by Gideon Marcus
The Big Bang
The Americans and Soviets have signed onto a Partial Test Ban Treaty, restricting nuclear tests to deep underground. The Chinese and French are under no such obligation, however. Not only have the Chinese detonated two (or was it three?) atomic devices in the open air, but now the French have begun their own series of above-grown tests.
These big bombs are being burst on the French Polynesian atoll of Moruroa. I don't know what the indigenous South Seas population thinks of the blasts, but I imagine their opinions will sour as quickly as their strontium-90 laced milk.
The Big Fizzle
by Gray Morrow
The French may be making a big noise in the Southern Hemisphere, but Fred Pohl, editor of IF, Worlds of Tomorrow, and the formerly august Galaxy, has barely been squeaking by. Indeed, the August 1966 issue of Galaxy is the most feeble outing I've read in a long time.
The Body Builders, by Keith Laumer
by Nodel
Opening things up, Keith Laumer extrapolates a future that is a straight-line evolution of our current boob tube culture. Since so many of us are content to live vicariously, eyes plastered to the small screen, why not take things a few steps further? And so a large portion of humanity lives flat on their backs, plugged into life support machines. Their senses are hooked into humanoid surrogates of plastic and metal, optimized for task, emphasized for beauty.
Our protagonist is a prize fighter, or at least, he remote controls a synthetic boxer. Another artificial being provokes our hero into a duel while he's inhabiting his sport model body rather than his brawler suit. So he goes on the lam. Troubles, high jinks, and happy endings ensue.
Elements remind me of Robert F. Young's Romance in a Twenty-First Century Used-Car Lot (shuttling around in personally molded chassis) and Steel (human boxer steps into the ring against a robotic opponent), but this is a nice new spin.
Three stars.
Heresies of the Huge God by Brian W. Aldiss
A giant creature, thousands of miles long, crashes into the Earth. Its bulk causes tremendous damage, alters our seasons, and thoroughly discombobulates our society. This after-the-fact chronicle of the millennium following the alien's arrival is both unsettling and rather funny.
Four stars.
For Your Information: Scheherazade's Island by Willy Ley
This month's science column details the unusual creatures that inhabited Madagascar until quite recently: Big birds, giant lemurs, and other exotics. They may, indeed, yet live there in remote areas of the enormous island.
Interesting topic but bland presentation. Three stars.
The Piper of Dis by James Blish and Norman L. Knight
by Gray Morrow
Authors Blish and Knight return us to the overcrowded world of 2794 on which ten trillion humans live. In this installment, the asteroid Flavia is headed toward Earth, where it will cause tremendous damage. Millions of North Americans must be evacuated to the spare town of Gitler. There are two wrinkles: 1) a convention of the Jones family is currently occupying the city, and they must be evacuated out before refugees can be evacuated in; 2) an insane criminal member of the Jones family, Fongavaro, doesn't want anyone in the city lest he be extradited back to his home in Madagascar.
Actually, there's another wrinkle: it's a dreary potboiler of a story in an implausible world. I hope this is the last piece in the series.
Two stars.
Among the Hairy Earthmen by R. A. Lafferty
What if the Renaissance was really the work of bored aliens? In this typically whimsical piece, a band of seven humanoid cousins arrive at medieval Europe and make history their plaything.
This one of those tales that's all in the telling, and the telling is pretty charming. Three stars.
The Look, by George Henry Smith
Women, hare-brained slaves to fashion that they all are, succumb to trends so horrendous that no man can bear to look at them. It's the plot of a pair of homosexual fashion designers to ensure they have all of mankind to themselves. Or so we're meant to think. The "twist" is that it's actually a ploy of Alpha Centaurians to depopulate the Earth.
If we had a negative counterpart to the Galactic Stars, this would win the prize. One star.
Heisenberg's Eyes (Part 2 of 2) by Frank Herbert
by Dan Atkins
Last issue, we were treated to the first half of Frank Hebert's latest short novel. It takes place in a far (like tens of thousands of years from now far) future in which the human race has completely stagnated in technology, society, and biology. The "Optimen", sterile ubermenschen who are essentially immortal, rule over the mostly sterile humans whose offspring are all produced out of womb and with scrupulous surgical control.
Last installment, the Durant couple had stolen their embryo from under the noses of the Optimen with the help of the Cyborgs, a competing sub-race of humanity that has traded their emotions for computerized sturdiness. The Durant embryo, due to some unexplained quirk, is the first bog-standard human to be spawned in millennia. Able to reproduce, it may hold the key to toppling the static society of humanity.
This installment begins with the Durants stealthily escaping the megalopolis of Seatac. This takes up most of the part, and is ultimately pointless as the triumvirate of rulers is aware of their attempt the entire way. The Durants, their assisting Cyborgs, as well as Svengaard, the surgeon they had taken hostage, are summoned before a full council of the Optimen for punishment. Violence breaks out. Two of the triumvirate are killed. Calapine, the impulsive, simpering woman of the ruling trio, is both outraged and excited by the new feeling of mortality. Nevertheless, she is committed to destroying her captives before they destroy the current order.
Until it is pointed out that the order is just its own kind of death, a sentence of eternal boredom. In any event, it's doomed to failure since even the immortals need increasing doses of enzymes to stay alive, a situation that is quickly becoming untenable.
There is a solution! It turns out that being implanted with an embryo produces all the enzymes one needs to stay alive indefinitely. So women (and men) can be installed with pre-tykes that are made to gestate for thousands of years, and that will keep them alive forever. Thus, humanity can return to some sort of natural (if prolonged) rhythm.
Never minding the utter implausibility of, well, everything about this book, all of the above could probably have been written in about 20 pages. But when you're paid by the word, and you're one of the hottest authors in the genre (I can imagine a half century from now that Dune will replace The Bible as the most-read book in the world; there ain't no justice), I suppose sentences must flow.
Two stars for this part, two and half for the whole book.
Who Is Human? by Hayden Howard
by Jack Gaughan
Starting in medias res, we have the latest story of the Esks: people who look like Eskimos, but are actually born in a month and raised to adulthood in five years. In this installment, which really does not stand alone as a separate story, we learn that the Esks have been artificially created by alien visitors. We are meant to believe that 1) the Esks pose an intolerable risk to the human race as we will soon be outbred and replaced by them, and 2) no one will actually believe our protagonist, Dr. West, when he explains the true nature of the Esks. Everyone maintains they're just plain ol' Eskimos.
This is the silliest, most contrived set of premises. The Esks are already starving due to overpopulation, and thus applying for relief. Once free food starts being doled out, the unnatural increase in population will be known. This may spell adversity for the real Inuit (and the Canadian budget) but it hardly threatens world domination. And it's not like we have a Puppet Masters situation here; the Esks don't possess other humans. They just live alongside them.
Maybe there will be a better explanation down the road. Two stars.
Summer Slump
It's a pretty sad affair when Galaxy clocks in at a bare 2.5 stars. On the other hand, as Michael Moorcock informed us last month, it is not uncommon for magazines to save their weakest material for the summer, when readership is at its lowest. Let us hope that's what is going on here!
Ah well. At least the summer music is good:
Tune in to KGJ, our radio station!
"The Body Builders" wasn't the most profound story in the world, but decent entertainment. Sort of a combination of Laumer's slam-bang action stories and Ron Goulart technological farce.
"Heresies of the Huge God" was an intriguing exercise in sustained development of an extraordinary concept. The distancing effect of the pseudo-essay form works pretty well here.
In contrast, "The Piper of Dis" suffers from a different kind of distancing effect. Despite the extremely melodramatic events in the plot, none of it seemed real.
"Among the Hairy Earthman" has that combination of whimsy and philosophical depth that only Lafferty can pull off. The more I think about the story, the more meaningful the final encounter with the Pilgrim seems.
And the less meaningful "The Look" becomes, the more I ponder it. The author shouldn't have mentioned Danny Kaye's "Anatol of Paris" routine (from the movie "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") because it's genuinely funny, and this story isn't. (Besides, Kaye's routine was making fun only of women's hats, which can definitely be ridiculous, and not everything a woman wears or adorns herself with.)
"Who is Human?" just goes over the same ground as the author's last story with the same premise. The speculative content is less interesting that the setting, and a non-SF tale of survival in the Far North would have been better.
The early parts of "The Body Builders" really felt like a Ron Goulart story. But where Goulart would have gone zany, Laumer kept the humor on a short leash, never letting it take over the story. One of the better short pieces we've seen from him lately.
The Aldiss was good, though not really my cup of tea. I've said before that I often want to like his stuff better than I do. That goes here, too.
Madagascar is an interesting place, but Willy Ley somehow managed to make it less so. Not one of his better articles, really.
"Piper of Dis" was pretty bad. The world is unbelievable. In a situation as overcrowded as the one presented, how could there possibly be whole large cities held empty in case of need?
Lafferty is being Lafferty again. If you like him, you'll like this, and if you don't, you won't.
"The Look" was just awful. It's not even worth discussing.
"Heisenberg's Eyes" was just boring. Implausibility here or there, a well-told tale can make you accept some nonsense for the sake of a good story. This was dull.
As Victoria notes, "Who is Human" is just the last story retold. I have no idea what the author is trying to say or where he's going with all this. The first story at least gave us a somewhat interesting look at a culture that isn't really known to many outsiders. Since then, it's just been boring.
The Bodybuilders is a Keith Laumer story which didn't warm me any more to his writing. I will leave it at that.
Heresies of the Huge God was a really interesting piece from Aldiss. I wonder if it is a response to Ballard's The Drowned Giant?
I was not impressed with The Shipwreck Hotel, and didn't much care for The Piper of Dis either. Blish doesn't seem to be producing work up to his usual quality recently.
I am not generally a Lafferty fan but Among the Hairy Earthmen was an enjoyable enough piece.
The Look is indeed awful. I can only assume Pohl found himself a few pages short at the last minute and grabbed the first thing that fit without reading it.
I am not bothering to read the last two pieces. I didn't like the first half of the Herbert and really dislike the other Esks stories.
As you say, not much to the magazines but at least good music coming out this year. We have already had excellent albums from Marianne Faithfull, The Stones, The Beach Boys & Dylan with not long to wait for new ones from the Byrds (both American and Yard), the Bluesbreakers and The Beatles.
Heresies of the Huge God sound wonderful! Will need to read that one. My type of story.