[July 26, 1967] We Got Some Kicks on Route 66 (the continuing saga of Vicki and Mel)

July 26, 2022 Vicki Lucas 2 Comments

by Victoria Lucas

Well, we’re here! Months have gone by, I know, since my last report to this newsletter about my usual shenanigans, damped last time by my mother’s death but buoyed by anticipating the journey my sweetie Mel and I just finished to New York City.

To me, NYC is “The” City, the literary and musical and cultural center on the East Coast that outshines even “The City” where Mel and I met and where I had lived for a few years, San Francisco. I salivated at the thought of working at a publishing house, going to concerts of new experimental music, and getting involved in the protests here against the Vietnam War.

Route 66

It was exciting, too, because I had never been east of Arizona, or indeed visited any other state except California, or any foreign country except Mexico. Now Mel and I are living in New York City and planning – in a year or two – to travel to Europe. On our way here we spent many hours on Route 66, and yes, and there were some “kicks,” such as going through the Petrified Forest, and eating at diners along the way, but Mel is the one who likes to drive. He will drive just about anywhere just to check it out. In this case there was a lot of the US to check out: from coast to coast.

To avoid getting lost, we visited our local AAA office and consulted with them about the best way to get to New York from our apartment in North Beach. After some deliberation, we asked for a TripTik that took us to Route 66 at Barstow via 101, 152, and 99. From there to Oklahoma City, our little spiral-bound book said, we could experience the historic highway, but the last leg to Chicago seemed a waste of time since we had no business there, so we dropped off 66 at OK City and followed 40 till we could pick up Highway 81 just east of Knoxville. Mel had never been in the south, so it was an adventure for both of us.

Aliens among them

Not that kind of alien.

Just a little anecdote about how alien it was to be in the south, even though we are both white and didn’t have to worry about where to sleep or eat as we tooled along in our green and white VW bus – nothing bad, just alien. We pulled into the parking lot of a hamburger joint – maybe somewhere in Tennessee (it’s all starting to melt together in the summer heat). It was evening and we were looking for a motel to spend the night, since our expenses were being paid by Mel’s company for whom he is now working (with a promotion) in NYC. We both ordered hamburgers. There were few condiments on the table, including salt and vinegar, but no ketchup or mustard. When the burgers arrived, we asked for ketchup.

The waitress looked at us as if we had just walked through a wall. “Ketchup?” she repeated, as if even the word were foreign to her. (Did she want it spelled “catsup”?) Yes, we reiterated that we wanted ketchup. She left and returned with a bottle of the red stuff. We were almost the only people in the place since it was after dinner time, and we heard a lot of giggling of the staff behind the counter. Mel and I looked at each other. In what corner of the world did we find ourselves that ketchup was an unknown and ridiculous accompaniment to a hamburger? This one, evidently.

Ketchup! (or is it Catsup!)

New York City turns out to be alien too, even though there are concerts (YES!), and we have joined something called LEMPA (Lower Eastside Mobilization for Peace Action–spelling out “lamp” in Spanish) to protest The (Vietnam) War. The streets here in the Lower East Side where we found an apartment (we are saving for Europe) are full of trash, and parking is problematic because any car left on the street overnight is lacking something in the morning that it had had only the night before. Including our van. Watching the van out the window isn’t helpful, because what would we do if we saw someone stealing something? We hear screams at all hours of the day and night. We do not see any police near our apartment. We are looking for a place where we can park and leave the van without its being dismantled like other cars we see on the street, and that won’t be too expensive. Think want ads. Think New Jersey.

The first thing we did after getting Mel to work, finding a place to stay, and moving in, was visit our friends' pad and their business. They share an apartment as a little commune, and on opening the outer door a waft of patchouli incense, dog, and whatever they're cooking caressed our nostrils, with just a hint of grass (shhhh, don't tell anyone about the marijuana) not covered by the other odors, even the incense sticks.

The dog is a St. Bernard puppy. Ideal for a teensy New York City apartment, right? With the dog in the room and more than a couple of people, even in the living room, it's hard to maneuver around it. Its paws are huge for its size, indicating that it's going to be a much bigger adult. They are paper-training it, and it's a very congenial dog. They have that going for them. And they know the "Mamas and the Papas" and have a business relationship with them of a sort I'm not prepared to disclose.

That is a puppy?!?

Their legitimate business, The Bead Game, used to be a pharmacy. There are hundreds of little drawers lining the walls that – up to the day they occupied it after acquiring it – still held herbs and drugs. Now the drawers hold beads of every shape and variety imaginable. Of course I had to buy some. Everybody needs beads, yes?

Sgt. Pepper & friends

And everybody needs Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ask me how much I love it and whether we brought our record player! I don't know why I love such a peculiar eclectic mix: I don't like Dixieland, blues, soul, gospel, or most popular music, but I love John Cage, The Beatles, Morton Subotnik, Pauline Oliveros, Van Morrison, Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Moody Blues, and a bunch of other, less popular bands. Why? Who knows!

New York The Movie

A few blocks from our apartment

When Mel's not working, we're not home listening to music and cooking, visiting friends, etc., we go for walks, sometimes with our friends, sometimes without. We learned not to take notice of the people living in cardboard boxes, the shit on the sidewalk, and to laugh at the evidence of what we started calling "The Mad Pisser." You see, we would get to a corner and there would be a puddle of urine there. We would look around the corner, into the street, back in the direction from which we came–and see no one. No dogs. No humans. Whodunnit!?

But in general there are so many people: people with signs, people without signs, people with and without dogs, adults with children, children without adults. We learned to look at it all as if it were a movie set. This isn't real–not the people living in boxes, not the small gang of children running down the sidewalk and tugging on my purse strap (just in case I was holding it lightly), not the man with dark skin sitting on a park bench as if it were his home porch swing and addressing us as "dude."

Be cool till next time

Stay tuned for the further adventures of Mel & Vicki as we cruise the streets of the Lower East Side evenings and weekends, shower frequently, use pounds of Gold Bond powder to keep the sweat from soaking our clothes, and get together with friends and friends of friends to (smoke dope and . . . ) –oh! I didn’t say that, did I? Not aloud. Not in print! (Speaking of print, we read the East Village Other and the street handouts from somebody’s mimeograph.)

The East Village Other newspaper

And of course I need a job. Wish me luck!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 24, 1967] Not Feelin’ Groovy (Famous Science Fiction #1-3)

July 24, 2022 Kris Vyas-Myall 5 Comments

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

I guess it had to happen. I have reached the age of 34 and am annoyed by modern pop music. I should say this is one specific type. Not the experimental psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd, nor the soulful songs of Gladys Knight or The Four Tops. No, I am referring to sickly sweet “flower music” that has come over from California.

I first noticed it with Jan & Dean’s Yellow Balloon, a song which makes nursery rhymes sound like The Rolling Stones.

This was followed by more creeping into the charts such as The Association apparently performing a weather forecast and Harper’s Bizarre doing two awful covers of already poor songs. Then the worst has now been appearing everywhere. Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco, which sounds less like a pop song as an advertising jingle for flora hats.

So many of them are appearing on pirate radio now, apparently superseding the beats and blues sounds I have enjoyed over the last few years. Having to hear so many cloying horticultural tunes from groups like The Young Rascals, The Turtles and The Johnny Mann Singers, is enough to make anyone want to hide in the past.

Thankfully there is a new magazine just for that: Robert Lowndes' (of '50s magazine editing fame) new effort, Famous Science Fiction.

Famous Science Fiction

Famous is about 90% reprint and 10% new material. We are told the purpose is to bring to light pre-1938 stories that were well regarded but have since been out of print, whilst also bringing back an intermediate market for SF between Amazing and the comics.

Famous #1

The cover is not an original Finlay, rather a colourisation of a piece from 1962’s Amazing.

Original Image from 1962 Amazing — Artwork by Virgil Finlay

The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings

Ray Cummings story is his first and indeed was well known. However, it has been reprinted many times.

It first appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1919 and most recently in the collection The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction. Whilst this last reprint was thirteen years ago, it doesn’t feel as hard to find as Lowdnes seems to intend.

Anyway, it concerns a chemist (named merely The Chemist) who recites to his friends how he created a powerful microscope allowing him to see objects smaller than ever before. Looking inside a gold ring he finds a woman sitting inside a cave. He develops chemicals to shrink and grow himself so he can enter this microscopic world. From here it proceeds into an adventure tale as he must save her nation from destruction at the hands of an invading force.

Although it is important to acknowledge this story is almost fifty years old, this still feels old-fashioned for the time, more Victorian than Post-War in style. Also, even for the 1910s, the science is ridiculous. For example, the golden ring world resembles Earth because it comes from Earth, whilst Martian atoms would resemble Mars.

All of this would be tolerable if it weren’t so dull. Large sections are just spent with The Chemist explaining dull details and his friends ejaculating in surprise between puffs of cigars. Journey to the Centre of the Earth this is not!

Two stars…just.

The City of Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith

Smith fits Lowdnes’ brief better as, unlike fellow Weird Tales writers Howard and Lovecraft, his reprints have largely been restricted to a couple of Arkham House collections. That is, except for the Singing Flame stories!

City of the Singing Flame first appeared in Gernsbeck’s Wonder Stories in July 1931. It was then combined with its sequel, from November of the same year, (see below) in Tales of Wonder in 1940 whereupon it became a regular reprint, up to Derleth’s The Other Side of The Moon, which you can still get in paperback today.

In the narrative, Hastane has received the journal of author Giles Angrath, who recently disappeared along with artist Felix Ebbonly. In the journal’s account, Angrath is walking near his cabin when he steps into a mysterious stone circle and is transported to another place. He begins to explore the strange new land, encountering the beings that dwell there and their Singing City.

Comparing this to Golden Atom, Singing Flame does everything right Cummings' story does wrong. Where Atom gets bogged down in technical gobbledygook, this is just willing to say it doesn’t understand, whereas the former creates an unimaginative repetition of our world, the latter is a work of colossal imagination, unlike any other I have read. And, most importantly, it is never dull.

Four stars

Voice of Atlantis by Laurence Manning

This comes from Wonder Stories in 1934, but I do not believe it has been reprinted. Congratulations, one out of three!

Clearly a fan of Manning, Lowndes has reprinted three others from this series in Magazine of Horror, where members of The Strangers Club tell each other unusual tales.

Volking tells of his experiments in telepathy, where he makes contact with a man from twenty thousand years in Earth’s past. This is a man from Atlantis, whose civilization was significantly more advanced than ours and is surprised by how savage we are today.

This also feels very Victorian, reminding me of lost civilization tales like Erewhon. It should also be mentioned that even the characters note its style of using Socratic dialogue feels clumsy and the science is nonsensical. At least there is a kernel of some interesting ideas.

Two Stars

And now for the two new vignettes:

The Plague by George Henry Smith

In 2200, The Death Thing has come to a convent to claim the lives of eighteen young women. If Father Joseph does not accede to the request, all the children may be taken.

This is a dark and grim, if rather obvious tale. Like a combination of Killdozer and a Twilight Zone episode. However, the atmosphere raises it up a little.

Three Stars

The Question by J. Hunter Holly

Fifty years ago, the Vegans first encountered humanity. Humanity was told they would be allowed to join the family of intergalactic civilization if Earth could wipe out warfare. Since then, the World has strived to reach that goal, but will the Vegans be satisfied?

Well told story, if a little old fashioned and moralistic.

Three Stars

So, a mediocre start, with the one standout tale you can pick up elsewhere for a few shillings. But will it get better?

Famous #2

Another Finlay cover, this time from 1958’s Fantastic.

1958 Fantastic Reprint Cover — Artwork by Virgil Finlay

Inside Lowndes does better in his aims, with none of these stories appearing since first publication:

The Moon Menace by Edmond Hamilton

The first reprint comes from the September 1927 issue of Weird Tales, penned by the prolific, and still writing, Edmond Hamilton.

In The Moon Menace, Dr. Howard Gilbert, a famous but reclusive scientist, receives televisual signals from the Moon. Most other scientists doubt Gilbert’s findings but when the Earth is plunged into total darkness, he may be the world’s only hope.

It starts as a clear imitation of War of the Worlds and is a pretty standard invasion story. Whilst it may not be the most original work it has some interesting elements and readable enough to keep me engaged.

Three Stars

Dust by Wallace West

Although unpublished before, this was apparently rejected for Weird Tales publication some years ago.

Ralph Marvin of the Inquirer is writing up a story on how humanity may die out, but is it already here in the air we breathe?

A very didactic tale, one that could have been a science fact article. However, in spite of stylistic issues, it is a meaty subject that it is good to see addressed in fiction.

Three Stars

The White City by David H. Keller, M.D.

Taken from May 1935’s Amazing, Keller gives us yet another disaster yarn.

Farmer John Johnson decides to build a small holding in the slums of New York and live self-sufficiently. He becomes quite a sensation in the city as an eccentric, but when a terrible blizzard hits the Big Apple, he may be the one hope the world has.

This is an odd piece; for the majority it appears to just be the tall tale of an eccentric farmer. Then it takes a hard left turn into the kind of story you would see in the lowest of comic books.

Two Stars, mostly for curiosity value.

Rimghost by A. Bertram Chandler

The other new tale is a further outing for Chandler’s Rim stories, which we have been covering from the early days of the Journey to the most recent serial in If.

Mr. Willoughby joins a motley crew aboard the Rimgirl. However, something strange occurs, they encounter an exact duplicate of their ship, including its crew.

This spends far too much time for me running through all the characters and establishing connections to other stories such that the actual mystery is treated too abruptly. And, whilst the actual prose is solid, the misogynistic descriptions of Mary are poor.

A low Two Stars

Seeds from Space by Laurence Manning

And we finish with another visit to the Strangers Club, this one getting the cover of Wonder Stories for June 1935.

This time Col. Marsh tells of Blenkins who grows plants on his roof in Greenwich village. He plants some strange seeds in this garden and they grow into unusual tall plants. Eventually they walk into his apartment, telling him they are an intelligent species.

A reasonable story of sentient plant life, but it is less Day of the Triffids and more a forgettable tall tale.

Two Stars

So, whilst no complete blunders this issue, no stand outs either. Will third time be the charm?

Famous #3

Our final issue goes further back for its cover, from Science Stories in 1953.

Reprint Image from 1953's Science Stories — Artwork by Virgil Finlay

Beyond the Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith

This picks up after the publication of Angrath’s journal, where Hastane goes in search of the mysterious city. Within it he encounters even more wonders and what becomes of people who go through the flame.

I feel much the same about this sequel as I do about its antecedent. It is not so much a new idea and largely concerned with continuing exploration of this world, but Smith is such a marvelous wordsmith, the sense of awe pulls you along.

Four stars

A Single Rose by Jon DeCles

The only new fiction this issue. Silas Finnegan is a successful industrialist, who uses all his resources to make the one thing he always dreamed of, his very own unicorn. Of course, he then has to work out how to afford to keep it.

This piece seems to be aiming for something deeper about the nature of beauty, but I mostly just found it a pleasant little story about achieving childhood fantasies.

Three stars

Disowned by Victor Endersby

This one comes from September 1932’s Astounding, although reads to me more like something I would expect in Weird Tales.

On a rainy night a party is caught in a storm and Tristan is struck by ball lightning. This causes Tristan’s gravity to be reversed and he is being pulled upwards towards the sky.

Disowned Artwork — Artwork by H. W. Wesso

This is very silly, not just in the science, but also in the circumstances which follow from it, with him living an upside-down life on the ceiling and doing circus acts.

One Star

The Last American by J. A. Mitchell

This is the earliest story so far, originating in book form in the 19th Century. However, it is once again one that Derleth currently has out in paperback.

By 1990, the Mehrikan civilization vanished from the Earth and remains a mystery to the historians in Persia. This recounts the voyage of Noz-yt-ahl aboard the Zlothub in 2951 to their mysterious land.

Last American Art, New York In Ruins — All Artwork also by the Author

Landing in a strange port with huge structures, they eventually ascertain it is the fabled lost city of Nuh-Yuk, where the people were famous for nothing but their greed and having only prosperity as their God. As they continue to explore Nuh-Yuk they become less enamoured with the civilization, finding the people and buildings monotonous.

As such they then head down river to Washington and there encounter Jon and his family, the very last remnants of the Mehrikans.

In spite of its age, this holds up as a great satirical piece, with the American being put in the position of the fallen civilization, judged harshly by those in a now dominant position and treated as a museum piece.

A high four stars

The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning

Continuing his reprints of Manning’s back catalogue, Lowndes has moved on to his Man Who Awoke series, with this first part coming from March 1933’s Wonder Stories.

Norman Winters has discovered that by putting himself into a comatose state in a chamber protected from cosmic rays, he can survive without aging. Faking his disappearance, he then sets up an x-ray to wake himself up in the year 5000.

Winters wakes in a time of plenty but not much excitement. People live in small villages and get everything from the trees they grow, only working less than two hours a day. Once the truth about himself is revealed he is caught in struggle between the Oldsters and the Council of Youth. Eventually Winters decides he cannot live here and uses the same method to advance to a later time. To be continued.

When I started, I thought it was going to be another The Sleeper Awakes. However, it is actually closer to William Morris’ News From Nowhere, showing us an agrarian future without want or struggle, and also asks questions of our current waste of our natural resources.

But this is not a purely a utopian vision, it acknowledges that the level of reaction to “The Age of Waste” (as they call the 20th Century) has resulted in excessive caution and explicitly calls for a middle path, for progress to exist without careless consumption.

Also, in stark contrast to his Stranger Club tales, this is elegantly written. Rather than wading through treacle I felt like I was drinking a glass of dry white wine on a summer’s evening.

Five Stars

Finally, we get the reader rankings for the first issue here:

Reader Ratings Issue 1: 1) Golden Atom; 2) City of the Singing Flame 3) Voice of Atlantis 4) Question 5) Plague — Showing myself to have very different opinions from the average reader of this publication

Some Other Someday

West Coast Consortium Band Photo — West Coast Consortium, actually from London

So maybe the past isn’t always that amazing either. Whether you are looking at then or now, there will always be both muck and brass.

I am not sure if I will pick up future issues or stick to picking up paperback anthologies for my past exploration. But, even though I will not put plants on my head for a trip to America, I am still happy to listen to Radio London, maybe just turning down the volume if West Coast Consortium come on…

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Science / Space Race

[July 22, 1967] Getting the mail through (Australia introduces Postcodes)

July 22, 2022 Kaye Dee 1 Comment

by Kaye Dee

In my first article for the Journey, just over three years ago, I talked about rocket mail and flying postmen. Well, we haven’t seen either of them yet – despite continual promises that they are “only a few years away”. This month, though, Australia has taken a step into the future of postal technology with the introduction of Postcode, the new national mail sorting system.

Zipping the Mail Along
Postal codes are not exactly new. They were first developed in large cities like London (where they were introduced in 1857) to help improve the speed of mail sorting and delivery as populations and the size and complexity of cities grew.

Modern postal codes were first introduced in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932, followed by Germany (1941), Singapore (1950) and Argentina in 1958. Britain began introducing its current postal code system in 1959, while the US Postal Service introduced the five-digit ZIP code in 1963. I was interested to learn as I prepared to write this article that the ZIP part of ZIP code is actually an acronym standing for Zone Improvement Plan. I always thought that it was just a play on the idea of zipping, or speeding, the mail along to its destination. Switzerland was the most recent country to introduce postal codes before Australia, in 1964.

Mechanising Mail Sorting
What made the Postmaster General’s Department (PMG), which manages all Australia’s postal, telephone and telegraph services, decide that we needed to follow suit and speed up our mail by using a postal code system? After all, Australia’s current population is only 11.87 million – less than the population of New York City, which I understand is about 15.6 million.

Until now, mail sorting in this country has primarily been done by skilled human sorters, who have a detailed knowledge of geographical localities, reading the address on each letter. However, there are about 8,000 delivery offices around the country, so getting the mail to its final destnations has required at least two or three stages of sorting.

Mail sorting at the Sydney General Post Office in 1964

Australia has long been a world leader in in postal service mechanisation, and as early as 1958, the PMG decided to introduce large-scale mechanical mail sorting systems across Australia. As the first stage of this plan, the Sydney Mail Exchange opened in the suburb of Redfern in 1965, to automate and centralise the mail sorting facilities for New South Wales. It’s the largest and most advanced mechanised mail centre in the Southern Hemisphere, and the new electronic equipment and technology is attracting Worldwide interest. I’ve even heard that the Mail Exchange’s design concept is being considered as a possible future system by the US Postal Service.

Sydey's ultra-modern new mail exchange, in the inner-city suburb of Redfern

Sydney is our largest city, and New South Wales, the most populous state, so it makes sense to introduce a new Postcode system to work in conjunction with the state-of-the-art electronic mail handling equipment at the Sydney Mail Exchange, through which so much mail passes. Postcodes simplify the sorting process, as the mail sorter is now a coding operator, who enters the postcode using their data entry terminal, enabling the letters to be rapidly sorted electronically and speedily despatched to their delivery offices.

The Sydney Mail Exchange's state-of-the-art data entry system for the new sorting computers. Conveyors drop individual letters in front of the operators, who then type the postcode or suburb identifying the letter’s destination

The computers controlling this process occupy a large amount of space in the Mail Exchange building. Similar mechanised sorting systems will be gradually introduced around the country over the coming years: they’ll be immediately able to take advantage of the Postcode system to speed their mail sorting, without many of the teething problems that have bedevilled the Sydney mail Exchange.

The Australian Postcode System
The Postcode system was introduced on Saturday, 1 July. The new four-digit number system replaces some earlier postal sorting systems, such as Melbourne's letter and number codes (e.g., N3, E5) and a similar system that has been in use in rural and regional New South Wales. Nearly 5,000 postcodes have been allocated across the country, to every city, town, suburb and small regional centre.

Postcodes have been allocated following a broad geographical pattern, with Postcode numbers for capital city suburbs beginning in the west and moving to the north, east and south. A similar pattern is followed for regional country areas. The first digit of the Postcodes in each station corresponds to radio station call signs for that state: 2 (New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory – our equivalent of the District of Columbia), 3 (Victoria), 4 (Queensland), 5 (South Australia), 6 (Western Australia), 7 (Tasmania) and 8 (Northern Territory).

I think this is a good idea because everyone knows the radio callsigns, so it will make it easier to remember Postcodes for their friends locally or interstate. Subscriber Trunk Dialing for telephones, which commenced last year, is also using the state radio call sign number as the basis of the dialing codes for each capital city, so I imagine that will help with remembering the direct dial codes too.

Getting the Word Out

The first edition of the Postcode booklet, listing every national Postcode, is being distributed free by mail this month to every Australian household and business address. A total of 4.5 million booklets are expected to be distributed, along with a postcard identifying the recipient’s own postcode. Of course, with 5,000 postcodes to include in the booklet, and with some geographical oddities to contend with, it’s not surprising that diligent nit-pickers have already found faults in the booklet to complain about and have been writing carping letters to the editors of local and major state newspapers.

There has been extensive advertising about the new Postcode system in the newspapers and on television and radio, but so far, we have not been treated to a catchy jingle like the one that introduced us to decimal currency last year.

The PMG is hoping that if we all start using the Postcodes properly at the end of addresses, not only will it improve the speed of mail delivery, but that next year it will make it easier to introduce “post office preferred-size envelopes” as well, whose standardised sizes will further improve the speed of mechanised mail sorting!

And then I can finally get my postcards from the Traveler in a timely manner!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 20, 1967] An Analog of Analog (August 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

July 20, 2022 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Imitation is…

I think it's safe to say that, for almost twenty years there have been three Big Science Fiction Magazines. Each aims at a specific branch of the scientification fandom. For instance, John Campbell's Analog (formerly Astounding) is at once the hardest of the Big Mags, focusing on near-future gizmo tech or sweeping galactic epics with a scientific core, and also one of the softest, given John's weakness for psi stories.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction covers the literary end of the STF spectrum, and it also veers into the outright fantastical (q.v. the masthead). Galaxy navigates a sort of middle path between the two.

But the most recent issue of FS&F had me wondering exactly which magazine I was reading again, for this month, Ed Ferman's publication feels a lot like Campbell's. Perhaps writers have finally answered FS&F's plea for harder works, or maybe Ferman finally had a sufficient number of such pieces to fill (most of) an issue. Either way, it's an interesting departure, especially with the increased art throughout. Does it work? Let's find out!

by Ronald Walotsky

Nuts, Bolts, and Dragons

Reduction in Arms, by Tom Purdom

My good friend Tom Purdom offers up this fascinating piece set in the early '80s. The superpowers have bound themselves by the Treaty of Peking to curtail the development and implementation of terrible weapons. But there is always the suspicion that one side or another is working on some version of a "ninety-five plus virus"–one that will wipe out most of a non-incoluated population.

Sure enough, American agents are tipped off when a Soviet biologist, supposed to be a patient in a specialized "role-play" treatment center, is found cavorting with ladies at a bar 30 miles away. A raid is authorized. Between hostile Soviets and rogue team members, the investigation quickly becomes fraught with peril.

Tom himself has this to say about the tale:

After I got out of the army in 1961 I became very interested in arms control and disarmament. I did a lot of reading on the subject and ended up writing two articles for the Kiwanis magazine (a good middle market for a new writer). An opportunity to write an article for Playboy didn't work out but I got to interview some of the people I'd been reading.

Fred Pohl suggested I write a story on the subject for Galaxy. I didn't think I could handle the technical stuff needed for a story about detecting nuclear weapons so I decided to write about biological weapons which seemed like they might be the next big threat. Microbiology labs, in addition, can be hidden in all sorts of small spaces. I decided to focus on a treaty banning secret research because I had come to the conclusion we tended to run the arms race against ourselves. Our people thought up a possibility and we had to work on it because the Russians might be working on it. If we could determine they weren't, both sides could avoid another cycle in the arms race.

I picked a mental health facility as the hiding place because it raised interesting human and moral issues. The story revolves around ethical and political issues instead of a duel between inspection technologies and evasion technologies. The programmed environment therapy seemed like a natural extension of Pavlovian conditioning.

Fred Pohl rejected the story. My agent, Scott Meredith, tried it on Redbook and Esquire with near misses at both places. The fiction editor at Esquire said he wanted to buy it but he was overruled by higher ups.

The story was a novelette, about ten thousand words. Playboy said they'd buy it if I could cut it in half. I did but they rejected it. Ed Ferman at F&SF liked the short version but felt it needed to be longer. So I expanded it to its original length. He bought it and now it's the August cover story. One of the peak moments in my writing career, so far.

The story grew out of intense, solid research and some deep thinking on the whole problem of arms control. When I finished it, I felt I had summarized and dramatized the key issues and dilemmas. Perhaps the sweeping treaty in the story isn't very plausible. We live in a time when the advance of technology makes serious arms control seem a necessity–so necessary even the politicians will have to see it. Science fiction explores What might happen if? The If may seem unlikely, but is still worth exploring.

I originally called the story "1980". Ed Ferman asked for a change and I thought Reduction in Arms had a nice military clatter. I also suggested War and Peace and A Farewell to Arms but he preferred Reduction in Arms.

There's no question that Tom has gotten a feather in his cap for the placement of this tale. I will say that, although I found the concept interesting, it suffers for being an action piece told in third-person by a largely uninvolved party. Visceral immediacy would have given the story more punch.

Still, it was interesting to see a Reynolds-esque thriller outside of Analog— and without the nardy slang Reynolds employs.

Three stars.

by Gahan Wilson

The Conflict, by Ilya Varshavsky

Here is an import from the Soviet Union, about the large and small scale strife between humans and their increasingly sapient "servants".

I think it loses something in translation. Two stars.

The Baron's Dog, by L. J. T. Biese

When an unemployed governess in Italy is offered 25,000 lira a month to walk a Transylvanian wolfhound, what's a girl to think? Especially when the employer is tall, dark, handsome…and strictly enjoins against photography of his pet?

I found this tale delightful, such a nice contrast from all the creeping horror that such a setup normally would have entailed. It's not quite Analogian, but it is good. And if L.J.T. Biese isn't a woman, I'll eat my hat.

Four stars.

Soft Come the Dragons, by Dean R. Koontz

Koontz is a brand new author, and he offers up the tale of a far-off world, the miners who live in fear upon it, and the gossamer dragons that turn beholders to stone. It's all rather metaphorical and lyrical and not quite sensical, rather as if Koontz spent the night reading Zelazny's works and then tried his hand at it.

I'd say it works more than it doesn't, but Koontz' rawness definitely shows through. Three stars.

Earthwoman, by Reginald Bretnor

Will Adamson, born on a distant world, is human in all qualities save one: he and his race are possessed of telepathy, knit into a consciousness collective. He is sent to Earth to discern how it is that we can love without the possibility of true connection. And if we truly be human, is there an innate telepathic skill just waiting to be awakened?

Bretnor usually write silly stories or bad puns, so this more serious piece is a welcome change. I found it a touch too affected, but otherwise enjoyable. And definitely something that could have appeared in Analog.

Three stars.

by Ed Emshwiller

Mosquito, by Theodore L. Thomas

F&SF's story seeder suggests mosquitos might be laden with vitamins and inoculants such that their bite becomes a beneficial distribution method. As usual, he misses some important aspects of his invention. To wit, mosquito bites are not controllable in distribution or quantity. And even if they provide needed drugs and nutrients, they still aren't pleasant to receive.

Two stars.

Bugs, by Charles L. Harness

Speaking of bugs, Charles L. Harness (who used to team up with Thomas under the pen name Leonard Lockhard) has authored this story of living bugs employed as espionage bugs.

There's a lot of "as you know" explanations, and the smugness with which the Americans subvert their KGB counterparts is pure Analog.

Mildly interesting, but just a bit too glib as well as prolix. Two stars.

The Bubble, by J. W. Schutz

The destruction of humanity's first and only space station has spooked the government, and now they've decided to pull the plug on space investment. Deane Aircraft, the largest space contractor, is faced with a pivotal decision: retool back to making conventional vehicles, or become the first private space presence. The linchpin to the success of the operation isn't Theodor Deane, President of the company, nor the thousands of engineers he employs. It's certainly not Theodor's greedy wife, Lillian, nor her paramour, Briggs, who is also Theodor's financial wiz.

It's Georgia Lighton, Theodor's secretary, who comes up with all the brilliant, cost-saving ideas.

The whole thing reads like a cross between Silverberg's Regan's Planet and a soap opera. Again, very Analog.

Not great, but Analog. Three stars.

Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism, by Thomas M. Disch

The first man on the Moon, Mikhail Andreivich Karkhov, is dying. Does he die for science? For love? For the state? Or something else entirely?

A beautiful, moving piece, made all the more poignant by the recent twin tragedies that claimed the lives of three astronauts and one cosmonaut.

Five stars.

by Ed Emshwiller

Argent Blood, by Joe L. Hensley

A man is being treated in a ward for the incurably insane. Between fits of "disturbance" he begins to mistrust the charitable nature of his doctor and nurse. But he has a plan…

A good, atmospheric piece. Three stars.

Kaleidoscope in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov

In a rare return to topics astronomical, Dr. A. submits a nonfiction piece on the moons of Mars, and how these extremely low flying rocks would appear to a surface observer. If, indeed, they are even suitably placed to see them, for unlike our Moon, Phobos and Deimos orbit so close to their planet that Martian pole-dweller could not see them.

Good stuff. Four stars.

Quick with His Hands, by Avram Davidson

Capping things off, this vignette of sibling rivalry on Mars, ably told and with a tearjerking finale.

Four stars.

Doing the math

So, did F&SF's experiment in apery succeed? Well, there were high points and low points, but the overall impression I was left with was favorable. We'll just have to compare it to the real thing in just over a week to see if Brand X beat the competition!

(Speaking of kooky stunts, it looks like F&SF is joining forces with several other organizations to hold a writing contest. I wish them the best of luck, although the last time a magazine (Galaxy in that case) did this, in the early '50s, they got bupkis, and Fred Pohl had to write as a novice under a pseudonym to give them anything worth publishing.)

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 18, 1967] Highs and Lows (July Galactoscope #2)

July 18, 2022 Gideon Marcus 7 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

We've had a bit of a backlog of books here at the editorial desk, and the only remedy was to have two back-to-back Galactoscopes. Luckily, summer is slow season for TV, and thus the schedule opens up a bit. Sometimes, our book review column comprises a clutch of mediocrities. This time around, the disparity in quality was abnormally high–mostly thanks (no thanks!) to the debut novel by one Piers Anthony…

Chthon, by Piers Anthony

Imagine a world where genetic modification has created a monstrous race of humans. The women are near-immortal semi-telepaths, but they suffer from an emotional inversion: they only feel love and joy when men express hate and pain. You can imagine how warped the ensuing society must be, the females doomed to solicit violence from their partners, the men compelled to express their every animalistic whim on them. One woman of this race escapes this planet, but, a slave to her make-up, cannot escape her wretched fate. Thus, she marries a man wracked with guilt from the death of his first wife in childbirth. When his love for the alien woman becomes unalloyed, she must leave, but not before she bears a child.

But the alien woman still requires love, twisted, painful love, to live. So she seduces her own son, thus ensuring his passion for his mother will always be the appropriate mix of pleasure and pain, and they can live happily ever after.

In-between these episodes, the story takes place on Chthon, the hellish underground garnet mine whence the son is sentenced for murder. Naked and toolless, he must devise an escape, resorting to treachery, violence, rapine, and cannibalism. Of course, we know he will escape because author Piers Anthony elected to tell the story in a ping-pong flashback/flashforward style, starting and ending with scenes on Chthon.

This is a terrible book.

The premise, fundamentally implausible, seems tailored to indulge a male id-fantasy. We already have a problem in our current society whereby women are "othered" into a different species: vain, frivolous, subservient, sinister, yet desirable. With Chthon, Anthony comes up with a scientificititious explanation for why his starring woman must be that kind of creature. Not that the other women in the novel fare much better, consisting of a slave and vicious fellow Chthonian prisoners.

I'm sure Anthony would say that the book is unpleasant because it bares the human (i.e. male) soul, revealing the sordid mess underneath we'd rather not acknowledge. That all men desire to possess our mothers, rape our partners. That hate is really the purest kind of love.

Mr. Anthony needs professional help. Chthon is an odious turd, and I suspect its author is, too. One star, and winner of this year's "Queen Bee" award.

by Cora Buhlert

Like our esteemed host, I also had the misfortune of reading Chthon. I spotted the paperback in my friendly local import store and was intrigued enough by the unusual title to pull it out of the spinner rack. And while I have not read much by Piers Anthony – and am now unlikely to ever read more – he is one of Cele Goldsmith Lalli's discoveries and she normally has a good eye for authors. The blurb on the back of the slim paperback – promising a tale of an inescapable space prison and a man sent there for pursuing a forbidden love affair – sealed the deal, because I am a sucker for space prison stories.

The scenes set on Chthon, the hellish prison planet cum garnet mine, are indeed the one redeeming grace of this novel. Genuinely atmospheric and visceral, they immediately drew me in. However, even these scenes are marred by what will become a recurrent problem, namely the fact that every single woman protagonist Aton Five meets wants to have sex with him, while Aton manfully refuses, because there can only be one woman for him: Malice the forbidden minionette (i.e. his mother, though he doesn't know that yet).

Scenes of Aton's life leading up to his incarceration are interspersed with the scenes on Chthon. Again, there are some interesting ideas here, such as hvee flowers which Aton's family cultivates and which can detect true love. And once again, the good ideas are marred by off-putting sex scenes, such as fourteen-year-old Aton trying to have sex with a thirteen-year-old neighbour girl and failing because human girls have anatomy and fluids, unlike his idealized vision of minionettes.

When Aton rapes a woman on Chthon, the book came close to hitting the wall and I only prevailed because I had promised to review it for the Journey. The book did actually hit the wall – and considering how expensive import paperbacks are, that's saying something – once we got to the planet of the minionettes, genetically engineered to be masochists and enjoy pain, and of course the final twist of just why Aton has been so obsessed with Malice since he was seven years old and that their "love" is forbidden for a very good reason.

Honestly, this is a terrible book. The sexual revolution and the New Wave have made it easier for science fiction to address formerly taboo subjects like sexuality. But just because authors can write about sex now, doesn't necessarily mean that they should foist their sexual fantasies upon unsuspecting readers, particularly the kind Piers Anthony appears to harbor.

Zero stars. Stay away!

Belmont Double 5F0-759

Belmont Publishing has decided to take on the Ace Double is a flaccid sort of way by combining two novellas (calling them "two complete novels") in one thin volume. This is the first result.

Peril of the Starmen, by Kris Neville

First up Kris Neville's 1954 story, Peril of the Starmen, which first appeared in the magazine Imagination. You're welcome to give it a read if you like.

The Flame of Iridar, by Lin Carter

Considering how harsh I was on The Star Magicians, I was surprised to find that Lin Carter's The Flame of Iridar, published as an Ace Double knock-off by Belmont together with Peril of the Starmen by Kris Neville, reprinted from the January 1954 issue of Imagination, was the better of the two books I read this month. Not that this is a high bar to clear, considering how utterly terrible Chthon was.

That said, Lin Carter's writing has improved since last year's The Star Magicians. True, his prose is still overly purple – thews are inevitably iron and mighty, blood and pain are inevitably scarlet, and female breasts are inevitably described by inappropriate adjectives – and Carter is still oddly preoccupied with lovingly describing his protagonist's manly physique. However, at least Carter remembers who his protagonist is this time around.

The protagonist is one Chandar of Orm, a deposed prince turned pirate on ancient Mars, when it still had oceans. If this setting seems familiar, that's because it is, borrowed wholesale form Leigh Brackett's much superior 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars, better known as The Sword of Rhiannon, the title under which it was published as the very first STF Ace Double back in 1953 together with another excellent fantasy adventure, Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard. And indeed, Carter acknowledges this influence and dedicates The Flame of Iridar to Leigh Brackett and her husband Edmond Hamilton.

The opening of the novel finds Chandar of Orm in deep trouble. After a successful career as a pirate, he has been captured by the evil warlord Niamnon (occasionally spelled Niamnor in what I hope is not indicative of the quality of Belmont's copy-editing), the man who slaughtered Chandar's entire family in front the then twelve-year-old boy's eyes, and has been sentenced to die in Niamnon's arena, a fate Chandar himself imagines as follows:

A few more hours of darkness, and then the blinding morning sun on the arena sands… a few moments of scarlet pain… and he would rest… forever.

However, before it can come to that, Chandar and his comrade-in-arms Bram are freed by the enchanter Sarkond of K'thom, advisor to none other than King Niamnon himself. Sarkond also helpfully reveals Niamnon's plans of conquest and promises to take Chandar back to his pirate comrades. And in return, he only asks for a little favour. Use the Axe of Orm, a magical weapon that can only be wielded by a member of Chandar's family, to pierce the enchanted Wall of Ice that surrounds the magical realm of Iophar. What can possibly go wrong?

To no one's surprise, Sarkond double-crosses Chandar as soon as Chandar has fulfilled his purpose and hacked through the Wall of Ice. However, Chandar is saved by Meliander, exiled brother of the villainous King Niamnon.

What follows is an epic clash of the forces of good and evil. Chandar also gets revenge on Niamnon and his throne back. Furthermore, he gets entangled with two women, the witch Mnadis, whose breasts are "high and proud", and Llys, Queen of Iophar, whose breasts are "sweet and virginal". Three guesses with which of the two ladies Chandar ends up.

In many ways, The Flame of Iridar feels like the sort of swashbuckling planetary adventure that might have been found in the pages of Planet Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories twenty years ago. It's not as good as Leigh Brackett or Edmond Hamilton at their best, but then who is?

An entertaining adventure that feels like a throwback to the pulp era. Three stars.

by Gideon Marcus

And to continue our positive mood (because after Chthon, a double dose is necessary), let's all dig on Ted White's latest novel:

The Jewels of Elsewhen, by Ted White

Arthur Ficarra, an exhausted ex-beat cop-cum-desk-sergeant, just wants his subway ride to end so he can go to sleep after an overlong shift. But when he responds to the death rattle of a fellow passenger, he discovers to his horror that the stricken man, and everyone on the train but one, is just a mannequin, the train a cardboard model. Only Arthur and a young woman named Kim remain human. Indeed, it turns out they are now the only living things in all of New York City.

But this is not the Big Apple they remember. It is subtly changed, freshly painted, with hollow buildings. Almost a model of itself. And it is disintegrating…

Escape takes them on a whirlwind tour of alternate timelines, the common element of which is that the people speak some variety of Italian. There also is the sense of deliberate manufacture, as well as a shepherding of world events by a secret society of cloaked individuals. Arthur and Kim must solve the riddle of these artificial universes before they are captured and dispatched by these caretakers.

I came in without knowing what to expect. Sure, Rose Benton gave White's last book, Android Avenger, a whopping five stars, but I'd never gotten a chance to read it. All I really knew about the author was that he doesn't like Star Trek (per his column in the latest issue of the Yandro fanzine), he helps edit Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he's chair of the NyCon 3 committee.

I really dug this book. It's written in a punchy but understated style well-suited to mainstream fiction; indeed, I have to wonder if White makes most of his money out of the genre. He's certainly good enough. Arthur and Kim are compelling, strong characters, and the divergent timetracks are nicely detailed. I was in recent correspondence with Ted, and I mentioned that the book reminded me a bit of Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium books. He replied that the resemblance was intentional, and that Laumer had a strong influence on him.

If anything, I like White's even better! Four stars.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 16, 1967] The Weird and the Surprising (July 1967 Galactoscope)

July 16, 2022 Jason Sacks 9 Comments

by Jason Sacks

Philip K. Dick has a new novel out. And guess what, it’s very strange. Are you shocked?

The Ganymede Takeover, by Philip K. Dick & Ray Nelson

The space slugs have taken over the Earth.

Those slugs come from the distant planet Ganymede. Earth is their first invasion target ever. But they have ambitions. The Ganymedeans have managed to conquer and occupy our planet. However, the slugs are failing at their third objective: to absorb the people of Earth as their servants.

Resistance is strong in at least one area of the planet: the Bale of Tennessee. There, he will have to fight the Neegs, who are led by a violent revolutionary named Percy X. The dreaded assignment of conquering that area goes to Mekkis, an insecure slug whose fortune bodes poorly.

Mekkis and his fellow conquerors have one great weapon at hand they can use to defeat the humans. A human, the neurotic Dr. Baldani, condemned as quisling, has developed a reality distortion bomb, which can destroy all of humanity. But will he allow that weapon to be used?

The Ganymede Invasion, a rare collaboration between Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, is dense as hell and weird as hell. Dick and Nelson make a pretty good team. Nelson smooths out Dick while Dick makes Nelson weird. Their San Francisco writers’ workshop friends must love the stories the pair creates

Truth be told, I missed Dick’s wild randomness at times; I was genuinely shocked that nearly all the elements introduced in the first chapter resolve by the end! Meanwhile, Nelson pushed Dick to go even further with his usual psychedelia, with references to supermarket carts with submachine guns and to vorpal meat cleavers, among many other stunning images. It’s the Summer of Love and this book came from the San Francisco area, so how can you ask for anything timelier?

The Black Panthers at the California state capitol, earlier this year

Percy X is the most intriguing character in the novel. Percy can be seen as an analog to Malcolm X, which would make the Neegs the equivalent of the Black Panther Party. Or he can be seen as a reflection of Perseus, the Greek legend who slayed monsters and came to found the republic of Mycenae. Either interpretation would fit this story. Percy is a crusader, a fighter against the literal monsters of the Ganymedeans and is a true hero. Heck, the name Ganymede implies a reference to Medea.

Philip K. Dick, Nancy Dick, and Robert Silverberg conversing in lobby, Baycon

I haven’t discussed the sentient hotel rooms or talking, neurotic taxi cabs or even a key Quisling type character in the book. There’s just too much to cover in a review like this and I want you to be surprised by what you read.

The Ganymede Invasion isn’t great Dick, but it is hugely entertaining. And like nearly every novel by PKD, Ganymede is a short quick read. I recommend this oddball collaboration.

3 stars.

by Gideon Marcus

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison

The third collection of Ellison stories contains the now-typical set of introductions which folks often like as much as the stories they precede. It's a thin volume, with just seven pieces, and it suffers for being less tonally nuanced than the prior two collections. The subject is pain, Harlan's personal pain, and while I'm sure the tales were cathartic to write for him, by the end, they all start to sound like Harlan kvetching to us over a Shirley Temple at around 3am.

Not that they're bad–Harlan is a gifted author–but they are somewhat one-note and unsubtle. To wit:

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The last five humans are trapped in the bowels of the sapient computer who hates and torments them. This is the unexpurgated version of the story that appeared in IF a few months prior, with less veiled references to homosexuality and genitalia.

It's a raw, powerful piece. Four stars.
Big Sam was My Friend: An interstellar carnival makes a stop on a planet with a tradition of human sacrifice. Big Sam, the circus strong man, can't let them go through with it…with disastrous results. Interesting more for the detail than the events.

Three stars.
Eyes of Dust: On a world devoted to and obsessed with personal beauty, can deformity be tolerated? Be careful – perfection may need imperfection to exist!

Another passionate story, but somehow forgettable. Three stars.
World of the Myth: Three astronauts are stranded on a planet: a cruel but charismatic man, the woman who loves him, and the nice fellow who loves the woman. They meet a race of telepathic ants, conversation with whom reveals the true nature of the parties communicating. Can the astronauts stand that knowledge?

It's a neat setup, but a rather prosaic story. Three stars.

Lonelyache: A widower is tormented by dreams in which he is hounded by assassins, forced to dispatch them in the most brutal of fashions. Gradually, the man becomes aware that there is an inchoate…something…sharing his apartment, feeding on his unhappiness. Can he escape its thrall before it's too late?

The story with the most Harlan-esque voice. Three stars.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer: To all respects, Warren Glazer Griffin was the milquetoastiest of milquetoasts. But when he died in a freak accident, he was allowed to live an afterlife fantasy in which he indulged all of his suppressed depravities. The result isn't pretty.

Three stars.

Pretty Maggie Moneyes: Inspired by a true encounter (and with the best introduction of the collection), this is the tale of the woman who sold her soul for comfort, lost it permanently to a slot machine, and resorted to desperate measures to get free.

With the intro, I give it four stars.

For the collection, 3.5 stars.

by Robin Rose Graves

City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

An amnesiac narrator on a planet of liars. Le Guin takes us far into Earth’s future where humanity has regressed under the domination of a group of aliens called the Shing.

Our main character is Falk, who looks almost human except for his slitted yellow eyes. He wakes up in the forest with no memory of where he came from and mentally reduced back to the mind of a baby. Falk is taken in by a family and rehabilitated, all the while learning their culture, which fears the Shing who now control Earth and hinder civilization from developing to be any larger than scattered small groups of people across the planet. The Shing are most notable for being liars, something Falk is warned about throughout the book. However, in order to reclaim the answers that were stolen from him, Falk must leave the family and seek out the Shing.

The book drags during the first 80 pages as Falk travels alone through nature. This part serves well to relay the isolation of his journey and to show the effect the Shing’s presence has on Earth’s development. However, overall nothing of great significance happens in this part of the book.

Once Falk gets captured by a hostile group of humans, he meets a slave woman named Strella with whom he plots his escape in exchange for her guiding him to the Shing. Here the book becomes interesting, particularly when something Strella says suggests that the reason Falk has been stripped of his memory might be because that is how the Shing punish criminals. It made me wonder if Falk is really the good guy after all.

However, it isn’t until Falk reaches the City of Illusion that the story reaches its full potential and lives up to its name, as deceptions are uncovered and more information is revealed to Falk, who doesn't know what is true and what is false – including everything he has experienced up until this point. He’s unable to trust the Shing and unsure if they have ulterior motives. I had a lot of fun reading these chapters. Something would be revealed only to be quickly disproved and it made for an exciting read where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next because I barely knew what the truth was – much like the hero.

The end chapters redeem the slow beginning. For a small world, Le Guin well establishes Earth as something distant and foreign to a modern reader. The plot exercises the brain and leaves the reader in suspense. However, this book is far longer than it needed to be. For 160 pages long, the first 80 pages are particularly empty and I think Le Guin could have achieved the same story by cutting out half the words.

I enjoyed this book, but it failed to impress. 3 stars.

The Strength to Dream

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

There have been many surprising entries into SF writing, but perhaps none more so than Colin Wilson taking on H. P. Lovecraft.

Best known as a philosopher, Colin Wilson received great acclaim for his first book The Outsider and continues to be successful in this arena, including last year’s Introduction to The New Existentialism.

He has also attempted to express some of his ideas in popular crime fiction, such as Ritual in the Dark and The Glass Cage.

Neither of these avenues lead directly to science fiction, let alone Lovecraft. So how did it happen?

Apparently, Wilson is a fan of the concepts of Lovecraft and had written an essay saying so but expressing distaste for his actual prose. August Derleth saw this and wrote to Wilson suggesting he write his own book on these themes.

The result is The Mind Parasites, what could be described as Post-Lovecraftian. An optimistic existentialist new-wave cosmic horror, which is likely to either impress or appall the reader!

The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson

The story starts in 1997, with Dr. Austin learning of the suicide of his friend and colleague Dr. Weissman. The news unsettles him, but the world suicide rate has been increasing over the decades and is in fact a major concern of many people. Delving into his papers, Austin discovers Weissman had been experimenting with ways of expanding his consciousness but became fearful of an evil presence.

At the same time Dr. Austin is working on a dig in Turkey. They discover a remarkable Proto-Hattian settlement where the inhabitants worship “Aboth the Unclean” and have massive blocks of stone which should have been impossible to move in 10000 BC. The site becomes a sensation when an elderly August Derleth notes how much this mirrors the stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft.

These two facts come together to form a startling discovery: for centuries mankind has had its progress impeded by a force that feeds on our despair. The Mind Parasites!

Whilst the concepts and themes are definitely of the cosmic horror seen in 30s Weird Tales, it is also most clearly something different.

Firstly, its writing is more academic than purple prose. This story is said to be compiled from a variety of papers in the early 21st century, explaining the unusual world events in the early 1990s. The fact that it is being told from the future provides an explanation for the style and shows the author giving real consideration to the context.

Secondly, in keeping with Wilson’s “New Existentialist” ideals, the characters are not simply the victims of ideas too big to grasp. Instead this is an ode to the limitless potential of the human mind. Rather than nihilistic, the ending is optimistic and the revelation about the true nature of the titular creatures was a fascinating surprise to me.

Thirdly, and what is likely to repel some readers, is that large passages are devoted to discussion of various theories of the mind and man’s place in the universe. These sections read more like Huxley’s Heaven and Hell than an Ashton Smith fantasy. That is not to say there is not plenty of action, with scenes involving wars, ESP and space flight. But your tolerance for exploration of Wilson’s pet theories is likely to dictate your enjoyment.

Grading this on a standard scale is tough as it is so strange and experimental. So I am giving it a – very subjective – five stars!

And because we have so many books to review, we'll be having another Galactoscope in just two days! Stay tuned…

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 14, 1967] The Beat Goes On (August 1967 Amazing)

July 14, 2022 John Boston 2 Comments

by John Boston

The August 1967 Amazing looks out on the world through one of Frank R. Paul’s later and less interesting works, trimmed of course from its original pulp size. This one, titled A City on Uranus, is from the back cover of the April 1941 Amazing, as usual cropped to fit the lower half of this smaller magazine. The issue’s overall contents and presentation are also as usual: one new story and a bunch of reprints, with Harry Harrison’s intelligent book reviews taking a few pages.

by Frank R. Paul

La de da de de.

The Man from Zodiac, by Jack Vance

Once more I say—at the risk of repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself—when a first-rate author shows up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it. The one non-reprinted piece of fiction here is Jack Vance’s “Great New Short Novel,” as the table of contents has it, The Man from Zodiac. Zodiac Control, Inc., is a corporation that sells government services to colony planets across the galaxy, or galaxies (there is ambiguous reference to Andromeda), with competitors like Aetna, Fidelity, and Argus.

by Gray Morrow

The eponymous Man is Milton Hack, a Zodiac employee (and also a minority shareholder, a fact which ultimately has little significance), who is charged by the main owners with getting and supervising a contract with the Phrones of Ethelrinda Cordas. The Phrones are cartoon barbarians who have (or whose elite has) little interest in schools, sewer systems, and the other usual appurtenances of government; they wish only to obtain weapons with which to smite their neighbors and enemies, the equally cartoonish Sabo.

Hack engages in a course of bamboozlement and chicanery and ends up representing both the Phrones and the Sabos with identical contracts, and persuading them to live in something resembling peace, outsmarting everyone in sight at every opportunity since they are all utterly stupid. It’s frankly pretty crude, devoid of Vance’s usual sharp satirical wit; worse, it’s thoroughly boring, and gives the impression that the author is as bored as the reader. Or maybe he is attempting to emulate the literary and commercial success of Christopher Anvil. Two stars.

Martian and Troglodyte, by Neil R. Jones

The reprints are the usual mixed bag, slightly better mixed than in some issues. The longest and oldest—a “Special—Short Novel” per the contents page—is Neil R. Jones’s Martian and Troglodyte, from the May 1933 Amazing. Jones is best remembered for his protracted “Professor Jameson” series, about a scientist who is revived from his orbiting tomb and who goes chasing around the universe for a couple of dozen stories with the robot-bodied Zoromes. In this one, Thrag, a cave guy who has been chased out of his tribe in a dispute over possession of the winsome Tua, is saved from becoming lunch for a cave bear by visiting Martians on a voyage of discovery. (Jones’s Earth has many perils. In addition to cave bears and saber-tooth tigers, tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls are still around.) Thrag learns not to be afraid of the Martians and they help him out in his quest to recover Tua from her brutal usurper by lending him lethal Martian technology. Thrag’s and the Martians’ efforts to figure each other out are surprisingly well done.

by Leo Morey

Overall, this is a pleasant antique, though Jones’s peculiar verbosity is sometimes a distraction. (Any resemblance to the present commentator is entirely illusory.) A sample:

“In the depths of space between the earth and its contemporary planet, known to present day man as Mars, a small space ship sped at an inconceivable speed across the millions of miles of space towards the earth. It was now very close, having been upon its journey through the stellar void for the period of time in which it had taken the great globe it was approaching to turn upon its axis forty times. Forty times the topographical features of the planet earth had swung lazily before the eager eyes of the two space navigators within their interstellar craft as day by day, according to the rotation of the cosmic sphere, the planet grew larger in proportion as they drew near.”

Two stars; it probably would rate higher by the standards of its time.

Blabbermouth, by Theodore Sturgeon

by Malcolm Smith

Theodore Sturgeon’s Blabbermouth, from the February 1947 Amazing, is about a captivating woman who is telepathic and compulsively blurts out people’s secrets to those from whom they are being kept secret. This brings ruin to her husband’s career as a prominent New York radio emcee, but by the end he figures out how to make lemonade (i.e., money) from this particular lemon. The story is told in an affected semi-Damon Runyonesque style that bespeaks a writer trying to execute the cliches he thinks his market requires. And maybe it did. Or not. This is only the second published story Sturgeon sold to an SF or fantasy editor other than John W. Campbell, and maybe he didn’t have much confidence about following his own bent anywhere else. Two stars.

The Roller Coaster, by Alfred Bester

by Bernard Krigstein

There are two stories here from the magazine’s brief high-word-rate renascence of 1953-54. Alfred Bester’s The Roller Coaster, from the May-June 1953 Amazing, is also told in an affected style, but it’s Bester’s own affectation, so it’s a lot more convincing than Sturgeon’s off-the-rack costume in Blabbermouth. It starts with a slap to the reader’s face of Spillaneish violent sadism—quite appropriate in context, as it turns out—and continues without letup or wasted words to retell a familiar SF story. It’s as if somebody said, “You read Vintage Season? Here’s how it really goes.” Four nasty stars.

One Way Street, by Jerome Bixby

by Augusto Marin

In the other renascence item, Jerome Bixby’s One Way Street (Amazing, December 1953-January 1954), the protagonist has a split-second blackout, drives off the road, and wakes up in a wrecked car and a slightly different world—phone numbers are different, his dog is different, there’s no Hamlet, Shelley, Keats, or atomic power, and Stalin’s alive. His wife’s a little different too, but he likes the differences and is trying to make a life in this new world when he gets a chance to try to go home via an experimental procedure. The surprise ending is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, but overall the story is sharply and economically done. Three stars, pushing four.

North God’s Temple, by Henry J. Kostkos

by Leo Morey

We dip back into the archaic with Henry J. Kostkos’s North God’s Temple (Amazing, August 1934), in which a Professor Challenger-type blowhard, Professor Norton of the Cosmopolitan Museum, receives a telepathic summons from the historians of the People of the Magnetic God, who live undersea near the North Pole. So he fakes up a pretext for an expedition to seek out the magnetic pole. Once there he is summoned alone and sucked underwater and then underground in a rowboat, and finds the Temple of the Magnetic God (it must be, since he’s pinned to the wall until he manages to work his steel revolver out of his pocket). This Temple landed on Earth after the breakup of the former fifth planet that became the asteroids. Then Norton gets sucked back underwater in a contretemps that apparently is intended to explain the migration of the magnetic poles. Two stars for this tiresome period piece.

Vis Scientiae, by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.

But there’s still one more piece of archaic to eat: Vis Scientiae, a poem by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing, May 1930), which seems to be a lament by the ancient gods that they’re no longer in charge of those pesky humans. It must speak for itself:

“They have chained the livid lightning that goes hurtling down the sky,
Made it slave for them and pass them scatheless as it hurtles by;
They have trapped the furious tempest at whose breath the forest reels,
And the angrier it rages all the merrier turn their wheels; . . .”

Et cetera, though the meter varies. The substance of Tennyson and the accidents of Robert W. Service? The best to be said for it is that it could have been worse. Two stars.

Summing Up

A couple of stories well worth reading, a couple more at least readable, and a couple of wastes of time. La de da de da.

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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 12, 1967] The masks we wear; the masks we must wear (the film: The Face of Another)

July 12, 2022 Jason Sacks 3 Comments

by Jason Sacks

Over the last five years or so, there has been a renaissance of movies which take science fiction concepts and turn them into fine — and often obscure — film art. For instance The brilliant Agnès Varda, perhaps best known for her amazing 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7, used a kind of Island of Dr. Moreau motif for her film The Creatures (released in 1966). That film starts with a car accident and becomes a meditation on the way reality is changed by fiction.

Similarly, the equally brilliant Alain Resnais used the idea of limbo to emphasize the strange, surrealistic lives of the characters in his much-loved (and much-despised) philosophic meditation Last Year at Marienbad.

And anyone who saw Gennadi Kazansky and Vladimir Chebotaryov's charming 1962 film Amphibian Man couldn't prevent themselves from being caught up in the literal fish-out-of-water elements of that most magical and fascinating film.

The Face of the Creator

But the master of this mini movement (if there is such a movement) is Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara.

Teshigahara came to many American viewers and critics' attention with 1962's The Pitfall, a strikingly nonlinear semi-noir documentary fantasy (and yes it is all of that); the film shows the director's vast scope of vision and deep curiousity about the complexity of human nature.

Two years later he delivered The Woman in the Dunes, the film which truly won Teshigahara his international reputation. It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Award by the Academy Awards folks. It's an astonishing work of film art, one of the finer films of the 1960s thus far. It also is haunting on several different levels.

Both Pitfall and Dunes are adapted by novels by the beloved avant-garde novelist Kobo Abe, winner of the Akutagawa Prize and Yomiuri Prize, among many other awards. Apparently Abe's writing style is often labyrinthine, vivid and sensuous in its original Japanese. That style has to be seductive for an ambitous director, and with his success with these two films, now Teshigahara has taken on another Abe film.

The Face of Another uses the idea of a facial transplant to explore the nature of identity, human connection, and the impact of the atomic bomb. At the same time it possesses a stunning visual style which will likely be studied for decades (and which will only be touched on briefly in this essay).

All of this makes for a heady mix, beautifully delivered on screen. The film is often obscure, looks beautiful and is well worth checking out in your local art cinema.

Let me tell you a little more about it.

The Face of Another

One thing I was struck by in watching this movie was in how much it echoes. There is a lot of Frankenstein in here – both Shelley and Karloff versions. It also echoes The Beast With Five Fingers and last year's Seconds, and definitely a lot of French New Wave cinema and even that episode of The Avengers in which the villains traded minds with Steed and Mrs. Peel. Face is original, sometimes radically original. Yet it stands on the shoulders of giants as well.

The movie follows two parallel plots. In the primary plot, a businessman named Okuyama has had his face damaged in a major industrial accident. Forced to live life with a full-face mask, he is horrified and even sadly bemused by peoples' reactions to him. No matter if it's his wife or a stranger, everyone is cold and unemotional to him. His lack of a face has imposed a deep outsider feeling on him. Okuyama is profoundly alone.

Our businessman is bereft, forgotten even by his own wife. Only a young girl with impaired intellectual abilities actually sees and reacts to Okuyma as his own self. Like the Invisible Man, he's an id in bandages, lost and empty. It's the impact of his injuries that matters rather than the injury itself.

In the second plot, a young (unnamed) woman has scars over half of her face. It's implied she got those burns during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Unlike Okuyama, the woman does not bandage herself, simply covering that side of her face with her hair and handling her pain with some grace.

Okuyama persuades his doctor to create a mask which will allow the bandaged man to look human and have some semblance of a normal life. He believes the mask will be seamless. It will allow him to pass himself off as normal person different than the man he was before.

He can become a new version of himself. And the first thing he does with his new freedom is… go to his old office and see if any of his former coworkers recognize him as their old compatriot (they don't). The second thing he does is even more banal. Frustrated beyond reason at his wife's indifference to him when bandaged, Okuyama decides to try to seduce his wife while wearing his new face. Yes, he's trying to make his wife an adulteress by sleeping with her.

Bizarre.

It's all as bizarre as the conversations Okuyama and the doctor have throughout different Osaka settings, including an odd German bar and the magnificent doctor's office.

Meanwhile, the girl is simply still wandering her life, unmoored and unrooted. Though she is spending much of her time with her brother who loves her (he may love her too much), she is alone. As with Okuyama, people recoil upon seeing her. Unlike with Okuyama, her injuries are more than just symbolic of a single man. Her injuries are a symbol of national guilt. And therefore she is simply more repulsive to the ordinary Japanese person.

I don't want to reveal the secret of how either of these powerful plotlines end — and in fact both endings are powerful.

Now that I've hopefully intrigued you with an idea of what makes the plot so great, let me talk about how great this film looks.

Looking at the Face

For all the praise Teshigahara deserves for his film, we all know a film can never be an individual effort (go ahead, Cahiers du Cinéma, prove me wrong!).

So let me first praise the cinematography of Hiroshi Segawa. His work here is simply extraordinary. The scenes at the doctor's office are symbolic and rich in meaning, not so much a setting as the implication of a setting and all the more powerful for that reason. The backgrounds symbolize all that Teshigahara is exploring in this meditative film.

Scenes on the streets or at bars are composed in beautiful framing and look sensational on screen. More importantly, they're composed in ways that allow Teshigahara to create doubling of his images (that is, the chance to use two images to echo each other).

As I've been alluding to, the production design by Masao Yamazaki is simply exquisite, a heady and head-bending approach to design that manages to both deeply root and profoundly confuse a viewer, a balancing act necessary for the film but incredibly hard to manage.

And of course I must praise our lead actors, especially Tatsuya Nakadai as Okayuma and Miki Irie as the man and woman, respectively. It's deeply impressive to see how richly Nakadai draws his character with his eyes while in his bandages, and with a deep, stiff complexity when wearing the mask. His body tells much of the story, and an attentive viewer can notice subtle physical changes which reflect his changing psychological state.

Irie's acting is equally as challenging and equally as rewarding. She's wearing a giant prosthetic and yet we feel we can easily read her emotions, hear her mood through slight voice inflections and body movements. He ultimate fate feels inevitable but not unexpected. That's a great compliment to Irie.

Looking at the Reasons Behind the Face

Teshigahara is clearly exploring many key themes here (isolation, collective guilt, and the intolerance of outsiders to name but three). I think the most intriguing explanation for this movie is to read it as a parable of the atomic bomb and the long recovery from the War.

Injury and disfigurement is common to see in Japan after the War. Even those who didn't directly experience the atomic bomb still felt the impact of the Bomb on their society. Nobody in Japan escaped those emotional scars. Our two lead characters just manifest those scars in their own particular way.

The Bomb also really and truly ended Japan's history as it had happened up to 1945. Its agrarian, peaceful traditions; its samurai code of ethics and its long and proud defiant isolation were all truly dead in their classical sense. Those were nation — and empire-affirming — concepts through the war. But those concepts were antiques, consumed by the never ending westernization of the post-war period.

Modernity was the future, tradition be damned. Ironically in a culture with a long, proud history of mask-wearing, Japanese people would be asked to put away their classic masks and don the western masks of hats and make-up worn in places like New York, London and Paris.

Furthermore, the Bomb and the subsequent westernization of Japanese society has served to isolate people by breaking down traditional societal structures and even the centrality of family. Akira Kurosawa has explored these topics as well, for instance in the sublime High and Low.

Teshigahara here takes a more symbolic approach than Kurosawa, forcing the viewer to contemplate the future that is developing. Teshigahara is unhappy about that future. The nihilistic ending of the film implies Japan is experiencing changes that might tear it apart.

Living with the Memory of the Face

Last year I raved about the John Frankenheimer film Seconds in these pages. As much as any of the other films I've discussed in this article, Seconds seems the best analogue for The Face of Another. It's a symbolic film, telling a despairing story about someone who gains a new face and goes just a bit crazy.

Both films feature brilliant black and white cinematography, fascinating lead performances, and linger long in the mind after they are done on the movie screen. I hope you didn't miss Seconds. And I hope you won't miss The Face of Another.

Four stars.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[July 10, 1967] Return to Collinsport (the gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows)

July 10, 2022 Natalie Devitt 1 Comment

by Natalie Devitt

[Collinwood]

It has been barely over a year since the unusual soap opera Dark Shadows started airing as part of the daytime lineup at ABC back on June 27, 1966, and already the program has teetered on the verge cancelation, although it appears that the show may be spared for now.

Back in April, audiences were introduced to Barnabas Collins, a vampire originally from the 1700s played by Shakespearean actor Jonathan Frid, that was awoken from a long slumber after an attempted grave robbery by drifter Willie Loomis (character actor John Karlen was recast in the role after it was originally played by James Hall). Frid was brought on the program as a guest star, and so far his character seems to be wildly popular with audiences.

[Willie at the Collins family mausoleum]

After arriving at Collinwood, mansion of the prominent Collins family, Barnabas claimed to be a long-lost cousin from England. He acted like it was just a coincidence that he bore an almost uncanny resemblance to a Collins family ancestor, also named Barnabas and who was featured in a portrait hanging in the foyer at Collinwood. As they were unaware that Barnabas was undead and that he and the portrait’s subject were one and the same, Barnabas was able to gain the acceptance of his newfound family and set up residence at his original home, also on the property, determined to restore the aptly named Old House to its former glory.

[Barnabas next to his portrait at Collinwood]

Surprisingly, Barnabas did not have much trouble adjusting to the present day, and it was not long until a number of strange incidences began occurring in the quaint New England fishing town of Collinsport. Animals were discovered dead and drained of their blood. Willie was discovered with an unusual wound near his wrist and was unable to recall ever being injured.

[Collinsport, Maine]

Barnabas also met daughter of local artist Sam Evans (now being played by actor David Ford), waitress Maggie. Maggie is portrayed by relative newcomer Kathryn Leigh Scott, and now that she is no longer sporting a blonde wig, she's the spitting image of his late love, Josette du Pres, known for meeting an untimely demise at Widows Hill. Shortly after meeting Barnabas, Maggie went missing and was presumed to be dead, but little did the residents of Collinsport know that she had been kidnapped and put under a trance by Barnabas, with the intention of turning her into his vampire bride – despite the fact Maggie is romantically involved with Carolyn Stoddard’s (newcomer Nancy Barrett) ex, Joe Haskell (theatre and television actor Joel Crothers). Prior to her disappearance, she had been experiencing unexplained blood loss, just like Willie.

[Barnabas and Maggie at the Old House]

Almost immediately with the arrival of Frid’s character on the gothic serial, the program really began to really change dramatically in tone. In fact, Dark Shadows is starting to feel like a completely different show. Sure, there had been supernatural elements sprinkled throughout the series, like the storyline involving Louis Edmonds' (Kraft Theatre ) character, Roger Collins’s estranged wife Laura (television and stage actress Diana Millay) being a phoenix, and the ones about the ghosts of Frenchwoman Josette du Pres and Collins fishing fleet manager Bill Malloy, but they seem to be becoming more commonplace, just like all of the séances they’ve been holding at Collinwood lately.

[Ghost of Josette inside the Old House]

Veteran movie actress Joan Bennett receives top billing as family matriarch, Elizabeth Stoddard, having been the most established as an actor and being from a family of accomplished performers. Nevertheless, Dark Shadows was originally told from the perspective of Victoria Winters (Swedish actress Alexandra Moltke)–but her mission to find out her true identity after having been orphaned as a child seems to been put on the back burner for now. I am still curious why Elizabeth was intent on hiring her as governess to her troubled nephew David, played by child actor David Henesy, in the first place.

[Victoria shortly after arriving in Collinsport]

I am happy to report that some other mysteries were solved, though.

First, was the one involving the disappearance of Elizabeth’s husband, Paul Stoddard. In fact, it was Elizabeth’s missing husband that set things in motion for Barnabas’ arrival at Collinwood in the first place. As you may recall, Elizabeth’s husband had been missing and she had not left the Collinwood in more than eighteen years – that is until Paul’s old pal Jason McGuire (character actor Dennis Patrick) showed up at the family estate with Willie and an elaborate plot to blackmail her. Long story short, Jason led Elizabeth to believe for years that she had murdered her husband, and that he had buried his remains in the basement. It turned out that she did not murder Paul after all, and Willie would go on to free Barnabas from his coffin.

[Elizabeth with her husband]

Second, finally viewers learned that the rift between Roger Collins and Burke Devlin (now being played by Anthony George who recently replaced Mitchell Ryan) was caused by Roger testifying against Burke in a vehicular manslaughter case that led to Burke spending several years in behind bars, when Roger was the one who was really guilty of the crime and Sam had been bribed to go along with Roger's story.

[Elizabeth, Roger, Sam, and Bruke]

Even with its recent changes, I am still enjoying Dark Shadows. What can I say? I am a sucker for atmosphere, and this show has it in spades, especially with its crazy twists and turns, a cast made up of mostly theatre actors, Sy Tomashoff’s set designs, composer Bob Cobert’s musical compositions, costumes provided by Ohrbach's, and all of its surprisingly ambitious special effects for television. It does not hurt that each week, the show seems to adding more cobwebs and candles. In recent months, the program also seems to be attracting an usually young audience for a daytime drama. Rumor has it that the series is going to be making the leap from black and white to color later this summer. I am curious to see how that will affect the tone and the popularity of the show. Does Dark Shadows have any more tricks up his sleeve to ensure that it is not put back on the television chopping block?

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial, Uncategorized

[July 8, 1967] Family lines (August 1967 Galaxy)

July 8, 2022 Gideon Marcus 8 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Royal Families

The news always likes to focus on heads of state, especially when they are flashy or glamorous in some way. From Princess Grace of Monaco to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, these leaders are instant idols, somehow more compelling for having the reins (and reigns) of nations even though they presumably put their pants/skirts/obis on the same way as the common folk.

This week scored a triplet of spotlights. For instance, in the island nation of Tonga, Taufaʻahau Tupou IV was crowned monarch in a ceremony that included a feast of 71,000 suckling pigs! And that, by itself, tells you all you need to know about the current Jewish/Moslem population of Tonga…

Closer to home, El BJ, chief of the United States, has got his first grandson. Patrick Lyndon Nugent is the newborn child of First Daughter Luci Nugent (neé Johnson). There is no word, as yet, whether his toddler status will grant him deferment in the lastest draft lottery.

Finally, junta chairman General Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant leader of South Vietnam since 1965, has decided not to run for President in the upcoming democratic (perhaps) September elections. Premier Thiệu has been backed by the junta for the top role, instead, with Ky getting the Vice Presidential nod. It's all a lot of musical chairs, anyway. After all, Ky has asserted that the only politician he admires is Hitler, which tells you all you need to know about the state of democracy in that country (and its current Jewish population…)

Watching Big Brother

Fred Pohl, one of the original Futurians and a pillar of the SF community, has had his hands full for nearly a decade. After he took over the reins of Galaxy and the newly acquired IF from H. L. Gold, rather than sit on his laurels, he looked for new worlds to conquer. Thus, Worlds of Tomorrow was launched in 1963. But juggling three mags (plus a few reprint-only titles) was a challenging job, often resulting in uneven quality and occasionally right-out flubs. For instance, last year's issue of Worlds of Tomorrow where the pages got all mixed up.

One would think, with WoT going out of publication, that things might be less hectic over at the Guinn Co. mags. But, in fact, this month's issue of Galaxy is even more higgledy-piggledy, making reading a real challenge.

by Sol Dember

Which is a shame, because there's some quite good stuff in here (mixed with some mediocre stuff, to be sure). Thankfully, you've got me to be your guide. Just grab your compass, or you might get lost.

Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg

by Virgil Finlay

One-way time travel is developed in the early 21st Century. Since humanity is deathly afraid of creating paradoxes, the new portals are used by the totalitarian regime for just one purpose: shipping undesirables into the far past, a sort of Paleozoic Botany Bay.

Hawksbill Station is the one reserved for male subversives, established sometime in the late Cambrian (Silverberg repeatedly gives a date of two billion years ago, but of course, the Cambrian went from about 600-500 million B.C.) Our perspective is that of Barrett, the de facto head of the more than 100 settler/prisoners on the coast of what will one day be the Atlantic Ocean. It is a community slowly decaying as its denizens age along with no greater purpose in life. That is, until a new young convict arrives from the future, one who appears to be a government spy…

This is more of a travelogue than a story, and the ending comes on a bit abruptly. But the characterization, the details, the setting are all so gripping that I tore through the novella in no time, despite the labyrinthine page distribution.

Four stars, and if it ever gets expanded into a novel, it could make five.

Angel, Dark Angel, by Roger Zelazny

In another future-set tale, society is maintained by a sort of corporate Angel of Death who, with the help of ten thousand teleporting assistants, brings death to citizens after they have made sufficient contribution to humanity (and are, perhaps, on the verge of being detrimental).

One noteworthy woman has cultivated the aesthetic race of spirules (depicted on the cover) as an antidote to the cold, mechanistic technology of her time. A subordinate angel is sent to dispatch her, but things prove more complicated.

This is a middlin' Zelazny story, not an empty poetic suit like some, but not a near masterpiece like some of his other works. Three stars.

We're Coming Through the Window, by K. M. O'donnell

Throwaway vignette about a fellow who keeps duplicating himself due to time travel and needs Fred Pohl's help to get out of it.

Cute. Three stars.

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun, by R. A. Lafferty

Ginny seems to be a precocious four year old, but in fact, is actually just a baseline human, maturing at age 4 and going on as an upright monkey. It's the rest of us who are evolutionary aberrations, having five times as many heartbeats that a creature our mass should have. Inevitably, Lafferty suggests, we'll all go ape.

This tale doesn't really work, and it's a bit more impenetrable than Lafferty's usual fare. Two stars.

For Your Information: A Pangolin Is a Pangolin, by Willy Ley

Ley's article on the strange mammal that is neither aardvark nor anteater nor armadillo is interesting, but not much more than you might get from a rather good encyclopedia entry.

Three stars.

9-9-99, by Richard Wilson

Two wizened old characters are determined to settle an old score since both have outlived their wagered death dates, the bet having been made back in the 30s.

Whether it is even possible for them to collect given the state of the Earth in the late '90s is another matter…

Good enough, I guess. Three stars.

by Wally Wood

Travelers Guide to Megahouston, by H. H. Hollis

by Wally Wood

This is a very long, somewhat farcical account of a 21st Century evolution of the Astrodome, in which domes enclose whole cities.

Pretty dull stuff. Two stars.

The Being in the Tank, by Theodore L. Thomas

An alien being materializes in the heart of a hellish hydrazine factory and demands to speak to the President. But is he the real deal?

Forgettable, but inoffensive. A low three stars.

Hide and Seek, by Linda Marlowe

A childhood game is adapted into a method of population control. It has shock value, but little else.

Two stars.

The Great Stupids, by Miriam Allen deFord

Mad scientist makes everyone under 50 a mental moron, all in service of a rather lame joke at the end. DeFord was once one of the stars of the genre, but her light has waned over the years. Here's hoping she's a Cepheid variable and not a dying dwarf.

To Outlive Eternity (Part 2 of 2), by Poul Anderson

by Jack Gaughan

It is fitting that the final long piece of the issue is a sort of mirror image of Silverberg's novella in terms of strengths and weaknesses. As we read in last month's installment, the ramscoop colony ship Leonora Christine suffered damage to its decelerators while traveling at near light speed on the way to Beta Virginis. The solution: to accelerate to terrific velocities instead, plunging through the heart of the galaxy and out into the comparative emptiness of intergalactic space where repairs might be effected.

In this half, event after event conspires to force the Christine to travel ever faster and faster, ultimately spanning the lifespan of the universe and beyond in a matter of months. The story is told as a series of problem-solving conversations spread out over the weeks, and each character largely exists solely to have these conversations. Except for the women, of course, who are almost universally hysterics or hangers-on…except for the First Officer who ultimately whores herself out for the good of the crew.

In short, the setup and ideas are really neat, but its a plot outline, not a novel. And where Poul Anderson does try to characterize, it's with quick stereotypes, and usually not agreeable ones. As for setting, there really isn't one. The crew of the Christine might as well be floating heads in blank spaces for all we really get to experience the ship.

Readable, but badly flawed. Three stars.

Matrix Goose, by Jack Sharkey

Last up, some very familiar nursery rhymes as they might be rendered by robots–after the demise of humanity. It's cute. Three stars.

Perhaps my favorite example, art by Gray Morrow

Cross-eyed Kin

And so, Galaxy ends up a largely enjoyable, but unremarkable read — just under 3 stars in ranking. Perhaps, with the demise of Worlds of Tomorrow further in the rear-view mirror, Pohl will be able to concentrate on (and concentrate the best stories into) his remaining mags.

On the other hand, perhaps he hasn't learned his lesson. He's got a new magazine is coming out next month…

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Galactic Journey

[July 26, 1967] We Got Some Kicks on Route 66 (the continuing saga of Vicki and Mel)

[July 24, 1967] Not Feelin’ Groovy (Famous Science Fiction #1-3)

[July 22, 1967] Getting the mail through (Australia introduces Postcodes)

[July 20, 1967] An Analog of Analog (August 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

[July 18, 1967] Highs and Lows (July Galactoscope #2)

[July 16, 1967] The Weird and the Surprising (July 1967 Galactoscope)

[July 14, 1967] The Beat Goes On (August 1967 Amazing)

[July 12, 1967] The masks we wear; the masks we must wear (the film: The Face of Another)

The Face of the Creator

The Face of Another

Looking at the Face

Looking at the Reasons Behind the Face

Living with the Memory of the Face

[July 10, 1967] Return to Collinsport (the gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows)

[July 8, 1967] Family lines (August 1967 Galaxy)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction