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[February 28, 1970] Revolutionaries… (March 1970 Analog)

February 28, 2025 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Turbulent times

Unless you've been living under a rock the past two years, you know the shockwaves from The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are still reverberating. The open fighting on the convention floor, the fascist polemic of Mayor Daley, the protests, the baby blue and olive drab helmets, and the crippled candidacy of the man tasked to thwart Dick Nixon from taking the White House.

Aside from the shambolic shuffle toward further embroilment in southeast Asia, two other phenomena have kept the convention in the public eye. The first is last year's neck-clutch of a movie, Medium Cool. Half drama, half documentary, Haskell Wexler's film follows a jaded Chicago news cameraman in the weeks leading up to the crisis point. Indeed (and I didn't realize this at the time), the footage of Robert Forster and Verna Bloom in and around the convention hall during the clashes, hippie vs. fuzz, Dixiecrat vs. DFL, was all shot live.

Verna Bloom, playing an emigrant from West Virginia, searches Grant Park for her lost son

If you haven't caught the film, check your local listings. It may still be running in your local cinema. Be warned: it will take you back. If you're not ready for it, you will be overwhelmed.

Robert Forster is the news man. You'll recognize Marianna Hill (Forster's girlfriend) as a guest star in Star Trek's "Dagger of the Mind"

As for the other reminder, for the past two years, the papers have kept us apprised on the trials of the "Chicago Eight", charged by the United States Department of Justice with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. They included Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale.

(in the midst of his trial, Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage at Woodstock during the performance of The Who to protest the incarceration of White Panther poet and musician, John Sinclair—it was a trippy scene)

Abbie Hoffman: "I think this is a pile of shit! While John Sinclair rots in prison…"

Pete Townsend: "Fuck off! Get off my fucking stage!"

Pete Townsend, just after recovering the stage

The verdicts came down on February 18, a mixed bag of positive and negative news for the accused. Apparently, four folks on the jury held out until the bitter end, but eventually went with guilty for some of the charges. The verdicts were:

Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were charged with and convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. All of the defendants were charged with and acquitted of conspiracy; Froines and Weiner were charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices and acquitted of those charges. Bobby Seale had already skated when his case ended in mistrial.

Six of the "Seven": (l. to r.) Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden

So, it's jail time for five of the eight while their cases go to appeal. You can bet that these results aren't going to lessen the flames of discontent in this country, at least for the vocal minority.

From page 3 of my local paper on the 24th

Steady and staid

You wouldn't be aware of any of this turmoil if you lived under a rock and did nothing but read Analog Science Fiction. It remains a relic and deliberate artifact of a halcyon past as envisioned by editor John Campbell. The latest issue is a representative example.

by Kelly Freas

The Siren Stars (Part 1 of 3), by Richard Carrigan and Nancy Carrigan

First up, we introduce a new writing duo as well as a new James Bond-style hero. John Leigh is a veteran, a fair hand with a souped up, armored Triumph sports car, and most importantly, a Physicist. Shortly after serving his hitch in Korea, he is recruited by SPI—no, not the wargame company, but "Science Processing, Inc."

Leigh's latest mission is to infiltrate a Soviet radio telescope facility. It seems that the Russkies have picked up signals from an alien civilization, and Leigh needs to take pictures of their dish to see which way it's pointing, and also to pick up the computer data tapes to see what the Reds have heard.

At the end of Part One, Leigh has infiltrated his own facility as a dry run for his attempt in the USSR, only to find that the Soviets are already trying to infiltrate the American base for some reason.

by Kelly Freas

We get a lot of inches of Leigh driving his cool car, a lot of glimpses of incidental women through the eyes of men ("The blonde at the mail desk had been hired for her ornamental qualities as well as her fast hand with the correspondence…Like most men, [Leigh] approved highly of ornamental mail girls providing they didn't mangle the correspondence too badly." "Emily Parkman was that rarity among women—the completely discreet human being.") and a lot of "thrilling" action, like a car chase in a parking garage.

I'm bored. Two stars.

One Step from Earth, by Hank Dempsey

by Vincent DiFate

I hear tell Hank Dempsey is really Harry Harrison—I suspect he's nom d'pluming since this is going to be the first tale in a collection that deals with teleportation, coming out later this year. Hey, if the apple will support multiple bites, why not chomp that baby?

Anyway, this is the story of our first manned trip to Mars. A robot ship drops off a matter transmitter just big enough for a scientist to crawl through in a space suit. The components of a base and a larger transmitter are teleported to the Red Planet. Before their assembly can be finished, one of the two-man crew succumbs to a mysterious malady. Our hero must decide between spending life in quarantine on Earth or becoming the first permanent resident of Barsoom.

It's fine for what it is, an episode involving grit, courage, and pioneering spirit. Three stars.

Rover Does Tricks in Space, by Walter B. Hendrickson, Jr.

This is one of the best articles I've read on NERVA, the nuclear rocket stage being developed for use with the Saturn V. Apparently, they've gotten the thing to work, which means that it could, if produced, perhaps triple the lifting capacity of our biggest rocket. And once in space, NERVA engines could halve the trip time to our neighboring planets.

But here's why I suspect we'll never actually build the thing: the Saturn V assembly line is being shut down in the wake of the successful Moon landing. NERVA is expensive, so its benefits only really manifest once a space program is mature, rockets are being made by the dozen, and orbital infrastructure has been established. That doesn't like it'll happen any time soon.

Sure, NASA is working on its reusable, winged "space shuttle", which will reduce cost to orbit once it's operational, but that's a fair piece down the road, and I don't see a place for nuclear engines in that program. Still, the option is there for someday.

In any event, four stars for this clear and interesting piece.

Protection, by Steven Shaw

by Vincent DiFate

This piece starts promisingly, alternating viewpoints between a native sentinel on an alien planet, squatting near the defensive line, and the security man providing protection for a scientific expedition. When members of the team start crossing the line, they are slaughtered ignominiously by some unknown technology possessed by the aborigines.

I was enthralled until the story abruptly ended, the lead-up all in service of the "twist"—the aliens were using simple poison-tipped blowdarts. What an allegory! It's like our well-equipped troops getting aced by the "primitive" Viet Cong! How the proud fall!

Except that it is repeatedly established that the security men are wearing body armor. Last I heard, flak jackets repel bamboo reeds almost as well as bullets! Moreover, were the humans really unable to recover the darts presumably still in the corpses, nor identify the poison coursing through their bloodstreams?

One star.

Ravenshaw of WBY, Inc., by W. Macfarlane

by Vincent DiFate

Here's a story that I found almost indistinguishable from the serial. The hero is even named Leigh (in this case, Arleigh Ravenshaw). He's a veteran with a knack for innovation—for instance, in Vietnam, he plied the local kids with ice cream to get them to turn in mines and weapons caches. I'm sure it's that easy.

Ravenshaw is recruited to work for FBY (Flying Blue Yonder), a San Diego-based agency that entertains every crackpot in the region in the hopes that there might be wheat amongst the chaff (an endeavor Campbell surely thinks much of, but I can tell you, having worked with the publishing arm of the American Astronautical Society, which occasionally gets unsolicited papers, cranks are just that—cranks). He is accompanied by a "palomino-haired" young woman with a "bitter-honey voice" and a penchant for dressing bright, clashing colors.

On their first mission, to the desert near Borrego Springs on the trail of the creators of a matter converter, they find a wall-less room that houses an iodine thief from a parallel universe…and what may be the younger version of Ravenshaw's female companion.

Apparently, this will be the first in a series of loosely connected (and rather tedious) tales. Two stars.

by David Pattee

Wrong Rabbit, by Jack Wodhams

by Vincent DiFate

Earth has a working matter transmitter setup, with each booth operated by a single technician linked psychically with her or his unit. One day, wires get crossed, and the passenger of a similar, alien network ends up in a human booth…swapped with a human stuck in an extraterrestrial receptacle. Chaos ensues.

Wodhams tells the tale in alternating viewpoints to illustrate that both races, despite being repulsively different from each other, have surprisingly convergent societies and thought processes. Ultimately, the two reach a rapprochement and combine their networks.

I feel this tale would have been more effective had the two perspectives differed considerably. I also felt the constant use of nonsense terms as shorthand for untranslateable concepts ("I cannot describe to you the feeling of kooig that permeated by slaktuc.") was silly given just how similar the two species turned out to be, at least in mindset.

Two stars.

Revolutionaries, by M. R. Anver

by Vincent DiFate

Achates is a new Federation colony, a joint effort by humans and the blue-furred humanoids of Azure. An important election is coming up, between Ronan, head of the bi-racial United Party, and the reactionary Manoc—who is willing to win at any price, including a coup d'etat after a potential UP victory.

In the middle of it all is John Cameron, a Federation observer, who appears to be playing both sides against the middle… but are his loyalties really in question?

Anver seems to have taken a page from Mack Reynolds' book, turning in a competent, but unexciting (and not at all SFnal), political action thriller.

Three stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Analog's veteran book reviewer covers Orbit 5, which he notes wanders further from the truly SFnal than ever before, but he finds it a worthy effort, nonetheless. He damns with faint praise the books we also didn't sing huge praises of: The Palace of Eternity, Masque World, and Galactic Pot-Healer—which just goes to show how good Miller's taste is! Which means you should perhaps avoid J. T. McIntosh's Six Gates from Limbo and seek out Edmond Hamilton's World of the Starwolves, which we never covered, but Miller does.

Tallying the results

IBM 360 Model 65 with a woman at the IBM 1052 printer in the foreground, a man at the Direct-Access Storage Devices (DASDs) in the back

Analog these days reminds me nothing so much as Hugh Heffner's Playboy. Where the latter magazine is aimed squarely at the smug youngish libertarian with delusions of yacht-hood, Analog is for the smug youngish libertarian with aspirations in engineering. Every story reinforces the notion that, if you're a scientifically educated man, you too can save Democracy, make the girls swoon, and show up those stuffy institutionalists. Perhaps Campbell sees his mag as a kind of Fountain of Youth to recover never-gained glories. Or maybe this kind of slop is just the secret to getting 200,000 subscribers.

Regardless, I'm getting pretty tired of it. Maybe others are, too. If they rate tales as I do, this issue scored just 2.4 stars—the lowest of any mag this month. It is beaten by Amazing (2.7), IF (2.8), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8), The Year 2000 (3), New Worlds (3), Galaxy (3.2), and Vision of Tomorrow (3.5)

The overall average this month was 2.9, and the four and five star material in the eight mags that came out would fill two full-size mags. If you're keeping count, women produced about 9% of new short fiction published this month.

Luckily, as you can see, Analog just constituted one end of the bell-shaped distribution. Somebody's gotta be tail-end Charlie, I suppose. I'm just regretting that I drew the short straw and have to be the one to review it every month.

On the other hand, I could have gotten John Boston's gig and suffered through Amazing since Goldsmith left its helm. And anyway, since things are finally starting to look up for him over there, maybe there's hope on the horizon for this hoary, once-honorable magazine…

Does astrology really count as a science? Space Age, my Aunt Petunia!

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Science / Space Race

[February 26, 1970] Made in Japan! (Ohsumi, first Japanese satellite)

February 26, 2025 Kaye Dee Leave a comment

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

by Kaye Dee

An aerial view of the Expo 70 site in Osaka

In just three weeks, on 15 March, World Expo 1970 will open in Osaka, Japan, the first time that a world’s fair has been held in Asia. This event is intended to welcome the world to Japan as a celebration of the massive strides the country has made in national re-development since the War. One of Japan’s latest achievements took place only two weeks ago – the launch of its first satellite!

Yes, Japan has now joined the Space Club, as the first Asian nation to put a satellite into orbit. Not only that, but Japan becomes only the fourth country to have launched its own satellite using a home-grown launch vehicle!

The small satellite, named Ohsumi for the peninsula on the island of Kyushu from which it was launched, was lofted on a four-stage Lambda 4S solid-fuel rocket on 11 February. The launch site, known as the Kagoshima Space Centre, is located in Kagoshima Prefecture at the southernmost end of the island of Kyushu, near Uchinoura. It’s been the home of Japan’s space launch activities since 1962.

At this point, you are probably thinking that you’ve never heard anything before about Japanese space activity – and that would be no surprise, as the Western media, unfortunately, pays little attention to Asian nations outside of reporting on conflicts and (supposed) Communist threats. So you might be surprised to know that Japanese interest in space exploration goes back to the mid-1950s.

"The Father of the Space Rocket"

Prof. Hideo Itokawa around 1961

Japan’s equivalent of Wernher von Braun, and the driving force behind its first decade of rocket research, was Professor Hideo Itokawa, whose influence on Japan's space programme has been so profound that he's known as "the father of the space rocket". Born in 1912, Prof. Itokawa studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Tokyo. During the War he designed military aircraft, contributing to the design of the “Hayabusa” (peregrine falcon) fighter plane, known by the Allied designation of “Oscar”.

But with the initial post-War dismantling of the Japanese aviation industry, Prof. Itokawa was forced to seek a new career, and he worked for several years developing electronic medical instruments. On a visit to the United States in 1953, he happened to read a treatise on space medicine and became inspired by the idea of developing a Japanese space programme! On returning to Japan, he joined the newly re-established Aviation Department at the University of Tokyo and commenced research in rocket development.

Prof. Itokawa moved swiftly to engage both university students and Japanese industry in his dream of spaceflight, and by early 1954, solid rocket propellants were under development, and he had formed a rocket research group at the university called AVSA (Avionics and Supersonic Aerodynamics).

From Pencil Rockets to Sounding Rockets

With a small research budget, Prof. Itokawa developed a series of tiny test rockets, which culminated in the “Pencil”. Just 23cm (9.1in) long, 1.8cm (0.71in) in diameter and weighing only 200g (7.01oz), AVSA Pencil rockets were launched horizontally, instead of vertically. The first test launch of a Pencil occurred on 11 March 1955, followed by a public test on 12 April at a firing range in Kokubunji, Tokyo, with observers including government officials and the press.

Prof. Itokawa during the first Pencil rocket tests. A Pencil sits on the floor in front of him, and he is inserting a stick of solid fuel into the base of another rocket

Constantly experimenting and pushing the technology, as Prof. Itokawa’s rockets grew larger the university established a new launch facility at Michikawa Beach, Akita Prefecture, Honshu, facing the Sea of Japan. Rockets were launched here from August 1955 until 1962, when the present Kagoshima site was established.

A 1954 preparatory meeting for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957-1958) had proposed the use of sounding rockets for conducting research into the upper atmosphere. This idea interested the Japanese delegation, and the United States offered to allow Japan to use American sounding rockets. However, the Japanese Ministry of Education, responsible for the national IGY programme, hoped to develop a locally-built sounding rocket.

A newspaper article by Prof. Itokawa in January 1955, on the potential of rapid rocket travel across the Pacific Ocean, had impressed the IGY co-ordinator at the Ministry of Education. He commissioned the AVSA group to develop a sounding rocket capable of carrying scientific instruments into the upper atmosphere.

The newspaper article that attracted the attention of the Ministry of Education. The rocket in the photo was apparently a small paper model built by one of Itokawa's students, carefully photographed to appear like a real test rocket!

The Kappa Sounding Rocket

The IGY organising body had proposed 60-100 kilometres (38- 62 miles) as a minimum research altitude for sounding rockets, so, commencing in 1956, AVSA began a crash programme to develop its “Kappa” sounding rocket, which would be capable of achieving those altitudes using Japanese-developed solid propellants.

A Kappa K-6 sounding rocket launched during the IGY

Rapid development meant that, by June 1958, a Kappa K-6 rocket successfully carried instruments to the target minimum altitude of 60km, conducting observations of upper atmosphere winds, temperature and cosmic rays. By 1960, the K-8 sounding rocket was capable of reaching heights of 435 miles, comparable with many US sounding rockets, and attracting the attention of NASA.

Plans for a National Satellite

1962 was a watershed year for the Japanese space programme, with the decision taken to launch a 30 kilogram (66lb) satellite into orbit within five years. With larger Kappa sounding rockets under development, and plans to turn the Lambda rocket (in development since 1960) into a satellite launch vehicle, the current Kagoshima Space Centre was established for these larger launchers that needed a longer downrange area.
A three-stage K-9 sounding rocket capable of reaching altitudes of over 600 miles

Lambda sounding rockets commenced test flights in 1963. The fourth stage needed to turn the Lambda 3 sounding rocket into the 54 ft Lambda 4S satellite launcher was developed by the Prince Motor Company, which merged with Nissan in 1966. It’s interesting to note that Lambda rockets do not have guidance systems, as they would then have the potential to be converted for offensive military use. This could be interpreted as a violation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which prohibits Japan’s involvement in war, and consequently the development of offensive weaponry. I wonder if this will have an impact on the development of larger, more capable Japanese satellite launch vehicles in the future?

In 1964, the University of Tokyo's Institute of Aeronautics and AVSA (which was part of the university's Institute of Industrial Science) were merged into a new body, the Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science (ISAS) attached to the university.

Lambda 4S rocket ready for the first satellite launch attempt Two attempts were made to launch Japan’s first satellite in 1966, but both were unsuccessful due to fourth-stage failures. A third attempt in 1967 failed, as did a fourth in 1969.

During this difficult period, Prof. Itokawa abruptly resigned from ISAS in 1967. The reasons for his departure from the programme he worked so hard to build are not clear. Was he discouraged by the satellite launch failures? I have heard from a WRE colleague who was recently in Japan that there is a rumour he may have resigned in frustration at pressure from the United States for Japan to abandon its launcher development programme and use US vehicles instead. However, I wonder if that can be true, since there has been technological cooperation between Japan and the United States on the Ohsumi project, particularly in the development of highly efficient batteries that do not lose power at high temperatures.

In Orbit at Last

Despite the earlier failures, persistence has paid off, and on the fifth attempt Ohsumi soared into orbit. The launch trajectory successfully employed a “gravity turn manoeuvre” to place the satellite into its elliptical orbit, with an apogee of 3191.4 miles and a perigee of 326.2 miles.

Ohsumi ready for launch. This time for sure!

Intended as a demonstration of technical capability, Ohsumi was essentially built into the nosecone of the rocket. It went into orbit with the fourth stage motor still attached to it (a design concept not unlike that used for Australia’s first satellite, WRESAT). The launcher and satellite together are said to have cost 120 million yen (AUS$298,000).

The small 84lb satellite is about 3 ft long and consists of an roughly conical aluminium instrument capsule, shaped as a 26-sided polygonal prism, attached to the spherical, titanium-cased solid motor. It has two hook-type antennae and four beryllium-copper whip antennae. 5,184 solar cells on the satellite provided power to the batteries. The 24lb instrumented payload includes instruments to measure the ionosphere, gathering data on solar emission, temperature, and density. It also carries engineering testing equipment consisting of a "precise accelerometer", an additional accelerometer, strain gauge-type thermometer, telemetry transmitter, beacon transmitter, pilot transmitter, and a radio beacon transmitter.

Note that the dimensions on this diagram are given in millimetres, not inches

A Short Life

Two and a half hours after launch, mission control at the Kagoshima Space Centre received signals from Ohsumi, confirming that it had completed its first full orbit. However, the mission ended about 15 hours later, on 12 February, during the satellite’s seventh orbit, following a sudden loss of power that ended any radio transmission from the satellite. The cause of the failure is presently unknown. However, although Ohsumi may be “dead”, it is expected to continue in orbit for several decades before it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

What Comes Next for Japan in Space?

Ohsumi was only a basic test satellite, and Japanese scientists are said to be planning to launch the nation's first full-scale scientific later this year. Reports are that, by 1975, Japan hopes to be able to able to launch an experimental communications satellite into geostationary orbit, as well as navigation and geodetic satellites. According to Aviation Week and Space Technology: “If successful, and if the funding to support it is forthcoming, [Japan’s] satellite and booster technology will outstrip that of the older programs of western Europe, placing Japan third in line behind the U.S. and the Soviet Union.” It will be exciting to see just how far Japan can develop its space ambitions in the next decade!

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 24, 1970] Sex and the Single Writer: New Worlds, March 1970

February 24, 2025 Fiona Moore 2 Comments

by Fiona Moore

This month has seen a few positive developments. In news of the former British Empire, the world welcomes the new Cooperative Republic of Guyana. Guyana (formerly British Guyana) had achieved independence in 1966, but now the country has completely severed governing ties with the U.K., exchanging a Governor General for a ceremonial President. The South American nation is also officially pursuing a somewhat socialistic path, introducing cooperative elements to the economy. May she continue to be a leading member of the Commonwealth!

Former President Forbes Burnham addresses a crowd regarding his plan for a Cooperative Republic in 1969

Meanwhile, Miss Ono is back in the news, as the owner of the London Arts Gallery has been charged with corrupting morals for exhibiting John Lennon’s etchings, which include lithographs of himself and his wife in coitus. I suppose we’ll get to see just how far the Permissive Society goes.

A crowd at the Gallery examines Lennon's art

Which brings us neatly to New Worlds, who seem to be courting similar controversy, or attempting to, anyway. The front cover this month is a file-box of erotic pictures with the heading Does Sex Have A Future? This gives the impression that New Worlds are trying to restore their flagging fortunes by going back to basics: shock the Tories by talking about sex.

Artist/designer uncredited

My immediate fear is, of course, that it will be New Worlds business as usual, full of Philip Roth pastiches and wish fulfilment fantasies on the part of frustrated young white men. Fortunately the resulting issue is better than that. Most of the stories are light on the titillation (if indeed any is present), and heavy on the use of SF to explore the more complex and disturbing aspects of sex.

Lead-In

Mostly highlighting the Sex! theme of the issue, and promoting the Ballard story, so pretty much as usual.

The Sex Machine by Ian Watson

Artist uncredited

Watson is emerging as the new darling of New Worlds. However, I don’t really mind the recent overexposure, as his work has thus far been refreshing and exciting. This one is a really disturbing story about a sentient vending machine for sex, casually used and vandalised in misogynous ways. Five stars.

Agatha Blue by Hilary Bailey

Artist uncredited

Another standout story and another one exploring the misogyny of everyday life. An alien being, curious about human life, inhabits the body of a mentally ill woman; the alien is from an implied-to-be-gender-egalitarian society and finds what she discovers on Earth to be shocking and frustrating. Also five stars.

Princess Margaret’s Facelift by JG Ballard

Art by Charles Platt

Fairly standard Ballard fare, using the clinical description of a facelift to criticise the beauty industry and our attractiveness standards for famous (and non-famous) women. I found it a bit too similar to his story "Coitus 1980" a couple of issues ago, however. Two stars.

Does Sex Have A Future? By John Landau

Artist uncredited

Clearly the answer is “yes”, or we're doomed as a species, but Landau argues that it will become increasingly commodified and solipsistic, due to the combination of technological advances and increasing permissiveness. He imagines a future where a man might never physically meet his partner, but have sex with her through videophones and customised artificial genital-substitutes. It doesn’t sound to me like it’ll catch on. Three stars.

Cinnabar Balloon Tautology by Bob Franklin

A surrealist/absurdist piece, where the unnamed narrator takes a balloon trip with a man and some chickens. They eat eggs and play chess. I suppose it could be about the banality and absurdity of daily life. Two stars.

High in Sierra by Reg Moore

Art by Gabi Naseman

A short vignette. A traveller on an island visits an Indian reservation and is implored to stay, but leaves and regrets it, seeing the reservation as the future. I suppose it’s saying that we should aim for a happy multicultural society that doesn’t depend on capitalism or technology, and yet we fail to achieve it? Anyway, two stars.

Front and Centaur by James Sallis

Art by R. Glyn Jones

Surrealist humour. Two American writers come to London and have a relationship with a woman named Berenice who leaves them for a unicorn. A bit sophomoric. Two stars.

Computer 70: Dreams and Lovepoems by D.M. Thomas

Art by Gabi Naseman

As the title indicates, this is advanced and experimental poetry by Thomas, on the themes of love, sex and/or technology. Some of them are really very good but the whole thing went on a little too long for me. Three stars.

The Terminal by Michael Butterworth

Art by Allan Stephanson

Short vignette/prose poem about a car accident. I think Ballard might have started a trend. I do like Butterworth’s imagery though. Three stars.

Edward at Breakfast by Yannick Storm

Short modernist piece about a man drinking coffee and ruminating on his unsatisfactory relationship, and I suspect his wife leaves him in the end. Didn’t really stick with me. Two stars.

Nest Egg by Sandra Dorman

Art by Ivor Latto

Good heavens, a second woman in the magazine! And one who appears to be actually a woman and not a pseudonym for one of the male regulars! It’s a rather good short story, satirising domestic and consumer culture through paralleling the life of a suburban woman with that of a battery hen. I’m still not entirely enthralled with the way women writers for New Worlds tend to be pigeonholed into the domestic satire/critique genre, but this was a good enough story. Four stars.

Books

William Barclay complains that bad books sell better than good ones; Michael Dempsey gets sarcastic about a volume of art criticism; Joyce (Not Actually A Woman) Churchill reads some nonfiction; John T. Sladek thinks about voting and Peter White finds a social-breakdown novel a little unoriginal.

Music

Ralph T. Castle likes the new album by the Mothers of Invention, but is pretty scathing about everything else that comes out this month. Having recently been subjected, along with the entire campus, to the debut album of Black Sabbath courtesy of an undergraduate playing it at top volume on the fourth floor of Founders Building, I share his disapproval. We should never have let the college go co-educational.

Next month I’m off for a fieldwork trip to the Republic of China (Formosa), where I can update you all on the latest exciting developments in the lives of Chiang Kai-Shek and Madame Chiang! The next issue of New Worlds will be its 200th, and I’m interested to see what they will do to celebrate this milestone.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[February 22, 1970] An Es-scale-ating Conflict (Doctor Who: The Silurians)

February 22, 2025 Jessica Holmes 2 Comments

By Jessica Holmes

Welcome back to another month of Doctor Who coverage. Jon Pertwee’s run as the Doctor continues in the same strong fashion in which it started with an intriguing serial from the pen of Malcolm Hulke. We’re about halfway through, so let’s catch you up on the latest happenings in “Doctor Who And The Silurians”. No really, that's how he titled it. Yes, it is an odd choice, but don't let it put you off.

In Case You Missed It

The Doctor’s new job with UNIT sees him summoned to a nuclear research centre located deep within a pre-existing cave network. They’re making exciting inroads in some new kind of fusion reactor, but there’s a problem: their workers keep going missing in the tunnels. And those who don’t go missing end up dead. Or, as in the case of one man, so traumatised by whatever happened down there that he regresses into a caveman.

What’s more, the cyclotron (read: the thing that makes the atoms go smashy smashy) keeps inexplicably losing power, potentially destabilising the reaction. And unstable nuclear reactions are…bad. Someone has tampered with the records, however, and it soon turns out that people who work in the cyclotron room have an oddly elevated chance of having a nervous breakdown. Said room is the closest in the whole complex to the natural caves.

Ditching the fabulous cape for a pair of overalls, the Doctor goes caving to investigate, and it doesn’t take long to find what’s been killing and/or traumatising workers who go spelunking. It’s a dinosaur! One of the UNIT soldiers falls afoul of it as he attempts to hunt a suspected saboteur skulking in the shadows. While everyone is attending to him, something escapes to the surface. Not the dinosaur, but certainly not a human, either. And now it’s loose on the moors.

Dr. Quinn, the lead scientist in charge of the cyclotron, turns out to know more than he’s letting on about the current state of affairs. Unbeknownst to the other characters, he descends into the caves on his own to meet with the inhabitants, an advanced reptilian people that come to be known as the Silurians. It appears they ruled the Earth eons ago, but for whatever reason they’ve been slumbering underground since the time of the dinosaurs. And now, borrowing energy from the cyclotron, they’re waking up.

He warns them that UNIT is planning a full-scale invasion of the caves, and asks them to stop taking power from the cyclotron. However, the Silurians have their own bone to pick with the humans. One of their own is injured thanks to UNIT’s intervention, and is now stuck on the surface. They want him rescued, and to that end, give Quinn a communication device to track and command the stranded Silurian.

Said Silurian, however, has accidentally killed a farmer on the surface and vanished. There are claw marks on the man’s body, but the cause of death was heart failure. I think they’d call that manslaughter. The farmer’s widow, hospitalised with sheer fright, barely manages to tell the Doctor that the creature is still in her barn… where Liz is currently conducting a forensic examination.

The Doctor and UNIT rush back to the barn, where they find Liz unconscious but mostly unhurt. Quinn checks in, supposedly on his way to the lab from his cottage. But he’s far out of his way, and this, in concert with other odd behaviour, makes Liz and the Doctor suspicious of him. The Doctor later drops in on Quinn’s house, finding that he keeps the place very warm. Almost like the reptile house at the zoo, in fact.

Quinn gets him to leave, and the Doctor sets about investigating his office at the research centre. Quinn meanwhile turns out to be holding the missing Silurian hostage. Far from benevolently trying to help them, he’s trying to extort information out of his ‘guest’. If he doesn’t take the Silurian back to the cave, it’ll die. And despite his assistant, his one confidant, begging him to accept the Doctor’s help, he won’t admit that he’s in over his head.

So of course it’s not that much of a surprise when the Doctor finds him dead in his living room a short while later.

Finally about halfway into the serial we get to meet the creature from the black lagoon. I mean, a Silurian. It doesn’t seem hostile to the Doctor, who just wants to talk, but unfortunately it runs off before answering any of his questions.

Meanwhile, the previously injured UNIT soldier goes back down to the caves, determined to find the ‘saboteur’ he saw earlier. He gets a bit more than he bargained for. The Silurians take him captive, though they don’t come out of the encounter unscathed.

With matters escalating, the Doctor recommends that the research operation should be shut down immediately, followed by a careful scientific expedition into the caves. However, even considering that he hasn’t told anyone about Quinn’s death to avoid causing a panic, he doesn’t have a sympathetic audience. Despite the lack of backup, he and Liz go back to the caves by themselves, following Quinn’s map to find the Silurian base and the abducted soldier. They don’t get the chance to free him however, and when they return to report their findings, things go from bad to worse as the news of Quinn’s death finally breaks. Now the Doctor hasn’t a cat-in-hell’s chance of dissuading the Brigadier from a full-scale invasion.

Having had no luck with the humans, the Doctor instead tries to reason with the Silurians. They’re every bit as rational as we are, after all. And unfortunately every bit as irrational. They promptly take him prisoner. From behind bars he warns them that the humans are coming, and urges them to meet with them in peace.

But like the humans, they don’t seem very interested in listening to reason. Can he change their minds before there’s a massacre?

Between A Rock And A Hard Place

The Doctor’s first outing with UNIT as their scientific consultant is already off to a rocky start. When you default to taking the military approach against the extra-terrestrial, you’re liable to cause as many problems as you solve. The Brigadier has barely set foot on base when he’s already butting heads with Dr. Lawrence, the head of the research station. He doesn’t appreciate the intrusion or the interruption to their work, complaining about UNIT’s presence more or less every time he’s on screen. Caught between the two is the Doctor, who begrudgingly needs UNIT’s help, but would rather it didn’t come with firearms. To put it succinctly, it’s not an ideal work environment for anyone involved.

And that’s before mentioning the lizard-man in the room. What we have here is a very volatile first-contact scenario that’s being conducted with all the delicacy of a bull in a china shop. An escalating sense of paranoia and exchanges of tit-for-tat violence are bringing both species to the brink of disaster. We’ll have to wait and see how it pans out, but if matters carry on as they are, the situation will get a lot worse before it gets better — assuming it even does get better.

I think we may be heading for a tragedy, because this is a conflict that absolutely doesn’t have to happen, but both sides are so determined to assume the worst of one another that everything they do just reinforces that idea. But the fact is that while we take for granted that humans are not monsters, neither are the Silurians. Some of them are hostile, yes. But they’re not without reason. They don’t kill unless their life is threatened. The one in Quinn’s cottage didn’t even attack the Doctor. There’s even one which, much like the Doctor, wants to take a scientific approach to learning more about humanity, rather than just extracting intelligence from their captive via brute force. I appreciate that, as there is a bit of a tendency in Doctor Who to treat ‘alien’ species as a bit of a monolith.

Technically speaking though, the Silurians aren’t even aliens. They’re another of Earth’s native species with just as much right to be here as us. If enough people on either side are willing to listen, there’s no reason things can’t be resolved through diplomacy. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like either side is very interested in talking right now. Can cooler heads prevail?

Final Thoughts

On a lighter note, the Doctor did get the car the Brigadier promised him. She’s a charming bright yellow Siva Edwardian which the Doctor has christened ‘Bessie’. He serenades her as he tunes her up and drives her as if he’s got lives to spare. Which, to be fair, he has.

We’re only halfway through the serial so my appraisal of the themes can only go so deep, but there’s very promising indications of moral complexity and a nuanced conflict building. There’s a maturity to the writing and a willingness to trust the audience to ask themselves: Are we jumping to conclusions about who is good and who is bad? And is that even the right question?

For answers, and probably more questions, we’ll have to wait and see when “Doctor Who And The Silurians” concludes. Until next time.

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Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 20, 1970] Fun-nee enough… (OSCAR 5 and the March 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

February 20, 2025 Kaye Dee 2 Comments

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

by Kaye Dee

Recently, The Traveller covered the launch of the TIROS-M weather satellite, noting that the rocket’s payload also included a small Australian-made ham radio satellite, OSCAR-5 (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio), also known as OSCAR-A.

Cover of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre's in-house magazine, marking the launch of ITOS-1/TIROS-M and Australis-OSCAR-5

A New Star in the Southern Cross

It was exciting to be in “Mission Control” at the University of Melbourne when the satellite was launched in the evening (Australian time) on 23 January. You should have heard the cheers! After all, Australis-OSCAR-5 (AO-5), as we call it, is Australia’s second satellite. It’s also the first amateur radio satellite built outside the United States and the first OSCAR satellite constructed by university students – in this case, members of the Melbourne University Astronautical Society (MUAS).

The MUAS student team with the engineering model of Australia's first amateur radio satellite

Radio Hams and Satellite Trackers

Commencing in 1961, the first OSCAR satellite was constructed by a group of American amateur radio enthusiasts. Cross-over membership between MUAS and the Melbourne University Radio Club (MURC) encouraged the students to begin tracking OSCAR satellites, moving quickly on to tracking and receiving signals from many other US and Soviet satellites.

Nimbus satellite image of the western half of Australia received by MUAS for the weather bureau

One of MUAS’ achievements was the first regular reception in Australia of images from TIROS and Nimbus meteorological satellites. By 1964, they were supplying satellite weather images daily to the Bureau of Meteorology, before it established its own receiving facilities.

"How Do We Build a Satellite?"

After tracking OSCARs 3 and 4 in 1965, the MUAS students decided to try building their own satellite. “No one told us it couldn’t be done, and we were too naive to realise how complex it would be to get the satellite launched!”, an AO-5 team member told me at the launch party. MUAS decided to build a small ‘beacon’ satellite which would transmit telemetry data back to Earth on fixed frequencies.

Even before Australia’s first-launched satellite, WRESAT-1, was on the drawing board, the Australis satellite project commenced in March 1966. Volunteers from MUAS, MURC and university staff worked together to design and build the satellite, with technical and financial assistance from the Wireless Institute of Australia and a tiny budget of $600. The Australian NASA representative also gave the project invaluable support. The students acquired electronic and other components through donations from suppliers where possible: the springs used to push the satellite away from the launcher were generously made by a mattress manufacturer in Melbourne. Any other expenses came out of their own pockets!

Carpenter's steel tape was used to make AO-5's flexible antennae, seen here folded in launch configuration. Notice the inch markings on the tape!

AO-5 is a fantastic example of Aussie ‘make-do’ ingenuity. A flexible steel measuring tape from a hardware shop was cut up to make the antennae. The oven at the share house of one team member served to test the satellite’s heat tolerance, and a freezer in the university's glaciology lab was unofficially used for the cold soak. Copper circuit boards were etched with a technique using nail varnish, and a rifle-sight was used to help tune the antennae! Various components, including the transmitters and command system, were flight-tested on the university’s high altitude research balloon flights.

A university lab freezer and hitching a ride with university experiments on US HiBal high altitude balloon flights in Australia used to test the ruggedness of AO-5 components

A Long Wait for Launch

Australis was completed and delivered to Project OSCAR headquarters in June 1967, well before WRESAT’s launch in November that year. Unfortunately, AO-5 then had to wait a few years for a launch to be arranged by the Amateur Radio Satellite Corporation (AMSAT), which now operates the OSCAR project. However, it is surely appropriate that, as OSCAR-5, it finally made it into orbit with a weather satellite.

After launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, AO-5 was placed into a 115-minute orbit, varying in altitude between 880 – 910 miles. This means it will be in orbit for hundreds of years – unlike the short-lived WRESAT.

In Orbit at Last!

Battery-powered, Australis-OSCAR-5 weighs only 39 pounds and carries two transmitters, beaming out the same telemetry signal on the two-metre and 10-metre amateur radio bands. Its telemetry system is sophisticated but designed for simple decoding without expensive equipment. The start of a telemetry sequence is indicated by the letters HI in Morse code, followed by data on battery voltage, current, and the temperature of the satellite at two points as well as information on the satellite's orientation in space from three horizon sensors.

AO-5 includes the first use in an amateur satellite of innovations such as a passive magnetic attitude stabilisation system (which helps reduce signal fading), and a command system to switch it on and off to conserve power. Observations are recorded on special standardised reporting forms that are suitable for computer analysis.

Just 66 minutes after launch, the first signal was detected in Madagascar and soon other hams reported receiving both the two and 10-metre signals on the satellite's first orbit. At “Mission Control” in Melbourne, we were thrilled when MURC members managed to pick up the satellite’s signals! By the end of Australis’ first day of operation, AMSAT headquarters had already received more than 100 tracking, telemetry and reception reports.

A selection of local newspaper cuttings following AO-5's launch. There was plenty of interest here in Australia.

The two-metre signal failed on 14 February, but the 10-metre transmission continues for now. How much longer AO-5’s batteries will last is anybody’s guess, but the satellite has proven itself to be a successful demonstration of the MUAS students’ technical capabilities, and the team is already contemplating a more advanced follow-on satellite project.

This philatelic cover for the ITOS-1/TIROS-M launch, includes mention of AO-5, but the satellite depicted is actually OSCAR-1

by Gideon Marcus

Fantastic emanations on Earth

And now that you've had a chance to digest the latest space news, here's some less exciting (but no less necessary) coverage of the latest issue of F&SF.

by Ronald Walotsky

The Fatal Fulfillment, by Poul Anderson

Well, this is very interesting. You remember that Ellison story that impressed me so much this month? The Region Between, it was called. Well, it has an intriguing genesis. I'll let editor Ed Ferman explain:

Five of science fiction's best storytellers were asked to write a novella beginning from a common prologue (written by Keith Laumer), to be combined in a book called Five Fates. The Anderson story and one by Frank Herbert (coming up soon) will be published in F&SF. We suggest that you look for the book (out in August from Doubleday) in order to catch up with the others: by Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson and Harlan Ellison.

The prologue, as you may recall, involves a fellow named Douglas Bailey being euthanized. We don't know why he goes there, but he ends up very much dead. In the Ellison story, he goes on to have his soul stuffed in a series of different bodies (five of them described in detail) until he rebels against his puppetmaster and becomes God.

Anderson's story is different.

Bailey in his tale is suffering from insanity brought on by the burgeoning population, stifling technology, and all the other bugaboos of modern society. Each of his fates (five of them! I see a motif developing) involves a different "cure" for his malady. The first was obviously destruction. The second involves radical therapy. A third involves government subsidy. Number four takes place in a post-pandemic world where the remaining 5% of humanity is enlightened to a degree that precludes craziness.

The fifth, well… that explains what's going on. Anderson lays the crumbs such that, if you don't figure it out by the end, you'll at least find the conclusion well set up.

It's not a bad piece, though not nearly as gripping as Ellison's. Moreover, it's one of those that makes you go "why bother" for too long before you realize Poul's actually got a point to his meanderings.

Three stars.

Books , by Gahan Wilson

F&SF's (and Playboy's, and who knows how many other magazine's) illustrator returns to host the book review column. All are collections/anthologies, and none are SFnal (being either horror or mystery in genre). He does spent a good page expressing discomfort at how universally misogynistic the stories in Splinters: A New Anthology of Macabre Modern Fiction are, noting that virtually all the tales feature evil women who get their gruesome comeuppance. He concludes the review by conceding that many of the stories are excellent, and that readers of the macabre will enjoy the volume, but suggests that the next such volume should be misandrist to compensate.

I bring this up because time and again (and again, and again) the Journey has been criticized for just this sort of column—daring to impugn the worth of a work simply because it treats women badly. Indeed, we are often told that "no one cares" about such things.

We do, and obviously others do, too.

The Night of the Eye, by Dennis Etchison

A fellow is driven off the road by Death in a Car. He survives, but upon being driven home from the hospital by his harridan wife, Death reappears.

A nothing story. Not even frightening. One star.

Harvest, by Leo P. Kelley

If you read Joanna Russ' Initiation in last month's issue, then you already know the premise for this similar story: humans from Earth are making planetfall on a remote colony where the settlers' descendants have widely diverged from the original stock.

In this case, the colonists were involuntary emigrés from an overpopulated Earth, and the incoming ship holds the last vestiges of humanity fleeing from an exploded Sun.

I spent the whole time waiting for the author to drop the other shoe—the way humanity on this new world had changed such that they would be repugnant to the newcomers.

It wasn't worth the wait. Two stars.

The Falls of Troy, by L. Sprague de Camp

Did the Troy of The Iliad exist? The answer is a maddening mix of "yes", "no", and "not exactly"—for there were no fewer than nine Troys, all with their unique history and character. F&SF writer and historian, De Camp, offers up a fascinating, if all-to-brief, summary of what we know about the history of the hill towns on Hissarlik.

Invaluable stuff to the amateur classicist. Five stars.

Fun-Nee, by Miriam Allen deFord

Sort of a children's tale, it's all about the importance of tolerance, especially on an alien world where the two races are just different enough to elicit physical revulsion, but close enough to be good friends anyway.

A little simple, and perhaps mawkish, but then, I like happy endings.

Three stars.

The Chameleon, by Larry Eisenberg

A politician with a talent for exactly meeting expectations runs afoul of a focus group with too many conflicting desires.

Short, fun, and to the point.

Three stars.

Bridging the Gaps, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor explains how elements fit in the Periodic Table… without really explaining why. I just don't get chemistry, and he's not making it any easier.

Three stars.

by Gahan Wilson

The Tangled Web of Neil Weaver, by Charles Miller

Pretty typical Satanism/voodoo tale about a college kid on the make who crosses a co-ed coven leader when he tries to bed a young witch. There are no heroes in this admittedly well-told story.

Three stars.

Tuning in

All in all, this is one of those issues that sounds worse than it was. It was diverting enough, just not stellar. Given the low lows we've had, this is perfectly acceptable. Let's just try to up the average next month!

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide

February 18, 2025 Jason Sacks Leave a comment

[We've saved the best for last this month—one of these books is sure to be a pick for the Galactic Stars. Read on about this remarkable quartet of science fiction tales…]

by Jason Sacks

Time Trap, by Keith Laumer

Sometimes a back cover blurb sells a book. “ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?” the cover reads in breathless bold sans-serif type. “He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar.” Hooked yet? How about the mention on the cover of “an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniards, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…”

Yeah, you probably thought, take my 75¢ plus tax, because that’s a book I have to read. Especially if it’s scribed by the always delightful Keith Laumer, he of the wildly satirical Retief series. At the very least, Time Trap has to be readable, right?

Well, yes, Time Trap is readable, very much so in fact. I flew through its 143 pages in near lightspeed. But there’s just no there there. Time Trap is like a Big Mac: enjoyable at the time but utterly devoid of any nutrition.

Laumer’s latest is fun, sure, but maybe it’s too much fun. Because the novel is just too silly, too whimsical, too full of absurd wordplay and pointless tangents and the sense that Laumer was scripting little bits of this story between partying with friends and warming up for his next, more serious novel.

cover by Richard Powers

You know those kind of classic Twilight Zone episodes where a character leaves a place to go on a journey, only to end up at the same place they left? Laumer starts Time Trap with a scene similar to that, and I was initially intrigued. My receptors came up, the same way they do when I flick on channel 11 at 6:30 and spend some time with ol’ Rod. But Serling always gives us a twist in the tail that lays a moral lesson on us, gives us something to think about. Laumer, on the other hand, just never really builds on the idea time loop.

Instead the book turns its focus on a different guy, Roger Tyson. His crappy car breaks down on the side of a dark country road on a wretched, rainy night. When a motorist, impossibly, happens to drive down the remote road, Tyson wildly waves his hands to beckon them to stop. The driver turns out to be a girl riding alone on a powerful motorcycle. But, oh no, the cycle crashes into a heap of destruction on the side of the road. The girl is dead… but with her last words, she passes an earpiece over to Tyson.

And there his adventure begins.

It’s a wild and wooly adventure as Tyson and his pals (including the girl, Q’nell, who’s not actually dead but kind of is actually dead– it’s complicated) journey from the deep past of Earth to the far future, all over the world, dodging dinosaurs and armies and molten lava and all manner of obstacles along the way. There’s a body swap and some crazy weapons and an alien who’s a higher level being and all kinds of over-the-top silliness. And all along the way Tyson plays the fool: frightened, confused, acting like a Doctor Who companion who traveled without the Doctor.

The adventure is fun enough read episodically, one chapter per night or something. Reading it all at once was a dive into a short attention span I found exhausting. It all would have been worth it if the destination was entertaining.

But Laumer doesn’t quite nail the landing in any sort of thrilling way; instead, the book ends like one of those human- Meets-God moments which grew so tiresome on Trek (to mix my TV metaphors). The threats to wipe out all life on Earth seem a bit breathy and unconvincing, too much connected to the cliches and not quite as wackily transcendent as Laumer clearly wants them to be.

So, yeah. Time Trap. It’s goofy, silly fun. But where most of Laumer’s other comedic works are smart while also being silly, this is pure silliness. It’s a good book to read to clear your head after watching images from Vietnam on the 6:00 News, but this book probably won’t keep looping in your mind. It will likely be forgotten by the time the Twilight Zone comes on tomorrow.

3 stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

Seems Familiar

Back in 1958, Aldous Huxley published a nonfiction book that took a look back at his 1932 novel Brave New World.

Why do I bother to mention this fact, which is familiar to science fiction fans and literary mavens alike? Because a new novel by a bestselling author reminds me so much of Huxley's classic satiric dystopia that it, too, might have been called Brave New World Revisited.

This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin

Cover art by Paul Bacon.

Levin is, of course, best known for his popular novel Rosemary's Baby and the smash hit film adapted from it. Can he handle science fiction as successfully as he did horror fiction?

Some centuries from now, the world is inhabited by people who all look very much alike, with a few minor exceptions. The central authority tells folks where to live, what kind of work to do, who they should marry, and whether or not they should have children.

The populace is kept under control through the mandatory administration of drugs that keep them calm and unaggressive. Words like hate and fight are profanities. Starting at adolescence, people have sex once a week.

Television viewing, apparently for the purpose of propaganda, is a daily ritual. Everything is planned by a huge computer.
Everybody wears a bracelet that is difficult, if not impossible, to remove, and which much be scanned everywhere they go.

Our protagonist is Li RM35M4419, known as Chip. That's because his grandfather, who isn't quite as much a conformist as younger folks, thinks he resembles his great-great-grandfather, and calls him a chip off the old block.

I might note here that there are only four first names for women and an equal number for men. That symbolizes the rigidness of the society, I suppose, but it also seems like a pointless restriction.

Chip is an oddball because he has one green eye and one brown eye. Grandpa takes him to see the real computer, hidden underneath a false facade that is meant to satisfy tourists. This becomes a plot point much later in the book.

We see a lot of Chip's childhood and teen years. Suffice to say that he eventually joins up with a small group of rebels. It turns out to be really easy to avoid the constant bracelet scanning, which makes me wonder why there aren't a lot more rebels. Quite a bit later, Chip discovers a way to avoid the tranquilizing drugs. This is almost as simple as skipping the scanners. Not the most efficient totalitarian dystopia ever imagined!

There's a lot of back and forth running around, but let's sum up. Chip falls in love with one of the rebels, who has gone back to her old tranquilized ways. He kidnaps her and takes off for an island of rebels. Again, this is remarkably easy to do, but at least this time there's a reason, revealed in a plot twist.

I have to mention that Chip rapes the woman he supposedly loves. When she comes out of her drugged state, she accepts this as natural, and their romance continues. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Long and somewhat tedious climax short, Chip leads an attack on the computer, leading up to a surprising revelation as to what's really been going on. This part of the novel is very melodramatic, in sharp contrast to the rest, which is often as bland as the world in which it's set.

Neither original nor plausible, this simply isn't a very good book. It could benefit from some serious editing. Keith Laumer would have told the same story in one-third the length. Robert Sheckley would have made it more satiric. Stick to the scary stuff, Ira.

Two stars.

by Winona Menezes

Whisper from the Stars, by Jeff Sutton

cover by Paul Lehr

The year is 2231, and jet-setting science journalist Joel Blake is at the top of his field. His glamorous job has him rubbing shoulders with the brightest minds of his age, and affords him a level of comfort that rarely has him challenging the technological utopia that Earth has become thanks to the control of a world government determined to maintain peace and progress… at any cost. His easy complacency is rattled for the first time when he meets the brilliant astrophysicist Ann Willett at a party she doesn’t want to be at; her aloofness betrays a discontent with the world that he finds fascinating. All his probing yields from her is a frustration at the government’s unwillingness to fund research into any field without an immediate profit motive, leaving her feeling like a great discovery lies just beyond her reach. He’s never met a mind like hers, and he doesn't meet another until work assigns him an interview with the visionary polymath Mark Randall.

Randall’s scientific work spans multiple fields, with seemingly nothing beyond the grasp of his prodigious mind. Feeling as though he has conquered the known world of science, he has turned his attention to the unknown: dimensions beyond human perception, elongation and reversal of the passage of time. Randall and Willett immediately find kindred spirits in each other, leaving Blake to feel insignificant under the shadows of their intellects. But when the tyrannical rulers of their gilded world discover their attempts to liberate mankind from the order they’ve imposed, both scientists are forced to flee into the cosmos, and Blake is left behind to piece together their radical vision for the future of humanity.

Now, I don’t feel that this book did anything I haven’t seen before: the oppressive government, the predictable utopia, the geniuses turned space-fugitives. Randall is very much a stock genius character, as though Sutton wished to rely heavily on our shared cultural knowledge of the Sci-Fi Genius to fill in the gaps left by his sparse characterization. It's all familiar, but familiar in the way my favorite blanket is familiar. If I didn’t like this genre with all its conventions, I wouldn’t be here. No, the reason I connected with this book lay in its smaller details.

The character of Ann Willett was so interesting to me, and though she could (and should!) have been explored in greater depth, I did also get the sense that the tantalizingly sparse but dense scenes centering her character contributed to the air of mystery, the self-imposed isolation that so intrigued Blake and drew him to her. Sutton’s intimate descriptions of spaceflight were scattered with those delightfully technical imaginative flourishes that always betray a writer’s engineering background. Blake’s charmed life as a high-society journalist is simply everything I’ve ever wanted, and I brimmed with envy the entire novel.

My absolute favorite detail was Willett’s violin motif. I’ve always found it hard to put into words the way that the sound of a violin can sound so haunting to me, so profoundly lonely. It fills a room with sorrow and longing in a way to which no other sound compares, and this is the motif through which Sutton conveys Ann Willett’s loneliness. She expresses her solitude in the melodies she plays on her violin, and the invocation of violin music had such a visceral sensory effect on me that she instantly became one of the more unforgettable characters I’ve read. I was so enchanted to read Sutton put into words the lonely beauty of violin song and to know the feeling is more universal than I thought.

It was the details in Whisper From the Stars that appealed to me, minutiae small enough to pass by a reader unnoticed but which felt tailor-made to suit my sensibilities. On its face it's a good, solid, unremarkable book, but it’s so rare and wonderful to recognize so much of your own eccentricities in a book that I’m going to have to give this one four stars.

Society's Fears Made Uncannily Manifest

by Amber Dubin

The Incredible Tide, by Alexander Key

by Davis Meltzer

I cannot think of a more fitting name for Alexander Key's stunning piece of fiction than The Incredible Tide. This fast moving ride of a story immerses the reader immediately with a forcefully aggressive pace and doesn't release one's attention until it has crashed upon the shores of its abrupt conclusion. It takes what appears to be a fantastical hero in a uniquely broken world and anchors to a coming of age anti-fascistic message so masterfully that the reader truly feels the author’s societal warning.

In order to dispel all doubt that the story within is meant as a warning, Alexander Key begins The Incredible Tide with the ominous dedication “To a people unknown, of a land long lost – for surely what is written here has happened before. It depends upon us alone whether it is a reflection or a prophecy.” It is thusly that the reader embarks on the plot like a scavenger unearthing a sandy message in a bottle. Like a freshly unburied treasure, the remarkable 17 year old castaway, Conan of Orme, shakes himself loose of his seemingly unsurvivable circumstances, marooned alone on a tiny cluster of rocks with only birds as companions. It is revealed that he has endured in this solitary state for five years after a catastrophe coined “the incredible tide” drowned a previously Earth-like environment in endless water.

He is “rescued” involuntarily by elderly, frail representatives of one of the fascist factions responsible for plunging the world into this regrettable state. Once taken prisoner, it is revealed to Conan that the New World Order, an Axis-powers-like force, is still greedily fighting over the scraps of this decimated planet, clinging to the totalitarian, short-sighted ways that caused its own destruction. Thankfully, all hope is not lost because Conan and his ilk possess certain super human abilities of perception and telepathy, and they use these powers along with the sometimes equally powerful and very human capacity to love, empathize, and connect with each other and a very strong spiritual source. Conan and all his allies will need to use every opportunity they can to be able to survive and ultimately overthrow the oppressive, greedy and powerful government whose obsession with clinging to its own past threatens to doom the entire future of humanity.

In my experience of dystopian world creation, The Incredible Tide's is vague and as enshrouded in mists as their planet is presently, but I don't think this takes away from the story. I felt like the story could have been longer and the character development and relationships could have had more room to take wing, but there was also something beautiful in the story's conciseness. The way Alexander Key was able to somehow balance a Lord of the Flies-esqe uprising on one shore with a colliding tsunami of Animal Farm oppressive governmental takeover was particularly masterfully done in a short amount of pages. I was also impressed by the way he was able to communicate the absurdity of maintaining an Orwellian Big Brother police state (a la 1984) on the remains of an actively rotting planet. Intriguing too, is a moment very much reminiscent of the unheard warnings that Superman's parents conveyed to the stubborn oligarchs on the planet Krypton before their willful self-destruction; though I felt the way it was communicated here was much more gritty and frustratingly human than the comic book version.

Overall I found The Incredible Tide to be an awe-inspiring, page-turning, and unique adventure that deserves a singular place alongside many other powerful works of dystopian fiction, and I'm rather pleased to see another heavy-hitting ominous warning make it into the 70s, as it has been decades since we've seen such cautionary tales as were more commonplace in the 40s and 50s.

5 stars

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 16, 1970] Unassailable Fortresses? A Full-Five pair of issues: (Vision of Tomorrow #6)

February 16, 2025 Kris Vyas-Myall 1 Comment

By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

We are only in the second month of the new decade, but one thing seems to be clear. Women are no longer willing to be silent.

In Leeds, hundreds of women textile workers have walked out on unofficial strike. They are opposing the pay deal struck between their union and employer, claiming it is unfair that women will be getting smaller pay increases than their male co-workers.

At the other end of the social scale, the hallowed halls of Oxford is set to host the “Women’s Weekend”. Tired of being ignored and shouted down by men at other meetings, this will be an all-women conference to discuss women’s history and their current position in the world.

In a more literal sense, a woman’s voice can now be heard on British Pop Radio. After hiring an all-male team from Pirate Radio and Radio Luxembourg to start Radio 1, the BBC have finally branched out and employed their first woman DJ. Annie Nightingale is only thirty but has already had an impressive career, including working as a journalist, presenting numerous music television programmes, having a modelling career and running her own fashion boutique.

Whether this will lead to changes in British science fiction publishing remains to be seen. The Current Issue of Vision of Tomorrow’s only female representation is in its review columnists. Maybe we need to organize our own flying pickets?

However, maybe some of this atmosphere is affecting our writers, as all these stories are, in one way or another, about people trying to break out of their social circumstances. So, let’s walk through the stench of cigar smoke in this gentleman’s club and check out the contents:

Vision of Tomorrow #6

Cover Art by David A. Hardy

Whither SF? by Rev. John Clay

I would like to thank Philip Harbottle for realizing that he has run out of things to say and inviting in guest writers to open the magazine. Take note American publishers!

I was quite taken with this first installment, with the Reverend John Clay discussing the theological underpinnings of recent SF, q.v. Sheckley & Leiber, and going on to talk about how imagination is undervalued in our modern society.

Full-Five by E.C. Tubb

Illustrated by Eddie Jones

In the 21st Century there exists an incredibly powerful illicit drug called full-five. This has the power to give a sense of perfection to all five senses, for a short period of time. It is not chemically addictive, but it makes the real world seem like a nightmare in comparison.

When a chemist secretly making the drug is murdered, we follow how this impacts four different groups of people: his criminal associates; a rich customer and his dealer; a prize fighter; and the police investigating the case.

Given how well received his other works in Vision have been (including by yours truly) it is perhaps unsurprising Tubb would be allowed to take up a large portion of this month’s magazine. And he puts it to great use. Even with 16 pages at his disposal, it is not easy to create a fully visualized world, populated with solid characters. A lot of writers cannot even manage it in a novel.

I was worried at times it was going to be a case of an old man yelling at the young kids, but it is actually quite measured. It does get a touch didactic at points but this is necessary to give the different perspectives on full-five’s effect on society.

Even though I imagine others will question if I am taking something myself. I am giving this story a Full-Five Stars.

The Impatient Dreamers: Blast-Off

Reproduction of Issue 1 of Tales of Wonder. Cover by Nick

As the title suggests we now get into the real meat of things. With the British market finally starting to get its own specialist magazine titles in the mid-30s, there were some willing to take a chance on SF. This piece primarily focuses on the publication of Gillings’ Tales of Wonder and publisher Newnes’ plans for Fantasy.

Once again full of great detail, even more enhanced by the fact that he is now directly involved behind the scenes of both magazines. Possibly the most interesting part for me was the original guidelines Newnes put out for soliciting stories for Fantasy:

– No implausible flights of fancy, no weird fiction, no spiritual or ghost stories, no gore or sex, no animals with human attributes, no interplanetary travel, no medical or biological themes, and no time travel

– Stories particularly welcome are those envisaging new developments of existing technology, such as flight and television, or on future developments in warfare.

As you can probably imagine, Gillings was unimpressed by these limitations.

Continuing to cruise high at Five Stars

Fifth Commandment by John Brunner

Illustrated by Eddie Jones

The prolific John Brunner seems to have generally moved away from short fiction to the more lucrative book market, this being only his second new short story in the last 12 months.

Grumman lives in Retirement, a self-contained community providing all the needs of the elderly. But why does that make him feel so dissatisfied? And why does no one in Retirement have any children?

Not the most original story but fulfills its purpose well.

Three Stars

The Phoenix People by Richard A. Gordon

Illustrated by Eddie Jones

An expedition comes to visit an ancient planet called by its inhabitants “Earth”. The sentient population represent the longest recorded continual chain of evolution in the known universe, yet they seem to lack technological progress and are unresponsive to any queries. Just as the expedition is close to giving up, they discover an ancient buried spaceship, more advanced than any they have seen anywhere. What is it doing here?

I found this a fairly obvious tale, padded out with a level of verbosity that puts even me to shame. It is not bad as such, just rather dull and pointless.

Two Stars

The Visitors by Frank Bryning

Illustrated by Eddie Jones

Alien visitors are watching a galley sail across an inland sea. When one of the passengers goes overboard, they pick him up to investigate the species further.

This comes with a special “Vision Vignette” logo. Unfortunately, the contents are lacking in any superlative qualities. It is the kind of tale that would have been considered old hat a decade ago. However, it is short and reasonably written, which saves it from the bottom rung of the ranking ladder.

Two Stars

The Star-Mutants by Damien Broderick

Illustrated by Eddie Jones, who I believe has excelled himself in this issue

The generation starship Man’s Dream set off from Earth a century ago. Fifteen years into the voyage, an outbreak of psychosis infected those born on Earth, whilst the children born on the ship were unaffected. With the help of the computer system, the space-born quarantine the Earth-born and try to provide them with help. However, space radiation mutates their children and a conflict between the two emerges.

Now, a hundred years later, the Space-Born are being slowly pushed back to a smaller section of the ship. The Space-Mutants live in a jungle (an outgrowth of untended hydroponics plants) where they raid into the Space-Born territory. Captain Van of the Space-Born realizes the time has come to make a decision that is contrary to their programming. Either forgo their mission and integrate into Space-Mutant society, or wipe out the mutants completely.

At first glance this may seem to be just another variation on Aldiss’ Non-Stop, but it possesses some elements that raise it up. Firstly, this is quite a dark, mature story where our narrator is faced with an unwinnable scenario, whatever he does something will be lost. Secondly, it is very fast paced and action-packed, making it a very easy read in spite of the heavy subject matter.

Whilst there may be more mention of breasts than is strictly necessary in the story, women are present throughout and have varied pivotal roles. Lady Violence in particular lives up to her name and I would willingly read a novel of her future adventures.

Four Stars

Fantasy Review

Katheryn Buckley reviews Barefoot in the Head by Brian W. Aldiss and has more praise for it than we had for the original short stories in New Worlds. Don Malcolm spends some time covering the innumerable flaws in Chariot of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken but still advises readers to try it and make up their own minds.

Finally, Robert Conquest writes another attempt to take down the new wave in his “review” of The New SF. The quote marks are mine as he barely mentions the stories inside, instead choosing to decry experimentation, get angry that the initials “SF” can mean something other than science fiction, and making rambling references to the 1920s.

The belated poll results for issue #2. Apart from the high positioning of Moonchip I don’t particularly disagree with these rankings.

A Great Escape

Marianne Faithful in Girl on a Motorcycle. Not quite as good a role as Steve McQueen got.

So, overall a pretty good selection of tales in this issue of Vision of Tomorrow, and a worthy diversion from your troubles for an hour or so. No stories are truly bad and a couple are very good indeed.

Just like the characters above, let us hope that society progresses enough that women can break out of their social confines and allow their voices to be heard just as loudly as men. Imagine if one day we could pick up a magazine to be surprised to find there are no women featured in an issue, rather than when one turns up.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 14, 1970] Spock must Die!, Starbreed, Seed of the Dreamers, and The Blind Worm

February 14, 2025 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

[For this first Galactoscope of the month, please enjoy this quartet of diverting reviews…which are probably more entertaining than the books in question!]

by Gideon Marcus

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

Star Trek is dead. Long live Star Trek!

No sooner had Trek left the air at the end of last year's rerun season than it reentered the airwaves in syndication. And not just at home, but abroad: the BBC are playing Trek weekly, exposing yet more potential fans to the first real science fiction show on TV.

While new episodes may not be airing on television, new stories are being created. I am subscribed to a number of fanzines devoted to Trek. There aren't quite so many these days as once there were, but there's also been something of a distillation of quality. For instance, I receive Spockanalia and T-Negative with almost montly regularity. These are quality pubs with some real heavy hitters involved. They are crammed with articles and fiction. As to the latter, a lot of it is proposed fourth season scripts turned into stories—by people who really know the show. The stories by such Big Name Fans as Ruth Berman, Dorothy Jones, and Astrid Anderson (of Karen/Poul Anderson lineage) are always excellent.

There have been few commercial Trek books to date. You had Gene Roddenberry/Stephen Whitfield's indispensible reference, The Making of Star Trek, released between the 2nd and 3rd seasons, and Bantam has published three collections of Trek episodes turned into short stories by James Blish (rather sketchily, and not overly faithfully). There was Mack Reynolds' juvenile Mission to Horatius, which wasn't very good.

Now Bantam has released the first "real" Trek novel, one aimed at adults. It is also by James Blish, who liberally sprinkles footnote references to prior episodes he has novelized. The basic premises are two-fold:

The Enterprise is on a farflung star-charting mission on the backside of the Klingon Empire, which is in a grudging armistice with the Federation enforced by the mind-being Organians (q.v. the excellent episode, Errand of Mercy) . Lieutenant Uhura reports to Captain Kirk that the Klingons have somehow managed to neutralize Organia and launch a surprise attack that knocks the Feds back on their heels.

Chief Engineer "Scotty" bungs together a long-range transporter that will allow Mr. Spock to reconnoiter Organia and report back his findings. However, the journey has an unexpected consequence: the first officer is duplicated—and the replica is irretrievably evil. Can Kirk and his crew resolve the Organia issue before the bad Spock destroys them all?

Put like that, the story seems awfully juvenile, but the slim novel (just 115 pages) is actually quite a good read.

Characterization is weak, relying on the reader's knowledge of the show, but it is rather truer to the cast than prior Trek novelizations. Everyone is a bit more technically savvy and erudite than normal: Star Trek as an Analog hard SF story. Scotty's accent is lovingly, if not quite accurately (to Doohan's variety) transliterated. Uhura and Sulu are given some good "screen time". Spock (both incarnations) are particularly well-rendered. Kirk is a bit of a cipher, and McCoy is more logical than usual. Also, the captain keeps calling him "Doc" rather than "Bones", which is a little jarring (though true to early 1st season Kirk). I did appreciate when Kirk mused, early on, "What was the source of the oddly overt response that women of all ages and degrees of experience seemed to feel toward Spock?" Blish certainly has kept up with the fandom!

As for the plot, well, it's a series of short chapters that read like episode scenes, the novel as a whole divided (informally) into a series of acts. It's a bit overlong for a TV show, but it would make a decent movie. Technical solutions are hatched out of nowhere, implemented, and moved past. One gets the impression that the Enterprise is responsible for half of the Federation's scientific innovations; it's a pity that most are forgotten about after they are developed.

The novel's climax is suitably exciting, and it's quite momentous. The Trek universe is substantially changed as a result…so much so that Blish has probably pinched off his own parallel continuum. Read it, and you'll see why.

I liked it. It's not literature for the ages, but it is at least as good as the best fanfiction (not a slur), and I think it sets a standard going forward.

3.5 stars.

[We were very excited to get this next review from someone who has worked behind the scenes at the Journey for a long time—please welcome Frida Singer to the team!]

by Frida Singer

Starbreed, by MARTHA deMEY CLOW

cover by Steele Savage

Starbreed begins with a port-side interlude when a frustrated Centaurian merchantman (cross-fertile with other hominids, somehow) exercises his resentment by raping a pubescent prostitute. On discovering the consequent pregnancy, the never-named girl seeks refuge in a local convent. There, nuns present us an America where parentage is a licensed privilege (thanks to the problems postulated by that old dastard Malthus), where the 'defects' of crime mandate sterilisation, and where remote towns have euthanasia clinics. The Soviet Union and China both remain, but the promise of communism has never truly flowered again, while American capital trips gaily forward, with bigotry her bold escort. Eighteen years have passed since Centaurian traders first made contact, and thus far they have exploited their contracts, plying a colonial trade monopoly across the seas of space.

The child is raised in the shelter of the convent after his mother dies in childbirth. Thanks to his mixed parentage, by the age of 14 he's already a bizarre demigod of self-sufficiency, and so flees across the border of the American trade zone to Guayaquil. Taking the alias ‘Roger’ after the slur ‘rojo’ which the border guards used, there he and a cohort of other half-Centaurian teens play at larceny, revolution and revenge. He conceives the idea that, through the time dilation of Centaurians superluminal transport (20 years in a few weeks subjective), he may evade the capital crime of being a child of miscegenation—by being older than would allow for his existence. With stolen money, he invests in a new identity and a working berth on a Centaurian trade vessel, burning to discover the secrets of their design.

Not a soul seems happy, and few afford one another grace. The story reads like something written by Ellison were he smidgen less misanthropic. Imagine, if you will, Vogt's Slan, but the antagonist is our protagonist. A Khan of the Eugenics Wars, but molded out of the pain of rejection rather than to the designs of some military-industrial complex. Books, in the end, are Roger’s only solace, and he bitterly resents his social isolation, fixing on attaining power to secure for himself that which he feels he has been denied. Women all seem to be playing to scripts which evoke John Norman: prizes to be conquered into obedient adoration, mothers to be outgrown, and artifacts of abjection. Often it feels as though they’re only set-dressing for the quintet of rational, hale, golden-eyed men who scheme to seize the future as continental hegemons.

This is a bitterly comic, almost Wildean novel where every patronizing impulse seems bound to erupt with the pus of profound condescension, framed within a nesting-doll of layered imperialist exploitation, where the genocide of the Watusi is but a historical footnote. It strives to be a warning klaxon against the simmering of the dispossessed, and fails most profoundly where it relies on racial caricature, or lacks follow-through. I don't expect to re-read it, but I might refer it to others with a taste for maror, willing to subject themselves to stories about eugenics for reasons other than enjoyment.

3 out of 5

photo of a man with short dark hair and goatee — by Brian Collins

With the latest Ace Double (or at least the latest one to fall into my hands), we have two original short novels—although one of them is closer to a novella than a true novel. The shorter (and better) piece is by Emil Petaja, a veteran of the field, who seems to be as productive as ever. The other is (I believe) the second novel by a very young Englishman (he's only 21, so let's take it easy on him) named Brian Stableford. Stableford was apparently sending letters to New Worlds and the dearly missed SF Impulse years ago, when he was a snot-nosed teenager; more recently he's tried his hand at writing professionally.

Ace Double 06707

Double book covers, the first featuring the head of a man and a robot with the caption Emil Petaja
Seed of the Dreamers
The heroes of the Earth must live again!
The second book cover depicts a long sharp green, blue and purple abstract figure with an eye atop, with small humanoids weilding swords below. the caption reads.
Brian M. Stableford
THE BLIND WORM
Complete the Quadrilateral -and the universe is yours — Cover art by Gray Morrow and Jack Gaughan.

Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja

Brad Mantee is a tough and hard-nosed enforcer for Star Control, an intergalactic empire which Petaja, in his narration, explicitly calls fascist. Brad is here to take one Dr. Milton Lloyd to prison, for the doctor, while undoubtedly brilliant, is also responsible for an experiment gone wrong, killing over a dozen people. The journey goes wrong, however, when, upon landing, Brad meets a beautiful young woman who, unbeknownst to him, is Dr. Lloyd's daughter. Harriet Lloyd, the heroine of the novella, is bright like her old man, but what makes her different is twofold: that she works for TUFF, a league of what seem to be space-hippies, undermining Star Control's tyranny in subtle ways; and two, she has psi powers, these being more or less responsible for the rest of the plot. While Harriet is distracting Brad, Dr. Lloyd hijacks Brad's ship and takes off for what turns out to be a seemingly uninhabited planet, which Harriet christens as Virgo (she's interested in astrology).

The rest of the novella (it really is a lightning-quick hundred pages) is concerned with Brad and Harriet having to cooperate with each other once it becomes apparent Dr. Lloyd has crash-landed on Virgo, and may or may not be dead. This would all be a pretty derivative planetary adventure, and indeed during the opening stretch I was worried that Petaja had not put any effort into this one; but the good news is that Seed of the Dreamers has a neat little trick up its sleeve. It soon dawns on Brad and Harriet that they are not the only people on this planet—the only problem then being that said people have apparently spawned from the old adventure books Brad is fond of reading (secretly and illegally, since Star Control has long since outlawed fiction books). They meet and nearly get killed by some tribal folks out of the pages of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, and really it's off to the races from there.

Seed of the Dreamers reads as a sort of reversal of L. Ron Hubbard's Typewriter in the Sky, since whereas that novel involves a real person getting thrown into a world of fiction, in Petaja's novella the fictitious characters have decided to bring the party to the real world. Virgo is thus strangely populated with characters from different real-world books, including but not limited to King Solomon's Mines, The Time Machine, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and more. There's even a Tarzan lookalike named Zartan (I assume for legal reasons Petaja cannot use "Tarzan" as a name), who appears in one scene. These characters from books all live by what they call "the Word," which is clearly a joke about the Bible, but it's also in reference to each character's programming, or rather their characterization according to each's source material.

Petaja has a lot of fun with his premise, although Seed of the Dreamers is, if anything, too short. Brad and Harriet coming across one fictitious character after another makes the adventure feel almost like a theme park ride, and most of the supporting cast (excepting Tsung, a Chinese mythological figure) only get a chapter or two before Petaja quickly becomes bored of them, like a bratty child throwing away his toys. It's also mind-numbingly stupid, between the planetary adventure aspect, Brad and Harriet's fast-moving (and thoroughly unconvincing) romance, and Petaja's attempts at explaining scientifically a world that seems more aligned with fantasy. But most of it is good fun.

A hearty three stars.

The Blind Worm, by Brian Stableford

Stableford's novel is much longer than Petaja's, and unfortunately much worse. Indeed, this might be the first time I've reviewed a book for the Journey where I've loathed it simply due to how poorly it's written. The Blind Worm is a far-future science-fantasy action romp, in which humanity has all but died out, with only a tiny number of people living in Ylle, "the City of Sorrow," surrounded by the Wildland, a vast forest front that for humans is almost impossible to traverse. John Tamerlane is known as the black king, being black of both skin and clothing. He seeks to solve the Quadrilateral, a puzzle that seems to connect parallel universes, and which could provide a new beginning for mankind. Unfortunately, the black king and his cohorts must contend with Sum, an alien hive-mind with godlike powers, and a synthetic humanoid cyclops called the Blind Worm. Both the black king and Sum want to solve the Quadrilateral, but only the black king has the "key," in the form of Swallow, one of his aforementioned cohorts.

I would describe this novel, which mercifully clocks in at just under 150 pages, as like a more SFnal take on The Lord of the Rings, but only a fraction of that trilogy in both quantity and quality (I say this already not being terribly fond of Professor Tolkien's magnum opus). There is a big existential battle between good and evil, in a landscape that feels somehow both desolate and overgrown with vegetation; and then there's the Blind Worm, who acts as a third party and a sort of walking plot device. The Blind Worm is the invention of one Jose Dragon (yes, that is his name), a nigh-immortal human who had created the Blind Worm as a way to combat Sum and the Wildland. This is all conveyed in some of the clunkiest and most pseudo-philosophical dialogue I've ever had to read in an SF novel, which does make me wonder if Stableford had intended his characters to talk this way. It doesn't help that he mostly gives these characters, who are generally lacking in life and individual personality, some of the worst-sounding names you can imagine.

Given Stableford's age, I was inclined to grade The Blind Worm on a curve—but it took me four days to get through when it really should have only taken two. The dialogue and attempts at describing action scenes border on the embarrassing. Of the strangely large cast of characters, maybe the most conspicuously lacking is Zea, the single woman of the bunch. Clearly Stableford has certain ideas as to what to do with Zea, as a symbol with arms and legs, but as a character she does and says next to nothing. This is not active woman-hating like one would see in a Harlan Ellison or Robert Silverberg story, but rather it descends from a long literary tradition of contextualizing women as ways for the (presumably male) writer to work in some symbolism, as opposed to giving them Shakespearean humanity. The issues I have with Zea, more specifically with her emptiness as a character, feel like a microcosm for this novel's apparent deficiencies.

The shame of all this is that I would recommend Seed of the Dreamers, albeit tepidly, but it's conjoined to a much longer and much less entertaining piece of work.

One star.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 12, 1970] Up Front (March 1970 Amazing)

February 12, 2025 John Boston 3 Comments

by John Boston

Let’s be up front. That is, the front of the March 1970 Amazing, depicting a space-suited person with outstretched arms following or yearning after or paying homage to an apparently departing spacecraft. The contents page says it’s by Willis, illustrating a story called “Breaking Point.” However, Ted White’s editorial says, first, that he’s contacted some “promising young artists” whose work will appear on future covers, but right now they’re “sifting” the European covers that they apparently buy in bulk and having stories written around them “whenever possible,” like Greg Benford’s “Sons of Man” a couple of issues ago. And this issue’s “Breaking Point” was written around the present cover, so the story illustrates the cover rather than vice versa.

by Willis

And now that we have that straight, who’s this Willis guy? Well, informed rumor has it that the cover is actually by our very familiar friend Johnny Bruck, from the German Perry Rhodan #201 from 1965. The style and subject matter certainly look like Bruck’s.

Moving on to more straightforward matters: the contents look much like the previous White issues, with a serial installment, several new short stories plus a reprint, editorial, book reviews, fanzine reviews, and letter column.

White’s editorial is mostly devoted to the tortuous history of his novel By Furies Possessed, serialized starting in this issue. This is another of his commendable efforts to educate the readership about How Publishing Works. And he says it in black and white! “It helps to Know Somebody, to Have Friends.” Well worth reading. White also notes the addition of Arnold Katz, Arnie to fandom, who as Associate Editor “will have the task of pouring [sic, I hope] through all those smouldering [ditto] old issues” looking for Classic Reprints. He also announces a new program of Reader Feedback: since he gets more letters than he can print, he will forward unprinted letters to the authors on whose work they comment, cutting up the letters concerning multiple stories. I wonder how long that laborious task can be maintained.

The book review column is its usually slightly incestuous but quite readable pool of contention, with editor White praising Ursula LeGuin’s new juvenile A Wizard of Earthsea as not at all juvenile, and Greg Benford praising White’s new juvenile No Time Like Tomorrow only a bit less fulsomely. Dennis O’Neil responds lukewarmly to The Andromeda Strain, Richard Lupoff offers qualified praise to Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor (“doesn’t quite make it, but it was a worthwhile effort . . . and will be equally worthwhile for serious readers of science fiction”), and—whoa! What’s this? Speaking of incestuous, or maybe recursive, Hank Stine is here to refute Richard Delap’s mild praise last issue of Harry Harrison’s Captive Universe: “This book is a crime. If it is as common a crime as the smoking of marijuana, it is no matter; the offense is the same. . . . There was simply no reason for this book to have been written and no reason to read it. . . . It could have been written twenty years ago”—and it was, “at least once a year since then.” (Sounds about right.)

And here’s Delap, pounding away at Josephine Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith. He praises the earlier, shorter version “The Consciousness Machine” published in F&SF, but . . . “In discarding the concept used in the shorter version—an emblematic fantasy of the subconscious recorded pictorially by a machine used in psychoanalysis—the author has left her tale stranded in a hazy, directionless waste, discarding all the original sf elements in favor of unnecessarily extended feminine symbolism.” (Actually, I liked it pretty well, though maybe that makes me hazy and directionless too.) Oh, and I see I skipped over Alexei Panshin’s very succinct praise of R.A. Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, which concludes: “It’s a wild book full of prodigious lies, and I’ll probably read it again.”

The letter column is the usual mix of the inane and the intelligent, with some apparent self-parody (“The November Amazing is a groove! . . . The first installment of the Philip K. Dick novel was a trip! . . . Dick must be stoned out of his mind—on talent! And Ray Russell . . . came through with a mind-blower. . . .”). Or maybe it’s just part of the inane. Rocks are thrown at John J. Pierce’s anti-New Wave comments. The only news here about the magazine’s functioning is that its artists must be near at hand because its deadlines are too short, so mailing stories to the West Coast and receiving art by return mail is not feasible. The fanzine review column is full of fanzines, some analyzed with more nuance than I suspect goes into their production.

As for the fiction . . . it’s still a frustratingly mixed bag.

By Furies Possessed (Part 1 of 2), by Ted White

by Gray Morrow

White’s serial novel By Furies Possessed comes with a celebrity blurb. On the cover: “Big and powerful, gut-hard stuff!—Philip K. Dick.” Inside the magazine, there’s more, equally fulsome, from PKD. I will as usual withhold comment until the serial is complete. But looking through the first few pages, I see that White has rung a change on Tuckerization, Wilson Tucker's practice of giving his characters the names of prominent SF figures. White, the sometime jazz critic, has named his protagonist Tad Dameron. Tadd Dameron—birth name Tadley—was a respected jazz pianist, composer, and arranger who died young (1917-1965).

Breaking Point, by William C. Johnstone

Did I say straightforward above? Let me take that back. Breaking Point is blurbed as “Story Behind the Cover,” though the Cover is actually Behind the Story, as White’s editorial discloses. The author, William C. Johnstone, is there said to be “a writer new to SF and these pages, but he’s somewhat better known in Hollywood, where he has accumulated numerous TV and screen credits. He originally queried us about a novel he wanted to write, and the cover-story commission grew out of this. ‘Breaking Point’ is actually the opening story in a projected book-length series. You’ll be reading the rest of the stories here as fast as they’re written and we can publish them.” However, plausible gossip has it that Johnstone is actually a pseudonym of White, and the style is noticeably similar to White’s.

In any case, this introductory story is not actually a story. It is an introduction, or maybe a first chapter. A spaceship full of colonists-to-be, dormant in the Sleep of the Long Moment, malfunctions and breaks up into component modules. A crew member caught in a corridor outside the modules hangs onto one of them and dies when it hits atmosphere. (That must be what the cover is alleged to depict.) The module lands on an Earth-type planet (the four occupants are out breathing the air almost immediately). The viewpoint character, Aaron, awakes to discover that one of the others, Chaimon, is hysterical because his girlfriend was in a different module and now he’ll never see her again. Aaron, a psychotherapist, divines that their acquaintance was only a matter of days and Chaimon’s disturbance results from a vivid Dream of the Long Moment, and talks him down. Then they see a headlight racing across the valley below. There are people here! And that’s it, after seven pages. Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment, if any. Two stars, subject to revision.

Trial by Silk, by Christopher Anvil

Christopher Anvil’s Trial by Silk begins with a demonstration of the moral hazard of payment by the word. The good ship Starlight has been directed to an unnamed planet for shore leave, and Captain Engstrom is warning the crew of its perils—but he can’t explain them. He begins: “Men—ah—This is very difficult. I don’t quite know how—But it’s my duty to tell you, as a captain, that the—er—women—ah—on this planet—are . . . not—quite the way they seem.” And he goes on for some time in this vein, mentioning the food and drink, and concluding, “Whatever you do, don’t enjoy yourself. –I mean—You know what I mean! –Anyway—That’s it.” This spiel, and the description of the crew laughing during it and after it, and everybody talking and joking about it before they actually manage to get off the spaceship, goes on for four and a half pages.

by Ralph Reese

At that point, the story actually begins, and proves to be a discourse on other sorts of moral hazard. Upon entering the nearby city, the spacemen are met by beautiful women offering to show them the sights—the “fountains, pools, lakes, theatres, wine shops, a communal feast and barbecue center, free communal dwellings, drug shops, fume dispensaries, sizzle palaces.” The narrator, the ship’s first officer, asks what’s a sizzle palace? His guide says “It’s terrible. I can’t talk about it.” The sizzle palace has a skull and crossbones logo on it—as does, he notices, his guide’s hair clip, and the small bottle of highly captivating scent that she keeps applying. They go to a public feast site where food (mainly meat) and drink are constantly replenished, and people including crew members are compulsively stuffing their faces. He sees a cook seasoning meat from a box with the label Addicteen, also with skull and crossbones.

The narrator bails on this G-rated orgy and says to a doctor who is treating its casualties, “I’m from off-planet. What’s the purpose of this pleasure set-up?” The doctor responds with a bolus of Anvillean philosophy (i.e., Campbellian, but cruder): “Why, to let the unfit pleasure-lovers eliminate themselves! If you let them have their own way, they will wreck any civilization ever built—unless you make allowance to get rid of them. . . . Yes, you see, rot and corruption set into every civilization ever built, unless an iron discipline is imposed or some means is provided to exterminate the hedonists who spread the corruption. The best way to get rid of them, obviously, is to provide them with exactly what they want. It is the genius of our planet that we have worked out how to do it. The expense is really very modest, as long as you let them finish themselves off fast, so their numbers don’t become too great.”

So why couldn’t the captain, who has been to this planet before, explain that to the crew in just that many words? Because if he had, there wouldn’t be much of a story at all, let alone those delicious four and a half pages of remunerative surplusage at the beginning.

Speaking of philosophy, there’s an earlier exchange with the narrator’s alluring guide when he asks her why there’s hardly anybody around who looks older than 35. She explains that when people are worn out, they “take a recoup”—i.e., go into the recuperator, which renews them. Forever? No, most last until 28 or 29; 35 is “frightfully old.” She giggled. “Who would want to live that long?” So the recoup wears them out? “No, silly. Man was made for pleasure, and it’s the pleasure that wears him out, not the recoup.” The narrator protests that in this system, people lose half their lives. She says, “But shouldn’t a life be measured by the total amount of pleasure received; not by the years it lasts?” Narrator responds, “What about accomplishment?” and she says, “You belong up there with them!”—referring to the people who actually do the work of keeping the society going, who pass by above the fray on overhead walkways with disapproving looks—and she walks away.

So why didn’t this appear in Analog? Too unsubtle even for Campbell, maybe. It's a toss-up whether it is more tedious than offensive, or vice versa. Either way, one star.

I'm Too Big but I Love to Play, by James Tiptree, Jr.

by Michael Hinge

Matters are somewhat redeemed by the next item, James Tiptree, Jr.’s “I’m Too Big But I Love to Play,” which is a little reminiscent of A.E. van Vogt, or what van Vogt might be like if he had a sense of humor and his writing were less ponderous. The protagonist is an energy being who spends his life (Tiptree’s pronoun usage) sailing around the universe on energy currents, until the day he discovers Earth and the subtle energy exchanges of human communication and interaction. What fun! He tries to join in but can’t get it right, causing havoc wherever he goes. This Tiptree guy loves to play and he seems to be about the right size, though he, like his protagonist, needs to get a little more practice. Three stars.

The Tree Terror, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The “Amazing Classic” this issue is David H. Keller’s “The Tree Terror,” from the October 1933 Amazing, and it is actually a charming relic, unlike some of its decidedly un-charming predecessors. Keller is back on his usual theme—people mess with the natural order of things and disaster results. President Tompkins of Cellulose Consolidated needs more cellulose, because it’s essential to making “a thousand synthetic products.” And he needs lots of it, and cheap, and near to his factories. Horticulturist Simcox is ordered to do it or be fired.

So Simcox goes to work, consulting a paleo-botanist who tells him about club mosses, which (supported by stems) grew a hundred feet high during the Carboniferous and which we are now burning as coal. Then he talks to a biologist who is irradiating ferns, and figures out how to return club moss to its ancestral glory, and bingo! We’re in Sorceror’s Apprentice territory, starting with a test plantation in rural Nebraska and proceeding straightway to dense forests of club moss with roots so deep they can grow almost anywhere, and do. “Their falling trunks began to block the highways, arteries of commerce. Only by constant vigilance were the railroads kept open and safe.” Food crops are crowded out. Everyone flees to the cities to starve. (At least the club moss doesn’t grow in concrete.)

Now Simcox returns to confront Tompkins and demands that this captain of industry rise to the occasion. He’s brought with him an eccentric genius who has invented a machine that costs three dollars to make and will grind up club moss and turn it into food. Simcox tells Tompkins he’d better crank up his company to distribute these machines nationwide so the starving millions can go out and eat the club moss out of existence. “Broadcast it! Put food into the stomach and hope into the soul of the desperate men of the nation!” And you don’t have to pay the inventor, he’s too busy on his next invention. Harmlessly amusing, three stars.

Is Anybody Out There?, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford and David Book continue their “Science in Science Fiction” series with “Is Anybody Out There?,” which as you might suspect is about the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere than Earth. They lay out plainly and methodically the numerous questions that have to be answered en route to getting the big answer, and the current state of knowledge about each, and they don’t obscure the fact that most of their answers are essentially pulled out of the air, er, are very gross estimates. This lucid presentation is a pleasure to read compared with the run of SF mag science articles. Four stars.

Summing Up

Uneven. Promising. Disappointing. Have patience. The same things I said for years about the Goldsmith/Lalli version of the magazine, punctuated by transitory bursts of excellence. I am tempted to get a rubber stamp made. Meanwhile, how about one of those transitory bursts?

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 10, 1970] Thirty Years To Go (The Year 2000, a science fiction anthology by Harry Harrison)

February 10, 2025 Victoria Silverwolf 2 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Clarke and Kubrick Minus One

A recent film has made many of us aware of the first year of the next century. But what about the last year of this century?

(You do know that 2000 will be the last year of the twentieth century and not the first year of the twenty-first century, right? I thought so.)

A new anthology of original science fiction stories attempts to offer a glimpse of that evocative year to come.

The Year 2000, edited by Harry Harrison

Cover art by Pat Steir.

Obviously, all the stories take place three decades from now. Other than that, they have a wide range of themes and styles, from old-fashioned tales of adventure to commentary on social issues to New Wave experimentation. Let's take a look.

America the Beautiful, by Fritz Leiber

The narrator is a poet and scholar who travels to the United States on an academic tour. He stays with a typical American family and has an affair with the adult daughter of his hosts. Despite the fact that pollution has been eliminated and racism is no longer a problem, there's something about the place that makes him uneasy. Part of it has to do with the fact that the USA is still involved in small scale wars, similar to the current conflict in Vietnam.

Although there is a fair amount of futuristic content (rocket transportation between North America and Europe, for example), this reads almost like a mainstream story, something that might be published in a future issue of The New Yorker. It's impressionistic and introspective. Given that it's by Leiber, it's no surprise that it's very well written. Perhaps it's a bit too subtle for me.

Three stars.

Prometheus Rebound, by Daniel F. Galouye

An aircraft that uses the Earth's magnetic field gets in trouble. The huge plane, which looks like a flying saucer, keeps gaining altitude, beyond the control of the pilots. Can an elderly veteran flyer of World War Two help the crew save the lives of all aboard?

There's a ton of technical jargon throughout the story, the vast majority of which went way over my head. The plot depends on a character doing something really foolish.

Two stars.

Far from This Earth, by Chad Oliver

In Kenya, an area formerly used for raising cattle now serves as a wildlife preserve. The main character is a warden who has to prevent elderly people from following their traditional ways by tending cattle in the region. Part of the preserve is an amusement park, something like an African Disneyland. The protagonist visits the space-themed part of the park, which offers hope for his son's future.

The story offers a thoughtful look at culture change. The warden bitterly regrets what has been lost, but also welcomes improvements. He's an ambiguous sort, not always sympathetic, which adds depth of characterization. The author obviously knows the area and its culture very well, and depicts them vividly.

Four stars.

After the Accident, by Naomi Mitchison

The title disaster contaminated the Earth with radiation. Genetic testing is used to find out which persons would be likely to produce offspring without mutations. The narrator, a biologist and historian, meets a man who plans to send colonists to another world. She becomes pregnant with their child, who will have mutations that will allow it to survive on the planet.

This is a quietly disturbing story. The narrator's calm acceptance of the situation and decision to bear a mutant baby are the most chilling aspects of it. The speculative biology is convincing, the stuff about colonizing another planet less so.

Three stars.

Utopian, By Mack Reynolds

A social activist who was in suspended animation wakes up to find that the world has become the kind of paradise he imagined. There's no money, because everybody has everything they need. The folks who revived him tell him what they need from him.

The fellow went into suspended animation only because the people in the year 2000 used a sort of mental time travel to take over his mind and make him abscond with funds from his organization and then freeze himself. I found this aspect of the story gimmicky and implausible compared to the rest. The impact of the piece depends entirely on its punchline.

Two stars.

Orgy of the Living and the Dying, by Brian W. Aldiss

A man leaves his wife in England to work for a United Nations famine relief agency in India. He has an affair with a physician. When the facility is attacked by bandits, he battles them in an unusual way.

This synopsis makes the story sound like mainstream fiction, without futuristic elements. The main speculative premise is that the man hears voices, some of them seemingly precognitive. Excerpts of what he hears alternate with the narrative portion of the text, giving the work a touch of New Wave.

The author creates an evocative setting, if one that could easily be set today rather than in the year 2000. The man's lust for the doctor causes him to force himself on her at one point. It's hard to accept him as a hero later, when he comes up with a technological way to defeat the bandits. (This technique, by the way, is the part of the story that most evokes the feeling of science fiction, even if there is nothing futuristic about it.)

Three stars.

Sea Change, by A. Bertram Chandler

(The book just calls the author Bertram Chandler, but we know better than that, don't we? It's also no surprise at all that it's a sea story.)

A sea captain (of course!) who went into suspended animation for medical reasons gets thawed out, cured, and given a job commanding a gigantic, automated cargo ship. When things go wrong, he has to make use of his experience with sailing ships to save the day.

Chandler can't be beat when it comes to describing nautical stuff, and in this case he doesn't even have to pretend that his vessel is a starship. It may be hard to believe that a guy whose experience with ships is thirty years out of date would be given command of a futuristic vessel. It may also raise a few hackles to learn that the ship's troubles are caused by a female member of the crew, who messes everything up.

Three stars.

Black is Beautiful, by Robert Silverberg

New York City is populated almost entirely by Black persons, with only a few White commuters and tourists. The main character is an angry teenager who sees the mayor of the city as an Uncle Tom. He stalks a White teenager out of a sense of injustice and seeks revenge.

A White author writing from the point of view of a Black radical is taking a big chance, I think, and could be accused of depicting Black stereotypes. In this case, the gamble pays off pretty well. The teenager is passionate but naive, the Mayor cynical but effective. The story might be read as a debate between two styles of Black activism.

Four stars.

Take It or Leave It, by David I. Masson

Two sections of text alternate, both featuring the same characters. In one, they face challenges like local crime bosses and being forced to move in a technologically advanced society. In the other, they struggle to survive in a world devastated by a plague.

This reads almost like two different stories. The first one is full of futuristic slang and nouns used as verbs. (The word visited is replaced by visitationed, for example.) The second one has more direct language, but is very grim. People hunt cats to eat them, for one thing.

The tricks with language make the story difficult to read. Given the title, I wonder if the author is saying that an imperfect future is a lot better than a horrible one. This is one for New Wave fans.

Three stars.

The Lawgiver, by Keith Laumer

As a way to fight overpopulation in the United States, a controversial law makes it mandatory to terminate pregnancies unless the mother-to-be has a birth permit. (There's also the implication that she has to be married.) The Senator who pushed this law through Congress, against much opposition, confronts a woman made pregnant by his son.

Given the fact that abortion is only legal under certain circumstances in a handful of states, it seems unlikely that it would often be mandatory a mere thirty years from now. (And the story makes it clear that the procedure has to take place even if birth is imminent.)

The author doesn't seem to be making a case for or against abortion, as far as I can tell. The plot is melodramatic, throwing in a car crash to add excitement (and maybe some dark irony.) Still, I have to admit that it held my attention throughout.

Three stars.

To Be a Man, by J. J. Coupling

A fellow is seriously injured in battle and has almost all of his body except brain, eyes, and part of his spinal cord replaced by artificial parts, indistinguishable from the original. He returns from the war to confront his lover.

Much of the story consists of exposition, as the man explains in great detail how his new body works. This makes for dry reading. In sharp contrast to this is the sexual content: it seems that the fellow can be programmed to be a tireless sex partner. This results in an outrageous scene in which all the nurses in a battleground medical facility have an orgy with the guy. Pure male fantasy.

Two stars.

Judas Fish, by Thomas N. Scortia

A man works in a deep sea facility, altering the genetics of fish so that they will lead members of their species into the facility's chambers, to be processed into food for a starving world. Squid-like beings, having intelligence at least as great as humans, steal the fish away. The man's capture of one of the creatures leads to a strange transformation.

This is probably the most speculative story in the book, with a common science fiction theme that goes far beyond just extrapolating the next few decades. Not overly plausible, but readable enough if you're willing to suspend your disbelief.

Three stars.

American Dead, by Harry Harrison

Black guerrillas wage open warfare against the United States government, making use of weapons stolen from the military. An Italian journalist observes an assault by one of the Black commanders.

This is a gruesome vision of the worst possible outcome of current racial tensions in the USA. The manner in which the rebels fight is clearly based on tactics used by the Viet Cong. A powerful and disturbing tale.

Four stars.

Worth Waiting Thirty Years?

Overall, the book is OK, if not great. Some low points, some high points, mostly decent stories if not outstanding ones. Worth reading once, but don't expect it to be in print three decades from now.

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Galactic Journey

[February 28, 1970] Revolutionaries… (March 1970 Analog)

[February 26, 1970] Made in Japan! (Ohsumi, first Japanese satellite)

[February 24, 1970] Sex and the Single Writer: New Worlds, March 1970

[February 22, 1970] An Es-scale-ating Conflict (Doctor Who: The Silurians)

[February 20, 1970] Fun-nee enough… (OSCAR 5 and the March 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

[February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide

[February 16, 1970] Unassailable Fortresses? A Full-Five pair of issues: (Vision of Tomorrow #6)

[February 14, 1970] Spock must Die!, Starbreed, Seed of the Dreamers, and The Blind Worm

[February 12, 1970] Up Front (March 1970 Amazing)

[February 10, 1970] Thirty Years To Go (The Year 2000, a science fiction anthology by Harry Harrison)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction