Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 6, 1968] Snail on the Slope? (November 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Suspicions confirmed—this November Amazing names as Editor Barry N. Malzberg, who was listed last issue as Associate Editor.  Sol Cohen is now merely the Publisher.  Oddly, though, the editorial is by Harry Harrison, now listed as Associate Editor (though most likely gone).  Go figure, or just say it’s more Sol Cohen chaos.

Johnny Bruck is back as the cover artist; this one (from Perry Rhodan #109, published in 1963) looks even more cliched and perfunctory than his earlier covers, making me wonder if they are really getting worse, or if I am just getting more tired of them.


by Johnny Bruck

“New” is sprinkled across the cover wherever possible to distract from the fact that once again, reprints dominate.  Four new short stories take up 36 pages, just under 25% of the magazine. And the prize: “plus stories by: RAY BRADBURY (Winner of the Aviation Space Writers Association’s Top Award). . . .” Does Bradbury need that kind of boosting? 

One of the new stories, interestingly, is a collaboration between Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany.  When Delany appeared with a novel excerpt in the issue before last, his name was misspelled about half the time; this issue, it’s misspelled “Delaney” everywhere—on the cover, on the contents page (twice), on the first page of the story, in the book review column.  Well, small mercy, it’s spelled right in the blurb for the story. 

There are worse production botches, discussed when I get to them.

Harrison’s editorial, Science Fiction and the Establishment, is superficial and banal: the Establishment doesn’t like SF, it’s a problem all over, but it’s starting to get better, someday it will be gone.  The book review column continues interestingly but incestuously, with James Blish as William Atheling reviewing Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany reviewing Blish.  Leon E. Stover contributes another in his “Science of Man” series, discussed below.

Despite all the above kvetching about the magazine’s presentation, the good news is that the new short stories are as interesting a batch as we’ve seen in Amazing for a while, and the reprints are all readable or better, unlike many of their predecessors. 

Power of the Nail, by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany

Ellison and Delany’s Power of the Nail reads like what Ellison was publishing in the SF magazines around 1957, polished up by a smoother writer.  Robert Zagaramendo and his wife Margret are Ecological Observers on the planet Saquetta, and boy howdy is Margret pissed: “You promised me better than this, somewhere.” Robert’s not too thrilled either, especially with Margret.  Bickering is constant.

Saquetta features the Saquettes, mole-like aliens who are not at all cute, but have the interesting trait of being reincarnated when they die naturally, which is most of the time.  But the vibrations of the “phase-antenna of the automatic ecology equipment” that the humans are burying in various locations draw the Saquettes away from their usual hideouts to places where they are vulnerable to attack by giant predatory birds, called molloks because that’s what the Saquettes scream when they’re being hunted.


by Dan Adkins

After further conflict with his wife, including a near-rape, Robert sets up “ecology equipment” near an especially large Saquette colony, complete with lurking molloks, and goes back later to find, as expected, hundreds of dead Saquettes.  He builds little round coffins for them and nails them together, then goes back and tells Margret that they’re going home—and shortly, suffers a terrible and fatal punishment that is not clearly explained, though one may surmise it is related to the operation of the "automatic ecology equipment."  (Compare David H. Keller's The Doorbell if you've ever read it.) In the moral universe of the story, it’s obviously because he decided to sacrifice hundreds of Saquettes in order to escape an emotionally intolerable situation.

It's a very vivid and readable story, which goes some way towards compensating for its ultimate obscurity.  Three stars.

The Monsters, by David R. Bunch

The formerly prolific David R. Bunch, who has not appeared in Amazing since Sol Cohen took over, is back with The Monsters.  It’s short as usual for Bunch, and on a familiar theme: the need to harden one’s small children against the brutalities of life by brutalizing them pre-emptively.  (See Bunch’s earlier story A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins, Fantastic June 1961, and thence to Judith Merril’s annual “year’s best” volume.) Here, the threat the children are to be prepared for is a bit trite, but the writing is brisk and economical.  Three stars.

Try Again, by Jack Wodhams

Jack Wodhams is new to me, though the Journeyer-in-Chief has not thought highly of his work in Analog.  His Try Again is surprisingly good.  Pyler, a psychiatrist, is having a session with the precocious five-year-old Tommy, who says he has lived before and remembers it.  But this isn’t quite the same life as before, since with adult memories he acts differently the second time around.  Tommy is much burdened by his knowledge of future events and the question whether he could do anything about them (it’s 1935, Mussolini has just invaded Ethiopia; and Tommy knows what comes later).  Shortly he is kidnapped to Germany.  An alternative history, even worse than the real one, is telegraphically unfolded.  Tommy, who has disappeared from the plot after his interrogation, reappears at the terrible end.  Four stars—maybe a bit crude, but powerful.


by Jeff Jones

The reading experience is undermined at the end by Amazing’s production values, or lack of them.  The story stops on page 29 in the midst of a sentence with no “continued on” notice, and the reader is left to rummage through the magazine to find the rest of the text on page 138.

This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty

R.A. Lafferty’s This Grand Carcass is, typically, told in high Tall Tale mode, and it is also clearly a moral tale, though the precise moral may be a bit obscure.  Mord comes to Juniper Tell offering to sell a device cheap that will allow Tell to “own the worlds.” So why is he selling it?  He’s dying. Tell bites and is the new owner of Gahn, for Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus, which soon enough is outdoing and dominating all the other “general purpose machines.” Shortly, it is a full partner with Tell (in Tell and Gahn—get it?). 

Before long, Tell, like Mord, is almost, er, gone, and Gahn (whose power inputs have been revealed as dummies) candidly admits: “I use you.  I use human fuel.  I establish symbiosis with you.  I suck you out.  I eat you up.” So Tell sells Gahn on to the next high-rolling sucker.  Moral, did I say?  Machines are the Devil?  Anything that makes humans’ work too easy is damnation?  Something along those lines, I’m sure.  This is not one of Lafferty’s best; it is simultaneously obvious and vague and less deliciously absurd than Lafferty at his best.  But it’s amusing enough, good for three stars.

The Dwarf, by Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf (Fantastic, January/February 1954), Mr. Bigelow, a dwarf, visits the carnival daily, forks over his dime at the Mirror Maze, and heads straight for the mirror that makes him look large.  Aimee, a carnival worker, hangs out in the booth with ticket-seller Ralph when her business is slow.  She is sympathetic to Mr. Bigelow’s plight.  Ralph isn’t, and makes fun of him, and of her.  Aimee discovers that Mr. Bigelow makes a living writing detective stories, which reveal his inner torments.  Ralph plays a nasty trick on him, proving that Ralph is nasty, which we already knew.


by Sanford Kossln

Rather abruptly, end of story.  Or is it?  There’s no “Continued on . . .” at the end.  As with Try Again, I rummaged through the magazine, but found no loose piece of the story.  So I checked the original 1954 Fantastic . . . and there’s an entire page of text at the end that is omitted from this reprinted version.

No rating, since the full text doesn’t actually appear in the magazine.  It’s not one of Bradbury’s better stories to my taste, but it’s a whole lot better complete than truncated.  Sheesh.

The Traveling Crag, by Theodore Sturgeon

The Traveling Crag, from the July 1951 Fantastic Adventures, is a silly confection by Theodore Sturgeon—a non-trivial category of his ouevre.  On the other hand, silliness by Sturgeon is more palatable than that from less accomplished hands.

Cris is a literary agent with an assistant, Naome, who is obviously in love with him, though he is oblivious.  Cris has received a story, The Traveling Crag, from an unknown, Sig Weiss, which “grabs you by the throat, shakes your bones, puts a heartbeat into your lymph ducts and finally slams you down, gasping, weak, and oh so happy,” and incidentally makes a lot of money fast.  But Weiss sends no more stories.  Cris visits to find out why, and the local storekeeper warns him, “Meanest bastard ever lived,” a judgment Weiss lives up to in the flesh.


by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)

When Weiss finally submits another story at Cris’s urging, it begins: “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light-years from Sol.” This is the beginning of a notorious subscription ad that ran in Galaxy, headlined YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY!, designed to distinguish Galaxy’s policy from that of lowbrow pulp magazines like . . . Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories.  So to perpetrate this in-joke, Sturgeon must have convinced not only Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, but also Fantastic Adventures editor Howard Browne, to allow it.

But I digress.  The point is that Weiss has turned in a bunch of crap, continuing his mean-bastard performance.  Meanwhile, Cris meets Miss Tillie Moroney, who is offering a reward for an “authentic case of devil into saint,” and eventually tells him a story—“a science fiction plot”—about a humanoid race that has developed the ultimate weapon, one of which has apparently been lost on Earth for thousands of years.  And she wants Cris to get Weiss to write another blockbuster story and then find out how and where he wrote it.

So Weiss produces another story that makes everyone cry, and Cris and Tillie head out to see him, but Naome the assistant contrives to get there first, and the ultimate weapon, a small object found after a rockslide, proves to have been the key to Weiss’s transformation, but it gets triggered, and one of Tillie’s blouse buttons emits communications from the humanoids, who explain to them all telepathically that the ultimate weapon was one that stops useless conflict, and now a reaction is propagating through the atmosphere to bring the weapon’s benefits to all the world (it’s science!), and by the way Naome has paired off with Weiss, and Nick with Tillie.  “Outside, it was a greener world, and all over it the birds sang.”

It's all just Too Much, but rendered so smoothly as to disarm even the house misanthrope’s ire.  Three stars for this feat of making fatuity charming.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

“Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed, for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind.  Universe?  Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit.  Universe?  The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of whose who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak.  The word is a mockery.  Yet how glibly men utter it!  How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!”

Yes!  Rave on!  Here is a fine specimen of the peak of cosmos-spanning rhetoric occasionally reached by early (pre-Campbell) SF, and what follows lives up to it in naïve grandeur.  It is the first paragraph of He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, a novella from the August 1936 Amazing.

The plot is essentially that of The Man from the Atom run backwards.  Atoms are solar systems and galaxies are molecules, and the Professor has devised a substance (called Shrinx!) that will reduce humans to subatomic dimensions so they can explore the sub-universes.  When his unnamed assistant is unenthusiastic about making this one-way trip, the Prof stabs hin with the needle.  As he shrinks, the Prof drops him onto a block of Rehyllium-X (sic!), where he descends into a microscopic scratch on its surface and is chased around by a germ, fearsomely portrayed by illustrator Morey.


by Leo Morey

Soon enough, our hero finds himself surrounded by luminous masses—nebulae!—and then, as he shrinks further, stars and planets.  He alights on one occupied by gaseous intelligences, shrinks further to a planet of cave-dwellers, and then (in a powerful passage) to a planet of machines gone out of control.  Their birdlike creators have fled to the world’s moon, as their mechanical heirs maniacally tear down the remains of their civilization and remake the world closer to their circuits’ desire. 

Our hero continues downward, or smallward, through universes he cannot bring himself to recount except in the most summary form (“Suns dying . . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more years of sustenance . . . [etc.]”) But then . . . he is mysteriously attracted to a tiny, distant spark of yellow, which on approach proves to be circled by planets including a tiny blue one that twinkles invitingly, so he approaches, descends, and finds himself in . . . Cleveland!

Well, actually, he lands in Lake Erie, flooding much of Cleveland as well as nearby Toledo.  Upon attaining dry land, he is accosted by aircraft shooting at him, which he finds annoying.  He is bundled into a vehicle and taken to Cleveland, to a building where scientists assemble to interrogate him, but are unable to understand his thoughts, though he can read theirs.  He is not impressed by them, or humanity.  He escapes and flees into the countryside, where he is drawn to an isolated house occupied by a writer, of science fiction of course, who is sufficiently enlightened to be capable of receiving his thought, and to whom the shrinking man tells his tale before continuing his apparently endless and by now wearisome voyage.

In one sense this is an odd story for Amazing to reprint, since it appeared in the 1946 anthology Adventures and Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—one of the oldest stories in the book, and the only one from Amazing.  That book is so well known that stories included in it are much more likely to be familiar to current Amazing readers than most of Sol Cohen’s other reprints.  I read that anthology when I was a kid and wondered what this old-fashioned story based on scientific nonsense was doing in the company of Heinlein, Asimov, et al.  But I’m younger than that now and can better appreciate its hokey majesty.  Four stars, allowing for its age.

Henry Hasse (b. 1913) began publishing SF in 1933; this is his third published story.  Aside from it, he is best known for collaborating with Ray Bradbury on a few minor early stories.  None of his other work, which has appeared sporadically over the decades, has garnered the recognition that this story has. 

One side note: This story presents a very early occurrence of what later was named Tuckerization, after its heavy use by Wilson Tucker: giving fictional characters the names of real members of the SF community.  The Cleveland writer to whom the shrinking man tells his story is named Stanton Cobb Lentz, obviously a reference to Stanton A. Coblentz, a prolific SF writer mainly of the late ‘20s and ‘30s, whose work is nowadays most charitably described as quaint. 

The Last Day, by Richard Matheson


by Robert Kay

In Richard Matheson’s The Last Day (Amazing, April/May 1953), the Sun is about to destroy Earth (it’s swollen and red and much too hot).  Protagonist wakes up after the last night, which he and friends have spent in drunken, lustful, and/or senselessly destructive pursuits.  He decides this approach to the end is unsatisfactory, and after wrestling with his conscience reluctantly heads to his parents’ house (shooting an attacker en route).  He has avoided this visit for years because of his mother’s excessive piety.  But on this final hot day, she’s cool, and they hang out waiting for the end.  The editor blurbs: “Waxing philosophical is like waxing a floor; it is powerful easy to fall on your face while trying it.” Matheson does not.  Four stars, mainly for keeping just on the right side of bathos as he renders the conventional sentiments.

Science of Man: War Is Peace, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover is back with another of his “Science of Man” articles, War Is Peace, written in his usual dogmatic style.  He takes on the likes of Konrad Lorenz (of On Aggression), arguing that aggression is not a mode of behavior that we must sublimate or otherwise redirect, but a goal-directed extension of human social organization.  He says: “The ethologists have nothing to offer that can improve on what Karl von Clauswitz said of war in the 19th century: that it is an extension of politics carried on by different means.” And he concludes: “There is no magic solution to be found in animal behavior studies, psychology, or biology.  Do not be misled.  The only solution is better politics.  But we have to know that to want it.” Well, maybe—he has no suggestions for how we get there in practice.  But Stover recounts much entertaining anthropological lore along the way.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Well, that wasn’t bad at all.  The new material is lively and interesting, and even the reprints are all readable or better, with nothing grossly stupid or incompetent.  Admittedly, that shouldn’t be the standard, but in Sol Cohen-world it does make a difference.  This issue is a magazine that one might actually purchase for enjoyment and not as a duty, a change not to be sneezed at.  Can it continue?

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 4, 1968] (Star Trek: "The Enterprise Incident")

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by Erica Frank

This episode begins with Kirk acting strangely, and everyone on the Enterprise has noticed. He is snappish, angry, arbitrary; he gives orders that defy Federation law and threatens people who argue with him.

His crew is loyal; they have been through many hardships together—so when he orders them into the Romulan Zone, they obey, although they are obviously nervous.


The Captain's orders are final

They are, of course, discovered, surrounded by Romulan vessels of a new, Klingon design. Kirk and Spock are compelled to beam aboard the Romulan ship to discuss matters, in exchange for two Romulan prisoners sent to the Enterprise. Kirk insists their location is a matter of instrument error: by the time they discovered the mistake, they were too deep in Romulan territory to get away quickly. The Romulan Commander (the first woman flag officer we have met in the show) says that sounds like—well, she doesn't call it the produce of a hind end of a male cow, because she is being politely formal, and this is a television show for families (and the Romulans may not have cattle), but she obviously indicates that it sounds implausible to her.


Color her unconvinced

Spock… confirms her opinion. Says the captain has been irrational recently. That he ordered them past the Neutral Zone. Kirk gets angry and threatens him, and is removed to the Romulan brig. Later, he injures himself enough that they call McCoy to attend him, and he attacks Spock. Spock defends himself with the "Vulcan death grip," an attack we haven't seen before, that looks surprisingly similar to the mind-meld grip.


The closer Jim gets, the worse he looks…

The Romulans send the captain's body back to his ship while the Romulan Commander attempts to convince Spock that he'd be much happier in the Romulan empire.

Have we seen this before?

McCoy revives Kirk. (I wonder if anyone actually thought Kirk died.) Kirk tells a select few people that his supposed insanity was a ruse, a form of dodging accountability in case they were captured. This is an undercover mission. 

The interesting part of the episode, for me, is the Romulan Commander's discussions with Spock. She attempts to seduce him in multiple ways, first laying out how much more power he'd have in the Romulan empire, and when Spock says he does not want command of a ship, she switches tactics. She offers him fine Vulcan food, which he admits is better than what's on the Enterprise. Pours him drinks—first a clear blue-green liquid, and later something orange, served in small glasses like liquor. Spock eats tiny food on toothpicks, and relaxes with her.

She puts herself into the bargain: "Romulan women are not like Vulcan females; they're not… dedicated to pure logic." She drapes herself enticingly, making sure he knows what she's offering. She whispers her name in his ear, and he tells her it's beautiful.


Oiling her traps

At each point, he makes appreciative comments, tells her that the offer is indeed a good one. That he can tell he'd have more power, more freedom, more creature comforts in the Romulan empire.

Eventually, he agrees to her terms: he will lead a small party of Romulans aboard the Enterprise, and from there order the ship to surrender at a Romulan port, her flagship at its side.

It doesn't matter what the terms are. He's lying. He's obviously lying—at least, it's obvious to anyone who knows him. Maybe outsiders who think Vulcans are actually emotionless would believe that Spock agreeing that the food is good means he's content to betray his heritage and his captain and wander off to a government with helmets designed to cover pointed ears.

Predictable but not boring

Instead, it turns out Spock was stalling for time so Kirk could sneak back to the Romulan ship in disguise and grab the new cloaking device. Scotty then has to install and use it before the Romulans get their phasers online—of course there's a deadline. But if we didn't believe Spock used a death grip on Kirk, we weren't going to believe the Romulans would succeed in blowing up the Enterprise. We wonder how they will escape, but not whether.

We could see the Commander convincing herself that her seduction was working—and we could also see Spock watching her reactions, feeding her facts that would convince her that he agreed, without actually admitting to being moved by her offer. Since he's a Vulcan, she doesn't expect him to offer an emotional reaction—and she fails to notice that not only is his enthusiasm lacking, so is any admission that he's actually been persuaded.

He says that the food is better than what the Enterprise has—he doesn't say that he'd leave his position for it. "Please give up your career; we have better snacks" is not going to work on anyone who actually likes their job.

Four stars. I loved the nuanced interactions between them, and I could tell something was off about Kirk but wasn't sure what until McCoy revived him.

Rewriting the present


by Gideon Marcus

Somewhere in North Korea, 83 American sailors and officers are interned, their captain occasionally forced to make confessions as to why his spy ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, was inside Communist waters in January of this year.  I'm sure you all remember the news—air units were redeployed from Vietnam to Japan, the U.S.S. Enterprise (the aircraft carrier, not Kirk's ship) was stationed off the North Korean coast, and there were rumbles of an impending World War 3.  Indeed, if it hadn't been for the North Vietnamese launching their Tet holidays offensive at the end of January, shifting our focus, who knows where things might have ended up?

With The Enterprise Incident, the metaphor couldn't be more blatant.  The Romulans have been remolded.  Gone are the Kriegsmarine/Roman hybrids that populated "Balance of Terror".  Now they are cloaked in Orientalism, down to the little sideburns Joanne Linville sports, with their smooth speech reminiscent of every movie that features a sinister Red Chinese or Korean.  Vina's exotic theme from "The Cage" has been reworked for the Romulan Commander (effectively, I might add).  The defense-minded Romulans, who showed no interest in capturing the Enterprise when it violated the Neutral zone in "The Deadly Years", suddenly want nothing more than the prize of one of Star Fleet's finest vessels, a greed that proves their undoing.

And so, the American public gets to have its cake and eat it, too.  The Romulan Commander has the right of it when she accuses Kirk of entering Romulan space on a Federation-sanctioned espionage mission to get the cloaking device.  Yet, thanks to a series of Mission: Impossible-style exploits, the "good guys" get away with not only bearding the lion, but stealing the lioness. Rah, rah.  We win.


For ease of maintenance, you can't beat the easy-to-remove Cloaking Device!

This episode is only the latest in what has become a kind of motif.  Earlier this year, John Wayne's "The Green Berets" (the movie that took Sulu away from us for much of Trek's second season) turned Vietnam into World War 2, complete with a platoon with soldiers named Muldoon and Kowalski—and precious few black troops.  David Janssen, no longer a fugitive, plays a jaded reporter, who comes to learn the value of the American presence in Southeast Asia.  And so, contrary to any news you might have read this year, we win the war in Vietnam.

And just last month, the movie Anzio came out, detailing that SNAFU of a landing on the Italian coast in January 1944.  Robert Mitchum plays…a jaded reporter, who comes to learn the pointlessness of the American presence in southern Europe.  Thus, the anti-war movement comes to World War 2.

Mind you, "The Enterprise Incident" is better than either of those two movies.  It's superlatively paced, the dialogue crackles, the chemistry between Nimoy and Linville is palpable, and Shatner makes a convincing Romulan.  I'm even getting used to Scotty's new hairdo.  But the flag-waving has not been so blatant since "The Omega Glory".  Juxtaposed with the nauseating Nixon ad that aired halfway through, lambasting American policy in Vietnam and promising "peace with honor", the episode just didn't sit well with me.

Four stars.  Just have your Maalox tablets handy.

The Lady IS the Tiger


by Janice L. Newman

I’ll admit, when I watched The Enterprise Incident the other night, at first I was frustrated by the behavior of the Romulan Commander. But upon watching the tape we made of the episode with our trusty “Videocorder”, my feelings changed.

Women have an interesting, inconsistent place in the Star Trek universe. Sometimes they are slaves or seemingly exist only to titillate the male characters, like Shahna or Kara (the dancer from “Wolf in the Fold”). Sometimes they have positions of power and importance, like Uhura, Commissioner Nancy Hedford, or Sylvia. Yet even the women in the latter group often give up their position or power when tempted by romantic love. I originally thought the Romulan Commander fell into this same trap, but upon re-watching the episode, I realized I was wrong.

The Romulan Commander is doing her job.


These boots are made for commanding

When the Enterprise flew into the neutral zone, what a plum it must have seemed had fallen into their lap. After the ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ response from “The Deadly Years”, perhaps the Romulans re-evaluated their policy for when a ship like the Enterprise strayed into their territory. Or perhaps this particular commander was just especially ambitious. Regardless, rather than immediately blowing up the ship, she looked for a way to capture it and its wealth of intelligence. Knowing that the crew would surely self-destruct rather than let themselves be taken, she sought a crack in their armor that she could exploit.

Her interest in Spock thus becomes a rational, considered strategy rather than that of a woman letting her heart overrule her mind. She is believably attracted to him, but she is also doing her duty. If she can ‘turn’ Spock, and if he then orders the crew to surrender rather than self-destructing, not only will she win the starship, but the cooperation of a high-ranking Starfleet officer.

Perhaps her reach exceeds her grasp. Perhaps she is too greedy. With the benefit of hindsight and inside knowledge of Kirk’s and Spock’s personalities, it’s easy to be judgemental and say, “She should have just blown up the ship,” or “She should have known better.” But these are still better than, “She should have been thinking with her head rather than her heart.”

When her actions are viewed as those of an ambitious Romulan Commander who wants to get ahead and who is loyal to her people, they make perfect sense. After all, how many times has Captain Kirk used seduction to manipulate women and get what he wants? Can we blame the Romulan Commander for taking a gamble and trying the same? She may have lost, but I can’t help but respect her for trying.

I also appreciated Spock’s acknowledgement that no other outcome was possible, because she would not have truly respected him if he’d made such a choice. No matter how attracted to him she might have been, in the end she would merely have been using him, and they both know it. If there were any doubts that she was seducing him for political more than personal reasons, this line lays them to rest.

Three and a half stars.

The bounty


by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

Two officers beam onto a ship. The captain is confident and capable, skilled at manipulation, and fools even the audience. One provides a distraction and the other collects a valuable asset in a dangerous gamble.

No, I don't mean Kirk stealing the cloaking device.

It was a neat trick and one that allowed the Enterprise to escape without a trace, but I would argue that it was not the actual mission goal, or at least, not the only mission goal. As Kirk and Spock went up against the Commander – who could serve as the Romulan answer to Captain Kirk – this was yet another layer of the ruse. Romulan technology is advanced, but what is more powerful? Knowledge.

It was only in "Balance of Terror" that Romulans were even seen for the first time in a century. Additionally, Starfleet intelligence had already told some of the Bridge crew that Romulans were now using Klingon ship design. Between a cloaking device and the weapons capability to obliterate entire outposts, why switch to a design that the Fleet is not only more familiar with but has dealt with more often? The Enterprise could be destroyed before they ever make contact with a ship past the Neutral Zone. An alliance with the Klingons could change the terms of the Organian peace treaty. Klingon/Federation battles may not be possible but bringing in allies might circumnavigate the way the Organians neutralized fighting capabilities. Finding a way to disrupt a power consolidation such as that seems a far more compelling reason to risk losing the Enterprise or potentially igniting a new conflict with the Romulans.


Spock obtains the real prize of the expedition

With Kirk "dead" and the more immediate threat "discovered", Spock was free to act. He and the Commander shared cultural information, confirming aspects of what the species knew of each other. He also had time to observe Romulan command structure, the quarters of the Commander, and possibly even collect information from her mind. This would be a gamble, as they share distant ancestry and Spock can be vulnerable when connecting with another mind, but not inherently riskier than the plan for Kirk.

Whether they escape with the cloaking device or intelligence, Starfleet gains something to use.

5 stars

Mission: Possible


by Joe Reid

In his letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul says, “…I am made all things to all men, that I by all means save some.” This episode, “The Enterprise Incident”, epitomized becoming many things to a varied audience.  This episode skillfully blended multiple themes and genres into a cohesive quilt that when looked at from a distance you realize isn’t a quilt at all.  It is a beautiful tapestry, a singular thing that through different sets of eyes will reveal itself differently. 

In the past I complained about episodes that attempted to do too many things in one airing: “The Gamesters of Triskelion” comes to mind.  The different themes in that episode were not blended, to the point of being jarring.  “The Enterprise Incident” presents a military thriller, a heist story, a secret agent tale, a romance, and a science fiction story all rolled into one.  This unified, multifaceted story is not the only reason that I loved this episode.  Here are some other reasons:

It didn’t go out of the way to tell the audience what was happening.  The events told the story.  There was no long explanation from Captain Kirk as to what was happening.  We were given no reason why Romulans were flying Klingon ships.  There was no discussion as to why the commander of the Romulans was female and whether that was common.  The audience was given no revelation as to whether or not Romulan commander had feelings for Spock or if she was simply tricking him.  In this episode things were what they were, and it was up to the audience to make sense of the event for themselves.  An intelligent tale for intelligent viewers.


Even Subcommander Tal is impressed

Another reason to love this episode is because of the amount of respect that was given to the Romulans.  There were not overtly evil, mustache twirling, or stupid enemies in this episode.  The Romulans made no logical missteps in the episode.  Their actions were based on information that they verified.  The Romulan commander didn’t take it for granted that Kirk lost his sanity, she allowed the information to be verified by both Spock and Bones before believing it.  The Romulans monitored transmissions from their own ship and acted when they discovered alien/human signals.  They remained vigilant and intelligent in every scene.  Spock and the others didn’t defeat the Romulans, they simply outmaneuvered them by being slightly more clever in the way they responded to the information that each person had at the time.  Outside of Kirk faking his death, no one was even killed in this episode, which for Star Trek is rare.

Seeing what came before it, I would have thought it impossible for Star Trek to tell a unique and novel multifaceted story, representing so many things to so many people, without speaking down to the audience.  I’m happy to say that they successfully completed the mission in more ways than one.  For that I am grateful.

Five stars




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[October 2, 1968] Future History Lessons (November 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

Saving the past

Around the turn of the century, the British in Egypt set out to regulate the flooding of the Nile by building a dam at Aswan, near the First Cataract, a little under 150 miles north of what is today the border between Egypt and Sudan. They limited the height of the dam in order to prevent the submergence of the island of Philae and the many monuments there, but still raised the height twice by the mid-1930s. The reservoir nearly overflowed the top in 1946, and it became increasingly clear that the dam’s storage capabilities were insufficient for modern Egypt.

King Farouk favored the construction of dams in Sudan and Ethiopia, where cooler temperatures would mean less loss of water due to evaporation, but when he was overthrown, the new government under Nasser preferred a larger dam at Aswan under Egyptian control. One of the reasons for the nationalization of the Suez Canal was that shipping fees would pay for the new dam. The change in plans alarmed archaeologists, who pointed out that the entirety of the ancient province of Nubia would be flooded, inundating numerous ancient monuments and sites. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan appealed to UNESCO for help, and thus was born the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia.

The most impressive of the monuments to be rescued are the temples of Abu Simbel, built by Ramses II in the mid-13th century B.C. to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh. Best known is the Great Temple, dedicated to Amun, Ra-Horakty, Ptah and the deified Ramses himself. The entrance is flanked by four statues of the pharaoh, each over 65 feet tall. Nearby is a temple dedicated to Hathor and Ramses’ favorite wife Nefertari.

Ramses gets a face lift.

But how do you rescue something like that? A freestanding temple can be taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt elsewhere. This was done with the temple of Kalabsha, in work funded and supervised by West Germany. The Ramesseum was carved into sandstone cliffs. One suggestion was to build a clear freshwater dam around the temples and create underwater viewing chambers. Instead, an international team of archaeologists, engineers, and heavy construction experts have spent the last four years carefully carving the entire site into enormous blocks with an average weight of 20 tons and moving the whole thing to a new site some 650 feet back from the Nile and over 200 feet higher. The work is finished, and on September 22nd the reconstructed Ramesseum was opened to the public. Let’s hope that the many other rescue projects are just as successful.

Optimists and pessimists

This has been a rough year all around the world, and so it’s natural to turn to our entertainment to make us feel better. Unfortunately, the trend in science fiction seems to be toward unhappy endings, and this month’s IF seems to lean more to the pessimistic side. It also takes us to Ancient Egypt in the far future.

The Waw is bored. Art by Vaughn Bodé

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 30, 1968] A spoonful of sugar… (October 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Sputnik all over again?

Last week, the Soviets produced their latest space spectacular, potentially leaving America in the dust again.  Zond 5, launched September 14, was sent around the moon, returning safely to Earth on the 22nd.

It's tempting to say, "What's the big deal," right?  We've sent probes to the moon, too, and the Russkies have orbited lunar satellites and soft-landed spacecraft.  What's special about Zond?  Well, it's suspected that "Zond", a monicker usually reserved for interplanetary spacecraft, is really a lunar-adapted Soyuz.  That means the Communists have completed a successful, robotic dry run for a human mission to the moon.  We haven't even launched our first manned Apollo yet!

So we're in something of a race.  Apollo 7 will go up in a couple of weeks, testing the spacecraft for an endurance run in Earth orbit.  Apollo 8 is due to be a circumlunar shot, to be launched near the end of the year.  That's the one to beat: if the Soviets make that journey before us, that'll be a feather in their cap.

That said, while our program was delayed 20 months due to the tragedy of Apollo 1 last year, the Soviet lunar program has undergone some setbacks, too.  Most notably, their Saturn equivalent appears to be having teething troubles.  While they might be able to send a Soyuz around the moon with their current rockets, landing cosmonauts will require a beefier launch system.  Our Saturn is already man-rated.

If I were a betting man, I'd give the odds of the Soviets beating us around the moon at around 50/50.  But as for landing on the moon, which is still planned for some time next year, I think we're still favored to win that one.

The medicine

This month's issue of Analog starts off extremely well.  Savor the taste of the opening piece, as it's what will sustain you through the rest…


by Kelly Freas

The Pirate, by Poul Anderson

Trevelyan is the agent of an arcane, galaxy-wide service.  Most of the such agents are employed for scouting, search and rescue, and mediation services.  This time, Trevelyan is on a mission of crime prevention.  His suspect: Murdoch Juan and his partner, Faustina.  Ostensibly, they aim to set up pre-made colonies on the marginal world of Good Luck, offering transport and homes to settlers at a bargain.  Trevelyan knows such endeavors are never profitable, and he suspects a shady angle.


by Kelly Freas

Such concerns are confirmed when he and his alien shipmate, Smokesmith, discover Murdoch's true target: a once-inhabited world, seared with abated radiation, abounding in empty cities ripe for occupation.  But is that what the dead race would have wanted?

Poul Anderson's writing ranges from turgid to sublime.  This piece is much closer to the latter end of the scale, and it benefits from lacking the author's typical linguistic tics.  In addition to being a good read and an excellent depiction of a true alien race, I appreciate the moral questions raised and the conservationist attitude expressed.  This would be good required reading for any apprentice building contractor or would-be Schliemann.

Five stars.

Mission of Ignorance, by Christopher Anvil


by Leo Summers

The galactic aliens have returned.  Last time, they brought three gifts to revolutionize our food production, our computers, and our birth control—and leave us completely at their mercy.  This time, Earth is being a bit more circumspect.  Rather than accepting the ambassadors with open arms, a buck 2nd Lieutenant is dispatched to treat with them—with absolutely no briefing at all, but with a set of instructions designed to terrify and befuddle the extraterrestrials.

I often joke that every Chris Anvil story begins with [Military rank] [Name] [present participle verb], and this is no exception.  I also, less jokingly, note that Chris Anvil's stories for Analog tend to be smug, stupid affairs.  Thus, I was surprised to find I didn't hate this piece.  It is somewhat smug, and the latter half is all explanation, but the premise is kind of interesting.

Right on the 2/3 border.  I'll be generous and say three stars.

Taking the Lid Off, by William T. Powers

The "lid" in this science article refers to Earth's atmosphere, which prevents us from seeing the universe in most of the interesting wavelengths like X-ray and infrared.  Powers, who wrote a terrific article on measuring charged particles last year, offers up a less impressive, but serviceable piece on lunar and orbital telescopes.  It's just a bit less coherent than his last article, and with fewer revelations, although I did appreciate his explanation of using gravity gradients to stabilize satellites.

Three stars.

The Steiger Effect, by Betsy Curtis


by Leo Summers

Human merchants arrive at a planet that views internal combustion as a kind of witchcraft.  Nevertheless, they buy our engines when they are demonstrated to work.  But the engines all mysteriously conk out when humans reach a certain distance away.  Turns out they—and all internal combustion engines, everywhere—run on psi energy, and always have. 'Humans secretly have psi powers and don't know it' certainly sounds like a plot tailor-made for Campbell, doesn't it?

Never mind that the premise makes no sense; the division of the (otherwise completely humanoid) alien society into "Men" (those who do with their minds) and "Boys" (those who do with their brawn) hews too close to a metaphor of antebellum days in the American South for comfort.

One star.

Underground, by Lawrence A. Perkins


by Kelly Freas

A senator is kidnapped by a Latin American insurgency that plans to harness earthquakes to topple their oppressive dictator [a plot reminiscent of the Doctor Who episode "Enemy of the World" -Ed].

This piece reads like one of those Ted Thomas mini science articles from F&SF turned into a story, except there's no real story—just a lot of show and tell.

Two stars.

The Tuvela (Part 2 of 2), by James H. Schmitz


by John Schoenherr

Last installment, we learned that the colony of Nandy-Cline was about to be invaded by the rapacious Parahuans.  The only thing holding them back was the concern that humanity was led by a shadow cabal of "Tuvela", a subrace of genetic supermen.  Now, the security of the world lies in the hands of the youthful Dr. Nile Etland, who must convince the Parahuan that she is one of the mythical Tuvela.  Luckily, she has a quartet of sapient otters as wingmen…

This is a frustrating novel.  The premise is excellent, and Schmitz is one of SF's few authors who lets women be heroes.  What keeps this book at the three-star level for me is the lack of characterization.  I have a vague idea of who Ticos Cay is, the two-hundred year old man who we meet as a prisoner of the Parahuan.  I even kind of know the various Parahuan.  But Etland is a cipher, utterly uninteresting as a person.  She goes through her James Bond maneuvers with competence and a few jitters, but with precious little demonstration of a soul.

My nephew enjoyed this serial a lot.  It is creative, and the biology of the world well realized.  If only I could say the same for Nile Etland.

Three stars.

Doing the math

Thus ends the month with Analog clocking in at 2.9, just under the 3-star line.  Ahead of it are The Farthest Reaches (3.4), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1) and IF (3.1).  The pack below it is far below—Galaxy (2.4), Worlds of Fantasy (2.3), and Fantastic (2).

The worthy stuff would fill two magazines, which would be an impressive amount if it hadn't taken seven publications to produce it.  Women penetrated the magazines pretty well this month, but their lack of pieces in Worlds of Fantasy and The Farthest Reaches brought the aggregate percentage down to 11%.

And so, with science fiction as with science fact, we find ourselves in a bit of a holding pattern, awaiting what's to come next month.  But whether it's the Soviets or the Americans, Campbell or Ferman, someone will entertain us.

And that's worth being ready for!

[Stop Press: Mark just got his reviews of this month's New Worlds to me.  It's too late to run an article, so we'll be doubling up next month.  For the sake of statistics, however, the magazine raises the amount of worthy material slightly, and it reduces feminine participation in SF magazine prose for October 1968 to 10%.  Stay tuned…]




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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 28, 1968] Intelligence Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be: Charly

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by Jason Sacks

So far, 1968 has been an exemplary year for science fiction films. Filmgoers have had a chance to watch psychedelic, universe-spanning science fiction with 2001: A Space Odyssey and adventure science fiction with Planet of the Apes and buxom science fiction with Barbarella. And now we have down-to-earth, humanistic – and surreal – science fiction with the new film Charly.

Cliff Robertson stars in the new film version of the already-classic Daniel Keyes novel, which Victoria Lucas gave five stars to back in ’66. And while this film isn’t nearly as good as the novel, Charly still is a clever movie, somehow both a real change-of-pace and a film very much of its moment.

(If you’re confused by that contradiction, dear reader, stick around and I’ll explain myself to you.)

Picture 1 of 1

As we come to know him, Charlie Gordon (as the book names him; the movie calls our lead character Charly) is a man with the mind of a small child. He’s mentally impaired, with a low IQ, a childlike take on the world, and a temper to match his frustrations. When Charly is offered the opportunity to become the subject of an experiment to give him super-intelligence, he jumps at the chance. But Charly soon discovers how brilliance and happiness don’t always go hand in hand, and his new intelligence just makes him feel deep angst.

Victoria loved the book for its unique epistemological structure and the way writer Keyes gives the reader deeper insights into Charly’s perceptions of the events which happen to him. That subjective nature gave the book a certain amount of pathos which makes the novel embed itself into readers' minds.

Of course, no film can simulate the effect of a series of journal entries, so we are forced to get by with the events which play out on the screen.

Robertson in this film feels like Fredric March starring in a kind of odd version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this case dumb Charly is a kind of monstrous identity. Not because of his low IQ, but more because dumb Charly acts weirdly. He feels like someone we don’t quite comprehend because he’s so different from most of us.

Robertson method-acts and method-acts all throughout this film, seeming to inhabit Charly’s body and mind. When he has a low IQ, he seems twitchy and odd, a man distorted and damaged by his impairment. It’s a grand, actorly performance, a transformation on the screen, but somehow I just never connected to Charly's humanity. It feels a bit much. For instance, Charly acts kind of jolly when his coworkers at a bakery play a nasty prank on him, and Charly's penmanship feels a bit like gilding the rose on his disabilities.

The prank-playing bakery coworkers

There are some quite moving scenes, though. One which really stands out happens when Charly attends a class with other severely disabled people. He's the only adult in a room full of children with Down's Syndrome and other disorders. The kids are filmed realistically and respectfully while Charly comes across as a real freak. This wonderful sequence gives the character some real pathos, an undercurrent of sadness which helps to explain his transformation.

Charly playing with kids

Robertson delivers the kind of performance which feels like it’s specifically planned to garner its actor an Oscar nomination. There’s nothing really wrong with aiming for a precious golden statuette, but his performance does seem a bit calculated somehow. I felt like Robertson seemed too smart for the dumb Charly, planned out rather than spontaneous, considered rather than active in his scenes.

The best parts of this film are when Charly is transitioning to becoming smart. He hides out from people, seems to be really beginning to think through his experience, and we can actually see signs of emerging intelligence in these scenes.

As you might imagine, this sequence is where Robertson's calculated performance shines. Here we see the intelligence at work and feel we are watching a real person as Charly figures out how to live in his new experiences.

And then the movie takes a decided turn for the weird when Charly actually does become smart. At first he seems happy to be able to both lead seminars and be the lead subject them. His newfound genius brings intellectual intelligence but not emotional maturity nor insights into the world around him. Charly learns he may have actually been happier when he was innocent about everything which happened around him.

Charly begins to become paranoid, and his paranoia plays out in a series of increasing surreal sequences in which he imagines himself leading a motorcycle gang, endlessly professing love for his psychologist Alice (well played by Claire Bloom), and some oddly brilliant split-screen effects.

Charly even includes an undercurrent of paranoia in Charly's actions, as if he's being watched as part of a government conspiracy. Of course, he may actually be surveilled but we only see the paranoia from Charly's viewpoint, never from an objective viewpoint which might actually provide context for Charly's actions.

We even get a double-exposure shot in which director Ralph Nelson shows Charly running away from his old self, a very over-the-top bit which unfortunately made me laugh. This surrealism is just a bit too much for the narrative structure Nelson has set up in the first half and the movie threatens at times to teeter and  fall under the weight of his ambitions.

I do have to mention the excellent soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. The music in this film feels both exotic and comfortable, a fascinating mix of west and east which helps to elevate this film, and certainly gives the soundtrack a very contemporary feel.

Charly is a fairly conventional film in its first half and a determinedly surreal film in its second half.  Nelson seems up to the task in the first half but pretty much falls on his face in the second. It's somewhat worth watching for Cliff Robertson's interesting performance. I think his performance will be discussed come Oscar season. And though I only kind of liked this movie, it would be fun to see an Oscar won by a lead actor in a science fiction movie.

Three stars.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[September 26, 1968] Brain drain: (Star Trek: "Spock's Brain")

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[Star Trek is back for its third season!  Accordingly, we've devoted a great many inches to this rather uneven debut….]


by Janice L. Newman

This week we gathered all our friends together to start off a new season of Star Trek. We served dinner, then put our little portable color set outside and everyone enjoyed the lovely late summer night.

Well, everyone except me, that is. I was stuck inside with a VERY nasty cold that, oddly enough, no one else wanted to share with me. It made watching Spock’s Brain a lonely experience, but it did give me space to focus on the episode without being distracted by gasps, groans, or laughter—except my own, that is.

With the recent threats of cancelation and huge fan response, I expected NBC to put their best foot forward starting the new season. For Season 2 they knocked it out of the park with Amok Time. Could they do it again?

In a word, no.

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Book, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 24, 1968] Reconstructing The Past (The Farthest Reaches & Worlds of Fantasy #1)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Yesterday, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, a huge celebration took place. International dignitaries attended, US Marines fired cannons, Local Choirs sang specially composed songs.

What was all this in aid of? The beginning of one of the strangest architectural projects of our time. The reconstruction of London Bridge.

An Abridged History

A painting of Old London Bridge, in the 18th Century. A stone bridge of many arches with georgian houses built on it as boatman sail underneath it.
Old London Bridge, in the 18th Century

Whilst there has been a bridge across the Thames for at least as long ago as The Romans, the longest lasting and one that has been immortalized in song is the medieval “Old London Bridge”, which was completed in 1205. As you are probably aware it was constantly beset with problems. After endless changes, removal of properties and attempts to shore it up, a committee in 1821 was formed to build the New London Bridge.

The ”New” London Bridge,early in the morning a granite bridge with arches, with a road, pedestrian walkways and a small number of cars
The ”New” London Bridge, at a less busy time

This new version was opened to the public in 1831 and has fared reasonably well for over a century. However, the increased volume of traffic has caused it to slowly sink. This was not as much of an issue in the era of the horse and cart, but with hundreds of tonnes of steel sitting on it every rush hour, and not prepared for the passage of millions of Londoners, a change had to be made.

New London Bridge with high volumes of traffic
Not made for this kind of weight

In order to recoup some of the costs for the destruction of the old bridge and construction of a new one, Ivan Luckin of the Common Council of the City of London, put it up for auction. After a promotional campaign, two dozen serious bids came in. In April, the winner was announced to be Robert P. McCullough of McCullough Motors, planning to rebuild it in Arizona.

“In The Modern House They Throw In A Few Antiques”

What does a motor company want with 100,000 tons of granite? To understand that you have to know a little more about where it is going.

Lake Havasu City as pictured from the air in the late 1950s
Not your typical holiday destination

In 1938, the Parker Dam was built on the Colorado River, providing water and power to Southern California. Behind it sits the reservoir of Lake Havasu. In 1942 the US government built an auxiliary airfield and support base there. What they were apparently unaware of was the land was not theirs to take but was actually owned by Victor and Corinne Spratt. After the war, the couple were able to get the land back and turn it into a holiday resort.

In 1958 McCullough enters our story. He was looking for a site to test onboard motors and convinced the Spratts to sell most of their land to him. He turned it from a resort into a city and set up a chainsaw factory there in 1964.

However, this is not exactly prime real estate. Lake Havasu City sits in the middle of the Mojave desert, around 40 miles from the Colorado River Reservation, a hundred miles from the Hoover Dam and almost equidistant between Las Vegas, Palm Springs and Phoenix. There is little else of interest, unless you like a lot of rocks. What could attract people? Maybe a piece of history…

Anglophilia

McCullough standing in front of the New London Bridge, arms spread wide
McCullough, now the proud owner of the world’s largest antique

Whilst this may be the strangest and, at over $2.4m, possibly the most expensive purchase of a piece of British design, it is not unique. The Queen Mary currently sits at Long Beach, California and the Church of St. Mary Aldermanbury was recently relocated to Missouri.

Will this grand venture pay off? It will take at least three years to complete the project, so we will see if in the mid-'70s people are coming from all over to see London Bridge, or if Lake Havasu City becomes another ghost town.

Ghosts of the Past

Talking of this kind of reconstruction project, this month, across two publications, I read 21 short stories, all of which are attempting to revive something of the past.

The Farthest Reaches
The Farthest Reaches hardback book cover
Joseph Elder is not a name I was familiar with before. He appears to be a fan of the old school, endorsing the “sense of wonder” over literary pretensions. As such he has asked his contributors to only include stories set in distant galaxies containing Clarke’s ideals of “wonder, beauty, romance, novelty”. Let’s see how they have done:

The Worm That Flies by Brian W. Aldiss
As these are sorted alphabetically, we of course start with Mr. Aldiss (at least until Alan Aardvark gets more prolific). And, just as obviously, it is one of the strangest in this volume.

Argustal crosses the world of Yzazys collecting stones to build his parapattener. When he is then able to communicate with Nothing, he hopes to answer the strange questions emerging about phantoms called “childs” and the dimension of time.

The ideas of this story are not particularly new and the mystery is reasonably obvious. However, what Aldiss manages to do well is create such a strange unnerving atmosphere, such that it carries the reader along and raises it up above standard fare of this type.

A low four stars

Kyrie by Poul Anderson
The spaceship Raven is sent to investigate a supernova, a crew consisting of fifty humans and one Auregian, a being of pure energy. This being, Lucifer, has its orders communicated telepathically by technician Eloise Waggoner.

I am not usually as much a fan of Anderson’s science fiction compared to his fantasy, but this one impressed me. It has an interesting mix of hard-science with psi-powers but a strong character focus. A compelling read.

Four Stars

Tomorrow Is a Million Years by J. G. Ballard
I am not quite sure why the cover claims these tales are never before published, as this one has been printed a number of times, including in New Worlds two years ago.

I don’t have much to add to Mark’s review, I will just say it is a strange, but wonderful piece.

Four Stars

Pond Water by John Brunner
Men attempt to create their ultimate defender, Alexander. The creation, indestructible and with all the knowledge of humanity, proceeds to invade and take control of more and more worlds. But what is Alexander to do when there are no more worlds to conquer?

This progresses well and Brunner shows us the scale of conquest vividly in such a short space. Unfortunately, the ending is so pat it wouldn’t even appear in the worst Twilight Zone episode.

Three Stars

The Dance of the Changer and the Three by Terry Carr
Forty-two men died on a mining expedition on the gas giant Loarra. According to a PR man who was there, the answer to what happened lies in an ancient myth of the native energy forms, The Dance of the Changer and the Three.

This is a very challenging story and you may need to read through a couple of times to fully understand it. However, it is definitely worth your patience. Carr really makes an effort to show the Loarra as truly alien, but not in an unknowably menacing way as Lovecraft does. Rather they have a completely different understanding of what life and reality is.

Five Stars

Crusade by Arthur C. Clarke
On an extra-galactic planet, a crystalline computerized creature sets out to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

What Clarke gives us here is a kind of fable about the dangers of biases and science for its own sake. A more cynical take than is usual for him; perhaps Kubrick's influence is rubbing off?

Four Stars

Ranging by John Jakes
Jakes’ tale is set centuries in the future, where generations range the universe, in order to map it and send back data. Whilst Delors wants to carefully explore as instructed, Jaim wishes to rebel and jump trillions of light years at a time.

This could have been an interesting take on exploration but it mostly descends into the two leads yelling at each other “you cannot understand because you’re just a man\girl”.

Two Stars

Mind Out of Time by Keith Laumer
Performing an experimental jump to Andromeda, the crew of the Extrasolar Exploratory Module find themselves at the end of space, where they start to experience reality outside of time.

I feel like Laumer was going for something analogous to the final section of 2001. However, he lacks the skill of Kubrick and Clarke, making what could be mysterious and profound merely serviceable.

A low Three Stars

The Inspector by James McKimmey
Steve Terry, hero of the planet of Tnp, went into orbit, walked out of his spaceship and suffocated. Forest and his team are sent to investigate why this happened, and why no one has attempted to retrieve the body.

This is the one story that does not conform to the brief—there is no particular reason this could not be set on Earth. In fact, there isn’t much need for it to be SFnal at all. With half a dozen small changes you could have it contemporaneously on a newly independent Caribbean Island.

Putting that aside, it is not a bad story, just rather pedestrian, where I had deduced the themes and mystery by the second page.

A low Three Stars

To the Dark Star by Robert Silverberg
Three scientists, a human man, a human woman altered to suit alien environments and a microcephalon, are sent to observe a star. One problem: they all hate each other.

Your feelings for this story will likely depend on how you feel about unpleasant protagonists. The narrator in this piece is incredibly so and the whole thing left me cold.

Two Stars

A Night in Elf Hill by Norman Spinrad
After 18 years of service, Spence is depressed that his travels in space will be over and he must choose a single planet to settle on. He writes to his psychologist brother Frank begging him to talk him out of going back to the mysterious city of The Race With No Name.

This is quite an impressive short story. Spinrad manages to seamlessly move from science fiction to fantasy to horror, creating a real emotional thrill. He also does it through a letter that has a unique tone of voice and gives a whole new sense to Spence’s descriptions.

It does sound like it might resemble what I have read of the Star Trek episode The Menagerie but I think Spinrad spins this yarn well enough that it doesn’t bother me.

Four Stars

Sulwen's Planet by Jack Vance
On Sulwen’s Planet, sit the wreckage of millennia old ships of two different species. Tall blue creatures, nicknamed The Wasps, and small white creatures, nicknamed the Sea Cows. A team of ambitious scientists departs from Earth, all determined to be the first to unravel these aliens' secrets.

Like Silverberg’s piece, this is also a tale of squabbling scientists, here primarily focused on the two linguists. Competent, enjoyable but forgettable.

Three Stars

Worlds of Fantasy #1

Worlds of Fantasy #1 Cover by Jack Gaughan depicting a human baby being bottle fed by a green amphibious creature
Cover and all illustrations by Jack Gaughan

After a 15-year hiatus Lester Del Rey returns to editing. He opens the magazine with a rambling editorial taking us from ancient firesides, through folktales, modern uptick in astrology, Tolkien, and theories of displacement, before concluding it doesn’t really matter as long as the stories are fun.

Well, are they? Let’s find out:

The Mirror of Wizardry by John Jakes
Brak the Barbarian shown on the floor after fighting the wizard
This marks the return of Brak the Barbarian, late of Cele Lalli’s Fantastic issues.

As Brak is fleeing from Lord Magnus he rescues a woman from rock demons. She reveals herself to be Nari, also fleeing but from Lord Garr of Gilgamarch and his wizard Valonicus, who can send forth shadow creatures after them with his magic mirror. Nari’s back is tattooed with a map to a treasure, one that could win or destroy a kingdom. Together the two attempt to flee across the Mountains of Smoke, but can they outrun such power?

This is a pretty standard story, full of the usual cliches of these kinds of tales. It probably would have managed a low three stars, except that it treats a rape victim very poorly. Brak does not seem to understand why a woman running scared would be wary of getting naked in front of a stranger who angrily badgers her for information about torture and sexual assault. And the ending is just disturbing in the wrong way.

A low two stars

Death is a Lonely Place by Bill Warren
Miklos Sokolos is a 68-year-old vampire who leaves his crypt in Parkline Cemetery to feed. But when he meets his latest potential victim, he is not sure if he can kill her.

I was originally surprised to see this here as it seemed like it would be more suited to Lowdnes’ Magazine of Horror, but, as it went on, I realized it was less a Lord Ruthven style tale, and more a meditation on how much of a curse the situation might be.

More thoughtful than expected.

Four Stars

As Is by Robert Silverberg
A turbaned man, descending on a rope from the sky with an oil can to aid another man standing by his car
Sam Norton is transferred from New York to Los Angeles, but his company will not pay moving costs. To save money he rents a U-Haul and buys an unusual secondhand car that was left for repairs a year ago but never returned to. Not long after Sam sets out, the prior owner returns and wants his vehicle back. How will he catch up with Sam before he reaches LA? By renting a flying horse, of course!

Eminently silly short.

Two stars for me, although car owners might give it three.

What the Vintners Buy by Mack Reynolds
Matt Williams is a hedonist who has tried everything twice but has grown bored. As such he approaches Old Nick to make a deal for the ultimate pleasure.

Yes, another “deal with the devil” story, a dull and talky example. I can’t help but wonder if this was a reject from The Devil His Due.

One Star

Conan and the Cenotaph by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp
Conan, arms up against a wall as he is attacked by a gelatinous creature
A young Conan “untampered by the dark deceits of the East” is working for the King of Turan, transporting back a treaty from the King of Kusan. Enroute their guide, Duke Feng, tells Conan of an ancient treasure hidden in a haunted valley and suggests together they can retrieve it.

This is another new tale of Conan from his biggest fans, however Carter and de Camp lack even a quarter of Howard’s skill. Over described, dull and the plot feels stretched even over these 10 pages. This would be bad enough but it, as you can probably tell from the quoted phrase above, invokes some horrible racism.

This can be seen most prominently in the villain of the piece. Duke Feng encapsulates every negative Asian stereotype, managing to somehow be both Fu Manchu and a sniveling traitorous coward. Whilst there are problems in Howard’s original work (the finer points of which my colleague Cora and I have expended much paper debating) this takes it many steps further.

One star

After Armageddon by Paris Flammonde
At the start of the “Final War”, Tom accidentally stumbles on the fountain of youth. Centuries later, after everyone else has died, Tom continues to wander the Earth.

This is another last man tale, the melancholic philosophical kind that used to fill the pages of New Worlds a few years back. This is not a great example and doesn’t add anything new to the already overused subgenre.

Two Stars

A Report on J. R. R. Tolkien by Lester Del Rey
The editor gives a look at the publishing history of The Lord of the Rings, the status of its planned sequels and the effect it is having on the industry.

Fine for what it is but, at only two pages, it does not delve into the why or give any information not already reported in multiple places.

Three Stars

The Man Who Liked by Robert Hoskins
A small man appears in the city dispensing joy to the residents. Who is he? And why is he being so generous?

A pleasant vignette, but one where you are continually waiting for the penny to drop. When it does, it is not where I would have predicted it going, but it works well.

Three Stars

Delenda Est by Robert E. Howard
The first printing of one of the many unpublished manuscripts that were left by the late author. This one is primarily a historical tale, set in the Vandal Kingdom of the Fifth Century. As King Genseric ponders his position, a mysterious stranger comes to convince him to sack Rome.

Howard clearly did his research and manages to explain the history of this much neglected period in an entertaining fashion. It also only contains a mild piece of speculative content (the rather obvious identity of the stranger), which is probably why it remained unsold.

Three Stars

However by Robert Lory
A large sea serpent peering over two men in a row boat
After having accidentally caused his boatman to be eaten, Hamper finds himself stuck in Grath. There, people are committed to only doing their profession, no matter how useless or obsolete it is. As such, getting across the water is to prove incredibly tricky.

Robert Lory has been writing for the main magazines for over 5 years, with some modern feeling pieces under his belt. This, however, feels like a reprint from the 19th century, one that might have been intended as a satire of mechanization but now reads as a tall tale.

Serviceable but silly and rambling.

Two Stars

A Delicate Balance

Artist's impression of What the New-New London Bridge may look like, a long steel structure only supported on either end
What the New-New London Bridge may look like

As can be seen, trying to do stories in an old style can be difficult work. Some, like Anderson and Warren, are able to use the ideas in a new way to make something profound. Others, such as de Camp and Carter, create an object of significantly less value. Whether constructing prose or pontoons it takes both skill and imagination few possess. However, those that do make the journey rewarding.




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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[September 22, 1968] Pageantry and Picket Signs

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by Gwyn Conaway


On September 7th 1968, Debra Barnes, also known as Miss Kansas, won the crown of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, sharing the spotlight with protestors that managed to hang banners during the live broadcast and spark a nation-wide controversy over women's liberation.

“The personal is political.”

This astute piece of wisdom, born of deep discussions in the rising New York Radical Women group this summer, was voiced by one of its leaders, Carol Hanisch. She’s the feminist mastermind behind the Miss America Pageant protest that happened just two weeks ago on the Atlantic City boardwalk outside of the live broadcast of the event on the seventh of September.

When it comes to a woman’s image, she couldn’t be more on the nose. Women’s beauty has been touted as the ultimate symbol of the successes of nations, militaries, companies, and men. Even the origins of the Miss America Pageant are rooted in consumerism and marketing.


Miss America has two key duties after her coronation. Product placement and stimulating the economy is the origin of the pageant, and no surprise now includes brand sponsors such as Pepsi. Her other obligation, however, is touring the U.S. troops. The New York Radical Women call the latter a "death mascot."

In 1921, the first Miss America pageant was held just after Labor Day to lengthen the resort season and bring more revenue to the New York and Jersey coasts. The contest was described as an evaluation of a woman’s “personality and social graces,” with an initial round of judgment conducted by photograph–a medium, I should mention, that is hard pressed to showcase either of these laudable traits.

Within a score of years, the requirements for the pageant became clearer, though surely they were a requirement from the start. A contestant was to be a white woman in good health, never married, between the ages of 18 and 28. All the accolades that she brought with her were expected to be mildly bland, uninspiring, and only the sort of polite conversation one has with their in-laws. The Goldilocks Rule aboundeth: Not too hot, and not too cold. This contradictory manner was invented to define the Modern Woman by none other than Charles Dana Gibson, a male illustrator-turned-editor for Life magazine, once again linking the idea of women's beauty, national identity, and consumerism from the male point of view.


When Women Are Jurors, studies in expression by Charles Dana Gibson, 1902.

When New York Radical Women organized the protest outside of Boardwalk Hall, the history of the pageant was baked into its message of decrying the tradition's inherent sexism. Performances of being shackled and mopping the boardwalk with an infant in hand, for example, were meant to visually represent the unending pressures of Western women. Caricatures of the contestants were labeled as a cattle auction, and even a sheep draped in a banner that read “Miss America” was paraded around the picket line throughout the day.

But perhaps the most provocative element of the protest was the now infamous Freedom Trash Can.


Protestors throw their objects of oppression into the Freedom Trash Can on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Contrary to popular belief, no bras were burned that day, though organizers claim they'd wanted to do so in solidarity with recent draft card burnings.

Yes, the one into which women threw their objects of oppression: lash curlers and fakies, nylons and office pumps, girdles, wigs, lipstick, gloves, the Cosmopolitan… The one you’ve no doubt read mention of in the Atlantic City Press’s scorching article, “Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.” The assumption that women burned their effects seems trollish sensationalism from my point of view, though. In looking through statements from Carol Hanisch, she mentions they had intended to burn them, much like veteran draft cards in the protests on the lawn over the summer, but were instructed not to. The protest happened on a wooden boardwalk, after all.

The image of burning one’s brassiere is so striking that it will surely live in infamy, and I won’t be surprised if it happens during feminist protests in the future. Truthfully, it’s already become a double-edged sword. While women might choose to honor the efforts of the activists who came before them through bra-burning, their critics will latch onto it as well, claiming it a symbol of anarchy. To think, choosing one’s own most personal garments could be such a political threat.

However, harking on the Miss America Pageant alone only tells half of the fascinating tale of this year’s beauty brawl. The New York Radical Women’s protest revolved entirely around the misogynistic use of women as a patriotic trophy and how it signaled to American women what mainstream beauty standards should be in the eyes of male judges. But focusing on the pageant by nature necessitated the whole-cloth exclusion of brown and Black women who, as I laid out in the rules of the pageant, were barred from participation.

While white women in the United States have been oppressed by the gender extremes of our society for centuries, Black and brown women haven’t been included at all in the definition of ideal beauty. This means their struggle has been two-fold, balancing the incorrigible partnership of the legacy of slavery and a beauty standard that expects their hair, features, and physique to mold itself after the white ideal.


Phillip Savage (center) plans a civil rights march in 1963 with collaborators Cecil B Moore (left) and A. Philip Randolph (right). Savage cofounded the Miss Black America pageant with J. Morris Anderson. The poster below is undated, though this style of poster and rhetoric was ubiquitous throughout the events of September 7th.

Just down the street from the Miss America Pageant broadcast, there was another event being held: the first annual Miss Black America Pageant.

While the New York Radical Women’s protest challenged the male gaze and has received immense derision from (mostly male) newsrooms, the Miss Black America Pageant has enjoyed public success so far. J. Morris Anderson of Philadelphia decided to organize the event when his daughters lamented over not being able to participate in the long-standing contest. He, Phillip Savage, and others, came together to make a space for the Black beauty ideal on the American stage. They didn’t directly oppose Miss America and its whiteness. Rather, much like Thurgood Marshall in his Supreme Court hearings last year, they circumvented the argument altogether.


I can’t help but think that male involvement in the Miss Black America Pageant was critical to its warm reception, especially since men were barred from participating in the protests down the street. (New York Radical Women even forbade male journalists from interviewing participants.)

The strategic differences between the two events couldn’t have been more stark, nor the message more similar. While the Miss America Pageant protests on the boardwalk were meant to cast derision on men’s control of women’s bodies, the Miss Black America Pageant aimed to take ownership of Black beauty. Both events were after the same goals: to give women a voice in their own image, the power to decide what makes them feel powerful, and the platform to enact change for their communities. 


Miss Saundra Williams, crowned the first Miss Black America, gave a monologue entitled “I Am Black,” performed an African dance, and wore her hair in a natural halo of curls. Miss Williams took ownership of her roots before, during, and after her coronation. Rather than the event pressuring its contestants into following the more marketable approach of the longstanding Miss America Pageant, the organizers and contestants took it as an opportunity to speak directly to their own demographic and define beauty on their own terms.

Whether it's suffrage, the right to divorce, or the profit of our bodies, women have been fighting the same battles head on for centuries with abysmal results. Truly, if we’re fighting the same stigmas in the next century, it will come at no surprise.

Maybe the Miss Black America pageant has the right idea. We learned in looking at fashions of the Civil Rights Movement (of which many of its leaders were involved in this pageant) that the old saying holds true: it’s easier to catch flies with honey. I don’t believe that Miss Black America capitulates to the structure of how white America judges beauty, but rather makes room, and in doing so, diminishes the power of the mainstream.

While New York Radical Women and other women's liberation movements battle the mainstream head on, efforts such as the invention of Miss Black America flank our culture. In a trench war so long and grueling, I have no doubt that these mainstream ideals will sadly stand the test of time…

But they'll also be fighting for oxygen with every new space we create.


Saundra Williams speaking at the 369th Regiment Armory in Harlem New York, 1968.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 20, 1968] It comes and goes (October 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Out and in

Being something of a geography buff, one of my favorite games is to go to a thrift shop and inspect their globe collection.  I can generally tell what year a globe was manufactured from the configuration of countries.  And while we haven't had anything like the banner year of 1960, when more than a dozen African states sprang into existence, nevertheless, there are still enough changes every year to keep the game going.

For instance, this month, the Kingdom of Swaziland with its 400,000 denizens, achieved independence from the United Kingdom.  The second-smallest African country, is not entirely free, of couse.  It is completely surrounded by South Africa, with all transportation lines running through Pretoria.  The money is South African.  All telegraph lines go through South Africa.  As for their economy, it's mostly propped up by British hand-outs.

But they do have sovereignty, something South Africa tried to snatch from them time and again, but which was thwarted by the British.  Plus, the new country has vast mineral reserves of asbestos and iron, plus forests and fertile soil.  So King Sobhuza I just might make a go of things.

Going the other way, the people of West Irian (formerly Netherlands New Guinea) have has been annexed as Indonesia's 26th province.  Six years ago, the United Nations stepped in to stop a budding conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesians, who both laid claim to the region.  Now the 800,000 poverty-stricken inhabitants are officially under the auspices of General Suharto.  Sometime soon, they will be given the choice between independence and a union with their neighboring would-be superpower.  It is anyone's guess how free and honest the local elections can be under the Suharto dictatorship (i.e. don't expect a free West Papua any time soon…)


The Morning Star Flag—which you won't see flown until and unless the Irians get independence…

Good and bad

Speaking of mixed bags, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction has much to recommend it, but then there's all the rest of the magazine.  See for yourself:


by Ronald Walotsky

The Meddler, by Larry Niven

Bruce Cheeseborough, Jr. is a private dick operating some time in the near future.  While in the course of waging a one man crusade against the new crime boss, Lester Dunhaven Sinclair, a certain meddler crosses his path.  Said meddler first appears as a nebbishy, softish man, but he quickly betrays himself as a protean blob, possessed of all manner of wondrous powers.  The "Martian" offers to help the detective, granting him invulnerability, the gift of flight, time dilation…but Cheeseborough finds the tilting of the scales unsporting.

Still, when the detective makes his final assault on Chez Sinc, it's going to take every resource he has, from human wit to alien marvel, to come out the other end alive…

The Meddler is a brilliant piece of genre hybridization, combining hard-boiled noir with cunning science fiction.  Every piece of the story's myriad puzzles is meticulously laid out, so that an astute reader can figure out the revelations just before they materialized.  Beyond that, the piece is funny as well as perfectly paced.

Five stars, and a nice broadening of the author's talents.

Time Was, by Phyllis Murphy

Picture a man so obsessed with saving time, that he applies the art of speed reading to life.  You know: skipping over most of it, trying to absorb only the salient points.  Except, how do you know which bits are the important ones?  And what if you lose the ability to focus on any given thing in the pursuit of apprehending everything?

This story reminded me of a friend who insisted a person must do several things at once to be truly efficient.  If she read the paper, she listened to the radio.  When we watched television together, she'd inevitably crochet.  Remarkably efficient…except half the time, she lost track of the show's plot and had to ask us what was going on.

Three stars.

The Wide World of Sports , by Harvey Jacobs

They say that football is a bloody sport, but it's nowhere near as bloody as whatever Jacobs is describing in this story, featuring machine guns, the slaughter of all audience members of a certain name, and general mayhem.

This story would be more effective if it made a lick of sense and/or had a plot.  Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

Coffee Break, by D. F. Jones

There's a Laugh-In bit where the projected news break underneath the action runs, "The United Nations today voted unanimously on everything; UN police are still looking for who put grass in the vents."

This story covers the exact same ground, but it takes much longer to do it, and not in nearly as funny a manner.

Two stars.

Dance Music for a Gone Planet, by Sonya Dorman

Fiddling after Rome is burnt?  A tinge of hope for a post-apocalyptic ode?

I'm not sure—I found this one a bit too obtuse to understand.  Maybe I'm the obtuse one.

Two stars.

Possible, That's All!, by Arthur C. Clarke

The Other Good Doctor takes umbrage at Asimov's assertion that nothing can go faster than light.  He offers up some counterexamples, but they're honestly rather feeble, and the article is not particularly coherent.

Three stars.

Try a Dull Knife, by Harlan Ellison

Eddie Burma is an empath, life of the party, and he has so much to give.  Folks are drawn to his magnetic personality like moths to flame, but, unknowingly, each takes a little bit from Burma in each encounter.  This is the price of popularity: eventually, there can be nothing left of you, the you behind the glamor and charm, because no one wants you.  They just want what rubs off.

If you've heard this refrain before, it's because Ellison delivered a soliloquy on the subject in his last collection, From the Land of Fear.  Harlan is afeared that no one really loves him; they just love The Talent that resides within his physical husk.  Readers of that collection also have encountered Knife in its embryonic form, a snippet of it among the story fragments at the beginning of the book.

Anyway, I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your soul overlaps with Harlan's, then his writing resonates with you as The Truth.  If you are much unlike the man (as, for instance, I am), then you can admire the way he strings words together, but they don't move much.

Three stars for me.  Four stars, perhaps, for you.

Segregationist, by Isaac Asimov

Organ transplants are the topic du jour in both science and science fiction.  I find it particularly interesting that much is made of the muddled identity of a person when they incorporate the parts of other humans (viz. Van Scyoc's A Trip to Cleveland General in this month's Galaxy).  This time around, Asimov takes things a step further: are humans less human if they have metal hearts?  And are robots more human if they incorporate biological components?

I liked this story, one of the better pieces Dr. A has done since largely going on fiction hiatus after the launch of Sputnik.

Four stars.

The Ghost Patrol, by Ron Goulart

Speaking of crossed genres, Ghost Patrol is the latest in the Max Kearny series about an art director who solves occult crimes in his spare time.  These yarns range from hilariously clever to limp.

This one, about a free doctor beset both by celebrity ghosts and Bircher anti-freeloaders, belongs, sadly, in the latter category.

Two stars.

Little Found Satellite, by Isaac Asimov

This month's piece is worth it for the funny anecdote that forms its preface.  The rest is a pleasant, if not particularly deep, history of Saturn's telescopic observation.  The piece culminates in the discovery of Saturn's tenth moon, Janus, just outside the ring system.

Four stars.

The Fangs of the Trees, by Robert Silverberg

At a recent convention, my daughter led a panel entitled "Plants vs. People", in which the panelists and audience discussed green menaces of various kinds.  Triffids, killer ragweed, stuff like that.  I wish I'd had Fangs as an example, as it's a good one.

Zen Holbrook is runs a plantation on a world countless light years from Earth.  His trees produce a valuable, hallucinogenic-juiced fruit.  They're also quasi-sentient, something like ultra-advanced Venus Fly Traps.  Though he tries to keep his relationship with his trees strictly business, he can't help ascribing them personalities, giving them names, and treating them like pampered pets.

Which makes it all the more difficult when he gets news that all of the trees in Sector C have been afflicted with "rust", a disease that not only spells their impending death, but has the risk of spreading throughout the whole planet.  Holbrook must kill his friends lest an entire world's economy die.  Further complicating the matter is his 15-year old niece, Naomi, who would rather die than see the grove decimated.

It is implied, though never specifically stated, that there is no less destructive way to solve the problem: not only must the trees die, but so must an entire species of benign hopper-bear—a link in the infection cycle.  Lord knows what that will do the local ecosystem, but "the needs of the many…"

It's an interesting, thought-provoking piece, composed with Silverberg's usual excellence, though I'm not quite sure which side we're supposed to take, if any.  Like, do we all need to grow up and realize that ecological destruction is a valid and important necessity?  Or is Zen actually the villain?  I could have done without so much of the Uncle's attraction for his niece, too, even if it was supposed to say…something…about Zen's character.  I know that the word for people who ascribe the emotions of an author's creation to the author himself is "moron" (at least, per Larry Niven), but Silverbob sure includes a lot of just-pubescent minors in his stories…

Four stars.

Whaddaya make of that?

If you read judiciously, this month's mag is terrific, kind of like how, if you parse the news in just the right way, it's all positive developments.  Look deeper, and the seams show.  Still, whether the news or the magazine are half full or empty all depends on your temperament, I suppose.

I guess I'll leave with the wishy washy conclusion that's always true: things could be worse!




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 18, 1968] Dangerous Visions (Not Those Dangerous Visions!) (September 1968 Galactoscope)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Finlandia

Emil Petaja is an American writer of Finnish ancestry. His best known works are a series of novels based on the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. (Saga of Lost Earths, The Star Mill, The Stolen Sun, and Tramontane. These were all published from 1966 to 1967.)

Petaja's latest novel, although not part of this series, also deals with themes from Finnish mythology.


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Doctor Stephen McCord is an anthropologist. Although he's the only major character who isn't of Finnish descent, he's studied the culture and knows something of the language.

Before the novel begins, his college buddy Art Mackey took off for a remote area of Montana, in search of his girlfriend Ilma, who mysteriously returned to her old homestead. Stephen gets a tape recording from his friend, giving him a few hints as to what's going on. (It also serves as exposition for the reader.)

It seems that the former logging town of Hellmouth, inhabited by Finnish immigrants, was completely destroyed in a huge forest fire in 1906. When Art arrived in search of Ilma's nearby farmhouse, he found the place looking exactly the way it did six decades ago, with some of the former citizens still alive and kicking.

Intrigued by this mystery (and wondering if his pal has gone nuts), Stephen makes his way to the supposedly vanished town. He discovers that Hellmouth is indeed still around. Furthermore, the inhabitants worship Ukko, the chief god of Finnish legend. (Roughly comparable to Zeus or Thor, I believe.)

Stephen finds Art, and they both search for Ilma. Things get weird when they actually run into what seems to be Ukko, a being whose presence is so overwhelming that it's almost impossible not to fall to one's knees in adoration. The apparent god promises to make Earth a utopia, in exchange for worship. Ukko also has plans for Stephen.

What happens involves Ilma's elderly father Izza, her hunchbacked brother Yalmar, the local schoolteacher/librarian, and the steel plate inside Stephen's head, a souvenir of his time as an ambulance driver during a conflict in Southeast Asia. (Maybe Vietnam, as the story takes place just a little bit in the future, some time in the 1970's.)

The author writes clearly and elegantly. I always knew what was going on and was able to keep track of the characters. There are many vivid descriptions of Petaja's home state of Montana. (He now lives in San Francisco, which is also depicted excellently in the early part of the book.)

Besides having a compelling plot that kept me reading in one sitting, the novel has some intriguing and controversial things to say about the nature of deity and its relationship with humanity. Even at the very end of the text, Stephen still isn't sure if opposing Ukko was the right thing to do.

Four stars.

Comedy and Tragedy

The latest Ace Double to fall into my hands (designated as H-85, for those of you keeping score) offers a pair of short novels with contrasting moods. One is lighthearted, the other is serious. Let's start with the humorous one.

Destination: Saturn, by David Grinnell and Lin Carter


Cover art by Kelly Freas.

David Grinnell is actually the well-known fan, writer, and editor Donald A. Wollheim. He also created the Ace Double series, so he must feel right at home.

This novel was published last year in hardcover.


Cover art by Michael M. Peters.

The protagonist is a filthy rich and rather egotistical fellow named Ajax Calkins. A little research reveals that Wollheim (without co-author Carter) has been writing about him since 1941, sometimes under the pen name Martin Pearson. Most recently, this old material was recycled into the novel Destiny's Orbit. The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review a while back, calling it a juvenile space opera.

In the current volume, Ajax is the king of an asteroid that is actually a gigantic spaceship built by the civilization that was destroyed when their home planet blew up long ago, creating the asteroid belt. He and his fiancée Emily Hackenschmidt are on Earth, leaving the asteroid in the hands (so to speak) of their loyal Martian friend, a spider-like being called Wuj.

Dastardly amoeba-like aliens, the inhabitants of Saturn, are the sworn enemies of Earth. (In a touch of satire, we find out that they were perfectly nice folks until they learned aggression from humans.) Two of the Saturnians disguise themselves as Ajax and Emily and convince Wuj they're the real thing. They set off for Saturn, eager to uncover the ancient spaceship's secrets and use its advanced technology to conquer the solar system.

What I've failed to convey is the fact that this is a comedy. Ajax manages to save the day, of course, but he's also something of a fool. The more levelheaded Emily is often exasperated at him, with good reason.

The novel is written in a dryly tongue-in-cheek style that is more amusing than the usual science fiction farce. There are quite a few witty lines. I'm not a big fan of comic SF, but this one is better than some.

Three stars.

Invader on My Back, by Philip E. High

Let's flip the book over and take a look at something without laughs.


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

The cover proudly announces that this is the novel's first book publication. I assume that's true, but there's also a British hardcover edition that came out this year.


Cover art by Colin Andrews.

The story takes place a few hundred years after society fell apart, for reasons not apparent until later in the novel. Humanity has managed to build itself back up, but there's been a strange change in people. They're divided up into castes. Again, the explanation for this is unknown.

Roughly half of the population consists of Norms; ordinary folks. The other half are Delinks; murderers and other violent criminals. Some Norms and Delinks are also Scuttlers. These are people who have an intense phobia about the sky, and can't bear to look at it.

A small number of folks are Stinkers. Everybody else hates these people; so much so, that few of them survive. Those who do isolate themselves and protect their lives with various resources.

Michael Craig is a Stinker. (That looks like an example of nasty graffiti, doesn't it?) He gets a message from the police (by mail; if he came anywhere near them they would try to kill him) asking him to try an experiment. The cops want to know what would happen if two Stinkers met. Would they loathe each other on sight?

Michael agrees to meet Geo Hastings, a Stinker who lives in Africa. The oddly named Geo turns out to be an attractive woman. If you think the two are going to fall in love, give yourself an A in predicting familiar plot developments.

Besides not trying to kill each other, the two discover that they can communicate telepathically. Things would seem to be turning out nicely, if it were not for the Geeks.

A Geek is a type of human being that has just appeared recently. They are physically superior, tend to be cold-bloodedly calculating, and are intent on wiping out the rest of humanity. In particular, they are bent on destroying the Stinkers; not for the usual reason (pure, unexplained hatred) but as part of their plan to conquer the world.

Without giving anything away (although you may be able to predict the novel's plot twists), let's just say the reason for all these weird happenings is revealed. Can Norms, Delinks, and Stinkers work together against the Geeks and the secret menace behind them? Not to mention the Scuttlers, who have a vital role to play.

This isn't a bad novel. Not great, but not bad. The story held my interest. (I haven't mentioned Michael's three heavily armed robot birds, who are the most charming characters.) It's worth reading once.

Three stars.


by Cora Buhlert

The Long Con: God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake

Science fiction may be my first love, but I read other genres as well. And so my latest pick-up at the local import bookstore was a crime novel entitled God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake. The reason I bought the book is that it just won the prestigious Edgar Award, i.e. the mystery genre's equivalent to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, for the best crime novel of the year, beating out Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. Any novel that can beat a juggernaut like Rosemary's Baby is certainly worth checking out, so I picked it up. And reader, I was not disappointed.

God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake

The Most Gullible Man in New York City

The protagonist of God Save the Mark is one Fred Fitch, who must be the most gullible man in New York City. Fred is a magnet for con artists and there's not a scam in existence that Fred will not fall for.

The novel opens with Fred getting a phone call from a lawyer that his Uncle Matt has died and left Fred more than three hundred thousand US-dollars. This makes even the extremely gullible Fred suspicious, especially since he does not have an Uncle Matt.

So Fred alerts his friend his best and probably only friend, Detective Jack Reilly of the NYPD's "bunco squad", i.e. the police department dealing with fraud. Reilly tells Fred to go to the appointment with the fake lawyer, so Reilly can arrest him red-handed. Alas, Fred is late for the meeting because he got scammed… again and it turns out that the lawyer is not a fraud after all, but the real deal. As is the will of the late Uncle Matt. Fred really did inherit more than three hundred thousand US-dollars.

However, there's a catch or rather several. For starters, Uncle Matt was a con artist himself and the black sheep of the family, which is why Fred has never heard of him. What is more, Uncle Matt, though terminally ill, was murdered. Which makes Fred the prime suspect.

A City of Con Artists

The situation quickly escalates. To begin with, Fred's new found riches make him a target for even more would-be con artists, including a childhood sweetheart who intends to hold him to a marriage proposal made as a kid or sue him for breach of promise and a neighbour who wants to publish his alternate history novel Veni, Vidi, Vici with Air Power via a predatory vanity press. Worse, whoever murdered Uncle Matt is now taking potshots at Fred. Finally, Fred also finds himself entangled with two very different women, Gertie Divine, a former stripper who was the late Uncle Matt's nurse, and Karen Smith, Reilly's bit on the side who still hopes he'll marry her someday, once he gets over his Catholic guilt induced reluctance to divorce his wife.

The intense pressure under which Fred finds himself finally makes him wise up. He tells off several would-be con artists and also puts his skills as an independent researcher to use to investigate Uncle Matt's murder himself, since he no longer trusts the police.

However, there are still many twists and turns ahead, including a hilarious chase scene where Fred steals a child's bicycle to escape his pursuers and ends up tumbling headfirst into a pond in Central Park.

This was the first novel by Donald E. Westlake (who also writes as Richard Stark and under a number of other pen names and has even dabbled in science fiction on occasion) that I read, but it certainly won't be the last, because this book is laugh out loud funny and a complete and utter delight.

In many ways, God Save the Mark is a reminiscent of the screwball comedies of thirty years ago, yet it is also a solid mystery that plays fair with the reader and delivers plenty of red herrings as well as all the clues needed to solve it. The novel also offers an excellent overview of the various cons and scams going around, some I was aware of and others that were completely new to me. The ending is a perfect fit.

A Deserving Winner?

Edgar Award trophy

So is this novel better than Rosemary's Baby? Well, the two books are difficult to compare, because they are so very different. But all in all, I'd agree with the verdict of the Mystery Writers of America that God Save the Mark is a most deserving winner of the 1968 Edgar Award.

A fluffy, frothy caper that will leave you rolling on the floor laughing and guessing till the end.

Five stars.


by Jason Sacks

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Sometimes as a reviewer you just don’t quite trust yourself when you encounter something totally unexpected. When you read a work which feels sui generis for science fiction, a book which draws comparison to literary fiction like Dos Passos, Burges and Nabokov, it’s hard to assess that book in its own context.

John Brunner’s fascinating new novel Stand on Zanzibar is the spiritual successor to those modernist writers.

Brunner’s novel reads as part pulp fiction and part assault-the-senses bursts of information. Zanzibar is a prophecy and a critique, a satire and a work of deep seriousness. It has plot lines and complex emotions and an energy that won’t quit, and at 576 pages of very short chapters, it somehow felt exhausting and left me craving more. It’s also extremely hard to describe, so be aware I’m barely skimming the surface here, and I welcome anybody who’s willing to add their own comments in an LoC to this magazine.

Let’s start with the easy parts to describe. On its most basic level, Stand on Zanzibar is about the problem of overpopulation.  When we all were in diapers, if stood side by side, all of humanity could take up a space roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. By the distant year of 2010, however, as Brunner writes, "If you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space of one foot by two, you could stand us all on the 640 square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar."

There’s so much information contained in one sentence. You get one of the key themes of the novel and also a feeling of Brunner’s approach to his writing. Like Burgess’s punks in Clockwork Orange, the characters in this book chatter and mumble in an invented slang which feels clever and becomes part of the larger reading experience of the book. (Brunner admits a strong influence on  him from Burgess.) The language forces readers out of our comfort zones and therefore pay closer attention to the often fractured way Brunner chooses to tell his tale. (A codder is a certain type of man and a shiggy a certain type of woman and an appleofmyeye is a child, by the way.)

Mr. Brunner

The other key piece of information in that sentence above how fears of world overpopulation has led to strong laws against procreation. Those restrictive rules in turn have created a vast black market in child-rearing, as citizens are shown considering traveling to the state of Puerto Rico to have kids, much as one might escape their home state for an abortion or divorce to defy difficult local laws. World society also angles towards eugenics, forced sterilizations and genetic modifications. Can suicide booths be far behind?

All of the above is mere background – though thoughtful, fascinating background – for the main   thrust of this sprawling exercise. Much of the book tells the story of the small calm African country of Beninia, population 900,000, which has become the main staging point for refugees from wars in three neighboring countries. Those refugees despise each other, but the country has a kind of tenuous peace under the benevolent rule of President Zadkiel F. Obomi. However, President Obomi wants to retire. And when he retires, what will happen to the peace he worked so hard to broker?

Enter another key aspect of this book’s fascinating plot. Obomi is good friends with American Ambassador Elihu Masters, and as they discuss the problem, Masters comes up with an unexpected suggestion: what if American corporation General Technics (motto: "The difficult we did yesterday. The impossible we're doing right now") took over the country? What if the country exchanged its vast offshore mineral and oil reserves for education and infrastructure creation?

Parts of the book alternate between reveries by Obomi and the life in New York City shared by roommates Donald Hogan and Norman House. House is “Afram”, African-American, and has astutely used his race and his native intelligence to gain himself a powerful role inside GT. That means he will be on the ground while GT moves operations to Beninia – that is, of course, if Norman can shake his deep feelings of melancholia and dissatisfaction with his life and his career. Hogan, meanwhile, seems innocent since he spends most of his days at the New York Public Library. But in fact Hogan is a “Dilettanti”, a spy recruited by the government because of his preternatural skills at discovering patterns in seemingly normal experiences. Hogan is passive until “activated” by the government, and he worries about that aspect of his life.

Until he actually is activated and sent to Socialist Asian country of Yatakang, where the government has announced how eminent geneticist Dr. Sugaiguntung has invented a way for everybody around the world to give birth to perfect children. But is their assertion true, or it just a lie on top of all the other lies circulating in this complex world? Can Donald prove the Yatakang government’s announcement is a lie? Can he persuade the people of Yatakang to support the leader of a guerilla rebellion which is happening in the country’s mountains?

Shades of ol' Fidel

*Whew.* There’s so much there just in the plot. I’m sure you can see the pulpy outlines of a Le Carre style spy novel, as well as chances for Swiftian social satire in both storylines I’ve described, and yet all that description barely scratches the surface of this most profoundly wild novel. Because underpinning this entire book is a deeper critique of world society, a society full of selfishness and cheap thrills and tawdry media which creates false reality in its shows.

Most damningly, Brunner presents a world in which people seem constantly interconnected and yet somehow deeply distant from each other. Hogan and House, for instance, despite being roommates, scarcely know anything about each other. The media consumed by the people in this world prevents them from being social, and that gap has vast societal consequences. When people can literally project fictionalized versions of themselves on fantasy television shows, what attraction does the real world have? Drugs are all pervasive. Suburbs are collapsing. The planet is groaning from the weight of all the people living upon it. Yet the vast majority of men and women in this world care much more about the shows they consume than they do about the world they have created.

And there’s so much more here. There’s Shalmaneser, the super computer which makes critical decisions on Earth (wonder if Brunner heard about Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001 ideas?). There’s the muckers, a group of random people who go on killing sprees for no reason. There’s a drug which forces people to tell the truth which is given to a bishop who spends a Sunday mass telling everyone his real feelings about God. I could go on and on, and dear reader, I know I’m skipping one of your favorite elements of this book.

But I grow filled with a bit of despair that I could do an adequate job of explaining any element of this book; even more, I despair at the idea a mere plot summary would be useful to anybody who might be considering reading this astounding book.

So let me sum my feelings up this way. Like many of us here at the Journey, I’ve long been a fan of Mr. Brunner’s writing. But Stand on Zanzibar takes all of John Brunner’s writing abilities and takes them to a quantum level. He displayed massive potential in many of his earlier works, but here Brunner shows that potential paid off in spades.

No matter the context, on first read, Stand on Zanzibar Brunner has delivered the wildest, weirdest, most successful book of the year so far. Previously I called Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage the best book I had read in 1968 up to that point. Brunner’s achievement far exceeds Panshin's. I hope to be rereading this book in that far-flung future of 2010 and seeing how many of Brunner’s prophecies came true.

Five stars.

[And new to the Galactoscope, we are pleased to introduce poet and author Tonya R. Moore, who has dived into New Wave's deep end with her first brush with Chip Delany….]


by Tonya R. Moore

Nova, by Samuel R. Delany

Nova was my first encounter with the work of Samuel R. Delaney who has, thus far, proven himself exemplary of the originality and innovativeness one would expect from the current New Wave of Science Fiction writers. Set in a distant future where humans have migrated to other worlds, this book paints a chaotic but beautiful picture of human turmoil and adventurousness in an ever expanding universe.

Lorq Von Ray is a born upstart from a family of nouveau-riche propelled into high society by their ill-gotten gains. He makes friends and, eventually, enemies with Prince and Ruby, quintessential Earth-nobility driven by power, greed, and a keen sense of self-entitlement.

Von Ray grew up haunted by constant reminders of the social stratum wedging a vast chasm between himself and the siblings. Ever ambitious, Von Ray pits wills and wits against Prince and Ruby, aiming to upset the economic balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.

Further embittered by their twisted and broken friendship, he sets out, with dogged determination, to hit the motherlode of interstellar treasures in the form of illyrion, the ephemeral byproduct of a nova and the most valuable and potent energy source known to mankind.

Should Von Ray succeed in this second attempt to capture this precious material in abundance from the nova, his payload promises to transform the economy of the Pleiades system and upend Prince’s monopoly on interstellar travel technology which allows them to hoard most of the wealth and stratify the balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.

This book introduces a motley cast of characters who are destined to be enmeshed in the many dangers and high drama that comes along with being employed by Von Ray.

Mouse, for example, is a nomadic troubadour eking out a meager living while playing interplanetary hopscotch in the Draco system. He winds up on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, while seeking employment on one of the spaceships bound for other star systems and greater opportunities.

Here, Mouse encounters Lorq Von Ray, scion of the richest family in the Pleiades system and jumps at the opportunity to join the ragtag crew of cyborg studs on Von Ray’s spaceship bound for the heart of an exploding star.

Ruby Red and Prince don’t appreciate Von Ray’s intent to rise above a station they consider beneath them, not to mention shift humanity’s prosperity from Draco to the Pleiades system. A cargo hold filled with seven tons of illyrion would certainly help him achieve that.

Mouse and his syrynx, a musical instrument that conjures holographic imagery, bear witness to the changing times while the melodrama of a twisted love triangle unfolds among Von Ray, the selectively diffident Ruby Red, and the pridefully neurotic Prince.

The gypsy troubadour playing his syrynx is a recurring motif representing the backdrop humanity's culture and history against which the story unfolds. The syrynx, a stolen object, ironically foreshadows the climax of the story where it is once again stolen then turned into a weapon.

Delany’s command of astrophysics and the science behind supernovas is reasonably solid. He proves himself a master of using literary language to describe scientific concepts and the murky dynamics of human interpersonal entanglements but there are elements of Nova that make little sense.

Ruby Red’s complicity with Prince’s cruelty and neurotic behavior seems arbitrary, for instance. As a character, she seems to lack a will of her own. Despite her prominence in the story, we’re never given a real glimpse inside the mind of the woman. What does Ruby Red want? Why does she do the things that she does?

Ultimately, Nova is a beautifully chaotic and original tale rife with vivid, sometimes visceral prose, exuberant dialogue, and an intriguingly colorful cast of characters.

4.5 stars.




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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction