by Erica Frank

An unexpected place for science fiction

When I saw January's issue of Playboy, my first thought was, of course, "Ugh, mostly-naked women being exploited", including a Gidget-lookalike, wearing a lot fewer clothes than Gidget normally does.

And then I saw some of the contributors: Kurt Vonnegut (author of Cat's Cradle), Shel Silverstein (author of both the heart-twisting The Giving Tree and very clever Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book), Arthur C. Clarke, Ogden Nash (whose poetry I love), Ray Bradbury…

And I thought, well, it's pricey—more than double the price of most science fiction magazines—no doubt because of the, ahem, artistic photography. But I could get it just for the articles. (That's the joke, anyway.)

The shopkeeper at the store where I saw it refused to sell it to me. I was confused, but they were adamant. But I persevered, and found a less-discriminatory site that didn't care who acquired their wares.

My first thought was: There's certainly a lot of magazine for my buck-twenty-five! This anniversary edition has over 250 pages, and while a lot of that is advertisements, they don't skimp on the actual text.

Two science fiction stories, two articles by science fiction authors, some poetry, some futuristic art… and an article about religion and hippies.  That's well within my interests.

The Yellow Room, by John Cheever
Cheever is mostly published in The New Yorker, with some stories in Playboy, Esquire, and The Saturday Evening Post. He is not known for his science fiction, and if this story is typical, I can understand why.

Our protagonist is a rich fellow afflicted with the cafard, either a form of depression or just the ennui of someone wealthy enough to pay a psychiatrist a dollar a minute for therapy. (Mister, just skip half a dozen sessions and buy yourself a motorcycle, okay?) The doctor declares him sexually repressed—a "transvestite homosexual," caused by sculptures of his body-building father being used prominently at several hotels and opera houses. Our narrator denounces the guy as a charlatan and stops attending sessions.

After that, he starts gallivanting around the globe in search of the perfect room, one with yellow walls, which he is certain will end his cafard. I suspect half the purpose of the story is to give the reader the fantasy of jaunting from hotel to hotel without worrying about price, attending a job, or having family obligations. Eventually, he finds such a room, but it is owned by someone who won't sell her house. So, noticing that she is a heavy drinker, he plies her with expensive alcohol until she winds up in a car accident—and buys the house after her death.

It does, in fact, cure him, or at least, he feels energetic and happy in the room with yellow walls.

So where's the science fiction? His mother, a dilettante traveler, writes letters informing him that when she stays at hotels, she has dreams of the previous tenants of the beds. This is done in great detail over several pages, but does not seem to connect to the plot, if you can call it a plot.

The writing itself is good enough, if one enjoys overly intellectual rich man's pontification as a writing style. The story, however, begins nowhere, goes nowhere, and is packed with nothing but descriptions of a jet-set lifestyle and the protagonist's ego. Two stars.

God and the Hippies, by Harvey Cox
This article compares modern hippies to St. Francis of Assisi, and notes that modern "welfare society" allows a level of leisure that has turned to ecstatic exploration, meditation, and a strong interest in Oriental spirituality. Modern Protestant Christianity, he points out, is "squarer than American culture," and focused on dominion over nature instead of harmony with it.

The choice is no longer Christian, Jew, or atheist. Christianity will also have to recognize that in a postindustrial, leisure society, people will have more time for meditation and
for cultivating the kinds of religious practices that have been so highly developed in some Oriental countries—and so underdeveloped in the West.

A scene from the "Little Annie Fanny" comic strip at the end of the issue.

He then talks about three aspects of hippie culture that seem to clash most with Christianity: Drugs, aversion to work, and open sexuality. He points out that current drug laws are discriminatory in both focus and enforcement: that there is no rational reason for alcohol to be legal but marijuana a felony, and that the marginalized are penalized more heavily than the wealthy for infractions. He says the Calvinist work ethic may not make sense in a computer civilization—that we will soon all have more leisure time, and that hippies are not wasting it on "TV and bowling leagues," but taking to poetry, art, and philosophy. He even mentions that space travel will likely take many years, and require travelers who know how to stay alert and interested in life with no entertainments but each other. And, given that this article is in Playboy, of course it is in favor of erotic pleasure.

The article is a little starry-eyed about hippies (they are not all as idealistic and passionate as he seems to think) but does a nice job of showing the conflicts between hippies and much of modern society, especially how hippie ideals often clash with Christian morality. Four stars.

Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Welcome to the Monkey House is a delightful change from the previous story. Our setting is future-Earth; population 17 billion humans. They are required to take "ethical birth-control pills," which remove all the pleasure from sex without actually preventing it, three times a day, or face a penalty of $10,000 and 10 years in jail. Not many people will risk the cost of a cheap house to skip their mandated medications, but "notorious nothinghead Billy the Poet" has been spotted heading for the local Suicide Parlor, where he no doubt intends to seduce someone.

The workers at the parlors are referred to as "pretty, tough-minded, highly intelligent girls":

All Hostesses were virgins. They also had to hold advanced degrees in psychology and nursing. They also had to be plump and rosy, and at least six feet tall.

America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.

This story contains forced drug use, kidnapping, forced withdrawal, rape, and various other crimes, all in a very implausible future. It addresses themes of moral vs practical science—specifically, sexual abstinence vs contraception—written in a style that seems packed with science fiction clichés until it turns darkly philosophical.

While I was rolling my eyes at some of the "facts" of the future world, I couldn't stop reading. Five stars.

Death Warmed Over, by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury is a fan of the old classic horror movies: Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, The Body Snatcher, and other "monster movies." He does not care for the newer, more intellectual films: Our Man Flint, Charade, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He intensely dislikes horror-comedies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The point of horror, he says, is to take the universal fear of death, give it a face, a shape, a name… and conquer it.

I may not fully agree with his conclusion, but he argues his points eloquently. Four stars.

When Earthmen and Alien Meet, by Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke ponders how we might find evidence of extraterrestrials and what proof of their existence would do for humanity. In most cases, he points out: Nothing. Finding the ruins of an alien civilization on the moon might spark more space exploration, but after a few interesting photos make the news rounds, most people would shrug. The moon is a long ways off, and other stars even farther, and what is or isn't out there isn't relevant to their lives.

Most of this article is pondering methods of contact or verification, like finding ruins, receiving the equivalent of television broadcasts, or actual direct communication—although he points out this is not likely anytime soon. He goes on to quote a number of science fiction stories that deal with various possibilities, throws in a number of science facts that the general public may not be aware of but science fiction readers often are (e.g. how long a rocket would take to travel the four light-years to Alpha Centauri: 25,000 years), and declares the importance that we learn "to change, or at least to control, the atavistic urges programed into our genes," so we can take our rightful place among the stars.

"Could an alien tell the difference between a man and, for example, a bear—or would he conclude that the automobile was our dominant life form?"

If these were new ideas to me, the article might be intriguing and pleasant, instead of heavy and pedantic. Two stars.

City of the Future, by R. Buckminster Fuller
Last October, Fuller gave a speech in which he referred to "Spaceship Earth," building on Adlai Stevenson's 1965 description of our planet as a spaceship, one with limited resources that we must preserve. Fuller is widely considered an architectural visionary, and in this article, he talks about some possible structures for futuristic cities based on pyramids.

The city plan consists of "three triangular walls of 5000 living units apiece" forming a tetrahedron; each unit has a spacious terrace and a sky view. The interior receives sunlight through openings every 50th floor.

Artist's rendition of the 200-story city set outside Tokyo, with a view of Mount Fuji.

It's a lovely idea. The article itself talks about the history of housing construction, vehicle constraints of the past, and assumes we will soon have the ability to make giant floating pyramid cities. While he dismisses several potential drawbacks with a wave of the hand, claiming that that this is both technologically and politically viable, it's interesting reading. Three stars.

This & That
Ogden Nash's poetry turns out to be a page of somewhat-racy limericks with artwork by Ron Rae.

A teenage protester named Lil
Cried, "Those CIA spies make me ill!
First they bugged our martinis,
Our bras and bikinis,
And now they are bugging the pill."

They're all about that level of clever – a nice chuckle, nothing memorable.

The article, "The New Girl," by John Clellon Holmes is all about "postfeminism," how "girls" (not women, even when he's talking about adults) these days are free to explore their true selves. The New Girl, he says, is "self-emancipated, unabashedly sexy, charmingly individualistic and a joy to the men in her life."

I love the artwork. I hate the article. Didn't finish reading it; I don't need to hear a man going on about how feminism was about "attacking men's privilege" more than women's rights (and it's over), and women's self-exploration properly leads them to being sexy girlfriends.

Silverstein's article is a series of cartoons and a few photos about him visiting Hollywood. They're fun.

And of course, what would a review of Playboy be without a mention of scantily-clad beautiful women? Miss January is a 20-year-old blonde who recently moved back to her home town of Detroit. She looks very alluring in a black sheer negligee in the centerfold, but they're quick to point out that she's really a fun-loving gal. Her housewarming gifts included the new party game, Twister.

Humor?

Playboy is known for its jokes. Or at least, in some crowds, it's known for its jokes. The magazine is riddled with cartoons, both full-page color and quarter-page sketch art adorning the articles and stories, and it has a monthly page, "Playboy's Party Jokes," with a couple-dozen supposedly humorous anecdotes.

After the third one where the punchline seemed to be "and they HAD SEX!!!", I started counting:
Punchline is adultery: 5
Punchline is "women are sexual property": 5
Punchline is rape: 6
Punchline is nudity: 4
Punchline is kinky sex: 3
Punchline is "women want money for sex": 4
Punchline is sex: 14
Not sexual jokes: 22 (some of these are Santa/holiday themed)

This is one where the punchline seems to be "people have sex."

The whole magazine is very much For Men, even on theoretically neutral articles. The Playboy Adviser is Playboy's equivalent to Dear Abby, mostly about relationships. Playboy's advisor, however, is nameless. It's moderately decent advice with a politely sexist bias. All the questions are from men; they universally refer to the women in their lives as "girls." 

As much as I enjoyed the Vonnegut story and was intrigued by Cox's article on hippies, I don't think I'll be buying the next issue.