[April 16, 1968] Tripods and Others (April 1968 Galactoscope)

April 16, 2023 Victoria Silverwolf 4 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Chalk and Cheese

I recently read two new science fiction novels by British authors that are otherwise as different as they can be. One takes place in the very near future. The other is set centuries from now. One never leaves England. The other ventures into interstellar space. One uses an experimental narrative style. The other is told in a traditional manner. One is New Wave, the other Old Wave. Let's take a look at both.

Bedlam Planet, by John Brunner

Cover art by Jeff Jones.

Before the story starts, unmanned probes discovered a habitable planet orbiting Sigma Draconis. A team of four explorers went to check it out. Everything seemed hunky-dory, so three big starships carried a bunch of colonists there. They named the planet Asgard.

One ship was to be used for raw materials. Another was to be kept intact, in case the colonists needed to get out quick. The third was supposed to carry our hero, one of the original four explorers, back to Earth.

Disaster struck when an error in navigation caused one of the ships to crash into Asgard's moon. Our protagonist, a born wanderer, is stuck on Asgard, a reluctant colonist who doesn't fit in with the others. While off on his own, he is stung by a local critter and spends several days hallucinating.

Meanwhile, a microorganism native to the planet gets into the bodies of the colonists, leading to vitamin C deficiency and thus scurvy. For various reasons, the only permanent solution to this medical problem is for folks to start eating local foodstuffs, not yet known to be completely safe. Half a dozen colonists are selected at random to test native foods.

When our hero returns, he finds the six people locked up, apparently insane and guilty of sabotaging the colony. The other colonists are in a very bad state, barely able to take care of their basic needs and unwilling to make even very simple repairs. Can one man whip them into shape, solve the vitamin C problem, figure out what happened to the six insane folks, and save the colony?

I should mention that the hero's hallucinations, as well as those of the six colonists who eat local foods, take the form of folklore from their individual cultures. A Greek woman, for example, imagines scenes from Greek mythology. A detailed description of these hallucinations is probably the most interesting and original part of the book.

The explanation for what's going on didn't fully convince me; it got a bit mystical for my taste. What is otherwise a problem-solving SF story that wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Analog flirts with things like racial memory. I'll give the author credit for having major characters of both sexes and multiple ethnicities.

Three stars.

Synthajoy, by D. G. Compton

Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon.

It's nearly impossible to provide you with a simple synopsis of this novel, because it's narrated in a nonlinear fashion. In addition to that, the narrator may be insane, spends most of the day in a sedated condition, and is subjected to a form of therapy/punishment that definitely messes up her mind.

The narrator is the wife of a obsessive scientist, now dead. With the help of a brilliant electronics engineer (later the wife's lover, and also dead), he came up with a way to record the sensations experienced by one person and to allow another to share them. Originally used as therapy, it becomes a form of entertainment as well.

We slowly learn that the narrator has been convicted of a crime, and that she is subjected to mental recordings designed to make her contrite. With multiple flashbacks, some going all the way to the narrator's childhood, we see how the device was invented, how it was used, and how it was corrupted. We also receive varying accounts of how the two men died.

Alternating with these memories, which may be distorted, the narrator also relates events happening to her in the present. Her relationship with the Nurse and the Doctor is a complex one, with hidden motives everywhere.

This is a difficult book. Besides jumping back and forth in time, often from one sentence to the next, the text frequently breaks off in the middle of a line. Events are not only narrated out of order, but also retold in a completely different way. It's impossible to discover the real truth.

Despite the effort required on the part of the reader, and the inherent ambiguity of the work, this is a fine novel. The author happens to be male, but he writes from the point of view of a woman in a completely convincing manner. If you're looking for light entertainment, seek elsewhere. If you want to discover that science fiction can be serious literature, you're in the right place.

Five stars.

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

The Tripods (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire) by John Christopher

H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds casts a long shadow over the science fictional world. Whether fans see it as using invasion literature as a satire on imperialism or just an atmospheric horror tale, know it from films, radio or magazines, it is one of the core works of SF.

But what if Wells’ Martians came not to exterminate but enslave?

Whilst not officially a sequel to War of the Worlds, it is hard not to read it as anything else. In this version, the Tripods came and conquered more than a century ago. After millions were killed in the war what remains of humanity lives in a feudal society under their tripod overlords. Once people reach the age of 13, a metal “cap” is put into their head which ensures their compliance with the alien commands.

Will Parker, from a Southern English village, meets a vagrant who tells him of the location of free humans. Together with his cousin Henry they journey to The White Mountains, to both learn more of The Tripods, and to fight against them.

At their heart these are juvenile adventure stories, a cross between Ian Serallier’s Silver Sword and Andre Norton’s SF tales. However, juvenile should not be taken to mean shallow or hollow. These are dark tales of children trying to survive in an oppressive society.

The highlight for me is the second book, where we get to see life in a Tripod city and Will is treated as a pet by one of the aliens. It is insightful, vivid and very disturbing.

These do have one flaw and that is found in the final book. Christopher wants to tie up the trilogy in these short books and the ending feels incredibly abrupt and light, given what we see in the others. However, there is still much to enjoy here and worth checking out.

I actually feel the limitations of having to write for a younger audience benefit Christopher. He is forced to remove his tendency for gratuitous shock scenes for the sake of it, nor did I notice any of his usual prejudices against the Celtic nations of the British Isles. If he sticks within this field, I will willingly pick up more of his books.

Four stars

by Blue Cathey-Thiele

Ace Double H-56

Pity About Earth, by Ernest Hill

Pity About Earth introduces us to Shale, a callous, ambitious, often downright cruel man. He and Phrix, his alien assistant, work for the god-like Publisher, in advertising. His ship is automated, as is the rest of the universe. A mistress of his plots with a competitor, and Shale is forced to escape into a labyrinth. There he encounters cages inhabited by humans who have been conditioned to prove concepts in torturous and deadly ways. Shale feels no sympathy, up until a human-ape hybrid named Marylin catches his attention. He is strangely compelled by her. She helps him to escape the maze, and later, the planet.

Despite being a Groil, Phrix has been promoted to Shale's old position. In one of many instances where Marylin tries to redirect Shale from violence, she protects Phrix by setting Shale to go to Asgard, fabled home of the Publisher.

Upon reaching Asgard, they find the long dead remains of the Publisher. In his place is Limsola, a woman who has been gaining the secrets of Asgard executives just before their deaths. Shale is distracted by her allure, breaking Marylin's heart as he was the first being to show her a shred of care. Limsola encourages Marylin to Publish, to change the rules. Marylin confers with Phrix about how change could happen, and she takes up post as the new Publisher. On his homeworld, Phrix follows her lead, and together they begin to breathe life back into a world that had become frozen.

The world of the Publisher is automated to the point of inaction. Life is casually thrown aside even while there are means to prevent suffering. Advertising is a key function yet items only exist to *be* advertised. Phrix tasks himself with upending an entire universe. It is not a matter of ethics to him, only what is and what could be. Marylin has only abstract knowledge, no personal experiences, and yet she has more compassion and care than any other character.

Shale is hardly unique in his views, unwilling or unable to look beyond himself and care for others prior to meeting Marylin, and even after he begins to have some sense of shared "humanity" it is brief and confuses him. There is a special horror in his blasé approach to the labyrinth of experiments, food made of humans, and sexual violence. He doles out death and the dead are simply out of luck. He is a deeply unlikable protagonist; Marylin and Phrix provide far more engaging points of view.

I can't say I enjoyed it, but it left me with thoughts to chew on.

3 stars

Space Chantey, by R.A. Lafferty

Captain Roadstrum plays the part of Odysseus in a loose adaptation of The Odyssey. Along with Captain Pucket, he and the crew of hornet-men visit planets that serve as analogs to the islands on the way home from Troy. Roadstrum is not some wise general, he survives via luck, sheer force of will, and the rare moment of inspiration. Margaret the houri and Deep John the "original hobo", myths in their own right, join the crew.

Roadstrum finds Valhalla, where his crew feast and fight and die, all to rise up ready to fight again the next morning. Upon leaving, the crew have their tongues cut out and grow themselves replacement organs- Roadstrum opts for a forked tongue, which grants him clever speech. They speed through twenty years while being sucked into a black hole, escaping via a recently installed button that reverses time.

Helios' cows are replaced by an asteroid belt orbiting a sun, though that doesn't stop the crew from capturing and *eating* one of these asteroids like a prize calf.

Roadstrum takes over for Atlas, not carrying the physical weight of the world but perceiving existence in its entirety, as anything he drops his attention from ceases to exist.

The crew complains about the size and quality of the hell planet they've been sentenced to for their crime against Aeaea, a version of the witch Circe, before breaking out.

Roadstrum is in no great hurry to get home, and we don't even get the name of his wife or son (Penny and Tele-Max) until the last 15 pages.

There is a degree of self-awareness to both the story and Roadstrum himself, moments when he recognizes that he is acting out a story that has happened before, or even actions he seems to remember. He makes a determined break from repeating actions at the close of the book, choosing not to settle peacefully with his wife and son as the former version of Odysseus did, but to fly off toward more adventure.

Although Space Chantey, like Pity, has characters eating other people, casual killing, and brutality, it's in the format of a tall-tale and with barely half the gritty detail as the first book of this Ace Double. Even the characters who are dying often take it as a bit of a joke. Indeed, this book reads more as a folk story with space-travel trappings than science fiction. Characters die and return with little or no explanation, survive impossibilities and contradict themselves and the narration. It is larger than life and at times quite silly. It also has plenty of dubious poetry in the form of verse interludes.

This would have been better suited as a series of stories around a campfire than a sci-fi novel.

2.5 stars

by Gideon Marcus

Sideslip!, by Ted White and Dave Van Arnam

If you've been following Dave Van Arnam's First Draft 'zine, you're probably rooting for this fan-turned-filthy-pro. I didn't get a chance to read his Star Gladiator, and this newest book is co-written. Still, Ted White's name is magic to me, and who could resist this lurid cover. Therefore, it was with no hesitation that I plunked down my four bits plus a dime to read Sideslip!

I was even more excited to see that the book starred Ronnie Archer, outsized private eye, who starred in the excellent short story, Wednesday, Noon. Turns out he's a false cognate, however. Per a letter Ted sent me:

Same name, different characters. Ron Archer was my penname as a cartoonist in the early '50s, and got applied to subsequent characters, usually private detectives. Ron was the protagonist in my never-written mystery novel, "The Stainless Steal."

Ah well. The rest of the book was similarly a disappointment. In brief, Ron Archer finds himself zapped into an alternate New York in a set-up quite close to that of White's Jewels of Elsewhen. But in this New York, alien invaders conquered the Earth in 1938, turning our world into a colonial source for raw materials. The "Angels", who look like tall, luminous humans, are protected by force fields and human collaborators known as Yellow-Jackets. This does not keep resistance groups from forming, which in the Untied States are represented by The Technocrats (led by Hugo Gernsback and employing Albert Einstein–these are the folks who warped Archer to this alternate world), the Communists, and the Nazis (led by none other than Hitler, himself).

The first half of the novel details Archer getting captured by and escaping from each of the various groups, ultimately ending up in the hands of the Angels. Well, one particular Angel. The one female Angel, who of course immediately falls in love with Archer. At this point, the story practically grinds to a halt as Archer is taken off-world to meet the Angels and argue for Earth's sovereignty. There are lots of pop-eyed descriptions of advanced technologies that feel better suited to SF from the 20s or 30s. Archer and Sharna, his Angel lover, have a fraught relationship written with the subtlety and skill of a teenager writing his first fanfiction. The end is a brief, action-filled segment. In between, there's a lot more sex and nudity than I've seen in an American SF novel. I found it a bit embarrassing.

In short, we have the bones of a Ted White novel, but none of the feel. Missing is the deft, sensual touch that White lends his pieces, as well as any semblance of good pacing. This actually makes perfect sense–in another letter, White explained that the story was largely executed by Van Arnam:

This was a book which started in a writer's group. I wrote an opening hook and passed it out to the others. Dave Van Arnam picked up on it and suggested we collaborate on a book. Which we did. I was not happy with Dave's writing early on, and heavily rewrote his first drafts, but as I fed these back to him he picked up on what was needed, and the last quarter of the book is mostly his. Pyramid liked the book well enough to ask us to write their Lost in Space book…

The real problem with the book, beyond the technical issues, is that Archer doesn't do anything. At every turn, he's simply along for the ride, noting his surroundings, occasionally running. Archer, himself, notes as much at the end of the book. I suppose that speaks to some authorial awareness, though it doesn't fix the problem.

Still, the book is readable, in a hackish sort of way, and the concepts are fine, if as hamfisted as the cover. Based on quality, I should give this thing two stars, but I did make it through Sideslip!, and I wanted to know what happened, so I'll give it three.

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[April 14, 1968] In Unquiet Times: The Frankfurt Arson Attacks, the Shooting of Rudi Dutschke and Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB

April 14, 2023 Cora Buhlert 2 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Another Annus Horribilis

1967 was a terrible year of unrest and violence. So far, 1968 seems to follow suit, especially considering the horrible events in Memphis, Tennessee, last week.

Regular readers may remember my article about the devastating (and still unresolved) fire at the À l'innovation department store in Brussels last year. I expressed my disgust at the pamphlets distributed by the leftist activist group and alternative living experiment Kommune 1 in West Berlin. The Kommune 1 members not only expressed their glee that a department store full of people, whose sole crime was caring more about shopping than the war in Vietnam, burned down, but also hoped that more department stores would burn.

The West Berlin police viewed those pamphlets the same way I did, namely as a threat and incitement to arson. Therefore, two Kommune 1 members, Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans (who ironically are not even the people who claimed responsibility for the pamphlets) were arrested and tried for incitement to violence and arson. That trial concluded last month, when a judge acquitted Teufel and Langhans, accepting their explanation that the pamphlets were satire and never intended to be taken seriously.

Kommune 1 members Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans in court

It is possible that the Kommune 1 intended the pamphlets as satire, albeit in very bad taste. However, even if the pamphlets were intended as satire, there was always the risk that someone might take them seriously.

And then someone did…

Flames in Frankfurt

On the evening of April 2nd, the phone rang at the office of the press agency dpa in Frankfurt on Main. A woman's voice announced that fires would start in the Kaufhof and M. Schneider department stores as an act of political vengeance. Shortly thereafter, homemade incendiary devices ignited in the bedding and toy departments of Kaufhof and the women's wear and furniture departments of M. Schneider respectively.

Kaufhof in Frankfurt on Main — The Kaufhof department store in Frankfurt on Main.

The M. Schneider department store in Frankfurt on Main decked out with Christmas lights.

Thankfully, the human and financial toll of the Frankfurt fires was far lower than that of the À l'innovation fire in Brussels. The arsonists used timers to make sure that the incendiary devices ignited after hours, when the stores were closed and the only person inside the building was the night watchman (who escaped with minor injuries).

Furthermore, the Kaufhof and M. Schneider stores, built in 1948 and 1954 respectively, are far more modern and safer than the seventy-year-old À l'innovation building. Unlike À l'innovation, both stores were equipped with sprinkler systems – something the arsonists were not aware of – and the fires were quickly extinguished, though they still caused considerable damages of approx. 282000 Deutschmarks at Schneider and 390000 Deutschmarks at Kaufhof.

Burnt cupboard at M. Schneider — Aftermath of the arson attack at M. Schneider: Even if it is a very ugly cupboard, that's no reason to burn it down.

Aftermath of the arson attack at Kaufhof — Police officers survey the aftermath of the arson attack at Kaufhof.

But who were the arsonists? Witnesses remembered a suspicious young couple and two young men hurrying up the escalators shortly before closing time. The same young couple was later seen in a student bar, celebrating and bragging. And so four suspects were arrested only two days later: twenty-four-year-old Andreas Baader, charismatic, bisexual, a failed artist with a history of car theft, who used to hang out with the members of the Kommune 1, twenty-seven-year-old Gudrun Ensslin, a clergyman's daughter from Stuttgart, student of German literature at the Free University of (West) Berlin, Marxist, occasional actress and publisher of poetry chapbooks, mother of a one-year-old son and current lover of Andreas Baader (who is not the father of her son), twenty-six-year-old Thorwald Proll, also a student of German literature and friend of Baader's and the Kommune 1 members, and twenty-four-year-old Horst Söhnlein, who runs an alternative theatre in Munich, which he trashed shortly before he was arrested, because he feared that his rival Rainer Werner Fassbinder would take it over.

The common denominators that connect the four suspects are the Kommune 1 as well as Andreas Baader. People familiar with the West Berlin activist scene have told me that Baader is desperate to impress the Kommune 1 members, who don't particularly like him. So even if those disgusting pamphlets were intended to be satire, as Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans claimed in court, they did inspire four young people to commit a serious crime.

Public Enemy Number 1

Axel Springer headquarters in West Berlin — The ultra-modern headquarters of the Axel Springer Verlag in West Berlin, directly at the Wall.

However, the Kommune 1 are not the only ones who are using the written word to incite violence. Sadly, the West German tabloid press is no better. Of particular note are the various newspapers of the Axel Springer Verlag, including their flagship quality paper Welt and Bild, West Germany's biggest tabloid, sold at every newsstand, in every tobacco shop and every bakery in the country.

Bild editorial "Stoppt den Terror der Jung-Roten!" — One of the nastier Bild editorials demands: "Stop the Terror of the Young Reds".

Like all tabloids, Bild specialises in sensationalistic headlines that tap into the fears and desires of the West German population. Right now, a lot of older and conservative West Germans have decided that protesting students are to be feared. Bild as well as the other Springer papers feed those fears with lurid headlines, angry editorials with titles such as "Stop the terror of the young reds!" and political cartoons that frequently cross the line of good taste, all aimed at the supposed menace of left-wing student protesters.

Dispossession political cartoon — This political cartoon in Bild responds to the "Dispossess Springer" campaign by offering suggestions whom else to dispossess

Walter Ulbricht political cartoon — This political cartoon from Bild shows the spirit of East German socialist party chairman Walter Ulbricht marching with the student protesters.

Bild political cartoon 1968 — In this Bild editorial cartoon, two long-haired students wonder if they, too, will make it into the papers, if they riot enough.

Political cartoon 1968 — Officials of the far right party NPD praise student protesters as their best election campaigners.

Political cartoon 1938 and 1968 — In a remarkable feat of mental contortion, this Bild cartoonist equates left-wing student protesters with Nazis attacking Jewish businesses during Reichskristallnacht in 1938.

Bild and the other Springer papers have singled out one man in particular as the chief menace to society, namely twenty-eight-year-old Rudi Dutschke. Originally from East Germany, Dutschke's idealistic and pacifistic Christian Marxism quickly clashed with the real existing Socialism of the German Democratic Republic. Only three days before the building of the Berlin Wall, Dutschke fled to West Berlin. He found work as a sports reporter for the tabloid B.Z., ironically owned by the Axel Springer Verlag. He began studying sociology, philosophy and history at the Free University of (West) Berlin, where he quickly became involved in the activist scene and joined the left-wing student organisation Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund SDS.

Student activist Rudi Dutschke speaks at a protest march.

Rudi Dutschke political cartoon — This political cartoon in Bild shows Rudi Dutschke standing on his head and wondering why everybody else is wrong.

This editorial cartoon in Bild shows Rudi Dutschke in Hitler pose. Just in case there was any doubt about the cartoonist's intentions, the letters "SDS" on Dutschke's belt are styled like SS runes.

Rudi Dutschke scientists — In this Bild political cartoon, rendered even more tasteless by recent events, several doctors try to peer into Rudi Dutschke's head to find out what's wrong with him.

Rudi Dutschke is not the most violent or radical of the West Berlin student activists, but he is the most visible, taking part in every protest and relentlessly organising marches, meetings and discussions. He was invited to join the Kommune 1, hub of the West Berlin activist scene, but declined, preferring a more traditional family life with his American wife Gretchen and their infant son Hosea Che. Dutschke also knows the Frankfurt arsonists and is the godfather of Gudrun Ensslin's young son, though it is not known if he was aware of their plans. Finally, Dutschke is a charismatic speaker, which is how he ended up in the crosshairs of Bild and became public enemy number 1 to the conservative press.

Rudi Dutschke in Amsterdam — Rudi Dutschke earlier this year at a peace protest in Amsterdam

Rudi Duschke wedding — Happier times: Rudi Dutschke and his American wife Gretchen at their wedding in 1966.

According to the old saying, "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me." But, as the Frankfurt arson attacks show, words can incite people to do physical harm. And so the relentless attacks on Dutschke by the tabloid press led to threats and hateful slogans left in the stairwell of the apartment house where Dutschke lives with his young family.

Three days ago, they led to something far worse.

Shots in West Berlin

On April 11th, a young man – later identified as Josef Bachmann, a twenty-three-year-old unskilled labourer from Munich – rang the doorbell of an apartment on the quiet end of West Berlin's Kurfürstendamm boulevard that serves as the headquarters of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund. Bachmann asked if Rudi Dutschke was there. The student who answered the door nodded and asked if Bachmann wanted to come in. But Bachmann just shook his head and left.

He loitered on the sidewalk outside the apartment block and waited for Dutschke to emerge. Dutschke only wanted to buy nasal drops for his three-months-old son at a nearby pharmacy and got on his bicycle, when Bachmann approached him. "Are you Rudi Dutschke?"

Dutschke nodded, whereupon Bachmann screamed "Dirty Communist Pig", pulled a gun and shot Dutschke three times, in the head, the neck and the shoulder. Miraculously, Dutschke survived and even managed to walk a few more meters, before he collapsed in front of an undertaker's office. Passers-by quickly came to his aid and lifted Dutschke onto a bench, where he lay calling for his parents, declared that he had to go to the hairdresser and hallucinated something about soldiers. He was taken to hospital and underwent emergency surgery. As of this writing, Rudi Dutschke is still alive, though in critical condition. Even if he survives, he will retain lifelong disabilities.

Aftermath: Rudi Dutschke's bicycle lies on the sidewalk.

Rudi Dutschke shooting site — The police at the scene of the attack on Rudi Dutschke

Rudi Dutschke's shoes where he collapsed — Rudi Dutschke's shoes still lie where he collapsed in this crime scene photo

The spot where Rudi Dutschke collapsed — The place where Rudi Dutschke collapsed, right in front of an undertaker's office. Passers-by lifted him onto the bench, until the ambulance arrived.

Josef Bachmann fled and was eventually cornered by the police in a nearby backyard. Shot rang out and Bachmann was hit, though he, too, survived and is currently in hospital.

Police officers carry off the wounded assassin Josef Bachmann.

The Smoking Gun

But who or what persuaded Josef Bachmann to shoot down a complete stranger in the street? To the West Berlin students, the culprit was clear. The various tabloids of the Axel Springer Verlag had incited so much hatred towards Dutschke that they inspired Bachmann to travel from Munich to West Berlin to shoot a man he'd never met.

The truth is more complicated. Bachmann was carrying a newspaper, when he shot Dutschke. However, it was not a Springer paper, but the far right Deutsche National-Zeitung, which contained a Wanted poster style headshot with the headline "Stop Dutschke now!" In Bachmann's home, the police also found a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, the Springer papers are not a monolith. The tabloid B.Z. criticised the way its sister papers were turning Dutschke into public enemy number 1. And even Bild expressed their shock over the shooting in an article entitled "Millions fear for Dutschke's life".

The students, however, were too furious about the attempt on Dutschke's life only a week after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and not even a year after the murder of Benno Ohnesorg to care about nuance. To them, the Springer tabloids had at the very least incited violence, if not helped to fire the gun. And so, protests erupted, first in West Berlin and then all over West Germany.

Protest in Berlin following the shooting of Rudi Dutschke — Students protest in the streets of West Berlin after the shooting of Rudi Dutschke.

"Bild fired, too" protest — Protesters in West Berlin carry a placard declaring that "Bild fired, too".

Student protest in Stuttgart — At this protest in Stuttgart, protesters carry placards comparing the Springer papers Bild and Welt to the Nazi papers Stümer and Völkischer Beobachter, proving that Springer does not have a monopoly on tasteless Nazi comparisons.

In West Berlin, protesters attempted to storm the Springer headquarters, only to find themselves confronted by angry printshop workers, armed with heavy tools. Kommune 1 member Dieter Kunzelmann got stuck in the revolving door of the Springer building, where workers emptied a bucket of red paint over him. When they found that they could not storm the publishing house, the West Berlin protesters torched stacks of newspapers and delivery vehicles. Meanwhile in Munich, protesters trashed the local editorial office of Bild.

Torched Springer delivery trucks — A West Berlin firefighter extinguishes a torched Springer delivery truck.

Overturned Springer delivery vehicles — Overturned Springer delivery vans. Even a van delivering the latest issue of Bravo, an apolitical teen magazine focussed on pop and movie stars, suffered the wrath of the students.

Police officers wade through newspapers — It's raining newspapers. Police offers wade through Springer papers thrown onto the sidewalk by the protesters.

Students attack the Bild office in Munich — In Munich, protesters trashed the editorial offices of Bild.

So far, the protests have spread to twenty-seven West German cities and also abroad and show no sign of stopping. The protesters are no longer just university students either, but high school students, apprentices and workers. As we've seen with other protests in recent years, the police responded with violence, escalating an already volatile situation even further.

Protests in West Berlin 1968 — Protesters face off against the police in West Berlin, close to where Rudi Dutschke was shot.

Students protests Berlin 1968 — Protesters and police clash in West Berlin.

Political Bild cartoon — The political cartoonists of Bild responded to the attacks on their headquarters with this cartoon showing student protesters attacking the Easter Bunny.

Dad's Cinema Is Dead

With West Germany burning and all the terrible things happening here and elsewhere in the world, it's easy to forget that there are bright spots as well. One of those bright spots is the 14th West German Short Film Days in Oberhausen.

The West German Short Film Days were founded in Oberhausen, an otherwise unremarkable industrial town in the Ruhrgebiet area, in 1954 as the first film festival in the world focussed solely on short films. The new festival gained international attention for its willingness to show experimental movies by young filmmakers and also as a place where one could see East European movies that have no distribution elsewhere.

The West German Short Film Days also became a flashpoint for radical filmmakers. In 1962, a group of twenty-six young West German filmmakers published the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which they declared "Dad's cinema", i.e. the largely entertainment focussed West German cinema of the postwar era, dead. Unfortunately, this flaming manifesto did not lead to better movies – instead the results were no better than the films the signatories criticised, but infinitely duller. A new group of young filmmakers issued a second manifesto in 1965, in which they criticised the dull problem movies championed by the first manifesto and called for making good and entertaining movies in the style of Howard Hawks and Jean-Luc Goddard. Three years later, this second group has at least made a few decent would-be noir films.

Signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto — Some signatories of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto pose for a photo.

Talking Dicks

This year's festival was beset by controversy as well, when Besonders Wertvoll (Of Special Merit) was pulled at short notice, even though it had been previously approved. The eleven-minute film shows a close-up of a talking penis – portrayed by director Helllmuth Costard or rather his penis – reading out the new West German film grant law, which denies grants to movies deemed obscene. After reading out this very dry subject matter, the penis gets his deserved reward, while director Costard, this time fully clothed, attempts to confront the main sponsor of the bill Hans Toussaint.

Hilmar Hoffmann and Hellmuth Costard Oberhausen — Hilmar Hoffmann, head of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and Hellmuth Costard, director of "Besonders Wertvoll". The star of the film is hidden under the table and hopefully pants.

I have seen Besonders Wertvoll at an impromptu screening at the Ruhr University in nearby Bochum. It is clearly satirical and the true nature of the narrator isn't even immediately apparent. However, the festival refused to show the film, whereupon several West German filmmakers and a member of the jury withdrew in protest.

I Have Seen the Future…

But even with several films missing, the 14th West German Short Film Days still offered plenty of interesting and innovative filmmaking.

Oberhausen Short Film Festival 1968 — Hilmar Hoffmann, director of the West German Short Film Days, with the three young directors Werner Herzog, Heinz Badewitz and Rudolf Thome on stage.

One film that particularly impressed me is Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB, a dystopian science fiction film made by a young graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts named George Lucas.

Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB plunges us into the nightmarish future of the year 2187, a world where humans have numbers rather than names tattooed onto their foreheads. The titular THX 1138 4EB (Dan Natchsheim) has been found guilty of the crime of "sexacte". His mate YYO 7117 (Joy Carmichael) is interrogated and denies ever having loved him. The unique naming pattern is based on California licence plates, by the way. THX 1138 happens to be the number of director George Lucas' licence plate, while YYO 7117 is that of Lucas' fiancée.

Meanwhile, THX 1138 4EB is on the run through stark white corridors and what looks like an underground parking garage, tracked by countless cameras monitored by men in white jumpsuits in a white room filled with computers and screens. For most of the film, the only dialogue is the radio communication of the security personnel. They try to thwart THX 1138 4EB's escape, first by subjecting him to a high-pitched noise and then by having a guard attack him. However, THX 1138 4EB forces open a door and runs off into the sunset and hopefully freedom. Meanwhile, a voice informs YYO 7117 that they regret that THX 1138 has destroyed himself and that she may apply for a new mate – of either gender – at any time.

George Lucas THX 1138 4EB — Director George Lucas on the set of Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB.

Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB is a neat work of dystopian science fiction that manages to tell a complete and coherent story in only fifteen minutes. The film also shows that it is possible to make a science fiction movie on literally a shoestring budget.

Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB has already won the National Student Film Award and was also honoured at the West German Short Film Days. As for the talented twenty-three-year-old director George Lucas, he is planning to turn Electronic LabyrinthTHX 1138 4EB into a full-length feature film. I for one will certainly be watching. I'm am also looking forward to whatever Mr. Lucas does next.

Bild & Funk Easter 1968 — The world may be terrible, but it's still Easter, so enjoy the cover of the TV magazine "Bild & Funk"

Bild und Funk Raumpatrouille Orion cover — The cover of last week's issue of "Bild und Funk" features some familiar faces, advertising a rerun of "Raumpatrouille Orion". Now where is season 2?

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 12, 1968] Darkness (May 1968 Fantastic)

April 12, 2023 Victoria Silverwolf 1 Comment

by Victoria Silverwolf

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

These are dark days.

I need not remind you of the recent shocking murder of a genuinely great man who dedicated his life to nonviolence. Nor is it necessary to mention the wholesale slaughter of soldiers and civilians in Southeast Asia, which shows no signs of abating.

As if the heavens wish to mourn for the horrors humanity unleashes upon itself, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon tonight, visible from almost all parts of the Western Hemisphere.

An visual depiction of the phenomenon.

It is tragically appropriate that light reflected from Earth makes the eclipsed Moon appear reddish; an event known as a Blood Moon.

Even in the frivolous world of popular music, we are reminded of tragedy. At the top of the American music charts is the melancholy ballad (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay by the late Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash last December. It holds the unhappy distinction of being the first posthumous single to reach Number One.

Recorded just three days before Redding's death.

Better to Light One Candle Than to Curse the Darkness

It is tempting to sink into silence and depression. Instead, let us take what comfort we can from small pleasures. One such anodyne, at least for me, is reading science fiction and fantasy. Let's take a look at the latest issue of Fantastic and see if we can draw any solace from it.

Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

As has happened a few times before, the image on the cover comes from an issue of the popular German magazine Perry Rhodan.

That seems to mean The Little Men from Siga, presumably a fictional planet.

High Road to the East, by Christopher Anvil

Illustration by Gray Morrow.

In this trivial bagatelle an Admiral (clearly supposed to be Christopher Columbus) has a scheme to sail west from Europe to the Indies without bumping into the new continent in the way. He uses gunpowder to send his ship into the air.

Can you guess this won't work out the way he thinks?

This is a weak joke, hardly the outstanding new story promised on the cover. At least it's short and inoffensive.

Two stars.

The Little Creeps, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

The December 1951 issue of Amazing Stories is the source of this tale of the Cold War turned Hot.

Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

We start off with an odd scene in which a huge number of tiny glowing things invade the Tokyo home of an American General at night. Only light drives them away. They manage to talk to the officer by invading his phonograph and manipulating the needle. These are, of course, the Little Creeps.

Illustration by Leo Summers.

China and the USA are in a shooting war. The Soviet Union is supposedly neutral, but gives aid to its Red ally. The Little Creeps tell the General not to do three things.

1. Don't fire a Japanese servant.

2. Don't listen to a visiting General from the front lines.

3. Don't bomb Chinese installations along a river that serves as the border with the USSR.

You can probably predict that the General doesn't listen to the annoying Little Creeps, and things go from bad to worse.

This is a strange story, with a strong antiwar message mixed up with bizarre science fiction content. The latter never really made sense to me.

The visiting General is a loathsome character indeed. Not only does he love war, he also endlessly harasses a WAC Sergeant. I understand that he's the story's villain, but he really gives me the creeps (if you'll excuse the expression.)

Very mixed feelings about this one. The author has his heart in the right place, and the escalating tension of the situation creates a great deal of suspense, but the Little Creeps are kind of goofy.

Three Stars.

Dr. Immortelle, by Kathleen Ludwick

From the Fall 1930 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly we have the only story, as far as I can tell, this author ever published. I managed to take a look at a copy of the yellowing pages of the old magazine, and the table of contents lists her name as Luckwick. The introduction to the story refers to her as Miss Ludwick. I don't know which one is correct.

Cover art by Leo Morey.

Anyway, this is a horror story about a Mad Scientist who discovered a way to extend his life way back in the 18th century. (Did the title give you a clue?)

Illustration also by Morey.

He and his mulatto slave have kept themselves alive and young by transfusing the blood of children into their bodies. Even more improbable, and embarrassing for the modern reader, the transfusion of blood from white children has made the mulatto completely Caucasian!

Sometimes the children don't survive the sinister procedure. Justice finally catches up with the evil scientist and his servant (who developed a conscience about what they were doing over the decades) in the form of the grown sister of a little boy who died because of the transfusion.

It's easy to tell this yarn is nearly four decades old. Besides the stuff about the mulatto turning white, there's a lot of flowery language. The author uses a narrative technique I've seen in other antique works. We start with a narrator, who then quotes at length from another narrator. (In this case, the dying servant.)

Thirty-odd years ago, this could have been very loosely adapted into a cheap Boris Karloff movie, of the kind I eagerly seek out on Shock Theater. In print form, the years have not been kind to it. Whatever became of Miss Ludwick/Luckwick, she does not appear to have been a major loss to the literary world.

Two stars.

Spawn of Darkness, by Craig Browning

Never heard of Craig Browning? That's because he's really Rog Phillips, who gave us this story in the May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

Cover art by H. L. Blumenfeld.

Guess what? Gregg Conrad, whose name appears on the cover, is also Rog Phillips! The guy gets around!

Illustration by Edmond Swiatek.

In a future war, two death rays meet, causing an entity to appear out of nowhere. It takes the form imagined by a soldier; namely, a genie.

Forget the futuristic stuff. From this point on, we've just got a story about a guy and his genie. He might as well have found it in an old bottle in the desert.

Anyway, he wishes his way home. Things seem fine, but then the military sends his mother a telegram, stating that her son is missing in action and presumed dead. I guess the mother is pretty superstitious, because a self-proclaimed psychic convinces her the young man is a ghost. Complications ensue when the guy rather foolishly uses the genie to perform practical jokes that seem like the work of a poltergeist.

I don't know what to make of this thing. As I've indicated, the science fiction content is pointless. I guess the author is making fun of parapsychologists and such, but nothing particularly funny happens.

Two stars.

Spartan Planet (Part Two of Two), by A. Bertram Chandler

Illustration by Jeff Jones.

Let's recap. Chandler's series character John Grimes, a female ethologist, and a bunch of other folks have arrived on a planet without women, as far as the bulk of the population knows. The elite Doctors actually have a secret cache of women hidden away.

Our protagonist is a military police officer native to the planet. He becomes a secret agent for the head of Intelligence, assigned to keep an eye on the new arrivals while also investigating the Doctors.

In this installment, the officer finds himself strangely attracted to the ethologist, although he thinks of her as an alien. On a tour of the planet, they come across the place where girl babies (considered to be deformed) are left to be eaten by predators. Of course, the ethologist rescues the sole surviving infant.

Meanwhile, another woman from Grimes' spaceship is raped (blessedly, this is obliquely described) by a gang of locals. The implication is that men who have no idea that women exist, and who imagine the strange visitors to be bizarre creatures of another species, are irresistibly drawn to them.

Eventually, there's a huge mob of men trying to get at the women hidden by the Doctors. After the battle, Grimes offers a long speech explaining how the planet developed its unique society.

As you can see, this half of the novel is a lot darker in mood and a lot more violent than the first half. After plenty of action, Grimes' expository speech slows things down quite a bit. Overall, I didn't mind reading it once, though this segment is somewhat distasteful.

Three stars.

Something for the Woman, by Ivar Jorgensen

As you may know, Ivar Jorgensen is a name used by a whole bunch of different writers in various science fiction and fantasy books and magazines. In this case, my research tells me it's really Randall Garrett hiding behind the name, in the March/April 1953 issue of Fantastic.

Cover art by Richard Powers.

A family (Mom, Dad, and two little kids) go through the process of selling everything they own except the clothes on their backs and a few other small items. They're going on a long, long journey.

Illustration by Ed Emshwiller, often known as Emsh.

The story mostly deals with the woman's fear of leaving home for the unknown. A small gesture from her husband makes the impending voyage less terrifying.

I think I like this story more than it deserves. Yes, it supports the stereotype that women are timid creatures. (There's reference to a few rare women who are as eager for adventure as men.) But it's sensitively written, and it was a welcome novelty to read something that was unashamedly sentimental.

Four stars.

Brave Nude World, by Forrest J. Ackerman

A hint in the introduction to this reprinted article led me to track down the publication where it originally appeared. I hope you appreciate the effort and embarrassment it took to secure a copy of an old nudist magazine. Namely, the August 1961 issue of American Sunbather.

I have cut off the lower half of the cover, which features the young lady with the big smile completely unclad, in order to spare the delicate sensitivities of any Journeyers who might be offended.

Big Name Fan Ackerman chatters away about his experience of nudism, while also mentioning a few science fiction stories that deal with the topic. Notably, the original magazine featured drawings by another well-known fan, Betty JoAnne Trimble, universally known as Bjo.

Ackerman claims this is the title of a story by Spencer Strong (Ackerman himself), but I can find no reference to it. Maybe it appeared in a fanzine.

On the other hand, this is a famous story by Robert A. Heinlein. (Galaxy, March 1952.)

This tale appeared in the December 1956 issue of the girlie magazine Caper, attributed to Spencer Strong (Ackerman again) and Morgan Ives (Marion Zimmer Bradley.)

The author indulges his love of puns throughout. There's not really any point to this look at nudism in science fiction. It's kind of like Sam Moskowitz without the scholarship. Too bad Fantastic didn't reprint Bjo's cute cartoons, so I had to dig them out for you.

Two stars.

A Portfolio: H. G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, by Anonymous

The magazine fills up a few pages with illustrations from the Winter 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, which reprinted the famous novel in full.

Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

The drawings were themselves reprinted from the 1899 hardcover edition.

Cover art by . . . indulge me a while as I explain how I solved a mystery.

The introduction in Fantastic says the artist's identity was lost.

In fact, it says that even Amazing Stories Quarterly didn't know the artist's name.

I'm not sure I believe that. Maybe the magazine just didn't bother to give credit where credit was due.

Fantastic just attributes them to an English artist.

In fact, my research revealed that the artist was actually French, a fellow named Henri Lanos who often illustrated scientific romances.

Nice drawings, and the enigma of the artist's identity piqued my curiosity.

Three stars.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber

The master of sword and sorcery reviews books of that kind (Conan and King Kull) by Robert E. Howard, with much additional material by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. Leiber doesn't talk much about the two modern authors, and generally praises Howard while pointing out his poorest stories and offering an example of his worst prose.

No rating.

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

This issue offers only mild diversion from the terrors of the real world. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, with only Jorgensen/Garrett rising a bit above that level. Maybe that's enough for now.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Uncategorized

[April 10, 1968] Things Fall Apart (April 1968 Amazing)

April 10, 2023 John Boston 10 Comments

by John Boston

Entering the Stengel Zone

The April 1968 Amazing displays a deep incompetence at the most basic tasks of assembling a magazine. For starters, this April issue—identified as such in two places on the contents page—is dated June 1968 on the cover, a blunder that will likely cost the publisher when the next issue appears. Further, Harry Harrison’s editorial, titled Unto the Third Generation, has apparently been accidentally truncated. It describes “first generation science fiction, or SF-1” (up to the early forties, relying on novelty of ideas), and then “second generation science fiction, SF-2” (starting in the forties with—it says here—Kornbluth, Pohl, and Wollheim, and reexamining old themes), and then . . . stops. Abruptly. What happened to SF-3, the Third Generation of the title? There’s no continuation anywhere in the magazine, nor is there any hint that Harrison meant to stop short of this third generation or continue the editorial in some future issue.

by Johnny Bruck

Other evidence of chaos in the composing room is that the texts of two items in the magazine conclude on the inside back cover, which is usually devoted to advertising. This inside cover has microscopic top and bottom margins, suggesting a last-minute effort to correct earlier miscalculations and cram everything in (except, of course, the end of the editorial, seemingly lost to follow-up). And the proofreading, which has been routinely abysmal since before Sol Cohen took it over, if anything seems to be getting worse. In particular: The very first sentence of the editorial reads “In the beginning there was the word, and it was scientifiction.” Except as printed it actually reads “scientification.” You’d expect in this specialist magazine that someone—especially the editor who wrote it—would notice an error that blatant if they looked at it. Apparently, no one is looking.

Legend has it that Casey Stengel, manager of the hapless 1962 New York Mets, asked in exasperation, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Amazing now prompts the same question.

The news is no better with respect to the magazine’s content. Rumor has it that Harrison upon taking the editorship worked out some amicable arrangement with the Science Fiction Writers of America concerning Cohen’s use of reprints—presumably getting him to pay the authors something. But reprints continue to dominate—they comprise six out of seven of the stories here.

There is new non-fiction material—another “Science of Man” article by anthropologist Leon Stover (see below), and a lively book review column by James Blish, under his pseudonym William Atheling, Jr. Blish virtually disembowels Sam Moskowitz’s book Seekers of Tomorrow, which collects essays on major science fiction writers, earlier published in Amazing before Cohen. Blish’s judgment: “inaccurate, prejudiced, filled with false assumptions and jejune literary comparisons, very badly written and utterly unproofread. If this is scholarship, we could do with a lot less of it.” He makes his case in detail. About the only defense remaining to the book is that it’s better than the competition, since there is none. Blish also reviews Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions with measured praise.

And, on the front, there is another Johnny Bruck cover taken from Germany’s Perry Rhodan magazine, badly cropped, and featuring guys in spacesuits running around with ray guns. Bruck’s work is colorful but cliched, and that is getting old.

All that, before we even get to the fiction! Sheesh.

Send Her Victorious, by Brian W. Aldiss

by Jeff Jones

The only non-reprint story is Brian W. Aldiss’s Send Her Victorious, which at first seems like a slapdash, thrown-together story, but proves to be about a slapdash, thrown-together world. It’s minor Aldiss, odd but quite funny in places. Three stars.

The Illusion Seekers, by P.F. Costello

The Illusion Seekers, a “complete short novel” from the August 1950 Amazing, is bylined P.F. Costello, which is a “house name”—a pseudonym belonging to the publishing company and used by various authors as convenient. This name is said to have been used often by William P. McGivern, but I don’t think this one is his, since McGivern is rumored to be a competent writer.

by W.H. Hinton

The story opens in a small and isolated colony of people suffering from deformities such as soft bones, woody skin plaques, and multitudes of miniature fingers growing from the backs of their hands. But young Randy is normal. Down the road from the east comes a guy named Raymond who calls himself an Illusion Seeker, but won’t explain what that means. He warns that “death will breathe through the trees” in three days, but throws golden dust into Randy’s face and says he will be saved. Sure enough, three days later everybody but Randy is dead. So Randy sets off west following Raymond, discovering that the golden dust has left him with enhanced physical prowess as he fights off wild dogs with an axe. He encounters two survivors from other groups who, hearing his story, tell him Raymond is responsible for the deaths. They all continue west and catch up with Raymond. Randy’s companions kill Raymond. Then they start heading back east in a state of mutual murderous mistrust, have other picaresque but wearisome adventures, and eventually Randy gets the real story of how his world works, which of course makes very little sense.

This story is both repellent and remarkably incompetent, written in a dead, flat style, with a pseudo-plot that rambles on and gives every indication of being made up as the author goes along, all set against a sketchy and implausible background. Overall, it’s a reading experience sort of like the world’s least interesting bad dream, or like listening to a long and tedious monologue by someone who you gradually realize is not all there. It made me wonder whether it’s Richard S. Shaver, Amazing’s foremost ex-psychiatric patient, making a few bucks behind the pseudonym. In any case—one star, a burnt-out husk of a black dwarf.

The Way of a Weeb, by H.B. Hickey

by Robert Gibson Jones

H.B. Hickey contributes The Way of a Weeb (from Amazing, February 1951). A Weeb is a frail humanoid creature native to Deimos who is always scared and always whining about it. They’ve got one on space ship Virtus, to the great disgust of all the crew except Crag, who takes pity on him. But things get tight when the evil Plutonians come after the Virtus, and the Weeb comes through and saves the day. It’s a dreary bag of cliches, professionally rendered. Two stars.

Stenographer's Hands, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The issue’s “Classic Novelet” is David H. Keller’s Stenographer’s Hands, from the Fall 1928 Amazing Stories Quarterly. In broadest outline it follows the template of the earlier-reprinted Revolt of the Pedestrians and A Biological Experiment: humanity’s traditional ways of life get drastically altered, the results are disastrous, and there’s an upheaval to set things right (though the upheaval here is a little milder than in the others).

by Frank R. Paul

The president of Universal Utilities is bedeviled by the number of errors his ditzy stenographers make (apparently his business runs on non-form letters), and demands that his house biologist come up with a solution. Easy-peasy: they’ll breed the perfect stenographer, by the hundreds or thousands, firing the less competent of the current flibbertigibets to make room for an army of promising males to balance the sexes. Stenographers who marry and breed will get a free house in a special stenographers’ suburb among other perks. There will be certain other undisclosed manipulations such as providing special food for the kids to help them grow up faster.

Two hundred years later, Universal has achieved world domination economically, with a torrent of flawless letters flowing out from a work force that matures at age 9, marries at 10, and reproduces quickly thereafter. But the daughter and heir apparent of the current company president, having flunked out of college, says she wants a job as a stenographer. She is then appalled at the sterility (metaphorical, of course) of the stenographers’ lives, and says when she’s in charge she won’t stand for it. Conveniently, it is discovered that the stenographers have become so inbred that they are all starting to display nocturnal epilepsy. Never mind! The great experiment is reversed and once more the company's letters will be haphazardly produced by flighty young women of normal upbringing.

So, an obviously terrible idea is belatedly discovered to be terrible and is abandoned. This is not a particularly dynamic plot and nothing else about the story is especially captivating. Two stars.

Lorelei Street, by Craig Browning

Craig Browning is a pseudonym of Roger Graham Phillips (“Rog” to the readership), and Lorelei Street comes from the September 1950 Fantastic Adventures. It's a facile but insubstantial fantasy involving a cop named Clancy who is asked by a passer-by for directions to an address on Lorelei Street, which he provides, later realizing that there is no such street. There are more funny happenings about Lorelei Street. A man who bought a big bag of groceries there was found later in a state of near starvation despite eating them. A woman bought a suit which later disappeared, leaving her on the street in her underwear. A Mr. Calva is the apparent proprietor on Lorelei Street, and Clancy arrests him for fraud. Calva says he’ll regret it. Next day the newspapers describe the arrest of “Calva the Great,” a “hypnotist swindler.” Calva vanishes from court on the day of trial, and when Clancy tries to go home, he finds himself on Lorelei Street, and it’s curtains.

by Edmond Swiatek

There’s more to the plot than that, but not better. Like Phillips’s “You’ll Die Yesterday!” from the previous issue, the story displays considerable cleverness to no very interesting end. Two stars, barely.

Four Men and a Suitcase, by Ralph Robin

Ralph Robin’s byline appeared on 11 stories in the SF magazines from late 1951 to late 1953, most of them in Fantasy and Science Fiction or Fantastic, plus one in Amazing in 1936. Later he made an appearance in Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine published at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the story wound up in Martha Foley’s annual volume The Best American Short Stories 1958. He seems to have quit while he was ahead; he has not been heard from since that I can discover.

Robin’s story Four Men and a Suitcase, from Fantastic for July/August 1953, is about some Skid Row drunks discussing what to do with a mysterious object one of them has found. It looks like a giant hard-boiled egg, and when yelled at threateningly displays diagrams on its . . . skin? (No shell.) The first one illustrates the Pythagorean theorem. After several further iterations, one of the characters slaps the egg, with large and regrettable consequences. The main point here seems to be how hilarious poverty-stricken alcoholics are. Sorry, can’t get with it. One star.

The Mechanical Heart, by H.I. Barrett

The issue’s fiction winds up, literally, with The Mechanical Heart by one-story wonder H.I. Barrett, from the Fall 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly. Inventor Jim Bard has just learned that his heart could conk out any minute. But he wants to complete his telephoto machine! (Actually more like television.) The solution? Make an artificial heart! His assistant Henry, trained in a Swiss watch factory, hops to it. It’s a beauty! And his doctor is persuaded to install it. Jim will carry a case in his pocket with two six-volt flashlight batteries and a watch to time the impulses that drive it. Just wind the watch, and don’t forget to change the batteries!

by Leo Morey

After the surgery, Jim convalesces, and experiments with increasing the blood flow, which he finds highly stimulating. “Have to be careful or he’d have himself cutting all sorts of didoes.” (Dido: “a mischievous or capricious act : prank, antic,” says Merriam-Webster.) But he can’t resist, and starts increasing the flow so he can stay up all night working on the telephoto, and then so stimulates himself that he scandalizes Hilda the Swedish maid and has to be restrained and briefly disconnected by Henry.

At the Associated Scientists’ meeting, to demonstrate both the telephoto machine and the heart, Jim gets stage fright, cold sweat and the works, and then realizes he can increase his blood flow. He sets up the telephoto for a demonstration and discovers—he’s forgotten the C batteries! In desperation, he snatches the batteries powering his heart, and the show goes on, with his machine relaying the picture from a distant movie theatre, while his unsupported heart races . . . for a while. And then, time’s up.

This is the best of a bad lot of reprints—corny, but with at least a bit of period charm, while the others lack charm of any sort. Three stars, grading on the curve.

Science of Man: Dogs, Dolphins and Human Speech, by Leon Stover

Dr. Stover takes on John Lilly’s claim that dolphins can learn to speak English in addition to their accustomed clicks and clacks. He starts out with dogs, which communicate vocally, he says, “but the level of signaling is that of a call system, quite distinct from that of language. A call system is no more linguistic than the system of visual signals dogs communicate to each other by means of facial expression, body movement, and position of the tail.” However: “Language and only language is a symbolic form of communication,” one which allows meaning to be assigned arbitrarily to symbols.

Dolphins? Same story. Their large brain size has more to do with body weight than with intelligence. “How the brains of dolphins function to meet the demands of their environment is not yet known, but it is a sure thing that research will show that symbolic behavior, like language and culture, is not part of that adaptation.” And there’s the rub—“it is a sure thing that research will show.” Stover continues with arguments about the evolution of human intelligence in ways that exclude dolphins, but there’s no way for the lay person to tell how much of it is supported by research and how much is his admittedly informed supposition. Two stars.

Summing Up

Editors change, formats change a bit, but the consistent mediocrity of this magazine abides, firmly rooted in the dominant and seemingly immovable prevalence of reprints of only occasional merit. One wonders how long this can last.

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Science / Space Race

[April 8, 1968] Ups, Downs and Tragedy: An Eventful Month in Space (Gagarin's crash, Zond-4, OGO-5, Apollo-6)

April 8, 2023 Kaye Dee 1 Comment

by Kaye Dee

Despite the continued hiatus in human spaceflight on both sides of the Iron Curtin, March and early April have been a busy time in space exploration. But, sadly, I have to commence this review with the tragic news that Colonel Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, was killed in a plane crash during a training flight on 27 March. Very little is currently known about the circumstances surrounding Gagarin’s death, which has occurred just one month shy of the first anniversary of the loss of Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in the Soyuz-1 accident.

Loss of a Space Hero
There have long been rumours that the Soviet leadership refused to allow Gagarin to fly high performance jets or make another spaceflight due to his invaluable propaganda status as Cosmonaut No. 1. However, it seems that since Gagarin completed an engineering degree in February, he had finally been allowed to resume flight status and was undertaking training flights to regain his lapsed jet pilot qualifications.

According to an official government commission investigating the crash, Col. Gagarin was flying a two seat MiG-15 trainer with Colonel Vladimir Seryogin, 46, described as an experienced test pilot and instructor on the training flight. Taking off at 10 a.m., Gagarin and Seryogin apparently flew east 70 miles from Moscow. After completing the training flight, around 10.30, Gagarin radioed that he was returning to base. The plane was then at 13,000 feet. A minute later ground control could not establish contact.

A MiG-15UTI, the same type as the aircraft Gagarin was flying at the time of the crash

An air search began, and a helicopter found the wreckage in a forest. The plane had dived into the ground at an angle of 65 to 70 degrees and was destroyed, killing both men. No information as to the cause of the crash has so far been forthcoming, but a story has been circulated that Gagarin heroically sacrificed himself, refusing to bail out of his stricken aircraft to guide it away from crashing in a populated area. How much truth there is to this, or whether it is pure propaganda, cannot be determined at this time.

Cosmonaut No. 1 is “flying through space forever”
Following an autopsy, the bodies of Gagarin and Seryogin were cremated the day after the crash and the ashes returned to Moscow, where the urns lay in state for 19 hours in the Red Banner Hall of the Soviet Army. Thousands are reported to have filed past to pay their respects to the world’s first space traveller. Thousands more lined the streets as the flower-covered urns, borne on a caisson drawn by an armoured troop carrier, moved slowly to Red Square along a 2½-mile route. The funeral procession included the Gagarin and Seryogin families and the highest leaders of the Soviet state and Communist Party.

The funeral procession for Gagarin and Seryogin making its way towards Red Square

Gagarin and Seryogin were both interred in the Kremlin Wall, behind Lenin's Tomb in Red Square. In what is said to be a rare honour, car horns, factory whistles and church bells sounded in unison as the urn bearing Gagarin's ashes was inserted into a niche in the red brick wall. Then the nation fell still for a minute of silence, followed by a final salvo of cannon fire. A day of national mourning was also declared, the first time this has ever been done in the USSR for someone not a national leader. President Johnson, UN Secretary General U Thant and other world leaders sent messages of condolence. John Glenn sent a personal letter of sympathy to Col. Gagarin’s wife Valentina.

Seryogin and Gagarin buried side by side in the Kremlin Wall. Their various honours and awards are displayed before their portraits

Gagarin was just 34 years old when he died, leaving two young daughters, aged nine and seven. He was based at the cosmonaut training centre near Moscow, involved in training other cosmonauts when not engaged in official duties as a public figure. Little is known about Col. Seryogin, but he has been described as a Hero of Soviet Union and the commander of an air unit. It is unknown if he is also a member of the Soviet cosmonaut corps or has any other role in the Russian space programme.

Gagarin’s words upon landing after his space flight were “I could have gone on flying through space forever”. Though he never returned to space in this life, his spirit surely resides in the cosmos now.

Making up Lost Ground?
The somewhat mysterious Zond-4 unmanned spacecraft was launched on 2 March. A TASS news agency announcement of the launch described Zond-4 as an “automatic station”, “designed to study the outlying regions of near-earth space.”

Thanks to my friends at the Weapons Research Establishment, here is a photo of a Proton rocket, rumoured to be the type used to launch Zond-4.

TASS reported that Zond-4 was put into an initial 170-mile parking orbit, before being sent on a “planned flight” further into space, apparently reaching the environs of the Moon. According to my contacts at the WRE, Zond 4’s flightpath reached an apogee of 240,000 miles, “comparable to lunar altitude”.

No further information was released by TASS about the mission, which has occurred several years after previous launches in the Zond series: Zond-1 was launched in April 1964, Zond-2 in November that year, and Zond-3 in July 1965. “Zond” is the Russian word for “probe” and these earlier spacecraft were apparently planetary or lunar missions. Could Zond-4 actually have been an attempt by the Soviet Union to make up lost ground with a test of the new Soyuz spacecraft, presumably redesigned or modified following the failed Soyuz-1 mission last year?

Does this cutaway illustration represent mysterious Zond-4? My WRE friends think it might!

It would hardly be the first time that the Soviet Union has concealed real purpose of a space mission behind the name of a different spacecraft series. (paging Mr. Kosmos/Cosmos!). As the Soyuz vehicle is believed to be the USSR’s answer to Apollo, a test of an improved spacecraft out to lunar distance would certainly make sense at this time, with the Apollo 6 mission (see below) testing out the Apollo Command and Service Modules just a few days ago.

Whatever its mission, Zond-4 returned to Earth on 9 March, but there was no official communique on the conclusion of the flight. This silence suggests that the re-entry failed in some way and that the spacecraft was either destroyed on re-entry or crashed on landing. If Zond-4 was a test of the Soyuz vehicle, could its loss have been due to a repeat of the parachute failure that doomed Soyuz-1 last year? If this was the case, it does not bode well for the USSR getting its lunar programme back on track in time to challenge the United States in the race for the Moon.

Go, OGO-5!
Just two days after the launch of Zond-4, the United States launched the latest satellite in its Orbiting Geophysical Observatory (OGO) series of scientific satellites. OGO-5 soared aloft on 4 March, establishing itself in a highly elliptical orbit with a 170 mile perigee and a 92,105 mile apogee. The orbital inclination was 31.1 degrees, with the satellite taking 3796 minutes to complete one orbit. The 1,347 lb satellite carries more experiments than any other automated spacecraft to date.

OGO-5 First day Cover and informational insert, courtesy of my Uncle Ernie, the philatelic collector

OGO-5 is primarily devoted to observation of the Earth’s upper atmosphere and its interaction with conditions in the space environment. Like earlier OGO satellites, it carries instruments for studying solar flares (which can also detect cosmic X-ray bursts) and a gamma-ray detector. This will enable it to examine the hazards and mysteries of Earth's space environment at a time when radiation-producing flares on the Sun are intensifying. It will also chart magnetic and electric forces in space, measure gases in Earth's upper atmosphere, investigate the Aurora Borealis over the North Pole and listen for the puzzling radio noises that have been detected from the planet Jupiter. Each of OGO-5’s predecessors is still operational at this time, so let’s hope the latest Orbiting Geophysical Observatory also has a long life ahead of it.

Apollo 6: NASA Keeps Moving Forward
If Zond-4 has been an un-announced trial of the USSR’s Soyuz lunar spacecraft, Apollo-6 has been NASA’s very public test flight of the Saturn-5 rocket and some of the modifications to the Apollo Command Module.

Launched on 4 April, Apollo-6 marked the second test flight of the massive Saturn-5 launch vehicle, crucial for reaching Moon. The primary objective of the mission was to test the performance of the Saturn-5 and the Apollo spacecraft, the first time that the Command and Service Modules (CSM) would be fully tested in space. In particular, the mission was intended to demonstrate that the Saturn-5’s S-IVB third stage could send the entire Apollo spacecraft (CSM and Lunar Module) out to lunar distances. Although things didn’t go quite to plan, Apollo-6 did accomplish its basic objectives.

An All-Up Test Flight
The Apollo 6 launch vehicle was the second flight-capable Saturn-5, AS-502, its simulated payload equal to about 80% of a full Apollo lunar spacecraft. The CSM it carried was a Block I (Earth-orbit mission) type, with some Block II (lunar mission) modifications. According to NASA “more than 140 tests since last October showed modifications of the Apollo spacecraft since the 1967 disaster had drastically reduced the hazard to life”.

Possibly the most important modification was a new crew hatch, intended to be tested under lunar return conditions. This new hatch incorporated the heat shield and crew compartment hatches of the original Apollo design into a single hatch, called the "unified" design. This has been in response to the Apollo-1 investigation board finding that the dual hatches were too difficult to open in case of emergency and had contributed to the deaths of the crew.

Apollo-6's redesigned unified hatch, photographed during a post-flight inspection of the Commend Module

Like the earlier Apollo-5 test flight, Apollo-6 carried a simulated Lunar Module (LM) which lacked the descent-stage landing gear. It also had no flight systems, and its fuel and oxidiser tanks were liquid-ballasted. While the LM remained inside the Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter throughout the flight, its ascent stage was instrumented to determine the craft’s structural integrity and the vibration and acoustic stresses to which it was subjected.

Apollo-6's "legless Lunar Module", formally called the Lunar Test Article LTA-2R

A few weeks prior to launch, NASA announced that, to further reduce fire hazards that contributed to the deaths of Apollo-1 astronauts, it intended to change to a mixture of 60% oxygen and 40% cent nitrogen in the Command Module, while the spacecraft and its crew are on the ground and during launch. Once their spacecraft left the launch pad, the astronauts would switch to pure oxygen. Since the gas mixture will be used in the spacecraft only during ground operations, NASA has not planned any change in the existing environmental control system, so the decision did not affect the Apollo 6 mission.

Apollo 6: What Was Planned
The original Apollo 6 mission plan intended to send the CSM and simulated lunar module into a trans-lunar trajectory. (That trajectory, although passing beyond lunar orbit distance, would not encounter the Moon, which was in another part of its orbit at the time.) The Saturn-5’s S-IVB third stage would be fired for trans-lunar injection, with the CSM separating from the S-IVB soon after. The Service Module engine would then fire to slow the CSM, reducing its apogee to 11,989 nmi.

NASA illustration showing the CSM and LM inside the Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter, as they would be at trans-lunar injection

The CSM would then return to Earth as if it had experienced “direct-return” abort during a Moon mission. As it returned, the SM engine would fire again, accelerating the CSM to simulate the conditions that an Apollo spacecraft would encounter on its return from the Moon: a re-entry angle of −6.5 degrees and velocity of 36,500 ft/s. The entire test flight was planned with a duration of about 10 hours.

Not Quite Going to Plan
After the launch was delayed for some days due to problems with guidance system equipment and fuelling, Apollo 6 made a smooth lift-off from Kennedy Space Centre. However, during the last ten seconds of first stage firing, the vehicle severely experienced a type of longitudinal oscillation known as “pogo”. Pogo occurs when a partial vacuum in a rocket’s fuel and oxidiser feed lines reaches the engine firing chamber, causing the engine to “skip”. The pogo phenomenon is well-known, since rockets have experienced it since the early days of spaceflight, and it occurred in launchers such as Thor and Titan II (used for the Gemini program).

While the Apollo-4 Saturn-5 also experienced a mild form of pogo, Apollo-6 was subjected to extreme pogo vibrations. It appears that these oscillations, travelling along the length of the huge Moon rocket, caused multiple problems with the vehicle. Two engines in the second stage shut down early, although the vehicle's onboard guidance system was able to compensate by burning the remaining three engines for 58 seconds longer than planned. The S-IVB engine also experienced a slight performance loss and had to burn for 29 seconds longer than usual. Intense vibrations were felt in the Command Module that could have caused injuries had a crew been onboard. There was also some superficial structural damage to the Spacecraft Lunar Module Adaptor (SLA).

A chase plane image of the Apollo-6 launch, taken at approximately the time of the pogo oscillations. It shows an area of discoloration on the SLA indicative of superficial damage and what appears to be falling pieces of debris, perhaps a panel or two shaken lose by the pogo vibrations

The underperformance of the apparently pogo-damaged engines resulted in the third stage being inserted into an elliptical parking orbit, rather than the planned 100 nmi circular orbit. Although Mission Control decided that this did not prevent the mission from continuing, when the vehicle was ready for trans-lunar injection, the apparently damaged S-IVB engine failed to restart.

Repeating Apollo-4
Without the ability to continue with the original flight plan, Mission Control decided to complete some of the mission objectives by adopting a flight plan similar to that of Apollo-4. The SM's Service Propulsion System (SPS) was used to raise the spacecraft into an orbit with a 11,989 nmi apogee, from which it would re-enter. However, the SPS engine did not have enough fuel for a second burn to accelerate the atmospheric re-entry and the spacecraft was only able to enter the atmosphere with a velocity of 33,000 ft/s, instead of the planned 36,500 ft/s that would simulate a lunar return.

With the SM was jettisoned just before atmospheric re-entry, the CM splashed down 43 nmi from the planned landing site north of Hawaii, ten hours after launch. It was recovered by the USS Okinawa.

A Rocket's Eye View
Unlike earlier unmanned missions, the Apollo-6 Saturn-5 was fitted with several cameras intended to be ejected and later recovered. Three of the four cameras on the first stage failed to eject and were lost and only one of the two cameras on the second stage was recovered. Fortunately, this camera provided spectacular views of the separation of the first and second stages.

Two spectacular views of the interstage between the first and second stages falling away, taken from Apollo-6's second stage camera. How amazing that we can now see events happening during a launch that cannot be observed from the ground!

The CM also carried two cameras: a motion picture camera, intended to be activated during launch and re-entry and a 70mm still camera. Unfortunately, as the technical issues meant that the mission took about ten minutes longer than planned, the re-entry events were not filmed. However, the still camera, pointed at the Earth through the hatch window provided impressive photos of parts of the United States, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and the western Pacific Ocean. Advanced film and filters, improved colour balance and higher resolution have provided images that are a significant improvement on the photographs taken on previous American crewed missions and demonstrated that future imagery from space will be useful for cartographic, topographic, and geographic studies.

A view of the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, taken from the Command Module's 70mm still camera. Special thanks to the Australian NASA representative for providing me with rush copies of these incredible Apollo-6 images for this article

What’s Next for Apollo?
NASA announced in mid-March that its first Earth-orbiting Apollo mission will be launched on a Saturn 1 vehicle and spend as long as ten days in orbit. The flight, which could come as early as mid-August, will be crewed by astronauts Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham. If that mission goes well and the Saturn-5 is cleared for manned launchings, astronauts James McDivitt, David Scott and Russell Schweickart will ride a Saturn-5 into Earth orbit two or three months later to conduct flight test of the lunar module.

Following the return of Apollo-6, Apollo Programme Director Samuel C. Phillips said, “there's no question that it's less than a perfect mission”, although the Saturn-5’s demonstration of its ability to reach orbit despite the loss of two engines, was “a major unplanned accomplishment”. However, Marshall Space Flight Centre Director Wernher von Braun has recognised that the “flight clearly left a lot to be desired. … We just cannot go to the Moon [with this problem],” referring to the extreme pogo experienced on the flight. This means that solving the pogo phenomenon is now a major priority for NASA in order to keep the Apollo program on track and bolster confidence in the Saturn-5 vehicle. Can they do it?

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[April 6, 1968] The mountain of despair (the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

April 6, 2023 Dana Pellebon 3 Comments

by Dana Pellebon

On April 4, 1968, my world changed and I wasn’t even aware of how much. My day was as any other. Go to work, come home, make dinner, do a little reading, and go to bed. Yet, on April 5th, the horror of opening my newspaper made my world stop. Front Page. Dr. King Murdered. As the paper slipped from my hands, gravity took my body and the tears now flowing to the floor. Who? How? I tried to read the words on the now wet pages, but I couldn’t escape the feeling of intense pain and sadness. When you’ve lived through a man shepherding you and the world through progress, what does it mean when he’s not here? I ached for his wife and children. I dreaded the moment I had to move my body to figure out what was next.

Civil rights leader Andrew Young (L) and others on balcony of Lorraine motel pointing in direction of assailant after a shot mortally wounded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Photograph by Joseph Louw

Somehow I got off the floor to ready myself for work. The bus there was filled with other Negroes like me silently crying. At the next to last stop downtown, a small group of men came on the bus and were very loud about ridding the world of another one of “them”. I straightened my head, methodically dried my tears, and looked right in their direction. My steel gaze was met with some chagrin on their part and blessed silence. It was in that moment that I knew I would never let another one of them see me cry ever again.

I hear there is a work strike coming up. Already people are mobilizing. There’s rumblings on the radio about the riot in Memphis and DC. I read the words of Robert Kennedy talking about his brother’s death and how he too was killed by a white man. How we should not take this time for violence but instead for compassion. I want to take in these words of reconciliation but my heart is cold and distant from such talk.

I believed in the dream of Dr. King. Nonviolence begets understanding and peace. He may be targeted but he was special. Malcom X was killed because of who he was. Dr. King would stay alive because of who he was. Or, so I thought. My naïveté was on full display as I realized that him dying was the only inevitable outcome for whites who hated his message. My new understanding that peace and conflict are natural bedmates. As I step into this world without Dr. King, I must ask myself, what is next?

This is the question for the Negro. Without our great Shepherd, how does this flock move through the pasture? Who leads the next part of the movement? What legacy of his can we grab of our own to continue to shape the world into a just and equitable future? I don’t know what the path forward is and how to get there, but I think of the last words Dr. King said the night before he was murdered and I know in this moment and the next and the next, every thing I do will be to realize the vision of our collective promised land.

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Dr. King, giving his last speech at Mason Temple, Memphis, on April 3.

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

When morning finds me, I read the newspaper. Earlier and earlier these days, as my newborn moves towards infancy and begins to make his own dawn schedule.

It was one of Will Roger’s favorite lines: “All I know is just what I read in the papers.” As a Cherokee man born in land that was treaty promised and greed taken, he knew better than most how wrong the press can be. But still, it’s the only first draft of history many of us are privileged to see.

Which is what makes reading it while nursing my baby so strange some days. Like a few weeks ago, when, on a single page, these were the headlines:

"Policeman Admits He’s a Klansman"
"‘Oakland in 1983: Over Half Negro’"
"Commission Warns: Spend Billions or Face Rebellion"
"‘Had To Tell It Like It Is’ — Riot Report Jolts Congress"
"Policeman’s Lot Not a Happy One"

On mornings like this when decency weeps, a page like that perhaps only has one or two truly true things in it. One, I suspect, is from the "Commission" report breathlessly exaggerated in the headlines, whose full and proper title is “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders;” that commission includes the former Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr., leading Congressmen from both parties, and Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins. The paper says of the report:

“For instance, the commission said, belief is widely held that riot cities were paralyzed by sniper fire. Of 23 cities surveyed, there were reports of sniping in 14. And probably there was some sniping, the commission said, but: “According to the best information available to the commission, most reported sniping incidents were demonstrated to be gunfire by either police or National Guardsmen.’”

There’s a lot of passive voice in there, unfortunately common with newspapers’ coddling of police officers’ egos (see the unsourced and useless sob piece in the bottom left hand corner). But those “sniping incidents” included a mother shot in the back and murdered inside her own home during a riot as she tried to pull her 2 year old to safety, away from the glass window.

I hold my baby tighter as I read that.

In another powerful moment, the paper says:

"Asked why the panel made such a hard-hitting report, Harris said: 'We all knew these things intellectually – but we didn't feel it in the pit of our stomachs.

'We want people to see this as we did. We thought we had to tell it like it is.'

Another commissioner returned from a ghetto inspection tour and switched his position on one issue, remarking:

'I'll be a son-of-a-gun. You might be 99 miles further to the left than I thought I would be.'"'

Another bit of truth came from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, as it so often does. He called the report “a monumental revelation of what we had seen since the burning fires of Watts.”

The report laid the blame for the riots on centuries of white racism and systemic lack of funding in Black communities. It prescribed deep and meaningful investment in those communities to try to make back some of the time that was stolen (the “billions” listed in the third headline, as if we don’t spend “billions” in Vietnam every year).

Reports of commissions like that are the second, or even third drafts of history. I suspect they get it right more often than they do not.

I heard on the radio last night that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and murdered in Memphis. The radio report wasn’t even the first draft of history, maybe just the notes for a future draft. Later, Bobby Kennedy came on, said something like:

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

Robert F. Kennedy, speaking in Indianapolis, April 4.

I don’t know what the headlines will read today or tomorrow or when the killer is caught, if he is caught. A lot of people hate Dr. King, blame him for the riots. God knows the newspapers did in their first drafts. But reports like the Kerner Commission, they tell us the true causes, lay blame at the right doors.

Until then, until we know more about what happened than we read in the newspapers, I’ll stick with Senator Kennedy, who knows at least something about surviving deaths by violence. I'll try to find some wisdom in the awful grace of God. I’ll try to think about one of Will Roger’s other great quotes, “It's not what we don't know that hurts. It’s what we know that ain’t so.”

I’ll keep trying to teach that to my baby, the things I thought I knew from the papers that I now know aren’t so. I'll try to tell it like it is, as much as I can for someone of his small size. And I'll hold him just a little tighter.

by Mona Jones

My husband calls me from the living room. Any other day, I might think him or Big Mama needed a drink of water. But something about his voice sends a shiver down my spine. He calls me again.

“Mona, you better get in here.”

I walk into the living room just in time to hear a recording of Robert Kennedy over the radio say, “Some very sad news for all of you and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. . .”

The rest of his words are drowned by the deafening cries of those in attendance of his last-minute press conference. Mabel must sense a change in the air because she leaves her uncle in the kitchen to come wrap her skinny little arms around my waist. “Mama, what’s wrong? Did something bad happen?”

She’s looking up at me for answers and I have no idea what to say. Even if the cries of the people on the air hadn’t drowned on Mr. Kennedy’s voice, I’m sure the blood rushing in my ears would’ve done the same. Thomas walks up to stand in the archway with me as Mr. Kennedy keeps talking.

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause for that effort.”

Even from our little home in Indianapolis, I can already imagine the streets of my hometown in D.C. filling with people with a whole lot of rage and hurt with nowhere to direct it but at themselves. I clutch my little girl closer to my side.

“On this difficult day and in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”

Hasn’t this country already chosen? A great man was killed tonight, I think as my lips tremble and my eyes well up with hot tears. I don’t feel like a mother or a wife or even a sister right now. I feel like a child clinging to another child trying to figure out what’s gonna happen now that the one person who was allowed to care isn’t allowed to care anymore.

“For those of you who are Black – considering the evidence evidently is that there were White people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness and with hatred and a desire for revenge.”

Sounds of people yelling and crying echoes around the neighborhood. I fear it's only gonna get worse. I only hope that Thomas doesn’t get any ideas about running out there to help or hurt. He may not have agreed with the Reverend’s methods, but I could see it on his face that he was feeling it, too, plus all the anger that rushes out from inside of him whenever the position of Black people in this country comes up.

“We can move in that direction as a country. . .”

Easy for him to say. He’ll wake up tomorrow and still be a White man. We’ll wake up tomorrow and be Black people without a leader. We’ll wake up not knowing what tomorrow is gonna bring. If the Reverend Martin Luther King was killed, what’s gonna happen to us if we speak out? I can’t tell where this country is headed, and neither can Mr. Kennedy. But I have a feeling it’s nowhere good. Nowhere good at all if a man like that can be taken from us so very, very soon.

by Victoria Lucas

Mel and I grieve that Martin Luther King, Jr. has been taken from us. The turmoil of the day only underscored the tragic events.

It’s not like NYC where mimeographed newsletters were hurried out to the streets with the hour’s news—it takes time for the Berkeley Barb or other newspapers to be ready to distribute. What a difference a Gestetner makes.

Thus, it’s quite possible to drive into something unexpected, as we did on the day of the assassination. People glared at us, yelled at us, even threw things until we stopped and asked someone what was going on. It seems we were supposed to have known to place a black ribbon on our radio antenna or someplace else on our car, as a memorial to Dr. King. We had no idea. We hurriedly found a ribbon and attached it.

Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement a few years ago.

The lack of timely information and the increasing violence here are driving us out. Not only are the police getting more violent, but the Panthers are violent, the protests are getting violent; I cannot pass UC Berkeley's Sather Gate without seeing and hearing a male speaker getting purple in the face about “the pigs” (which now includes both the police and the UC Berkeley administration). What’s more, we're finding we cannot drive or walk around Berkeley at all and feel safe.

And so, we shall soon be leaving tumultuous Berkeley for points north. Our family member is staying, so we will be back to check on him and see friends. But living here has become too scary.

Maybe everywhere has gotten a little more scary.

by Joe Reid

Dr. King was loved by many for what he did with his life. I thought I loved Dr. King for what he did, but I think that I really must not have. For the thing I called love was ineffective and unhelpful. It was empty in that it let another carry a burden alone, without me stepping forward to help. While this man was walking around doing for others; walking around with a bullseye painted on his back, I only looked out for myself and mine. It was good that Dr. King was doing the work of leading protests. Organizing folks. Giving speeches to inspire others. Writing books so that others might understand our struggles. All that I did was say that I loved his work, but I did nothing to help. I worked and took care of my family and had the nerve to call another man brother when I didn’t lift a finger to try to make that man’s life better.

Dr. King was clearly not like me. When he called you sister, it was because he cared about what happened to you. If he called you brother, it was because he saw you as family. He was able to see another man’s struggles as his own and was willing to use what talents he was given to do something about it. When I see another man’s struggles, I see it as that man’s struggles. How does that make me any different than most white folks? People that might not hate me; might not call me a nigger, but who don’t see themselves in me. They don’t see my struggles as their own. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was not that the kind of man that I have found myself to be. He clearly possessed something that I lack.

Dr. King, flanked (from left) Hosea Williams, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy on the Lorraine Motel balcony in Memphis on April 3. Photo by Charles Kelly.

I think that my problem is that I don’t love God. How could I say that I love God, if I don’t love those who God loves? Like how if you love your friend, you will help your friend's family because of that love. That I am not willing to step away from my own life to take up the cause of another shows me how fruitless my love is. It shows that I don’t love my neighbor, I don’t love my coworker, I don’t love my family, I don’t even love myself. If another man is fighting a battle for me that I won’t fight for myself, then I must not love myself. I really don’t love myself, if I haven’t walked with the man. My inaction proves the point that I must not love God.

Dr. King was not only fighting for negroes in this country, but also for poor folk of all stripes. This man truly loved others. His actions showed that. He loved his children. His speeches showed that. He loved his brother. His hands demonstrated that. Lastly, it is now obvious to me that Dr. King really and truly loved God. His life was a testament to that.

So, if I am going to claim to love God, as this man clearly did, I need to stop seeing people as separate from myself; realizing the truth that if anyone is being denied participation, representation, opportunity, or even their very life, I am being denied those things as well. It was very unloving of me to let others fight on my behalf without me. It’s time for me to start loving God and those who He loves. Dr. King, thank you for your example of how to love. You will be missed, but you will never be forgotten.

by Tom Purdom

I was doing the dishes and listening to our local all-news station, KYW, when the news came over the radio. The first thing that leaped into my mind was Carl Sandburg’s poem Upstream:

The strong men keep coming on.
They go down, shot, hanged, sick, broken.
They live on, fighting, singing, lucky as plungers,
The strong mothers pulling them on,
The strong mothers pulling them from a dark sea, a
great prairie, a long mountain.
Call Hallelujah, call Amen,
The strong men keep coming on.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[April 4, 1968] Time and time again (Star Trek: "Assignment: Earth")

April 4, 2023 Amber Dubin 10 Comments

by Amber Dubin

Time travel is a concept which every science fiction show must one day address. Yet, unlike the plausibly possible science of navigating space-travel, successfully representing time-travel comes with much greater risk, not only of straining credulity, but of destroying continuity: tearing a time-line—or in this case a plot line—to ribbons. "Assignment: Earth", the last episode of Star Trek's second season does a better job of avoiding the pitfalls of "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "The City on the Edge of Forever," though it is not without its foibles.

We begin with the announcement that the crew has used the technique they discovered by accident in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" to travel to the past, on purpose this time, to the year 1968 in a cultural observation mission. This mission starts going off the rails pretty much immediately as the ship starts to shake violently. Attention is drawn to the transporter room, where it is found that the transporter pad is intercepting a transporter beam of unknown origin.

Upon the pad materializes Robert Lansing as Gary Seven, a mysterious, cat-carrying, super secret agent sent from a distant "advanced civilization" in order to save planet earth. Captain Kirk is immediately suspicious of the man and the tiny silver-collared black cat, and he orders him to surrender himself for observation while they verify his lustrous claims. Seven briefly appears to comply, despite his insistence that he must be allowed to continue to beam down to the planet, or face the annihilation of earth and life as they know it. He suddenly changes his mind and he and the cat, who he refers to as Isis, launch into an attack where he puts down an entire room full of officers and repels even Spock’s Vulcan nerve pinch before being subdued by the stun of Kirk's phaser.

It then follows that Gary Seven possesses powers to back up his claim as earth's clandestine savior. He easily manages to free himself from the brig using a wand that both deactivates force fields and causes officers he targets to fall into very pleasant-looking slumbers.

It beats being judo chopped!

As he's forging a path to his escape as easily as a knife through butter, the senior officers obliviously discuss the plausibility of his claims and the risks to allowing him to carry out his mission. The dilemma, of course, is the paradox faced by all time travelers: not knowing if one's interference will derail or cause the events meant to occur in history as they know it. On the one hand, Seven could be telling the truth and by detaining him they could be dooming humanity to destruction in 1968. On the other hand, coming back to this moment could be a fated occurrence that prevented a lying, intergalactic criminal alien from destroying the earth in the same way. The opinion of the crew seems split down the middle and the discussion goes nowhere. It's worth noting that Isis is completely underestimated throughout, getting cuddled by Spock and allowed to freely roam the ship, despite it being very obvious to this viewer that she is no ordinary feline.

"A most curious creature, Captain. Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course, I am immune to its effect."

While the crew is distracted, Gary Seven and Isis manage to escape to beam down to their original destination. The episode then shifts from a typical Star Trek episode to a cross between Mission: Impossible, Get Smart! and Mannix, complete with secret agent gadgets, a wise-cracking super computer and a lovely human secretary named Roberta, who's just as charismatic and whip-smart as she is goofy and unique.

At home in the Seven cave.

The supervisory secret agent checks in to his mission to discover that it's all gone wrong and Roberta is there because the agents who hired her and were supposed to be completing the mission were senselessly killed in an automobile accident before they could bring their plans to fruition.

Gary Seven has Roberta Lincoln give dictation to her typewriter.

Thus ensues a cat-and-mouse game between Seven and Isis (who are trying to complete their mission to sabotage a rocket carrying an orbital nuclear bomb) and Kirk and Spock (who are pursuing trepidatiously, not entirely sure whether they should be helping or thwarting the oddly capable team). Roberta's meddling aids both teams in their conflicting missions, culminating in a nail-biting scene where Kirk makes the last minute decision to trust Seven in the end, and the agent swiftly causes a nuclear warhead to detonate harmlessly in mid-air, thus scaring the world out of participating in a fatal arms race.

A genuinely gripping face-off.

The Enterprise's crew then confirms in their history banks that the time-line has been restored and their interference was actually predicted by the details of the event as recorded in history. This episode does not suffer from a rushed nonsensical 'it was all a dream' ending like "Tomorrow is Yesterday," nor did it have the dissatisfying 'they were never there' conclusion of "The City on the Edge of Forever." Instead, this explanation reflects my favorite and most plausible time travel theory: that contamination is impossible because all actions successfully completed by time travellers were fated to occur because they have always occurred and will always occur exactly as they did.

Overall, I'd say this episode passes muster. I only had two personal arguments with it: First, it seemed like Nimoy was the only actor on set who knew how to hold a cat. The cat seemed to begrudgingly tolerate Lansing but it was only purring in Nimoy's arms (I agree, cat). Second, the fact that they chose 1968 as the "most volatile in earth's history" was clearly an arbitrary decision to make a more comfortable crossover with Lansing's backdoor pilot set in modern times.

I'd say in the Star Trek time-line, the Eugenics Wars/WW3 seem like a much more volatile time in earth's history, and I'd argue that they could gain much more insights from directly observing WW1 or WW2. I didn’t like how the author just left a naked bias towards the particular year chosen which I felt could be easily covered up using an easily fictionizable event.

4 stars for the above reasons, and also because I thought downgrading the sentient cat to a humanoid alien woman at the end was disappointing and unnecessary.

Teri Garr is disappointed, too.

Inhumanly Perfect or Perfectly Human?

By Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

This episode ties up neatly and happily – on the surface. How much of what we saw is as it seems, though? Gary Seven didn't cause a world catastrophe, and indeed, may have averted one! But the question of who and what he is remains. He claims to be a human, an agent from a planet that is still unknown in the time of the Enterprise. The Kelvans in "By Any Other Name" also scanned as 'perfectly human' and were decidedly not. He's also immune to the Vulcan neck pinch…

And what of Isis? Is this a cat who can turn into a humanoid being? A woman who can turn into a cat? Or a completely separate alien species altogether? Are they partners, or is there a command structure? Perhaps Isis is Gary's handler.

Beyond this, if Gary was part of the same program as his two lost agents, he would be (according to his own description) a descendant of humans taken from Earth six thousand years ago, all raised and trained to operate on a planet that is no longer a home to them. And as Gary told Isis, they don't intend to stay long. Whether he means in the year 1968 or on Earth, the here and now is something he finds almost unlivable. After generations of living away from Earth, would any agent feel at home there? One wonders if he really does have "lots of interesting adventures in store."

A nice bit: while waiting with Spock down in mission control, Kirk’s supplemental log says he has never felt so helpless. Unlike when he followed McCoy to the 30s, he isn't here to correct a problem and set the path of history to right. As heartbreaking as it was to follow through when told "Edith Keeler must die," he was reacting and preventing a worse outcome. A known quantity, as far as he was aware. Unlike then, he doesn't know what, if any, action is necessary – and in that moment there isn't anything in his power that he can do to change things. All that knowledge, technology, and will… and he is left to watch.

Our heroes, helpless.

The whole reason the Enterprise traveled back in time was to observe a time period so tumultuous that either lack of records or sheer incredulity has the crew wondering just how we make it through. Roberta, however, doesn't have the security of hindsight, saying, "We wonder if we're gonna be alive when we're thirty." It's a bleak thought. Kirk may be reliving his history books, but Roberta is there as they are being written. She's frightened and caught off-guard by the strange people and happenings around her, but even so, she adapts. It may hinder Kirk, Spock, and Gary, but over the course of the episode she tries at least three times to get outside help. When she recognizes that Gary has to be lying and is interfering with dangerous things, she tries to talk him out of it, and puts herself in harm's way to physically prevent him from taking action. If Gary is in a spy thriller, Kirk and Spock in an historical drama, then up until nearly the end, Roberta is cast in a horror. Despite this, she manages to stay a cheery person. Surrounded by both normal—as normal as the current world can be—challenges and time travelers, she does her best. She's out of her depth but she still tries.

Roberta takes control of the situation.

Ultimately, the crew of the Enterprise is left with only their original mission to fulfill: they watch. This isn't their time, and they have neither the responsibility nor the means to change it. On the bridge, Lt. Uhura monitors the channels and hears military powers across the globe preparing to respond. Kirk and Spock are equally powerless in the control room as they are in front of Gary Seven's computer. All they can do is listen to Roberta, and step back to allow Gary to finish what he started. The only way out is through.

There was little action from my favorite crew, but within the context of the story, that fit. Gary, Roberta, and Isis were interesting new characters and I would enjoy seeing them again.

3 stars

Colonel Savage

by Lorelei Marcus

I have seen Robert Lansing star in many other shows, from Twelve O' Clock High to the shortlived The Man Who Never Was and even The 4D Man. I have always been charmed by his grave and understated performances. “Assignment: Earth” was no exception; it was delightful to see Lansing as a mild-mannered, cat-petting spy from outer space. My only grievance with the character is that he must live and die within a single Star Trek episode.

Gary Seven, Secret Agent (hey, better than Amos Burke!)

To a degree, the Star Trek setting is a strength. Gary 7 expands the Star Trek universe further beyond the Enterprise, introducing an alien world and beings that even Kirk and Spock can’t find. There is also fun in seeing different SF worlds collide. Two years ago I received audio tapes from England and reports of the new Doctor Who, an ongoing SF show on TV across The Pond. Gary 7 reminds me strongly of the Doctor, with his space-traveling machine and his plucky young human companion. (There are notable differences, of course, like his cat and stun-gun pen gadget, which feels more out of a spy flick than SF). Seeing our space-faring heroes encountering a being reminiscent of the Doctor and witnessing the adventures that ensued was quite amusing. (And sounds like a story I might have to write for the next issue of The Tricorder!)

The tragedy is not just that we only get to see Gary 7 once, but the very limitation of his screen time means his actor doesn't get quite enough time to breathe. Lansing thrives in a starring role where he can mold the show around him to his mood and level. His portrayal suffered for having to split the spotlight with the regular Trek heroes, leaving only glimpses of the potential of what he and the character could have been in their own show. I mourn the loss of what could have been, but for giving me anything at all, I give the episode five stars.

That's a wrap!

by Gideon Marcus

This was the first episode we got to see secure in the knowledge that there will be another season of our favorite science fiction show. I will say this for it—it's different! Sure, we've seen the Enterprise go to past Earth before, and we've seen lots of period pieces (this episode must have been particularly cheap), but the intersection of two powerful races, and the focus for much of the episode on an independent guest star, made for a very unusual experience.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. In some ways, it dragged down the pace of the episode, reducing Kirk and co. into a bunch of bystanders. On the other hand, that's how life is sometimes—you're not always the star. In the end, I'd say this was a successful experiment, but one not likely to be repeated…unless Trek turns into a true anthology show, which I would not necessarily be opposed to.

Some things the show did extremely well. The integration of the very recent Apollo 4 launch was particularly good. I also appreciated the incorporation of Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) technology. This is absolutely accurate, though I think only the Soviets actually are testing such a system. Several of their "Kosmos" tests have actually been launches of nukes on rockets that sail into space and then deorbit before completing a first orbit, thus allowing them to land anywhere. It's a terrifying development, and one I hope will be banned if the superpowers update last year's Outer Space Treaty.

We'd probably use a Titan, not a Saturn, but this is a divergent history.

As for how "Assignment: Earth" serves as an ending to Season 2, well, it's kind of an odd duck. It doesn't hit any of the main subjects we've seen thus far—no Klingons or Romulans, no Vulcan notables; just a joyride through time. I feel that the show might have been better served ending on a more Trek-ish episode, something like Mirror, Mirror or Journey to Babel. Instead, we got the 22nd Century's equivalent of Wild, Wild West.

Well, I guess it fits in alright. After all, like the season as a whole, there were high points, low points, but overall, we enjoyed the experience. Moreover, we got to see Robert Lansing, which is appropriate given that Trek cribbed the iconic "Enterprise theme" from Lansing's show, Twelve O' Clock High.

3.5 stars.

Live long and prosper, and we're looking forward to resuming Trek coverage in September!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 2, 1968] Asking the big questions (May 1968 IF)

April 2, 2023 David Levinson 1 Comment

by David Levinson

A spring thaw?

Change appears to be coming to Czechoslovakia. Faced with growing dissatisfaction last year, First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party Antonín Novatný invited Leonid Brezhnev to visit Prague last December in the hope of shoring up his position. Instead, Brezhnev was shocked by Novatný’s unpopularity and pushed him to resign as Party Secretary (he remained President).

Alexander Dubček was elected as the new First Secretary on January 5th and soon began on a course of reforms. On February 22nd, in the presence of Brezhnev, Dubček announced that steps would be taken to bring about “the widest possible democratization of the entire socio-political system.” A few days later, the Party adopted the first draft of an action program which allows greater freedom of speech (much of the resistance to Novatný came from the Writer’s Union) and more autonomy for Slovakia (the Czech Novatný had tried to curb Slovakian culture and language; Dubček is Slovakian). February ended with the release of the first uncensored magazine by the Writer’s Union.

Alexander Dubček addresses the nation after taking office.

On March 4th, the Party Presidium voted to dismantle press censorship, and by the end of the week the papers were calling for Novatný to step down as President. On the 14th, the Party voted to politically rehabilitate party members who had been purged in the 1950s. By the 22nd, the pressure was too much for Novatný and he reluctantly resigned as President. He will be replaced by Ludvík Svoboda, who had been purged, but rehabilitated at the request of Khrushchev.

The reaction in the East Bloc has been as might be expected. A Warsaw Pact meeting was hastily called for the 23rd in Dresden. The Poles, in particular, seemed unhappy with Dubček’s reforms. They may be nervous due to the student protests in Warsaw and elsewhere in the country. The word “counterrevolution” was mentioned and the specter of Hungary was raised. Dubček seems to have calmed fears for now.

Can Dubček keep the Soviets at arm’s length and bring about his reforms? Tito managed it, but Yugoslavia isn’t in the Warsaw Pact and doesn’t have a border with the Soviet Union. Only time will tell.

Seeking answers

The stories in this month’s IF grapple with deep questions. Some are big, such as expedience versus morality or the meaning of bravery and sacrifice; others are more personal. And Poul Anderson calls everything we think about the future into question.

Supposedly for Dismal Light, which doesn’t even have two male characters. Generic art by Pederson

Limiting Factor, by Poul Anderson

In a guest editorial, Anderson starts off looking at the limits of extrapolation as a tool for science fiction and winds up warning us about the limits of growth. Not population growth, as you might expect, but rather technological growth. A conservative estimate says that industry in North America alone will raise the average temperature of the Earth by 3°C. He warns, “You needn’t extrapolate far before you see the polar icecaps melting and the continental shores flooded. A little farther, and the entire planet swelters… A little farther, and life is threatened.”

Three stars.

Where the Subbs Go, by C. C. MacApp

When humanity discovered a faster-than-light drive, the Eje appeared with the Beam, allowing even faster travel across the galaxy, and established an outpost on Pluto. They also offer medical care for those injured in space. Those injured seriously enough are given substitute bodies, all identical with tremendous healing ability. These people are known as Subbs and are generally looked down on. Ralse Bukanan is one of the richest men in the galaxy; unknown to all but his closest business partners, he is also a Subb.

When Ralse’s son is kidnapped, he has to push his company to the brink of collapse and take some huge risks to rescue the young man. Add in some stolen Eje weapons, and the stakes get even higher.

Ralse questions one of the last people to see his son. Art by Jeff Jones

This is pretty good. MacApp can write good adventure when puts his mind to it, and he handles the more philosophical parts with equal skill. What we learn about the motives of the Eje turns everything upside-down and forces Ralse to change a lot of his priorities. The story is a little long, though. It’s right on the line between three and four stars, but probably good enough to go high.

A low four stars.

New Currents in Fandom, by Lin Carter

Our Man in Fandom takes a look at some new trends among fans. He starts off with the giving of fan awards at the latest Worldcon. He does try slightly to defend calling the awards Pongs, but I do share his hope that fan awards will continue to be given. After a quick look at some adjacent fandoms—which he’s covered before—Carter tells about an effort to print a portfolio of the late Hannes Bok’s work. Finally, he mentions a group of medieval reenactors known as The Society for Contemporary Anachronisms (sic; it’s Creative Anachronism). They’ll be holding a tournament at the Worldcon in Oakland on the afternoon of Labor Day.

Three stars.

Dismal Light, by Roger Zelazny

At the behest of Earth, Francis Sandow turned a bare hunk of rock orbiting Betelgeuse into the barely livable world Dismal, which Earth turned into a prison. The unnamed narrator stuck around after his sentence was up to keep working on a project to figure out the secret of a strain of extremely fast-growing rice. When an evacuation is announced because Betelgeuse is about to go nova, he drags his feet, saying he hopes to answer the question plaguing him. It may be more personal than rice.

One of the dangers faced by the narrator. Art by Brock

Zelazny gives us another of his smart-mouthed narrators. It’s starting to become a key feature of his work that he ought to use a little less frequently. The story is told with all the usual skill we expect from this author, but it fell a little short for me. That may be because the deeply personal question the narrator is struggling with didn’t resonate with me.

A very high three stars, but others may well give it a fourth.

Past Touch-the-Sky Mountain, by Barry Alan Weissman

Sommerfield, John is a merchant in the Chinese empire. On his way from his home base on the west coast of the New World (discovered by Marco Polo) to the British territory of Standish, his trip is interrupted by a police officer who has never heard of such nonsense.

Weissman is this month’s first-time author. Although forgettable, the story is well-written and has enough of a twist at the end to make it enjoyable.

Three stars.

Cenotaph, by D. M. Melton

As the shuttle bringing passengers down to Mora II swings past the Cenotaph Satellite, Steve Mendes reflects on the events that took the lives of the three people memorialized there, saving the lives of a full ship of colonists. Deservedly or not, he carries a lot of guilt.

Passing the Cenotaph when possible is tradition. Art by Eddie Jones

Melton’s output thus far has been a consistent low three stars. He’s taken a big step forward here. The events that took the lives of some of the forward team may not be terribly believable, but the characterization and internal monologue of the narrator are very well done.

A very low four stars.

The Creatures of Man, by Verge Foray

Hard-shelled, metal-spitting creatures have come to the world. After discussing things with a spider, a butterfly decides it is time to summon Man.

The butterfly and spider discuss the new creatures. Art by Wehrle

There’s a dreamlike quality to the narrative that, I suppose, reflects the different thought processes of the insect characters. However, the story was painfully obvious, too long, and the butterfly’s knowing of the “now-moment” didn’t really make any sense to me.

A low three stars, others may like this better.

The Man in the Maze (Part 2 of 2), by Robert Silverberg

Richard Muller was one of Earth’s top diplomats when he was sent to make contact with the first aliens humanity had discovered. On his return, he discovered that no one could stand to be around him for more than a few minutes, because the emotions of his deep subconscious radiate from him. In disgust, he retreated to the desolate planet Lemnos and the heart of a million-year-old city surrounded by deadly traps. Now his services are needed again. Charles Boardman, the man who sent Muller on the mission that gave him his affliction, and Ned Rawlins, the son of Muller’s late best friend, have come to recruit him.

Ned gradually gains Muller’s trust, feeding him the lies carefully constructed by Boardman. Eventually, he is overcome with guilt at the deception and reveals all to Muller. This was definitely not in Boardman’s plans. Is it possible to convince Muller to undertake this vital mission? If he goes, will he be healed? Can he rejoin humanity?

Ned may have gone too far to gain Muller’s trust. Art by Gaughan

Silverberg wraps up his retelling of Philoctetes strongly, though not as strongly as I had hoped. The final chapter, which focuses on Ned, is very, very good; it’s just that getting there wasn’t entirely satisfying. The whole thing is still excellent, and I’ll be putting it on my shelves when the novel comes out.

A high four stars for this segment and a very high four for the novel as a whole.

Summing up

At the beginning of the year, editor Fred Pohl promised a number of new features would be coming. So far, all we’ve seen is the introduction of the SF Calendar. Now for the first time since the October 1965 issue brought us the end of Skylark DuQuesne and the beginning of Retief’s War, the end of one serial hasn’t shared the issue with the start of a new. I’m not sure I’d call that a positive innovation, but I suppose Galaxy going monthly means Fred now has two vehicles for serials.

In any case, this is another strong issue for IF. Fred’s probably worked through the dross he’d already bought before the demise of Worlds of Tomorrow and now doesn’t need to buy filler. I hope having more pages to fill every month with 50% more Galaxy doesn’t change that.

Oh, dear. Are we going back to The Reefs of Space? Well, new Delany and Chandler is good.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[March 31st, 1968] Boredom From The Deep (Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep [Part One])

March 31, 2023 Jessica Holmes 2 Comments

By Jessica Holmes

There’s nothing…wrong with this latest serial of Doctor Who, per se. The acting’s pretty standard, nothing terribly stupid or offensive has happened, but it’s committed just about the worst sin a piece of media can do. It’s DULL.

But I’ll try to wring a moderately diverting review out of it anyway.

Let’s take a look at Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep, a serial by Victor Pemberton.

EPISODE ONE

The TARDIS arrives (yet again) in England, and it’s not long before the crew find themselves in the custody of the staff of a gas refinery. The boss around here is a man called Robson (Victor Maddern), and his blood pressure is constantly so high I think his head might actually explode.

His second in command, a nice bloke called Frank Harris (Roy Spencer), is apologetic for Robson’s terseness. The refinery controls a number of offshore natural gas rigs, and they’ve just lost contact with one of them. What’s more, there’s a funny noise coming from inside the gas pipe, but Robson won’t let them turn off the gas flow to check inside.

The base briefly regains contact with the rig, who assure them that all is well, but there’s something about their reassurances that doesn’t feel right.

Harris tries to raise his concerns about the pipeline to Robson, but finds that his research files seem to have gone walkabout. Thinking that he left them at home, he asks his wife, Maggie (June Murphy), to check in his office. She finds a bit more than she bargained for. The folder is there all right, but so is a stash of weed.

Seaweed, that is.

The seaweed pricks her hand, so she throws it away. However, there is more to this seaweed than it seems at first glance. It’s starting to glow, and she’s starting to feel quite peculiar…

Meanwhile, Robson throws the travellers into a prison cell, from which they promptly escape. Jamie exits through a ventilation grille with some difficulty, and Victoria takes the more pragmatic option of picking the lock with her hairpin.

I see London, I see France…

And guess which of them the Doctor is reluctant to take with him as he goes to the impeller room (where they pump the gas) to investigate the pipe problem?

I’m just saying, Victoria would be perfectly capable of looking at pipes. She’s from the industrial revolution. They were obsessed with gas and pipes and the like. Just look at the hats everyone was wearing.

Robson’s general bullishness hasn’t gone unnoticed, earning him a bit of a telling off from an overseer, the Dutch Van Lutyens (John Abineri). From his perspective, the problem with the gas is rather Robson-shaped.

Having been left behind while the boys go and look at some tubes, Victoria ends up in the right place at the right time to spot a shady figure opening some gas canisters in a storage room. Unfortunately for her, she then gets locked inside, and seafoam begins to pour in through the vent.

So now not only was she excluded from the investigation of the impeller room, she has been relegated to damsel in distress.

Again.

EPISODE TWO

Luckily for Victoria, the men come to her rescue in the nick of time, finding the room flooded with poisonous gas. She babbles something about seeing a creature in the foam, but there’s no sign of it now.

The other resident damsel, Maggie Harris, takes a turn for the worse, so her husband puts her to bed and goes to find her a doctor. I will say they are actually very sweet together, it’s clear they adore one another.

While he’s gone, a pair of maintenance workers arrive at the house, Mr Oak and Mr Quill (John Gill and Bill Burridge), who remind me of Abbott and Costello but rather less funny. Maggie allows them inside, not noticing their uncanny behaviour or the seaweed growing from their skin.

Other than the seaweed, they’re perfectly normal looking human beings. And that’s why it is quite impressive to me that they are perhaps the most viscerally unnerving characters ever to appear in Doctor Who.

Prosthetics and death rays are all well and good, but this is something else. With their mouths open wider than seems physically possible, eyes unblinking and bulging, the pair are absolutely grotesque as they begin to emit noxious gas, choking her into unconsciousness. It made my skin crawl. They’re straddling the line between human and inhuman, and there’s something about that that is scarier than any alien monster.

Even if I didn’t care much for the rest of the story, this one scene is excellent.

Harris arrives back with the Doctor and company in tow, discovering Maggie passed out on the floor and the house swimming in gas. There is no sign of the maintenance workers. They let the gas out through the window, and Harris explains to the Doctor about the seaweed incident. The Doctor theorises that whoever put the seaweed in the file meant for Harris to touch it and suffer the ill effects. And it looks like they’ve tried again, as Victoria finds some seaweed lying in the middle of the floor. Warning everyone not to touch it, the Doctor collects it for further testing.

Meanwhile, Robson continues to be stubborn about refusing to stop the gas flow, to the ever increasing frustration of Van Lutyens.

Taking matters into his own hands, Van Lutyens comes up with his own theory of where the blockage in the pipes must be, and asks the Chief Engineer (Hubert Rees) to go with him to sort it. However, though Robson is not an easy bloke to like, he is regarded as being genuinely good at his job, and the Chief Engineer is reluctant to take any action without getting Robson’s approval.

So that’s what they go to get, and Robson continues to be frustratingly stubborn, even though by this point the impeller has broken down and they’ve lost contact with another rig. And yet, the thudding from inside the pipes seems to be getting louder…

EPISODE THREE

Before departing the Harris’ house, the Doctor tells Harris that he should get his wife to the medical centre for supervision. She’ll probably be all right, but just in case.

The Doctor runs various tests on the seaweed, finding that it appears to feed on natural gas and excrete a toxic gas. And it’s very much alive. Well, yes. It’s a living organism. What you mean is that it is conscious and also mobile.

They find an illustration in an old book of a sea monster that bears a strong resemblance to the creature Victoria saw in the vent. Hoping to find out more, they venture back to the Harris’ quarters, breaking in when it appears that there is nobody home. To their shock, they find the house full to the brim of seafoam and tendrils, from which they have a difficult escape through the skylight.

Harris reports back to Robson, who has remembered that the Doctor and company are meant to be prisoners, and isn’t very happy that Harris has let them out of his sight. The impeller starts up again and almost immediately breaks down, putting an end to their argument, and sparking a bit of a tantrum from Robson. Increasingly concerned about Robson’s erratic behaviour, Van Lutyens urges Harris to take over.

They decide to confront Robson together, and he does not take it well. He has a right little strop and storms off to his room, where Mr Oak locks him inside. The room starts to flood with gas, and Robson bursts out just as Harris comes to check on him, yelling something about a creature as he runs off. Harris spots a seaweed-ish creature in the vent, but it’s gone by the time he tries to show Van Lutyens.

The Doctor reports his findings about the seaweed to Harris, who is very concerned to think that his wife might have been exposed to some unknown parasitic organism. He’s even more disturbed when he learns that despite having arranged for a medic to bring his wife to the medical centre, nobody has come to collect her yet. She’s still at home. The home which is now completely consumed in seafoam.

So where is Maggie?

She’s gone to the seaside, as one does when one feels under the weather. And who should be with her but Robson? Something has come over them both, and they don’t seem to be in their right minds. After all, wouldn’t you be at least a little concerned if you saw a woman walk into the sea?

Final Thoughts

So, we’re halfway through Fury From The Deep, and so far my reaction is a resounding ‘eh’. Like I said, there’s not really anything wrong with it. I like the characters well enough, they’re decent, I’m even picking up a little bit of a Lovecraft influence which is usually fun. And yet it’s just not doing anything for me. Why?

Perhaps ‘seaweed’ just doesn’t really work as a villain. Maybe it’s that the slowly building plot of something being wrong with the gas pipeline is just TOO slow to build. Perhaps it is that the conflict between Robson and Van Lutyens is just going around in circles until the third episode, where the status quo finally changes.

There’s not that much to look at thematically. The theme of ‘the leader is too arrogant for his own good and will doom everyone else because of that’ turns up in half the stories in Doctor Who, so there’s not much new territory being explored in that regard. We might be heading towards some environmental message, but no hint of it has popped up so far. That’s just speculation on my part. Ultimately, I just don’t find the story very interesting.

Let’s hope that things start to pick up from here.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 28, 1968] Design for effect (April 1968 Analog)

March 28, 2023 Gideon Marcus 3 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

There are all kinds of science fiction stories. Some explore the human condition, prioritizing people and how they might be affected by emerging technologies. Others are space or planetary adventures, utilizing an exotic locale as backdrop for classic derring-do.

Analog (formerly Astounding) has always emphasized technological pieces. They are stories of gadgets, of scientific implementations, not people. Even better is when the story underscores the libertarian, rather reactionary politics of one editor John W. Campbell Jr.

Sometimes, a skilled writer can get a story into Campbell's mag without that kind of tale. In this issue, virtually none of them did…

The issue at hand

by Kelly Freas

Secret Weapon, by Joseph P. Martino

The interstellar war against the Arcani is going badly. Now that the Terrans have doubled their Patrol Corvette fleet, suddenly their losses have quadrupled. Somehow, the alien enemy is tracking down their gravitational signatures as they zoom through their patrol lanes at four times the speed of light–and even when the human crews manage to intercept the enemy warships, somehow they elude destruction.

Two ships are dispatched to find the answer to this crisis, equipped with a new nucleonic clock that allows the ships to communicate even at superluminary speeds. Now they can cover each other in case of attack. When attack inevitably comes, they discover the secret to the enemy's success.

Joe Martino probably enjoyed writing this novella, and John Campbell obviously enjoyed reading this novella, so I suppose the story must be called some kind of success. However, if you don't enjoy things that read like the centerfold to a particularly dry issue of Popular Gravitics, I suggest you give this one a skip. This probably could have been a great novel, with time devoted to, you know, characters and prose, as opposed to a thinly dressed up engineering problem whose solution is implied to be beyond the comprehension of the alien foe.

Two stars.

Handyman, by Jack Wodhams

by Leo Summers

A married couple, trapped on a muddy world with virtually no trappings of civilization, try to make even the most basic rudiments of technology to ease their plight. Eventually, they figure out how to make ceramics, and when a rescue party finally appears, they are now happy to stay on their private world and even to start an export trade of their new kind of china. Chalk up a win for enforced entrepreneurialism!

I kept waiting for Wodhams to explain how the planet-wrecked pair figured out how to make their ceramic, given that all the ways that didn't work were so lovingly detailed.

Still, the story is at least readable. A low three stars.

Phantasmaplasmagoria, by Herbert Jacob Bernstein

by Kelly Freas

According to the scientists, power from nuclear fusion, harnessing the union of hydrogen atoms to produce boundless electricity, is just twenty years away. This story details the meandering road to the technology's serendipitous development.

It's a silly piece, and I'm not sure who thought it a good idea to put a fourth of the story in endnotes that one has to constantly refer to. They aren't worth the pay-off.

Two stars.

Is Everybody Happy?, by Christopher Anvil

by Leo Summers

A hay fever drug has the unfortunate side effect of making everyone extra-friendly. Society breaks down as folks would rather kibbitz than work.

It says something about Analog and its editor's beliefs that too much friendliness will obviously lead to economic ruin, as opposed to increased efficiency through greater cooperation. Call me crazy, but I work better when I like my co-workers.

Anyway, this is another "funny" piece by Anvil for Campbell, and it's as good as you'd expect it to be.

Two stars.

Incorrigible, by John T. Phillifent

by Leo Summers

A naval officer is up for treason, having facilitated the transfer of technical knowledge to the Drekk, potentially Earth's most dangerous foe. The implacable lizards, inhabitant of a Venus-type planet (nicknamed "Wet" for its torrid, humid conditions) are incredibly quick studies, and interstellar spaceflight is only a few developments away.

But, the officer notes, at the end of a very long dialogue with his attorney (the sole point of which is to build to the punchline conclusion) the information leak was ultimately to humanity's benefit. For it involves the ability to teleport water, which the Drekk will use to colonize the nearby planet, "Dry". And once enough mass is teleported from Wet, the core will explode, destroying the evil aliens.

Well.

I can't imagine this is particularly sound science, this notion that Venus-type planets are at a critical point such that the lost of a few million tons of water can destabilize them, especially coming from a fellow who still characterizes Venus as "wet" five years after Mariner 2. That notwithstanding, I might have been more tolerant, given the decent writing in this piece, if the author (under his pseudonym) had not used the exact same gimmick to end his recent novel, Alien Sea!

Two stars.

The Horse Barbarians (Part 3 of 3), by Harry Harrison

by Kelly Freas

Jason dinAlt's adventures appear to have come to an end with this third Deathworld novel. By the end of the story, the Pyrran city has been destroyed by the planet, the horse barbarians of Felicity have been defeated, and Meta and Jason have finally professed their love for one another.

How is Temuchin, highest chief of the Felicitan nomads defeated? After Jason is found out for the outworlder he is, the barbarian tosses him into a deep pit to die. Instead, Jason finds his way through a maze of caves, discovering a passage from the frozen steppes to the rich lowlands. All other methods of toppling Temuchin having failed, Jason tells the warlord the secret of the caves so that the barbarians can finally conquer the whole continent.

Almost immediately, Temuchin realizes his victory is really defeat, for taking all the cities means the inevitable death of the nomad way of life. The nomads collapse within weeks, and the Pyrrans set up shop.

There are a lot of problems with this book. Temuchin is supposed to be this awful, violent savage for slaughtering foreign invaders, and for wanting to take out the lowlanders. Does this justify the Pyrrans in killing and facilitating the killing of far more people than Temuchin ever could have managed on his own?

Beyond that, the historical "lesson" at the end of the story is specious. Sure, the Chinese sinicized the Mongols, but not all of them, and not in a matter of weeks. And as for the Goths and Huns (also cited), the former were invited to settle the Roman Empire rather than becoming Roman after conquering, while the Huns were simply defeated in fight after fight.

Thus, I find Jason's actions and motivations more ruthless and inhuman than Temuchin's; they are also out of keeping with the peacenik environmental message so beautifully expressed in Deathworld.

All that said, there's no question that Harrison is a terrific writer (he almost makes you accept the unrealistic extents to which Jason pushes his body). I turned to this serial first each of the last three months, and I finished each installment in a sitting. As a result, while I give this segment three stars, and even though I find the premise repugnant, I still am giving the novel as a whole three and a half stars.

Local Effect, by D. L. Hughes

by Leo Summers

An alien space drive discarded near Earth's moon has drastic effects on human scientific development. It turns out that the speed of light is not a constant…except around Earth. Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity only describes a local phenomenon, not the universe as a whole. Alien anthropologists from a faraway star survey humanity and note this local aberration with interest.

This is an interesting premise, but Hughes, knowing his audience (a certain editor named Campbell), turns it into an anti-scientific-establishment polemic, noting that, if only humans were a little more broad minded, they might not have gotten stuck in their rut. After all, how dare we assume that the rules that hold locally apply to the whole universe?

Except, of course, that is the very soul of the scientific method. Moreover, observations this century make it clear that relativity does hold throughout the universe–as early as 1919, just four years after the publication of General Relativity, light was seen to have been deflected around the sun's gravity well, pursuant to theory.

This could have been a fascinating story of aliens assuming that all beings should follow an "obvious" course of scientific development, deluded by their own understanding of all the facts. Instead, we get…this.

Two stars.

Doing the math

If it's a race to the bottom, Analog has won handily, scoring just 2.3 stars this month. This accomplishment is all the more sad when one realizing that this is a better score than it got last month!

Luckily, the other magazines of the month were somewhat better, including New Worlds (2.8), New Writings 12 (3.1), Famous Science Fiction #4 (2.9), Famous Science Fiction #5 (2.5), Famous Science Fiction #6 (2.7), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.7)
IF (3.1), and the best, Galaxy (3.3).

Women penned just 4% of the new fiction this month, and even with all the issues of Famous (lumped due to logistics into this one month), there was still only 2.5 to 3 issues' worth of superior stuff.

I guess we'll see if the Pohl mags continue to reign, or if all fortunes oscillate. I think it's safe to say, though, that Analog could definitely use a loosening of its editorial prescriptions. Hope springs eternal!

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Galactic Journey

[April 16, 1968] Tripods and Others (April 1968 Galactoscope)

[April 14, 1968] In Unquiet Times: The Frankfurt Arson Attacks, the Shooting of Rudi Dutschke and Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB

[April 12, 1968] Darkness (May 1968 Fantastic)

[April 10, 1968] Things Fall Apart (April 1968 Amazing)

[April 8, 1968] Ups, Downs and Tragedy: An Eventful Month in Space (Gagarin's crash, Zond-4, OGO-5, Apollo-6)

[April 6, 1968] The mountain of despair (the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

[April 4, 1968] Time and time again (Star Trek: "Assignment: Earth")

[April 2, 1968] Asking the big questions (May 1968 IF)

[March 31st, 1968] Boredom From The Deep (Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep [Part One])

[March 28, 1968] Design for effect (April 1968 Analog)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction