

In the end, the blind fortune teller Peter Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) is revealed to be Mabuse. Though Cornelius isn't his real name nor is he really a fortune teller nor really blind. Instead, he is one Professor Jordan, a psychiatrist who feels compelled to continue Mabuse's work. It is implied that Professor Jordan is the same psychiatrist in whose mental hospital Mabuse was incarcerated back in The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, even though the character names are different. But then, it is also implied that Kras and Lohmann are the same person.

Kommissar Lohmann and Mabuse
Kommissar Lohmann (Gert Fröbe) confronts Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss)

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse moves away from the stylish expressionism of the earlier movies towards a quasi-documentary style. The scenes inside the Hotel Luxor are implied to be footage recorded by Mabuse's cameras, turning the viewer into a voyeur. The science fiction elements are fairly light. It would certainly be possible to recreate the Hotel Luxor and its surveillance cameras with 1960s technology and indeed the new East German Interhotels are real life versions of the Hotel Luxor.

Thousand Eyes ends with Mabuse presumed dead once again. However, the film was a big commercial success and so Mabuse was promptly resurrected barely a year later. Fritz Lang had retired, so Harald Reinl, who previously worked on the Edgar Wallace series, took over the directing duties for Im Stahlnetz des Dr. Mabuse. The international title is the unimaginative The Return of Dr. Mabuse, a literal translation would be In the Steel Web of Dr. Mabuse. Shot in atmospheric black and white, Steel Web is stylistically closer to the expressionist Mabuse films of the Weimar Republic than Fritz Lang's Thousand Eyes.

Post: Steel Web of Dr. Mabuse

Mabuse's organisation now works with the Chicago mob in his quest to conquer the world. As a favour to his new allies, his gang murders a woman who is burned alive by a flamethrower that emerges from a flap in the side of a truck. Her burning body is seen lying on the sidewalk for several seconds in a scene that is shockingly brutal by the sedate standards of West German cinema.

The Berlin police once again puts an inspector played by Gert Fröbe on the case. This time, the character is actually called Kommissar Lohmann and it is strongly implied that this is the same Kommissar Lohmann as before. We also briefly meet Lohmann's wife and children at the beginning of the movie, a pleasant contrast to the many lone wolf investigators who dominate the crime genre.

Because of the mob connection, the FBI sends an agent named Joe Como (former Tarzan and current Old Shatterhand Lex Barker). Together, they uncover Mabuse's latest scheme: using a mind control drug on prison inmates to force them to commit crimes. In the end, prison warden Wolf is unmasked (literally, via ripping off a rubber mask) as Mabuse (still played by Wolfgang Preiss). During the final battle with the police, Mabuse escapes into a railway tunnel and is apparently killed by an oncoming train. Or is he?

The second postwar outing of Dr. Mabuse is a curious mix of gangster film and science fiction thriller. The gangster film elements are clearly influenced by the popularity of the German pulp hero G-Man Jerry Cotton – also note the similarities of the names Jerry Cotton and Joe Como. There are plenty of creepy moments, such as the vacant eyed convicts converging upon a power station, while a sound truck blasts out the words "I have only one lord and master, Dr. Mabuse" over and over again.

Flirting with SF

The science fiction elements were ramped up for the third movie, Die unsichtbaren Krallen des Dr. Mabuse (The Invisible Dr. Mabuse), which premiered in March 1962, directed once more by Harald Reinl.

Poster: The Invisible Dr. Mabuse

Lex Barker is back as Joe Como, this time working with Kommissar Brahm (Siegfried Lowitz, a regular of the Edgar Wallace series), since Kommissar Lohmann has apparently taken the long deserved holiday he had to postpone in the previous film. Together they tackle the case of an invisible man who haunts a theatre and stalks the dancer Liane Martin (Harald Reinl's wife and Edgar Wallace regular Karin Dor).

In spite of the title, the invisible man stalking Liane Martin is not Dr. Mabuse but Professor Erasmus, who has invented an invisibility device. An accident left the Professor disfigured and so he uses his device to visit his beloved Liane Martin, failing to realise that being stalked by an invisible man is a lot more terrifying than a scarred face.

Joe Como and Professor Erasmus
Joe Como (Lex Barker) and Professor Erasmus (Rudolf Fernau), not invisible for once.

Mabuse appropriates the device and the movie ends with Mabuse's army of invisible killers converging on a plane to kill a passenger. However, the police have placed strings with bells around the airfield and then make the invisible killers visible by spraying them with water. This time around, Mabuse is even captured, though he has gone insane.

The Invisible Dr. Mabuse seems to be two separate movies, for the haunted theatre plot and the invisible man plot don't come together until the end. Gert Fröbe is sorely missed as well. Nonetheless, the film has several memorable moments such as Liane Martin getting (almost) guillotined no less than three times, Joe Como confronting the invisible Professor in a steam bath and the army of invisible killers becoming slowly visible again in a spray of water. The special effects are surprisingly good by West German standards.

A New Testament

The next movie, released in September 1962, was a remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Mabuse is now incarcerated in a mental hospital run by Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla) and still manages to give orders to his gang via hypnotising the hapless Professor. Gert Fröbe makes a welcome return as Kommissar Lohmann, though Lex Barker's Joe Como is sadly absent, since Barker has found a more lucrative gig as Old Shatterhand in the film adaptations of Karl May's Winnetou novels. As before, Mabuse's body seemingly dies, while his spirit takes over Pohland's body.

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

Testament is a solid entry in the series, though it suffers in comparison with the 1933 original. It also doesn't help that anybody who has seen the original already knows the big twist. And while Mabuse's plan of causing economic collapse via flooding the market with forged banknotes clearly plays on the fears of the 1920s and 1930s with its hyperinflation, the Black Friday and the Great Depression, it feels anachronistic in postwar West Germany in the middle of a so-called economic miracle. Harald Reinl's atmospheric direction has been replaced by the more pedestrian Werner Klingler as well. I'm not the only one who feels that Testament was rather lacklustre, since the movie bombed at the box office.

Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse

Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse (Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse) premiered in September 1963. Mabuse, still in the body of Professor Pohland, has had enough of the Berlin police continuing to thwart his attempts to establish a world reign of crime and so decamps to Britain to continue his villainous ways. This time around, Mabuse steals a mind control device and plans to use it to destabilise the British government. He also stages impressive demonstrations, such as inducing a hangman to hang himself in a memorable scene.

Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse
The hanging scene from "Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse"

But Major Bill Tern of Scotland Yard (Peter van Eyck,) and Kommissar Vulpius of the Hamburg police (Werner Peters) are on Mabuse's trail. Luckily, it turns out that people wearing a certain hearing aid are immune to Mabuse's mind control device and so the police manages to arrest Mabuse and his gang. Alas, Mabuse's spirit has already moved on, leaving a hapless Professor Pohland repeating "It wasn't me, it was Mabuse. He used my brain" over and over again.

It is notable that the mind control motif – whether via hypnosis, drugs or electronic devices – appears again and again in the Mabuse series. And Professor Pohland insisting over and over again that he is completely innocent of the crimes Mabuse committed does bring to mind many former Nazis who make the same claim, though with far less justification.

Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse is a thoroughly entertaining film and curiously prescient, since one of the crimes committed by Mabuse's gang eerily mirrors the recent Great Train Robbery in Britain. Though the tendency to reuse the same actors in completely different parts (e.g. Werner Peters appeared in four of five postwar Mabuse movies, playing a different character in each one) is getting confusing by now. Of course, the Edgar Wallace films also tend to reuse the same actors over and over again (and to make matters even more confusing, several actors appear in both series). But unlike the Wallace movies, the seven Mabuse movies to date have an internal continuity.

Though like Mabuse himself, the movies tend to change their appearance from film to film. In the past forty years, the series has moved from reflecting the economic anxieties of the Weimar Republic (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) via Cold War paranoia (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) and offbeat gangster thriller (The Steel Web of Dr. Mabuse) to science fiction thriller cum theatre horror (The Invisible Dr. Mabuse) back to economic fears (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, take two). With Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse, the Mabuse series has morphed into an Edgar Wallace movie. And indeed, the screenplay is a loose adaptation of the 1962 novel The Device by Bryan Edgar Wallace, son of Edgar.

Whither Mabuse?

The flexibility of the Mabuse series and the character himself ensures its longevity. Dr. Mabuse has terrorised Germany for forty years now and may well continue for years or even decades to come, for Mabuse's nature as a malevolent spirit allows him to jump from body to body, plotting new crimes and leaving behind muttering hosts who insist that they didn't do anything, Mabuse did.

What form will the Mabuse series take next? Rumours suggest that the next Mabuse movie Die Todesstrahlen des Dr. Mabuse (The Death Rays of Dr. Mabuse), due out in September, is inspired by the popular James Bond movies.

I certainly will be in the cinema, watching as Germany's greatest supervillain plots yet again to conquer the world and establish a reign of crime and chaos.

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[July 6, 1964] Busy Schedule (August 1964 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

SFlying Eastward

Today saw the Journey in the wilds of Utah, attending a small science fiction conclave out in the lovely summer desert of Deseret.  What could have impelled us to make another plane trek less than a week after having returned from a long sojourn in Japan?

Well, we were invited.  The things one does for egoboo…

Nevertheless, duty continues, and so I find myself pounding the typewriter keys early in the morning (to the chagrin of the folks in the neighboring rooms, no doubt) so you can read all about the first SF digest of the month, the August 1964 IF.

The Issue at Hand


by Fetterly

The big news is that IF is a monthly now after years and years as a bimonthly.  Lord knows where editor Fred Pohl is getting the material for this increased frequency, especially given that he also helms the sister books, Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow. Let's see how the new mag holds up under the compressed schedule:

The Slaves of Gree, by C. C. MacApp


by Gray Morrow

Young Jen wakes up spluttering in a pounding sea, his memories forgotten, with the trace of a foreign name in the back of his mind.  Who is "Steve Duke" and what is his relation to Jen?  The hapless jetsam of a man is rescued by his own kind, fellow slaves to the great Gree.  Jen soon gets back his memories, remembering that he belongs to the happy, harmonious Hive, a burgeoning galactic power. 

Or does he?

Turns out Jen is a double-agent, quite literally.  He has two personalities, which swap as needed.  One is one of the Hive's most promising subalterns, a puissant veteran of the space corps.  The other is Major Steve Duke, a rather unsavory Terran sent to topple the Hive from within.

There are the makings of a great story here, but it needs a lot of polish.  So much of the tale is told mechanically.  At one point, I counted ten sentences in a row beginning with "He [verbed]…"  Plus, I kept expecting a twist at the end, but instead, it's just a straight adventure story with (I felt) the wrong personality winning. 

Two stars, just shy of three.

A as in Android, by Frances T. Hall

A middle aged rebel against the system encounters an android with his face and imprinted with his memories – memories he'd sold for some quick cash a decade and a half before.  Has the robot, who was exiled to the hell planet called Cauldron, come for revenge or something else?

Frances Hall's first SF story (to my knowledge) is a solid triple.  Four stars.

The Prince and the Pirate, by Keith Laumer


by Nodel

The latest Retief story sees our favorite interstellar diplomat/super spy thwarting the topple of a monarchy.  Neither the best nor the worst of the stories in the series, it entertains reasonably.  Three stars.

The Life Hater, by Fred Saberhagen

How do you convince a machine that biological life is superior?  And in the parley between human and sentient, life-hating battleship, who is playing who?

Fred Saberhagen continues to impress with his excellent tales of the Berserkers — sentient dreadnoughts who scour the galaxy, ridding it of biological infestations.

Four stars.

Farnham's Freehold (Part 2 of 3), by Robert A. Heinlein


by Jack Gaughan

Last up is the latest installment of Heinlein's most recent novel.  Last time, Hugh Farnham, a libertarian, nudist cat-lover (no resemblance whatsoever to his creator!) ducked into a bomb shelter with his family when the Russkies started to nuke America.  Instead of dying in the holocaust, however, Farnham et. al. found themselves transported to a virgin version of their world, one in which people had never existed.  Or so they thought.

At the beginning of this month's narrative, other people show up — technologically advanced black men who enslave the Farnhams (except for their house servant, Joe, who is black) and bring them to the Summer Palace of Ponse, Lord Protector of the region.  It turns out that this isn't an alternate universe, but rather some two thousand years in the future.  Descendants of the Africans now rule the world in a static society in which the whites are slaves.  Hugh must use his wits to carve a place for himself in this society before he is eliminated (or worse!) for trespassing.

This second part holds up a lot better than the first.  Near the end, we learn that there are still free savages hiding in the Rocky Mountains, an Part 3 will likely feature some kind of Farnhem-led insurrection.  All very patriotic and appropriate for Independence Day.

Four stars.

Summing Up

Truth to tell, I'd been dreading the Heinlein and leery of the rest of the issue.  In the end, though, Pohl managed to put together a readable (if not stellar) 132 pages of SF.  I will definitely be keeping my subscription!

Let's just hope that he…and I… can keep up this busy schedule.

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[July 2, 1964] Completing the Tour (July 1964 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Last Days

After three lovely weeks, our trip to Japan is sadly drawing to a close.  Someday, I can see relocating here for months out of the year — after all, my job really only requires a typewriter and access to a good postal service.  That's for the future, though, when the Young Traveler has finished school and left the nest. 

After Nagoya, we took a train to Hiroshima, the city made famous on August 6, 1945.

It has been nineteen years since the first atomic blast on Japan leveled a square mile of city and killed tens of thousands in an instant.  Hiroshima, a port city on the west end of the island of Honshu, has largely recovered since then, but the scars of that day still bear mute witness to the attack.

It is a sobering thing to visit a place of such megadeath, not dissimilar to the eerie feelings I experienced walking down "Bloody Lane" at Antietam, where thousands died in a few hours just miles away from where my wife's mother now lives.

Yet, life goes on.  Hiroshima is a vibrant city, peaceful and productive.  They're building a new train station that will further stimulate the local economy.  We like the people and the feeling here; this may well be come a standard stop for us in the future.

After several days in Hiroshima, we headed further south to our final stop, the island of Kyusuhu and the metropolis of Fukuoka.

Our main reason for stopping here was to visit our adoptive family, the Fujiis.  Just after the war, the Fujii family sent their teenaged daughter, Miwako, to the States for a few weeks as part of a student exchange.  The next year, my wife's little sister spent a year studying in Kyoto, where the Fujii's lived.  They accepted her into their family, even including her in the annual family photo.  Since then, Miwako, her sister Hideko, and their parents, Yuko and Yukio, have essentially become beloved in-laws, and we try to see them whenever possible.

Yukio, a former policeman, retired to his home town of Amagi, a little farm community a couple of hours from Fukuoka. He and Yuko reside in an ancient house there, a relic that dates back to before Commodore Perry sailed his black ships into Tokyo Harbor.

It's a beautiful, peaceful residence, and as luck would have it, Miwako, who had gotten married and moved to San Francisco, was also there for a visit.  With her adorable handful, Jin.

We all took turns playing with the tyke until he, in the way of small children everywhere, wore himself out and fell asleep in his grandfather's arms.

The Issue at Hand

It is appropriate that the end of our trip coincides with the wrap-up of the science fiction magazines for this month.  As always, the last magazine to be reviewed is this month's Analog.  So how did this oversized slick of a mag do this time?


by Kelly Freas

Origin of the Solar System, by William F. Dawson and Ben Bova

Opening up the issue is an informative piece on a rather unusual suggestion for how the planets came to be.  It lies somewhere between the Catastrophism of the stellar collision theory (which would make our solar system almost unique in the universe) and the Uniformitarianism of the "disk theory" which postulates that virtually all stars should be born with planets.  The hypothesis advanced by Bova and Dawson is that solar systems result in binary systems in which the second star is not of sufficient size to ignite and thus breaks up into a bunch of smaller worlds.

I don't know if I buy it, but since the article does a good job of presenting both this concept and more traditional ones, it's a decent read. 

Three stars.

Sleeping Planet (Part 1 of 3), by William R. Burkett, Jr.


by Kelly Freas

This new serial, written by a fellow I've never heard of, is a Mack Reynoldsy piece about an extraterrestrial attack on the Earth in the 26th Century.  The aliens use some kind of sleeping powder that puts all of humanity, save for a few immune holdouts, into a state of suspended animation.  Planet is the story of our resistance against the invaders.

I have to applaud Burkett for being willing to jump into the deep end on his first effort, turning in a novel-sized endeavor.  He's a good writer, too, with the first half of the installment quite vivid and engaging.  The aliens are just a bit too stupid, though (a big piece of the plot involves one of the survivors convincing the ETs that his dead grandfather will wreak vengeance on the invaders from beyond the grave…and they believe it!) and the light-hearted portions jar with the gritty ones.

Three stars so far, with a suspicion that this piece will end with a whimper, not a bang.

The Sea-Water Papers, by Raymond E. Banks


by John Schoenherr

An eccentric genius dies before he can explain how his desalination tablets work — is it the invention or the ingestion?

This is another too-cute piece starring clever garage-based scientists, the kind Analog editor, Campbell, loves.  The kind that champion dowsing, perpetual motion machines, and reactionless drives.

Two stars.

A Day in the Life of Kelvin Throop, by R. A. J. Phillips


by John Schoenherr

In this one, Mr. Throop, late of the Canadian Northern Territories Public Relations Division, tells the citizens what he really thinks of their letters.

Not particularly entertaining nor remotely science fiction. 

Two stars.

The Master Key, by Poul Anderson

Last up, we have the latest Let the Spacemen Beware.  This one is really Van Rijn's story, in which he tells of a frozen world that seemed ideal for trade, but the not-quite-human (or perhaps too-human) aliens become inexplicably hostile upon learning of our fealty to a God, ending the affair in tragedy.

With this piece, Anderson, who had been slacking of late, returns to form.  While the premise is a tad contrived, mainly so the reason for the aliens' change of heart can be explained neatly at the end, the telling is vintage Poul.

Four stars.

Doing the Math

On the whole, it's been a good month for SF.  Analog finished at 2.9 stars, just on the disappointing side of good, but that's more an artifact of the scoring system.  It's a decent issue, all things considered.  Decidedly worse were F&SF and Worlds of Tomorrow, both clocking in at 2.3 stars.

All the other mags were better, from the disappointing by comparison but still 3.1 stars earning Gamma, to the decent Amazing and IF (3.2 stars) up to the well worth reading New Worlds and Fantastic (3.5 stars).

It's enough to make me eager to go back home and collect my accumulated subscriptions for August! 

(Note: for those keeping track, women wrote 7 out of the 49 new fiction pieces published this month.  Not great, but not as bad as it has been previously.)

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[June 30, 1964] A big Delta (June 1964 Gamma)

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by Gideon Marcus

Heading South

After four lovely days in the Japanese capital, we hopped the train for points southwest, toward the center of the country.  Sadly, we were just a few months too early to take the new "bullet train" which will be debuted in October in time for the Olympics.  The trip thus took many hours, but the scenery was nice (this year's "rainy season" hasn't been very) and I got a lot of reading done.

Nagoya is Japan's "fourth" city, after Tokyo/Yokohama, Osaka, and Fukuoka.  A drab, gray and brown place, it nevertheless was a must-stay location for us given its proximity to so many of our friends: A husband-and-wife couple teach at the local university, our dear friend Hideko (now recently married!) lives in Osaka, and a friend I met when she visited America, Juuri, lives in nearby Shizuoka.

And, of course, there is the super-energetic Nanami, who teaches schoolchildren in Nagoya.

Dan and Jen, whose nieces were visiting at the time, took us up to old Inuyama castle.  This is one of the few original castles still intact.  It gave us a commanding view of the area.

We also explored the nearby town of Oobu, and we were welcomed into a local home.  Here's the bedroom of a little boy who lived there.

The bustling, brash city of Osaka was as smoky and wild as ever.  Western culture has thoroughly soaked the place: clothing, music, and food.

The Issue at Hand

Somehow in the midst of all this, I found time to read and review the latest Gamma, a new magazine whose first two issues had greatly impressed me.  Sadly, it seems that the stock of great fiction the editors had accumulated prior to launch has been exhausted, and what's left is so much trunk work, the substandard stories by big names that hadn't sold elsewhere.  Pity.


by Morris Scott Dollens

The Girl of Paradise Planet, by Robert Turner

The first story illustrates my point well.  Here is a piece by a veteran, with a thousand stories to his credit, and it's just mediocre.  A fellow on vacation on a pleasure planet goes SCUBA-diving and encounters a young girl under the waves.  She's not a mermaid — she has a full complement of human limbs, yet she can breathe underwater.  The vacationer quickly falls in love, to the annoyance of his shrewish wife, and spends endless hours with his newfound paramour. 

Said romance feels solipsistic, like something a fourteen-year-old might come up with, including plenty of the protagonist's thoughts and precious few of the object of his intention.  In fact, near the end, we are led to doubt that the encounter was real at all, which would have made a lot more sense given the sketchiness of the girl's character, who prefers not to talk but rather mostly perform aquatic acrobatics.  And smooch.

Alas, it turns out the girl is real.  Joy for our hero, disappointment for us.  A weak three stars.


by Luan Meatheringham

(speaking of illustrations, Gamma has employed young Luan Meatheringham to produce drawings.  While the pieces are nice, in a fanzine-ish way, they don't relate to any of the stories, and I'm not sure why they're here, taking space.)

The Feather Bed, by Shelly Lowenkopf

Shelly (a man, despite the name) Lowenkopf writes of a future where, upon the expiration of copyright after 56 years, literary works are destroyed to a copy, and replacements commissioned as a kind of artistic welfare.  When a writer refuses to finish his assignment to rewrite King Lear he is fired, eventually becoming a plumber — an industry in which pipes are torn out and replaced every three years.

I like stories about a future with rampant unemployment and the need for makework, but this one doesn't make a lot of sense, even by its own rules (no good argument is made against creating new works) and the piece doesn't work as satire, either, because I'm not sure what it's supposed to be satirizing. 

Two stars.

Angel Levine, by Bernard Malamud

A down-on-his-luck tailor is visited by a shabby, black Jewish angel, who (eventually) eases the man's pain.

Not much to say about this one.  Three stars for atmosphere and dialect.


by Luan Meatheringham

The (In)visible Man, by Edward W. Ludwig

Here's a piece about a man who is such a nonentity that the world completely ignores him, and he is able to lead a life of crime.  That is, until the fellow finds love and confidence, causing him to become visible again.

I might have enjoyed this story more had Ellison not done it so much better in The Forces that Crush six years ago.

Three stars.

Inside Story, by Miriam Allen deFord

From the pen of one of the genre's most venerable creators comes the tale of a sentient world and the tsuris of a cold given it by a four-being scount team from the Galactic Federation.

Cute, but this is the sort of thing Bob Sheckley used to do, and much better.

Three stars.

The Birth, by George Clayton Johnson

We've seen a lot of Johnson on TV, particularly us fans of The Twilight Zone.  This forgettable piece, a first person account of the creation of Frankenstein's Monster, does not even have a Serlingesque twist to redeem it.

Three stars for competent writing.


by Luan Meatheringham

The Gamma Interview: Soviet Science Fiction

The most worthy piece of the issue is an interview with "Ivan Kirov", editor of a Moscow publishing house that produces science fiction.  It is worth picking this issue up just for this piece, even though it has an unfortunate ediorial accident that omits a crucial line.

Five stars.

Buttons, by Raymond E. Banks

Along similar lines, Banks offers up the story of a dying spaceman who transfers his consciousness to a set of computerized buttons until such time as his persona might be restored to a human body.  Said spaceman decides he likes being a disembodied being better.

It's well-written, but like the rest of the pieces in this magazine, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Three stars.


by Luan Meatheringham

Society for the Prevention, by Ron Goulart

Goulart is known for writing humorous pieces, so this light-hearted tale of the fortunate intersection of an interstellar merchant, his shipment of alien pots which are actually extraterrestrial invaders, and some rabid anti-capitalists is right up the author's alley.

Entertaining, though frivolous.  Three stars.

The Snail Watcher, by Patricia Highsmith

Finally, mystery writer Highsmith presents the tale of a man whose love for snails ultimately proves his undoing.  The moral: molluscs are for eating, not voyeuring.

Yet another atmospheric piece that doesn't do much.  Three stars.


by Luan Meatheringham

Summing Up

Thus ends one of the most mediocre collections of digest-sized pages I've ever read.  I have to wonder if this is a momentary blip, or if Gamma is doomed to be short-lived.  Only time will tell.

And now, off to Hiroshima!  See you in two days…

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