by Janice L. Newman
This is Not a Test
Star Trek continues to surf the New Wave in this week’s episode, Spectre of the Gun. While the plot incorporated many things we’ve seen before (both in and outside of Star Trek) it combined and presented these elements in new and innovative ways.
Continue reading [October 31, 1968] How the Western was won (Star Trek: "Spectre of the Gun")
by Gideon Marcus
Up and over
Just as America returned to space in a big way with this month's flight of Apollo 7, the Soviets have also recovered from their 1967 tragedy (Soyuz 1) with an impressive feat. Georgy Beregovoi, a rookie cosmonaut (ironically also the oldest man in space thus far, surpassing 45 year-old Wally Schirra by two years) has taken Soyuz 3 into orbit for a series of rendezvous and perhaps dockings (TASS is being vague on the issue) with the unmanned Soyuz 2.
Comrade Beregovoi in training
We've seen flights like this before, but this is the first time there has been a person involved. Many are calling this a harbinger of an impending lunar flight, though NASA is adamant that this particular flight won't go to the moon. Indeed, Dr. Ed Welsh, Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council says Soyuz and September's Zond 5, which went around the moon, are completely different craft and the Russians aren't even close to fielding a lunar mission.
We'll have more on this flight in a few days. Stay tuned.
On the ground
Like the flights of Soyuz 2 and 3, this month's Analog is outwardly impressive, but once you dig in, it's not so great.
by Kelly Freas
The Infinity Sense, by Verge Foray
by Kelly Freas
Centuries from now, after the fall of the Age of Science, humanity is divided into two camps: the "Olsaparns", who dwell in isolated technological camps and retain a semblance of the original technology and society, and the Novos—psionically adept savages who live in conservative Packs. One of the Pack members is Starn, who possesses a brand new ability that allows him to best even the telepathically and premonitionally blessed. He runs afoul of Nagister Nont, a highly adept, highly disagreeable trader, who kidnaps his wife.
After a raid on the Olsaparns leaves Starn close to death, the technologists remake him into something more machine than man, like Ted White's Android Avenger. The Olsaparns want Nont out of the picture, so they help Starn in his quest to defeat the mutant and get back his wife.
I have no fault with the writing, which is brisk and engaging. I take some issue with the pages of discussion on whether or not psi powers be linked with primitiveness, or the concept that humanity could regress to Pithecanthropy in a scant few generations (or the idea that evolution must be a road that one goes forward and backward on; I thought we gave up teleology last century). But I blazed through the novella in short order, so… four stars.
The Ultimate Danger, by W. Macfarlane
by Kelly Freas
In which Captain Lew Frizel takes a shipload of eggheads to a hallucinogenic planet. He is the only one who, more or less, keeps his head. The message appears to be that LSD can be employed by aliens to judge our character. Or something.
Three stars?
The Shots Felt 'Round the World, by Edward C. Walterscheid
This piece, on atomic tests, was much easier reading than Walterscheid's last article. Do you realize that we have detonated half a billion TNT tons worth of nuclear explosives since 1945? It's a wonder there's anything left of Nevada.
Four stars.
The Rites of Man, by John T. Phillifent
by Rudolph Palais
A scientist is working on rationalizing the art of interpersonal relations (because in Phillifent's universe, no one has invented sociology). About twenty pages into that effort, humanoid (really, human) aliens show up and ask to be allowed to compete in the Olympics. They do, but they lose on purpose so we won't hate them. Then we interbreed.
Possibly the dullest, most pointless story I've ever read in this magazine. One star.
The Alien Enemy, by Michael Karageorge
by Leo Summers
Humanity is a resilient creature, tough enough to tame any world. Except that planet Sibylla, with its poisonous soil, extreme axial tilt, thin atmosphere, temperature extremes, high gravity, and violent weather may actually be more than Terrans can handle. What does one do when a world is too minimal to sustain a colony? And what is the value of 10,000 settler lives against the teeming, impoverished billions of Earth?
This is a vividly written piece with some excellent astronomy. If I didn't know better, I'd say Poul Anderson is writing under a pseudonym. I felt the solution to the colonists' problem, though reasonable, was not sufficiently set up to be deduced. Also, I felt Karageorge missed the opportunity to make a more profound statement at the end than "well, humanity can lick almost all comers." I'd have preferred something on the point of colonization or the shifting of priorities on a racial scale.
Still, a high three stars.
Split Personality, by Jack Wodhams
by Kelly Freas
Mauger, a homicidal brute, agrees to be split in two for science instead of getting the chair. Instead of this resulting in two new individuals, it turns out that the two halves remain connected, the gestalt whole. Thus, Maugam can literally be in two places at once.
This is timely as the first interstellar drive has had teething troubles. Two test ships have gotten lost, unable to communicate with Earth. Now, half of Maugam can fly on the ship while the other stays home and reports, since telepathy, for some reason, is instant.
It's actually not a bad story, though it's really just a bunch of magic and coincidence. It works because Wodhams has set it up to work a certain way, not because this is any kind of realistic scientific extrapolation. Also, it's hard to work up any sympathy for a homicidal brute.
Three stars.
Doing the math
When everything is crunched together, we end up with Analog clocking in at exactly 3 stars—again, adequate, but vaguely disappointing. On the other hand, it's been something of a banner month in SF (provided you're not looking for female writers; they wrote less than 7% of the new fiction pieces published). Except for IF (2.6), every other outlet scored higher than 3. To wit:
New Worlds (3.1), Amazing (3.2), New Writings 13 (3.3), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.4), and Galaxy (3.9).
The stuff worth reading (4/5 stars) would fill a whopping three magazines. Who says the science fiction magazine age is over?
The Apollo-7 crew. L – R: LM Pilot Walter Cunningham, CM Pilot Maj. Donn Eisele and mission commnader Capt. Wally Schirra. They were rarin' to go!
Apollo-7’s two rookie astronauts both come from Group 3, selected in 1963. 38-year-old Major Donn Eisele (USAF), designated Command Module Pilot, graduated from the US Naval Academy but was commissioned in the Air Force. Originally slated as a member of the Apollo-1 crew, he was switched to the back-up team due to a shoulder injury. Major Eisele has specialised in the CM’s new digital guidance and navigation computer, which is vital for conducting rendezvous during lunar missions. 
Apollo-7’s mission patch was designed by North American Rockwell artist Allen Stevens, who also created the Apollo-1 patch. Its similar design to the earlier patch depicts an Apollo Command Service Module (CSM) circling the globe trailing a tail of orange flame – a reference to the test firings of the CSM’s SPS engine. The navy-blue background symbolises the depths of space: it’s also a nod to the Navy background of the crew. Centred in the design, North and South America are flanked by blue oceans, with a Roman numeral VII appearing in the Pacific Ocean region. The crew’s names appear around the patch’s lower rim.
A Safer Spacecraft
Apollo-1’s CM was a Block I type, designed for Earth orbital missions, while Apollo-7 has been a shakedown test for the redeveloped Block II Command Module specifically designed for lunar voyages and able to dock with a Lunar Module (LM). Following the fire, the Block II CM was significantly redesigned to reduce or eliminate fire hazards (especially the use of flammable materials) and increase astronaut safety: many of these modifications, particularly a fully-redesigned quick-opening crew hatch for emergency escape from the spacecraft, were tested on the unmanned Apollo-4 and 6 flights. Emergency breathing masks and a fire extinguisher were also added to the cabin.
Experiments with starting fires in the redesigned cabin have also led to another crew safety enhancement: NASA now uses a 60/40 oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere in the CM during launch, before switching to a lower pressure pure oxygen inflight environment about four hours after lift-off. The astronauts’ spacesuits, and their new casual flight suits, have also been redeveloped using fire retardant materials.
Luxury Accommodation
Compared to NASA’s previous Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, the Apollo CM is a luxury suite, its greater interior volume allowing the crew to move around freely in zero gravity. Beneath the flight couches, where the crew sit for launch and re-entry, there is room for “sleeping quarters”, where two astronauts can zip themselves into sleeping bags underneath their flight seats to keep from floating around.
With ample water provided by its fuel cells, and new food preparation and packaging techniques, the Block II spacecraft finally gives NASA’s astronauts the opportunity to enjoy hot meals! The CM provides both hot and cold water dispensers to rehydrate food packages. Capt. Schirra, a coffee lover, enjoyed his first pouch of inflight instant brew just five hours after launch!
The expanded Apollo flight menu now offers some 60 different food choices, not all of which are dehydrated. Thermostabilisng techniques allow some foods, like frankfurters, to be eaten in their natural state, while small slices of bread, covered in a coating to prevent them crumbling, can now be enjoyed – although judging by the Apollo-7 crew’s complaints about crumbly food, this may not have been entirely successful.
Some of the new bite-size, possibly crumbly, foods available to Apollo astronauts
Bending the Rules
On 11 October (US time), almost four years to the day after the launch of the three-man Voskhod-1 spacecraft, Apollo-7 lifted off from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station's Launch Complex 34 on its crucial test flight. Since the LM is still not ready for spaceflight, and so could not be tested during this mission, a Saturn 1B lofted the mission into orbit.
High-altitude winds threatened to scrub the lift-off, as a post-launch abort might have seen the CM blown back over land, instead of splashing down in the ocean, potentially exposing the crew to serious injury. Mission commander Schirra disagreed with the decision by NASA managers to waive the wind restriction, but finally yielded. However, his unhappiness over this issue may have contributed to his further disputes with Mission Control during the flight.
Despite Schirra reporting the ride to space as “a little bumpy” a few minutes into the flight, ten minutes and 27 seconds after liftoff Apollo-7 was smoothly inserted into its elliptical low Earth orbit.
Coming Together
Rendezvous and docking practice, demonstrating that the CM’s navigation and guidance systems could successfully handle this vital technique for lunar missions, was a major element of the Apollo-7 flight plan, and the first major exercise began within three hours after launch.
Although Apollo 7 was not carrying a Lunar Module, the Spacecraft-LM adapter (SLA) that would normally house one was mounted on top of the Saturn 1B’s S-IVB second stage, carried into orbit to be used as a rendezvous target.
With the S-IVB still attached to the CSM, the astronauts manoeuvred as if conducting the necessary engine burn for Trans Lunar Injection. After separation from the S-IVB, Schirra put his Gemini rendezvous experience to good use, manoeuvring Apollo-7 towards the rocket stage and closing in as if to dock. This simulated the manoeuvre needed to extract the LM from the SLA. He then flew in formation with the stage for 20 minutes, before moving about 76 miles away to prepare for the first practice rendezvous.
Apollo-7's S-IVB stage, with the SLA petals open to reveal the docking target. The target was designed by Royal Australian Air Force opthalmologist, Dr. John Colvin. (note that one of the petals did not quite open all the way, restricting some of the possible maneuvers)
Power and Precision
The initial rendezvous exercise, occurring about 30 hours after launch, included the first inflight test of the Service Module’s powerful Service Propulsion System engine. Although tested on the ground, the SPS had never yet been fired in space, despite being vital to the success of a lunar mission: its 20,000 pounds of thrust is needed to slow the Apollo spacecraft into orbit around the Moon and propel it on its way back to the Earth. The SPS has to be totally reliable – it must work, every time.
The purpose of the rendezvous itself was to demonstrate the CSM’s ability to match orbits with a LM returning from the lunar surface, or an aborted landing attempt, even without an operating onboard radar (which Apollo-7 lacked, though later missions will have one). The SPS rendezvous burns were computed at Mission Control, but the final manoeuvres to close on the S-IVB saw Major Eisele making observations with the CM’s telescope and sextant to compute the final burns using the onboard guidance computer.
When the SPS engine ignited for the first time, Eisele was apparently startled by its violent jolt, while Schirra yelled excitedly “Yabba Dabba Do! – That was a ride and a half!” The inaugural nine-second burn went perfectly, and Schirra completed the rendezvous using the ship's reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, bringing Apollo-7 to within 70 feet of its tumbling target. The exercise successfully demonstrated that, even without radar data, an Apollo Command Module pilot could effect a rendezvous in lunar orbit.
A (Mostly) Smooth Mission
For the most part, Apollo -7 could be described as a “smooth” mission, with few real technical problems. The flight plan was “front-loaded”, with the most important experiments and activities scheduled for the early part of the mission, in case problems forced an early return to Earth. By day five of the mission, Flight Director Glynn Lunney estimated that the astronauts had already accomplished 70 to 75 percent of the planned test objectives.
The SPS engine was fired eight times in total, working perfectly every time and proving its reliability. The crew tested the fuel cells and battery chargers and checked out the cooling capacity of the thermal control system, putting the CSM into “barbecue mode,” rolling slowly around its long axis to distribute the heat load evenly over the spacecraft skin. Major Eisele thoroughly tested the sextant, telescope and guidance computer: even when vented, frozen urine crystals obscured his star targets, he proved that the optical instruments could provide sightings accurate enough to steer a spacecraft to and from the Moon.
It obviously wasn't easy for Maj. Eisele to take star sightings during the rendezvous exercise!
But the mission did experience a few technical issues. A power failure briefly struck Mission Control abut 80 minutes after launch. A mysterious “fuzz” or fog partially obscured the spacecraft’s windows, blurring the external view, although it gradually eased as the mission progressed, enabling photographic observations of the Earth (there are early indications that this may have been due to window seals outgassing). Perhaps the most annoying problem was the difficulty of using the crew’s “solid waste disposal system” – bags taped to an astronaut’s buttocks into which he excreted. The process proved to be very messy and rather smelly!
Despite issues with window fogging, the Apollo-7 crew has returned impressive images like these, showing the Gulf of Mexico (top) and Hurricane Gladys (bottom)
Grumpy Astronauts
About 15 hours into the flight, Schirra reported that he was experiencing a head cold. Unfortunately for him, a cold in space quickly becomes a miserable experience, because congested sinuses don’t drain in weightlessness. Cunningham and Eisele also developed stuffy noses and dry nostrils, but as they experienced colds a few days before the flight, flight surgeons believe that their condition may have been due more to breathing pure oxygen for long periods.
An astronaut with a head cold is not a happy man!
Despite the use of aspirin and decongestant tablets, the cold made Schirra tired and irritable and prone to sharp exchanges with Mission Control. When Houston suggested early in the mission to add some new engineering tests into the already busy flight plan and power up the TV system ahead of schedule to check the circuits, the mission commander testily refused, citing scheduling pressures and the need for the crew to eat. Over the first few days, Schirra repeatedly delayed the scheduled public television broadcasts, considering them non-essential.
Throughout the flight, the crew had difficulty sleeping, particularly as NASA insisted that at least one astronaut was always on duty to monitor the new spacecraft’s systems during the crucial test flight. Lack of sleep and exhaustion from working long hours on a packed flight plan undoubtedly contributed to the crew’s irritability throughout the mission.
Are You a Turtle?
Capt. Schirra has a reputation for playing practical jokes and "gotchas" and decided at one point to take out his frustrations on fellow astronaut and Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton. Both men are members of a private club, which has a joking requirement that if one member asks another "Are you a turtle?" the person so asked must immediately respond with a specific vulgar reply, or else buy drinks for everyone who heard the question.
Slayton had tried to catch Schirra out during his Mercury flight by publicly asking on an open communication if Schirra was a turtle. The Apollo-7 commander decided to "return the favour" during this mission by mischievously holding up a card during the second television broadcast from the spacecraft that said "Deke Slayton, are you a turtle?" Slayton avoided giving the rude answer in a public broadcast by recording it to be played to the crew after the mission.
The Mission Commander is in Command!
Perhaps the most serious disagreement between Schirra and Mission Control arose over the issue of whether or not the astronauts would wear their space helmets during re-entry. During the descent from orbit, cabin pressure rises from 5.9 to 14.7 psi (sea level pressure). Still suffering from his head cold Capt. Schirra apparently feared a sealed helmet would prevent him from pinching his nostrils to equalise the pressure, possibly leading to a ruptured eardrum. Although helmets protect the astronauts from cabin depressurisation and landing impact forces, Schirra stood on his right to make a decision as the mission commander and insisted that the crew would not wear their helmets for re-entry.
The discussion between Apollo-7 and the ground became quite heated on this point. Although Mission Control finally acquiesced to Schirra’s decision, comments suggest that they were exasperated and surprised by the astronauts’ testiness throughout the mission, which was definitely a departure from the usual respectful communications between space and the ground. While Capt. Schirra may have been prepared to speak his mind and have his way because he has already decided to leave NASA and has nothing to lose, I wonder if the clashes between the crew and Mission Control will impact upon the careers of Major Eisele and Mr. Cunningham?
“From the Lovely Apollo Room”
Despite Schirra’s early refusal to conduct television tests, the crew became TV stars when the first live television broadcast from an American spacecraft finally occurred on 14 October. Technical limitations with the television system meant that the live broadcast was restricted to the United States, but the audience was reportedly treated to a lively piece of entertainment, with Cunningham as camera operator and Eisele as MC.
Drawing from an old radio tagline, the “Apollo-7 Show” opened with a card reading “From the lovely Apollo Room high atop everything”. The seven-minute broadcast treated viewers to a look inside the spacecraft and showed views of Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans, before closing with Schirra holding up another sign reading “Keep those cards and letters coming in folks”, another radio tag line re-popularised by Dean Martin.
For the rest of the mission, daily television broadcasts of about 10 minutes each took place, with the crew holding up more fun signs and describing how the Apollo spacecraft worked. Since the broadcasts seem to have been very popular with audiences in America, I wonder if television’s newest stars might find themselves in line for an Emmy Award next year?
Back to Earth
Without the crew wearing helmets, Apollo 7 made a successful re-entry on 22 October splashing down about 200 nautical miles SSW of Bermuda, with a mission duration of 10 days, 20 hours, 9 minutes and 3 seconds. The conical CM landed upside down in the water, although it was soon righted with the use of floatation bags. However, the inverted position apparently interfered with communications, giving Mission Control an agonising 10-minute wait for contact to be established by search helicopters and aircraft.
The astronauts’ arrival by helicopter on the recovery ship USS Essex was carried live to the world on television, relayed via satellite – although we here in Australia were not able to see most of the broadcast due to technical difficulties. Despite the issues with colds and stuffy noses, the crew experienced no trouble during re-entry and are said to be generally in good health. They are now back in Houston, facing three weeks of technical debriefings and medical tests.
While the disagreements between the crew and Mission Control may have cast a shadow, Apollo-7 is being hailed as a technical triumph, with the mission successfully verifying the flightworthiness of the redesigned Command Module and SPS engine.
What comes next?
Even before Apollo-7 launched, Apollo Spacecraft Manager George Low proposed that, with the delays in the construction of the LM, Apollo-8 should be a manned circumlunar flight, to build programme momentum and pre-empt a possible similar mission by the USSR. This mission prospect was being openly discussed while Apollo-7 was in orbit. With its safe and successful return, let’s hope a decision will be made very soon on this ambitious and exciting next step in space exploration: Apollo-8 is already on the pad!
by Gideon Marcus
Star Trek is usually defined as an "action-adventure show" or maybe just a "science fiction program". While it is the first truly SFnal production on television (The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits had their moments, but for the most part, their science fiction was primitive), for its first two seasons, it tended to hew close to its '40s era Astounding Science Fiction roots.
With last week's episode, that all changed. The 1960s, and the experimental New Wave movement, has arrived on television.
Diana Muldaur returns to Trek as Dr. Miranda Jones, a human telepath who has never seen Earth, but who spent four years on Vulcan learning to master and tame her profound powers. She has been tapped to serve as ambassador to the Medusans, a race of inchoate aliens of sublime thoughts and profound navigational abilities, but whose appearance is so hideous as to render all humans who see them insane. Jones is accompanied by the Medusan ambassador to the Federation, Kollos, who spends most of his time in a box for the safety of the crew.
Ambassador Kollos is brought to his quarters by Mr. Spock and Dr. Jones
Jones is a meaty role, much more interesting than when Muldaur played Dr. Ann Mulhall in "Return to Tomorrow", and Muldaur plays it perfectly. Her demeanor is largely arch and cool, as befits Vulcan stoicism, but there are flashes of the human, too: jealousy regarding her unique relationship with Kollos, which she feels is threatened by Spock, who can both look at Kollos and communicate with him; irritation at the parochial behavior of the Enterprise's senior officers, who can't believe she'd give up on men to live with a monster; resentment when things do not go her way.
"Gentlemen, surely we can patronize Dr. Jones a little more intensely. Perhaps if we tower over her!"
The fly in this episode's ointment is another kind of emotion: one-sided love. Accompanying Jones is Lawrence Marvick, an illustrious engineer who is ostensibly there to contemplate how a Medusan might integrate into the crew of a starship. His real aim, however, is to convince Jones to abandon her mission to stay with him. To attain this goal, he is willing to resort to murder. Unfortunately for him, when he confronts Kollos, phaser in hand, all the alien has to do is open his protective box. Marvick is violently repelled by Kollos' appearance and, insane, takes control of engineering just long enough to drive the Enterprise into the barrier that surrounds the galaxy. The ship becomes lost in the zone, and none of the crew can navigate the ship out.
Where 430 men (and women) have gone twice before.
But Kollos can. Spock, with his telepathic abilities and his Starfleet training, volunteers to fuse minds with the Medusan, resulting in an astonishing hybrid, which successfully navigates the ship out of the zone with no difficulty. I cannot adequately express how marvelous Nimoy is in this role, subtly uniting the sober Spock with the somewhat whimsical, profound Kollos in an absolutely unique performance.
Sp/ollos makes an excellent navigator. I'd love to see a Medusan/Vulcan gestalt in a future episode!
The crew is not out of the woods, however. Upon returning Kollos to his box, Spock inadvertently catches a glimpse of the Medusan and goes insane. Only Jones and her telepathic abilities can save him—but her pettiness causes her to hesitate. It is up to Kirk, frantic with worry for his friend (indeed, seemingly more worried than he was for his ship, for once) to convince the doctor to do her utmost. In the end, what convinces her is the thought that Kollos would never forgive her if she let Spock die.
Kirk gives Dr. Jones a tough talk. To his credit, he is immediately concerned he did it wrong. (For the most part, he does…but one arrow hits the mark.)
I must express how excellent Shatner's performance is in this episode, as well. Missing are his usual, scenery-chewing tics. I have to think that the superlative jobs the cast did in this outing must be somewhat attributed to director Ralph Senensky.
Indeed, all of the "staff officers" of the show, from the cinematographer to the score master to the costume designer, work to elevate the production of "Truth". There are unusual angles, edits, and lenses to convey the disjointedness of insanity and to give a fresh feeling to the show; the score is entirely new and very evocative (though the distinctive "fight" theme is used perhaps one time too many); Dr. Jones' dress, which turns out to be a sensor web, enabling the normally sightless doctor to navigate (an excellent twist tastefully revealed), is terrific.
To be sure, the episode is not completely unexplored territory. Ugliness not equaling evil was a significant message in "The Devil in the Dark", with the monstrous Horta being a gentle, desperate mother being. The Enterprise has visited the galactic barrier twice before, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name". Both Spock and the ship are put in danger, two occurrences which the show-runners have made almost de riguer as plot drivers.
Amok Spock—don't drop acid, kids.
But it's the way it's all done that's special. Beyond the first class work turned in by the cast and crew, the writer must be credited. The pacing is unusual for Trek, with the episode's four acts of unequal length adding to the dreamy sense of madness that suffuses the episode. There is no one crisis to be resolved, but a mounting series of crises all revolving around the Spock/Miranda/Kollos relationship. In the end, the episode is not about Spock surviving or the Enterprise crew getting home safely, but about an unique woman in an unique situation navigating the fusion of not two but three alien races.
It's a rich, beautiful thing. Jean Lisoette Aroeste is a new name to me. This may well be her very first screenplay, and it is her newness that brings such a fresh cast to the show. Just as IF has made it its mission to bring new writers into the literary SF genre, it appears that the mature show of Star Trek may be providing that same vehicle for SF screenwriters (particularly women—the upcoming script, "The Empath" is also by a TV novice, the friend of a fanzine-writing friend).
I can't wait to see how the show develops as a result. 5 stars.
You've come a long way, baby
by Janice L. Newman
Most of the time, Star Trek gets it right. Women are frequently shown in positions of power and authority, and are given the respect such positions deserve. But even in the future, they occasionally run afoul of the undercurrent of sexism omnipresent in our own society. The dismissive attitude about Lieutenant Palamas in Who Mourns for Adonais, for example, or the exasperation shown toward Commissioner Hedford in Metamorphosis (not to mention the lack of concern for her ultimate fate), jar uncomfortably against our hopes and visions of a world where women have true equality and are allowed to pursue their dreams without facing condemnation or condescension—regardless of whether their dream is to be an engineer, a mother, or both.
The silver lining is when the women turn the sexist expectations of the male crewmembers on their heads. The treatment of Dr. Miranda Jones by the senior officers of the Enterprise (excluding Spock) borders on insulting. Dr. McCoy questions her career choice, while Captain Kirk is convinced of his own ability to divert her attention to himself, and patronizingly explains to her what she really wants.
Some of the best moments of the episode are when Dr. Jones defies the men’s expectations. Consider this exchange:
Dr. McCoy: “How can one so beautiful condemn herself to look upon ugliness the rest of her life? Will we allow it, gentlemen?”
All the men at the table: Certainly not.
Dr. Jones: How can one so full of joy and the love of life as you, Doctor, condemn yourself to look upon disease and suffering for the rest of your life? Can we allow that, gentlemen?
Or this one:
Captain Kirk: You're young, attractive and human. Sooner or later, no matter how beautiful their minds are, you're going to yearn for someone who looks like yourself, someone who isn't ugly.
Miranda: Ugly. What is ugly? Who is to say whether Kollos is too ugly to bear or too beautiful to bear?
Miranda’s quick witted responses, turning the men’s words back on themselves, are enormously satisfying. Her resistance to Captain Kirk’s charms is equally delightful. As much as I dislike any portrayal of sexism in the future, Miranda’s counters made it worth it. They made me wonder about the author of the episode, who she(?) is and whether she encounters such comments in her own daily life. Were the words of Dr. Jones intended to give professional women everywhere a blueprint for how to deal with such difficult situations?
Four and a half stars.
The Ambassadors
by Joe Reid
An ambassador is one that represents their country to a host country. This week in Star Trek we got to see several ambassadors of several races…and of more than one variety.
From the onset of the episode, when we were introduced to Dr. Jones, her desirability as a woman was heavily stressed. Kirk paid Jones several compliments that would lead one to think that Kirk really had a strong interest in her. These were followed by McCoy, and even Spock, who later dressed in Vulcan formal attire with the intent of honoring Dr. Jones.
All the males in this episode seemed strongly drawn to Dr. Jones, even the poor lovesick fellow who lost his life pursuing her. What was also clear was that Doctor Jones had absolutely no interest in the attention of these men in the episode. She was essentially at war with those who wanted her (perhaps a necessary battle to win status as a woman). What piqued her interest was the possibility of building a stronger connection to ambassador Kollos through a mind melding.
Her desire for Kollos was so all-encompassing that when it was revealed that Spock would have an opportunity to meld with Kollos ahead of her, she screamed out in frustration. Her rejection of the attentions of all other men throughout the episode demonstrated her desire for Kollos.
In the end, her desires were requited. Kollos did indeed have some measure of desire for her as well. We saw this as when he joined with Spock, Kollos paid special attention to her, highlighting the fact that her future and his would be intertwined going forward on his world in their near future. Although this was complicated when he also paid special attention to Uhura, Jones was able to receive confirmation of Kollos’ feeling for her when she melded with Spock in order to save his life. That connection to Kollos through Spock was all that she needed to assuage her fears and insecurity about her future with Kollos.
This successful conclusion to the story had Spock himself playing as the ambassador from the heart of Kollos to the heart of Jones, thus ending the quiet war between men and the doctor.
Happy endings for everyone.
It was a fantastic story with solid acting, great costumes, and three-dimensional characterizations. More of this please!
Five stars
by Mark Yon
Scenes from England
Hello. Testing, testing.. Anyone there?
This feels a little like one of those lonely messages out on the ether, post-apocalypse. I was last here for the July 1968 issue, whose publication, if you remember, was at a time of turmoil…. And then nothing for nearly four months.
Until now, when, like the proverbial British buses, two turn up (nearly) at once.
So – let’s start with the October issue.
I can only assume that the late arrival of the October issue was in part because of the recent kerfuffle. Editor Mike Moorcock explains the situation in this issue (and which you can read about in more detail in my last review), that with the effective banning of sales in English newsagents New Worlds is to survive mainly on subscriptions in the future, with a dollop of cash from the Arts Council, admittedly.
To Moorcock’s credit, he doesn’t dwell on the matter. But this whole issue feels like a statement of intent and a possible return to what I would regard as ‘normal’ – for New Worlds, anyway. It’s now being published from a new address, for one thing.
Cover by Malcolm Dean
And that ‘return’ seems to be echoed in the cover, too. Thank God – a ‘proper’ cover illustration. You know, with a picture, and something that looks like it’s taken more than ten minutes to produce. Whilst I could argue that it’s not the most complex piece of artwork ever shown – and a tad on the gory side – at least it is what I would regard as art.
Lead In by The Publishers
Some changes here too. Editor Mike Moorcock has brought readers (those of us who are left, anyway) up to date with what has been happening in the Lead In, even if some kind of strange time warp has happened as the Editor claims that his comments were made “last month” and not actually in the April issue. Readers with a good memory and less impacted by this may remember when Moorcock promised more pages and pictures in colour – clearly now that isn’t going to happen.
Other than that, the usual descriptions of the authors and their explanations of their stories, for those of us too unintelligent to work it out for ourselves.
Disturbance of the Peace by Harvey Jacobs
Do you remember The Shout? in the last issue? (I know, but it’s been a while.) Disturbance of the Peace reminded me a little of that, as it is an observational piece about I’m not sure what.
The story is focused on Floyd Copman, set in a fairly contemporary Manhattan. Floyd has a pretty mundane job in a bank, where in amongst the dull details of a day we find that Floyd is being watched by a dishevelled customer, who spends all of his day staring at Floyd. It becomes a bit of an obsession, and despite multiple attempts to remove him the situation inevitably ends up with the man’s return. It is quite unnerving for Floyd, and eventually results in both the old man having a fit and Floyd fainting.
What’s the point of the story? There’s lots of description of the city Floyd travels in and the things he sees, not to mention things happening around Floyd – the descriptions of his co-workers are supremely awful – and yet it all seems to be of little purpose. It’s more of a mood piece to me, but at its best it reminded me a little of John Brunner’s work. 3 out of 5.
The Generations of America by J. G. Ballard
"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum."
In which Ballard lists, in huge blocks of continuous text, people shot by other people.
I don’t know if all the names mentioned are real, although I have no evidence to suggest that they are not – there are some such as Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but the rest could easily be made up – but if the point is that lots of people have been shot in America, the point is made. Whilst the very, very long list makes the point that far too many people are shot, the purpose of the prose may also be to highlight the fact that many of the shootings that happen in the US are to people of whom we know nothing. They should be remembered, and it is perhaps an indictment of society that most of them are not.
The issue for me is that not only do I find reading long lists difficult, the block of text as presented is difficult to focus on – which I accept may be the purpose of the prose. It shows that Ballardian thing of repetition, after all – something he – repeats – often in his work.
But this feels like a Ballard clutching at straws, even if this is Ballard again riffing off American culture, and not in a good way. Is it fiction? I don’t know. It makes a good point, admittedly, but I think it is less exciting, less meaningful than his work from before, and weaker as a result. 3 out of 5.
Bubbles by James Sallis
If you’ve read my previous reviews, you may know that newly-appointed Associate Editor Sallis has been foisting much poetry upon us readers lately – something I’ve not appreciated. Happily then, this is a prose piece, and rather like Disturbance of the Peace it’s good on observational description, but this time about London. As we get all these lyrical sentences, the plot, such as it is, is about remembering someone – Kilroy – who is about to die. A story thus of a life lived and the places they frequented before showing us that life moves on. 3 out of 5.
Article: Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
An interesting article about how all media – audio, visual and print is interconnected like a spider’s web. Mike explains that future media will show an improvement in quality but at the same time have a lowering of standards in order to ensure mass appeal and remain commercial. How we manage a balance between all of this will be an important point in the future.
I can’t say I disagree.
Moorcock then manages to make his point using the analogy of Westerns and how they were important as printed stories, became less popular but have now been resurrected by returning to their core values through the medium of television. It shows the relative complexity of the interrelationships between media. Is this article inspired by the recent troubles here at New Worlds? Well, possibly, except that it is an extract from a longer article, and therefore possibly written before the furore. It can be said though that it is a reflection on the current state of play in the media, and it may not be coincidence that much of New Worlds' latest difficulties are in part due to Moorcock’s insistence on doing what this article says the media must do – setting new boundaries, of being different and not touting formulaic stuff. This article, like all good articles, was informative and also made me think. 4 out of 5.
Casablanca by Thomas M. Disch
No, nothing to do with the Humphrey Bogart movie. Disch’s story seems to be a satire on Americans abroad, showing us their insularity and pettiness. (We really are having a go at the US this month, aren’t we?) It all begins relatively normally before Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, our hapless Americans, find themselves in Casablanca in the middle of an anti-American demonstration and the unleashing of nuclear weapons, the once powerful now rendered impotent. It’s a compelling example of what happens when insular arrogance created by self-importance suddenly becomes redundant.
With its depiction of Americans lost in another country and befuddled by local customs, Disch's story reminded me of less of the movie Casablanca than the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Talking of Hitchcock, others must think highly of this one too, because I understand the story has recently appeared in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and is reprinted here. 4 out of 5.
Drawings by Malcolm Dean
by Malcolm Dean
I expected this section a little, as for the last few issues we’ve had graphic stories in various forms. This feels to me like it is the New Worlds version of Gahan Wilson’s efforts in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction – but as you might expect in a British magazine, darker, and perhaps odder. 2 out of 5.
Biographical Note on Ludwig van Beethoven II by Langdon Jones
The return of ex-Associate Editor Langdon Jones. Fresh from his publication of the Mervyn Peake Gormenghast material, this story begins like a typical biography (the clues in the title!) of a musician before the reader realises that it is satirical. It has many of the hallmarks expected in Langdon Jones’s usual material – florid language, poetry, musical scores, lyrics and so on. An inventive flight of fantasy, clearly meant to be a satirical musing on the music business and culture at large. I know some readers will like it more than me. For me, a middling 3 out of 5.
Photographs by Roy Cornwall
And again, something that’s been missing from recent issues, those pictures of strange artwork. This new version has buildings with patterns of light and shadow – and of course, a naked lady. No explanation – I guess we are just meant to be inspired – or aroused. 2 out of 5.
We’ll All Be Spacemen Before We Die by Mike Evans
Ah, poetry. 3 out of 5.
Bug Jack Barron (Part 6 of 6) by Norman Spinrad
At last – the final part of this story. It has only taken ten months to get here. (sarcasm inserted – feel free to vent your own frustration here.) Despite taking five parts to get to this point, some of the story is condensed here in the summary, even though it has never been seen before!
Quick recap – In the last part, Henry George Franklin makes a drunken claim on Jack’s TV show that he had sold his daughter to a white man for $50 000. After the show, Benedict Howards, the owner of the Foundation for Human Immortality, demands that Franklin is kept off the air and threatens to kill Barron if he doesn’t. Barron’s response? He goes to visit Franklin in the Mississippi.
After being told the story by Franklin, the two are fired upon. Franklin is killed. Barron is convinced that Howards is behind the buying of the little girl – and more so other mysterious disappearances in the area. He becomes determined to test Howards in his next TV show.
He agrees to meet Howards in Colorado and records the meeting. When Howards admits to killing Franklin, he discovers Barron’s recording. The result is that Barron wakes up in hospital having being made immortal. The secret is out – it is the glands of these young children that create immortality, but they are killed in the process. And Sara has also been treated.
Barron is now part of the process – can he now incriminate Howards on air? On his return to New York, he tells Sara what has happened. They now have a decision to make – does Jack live forever or tell the world and die now?
Before the show goes live, Sara contacts Barron, and after taking LSD tells Jack that she thinks he is not making the decision to attack Howards because of the need to protect her. To solve this, she jumps off Barron’s apartment balcony.
The story then takes up the narrative from here.
With the suicide of media star Jack Barron’s ex-wife, things are now set for a final showdown between Jack and Howards. The death of Sara was in part caused by Howards in an attempt to free Jack from being tied down to Howards.
I don’t think I need to say too much here. Suffice it to say that things are tied up as justice is done and Sara is avenged. If you’ve read all that has gone before, you’ll understand what’s happening. Everyone else? Less so – and perhaps be less inclined to bother.
Perhaps the more important point is: was it all worth it? After all, a story stretching across six issues has to merit some value, surely? I started reading it myself way, way back in November 1967 with some degree of optimism at a new and exciting means of telling a story and by the end am exhausted, willing the story to have departed long before it did. I suspect that reading it as a novel may reduce this feeling a little, but for me after its initial signs of promise it was too much for too long. Let’s also not forget that its publication nearly brought down the magazine as well. It outstayed its welcome, for me. Time will tell if other readers look on it as wearily as I do. Hard to think that at the start I was thinking 4 and 5 out of 5, now it feels more like 3 out of 5.
Time for something new.
Book Review and Comment – Boris Vian and Friends by James Sallis, and the conclusion of Dr. Moreau and the Utopians by C. C. Shackleton
Firstly, James Sallis (remember him?) reviews Boris Vian’s novel Heartsnatcher, translated from the original French by Stanley Chapman. This allows Sallis to quote great chunks of Vian’s text. Unsurprisingly for such an obscure work, Sallis can’t recommend it highly enough. He relates it to work by authors such as Ballard and Thomas Pynchon but also more recent writers here such as Aldiss, Disch, Sladek and Langdon Jones, describing Vian’s book as a new logic of the imagination.
It might gain some interest as a result.
The only other book of note briefly mentioned here is the paperback publication of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which “has all of Clarke’s virtues well-displayed.” For what it’s worth, I agreed when I reviewed the hardback novel here back in July. There'll be more on this later.
Lastly, we have the conclusion of an article by C. C. Shackleton (aka Brian Aldiss) begun last issue about H. G. Wells’ ideas of utopia. It may be difficult to read without referring back to the earlier, and longer, part, but I followed it easily enough. Unsurprisingly, as Aldiss/Shackleton is a huge admirer of Wells, the article is positive, saying at the end that Wells pretty much started the idea in science fiction that the genre (and therefore much of Wells’ work) is “a study of man and his machines and society’s changing relationship to science and technology.” To which I would add, “Well, yes – him and Jules Verne.” I’m sure there’s others that could be mentioned too.
Summing up the October New Worlds
A big sigh of relief this month. Although the issue is somewhat of a mixed bag and with nothing too controversial, it does feels more like a normal issue of New Worlds, with the usual mixture of allegory and confusion usually engendered by its presence.
Interestingly, although it has always been there in the last few years, this was the first time that I did notice how American (Americentric?) the issue felt. Perhaps it was because it’s been a while since I read a copy, but I really noticed it this time. Is this a consequence of New Worlds now being sold where most of you are? Perhaps. However, with American writers throughout and the prose filled with American characters and places, the quaint old idea of New Worlds being a “British” magazine seems to have gone – even when most of the stories seem to be attacking America satirically or ideologically.
The return of stalwarts like Ballard, even if he has passed his prime, will be a reason to buy this one, although being mainly subscription-based, the magazine may only be preaching to the already-converted.
For me the most memorable item, unusually, was Moorcock’s article. It’s not common for me to be impressed by the non-fiction, but this one really made an impression. The fiction, by comparison, was rather pallid. Nice prose, nothing especially extraordinary. If I was pushed to make a choice, I would suggest that Disch’s Casablanca was the fiction piece I appreciated most.
Most importantly, this issue means the end of Jack Barron, which took a long, long time to get there but finally ended. It is due out in book form fairly soon, I gather – if they can find any bookshop willing to stock it, of course!
The November New Worlds
So just as I was writing up my thoughts on the October issue, the November issue arrived. Looks like Mike and the gang are trying to make up for lost time! The issue is here.
Cover by Gabi Nasemann
One of those images that I suspect only a recreational drug user will understand. A step back from the October issue, I think.
Lead In by The Publishers
The key point here is that Moorcock points out that all of the fiction in this issue is from new writers. I see this raising of potential talent as a good thing, but my more cynical self suspects lower rates were paid. I also suspect greater variability in quality. We will see!
Area Complex by Brian Vickers
To the first – the cover story. I liked this one. It’s an account compiled from writings by a number of teenage gang members living in a gang in a future Clockwork Orange kind of dystopia. As you might expect, it is a tough existence, living in decaying cities with lives filled with sex and violence. The group often kills others from rival groups, whilst trying to survive.
The big twist at the end is that the group are a religious sect living in a post-disaster world. This also gives the writer chance to have a pop at religion as is rather expected in New Worlds these days. It doesn’t end happily, but then that’s what we’ve come to expect in these British anti-utopian stories.
What impressed me most was how this story epitomised the New Wave stuff at the moment. If anyone remembers Charles Platt’s Lone Zone back in July 1965 it reminded me of that, but with lots of elements that could be from Aldiss, Ballard, Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange) and Langdon Jones in style and content, for example, but are instead from a new writer. Old ideas in new ways, perhaps. A good start to the issue, if typically depressing. 4 out of 5.
Pauper’s Plot by Robert Holdstock
A story of a future life in a factory where the protagonist spends his life as a factory slave pauper, wanting to kill his Overseer, Mister Joseph. Effective description of an awful life that is devoted to work – they have no free time, no chance to go outside. There’s an obvious analogy to the factory and the machine our protagonist is slaved to being life’s dreadful grind. Think of it as a Dickensian novel set in the future – rather like the musical film Oliver! I saw the other week, but without the music, which I kept thinking of whilst reading this. Again, not a bad effort, even if the ending is a bit of a let-down. 3 out of 5.
The Pieces of the Game by Gretchen Haapanen
Another story in poetic prose, that style so beloved by Associate Editor James Sallis. The plot, such as it is, tells us of Sarah, living in a smoggy Los Angeles from which she manages to escape the daily drudgery – in other words, similar to Holdstock’s story! The tale is OK but doesn’t really say a lot, other than creating pictures in your head.
But never mind a plot: be in awe of the pretty prose (though occasionally set out in that way of type in various directions across the page that I am starting to really dislike). 4 out of 5.
Black is the Colour by Barry Bowes
Another story determined to be controversial dealing with the issue of colour. A white man suddenly wakes up one morning to find that he is now black. Deliberately provocative prose – the ghost of Bug Jack Barron hasn’t quite gone away, has it? – but the story makes the point that people of different coloured skin are treated differently in society, and it’s not long before the storyteller’s life suffers as a result. Not a particularly original idea, but it makes its point pretty well. 3 out of 5.
How May I Serve You? by Stephen Dobyns
A story of consumer capitalist culture, it describes a future world where a man who loves the physicality of coinage goes on a spending spree at Schartz’s, using his own manufactured money. He is arrested and we discover that it is an unfortunate consequence of being reconditioned. A nice take on the influence of money and consumable goods in our lives. I’m surprised that “Coca-Cola” hasn’t had something to say on the story though – or do they see it as subliminal advertising? 3 out of 5.
Crim by Graham Charnock
A story that feels a bit Bug Barron in nature. CRIM is a story of future warfare combined with media saturation. Lots of violent imagery, separate characterisations and made up language. This feels similar to some of the other fiction in this issue and gets across the idea that war is bad in a Brian Aldiss Barefoot in the Head kind of way. The difference here is that CRIM feels like it is trying too hard. 3 out of 5.
Article: Graphics for Nova Express by Richard Wittern
Images for what is presumably a new edition of William Burroughs’s Nova Express that seem a bit pointless without context. 2 out of 5.
Sub-Synchronization by Chris Lockesley
Ah, the inevitable New Worlds sex story! Actually, after that initial attempt of using a discussion of sex to grab your attention, it soon becomes something about time, in that disjointed poetic manner that James Sallis seems to like. I didn’t understand it myself. 2 out of 5.
Baa Baa Blocksheep by M. John Harrison
Another disjointed story about grotesque characters doing something incomprehensible. Like most of the allegorical stories here, it is about impressions and poetic description rather than anything else.
It seems to be about this Arm, who with another person named Block go to work for Holloway Pauce, who for some bizarre reason is experimenting on sheep. Whilst this is going on, we get Ballard-ian extracts of stories that Arm is trying to get published, of characters named Gynt and Morven. Deliberately odd and unsettling, obtuse and simultaneously designed to provoke, it becomes memorable for vivid but fractured sections of prose. For example, the first line is: ”Arm scuttled the streets like a bubonic rat–furtive by nature, flaunting in the exigencies of pain."
Typical New Worlds material. I’m sure it all means something… somewhere, but after two readings, I’m still not sure what that is myself. Appreciate the lyrical imagery; don’t look for meaning. 3 out of 5.
Book Reviews: The Impotence of being Stagg by R. G. Meadley and M. John Harrison
Harrison reviews as well as writes in this issue – I suspect that this will become a regular thing.
Unsurprisingly, the reviewers do not like old-style SF, such as that published by Doubleday, and so give a thumbs-down to Joe Poyser’s Operation Malacca, Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s The Still Small Voice of Trumpets and Flesh by Philip Jose Farmer, although they grudgingly admit that Farmer’s more-sexual tales are more entertaining than the rest. I have tended to think of Farmer as a New Wave writer in the US – Harlan Ellison certainly did in Dangerous Visions, so my surprise is that they have anything bad to say about it at all.
Of the other reviews, R. A. Lafferty’s The Reefs of Earth is regarded as a “slight work… well worth a glance if you have nothing else to read”. The publication of Philip K. Dick’s first novel Solar Lottery shows “how far Dick has progressed in the thirteen years since its first publication, and little else.” Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “a book for all the family” and will “hardly offend anyone” being seen as “An inoffensive and mundane little piece of Establishment SF.” Lastly, Charles Harness’s third novel, The Ring of Ritornel is seen as “brash, fascinating, eclectic,fast and glossy” but is a less satisfying work when compared with his earlier novels.
Article: Phantom Limbs by Frances Johnston
A medical article that is a little reminiscent of those written by Dr. Christopher Evans back in the early Moorcock issues of New Worlds. It begins with the recent film The Charge of the Light Brigade before going on to discuss the need for artificial replacement limbs and the future of such devices. I guess that it is close to being a robot, but not quite. It’s interesting but feels oddly out of place in this magazine. 3 out of 5.
Summing up the November New Worlds
An issue pleasing in its variety, but rather expectedly more variable in its quality. What we have here is a number of new writers taking inspiration from previously published authors, but as a result we have a lot of techniques we’ve seen before repeated. I recognise Ballard, Aldiss and Langdon Jones in those. The content is more of the usual – strange, disjointed, atmospheric.
I enjoyed most Area Complex, but wasn’t too excited about the Lockesley and the Charnock. The Harrison may be the most bewildering, but Barry Bowes’s story is the one that might cause most outrage, although it isn’t really saying anything new, sadly.
Out of the two issues, I think that the November issue is stronger, simply by having more stories with more of a range, even when a number of them resort to techniques that seem a little familiar. The idea of having an issue with all new writers to this magazine is a good one and shows that there is new talent out there to encourage. The downside of this is that the magazine doesn’t have any big names like Aldiss, Ballard or Disch to encourage the faithful, which might be what the magazine needs to get those reader numbers up, even when some of these new writers seem to be similar in prose, tone and style. Nevertheless, a good issue with good intentions, and one that feels fairly strong, if not entirely successful. It’s a fresh start of sorts, and I look forward to the next issue – hopefully next month!
Until next time – I wish everyone a Happy Halloween.
by Gideon Marcus
Black Power
The politics of race have been an actively displayed part of the Olympics as long as I can remember. Who can forget boxer Joe Louis defeating Max Schmelling at the 1936 Summer Games in Nazi Berlin? So it should come as no surprise that, at a time when the race crisis in America has reached a fever pitch, that there should be an expression of solidarity and protest at this year's quadrennial event in Mexico City.
The fellows with their hands "clenched in a fist, marching to the [Mexico City] War" (to paraphrase Ritchie Havens) are medal-winning sprinters Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) who had just won the 200-meter finals. Peter Norman of Australia (Silver), while making no physical gesture, is wearing the same "Olympics Project for Human Rights" medal as his fellow winners.
Why did the winners present this display? I'll let Carlos speak for himself with his comments at a post-race, press conference:
We both want you to print what I say the way I say it or not at all. When we arrived, there were boos. We want to make it clear that white people seem to think black people are animals doing a job. We want people to understand that we are not animals or rats. We want you to tell Americans and all the world that if they do not care what black people do, they should not go to see black people perform.
If you think we are bad, the 1972 Olympic Games are going to be mighty rough because Africans are winning all the medals."
Carlos added, responding to press references to "Negro athletes" said,
I prefer to be called 'black'…If I do something bad, they won't say American, they say Negro.
Smith and Carlos, described by the Los Angeles Times as "Negro Militants", have been expelled from the Games by International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage. This is the height of hypocrisy—how many times have we heard "we don't mind if Negroes protest; we just get upset when they riot and burn things"? Yet, here we have two men, American sports heroes, who peacefully highlight the plight of the Afro-American in our fraught country, and they're the bad guys?
With anti-Brundage feelings piqued and the U.S. expected to win today in the 400 and 1,600 meter relay finals (with nary a white man on competing on the teams), it is quite possible further displays of solidarity will be presented during the playing of our National Anthem.
Right on, brothers.
Speculative Power
It is with this as backdrop that I finished this month's issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which also leads with a powerful image. Does it deliver as striking a message? Let's read on and see:
by Gray Morrow
Once There Was a Giant, by Keith Laumer
Ulrik Baird is an interstellar merchant carrying a cargo of ten flash frozen miners in need of medical attention. In the vicinity of the low-gravity planet Vangard, his drive goes out, sending him hurtling toward the planet. But the planet is quarantined, off limits to outsiders. Nevertheless, Baird has no choice—a landing will happen one way or another; if it's a hard landing, the miners won't survive. Grudgingly, interstellar traffic control grants him clearance and coordinates to touch down softly. The approach is too fast for safety, and so Baird ejects, parachuting down, his frigid charges ejected safely in a separate, parachuting pod.
All according to Baird's plan.
Under the name of Carl Patton, Baird meets up with the last surviving man on Vangard, a 12 foot behemoth with the nickname 'Johnny Thunder'. Together with his 7' mastiff, the giant insists on accompanying Patton to where the pod of miners landed somewhere in the frozen wastes.
Again, all according to plan.
The plan is, in fact, quite clever, and this story marks a rare return to form for Laumer, who has been phoning it in of late. This is a story Poul Anderson would have woven liberally with archaicisms and mawkish sentiment. Laumer plays it straight, sounding more like E.C. Tubb in his first (the good) Dumarest story.
What keeps the tale from excellence is its resolution. Ultimately, Laumer provides the Hollywood ending, where everyone's a winner (more or less). His moral is roughly the same as Dickson's in this month's Building off the Line: some men are Real Men to be envied. The story even has a riveting travel sequence that takes up much of the story. An interesting bit of synchronicity.
I think I like this one better than Dickson's, but I still would have prefered something more downbeat, more nuanced. Four stars.
The Devil in Exile, by Brian Cleeve
Brother, here we go again.
Old Nick and his right-hand demon, Belphagor, were thrown out of the underworld by unionized hellions. An attempt to get Jack O'Hara, formerly a common drunk, lately a crime boss, to cross the union lines to bring the Devil back to power backfired when O'Hara took charge of The Pit.
Now, down to their last pence, Lucifer and friend pose as upper crust Britishers and miraculously (is that the word?) become heads of the Ministry of Broadcasting. Their debaucherous fare quickly wins over not just the terrestrial airwaves, but also those in Hell, and the Prince of Lies is restored to his rightful throne. Finis.
This installation is as tiresome and would-be-but-not-actually funny as the other two. Good riddance.
Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Coins, by Leo P. Kelley
In the time of Afterit, decades after The Bomb poisoned the world with its radioactive seed, humans have given up making decisions. After all, that's what brought about the Apocalypse, isn't it? Men making decisions? Instead, life is reduced to a series of 50/50 chances, each determined by the flip of a common coin.
Vividly written, but the premise (and the story's ending) are better suited to the comics. Anyone remember Batman's nemesis Two-Face from the '40s?
Three stars.
A Score for Timothy, by Joseph Harris
Timothy Porterfield is one of the world's greatest mystery writers. When he passes away after a long career, this seems to be the end—after all, does not death write the final chapter? Perhaps not, with the help of a medium with a flair for automatic writing. Nevertheless, there is still one final twist to the tale of Timothy…
Well wrought, atmospheric, and you're never quite sure how it will turn out. I liked it. Four stars.
Investigating the Curiosity Drive, by Tom Herzog
Curiosity killed the cat, but could it not also kill the human? And if one's goal is to test to determine whether or not curiosity be the salient feature of any sentient being, isn't it vital that one pick a being who isn't wise to your test?
This is a silly story, ultimately building to a joke that isn't worth the trip. Two stars.
The Planetary Eccentric , by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor discusses the discovery of Pluto and how it simply can't be the "Planet X" Percival Lowell was looking for. He does not quite so far as to say that it's not a planet at all, however, as some have opined.
Good article. Four stars.
Young Girl at an Open Half-Door, by Fred Saberhagen
The Museum of Art is haunted, it seems. Every night, an elusive prowler sets off the alarms in two of rooms housing prize exhibits. When a troubleshooter is dispatched, he finds the intruder is on something of a salvage mission, rescuing the art as insurance against an impending disaster. More importantly, said troubleshooter finds love…
It's a well-told story, and the ending is suitably chilling, though I found the romantic elements a bit too rushed for plausibility. Four stars.
The Kings of the Sea, by Sterling E. Lanier
In this, the second shaggy dog story of Brigadier Ffelowes, we return to 1938 Sweden for a brush with gods that make the Aesir look like Johnny-Come-Latelies. It's sort of Lovecraftian and not as compelling as the first tale Ffelowes recounted, which took place in the Caribbean. Not bad; just sort of pedestrian.
Three stars.
Stepping down from the podium
You know, it's nice to be able to step away from the real world for a while. There are important things going on that one must keep tabs on, causes to support, but everyone needs a break. Thankfully, this month's F&SF, while it presents no absolute stand-outs, nevertheless presents no real clunkers, and it finishes at 3.4 stars—well above the 3-star line.
And that's something to salute!
by Janice L. Newman
Star Trek is, first and foremost, a science fiction show. But science fiction is a special genre in that it need not be constrained by the same rules as other genres. A story that’s science fiction can also be a Western, a romance, a mystery…or a horror story, such as Wolf in the Fold and Catspaw attempted to be. On the first Friday in October, we gathered our friends in our backyard and watched on our portable 13" one of the scariest episodes of Star Trek I’ve seen yet.
Continue reading [October 18, 1968] Little monsters (Star Trek: "And the Children Shall Lead")
An Exquisite Delight: Barbarella
by Natalie Devitt
[Striptease in space]
Hot off the heels of Danger: Diabolik, producer Dino De Laurentis is at it again with another comic book adaptation, this time Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella. The French-Italian co-production is based on the sexy French comic book and directed by Roger Vadim (1956’s And God Created Woman). The movie’s title character is played by the none other than Vadim’s wife, the gorgeous Jane Fonda, who since her breakout role in 1965’s Cat Ballou, has been making name for herself in Hollywood, beyond just benefiting from her already famous last name.
[Make love, not war]
As the film’s heroine, a “5-star double-rated astronavigatrix”, she is contacted by Dianthus, the President of the Republic of Earth (French actor Claude Dauphin) at the beginning of the film, requesting that she set out in search of a supposedly young scientist by the name of Doctor Durand Durand, who reportedly vanished into “the uncharted regions of Tau Ceti” after creating a weapon known as the positronic ray. The device is so powerful that it threatens “to shatter the loving union of the universe”, which had “been pacified for centuries.” Barbarella is the president’s last hope to bring the doctor to justice and prevent possible bloodshed, because he has “no armies or police.” That said, she is armed with some weapons from the Museum of Conflict for “self-preservation” and urged to use all of her “incomparable talents” during her mission.
[Barbarella at the controls of her groovy spacecraft]
Shortly after beginning her journey, Barbarella gets caught in a magnetic storm, which results in her crashing her spaceship into Planet 16, located in the system of Tau Ceti. While stranded there, she meets 2 “marvelous little girls” who knock her out with a snowball, I kid you not. After taking her captive, they bring her to what she recognizes as Doctor Durand Durand’s wrecked spacecraft, but he is nowhere in sight. In fact, most of the inhabitants of the planet appear to be children. Barbarella threatens them with, “untie me or I’m going to call your parents!” Unfazed, the kids sic a pack of creepy dolls with razor-sharp teeth on her, leaving her with some abrasions and badly torn clothes. Luckily for Barbarella, a man draped in furs, known as Mark Hand the Catchman (Italian actor, Ugo Tognazzi), comes to her rescue. He and the authorities capture the children in nets.
[What nightmares are made of]
Afterwards, Mark Hand takes her back to his vehicle, which is basically a cabin on wheels with sails. There, he suggests she repay him for coming to her rescue by making love to him the old-fashioned way, something apparently that has not been done in centuries on Earth, because there is a newer and more civilized way to do the deed, involving individuals taking a pill and pressing the palms of their hands together. Ever the adventurous type, Barbarella agrees, forgetting all about her recent injuries. He fixes her spaceship, offers her some clothing and a tip on the doctor’s possible location, Sogo.
[Barbarella with Mark Hand after he saves her from the children and the dolls]
Barbarella tries to flee Planet 16, but shortly after takeoff, her spacecraft crashes yet again, this time near Sogo, in the Labyrinth of the City of Night on a planet called Lythion. There, she meets a blind angel named Pygar, played by John Phillip Law of 1967’s Death Rides a Horse and more recently Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. He tells her he has lost “the will to fly.” Pygar introduces her to a wise old man named Professor Ping. Here, French mime Marcel Marceau plays Professor Ping, who offers to help her fix her spaceship so she does not get stuck in the Labyrinth, a very frightening place, filled with those exiled from Sogo, City of Night. While Professor Ping works on her spacecraft, Pygar defends Barbarella against the Great Tyrant of Sogo’s guards. Later, one thing leads to another and they sleep together. Almost immediately after their encounter, Pygar miraculously regains his will to fly. He flies her to Sogo, but things take a turn for the worse when the guards to the Great Tyrant, also known as the Black Queen (and little one-eyed wench), spot them.
[Barbarella and her "fine-feathered friend" on their way to Sogo]
Barbarella and Pygar are taken in by the Black Queen’s guards. Model, actress and rock music muse, Anita Pallenberg, stars as the Black Queen. The earthling and the angel find themselves in the Chamber of Ultimate Solution, where they have to choose between 3 different types of death. Just as Barbarella and Pygar are about to choose, they are stopped by concierge to the Great Tyrant, played by Irish actor Milo O’Shea. Pygar and Barbarella end up being separated.
[Her Majesty The Black Queen]
The Black Queen gives orders for Barbarella to be thrown into a giant cage filled with birds, who peck at her and tear her clothes, again. She falls down a secret escape chute, which leads Barbarella into another room, where she meets Dildano, head of the revolutionary forces, played by David Hemmings (of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up). They get to know each other better. Afterwards, they devise a plan to capture the Black Queen while she is asleep in her Chamber of Dreams, so she can “divulge the whereabouts of Doctor Durand Durand.”
[Barbarella in the cage filled with "darling" birds]
I would imagine for the more sophisticated filmgoer, Barbarella’s plot and characters leave much to be desired. Barbarella hardly grows over the course of the film. In fact, no matter what happens to her, she maintains a certain level of naïveté through the entire picture. The same can be said for most of the characters in the film, who tend to be very one-dimensional and are often pretty silly.
[Speaking of silly characters, here are Stomoxys and Glossina with Barbarella after they kidnap her]
Turns out the movie posters sum up what Barbarella is all about with the line, “See Barbarella Do Her Thing!” When the movie’s protagonist is not taking up a tryst with someone new, she quite literally has killer dolls and birds tear what little clothing she does wear to shreds. Barbarella also seems to be irresistible to both men and women. And while it is nice to see a female protagonist, especially one that does not conform often outdated and puritanical views around sexuality, she is clearly some sort of male fantasy. One thing that does make her and the film more complicated is that she sure seems to find herself being tortured a lot.
[Her name isn't pretty pretty, it's Barbarella]
The movie’s opening sequence, involves the main character stripping in zero gravity, before even one word of dialogue is uttered. This alone should tell the viewer exactly what lies ahead. In addition, Barbarella does not bother putting on a stitch of clothing in order to speak to, of all people, the president. Another scene involves the concierge to the Great Tyrant putting Barbarella in his machine, which will cause her to “die of pleasure.” But it turns out that his machine is no match for Barbarella! What I am getting at is that part the film’s charm is that it is pure fluff. Entertaining fluff, sure, but fluff nevertheless.
[Barbarella in the Excessive Machine]
To top things off, Barbarella drives what else but a pink spaceship that has an interior decked out with iconic paintings on the walls, gaudy statues, and floor to ceiling orange shag carpeting. Even if Barbarella is guilty of being an absolute spectacle of style over substance, it does feature some incredibly creative costumes by Paco Rabanne, decent special effects and impressively psychedelic set design. Also, the movie’s theme song had me singing “Barbarella, Bar, Barbarella” for days after watching the film.
[Barbarella inside the Black Queens's psychedelic Chamber of Dreams]
Barbarella probably will not be nominated for any of the major awards anytime soon, but it is still a fun ride. More serious SF fans may want to steer clear of the movie, but I would recommend it to viewers with camp sensibilities. Three stars.
[Will Barbarella and Dildano be successful in carrying out their plan?]
Ice Station Zero: Ice Station Zebra
by Tonya R. Moore
Ice Station Zebra is a paltry film for which, apparently, little expense was spared. The production is elaborate. The special effects and visual details are impressive. The actors’ performances are mostly convincing. The plot of this film, however, leaves a great deal to be desired.
First, some background:
The story of the Russian satellite in Ice Station Zebra is loosely based on real-life technology and events. Discover 2 was an American satellite, a prototype of the optical reconnaissance Discoverer series, launched in early April 1959. It was cylindrical in shape and its film return vehicle, the capsule, was manufactured by General Electric.
Though it neither carried film nor conducted surveillance, Discover 2 was the first satellite equipped with a re-entry capsule and was the first to send a payload back to Earth. As depicted in the movie, mission control did lose track of the capsule when a timing error caused it to land in the vicinity of Spitsbergen, Norway instead of Hawaii. Attempts to recover the capsule were unsuccessful and some suspect it may currently be in the possession of the Soviet Union.
The standout star of the film for SF fans is probably Patrick McGoohan (David Jones in Ice Station Zebra), who is famously known for his role as John Drake in the British television series, Danger Man (Secret Agent in the U.S.) and more recently, The Prisoner. McGoohan is actually an Irish-American who was born in Queens, New York and spent his childhood years in Ireland. The actor is based in England where he has performed in several notable film and television roles over the past decade. Sadly, his performance is not enough to elevate the film beyond mediocrity…
In the first scene of Ice Station Zebra, men in uniform sit in a cramped room equipped with sophisticated machinery, looking very serious.
This is followed by footage of a small object separating from an inexplicably phallic Russian satellite orbiting the earth.
The focus shifts to the main character. Rock Hudson stars as Cdr. James Ferraday, Commander of USN nuclear submarine, USS Tigerfish.
While visiting a drinking bar, Ferraday gets a call on the establishment’s phone.
He promptly leaves to go to another bar. At the second bar, he goes upstairs to a private room where he meets Admiral Garvey.
The admiral gives him a sketchy summary of some potentially disastrous incident at Ice Station Zebra, located at or somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole.
Garvey issues an urgent order sending Ferraday and his submarine crew on an investigative rescue mission to Ice Station Zebra. They are to escort a certain David Jones to Ice Station Zebra, a man whose background they do not know. It is made clear that David Jones has some super-secret agenda pertaining to Russian military intelligence. His true objective for going to Ice Station Zebra is not to be divulged to Ferraday or crew.
David Jones, a paranoid Englishman of Russian origin with a noticeable dependence on hard liquor, isaccompanied by a platoon of marines led by Lt. Jonathan Hansen. Later, the Russian defector (?) Boris Vaslov…
… and Capt. Leslie Anders–The Token Black Man (played by Cleveland Brown and activist Jim Brown), are airlifted by helicopter to board the USS Tigerfish.
After a brief display of the requisite male posturing, the mission goes underway. (eg. Hansen is disrespectful. Anders puts him in his place.)
Upon reaching the North Pole, the USS Tigerfish attempts to breach the surface ice. The first few attempts fail so Ferraday decides to fire a torpedo at the ice.
Disaster strikes when the torpedo shaft/channel (?) suddenly opens. A deluge of freezing Arctic seawater comes pouring in and the USS Tigerfish starts sinking fast. The panicked crew and guests work together to get the situation under control and somehow, the number of casualties are limited to one.
Signs of sabotage are confirmed. Despite the presence of a born-Russian with questionable motives, Jones immediately suspects the Token Black Man of being the culprit instead. His reasoning? Anders comes with impeccable credentials and that just can’t be believable.
The USS Tigerfish successfully breaches thinner ice and surfaces. Ferraday leads Jones, Anders, Vaslov, the marines and a team handpicked from his own crew across treacherous the ice-scape, leaving someone else in charge of the submarine and its operations.
Following a near-death mishap on the way…
… the contingent arrives at the partially burnt out remains of Ice Station Zebra.
They locate some survivors while Jones begins frantically searching for the very secret, very mysterious object. Vaslov joins the search. Ferraday reveals that he actually knows that Jones is searching for a certain 8mm (?) / video tape (?) with highly classified spy intel containing footage and the locations of all of the US nuclear bases.
Reports of incoming fighter airplanes from opposing armies ramp up the urgency of the mission.
The Token Black Man is framed for someone else’s (Vaslov) treasonous act and shot multiple times (by Jones), to death. Naturally.
Disgusted by the stereotypical inevitability of this outcome, I took this opportunity to take a long bathroom break, returning in time for…
A transmission/press release is broadcasted reporting the successful rescue of Ice Station Zebra’s survivors.
– and all’s well that ends well, apparently.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
A Shambling Mess: Night of the Living Dead
by Amber Dubin
I was so pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the first horror movie that I reviewed (Rosemary's Baby) that I thought I had been too quick to dismiss the horror genre entirely. Thus, with a freshly opened mind, I decided to celebrate the Halloween season with a bag of popcorn and a screening of what was promised to be another horror classic. I'll admit that the bar was maybe set too high, so I tried very hard to be kind in my assessment of The Night of The Living Dead. In this, I summarily failed. This film had many never-before-seen, innovative elements and a rather bold story-telling style, but I simply did not see it fit for a major motion picture screen. I could not help but feel like I was being led down a garden path with the promise of the type of character development and storyline that could support this decently to moderately talented cast, only to be jilted at the altar by the loosely shambled together pile of scene changes that make up this film.
Night of the Living Dead does exactly this when it gets my hopes up in the opening scene. There is something to be said for tension built through hair-raising music played over shots of a lone Pontiac driving over rolling hills in a set of old-fashioned grainy black and white landscape shots. By the time we get to the first lines of the movie, I was already on edge in a subtle way that I was hoping would bode well for the types of thrills would continue throughout. This was my first disappointment, and just like the protracted winding trip that Pontiac took around turn after promising turn, this film alternately dilly dallied, rambled, and ultimately fell flat at a dead end.
The opening lines of the movie are delivered by a couple of youngsters named Johnny and Barbra who are visiting the gravesite of their deceased father. They disrespectfully bicker over the obligation the whole time, carelessly switching the radio off right in the middle of an ominous "all points bulletin" and ignoring the slow approach of a shambling figure in the distance. Mocking his sister over her healthy fear of graveyards, Johnny practically tosses Barbra in front of the approaching stranger, only to instantly regret it when the man grabs her by the throat. Johnny comes to Barbra's defense but is overcome rather awkwardly by the man slowly wrestling him to the ground and smooshing the glasses off of his face. Barbra, ever the loyal sister, doesn't bother checking if Johnny is ok before running to the car by herself, losing her shoe and falling to the ground, because it's just not scary enough if the fleeing woman isn't both helpless and unlikeable.
She finds shelter in her locked car for a moment before the man manages to break the window with a brick. Suddenly, she realizes the key is in the ignition and she slowly rolls the Pontiac down the hill. Even though her path is unobstructed, she drives distractedly enough to veer off the road and ding her side mirror slightly on a tree. This mirror seems to be so vital to her escape, that she decides that it'd be safer to abandon the car entirely and run barefoot through the woods away from her attacker (utter genius, this one).
Mind you, the limping man in the graveyard had no special makeup on, so for all we know she just abandoned her brother to be assaulted by a partially disabled, demented, old man. Literally the only way I can assume the strange congregants outside are "living dead" people is because that's title of the movie.
I expected the film to fall into a "poor decision-making blonde flees from monster" formula at this point, but when Barbra seeks refuge in an abandoned house, this film abruptly loses the plot for me. Barbara's actions have made precious little sense up until now, but after entering this house, her cognitive abilities fall to absolute bits. The first illogical decision comes when she is startled by the corpse of the homeowner and decides to rush outside to take her chances with her pursuer, running directly into the headlights of an arriving car. She stands bathed in the blinding lights, confused and wincing as if bracing herself to be struck; instead a complete stranger emerges, grabs her up and rushes her back inside. Unlike I, who was shouting "who are you and where did you come from?" at the screen, Barbra offers no greeting or introduction to this stranger and immediately falls in line behind his frantic attempts to create safety and figure out what's going on.
It is here that the stranger, whom we eventually come to know as Ben, takes the torch (sometimes literally) of the protagonist of the story. While Barbra dissolves into quiet hysteria, Ben violently dispatches several of the mindless congregants around the house, dragging their corpses to the lawn and setting them on fire to warn off the others. Once he's mostly boarded up the whole house by himself, Barbra launches into an awkward re-telling of everything we've seen her do in the film so far. Suddenly, she remembers she had a brother. She jumps up and throws herself at the newly sealed door, insisting "we must find Johnny now!" slapping Ben when he refuses. He immediately slaps her back, which normally would appall me, but here seems the only logical way to get the hysterical woman to stop throwing herself in front of monsters and cars.
Ben continues to secure the house, finding food and a weapon, hooking up a radio, and even bringing Barbra shoes as an apology for slapping her. When the radio crackles to life, we settle in with the now catatonic Barbra for our long-awaited first taste of an explanation of what on earth is going on in this world. We are offered the laughably pathetic explanation that the world is being seized by "an epidemic of homicide." We don't even get a chance to finish rolling our eyes at this when we are surprised by Barbra's scream as she witnesses people emerge from the basement.
There's absolutely no logical explanation as to why four able-bodied people and a child would remain hidden in the cellar of a house with distressed survivors upstairs, only to emerge and be suddenly invested in those additional survivors coming back downstairs with them. Harry, the obnoxious, stubborn patriarch of the Cooper family, offers such a poor explanation for his motives that I wonder whether this scene had less of a script and more of a general direction to the actors to come up with their own dialog. The teenaged couple, Tom and Judy, are convinced by this awkward exchange to come up and help Ben, while Harry's wife and sick child remain downstairs. Here we are introduced to Helen Cooper, played by Marilyn Eastman, who is a strikingly beautiful, classy and sharp-witted woman. She's responsible for nearly every cogent argument in the film and is such a mismatch for her husband that we are left to wonder why such a talented actress is filling that role and not that of the protagonist.
The stakes are now raised by the fact that there are three women and a sick child to defend. This emboldens Ben to make a plan to escape that involves Ben and Tom getting to the gas pump and truck outside by the barn. It is here that a schism appears in the group, and Harry quietly makes it his mission to undermine Ben's authority for every decision Ben makes (in much the same way I expect he is accustomed to undermining all his wife's opinions).
In another jarring turn, the focus shifts once again to the teen couple, Tom and Judy. Judy begs Tom not to go outside with Ben. She offers little in the way of verbal persuasion, but the scene is suddenly charged with so much of a different type of tension that one wonders if their mutual attraction isn't based in real life. They're clearly not meant to make it out of this movie alive, but knowing this didn't soften the blow for me when their escape plan literally goes up in flames, and Judy's caught jacket condemns them to a particularly gruesome and fiery death.
From here the rest of the film devolves into a fairly predictable series of disasters: Ben is forced to shoot an increasingly paranoid, maniacal and erratic Harry Cooper in self-defense, Barbara opens a door in order to be eaten by her now undead brother, and the survivors retreat to barricade the cellar. Karen, the little girl who's been lying prone and feverish suffering from an undead bite wound this whole time, suddenly springs to life as a crazed, cannibalistic creature. Her mother is just as shocked as the audience at this development, and she falls back, helplessly paralyzed in fear. To everyone's genuine horror, the child discards the bits of her father's flesh from her teeth as she advances on her mother, violently tearing her apart with a gardening spade.
Ben is set with the unenviable task of destroying the now undead nuclear family and he does so, huddling up next to the barricade afterwards and falling into a fitful sleep as the beleaguered lone survivor of this ordeal. The next day he emerges into the now silent and destroyed house. He is greeted with a swift bullet between the eyes from a sharp-shooting member of the crisis response team tasked with cleaning up the invasion of undead; thus rendering all the heroism and hard-fought survivalism of the entire film moot.
Though I was disappointed in this film as a whole, there were several things I did enjoy about it. I found it added a layer of realism to have the story background delivered by inter-cut scenes of a TV broadcast filled with busy scientists and professors on Capitol Hill trying to say as little as possible to the microphones being shoved in their faces. I thought it was a creative, bold take to explain how their situation was caused when the "unburied dead" were exposed to radiation from a destroyed Venusian satellite. I even found it authentically frightening when the teen couple immolates themselves and Ben is left to fight through the darkness and the silently encroaching hoard with nothing but a chair leg torch, all the while having to listen to the unnerving gnashing and chewing sounds of the undead dining on the burnt flesh of the unfortunate couples' bodies.
While I recognize that the film is making an innovative attempt to enhance the drama with bold lighting choices, I see this attempt as a failure because the lighting is so severe that the audience is unable to see what's going on. A particularly disappointing example of this comes in the authentically scary moment where Karen is committing matricide, and she is darkened in such deep shadow that you can barely see her at all. I was also disappointed that the score was absolutely all over the place. The beginning crescendo of appropriate music only serves to make the rest of the sound in the film feel poorly balanced by proving that at least one member of the staff knows how to smoothly score at least one scene. Cymbals crash and trumpets blast when stationary objects are meant to surprise the viewers, cricket noises get played very loudly in a bizarre attempt to make the approach of the undead hoards eerie, and yet the sound suddenly dies when the situation takes an actual dire turn; In a genuinely scary moment when undead break the window open, they do so noiselessly and a grasping, attacking undead hand gets dismembered in frustrating silence.
What made me feel this film was not of high enough quality to be released in theaters was the unforgivably sloppy pacing and direction. The Barbra-centered, awkward, choppy scenes at the beginning felt padded for runtime, and yet we are rushed through a systematic slaughter of the entire cast at the end. The script of each scene varies in quality so wildly that there are tonal shifts fast enough to give me whiplash. I felt volleyed between at least one writer who understood how couples banter, and one that decided to put a group of actors in a room and suggest that they improvise. The end result makes the film feel like a loosely connected collection of scenes, rather than a cogent story that supports character development or enhances the performances of some of the cast's talented actors.
While I appreciated the idea that Ben's death at the end implies that his race makes him just as worthless to society as the monsters getting burned in the fields, it's a poorly executed and shoe-horned-in concept. If that was going to be the message in the end, the least that could have been done is that he be attacked or singled out based on his race; but even Harry's prejudice against him was not clearly race-related and could have purely stemmed from him being an overbearing, control-obsessed, vile man.
Next time I decide to watch a film with an open mind, I'll make sure to look out for brain eaters first.
Two stars.
</small
By Jessica Holmes
This month on Doctor Who, we’re headed out of space and out of time and into a place rather more strange: the land of fiction. This is a bit of a weird one.
Let’s take a look at The Mind Robber, shall we?
This is supposed to be lava. Or Dulkis has oddly foamy volcanoes.
Continue reading [October 14, 1968] Outta Space and Outta Mind (Doctor Who: The Mind Robber)
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
Although only bi-annual, rather than quarterly, at the moment, Carnell continues to regularly release his anthology series, easily eclipsing Pohl’s Star series and Knight’s Orbit. Will it be lucky #13?
New Writings in S-F 13
Carnell notes there is an international flavour to this volume, with four Brits, Two Aussies, One American and One Belgian. Has any English Language SF publication series managed to have a male Belgian author before a woman author of any nationality? I think it may be a first! (International SF had both in its second issue.)
The Divided House by John Rackham
Leaving in 1984 on a ten-year voyage to look for intelligent life, Space-Farer IV now returns (due to time compression) in 2104. They find an Earth divided by genetics between the ruling Croms and their slaves, the Nandys, and the crew are split into the different camps.
I recently saw Judgement at Nuremburg on the BBC and this brought to my mind a scene where a witness on the sterilization procedure says:
My Mother…She was a hardworking woman, and it is not fair what you say. Here. I want to show you. I have here her picture. I would like you to look at it. I would like you to judge. I want that you tell me, was she feeble-minded? My mother! Was she feeble-minded? Was she?
This story addresses the question of eugenics, how we can judge one type of person to be inferior to another and how easy it is for science to be perverted. Important ideas.
And yet, I am not 100% sure I understand the conclusion he is meant to be reaching, nor the way in which it is delivered. I suspect this may be a story Rackham is planning to expand to novel length.
Three Stars for now.
Public Service by Sydney J. Bounds
On a densely populated island city, the fire service are reduced to a policy of containment instead of stopping fires. The poor are crying out for change, but what else can Fire Control do?
Reading this, I wondered if it was inspired by Kowloon Walled City, where the lack of access roads make it impossible for fire vehicles to enter. As such, it felt believable even in its exaggerated fashion, and Bounds put it together with great style. Dark, atmospheric but an all too realistic vision of the future.
Four Stars
The Ferryman on the River by David Kyle
The tower platform is a common site from which people throw themselves to their death. Hector is a salvager who takes away those who jump and offers them a new life. But is he salvation or slaver?
This is very much a stylistic piece, so your opinions will likely depend on how you feel about a regular switch between long run-on sentences full of descriptions and short clipped statements, in other words, how I write. I like it.
Four Stars
Testament by Vincent King
The Exploration Corps travel to 3m2t670, the last unexplored planetary system in the galaxy. Their mission, to determine if any other world has ever evolved life. We hear the record of Officer Dahndehr as his apparent discovery of the remnants of an ancient civilization turns to disaster.
King has tended to specialize in Vancian Medieval Futurism, but he manages to do well here in more common SFnal settings. It is a touch old fashioned, like a combination between Clarke and Ashton Smith, but he adds a unique style to it and has a twist in the tail I did not expect. Well done all round.
Four Stars
The Macbeth Expiation by M. John Harrison
On an unexplored planet an expedition shoots a group of alien beasts. When they return to the site, however, there is no sign of the encounter. Did they fail to hit them? Were they hallucinating in the first place? Or is something stranger going on?
This is described as a psychological thriller, and I would say that is accurate. It is a fairly atmospheric example, which makes us question what is real, albeit an unexceptional one.
A high three stars, probably a fourth for those who really enjoy the subgenre.
Representative by David Rome
Catton is an insurance salesman who is annoyed by his young neighbours, The Brownings. They laugh off his sales attempts and are convinced they will never need it. However, upon discovering a near identical couple have moved in next to his friends, he suspects something stranger is happening.
This is another example of what I term “Exurban Uncanny”, which often turns up in New Writings, unnerving stories about the sterileness of new towns. This is a pretty good story of this type, if rather obvious.
Three Stars
The Beach by John Baxter
People live in the warm embrace of the beach. Swimming, partying and in full contentment. One day Jael suddenly notices that buildings exist beyond the beach and leaves to investigate.
I am not sure what to make of this. Is it meant to be a mockery of surf bums? A stylistic experiment? An exploration of how people cope with trauma?
Whatever it is, Baxter writes it well enough to earn Three Stars.
The City, Dying by Eddy C. Bertin
In breathless and experimental style, Bertin tells of Wade’s attempts to find meaning whilst living in a police state. But, in such a place, what is reality and what is nightmare?
Apparently, this was originally written for a Belgian literary contest, then translated into Dutch and further into English, revised by the author each time. However, you wouldn’t know it. It reads incredibly well and makes use of the kind of typographical experiments en vogue in New Worlds.
Yet, it doesn’t feel like it is doing anything particularly new; rather it is what might happen if Kafka had submitted a piece to Michael Moorcock.
A high three stars
Keep Calm and Carry On
So, overall, this was a pretty solid volume of his series. Nothing that would rise to an all time classic but nothing I did not find interesting to read. Will the series continue its success? Given the British John C. has been editing SF publications for just as long as his American counterpart, I don’t see either of them putting down their red pens any time soon.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Laughing to Keep From Crying?
The latest Ace Double (H-91) contains two short novels (probably novellas, really) with plots that seem comic, at first glance, but are treated mostly in a serious manner. Let's take a look at them.
Murphy's Law
The shorter of the two presents a situation in which anything that could go wrong does go wrong.
Target: Terra, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
Some folks are inside a space station carrying nuclear weapons to be used against the Enemy should war break out. Our hapless hero, Intelligence Officer Angelo DiStefano, has to deal with artificial gravity that changes from zero to three times Earth normal, and everything in between, at random. His magnetic boots wander around on their own. The food machine produces inedible stuff that looks like weirdly colored snakes.
Bad enough, but when he finds out that the station's weapons are aimed at every major city on Earth, Good Guys or Bad Guys, he's got real problems.
So far, the story seems like a black comedy farce. I was taken by surprise, therefore, when an expository chapter reveals that the majority of Asians died in a plague that didn't harm non-Asians. Not exactly funny. Anyway, that's got something to do with the surviving Asians getting ready to attack the others, which will cause the station's missiles to launch.
(I should mention that the station has run out of sex suppressant, so the only woman aboard has a paranoid fear of being raped. Sorry, I'm not laughing.)
Angelo tries to figure out who's trying to wipe out all life on Earth. Aliens? A mad saboteur? And what can be done to prevent total Armageddon?
There's a lot of quirky characters, from a "midget" electronics genius to a captain who never leaves the bridge. Besides the distasteful content I mentioned above, there's also another armed space station containing Africans. The implication that there's a sort of racial Cold War going on doesn't fit very well with the silly slapstick that starts the story.
Two stars.
Far Out Music
The other, slightly longer, half of the book features a musical group set on going where no one has ever rocked and rolled before.
The Proxima Project, by John Rackham
Cover art by John Schoenherr.
Horace McCool is a rich guy who is obsessed with the band's female singer. The members of the Trippers call themselves Jim, Jem, Johnny, and Yum-Yum. Nobody knows their real names, or anything else about them.
Horace wants to marry Yum-Yum, even though he's never even met her. When he manages to make his way backstage during a concert, she's not interested at all. (Her utter disdain may be best demonstrated by the fact that she casually strips nude in front of him in order to take a shower.) Unable to take a very firm No! for an answer, Howard gives her a gift that has a tracking unit hidden in it. With his loyal secretary, who has her own crush on one of the male members of the group, Horace follows Yum-Yum and the others to a mansion on the Moon, and then much further.
Sounds like a romantic comedy, doesn't it? And yet there's a serious tone to much of the story. The four members of the Trippers are super-geniuses who only started the band so they could raise enough money for their secret project. They're cynical about the rest of the human species, and just want to get away from Earth forever, even if it means a seemingly suicidal one-way voyage.
Horace's mad passion seems way out of character for an otherwise sensible fellow. The climax of the story strained credibility to the breaking point. I suppose the author might be saying something about the worship of celebrities and the Generation Gap, but it's not a profound work in any way.
Two stars.
A is for Anywhere
Next on my reading list is a book that takes its two protagonists on another wild journey, but not into outer space.
Dimension A, by L. P. Davies
The narrator is a teenage boy who gets a message from a buddy of the same age. It seems that the other fellow's uncle disappeared, along with his mysterious helper. Enlisting the aid of a scientist, for whom the narrator works, they try to figure out what happened.
Not much of a mystery, really, because we find out right away that the uncle was working on a way to reach a parallel reality known as (you guessed it) Dimension A. (Does that mean our own universe is Dimension B?)
What with one thing and another, the two kids accidentally land in Dimension A, and don't see a way back. They have to deal with hallucinations created by an unseen entity behind a green mist, as well as primitive humans who somehow manage to have ray guns. Can they find the missing uncle and make their way home?
The novel seems intended for younger readers, mostly because of the age of the two main characters. The language isn't overly simple, and adults of any age can read it without feeling they're being talked down to. The book doesn't try to be anything but an imaginative science fiction adventure story, and it succeeds at that modest goal.
Three stars.
New and Improved?
Two well-known writers recently published expanded versions of earlier works.
Into the Slave Nebula, by John Brunner
This is a revision of one half of an Ace Double from 1960. (D-421, to be exact. The other half was Dr. Futurity by Philip K. Dick.)
Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.
I haven't read it, so I can't compare it with the new version.
Cover art by Kelly Freas.
At some time in the far future, Earth is a place of wealth and leisure. Robots and androids (artificially grown humans, with blue skin to identify them) do the work, while other folks enjoy themselves.
(There's a brief mention of people who have lost their wealth through foolish behavior. They're known as the Dispossessed. Otherwise, poverty doesn't exist.)
During a time of wild celebration, the protagonist stumbles across an android who has been severely beaten and maimed. Another android, knowing his fellow slave can't survive, puts him out of his misery with an injection. The protagonist is horrified by what happened to the dead android, but it's just considered destruction of property instead of murder.
(Given the different skin color of the android and their legal position in society, an analogy with American slavery prior to the Civil War seems likely.)
Adding to the mystery is the discovery of a dead man nearby with a knife in his chest. A police detective comes by, but doesn't seem very interested in solving the case.
The surviving android, noticing that our hero is sympathetic, slips him an item taken from the dead man. It reveals that he was a very important person everywhere but Earth. This sends the protagonist on a journey to several different colonized planets, where he learns the dark secret behind the manufacturing of the androids. Along the way, people keep trying to kill him.
(There's a plot twist that made me want to call the book Blue Like Me, but that seemed too frivolous.)
Not in the same league as the author's groundbreaking masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar, but a competent science fiction novel.
Three stars.
Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg
The novella Hawksbill Station appeared in the August 1967 issue of Galaxy.
Cover art by Sol Dember.
The Noble Editor gave it a positive review when it first appeared. Will the novel be better, worse, or about the same?
Cover art by Pat Steir.
In the twenty-first century, the United States is under a totalitarian (but superficially benign) government. Capital punishment is banned, but political prisoners are sent back in time about one billion years. Since travel to the future is impossible, this is equivalent to a life sentence.
The protagonist is the de facto leader of the exiles. (All male, by the way; there's another prison colony for women millions of years apart from the men. The novel never visits the female prisoners, and that might make for an interesting sequel.) He's more or less sane, unlike many of the other guys. One is trying to make a woman out of mud. Another is trying to use ESP to escape. Yet another attempts to contact aliens.
The situation changes when a new prisoner arrives. He's younger than usual, for one thing. More telling is the fact that he claims to be a economist, but doesn't known a darn thing about economics. What is he doing here?
If you've read the novella, you know that's the same plot. What's been added is a series of flashbacks, showing how the main character became a revolutionary and how he was betrayed and imprisoned. (These sections also feature the novel's only female character. She doesn't show up too much, but her fate adds a certain poignancy.)
The flashbacks make the character and the world in which he lives seem more real, but they're not absolutely necessary. Whether you prefer the leaner novella or the richer novel is a matter of taste. There isn't a big difference in quality, if any.
Four stars.
by Gideon Marcus
The Spawn of the Death Machine, by Ted White
Ted White has done it again…in more ways than one.
Some of you may remember Rosemary Benton's stellar review of Android Avenger, in which she gave five stars to the tale of Bob Tanner, a cyborg and revolutionary in a staid, computer-run future.
In the luridly (but appropriately) titled Spawn of the Death machine, Bob Tanner is back, and so is Ted White in fine form.
First, a little background, from the horse's mouth:
SPAWN was sold originally to Paperback Library, but was not my first submission to them (through my agent). The first book I submitted to them (in outline) was BY FURIES POSSESSED. They said they were looking for an Ace-Book-type book, so I figured, wothell archy, how about the sequel to an Ace Book? Which SPAWN is, being the sequel to ANDROID AVENGER (original title, changed by Don Wollheim, was THE DEATH MACHINE). That they bought.
The cover of the original edition of SPAWN was by Jeff Jones, who showed me the painting before I'd finished the book. The protagonist is holding a knife and defending the girl. So I wrote that into the book as a scene. But the art director decided to "improve" the cover and had the knife repainted (crudely) as a sword, and had shackles added to the girl, twisting her body in an anatomically absurd position. Pissed Jeff off no end, and me too.
Per Ted, Jeff is working on rewriting the rules of conduct for cover artists (keeping original paintings, selling only one-time repro rights). If successful, it will be a boon for all artists.
Anyway, as for the story…
Bob Tanner is wakened inside some sort of vault, naked, amnesiac. The robot brain inside exhorts him to explore the outside world, to spend a year amongst the humans, then report back with what he finds.
It turns out that civilization is long passed. He first arrives at the ruins of New York, the outskirts of which are inhabited by the most primitive of survivors, generations removed from the civilization Tanner only remembers in fragments. He is captured but escapes, taking with him the young Rifka, a captive member of the tribe.
Thus begins a series of adventures including a tangle with a bear, a run-in with a more advanced town with a mayor who doesn't let newcomers leave, a widespread constellation of farming communities at a 19th Century level of technology, and even a super-advanced enclave run by a group of individuals who were once the underdogs of society.
Through it all, Tanner becomes increasingly aware of his non-human nature—his metal bones, his ability to breathe fire, the hyperspeed he is capable of in brief spurts. And, at last, he discovers who he really is and decides what destiny he will forge for himself.
As is typical for Ted's books, I tore through this novel in short order. The man can't write a dull sentence even with a gun to his head. He takes the most cliché of settings and turns it into something fresh, certainly a damnsight better than Zelazny's recent stab at postapocalypse with Damnation Alley.
This may sound silly, but what I really liked about the book is that it's a romance. And not a "superman claims grateful damsel as prize" romance, but a believable progression of a relationship. Rifka is a well-realized character, one imbued with passion and an independent nature and set of priorities. It's not surprising that Ted draws her with such care—she is named after his wife, Robin Postal (Rifka means Robin in Yiddish). But, in general, the author is good with his female characters, surprising not just for the genre, but for the pulpy subgenre and venue.
I also really appreciate that one gets a pretty full picture of Bob Tanner even without having read the first book (in fact, I haven't, though it's on my shelf—it's really tough to find the time to read everything; even stuff you know is good). Honestly, the only real demerit to the book is its structure, really a series of vignettes. In that way, it is reminiscent of Omha Abides, C.C. MacApp's recent After-The-Apocalypse novel. Sure, White writes it better than most anyone else, but it still suffers from the disjointed, episodic nature of it.
Still, 4.5 stars, and I'm sure it'll make the Galactic Stars or at least get honorable mention this year.
by Jason Sacks
Star Well, by Alexei Panshin
I have a new favorite science fiction writer whose work I’m going to track. His name is Alexei Panshin and he’s had a terrific 1968.
Several months ago I reviewed Panshin’s novel Rite of Passage and found it intriguing, with great atmospherics, complex characters and a clever attitude which seemed to tell the story in multiple dimensions. Panshin told his story with a slightly ironic reserve to it, an approach which gave a detached commentary on the events, as if the narrator of the tale was someone looking back fondly at the events which shaped her.
That element is on display again in his newest novel, Star Well, but this time that ironic detached commentary reads like wry takes on the world readers are experiencing in the novel. For instance:
The apparently frightening and hopeless situation may turn out to have a candy-cream interior. That has been the main premise of the happy ending since the return of Ulysses.
Or he brings in a cute, clever meta-commentary about plot elements which gives the reader an aha! kind of feeling:
When managers of illicit traffic meet, their biggest plaint is the employment problem. In a word, henchmen. There are all too few young crooks willing to take training service under older and more accomplished men.
… a commentary which then goes into a detailed explanation of why it’s so dang hard to get good help these days, especially in a star base many light years away from anything important.
In short, these excerpts read like a bit of postmodern commentary on the space opera of Robert Heinlein. And since Panshin has written a monograph about Heinlein (Heinlein in Dimension, available through your local library, I’m sure), that reference has to be intentional.
The lead character here is one Anthony Villiers, a kind of lazy trust fund baby who’s spending his life just wandering the Nashurite Empire, occasionally drifting when he has cash, occasionally grifting when he doesn’t have cash. He’s aristocratic and hates getting his hands dirty, but he also has a gentlemanly aspect about him which makes Villiers feel charming and kind.
Villiers finds himself at the Star Well, a space port/gambling hall/shopping stopover which has been drilled into an asteroid in an area of space in which “the stars don’t grow”; in other words, a simple stopover for travelers who need a warm bed and maybe a touch of the illicit while on their way to their final destination. As such, it’s a perfect place for illegal smuggling and inept, corrupt bureaucrats who are striving to improve their social position or at least their bank accounts.
As you might guess, Villiers can’t help but get involved in the events at the Star Well, becoming quite the reluctant hero as he finds himself in conflict with Godwin, a man of low birth who yearns to be aristocratic, and Godwin’s boss Hisan Bashir Shirabi, a man with a massive inferiority complex who yearns to be like Villiers. Our protagonist also becomes unexpectedly close friends with the fifteen-year-old Louisa Parini, who traveled to Star Well en route to a stuffy finishing school but who craves adventure.
This is all so lightweight and enjoyable, and this whole charming souffle of a novel comes in at a mere 154 very quick pages – just like a Heinlein juvenile. And just like one of the juvies, there’s plenty of hints we’ll see more of Anthony Villiers in the future as he continues his peripatetic wanderings. I hope to spend many years following our besotted aristocrat as he wanders through the Nashurite Empire.
3.5 stars
![[October 31, 1968] How the Western was won (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Spectre of the Gun")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681031title-672x372.jpg)
![[October 28, 1968] Impressive at first glance… (November 1968 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681028cover-672x372.jpg)
![[October 26, 1968] Phoenix from the Ashes (Apollo-7)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Apollo-7-cover.jpg-672x372.png)
![[October 24, 1968] The New Wave comes to TV (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Is There in Truth No Beauty?")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681024title-672x372.jpg)
![[October 22, 1968] Hello Again! <i>New Worlds</i>, October & November 1968](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NW-October-November1968-672x372.jpg)
![[October 20, 1968] Giants among Men (November 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681020cover-672x372.jpg)
![[October 18, 1968] Little monsters (<i>Star Trek</i>: "And the Children Shall Lead")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681018title-672x372.jpg)
![[October 16, 1968] Cinemascope: <i>Barbarella</i>, <i>Ice Station Zebra</i>, and <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681016movies-672x372.jpg)
![[October 12, 1968] (October 1968 Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681012covers-672x372.jpg)