by Gideon Marcus
Hot Times
Summer is looming, and it looks like we're in for another riot season. I suppose it only stands to reason given that inequality still runs rampant in a nation ostensibly dedicated to equality. This time, the outrage boiled over in Chicago, and the group involved was of Puerto Rican extraction.
Things started peacefully, even jubilantly: June 12 saw thousands gather for the Puerto Rican pride parade. But after the festivities, the cops shot Cruz Aracelis, 21, and violence erupted. For three days, police cars were overturned, property went up in flames, and people were hurt (and some died). Despite the exhortations of the community's leaders, the rioting continued, and it was not until Mayor Daley promised much-needed reforms that the outbreaks lapsed, on June 15.
Tectonic shifts are rarely gradual. Similarly, we lurch toward progress with the accompanying devastation of an earthquake. Just as we're starting to build for seismic destruction in California, if we want to see riot summers a thing of the past, we'll need to build real systems for equality sooner rather than later.
Eye of the Storm
Chicago may burn, Kansas may be savaged by tornadoes, and Indonesia might be going to hell in a hand basket, but the latest Fantasy and Science Fiction is by comparison pretty mellow stuff. Indeed, it's a pretty unremarkable issue even compared to recent issues of F&SF! Still, there's good reading in here. Take a break from the outside world's madness and join me:
by Chesley Bonestell
Founder's Day, by Keith Laumer
Retief author Keith Laumer departs from comedic satire for a reasonably straight story. In a future borrowed from Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!, the only escape from Earth's 29 billion inhabitants is a five year journey in stasis to Alpha Centauri 3. But what really lies at the end of a grueling journey that includes a savage boot camp and the stripping away of all humanity?
A competent piece, Founder's Day nevertheless is no more than that. This story of friction between colonist and transport crew could have been set in 19th Century Australia as well as space. Laumer doesn't really bring anything new, in concept or execution.
Three stars.
The Plot is the Thing, by Robert Bloch
Psycho author Robert Bloch doesn't do much fantasy these days, but his turns are always slickly done. In this vignette, young heiress Peggy is the portrait of disassociation, abandoning reality for the Late Show, the Late Late Show, and the All Night Show — any program that will give her the horror flicks she craves. But when drastic medical intervention rescues her at the brink of death, is it salvation, or merely the gateway to greater unreality?
No surprises but the usual excellent execution.
Four stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Experiment in Autobiography, by Ron Goulart
The best part of Goulart's latest story is the double-meaning in the title. One gets the impression that the absurd lengths to which the protagonist, a free-lance writer, must go to collect his ghosting fee, is only slightly removed from reality.
Three stars for Goulart fans; knock one off for everyone else.
Brain Bank, by Ardrey Marshall
Sturm is a brilliant mathematician cut down in the prime of his life. Too valuable to be left to molder, Sturm is brought back as a disembodied brain, forced to offer his expertise to all who request it: students, businessmen, colleagues. He is a true slave with no human rights and the fear of being switched off perpetually hanging over him. Especially when an old rival, now a tenured professor who made his reputation by stealing the work of his T.A.s and associates, becomes Sturm's latest client.
In setup, it's not unlike Calvin Demmon's vignette The Switch, which appeared in F&SF last year. But the execution here is breezy, the story more of a potboiler.
I don't know if I buy the premise, but I can easily imagine a much put-upon sentient computer in the same situation. The rather conventional adventure story overlies some thoughtful philosophy.
Three stars.
Man in the Sea, by Theodore L. Thomas
Is oxygenated water the solution to problems posed by deep sea diving? What about direct oxygenization of blood? Some neat ideas that I can't immediately poke holes in for once.
Four stars.
The Age of Invention, by Norman Spinrad
This flip piece posits that our current art culture, and the ease with which it is manipulated, is no new thing at all. Indeed, it's been with us since we've been recognizably human.
Fun fluff. Three stars.
Balancing the Books, by Isaac Asimov
The latest article from The Good Doctor is about conservation of charge and mass in the subatomic particles. I suspect the material could have been covered in a piece as short as Thomas' column. Padded to ten pages, it loses its punch.
Three stars.
Revolt of the Potato Picker, by Herb Lehrman
A spud farmer, one of the last dirt agriculturalists in a time of yeast and lichen hydroponics, buys a sentient tractor to do his harvesting. All is well until the robot's sensitive side comes to the fore. Instead of devoting its (her?) time to picking and peeling, all it (she?) wants to do is pursue artistic interests.
Meant to be a winking, nudging joke of a story, I found it both distasteful and also just kind of stupid.
Two stars.
The Manse of Iucounu, by Jack Vance
At last, the meanderings of Cugel the Clever come to a close. Banished to the ends of the Dying Earth by Iucounu, the mage he was trying to rob, Cugel at last finds a way home with the treasure he was sent to find. The key turns out to be a misadventure with sapient rats and a liaison with a sorcerer liberated from their clutches.
Like the rest of the series, it wobbles between wittily imaginative and routine, too episodic to really engage. If anything, it feels like a modern day, rather adult Oz story. With a thoroughly unpleasant though sometimes entertaining antihero.
Call it four stars for this entry and three and a half for the series as a whole.
Emerging from Solace
There are issues of F&SF that astound, leaving an indelible impression. There have been others (not recently) that are better left to gather dust on the shelf (if not utilized for kindling next winter). The July 1966 issue lies on neither extreme. But if you find yourself wanting a quiet weekend away from the strife of the real world, this issue will be a fine companion.
Laumer has written some very good stories in a serious and thoughtful vein. I think, though, that he's spent so much time writing Retief and the occasional slam-bang adventure that he's out of practice. This one also felt like he reached a point where he wasn't sure where to go next, so he just put a bow on it and mailed off the typescript.
In the hands of a less experienced or even an experienced, but less gifted writer, the Bloch piece would have been filler at best and more likely a tedious exercise in the obvious. But in his hands, it's excellent. Nice to see that writing for Hollywood hasn't hampered his skills.
I count myself a Goulart fan, even of his humorous work, and I'd be hard pressed to give this three stars. Sounds to me like he had a hard time getting somebody to pay him, and he was just working out his frustrations.
"Brain Bank" was fine and didn't leave me questioning the editor's judgement in buying it. It certainly wasn't as good as "The Switch" was, though.
True that Ted Thomas didn't display an utter lack of understanding of the science under consideration for once. But I feel like I've already read one or two stories where this idea was involved.
The Spinrad was a reasonable bit of satire. But given the quality of some of his earlier work and the amount of time since the last time we saw something from him, I would expect something better. I hope this promising young writer isn't drying up.
Dr. A's article could probably have been shorter, but I think cutting to down to the length of one of Thomas' springboards would have rendered it unintelligible to a lot of people. On the plus side, it wasn't another superlatives article. On the other hand, he keeps trying to invent shorthand or symbols that nobody uses. Not sure that's better.
"Potato Picker" was awful. Not sure where you got the idea Lehrman was trying for a feminine personality. My impression was the sort of obnoxious teenager who goes off to college and becomes obsessed with "art", a kind of would-be Holden Caulfield. Either way, it's a bad story.
And so we come, thankfully, to the end of Cugel the Clever. Parts of it were good, parts were more on the tedious side. Unusually, Vance tended to miss the mark when trying to be clever, himself. I'm not sure this will work any better when it's all between the covers of one book. Maybe he can polish it up some, but I can't see myself seeking it out.
Overpopulation dystopias seem to be the new hot thing in science fiction. Just this month we had "Make Room, Make Room", the Laumer story and two of the stories in Orbit 1 featured overpopulated future Earths as well.
Meanwhile, I quite like Cugel the Clever, though it's best if he does not outstay his welcome.
People on here know well enough I have no love for Laumer's writing, Founder's Day did nothing to change that.
The Plot is the Thing was definitely very skillfully done and surprisingly engaging.
I consider myself a Goulart fan and I think I enjoyed it slightly more than others. Not exceptional but appealed to me in its own strange way.
I didn't enjoy Brain Bank but this kind of tale isn't really my cup of tea so it is unsurprising,
I was disappointed by The Age of Invention, I saw it more as a cheap mockery of beatniks that you might see on The Frost Report than anything deeper.
I have nothing to add on Revolt of the Potato Picker it was just pretty poor
And the Cugel the Clever tales come to an end. At least for now anyway. I enjoyed them all well enough and will probably pick up the Ace collection to put on my shelves.
No major disagreements here.
I thought the Bloch story was the best piece in the issue, and the Potato thing the worse. I'm not crazy about the Goulart or the Spinrad, everything else was fair-to-middling.