[April 26, 1970] Red stars in space (Communist China and the USSR make leaps)

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

It's likely you missed the other big news in space given how much the flight of Apollo 13 dominated the air waves.  But while we were busy ensuring that Lovell, Swigert, and Haise made it back home, the ChiComs and the Russkies were accomplishing some space spectaculars of their own:

If you look up in the sky, you'll see nine new stars, all of them Red!

Colour photograph from an elevated vantage of large crowds of people gathered in Tien An Men Square, illuminated from above by brilliant lamps

Continue reading [April 26, 1970] Red stars in space (Communist China and the USSR make leaps)

[April 24, 1970] Save Our Ailing Planet (Earth Day: April 22)

Tune in tonight at 7PM Pacific for a very funny and excellent episode of Science Fiction Theater!

Overdramatic closeup of William Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek.



by Erica Frank

Timothy Leary's exhortations to "turn on, tune in, drop out" have found their limits:

You can't turn on if your every breath is filled with poison.
You can't tune in if you are surrounded by industrial cacophony.
You can't drop out of living on Earth: Science fiction plans notwithstanding, it's the only planet we have.

Before we can live in harmony with nature and each other, we need to address the damage we have done and undo the harms to the land, the sea, the sky that sustain us.

That's what Earth Day is about: A day of protest against industrial waste and environmental toxins. A day of celebration of the world we share and the peace we hope to build in the future. A day of education and cooperation, of hard truths and hopeful plans, of turning fear and anger into new relationships and useful actions.

Poster saying War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things, with a drawn flower on a bright yellow background.

Smog is also not healthy for children and other living things. Part of the goal of Earth Day is to bring the energy of anti-war protests to protecting our environment.
Image by Another Mother for Peace (AMP), an anti-war activist group.

Continue reading [April 24, 1970] Save Our Ailing Planet (Earth Day: April 22)

[April 22, 1970] “Houston, We’ve had a Problem Here!” (Apollo-13 emergency in space)

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

A black-and-white photo portrait of Kaye Dee. She is a white woman with long, straight dark hair worn down, looking at the camera with a smile.
by Kaye Dee

Philatelic envelope with coloured line drawings relating to the Apollo-13 space mission.

We all breathed a sigh of relief when the astronauts of Apollo-13 returned to Earth safely a few days ago, after the Apollo programmes’ first (and hopefully last) inflight emergency, but superstitious people are claiming that Apollo-13 was unlucky because of a prevalence of “13s”! After all, the mission was launched at 13:13 Houston time (but somewhere in the world there will always be a place where the time is 13: something!) and the explosion that caused its inflight emergency occurred on 13 April (but only in certain timezones – it was already 14 April in Australia and most of the world east of the United States).

Don’t tell me the Apollo-13 crew were “unlucky”; in fact, they were immensely lucky that when something did go wrong they were a team with the right skills for the situation. As seasoned test pilots, the crew were experienced at working in critical situations with their lives on the line, and their professional skills as astronauts were matched by the “tough and competent” (to quote Flight Director Mr. Gene Kranz) Mission Control teams, backed by highly trained engineers and scientists – all determined to “return them safely to the Earth”, just as President Kennedy committed NASA to do when he set the goal of a manned lunar landing by 1970!

Diagram timeline of major mission events during Apollo-13Timeline of major mission events during Apollo-13

Continue reading [April 22, 1970] “Houston, We’ve had a Problem Here!” (Apollo-13 emergency in space)

[April 20, 1970] Not the final quarry (May 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Tunnel light

There have been a lot of happy endings recently.  The postal strike is over, thanks to the government agreeing to an 8% raise for federal employees.  Ditto the air traffic control strike.  Nixon's third nominee to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Harry Blackmun, isn't somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan.  The Apollo 13 astronauts made it back home by the skin of their teeth.

Newspaper photo of Harry Blackmun

But of course, the old stories go on.  The Vietnam war has grown to include Cambodia—if Domino Theory is to be believed, we'll soon be fighting in the streets of Canberra.  Teachers are on strike in California; Governor Reagan says they're "against the children".  And actor Michael Strong says you can't walk the streets of the nation's capital without a good chance of getting mugged.

And so, it is appropriate that the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a mixed bag.  Some of it will thrill you, some of it will leave you cold.  On the other hand, none of it will mug you.

The Issue at Hand

A robot sits on a nighttime apocalyptic desert reading a trail of issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction
by Mel Hunter

Continue reading [April 20, 1970] Not the final quarry (May 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

[April 18th, 1970] The Spaceman Who Came In From The Cold (Doctor Who: The Ambassadors Of Death [Parts 1-4])

a white woman with auburn hair and glasses
By Jessica Holmes

The name’s Who… Doctor Who. In the latest adventure, our favourite double-hearted space alien finds himself embroiled in a spy thriller with all the trappings: cool car, wacky gadgetry, and an espionage plot I need a diagram to keep track of. Let’s take a peek under the bonnet of David Whitaker’s most recent contribution to Doctor Who, “The Ambassadors Of Death”.

The space centre. Cornish communicates with an astronaut, who appears on a big screen.

Continue reading [April 18th, 1970] The Spaceman Who Came In From The Cold (Doctor Who: The Ambassadors Of Death [Parts 1-4])

[April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope)

Tune in tomorrow morning (April 17) for FULL APOLLO 13 SPLASHDOWN COVERAGE!!!


black and white photo of a dark-haired white woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Six-Gun Planet, by John Jakes

The author is better known around these parts for his sword-and-sorcery yarns about Brak the Barbarian, firmly in the tradition of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan. This new novel is a horse of a different color.

The cover of Six-Gun Planet.  The title is written in red block capitals across the top.  Beneath, the story summary reads: This is the story of the planet Missouri, whose revolutionary goals were to duplicate in the 23rd century the Terrafirman Old West, even if they had to use robot pintos for special effects.    Below the text, three images are superimposed over a background of psychedelic swirls in bright primary colors.  The first, at the top left, shows the planet Jupiter with its storm spot, encircled by a bright yellow aura.  In the center, a rope noose descends from the top of the image.  Inside the loop, an orange sunset sky surrounds a cowboy drawn in black and white in the foreground.  He is wearing a tall hat, gun belt, and cowboy boots.  His legs are bowed and his hands appear to be reaching for his gun as he stares malevolently at the viewer from under his hat brim.  In the background, two smaller cowboys, also black and white, appear far in the distance. On the right, three sandstone mountains in shades of yellow and orange appear to be blasting off into space supported by rockets shooting fire beneath them.
Cover art by Richard Powers

The planet Missouri had a revolution some time before the story begins. Advanced technology and a bureaucratic form of government were replaced by nineteenth century ways of doing things and fierce individualism.

In other words, the place now resembles Hollywood's fantasy of the Old West. There are some so-called savages who play the role of American Indians. Towns are full of outlaws and dance hall girls. There are sheriffs around, supposedly to maintain law and order, but they aren't very effective.

Our long-suffering hero is Zak Randolph, a minor government worker who ekes out a living by supplying souvenirs (such as miniature outhouses) to tourists and staging phony shootouts to entertain visitors from other worlds. He also arranges to have local badmen sent to more civilized planets to amuse those who hire them.

This latter function gets him in trouble. One of the leased gunfighters heads back to Missouri before his contract runs out. Zak has to track him down or risk losing his position. (What keeps him on the wild-and-wooly planet at all are his girlfriend and the presence of native plants that supply minerals that can be made into jewelry. Otherwise, he's a peaceable sort who hates the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the place.)

Along the way, he has to deal with ruffians who despise him as a coward. There's also the mystery of a legendary gunfighter called Buffalo Yung. Zak isn't sure this terrifying figure really exists. Then he gets reports from various places that he's been shot dead, apparently more than once. And what does this have to do with the disappearing bodies of lawmen killed by Yung?

Continue reading [April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope)

[April 14, 1970] Take this spaceship to Alpha Centauri (May 1970 Venture)

Coverage of the Apollo 13 crisis continues!

TUNE IN!



by David Levinson

Skyjacked

Until recently, it seemed like there was at least one major airplane crash every month. That’s one of the reasons almost every airport has a place where you can buy short-term life insurance for your flight. But crashes seem to be giving way to a new risk: hijacking (or skyjacking as headlines writers would have it; the term will never stick). Last year alone, there were roughly 100 incidents around the world. That’s worse than crashes ever were.

In the U.S., the hijacker usually demands to be taken to Cuba. It’s mostly an inconvenience for the passengers, who get to their destination much later than planned and don’t even get to see any of Cuba. It’s become so common that it’s the subject of jokes and skits. But these incidents are taking on a more violent turn.

My colleague Cora recently reported on two failed hijacking attempts in Munich, one of which left one dead and ten injured. Not long after that, Swissair Flight 330 was destroyed by a bomb. Those three attacks have been attributed to a Palestinian terrorist organization. On March 1st, a bomb was found on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight before it left Rome. On the 17th, a gunman aboard an Eastern Airlines shuttle flight wounded the pilot and fatally wounded the co-pilot after being told the plane had to refuel in Boston. Fortunately, the co-pilot was able to wrest the gun away from the hijacker before succumbing to his wounds, allowing the pilot to land the plane safely. To date, this is the only airplane hijacking in America to end with a fatality.

On March 31st, a Japanese group calling themselves the Red Army Faction hijacked a flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka and demanded they be flown to Cuba. After being told the plane was incapable of flying that far, they demanded they be flown to North Korea instead. While refueling in Fukuoka, they released 23 passengers, mostly children and the elderly. An attempt was made to land the plane in South Korea and trick the hijackers into believing they’d reached Pyongyang. Unfortunately, they realized what was going on after the plane landed. Following some tense negotiations, the Japanese Vice Minister for Transportation, Shinjiro Yamamura, traded himself for the rest of the passengers and the plane flew on to North Korea. The hijackers were granted asylum and the plane and crew were allowed to return to Japan (not necessarily a given with North Korea) a few days later, arriving in Tokyo on the morning of April 5th.

That’s a lot in less than two months. But in the midst of all that, airplane hijackings and bombings also made it to the movies. March 5th saw the premiere of Airport. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a disaster or a hit; either way it’s star-studded. Take a look at the poster.

Promotional poster for the movie Airport. It shows the faces of twelve actors around a prominent list of their names: Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Barry Nelson, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter, Barbara Hale.You probably know who most of these people are.

Based on the 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey, the film is about the operations of an airport crippled by a blizzard and dealing with a wrecked plane on the tarmac and an inbound flight with a suicide bomber aboard, plus lots of soap opera stuff. While critics almost universally panned the book, it spent 64 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 30 at #1, and was the biggest selling novel of 1968. The critics are no kinder to the film (“dull” seems to be one of the nicer things they say), but once it went to wider release, it promptly spent two weeks as number one at the box office and is still in the top five. There must be something in the water. Or the air.

Spacejacked

The hijacking theme continues in this month’s Venture, which is dominated by Edward Wellen’s new novel. It’s normal for Venture to give most of its space to a condensed novel, but it feels like more space than usual is taken up this time.

Cover of Venture Science Fiction. It announces Hijack, a novel by Edward Wellen. The illustration is a handful of humanoid figures running while rockets lift off and a gigantic sun burns in the background. The figures are highly stylized and the colors are angry red and yellow.I’m still not sold on Tanner’s covers, but this one is better than most. Art by Bert Tanner

Continue reading [April 14, 1970] Take this spaceship to Alpha Centauri (May 1970 Venture)

[April 12, 1970] And What Happens When the Machines Take Over? (Colossus: the Forbin Project)

BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.
by Jason Sacks

1970 has been a bit of a tough year for us in Seattle.

Our major local company, Boeing, has suffered the worst year in its history. The Boeing Bust keeps continuing, as the 1969 layoffs have grown into a full-scale decimation. Unemployment is up around 10% now, the worst since the Great Depression, and my family and I are starting to panic. Of course, the fall of Boeing hits many other local industries, so places like restaurants, bookstores and movie theatres are especially hard hit by this. And many of my friends have either moved or contemplated moving – even if they will lose money on their fancy $50,000 homes in the suburbs.

Black and White photo of the interior of a wide-body passenger jet, apparently taken while in service.  The passengers are seated while the cabin stewardesses travel the aisles.
Sales of this widebody jet have been declining

To make matters worse, we’ve also lost our pro baseball team, which I wrote about last summer. The Seattle Pilots premiered in ’69, in a minor league park and with the worst uniforms in the Majors. But after just one season, the team is gone—relocated to Milwaukee, of all places, leaving behind a community that embraced them despite the challenges. For my friends and family, it wasn’t just about losing a baseball team; it was about losing a piece of the city’s identity. Just as we gained a second sports team to join our beloved SuperSonics, they were wrenched away from us.

Their home park, Sick’s Stadium, had its flaws. But it was our flawed park. Fans showed up, hopeful that the Pilots would grow into something more. Their financial struggles were well-known, reported faithfully in our local Times and P-I, but few expected the team to vanish overnight. When the sale was finalized on April 1, 1970, it felt like an April Fools’ joke—except it was real. The Pilots were rebranded as the Brewers, and we were left without a Major League Baseball team.

Black and White photograph from April 3rd 1970 taken in Tempe Arizona 
 depicting baseball manager Dave Bristol modelling the Milwaukee Brewers' (formerly Seattle Pilots) new team uniform while flanked by catcher Jerry McNertney who is wearing the club's old uniform.

In fact, the Pilots trained in Spring Training as the Pilots before a chaotic moment as they traveled north from Arizona. Equipment trucks were redirected from highway pay phones, as the team learned they would be playing in Wisconsin rather than Washington. The new Brewers played their first game this week at Milwaukee County Stadium. The Pilots are no more.

Of course, the lawyers are getting involved and we may get a team in the future – but a city that deserved some good news has received some devastating news instead. We are like mariners without a destination as far as baseball goes.

The Machines Live

And in the midst of all that frustration comes a film that’s ultimately about mankind’s frustrating hubris.

Colossus: The Forbin Project, adapted from the 1966 novel, is claustrophobic, unsettling, and uncomfortably plausible. If Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey made us marvel at the potential of artificial intelligence, Colossus comes along and shakes us out of our dreamy optimism. This isn’t a sleek, cool machine with a calm voice and vague philosophical musings. This is cold, unrelenting domination, and there’s no arguing with it.

Continue reading [April 12, 1970] And What Happens When the Machines Take Over? (Colossus: the Forbin Project)

[April 10, 1970] A Style in Treason (May 1970 Galaxy)

[Be sure to tune in tonight at 7PM PDT for Science Fiction Theater!  It's Nimoytacular—plus Apollo 13 pre-launch coverage!]

A color photograph of Leonard Nimoy and a white woman standing together in front of a curtain.  He is looking down and to the right of the frame and the woman's eyes are closed as she leans on his shoulder.


photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Backlash in D.C.

50,000 people marched on Washington last week protesting the course of the Vietnam War.  Sure, you think, another day ending in "y", right?

Except these kooks were protesting for the war!

A black and white photograph of a pro-war protest outdoors in Washington DC.  Government buildings are in the background.  In the foreground a group of white women are holding up a long banner which reads Let's Demand Victory in Vietnam. The woman at the center of the banner is holding two American flags crossed over her chest.  Behind them a crowd of people are holding up signs.  The only one legible reads In God We Trust.
Photo taken by Tom Norpell

Organized by a fundamentalist coalition, religious fervor dominated the gathering.  That said, there were plenty of Birchers and Nazis in attendance, too, making this a truly ecumenical demonstration.

A black and white photograph of white men marching down a city street while carrying banners on long poles.  At the top of each pole is a symbol of a lightning bolt inside a circle.  Beneath that a sign reads NSRP, the acronym for the National States Rights Party.  The banner extending down from the sign also has the circle-and-lightning-bolt motif, with God Bless America written above and below it. A crowd of onlookers is in the background.
Photo taken by Tom Norpell

There were even counter-counter protestors.

A black and white photograph of a white man with chin length dark hair standing outdoors.  He is wearing a knit cap and leather jacket and smoking a cigarette. He has his hands in his pockets and is frowning.  Over his jacket he is wearing a pillowcase with arm and head holes cut in the seams.  On it is painted Thou Shalt Not Kill. -God.  The center of the O in Not has a button attached to it showing a hand making a peace sign. A woman in an overcoat and rain hood is standing behind him.
Photo taken by Tom Norpell

Which poses the question: can Nixon still call them a "silent" majority?

A black and white photograph from a newspaper showing more of the people attending the pro-war protest.  In the center front is a man in a wheelchair holding an Merican flag, with another man standing behind him guiding the chair.  A woman to his left is holding a sign with multiple slogans  pasted on it, including Stand Up for America and Wallace 72. In the background other protesters are carrying American flags as well as other signs, mostly reading In God We Trust or Victory in Vietnam. The newspaper caption reads: March for Victory: Some of the estimated 50,000 people who took part in the parade advocating victory in Vietnam as they assembled in Washington yesterday.

Calm after the storm

There's really nothing to protest in the latest issue of Galaxy, which offers, in the main, a pleasant reading experience.

A color photograph of the cover of the May 1970 edition of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine  Along the left side are listed stories by David Gerrold, James Blish, Avram Davidson, and Arthur C. Clarke.  The image shows a blue and black blob-like shape with multiple eye-like orbs embedded in it, against a yellow background.  Other orbs extend upwards from the blob, attached by black threads.  Parts of the blob seem to have been pulled up like pieces of dough around these upper orbs. The upper orbs have, from left to right, a green-cast image of half of a man's face (the other half is in shadow); A red-cast image of a man standing and looking outward; and a star or galaxy against a backdrop of outer space.
by Jack Gaughan for A Style in Treason

Continue reading [April 10, 1970] A Style in Treason (May 1970 Galaxy)

[April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins)

A young white man with short hair wearing a navy P-coat, blue polo collar, and green t-shirt.
by Brian Collins

There must be a growing demand for original anthologies of science fiction, because they keep coming—both standalone titles and series. Infinity One is, going by its title, the first in yet another series of these, although notably there is one reprint between its covers (really two reprints, as you'll see), a story that many readers will already be familiar with. Robert Hoskins is an occasional author-turned-agent-turned-editor, whose high position at Lancer Books has apparently resulted in Infinity One. Will there be future installments? Does it really matter? We shall see.

The tagline for Infinity One is “a magazine of speculative fiction in book form,” which strikes me as a sequence of words only fit to come from the mouth of a clinically insane person. This is a paperback anthology and nothing more nor less. I mentioned in my review of Nova 1 last month that Harry Harrison claimed that he simply wanted to put together an anthology of “good” SF, although I’m not sure if Hoskins had even such a basic goal in mind.

Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins

Cover of Infinity One. Against a black background, an bubble-helmeted astronaut in silver dances in front of a stylized circuit board, flowing into the shape of a rocket above, and a red planet below. Beside this illustration, in an all-lowercase font, reads the following legend: 'introduction by isaac asimov/a short novel by poul anderson/infinity one/new writings in/speculative/fiction/edited by/robert hoskins/plus/anne mccaffery/robert silverberg/gordon r. dickson/r.a. lafferty/kris neville/k.m. o'donnell/ron goulart/katherine maclean/miriam allen deford/featuring/arthur c. clarke'. Clarke's name, and the title, are in yellow. The other names are in pink, red, and turquoise.
Cover art by Jim Steranko.

Continue reading [April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction