Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 18, 1967] Bright Lights (May 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction

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by Gideon Marcus

Tinsel Town

Last weekend, the world's greatest stars and movie-makers assembled in Santa Monica for the annual celebration of the best the silver screen has to offer.  It was a cavalcade of prominent names, from Sidney Poitier to Lee Remick to Julie Christie to Omar Sharif.  Some of the contestants were unfamiliar (Herb Alpert has a short animated film?) Some were surprising but welcome in their inclusion (like The Wargame for best documentary).  Some were inevitable (If Grand Prix hadn't won Best Sound and Best Editing, I'd have written letters…) Two titans towered all the rest (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and A Man for All Seasons–both of which I still haven't seen yet).

And throughout it all, Bob Hope was host, narrator, and satirist.  Lorelei observed that this time, the jokes about recognition still eluding the aging comedian seemed more pointed and bitter than usual.  Maybe it's time he got some kind of lifetime achievement award, as did Isaac Asimov at a recent Worldcon…

Print City

The latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction features a similar assemblage of luminaries–and it's not even an "All-Star Issue"!  Presented in a format that has been standard and familiar since 1949, this month's read was as comforting and entertaining as two primetime hours at the Oscars.

With the added benefit that one can reread favorite stories!


by Ronald Walotsky

Planetoid Idiot, by Phyllis Gotlieb

Our first star is Phyllis Gotlieb, a woman writer who joined the SF ranks one year after Mses. Rosel George Brown, Kit Reed, and Pauline Ashwell.  Her latest is a fine novella in the Analog tradition–indeed, it reads like something Katherine MacLean might have penned.

A mutli-species spaceship has landed on the ocean planed of Xirifor.  Their goal is to save the indigenous race from a pandemic of gill rot such that they can better represent themselves when representatives of the Galactic Federation come to negotiate for the pearls the aliens harvest.

The crew of the contact ship are a beautifully heterogenous group: Hrufa, an eight foot telepathic amphibian is their leader, keeping the rest of the team in order, if not harmony.  Thlyrrh is a protoplasmic being with a shape-shifting carapace; it can do almost anything…except compose an original thought.  And then there are the two humans, or "solthrees" (I really like that phrase): Olivia the exobiologists, and Berringer, the generalist.

Despite their vast collective knowledge, they are hindered in their task by politics, internal and external.  But in the end, working together, they deduce a solution that is completely scientific and plausible.

It's all very satisfactory, and if I have any complaint, it is only the title, which I found misleading (I thought "planetoid idiot" would be a play on "village idiot").  Definitely a candidate for the next volume of Rediscovery.

Four stars.

Sleeping Beauty, by Terry Carr

It's nice to see Ace Books publisher, Terry Carr, slinging the pen again.  His latest story is a beautifully written if rather inconsequential tale of a landless prince, galloping across Europe looking for that most endangered of modern creatures: the single (and wealthy) princess.  There is, of course, a sting in the story's tale.

You'll forget it soon after you read it, but you'll enjoy the journey.  Three stars.

Safe at Any Speed, by Larry Niven

If Ralph Nader has his way, all cars of the future will be like the one presented in this, the latest tale to take place in Niven's "Known Space".  It's his most humorous piece, almost Sheckleyesque, and it accomplishes a lot in a brief space.

Four stars.

Fifteen Miles, by Ben Bova

Two years ago, Air Force astronaut Chet Kinsman was tested in orbit when he had to go mano-a-mano with a Communist spacewoman.  Now Kinsman is on the moon, haunted by the memory of the lady he had to slay.  Will his guilt get in the way of his rescuing a fellow astronaut trapped in a lunar crevice?

This is another grounded SF tale I'm surprised (but pleased) to find in F&SF.  I've not yet found Bova brilliant (though Victoria Silverwolf has), but I always enjoy him.

Three stars.

The Red Shift, by Theodore L. Thomas

Thomas explains in his nonfiction vignette how quasars, which must be extragalactic yet near objects, give lie to the Doppler shift, and thus rewrite physics. Specifically, he says that the redshift of quasars indicates that they are far away, but that radio astronomy locates them much closer to Earth.

I do not know how he makes this assertion, as it is radio astronomy that detects these quasars at all–including their red shift.  According to the article I read in Britannica's 1966 year book of knowledge, quasars are very interesting in that they point up an asymmetry between the young universe (quasar-rich) and the curent universe (quaser-poor).  But there's nothing that suggests quasars exist close by, or that there's anything wrong with Doppler.

There does seem to be something wrong, however, with Thomas.

One star.

Cyprian's Room, by Frances Oliver

Onward to the second woman-penned story, by an author about whom our editor knows virtually nothing.  A pity, because her first story is a good one.  Romantic Hilda Wendel takes a room in the big city hoping to meet someone interesting in her boarding house.  She finds a tubercular artist whose views on art are maddeningly contradictory, yet irresistably compelling.

Is he just an avante-garde…or something otherworldly?

A high three.

Interview with a Lemming, by James Thurber

This putative dialogue between man and lemming, to indulge in adjectives solely beginning with "i" is inconsequential, irritating, and inspid–particularly the thinks-itself-clever ending.

Two stars.

Where is Thy Sting, by Emil Petaja

One of the last fertile men in a post-atomized Earth, racked with suicidal desires, must be kept alive at all costs, even if it means subverting his reality.

I'd have liked this story more had I not read one so similar to it (The Best is Yet to Be) in the pages of this same magazine not many months before.

Two stars.

Times of Our Lives, by Isaac Asimov

All about time zones.  I actually found this atlas-derived article educational and interesting.

Four stars.

Fill in the Blank, by Ron Goulart

Finally, the return of a perennial star with a series with more installments than James Bond.  Max Kearney is dragooned into investigating what appears to be an infestation of poltergeists.  The culprits are all-too-temporal…but it doesn't mean magic's not involved!

It's funnier in the latter half.  Three stars.

House Lights Return

By strict mathematical computation, the latest F&SF only scores an average three star rating.  Nevertheless, the brilliance of the first piece, the general competence of most of the rest, and the edification provided by the Good Doctor leaves a most pleasant impression.

Let's keep our stars around for a while.  They make good illumination.


by Gahan Wilson



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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 16, 1967] The Generation Gap (May 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Youth is Wasted on the Young

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
— attributed to Socrates

It's no secret that young people are rejecting many of the opinions of their elders these days. That's always been true to some extent, of course. However, with the hippie culture, the civil rights movement, and antiwar protests, all of which mostly involve young adults, the gap between the generations seems wider than ever.

In particular, once heavy bombing of North Vietnam began a couple of years ago (Operation Rolling Thunder, still going on intermittently), college students, led by such organizations as Students for a Democratic Society, started demonstrating against the war. On April 17, 1965, somewhere between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand people showed up at the nation's capital, in the largest protest to date.


SDS members and others during the March on Washington, almost exactly two years ago.

There have been many other protests since then, both in the United States and other nations. I don't mean to imply that these demonstrations consist entirely of young people, but they do seem to make up the majority of peace activists.

Just yesterday, thousands appeared at massive protests against the conflict in Vietnam in major cities across the United States. In New York City, well over one hundred young men burned their draft cards, followed by a speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., at the United Nations.


The crowd fills Kazar stadium in San Francisco.

What does the parallel escalation of America's involvement in the war and the rejection of it by many young adults and their elders mean for the immediate future of the United States?  It's hard to say, but things look dark.  Just as the struggle for civil rights sometimes looks like a second Civil War, complete with bloodshed, the battle between Hawks and Doves threatens to tear the country apart along political lines.  Let's hope the nation is never as divided as it seems to be now.

Music to Argue With Your Parents or Children By

The tension between generations shows up in popular culture as well. A fine example of this happened recently. From late March until the middle of April, a cheerful little tune from the young folks who call themselves The Turtles was at the top of the American music charts. Happy Together is a great favorite of teenagers, I believe.


I like the part near the end, when the frequently repeated title changes to How is the weather.

Mom and Dad are likely to prefer the song that replaced it as Number One this week. Veteran crooner Frank Sinatra, assisted by daughter Nancy, currently has the nation's biggest hit with the much more traditional number Somethin' Stupid.


I'll refrain from commenting on the propriety of having father and daughter sing a love song together.

Catch a Wave

Not even speculative fiction escapes the conflict between generations. The so-called New Wave movement within the field, primarily in the United Kingdom, offers experimental, controversial, and sometimes incomprehensible stories to readers. The latest issue of Fantastic, a magazine which has been rather stodgy since it went to a policy of containing mostly reprints, mixes a bit of New Wave with plenty of Old Wave stuff.


Cover art by Malcolm Smith.

As usual, the cover reprints art from an old magazine. In this case, it's from the back cover of the July 1943 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


The original looks a lot better.

The Ant with the Human Soul (Part One of Two), by Bob Olsen


Cover art by Leo Morey.

The whole of this Old Wave, pre-Campbell novella appeared in full in the Spring-Summer 1932 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly. I guess Fantastic didn't want to devote most of the magazine to it.


Illustrations by Morey also.

The narrator tries to kill himself by jumping into the ocean, but a scientist rescues him. The scientist suggests a bizarre scheme. He has a gizmo that can increase or decrease the size of anything, even living creatures. He combines that with neurosurgery in order to perform a weird experiment.

First, he'll increase an ant to the size of a human being. After that, he'll put a part of the narrator's brain into the ant's head. When he shrinks the ant back down to normal size, the narrator will experience everything the ant does, and will be able to control the ant's actions. In essence, he will become the ant.

After the strange transformation takes place, the narrator takes us on a guided tour of life in an ant colony. This first part ends with a cliffhanger, promising the reader that a violent event is about to occur.


Mad Science!

This is an odd story, not only because of the outrageous premise. The mood varies wildly. Some sections deal with the narrator's loss of religious faith, which drove him to attempt suicide. Others are very lighthearted, with playful banter between the two characters. The best part of it is the description of life as an ant, which is depicted in vivid, accurate detail.

Three stars, mostly for taking me into the ant colony.

The Thinking Seat, by Peter Tate


Cover art by Keith Roberts, better known to me as a writer.

The magazine calls this a new novelette, which is a half-truth. It's new to American readers, but it appeared in the November 1966 issue of the British publication New Worlds. My esteemed colleague Mark Yon reviewed it at that time, but let's take another look.


Illustration by Gray Morrow, which is the only truly new thing in the magazine.

The setting is the seacoast of California in the near future. The rugged shore has been replaced with artificial beaches of a tamer nature. The water is warmer, due to the discharge from a nuclear power plant. (I also got the impression that it made the water thicker, almost gelatinous, but I may be wrong about that. This New Wave story isn't always clear.)

A man and a woman with a strange relationship show up at a beatnik colony. She'd like to be more intimate with the fellow, but he doesn't seem interested. Instead, he becomes fascinated by a charismatic poet, who openly announces that he's going to take the woman away from the other man. Things come to a climax during an attempt to sabotage the nuclear power plant, as a way of protesting what it's done to the coast.

I have probably greatly simplified and distorted the plot, because this isn't the easiest story to understand. The narrative often stops to offer examples of obscure poetry, which adds more ambiguity. (Apparently the poet steals phrases from the Beat poets, but I don't know enough about their work to confirm that.)

I got the impression that this example of the Eternal Triangle, which ends badly, was really a case of repressed homosexuality. That's a theme you won't find in most Old Wave science fiction, to be sure. The whole thing works better as a study of the psychology of the three main characters rather than as science fiction.

Three stars, mostly for keeping me wondering about things.

A Way of Thinking, by Theodore Sturgeon


Cover art by Art Sussman.

The October-November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this supernatural chiller from the pen of one of the field's greatest stylists.


Illustration by Ernest Schroeder.

The narrator is a writer of science fiction and fantasy, who even mentions his work appearing in Amazing, so I assume it's a fictional version of the author. He tells us about an acquaintance who reacts to problems in unusual ways, often by thinking about things backwards. The fellow's brother is dying a slow, horrible death. The suggestion arises that it might have something to do a doll owned by the dying man's vengeful ex-girlfriend. The brother deals with the situation in his usual unorthodox manner.

This synopsis makes the story sound like a typical tale of voodoo, but that's misleading. I don't want to give too much away, but the plot goes in unexpected directions, and the climax is truly disturbing. Of course, given the author, it's very well written. It's not his most ambitious work, to be sure, but it succeeds as a horror story.

Three stars, mostly for the shocking conclusion.

The Pin, by Robert Bloch


Cover art by Mel Hunter.

From the December-January 1953-1954 issue of Amazing Stories comes another tale of terror.


Illustration by Lee Teaford.

An artist looking for a cheap studio comes across an abandoned loft. It's supposed to be empty, but there's a guy inside, surrounded by a huge pile of telephone books, directories, and so forth. The fellow stabs at random names in the books with a pin.

You may have already figured out that the pin causes the death of those whose names are selected. (The premise reminds me of Ray Bradbury's 1943 story The Scythe, as well as the 1958 movie I Bury the Living.) There aren't a lot of surprises in the plot, but it's an effective little thriller.

Three stars, mostly for creating an eerie mood.

Cold Green Eye, by Jack Williamson


Cover art by Richard Powers.

The March-April 1953 issue of the magazine offers yet another spooky tale. In its original appearance, it was called The Cold Green Eye. Don't ask me why they left out the first word.


Illustration by Ernie Barth.

The child of a pair of daring explorers is raised by Buddhist monks after his parents die in a mountaineering accident. He's adopted by an aunt back in the United States. She's a harsh disciplinarian, punishing the boy for what she thinks of as his heathenish ways. In particular, she hates flies and kills them whenever she can, while the child believes in reincarnation and that all living creatures should be protected. Things get strange when the kid uses the sacred scroll he has in his possession.

There's a good chance you'll see the ending coming, although it still raises goose bumps. What's more surprising is that the cruel aunt is a devout Christian, in contrast to the boy's gentle Buddhism. I didn't expect that from an American horror story from more than a decade ago. Maybe the author just thought it made for a good story, and wasn't really trying to say anything about the two faiths.

Three stars, mostly for aunt's comeuppance.

Hok Draws the Bow, by Manly Wade Wellman


Cover art by C. L. Hartman.

Here's a sequel to a story that was reprinted in the previous issue of Fantastic. It comes from the May 1940 issue of Amazing Stories.


Illustrations by Robert Fuqua.

Once again our hero is Hok, a Homo sapiens fighting a war of extermination against sinister, cannibalistic Neanderthals. (It's best to forget about this story's version of prehistory and just think of it as a sword-and-sorcery yarn.) A fellow shows up bragging about his ability to project a spear farther than anybody else. That's because he's got a leather strap that he winds around it, sending it spinning.

The boastful man also has plan to take over Hok's clan, and he's particularly interested in Hok's pretty mate. He's made himself a god-like ruler over the Neanderthals, even teaching them basic military tactics. It looks like Hok's people will be wiped out, but our hero combines the man's strap and a throwing stick used by the Neanderthals to create a secret weapon.


That doesn't keep him from being captured. Fortunately, his mate has a throwing arm Sandy Koufax might envy.

The title and the opening illustration give away the fact that this story is about Hok inventing the bow and arrow. Other than that, it's an efficient adventure story.

Three stars, mostly for keeping things moving quickly.

Beside Still Waters, by Robert Sheckley


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

The same issue as the Sturgeon story is the source of this tale. A spaceman lives on an asteroid, turning rock into soil that can grow crops and extracting oxygen from minerals. His only companion is a robot. The machine starts off only able to speak a few phrases, but over time the man teaches it to converse more fully. The story ends with a scene that tries to touch the reader's emotions.

The fact that the man can live on the surface of an asteroid unprotected, even if he somehow produces oxygen and food, is ludicrous. (Not to mention the fact that the asteroid's tiny gravity is going to send the oxygen out into space quickly.) The ending takes the plot into pure fantasy. An author best known for his wit tries to be sentimental here, and the result is bathetic.

Two stars, mostly for the excellent illustration.

Bridging the Gap

That was mostly a middle-of-the-road issue, coming to a sudden halt at the end. Maybe there's something to be said for mediocrity. If nothing else, both young and old can agree that the Old Wave and the New Wave have their ups and downs.


The late President Kennedy closes the generation gap.



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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 14, 1967] Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (April 1967 Galactoscope)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Two new science fiction novels take readers from the dry land to the depths of the sea, and down from the sky in a burst of flames. Will they make proper use of the traditional four elements of ancient times, and reach the exalted level of the aether, that fabled quintessence that was of a more refined nature than the others? Let's find out.

Canada's Gift to American Science Fiction

Alberta-born writer Gordon Rupert Dickson, now living in the USA, has been publishing fiction since 1950. It's hard to say that there's a particular kind of Dickson story. He's written light comedy, such as the Hoka series with fellow Minnesotan Poul Anderson (currently a resident of the San Francisco region), all about aliens who look like teddy bears and cause trouble by imitating human beings. He's written entertaining adventure stories, some for a juvenile audience. In recent years, he's gained notice for more serious and thoughtful works.

His novella Soldier, Ask Not (Galaxy, October 1964), part of the Dorsai series, won the Hugo award, and the novelette Call Him Lord (Analog, May 1966) won the Nebula award less than a month ago. Will his latest novel add to his reputation?

The Past is Prologue


Cover art by Richard Powers.

It's something of a challenge to jump into The Space Swimmers without any preparation. The author throws a complex background at you in bits and pieces, and it's obvious that a lot has gone on before the novel begins. That's because it's a direct sequel to the novelette Home from the Shore (Galaxy, February 1963).


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Surf 'n' Turf

In brief, humanity has split into land dwellers and ocean dwellers. The sea people have developed abilities that make them valuable space explorers. Humans encounter the so-called space swimmers, beings that are gigantic in size but tiny in mass, beyond Mars. They die every time people try to capture them. This causes the sea folk to rebel, and withdraw their services from the space vessels of the land folk. The result is war, with the land dwellers destroying the underwater communities of the ocean dwellers.

This is where the novel begins. The war has cooled off slightly, although the land folk sometimes hunt the sea folk for sport, in the tradition of Richard Connell's famous story The Most Dangerous Game.

Our hero is Johnny Joya, who more-or-less instigated the rebellion of the sea folk in the novelette. He lives in isolation in the frigid waters of the Arctic with his young son Tomi after the death of his wife during the war. Tomi has even greater abilities than his father. The sea people can communicate with dolphins, but Tomi can also communicate with killer whales. Father and son become involved in an attempt to reconcile the two branches of humanity.

It seems the space swimmers can teleport instantaneously from one place in space to another. If Tomi can communicate with one of the mysterious creatures, he may be able to discover the secret of interstellar travel. Complicating matters is the fact that both sides have developed doomsday weapons that could wipe out the other.

I've only scratched the surface of a novel that has a heck of a lot going on in only one hundred and sixty pages. I haven't mentioned major characters or important subplots. Suffice to say that Dickson keeps things moving at a brisk pace.

There's a certain vagueness in some of the book's concepts that leads to confusion at times. We're told more than once that the ability of the sea people to communicate with dolphins is not telepathy, but this is left unexplained. Johnny works on problems by making use of so-called analogs (a nod to the magazine of the same name?) but I didn't understand how this was supposed to work.

It may seem unlikely that the sea people are willing to completely destroy life on land through a series of devastating earthquakes, and that the land people are willing to destroy all life in the ocean through modified disease organisms. The way each of these terrifying weapons is described, it seems as if either one would completely wipe out both sides. The fact that we live in an age of Mutually Assured Destruction (to make use of a term coined by Hudson Institute researcher Donald Brennan, appropriately known as MAD) may add some plausibility to this part of the book.

Worth reading, but I don't think it will win any awards. Three stars.

Sterling Silver

Native New Yorker Robert Silverberg has been an extremely prolific author in multiple fields since 1954. Not all of his work has been notable for its quality, it must be admitted, but he won a Hugo award in 1956 as the Most Promising New Author, beating out Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert, and Henry Still. (Who? He hasn't published anything since 1961. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

I won't mention the many sex novels he's published under multiple pseudonyms, except to say that eroticism plays an important role in Those Who Watch, his latest novel (unless another one comes out while I'm writing this, given his speed at the typewriter.)

Three Times Two Equals Six


Anonymous cover art.

Aliens have been monitoring Earth for centuries, cruising the skies in flying saucers hidden from human eyes by a screening device.  One of the hundreds of saucers filling the atmosphere has a disastrous failure, causing it to explode over New Mexico.  The three crewmembers bail out, landing in separate areas and sustaining serious injuries.

The trio consists of two males and a female, all part of a mating group.  (We'll find out later that such a triad is normal for the aliens, although sometimes it's two females and a male.) Although not described in any detail, the extraterrestrials are small beings, each one wearing an artificially created human body.  Their real bodies are intimately connected with their external disguises, so they experience the pain of their damaged human bodies and other sensations.

At this point, the narrative alternates among the three aliens and the human being each one encounters. 

One extraterrestrial appears to be an ordinary man of middle years.  A young American Indian boy, living in a pueblo that keeps its traditional ways only to attract tourist dollars, brings him food and water while he recovers from a spine injury that renders him paralyzed.  In exchange, the highly intelligent lad, who figures out very quickly that he's dealing with an alien, learns about the other's native world.  He also acquires a piece of advanced technology that could be deadly.

Another alien takes the form of an extraordinarily handsome young man.  He gets aid from a young widow with a small child.  The two fall in love, in the first of two human/alien couplings we'll see.

Paralleling this is the mating between the female alien, disguised as a voluptuous woman, and a military man, bitter because a medical problem kept him from becoming an astronaut.  He and the widow eventually come together, after their alien lovers leave Earth.

Meanwhile, rival aliens, who also have hundreds of unseen flying saucers orbiting the planet, try to track down the three, in order to charge them with violating an agreement not to land on Earth.  (There seems to be a sort of Cold War going on between the two species.  Neither one is supposed to be on the surface of the planet, but they both have secret agents on Earth.)

This is a leisurely novel, despite the attempt to create suspense in the form of the enemy aliens.  Much of it consists of conversations between each of the three aliens and the human being that renders aid.  The two sexual encounters between a lonely human being and a benign extraterrestrial may be too much of a good thing. 

The sections of the novel about the American Indian boy are probably the best.  The author avoids stereotyping Indians, and shows a great deal of empathy for their situation in modern society.  Silverberg displays a gift for characterization in his intimate portraits of the three humans; perhaps not quite so much for the aliens.

He's still a promising, if not quite so new, author.  Three stars.


by Gideon Marcus

Ring in the Old

If Silverberg is a new old hand (or an old new hand), and Dickson is a plain old hand, then Murray Leinster is the oldest of hands.  In fact, Will Jenkins (Leinster's real name) has been a pubished author of scientifiction since 1919–before the genre even had a name.  Suffusing his work with a patina of scientific accuracy, up through the '50s, his name was a welcome one on the masthead of any magazine.  I particularly enjoyed his Med Series tales of Dr. Lincoln Calhoun and his pet/assistant, Murgatroyd.

Those happy days are years in the past, and as John Boston and I can tell ya, his latest works have been phoned in…from a booth in Duluth that hasn't been serviced in decades.  Thus, it was with trepidation that I picked up Leinster's latest, Miners in the Sky.

It's actually not bad.

Set in the lawless rings of the planet Thutmose, a Saturn analog in a star system far from Earth, it details the perils faced by a space miner named Donne.  He's no sooner set foot on the trade asteroid of Outlook, a sizable rock within Thutmose's rings, when his little "donkeyship" explodes.  He quickly deduces that word has (mistakenly) gotten out that he has discovered the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a bonanza rock laden with the "abyssal crystals" that facilitate solar system travel.  Donne must get off Outlook as soon as possible: his partner, Keene, is stuck on the ringlet they are mining.  He may run out of air, or worse, already have also been the target of an assassination.  Complicating things is the arrival of Keene's sister, Nike, who insists on coming with Donne.  So begins a long chase through the rings of Thutmose, with a murder-inclined criminal on Donne and Nike's heels.

I had worried that the story would be simply a gussied up Western, but there's a bit of physics and a lot of pretty description of the Thutmosian locale that makes Miners reasonably SFNal.  To be sure, it is written in Leinster's current mode: all short sentences, lots of exclamation marks, and characterization as shallow as a kiddie pool.  Add to that the several times Leinster points out that, as a woman, Nike "instinctively" looks to a man for help. 

Miners in the Sky will definitely win no awards.  It is yet another in a long line of stories cranked out on autopilot to pay the bills.  Still, I don't regret the time I took reading the book.  Sometimes, all you need is a little adventure.

Three stars.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[April 12, 1967] We'll take Manhattan (Star Trek: "The City on the Edge of Forever")

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Time, the subtle thief of youth


by Janice L. Newman

We’ve been watching Star Trek for almost a full season, now. We’ve seen some sublime episodes and at least one really terrible episode, but the overall quality has been high. “City on the Edge of Forever” is one of the best episodes we’ve seen yet.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[April 10, 1967] A Queer Dream (the CBS "documentary" The Homosexuals)

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There is something profoundly queer in enjoying science fiction and fantasy. The genre asks us, again and again, to imagine worlds fundamentally different to the one we live in every day. Worlds with equality of the sexes in a workplace, fair and accountable courts, ends to unjust wars – and of course, pointy-eared aliens, impossible spaceships, and lithesome green women.

Still of an green-bodies Orion dancer from Star Trek: The Original Series episode The Cage
As queer a dancer as I ever saw outside of the Tenderloin.

For many of us, these science fictional spaces are a refuge, a place that is not only safe for imagining, but safe from discrimination, casual cruelty, and doubt as to our welcome. Fan communities, at their best, can be places where fairness, open mindedness, and creativity reign over entrenched biases, reflexive bigotry, and the dishwater-dull thinking of corporate life.

Last month, I felt myself yearning for Ursula K. Le Guin's shapeshifting wizards, the science fictional poetry of Adrienne Rich, the spinning worlds of Star Trek–the direct result of having watched CBS News's deeply cruel, intellectually lazy, and poorly reported documentary piece "The Homosexuals."

Over the course of an hour, reporter Mike Wallace managed to repeat nearly every stereotype, false scandal, and ignorant opinion of this group from the past decade, along with tossing tinder onto the fire of at least two witch-hunts whose scarring cinders had barely cooled. From San Francisco to Washington DC, with law enforcement layovers in Idaho and Los Angeles, this documentary gave platform and voice to faux expert after faux expert who pathologized, medicalized, and generally generalized about a population they are not from and whose membership they only come into contact with during extreme criminal or psychiatric crises.

1955 editorial headline from the Idaho Statesman "Crush the Monster"
Editorial headline "Crush the Monster," referring to homosexuality in Boise, ID. November 3, 1955, Idaho Statesman.

It was a bit like watching a reporter interview a panel of ax murderers about about the lives of modern lumberjacks and taking their words on lumberjacks' needs, lives, and values based on their shared experiences wielding an ax.

Love is generally treated much more gently in science fiction and fantasy. There are any number of cruel, debasing, woman-hating or family-hating or love-hating works of fiction available on the average public library shelf, but it is far easier to find acceptance and warmth and a curiosity about all the ways there are to be alive in our shared universe between the covers of a book than on the nightly news. Perhaps that is because those of us who love science fiction and fantasy are used to being seen as queer by the wider world, we can find it within ourselves to accept queerness in others. Perhaps the experience of imagining different languages and cultures and lifeways makes us more open to allowing others to live as makes them happiest.

I think this shared hobby certainly makes us more comfortable trying on new language for size. For example, in the program mentioned above, Mr. Wallace doggedly uses the word "homosexuals," even while one of the several men he spoke to used the term "gay." Once, Mr. Wallace used the term "bisexual," but swiftly dropped it.

A still of Mike Wallace speaking from the 1967 CBS News Report "The Homosexuals."
"Some are bisexual: they marry, have children, and keep their homosexual contacts to the side."

Now, there is no word for this community that is not soaked in blood. I have friends who call themselves saphists or faggots or queers or lesbians or fairies or dykes or homophiles or queens or gays or homosexuals, and that is their right; I'll call anyone what they ask to be called. I use "queer" for myself because I had four years of high school Latin and can't really square calling myself "man-sexual" when what I am is a woman who is plumbing agnostic. Bisexual is a fair enough descriptor too and one I sometimes use in the wilds, but there is something juicy in taking back a word so often used in violent insult, so "queer" is what I use.

It is also how I think of my collection of friends here in California, queer as to their sexual orientation or their genders or just their worldview. It is a wide and colorful umbrella we all crouch under, holding each other close out of the storms of social opprobrium like those given a megaphone in this documentary.

It did not have to be like this. Mike Wallace could have spoken to members of the Janus Society or ONE Magazine, rather than merely filming their doors for shock value; he could have followed in the footsteps of his fellows reporters at my own local station, KQED, who produced a much better documentary on this same subject six years ago titled "The Rejected." If he wished to speak to bisexuals, to women or anyone who isn't a man, to people of color, to people outside of the middle class, all he had to do was pick-up a copy of Tangents or The Phoenix or Vanguard Magazine or ring up the editors.

Song from Vanguard Magazine, 1966
"The Fairytale Ballad of Katy the Queen" from the August 1966 edition of Vanguard Magazine.
Cover of Tangents Magazine, Dec 1966, covered in anti-war and pro sexual liberation buttons
Cover from the December 1966 edition of Tangents Magazine. Pins include: "Equality for homosexuals," "It's a gay world," and "Be peculiar."

Mr. Wallace could have done what an anonymous congressional aide did nearly 20 years ago in one of the most sympathetic federal reports on queer people; he could have represented our experiences with compassion and care. In 1949, while the United States Congress was debating a change to the U.S. military's approach to discharges, an aide serving the House of Representatives' Committee on Veterans Affairs compiled report entitled: “History of the Phrase 'Discharged Under Conditions Other Than Dishonorable’ and Present Discharge Criteria for Three Services.”

Now, this report title has none of the thrill of Mr. Wallace's headlines from Boise ("Crush the Monster") or the brutal audio he included of a 19-year-old soldier begging police not to tell his mother they'd caught him with another man and near weeping when they taunted him with the threat of telling his commanding officer. But I find the best stories are sometimes tucked away, not behind flashy titles but in tomes deep enough to hide the truth. No one would accuse Professor J.R.R. Tolkien of being flashy, but I find more truth in his writing of the world than many a jazzier author.

Imagine cracking open the Congressional Record of 1949 like we're opening up your well-loved edition of The Lord of the Rings. Find your way to the report, where a staffer explains how extraordinary it is that the committee has received any formal complaints about the blue discharge ticket process – the process by which the U.S. military removed tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen from the armed services during World War II. Flip your way past the harsh realities of finding a job with blue ticket discharge and references to reports with names like The Pervert Records (1947), and you will find this impossibly poignant and beautiful paragraph:

“It should be borne in mind that even a moderate amount of complaint in a matter of this sort is significant. For a person to make such a complaint in his own case implies that, he feels, a sense of injustice so great that he is willing to risk publicizing the stigma of having been discharged from the Army under circumstances which savor of disgrace. For each complainant there are many more persons who feel the same sense of injustice but prefer to bury their hurt in as much oblivion as possible.”

Today, most people who I would call queer "bury their hurt in as much oblivion as possible," making the brave few who raise their voices worthy of our shared pride. Most people who I would call queer seek to protect themselves and the ones they love from the stigma and disgrace and frequent injustices that Mr. Wallace's program did nothing to address or to heal. Most of us fantasize about a day when we will be free to be who we are. Of living fully in communities where fairness, open mindedness, and creativity reign.

I think we can get there. I dream about it. I hope you do too.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 8, 1967] Swan Songs (May 1967 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

After the Ball is Over

According to my sources in the publishing world, the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is the last one that will be published. I can't say I'm completely surprised, given Frederik Pohl's juggling act of editing three magazines at once. Worlds of Tomorrow is the youngest of the literary siblings, and seems to have received the least attention. (The fact that it went from bimonthly to quarterly is a strong clue.)

While the band plays Goodnight, Ladies and my corsage begins to wilt, let's take one last waltz around the ballroom.

Save the Last Dance For Me


Cover art by Douglas Chaffee.

Stone Man, by Fred Saberhagan


Illustrations by Hector Castellon.

Here's the latest story in the author's Berserker series, featuring ancient machines bent on destroying all organic life. This yarn features a peculiar kind of time travel, which requires some explanation.

Humans settled a planet where some kind of weird space/time warp sent them into the remote past. It also wiped out their memories, so they pretty much started from scratch as cave dwellers. Many generations later, society evolved into one with advanced technology. Then the Berserkers showed up.

The planet's surface became a war-scarred wasteland, and the remaining population went underground. Making use of the same space/time warp, the Berserkers try to completely eliminate the human population by sending war machines to the past.


Our hero, a young cave dweller, and a Berserker device.

The main character sends his consciousness into an armored suit that goes back in time, in order to intercept the machines. (I will refrain from making a head 'em off at the past joke.)


A closer look at the enemy. The cave folk call it a stone-lion, and call their rescuer a stone-man.

It won't surprise you that our hero saves the day, after a very tough battle. (Let's ignore the fact that his body remains in the future while his mind inhabits the armor, so his life isn't really in danger. Anyway, if the Berserkers had won, he and the rest of the people on the planet would never have existed. Time travel is confusing, isn't it?)


He deserves to celebrate his victory.

What most impresses me about the Berserker series is that the author avoids repeating himself. (I wish I could say the same for the Gree and Esks series, or even Retief.) This is a pretty good story, but I have some quibbles.

There's a character I haven't mentioned yet, a young woman who suffers amnesia during one of the Berserker's attacks on the underground dwellers. (In the future, not the past. Are you still with me?) Her only role in the story seems to be to listen to the hero's expository dialogue. The premise is a complicated one, so I understand why the author needs to explain things to the reader via this character. However, like the plot itself, this strikes me as contrived.

I'd say a solid three stars for this one.

The Negro in Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz

Another article from the walking encyclopedia of fantastic fiction. As usual, this essay wanders all over the place, from dime novels of the Nineteenth Century to the present day. A lot of time is spent on obscure old stuff. The author seems to have his heart in the right place, decrying science fiction's failure to deal with modern issues of civil rights, but he also makes excuses for grotesque stereotypes from the last century. (As long as characters are on the side of the good guys, it doesn't seem to matter how they look, talk, or act.)

Two stars for a dull look at a very important topic.

Squared Out with Poplars, by Douglas R. Mason


Illustrations by Dan Adkins.

On behalf of the museum where he works, the protagonist journeys to the remote home of an eccentric fellow who intends to sell his collection of valuable artifacts. Along the way he runs into the elderly guy's beautiful granddaughter, who is headed the same way. After a difficult struggle to even reach the place, they discover the old man's bizarre secret project.


Dragging away one of the fellow's minions.

This is an odd story. I don't want to give away too much, but the premise involves truly weird technology that includes computers, human consciousness, and the trees that give us the title. In essence, it's a Mad Scientist yarn, with maybe a touch of James Bond. It's also written in an eccentric, affected style. The author doesn't seem to intend it as a comedy, but there are snide remarks from the hero all the way through it. At least it didn't bore me.

A wobbling three stars for originality, if nothing else.

The Uncommunicative Venusians, by David H. Harris


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

Forget the title. This is an article on symbolic logic, using syllogisms with science fiction elements that could have easily been replaced with something more mundane. The author seems to know what he's talking about, but his attempt to sugarcoat a math lecture with aliens and UFOs doesn't liven things up much.


The best thing about this piece is the above illustration, which adds a futuristic touch to Sir John Tenniel's original portrait of the Caterpillar from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Two logically derived stars for this homework assignment.

Base Ten, by David A. Kyle


Illustrations by Vaughn Bode.

A man in a spaceship comes across a derelict rocket on an asteroid. The relic is way out of date, so he knows it's been there quite a while. Surprisingly, there's still someone alive inside the thing, in very bad shape.


Studying the castaway's notes.

The survivor tells him an incredible story about running into small aliens on the asteroid. They were friendly enough, but didn't want Earthlings to know about their existence.


Examining the old rocket's complex operating system, which is an important part of the plot.

The older fellow, who is half-insane from many years of isolation, offers vague hints of why he wasn't able to leave the asteroid, although the rocket had plenty of fuel. Meanwhile, the younger man tries to figure things out from the survivor's records.


Including drawings of the so-called Redheads, who resemble potato/mushroom combinations with limbs.

Try as he might, the young fellow isn't able to keep the older man from suffering a tragic fate.


Giving in to despair.

At the end, he figures out why the survivor was unable to return to Earth.


Saying goodbye.

The beginning intrigued me, but the aliens are silly and the solution to the mystery is disappointing and implausible. I'm not sure why this minor puzzle story needed so many drawings, but I'm sure the artist was glad for the work.

Two heavily illustrated stars.

Syracuse University's Science-Fiction Collections, by Richard Wilson

There's not much to say about this article. It talks about the archive of books, magazines, manuscripts, and such mentioned in the title. It's good to know that scholars will have access to all this stuff, anyway.


A nifty example of the university's collection.

Two carefully indexed stars.

Whose Brother Is My Sister?, by Simon Tully


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

Some time after aliens arrived on Earth, the two species intermingled to such a degree that there are more extraterrestrials on the planet than humans. (The situation is said to be similar on the alien home world, but that's not really part of the plot.) The aliens are able to travel across the cosmos because they figured out that the current universe is absorbed by a new universe every instant.

(Don't worry if that doesn't make much sense to you. I felt the same way. And don't get me started on the debate as to whether the new universe is a lot smaller or a lot bigger than the old universe.)

The aliens have a chance to enclose the current universe inside some kind of so-called box, which will stop the passage of time. For some reason, they assume this will lead to an eternal paradise for everyone. Hardly anybody, human or alien, disagrees with this nutty scheme, except for a few religious folks.

Can you guess that things don't go as planned?


The arrow is a clue.

The best things in this story are the aliens. The author shows a great deal of creativity and imagination in describing their physical appearance, culture, and biology. (They have three sexes!) I would gladly read about their lives instead of all the nonsense about universes instantaneously eating up other universes, putting a box around the universe, and freezing time.

An ambiguous three stars.

The Throwaway Age, by Mack Reynolds


Illustrations by Gray Morrow. Notice the fine choice of reading material.

At some time in the near future, both the capitalist West and the communist East have expanded their territories, but the Cold War has cooled down considerably. So much so, in fact, that the best undercover agent for the West is reassigned from covert action behind the Iron Curtain to domestic snooping.


Sing along with me! There's a man who lives a life of danger . . .

The superspy, a fervent anti-communist (understandable, given his background) is bitter about what seems like a severe demotion. However, he accepts what he thinks will be a trivial assignment to infiltrate a very small and loose group of folks who want to change the economic system. They don't even have an organization, really, or a name for their movement. Harmless enough, but he runs into trouble along the way.


. . .With every move he makes/another chance he takes . . .

The members of this loose-knit bunch range from a gung-ho activist to a statistician to a ex-CIA agent. The one thing they have in common is the belief that both the West and the East are wasting resources and preventing humanity from reaching a higher level of civilization.

Did I mention that one of them is a pretty young woman, the daughter of the group's de facto leader, with whom the spy interacts in true Bondian fashion?


. . .Swingin' on the Riviera one day . . .

This is a manifesto disguised as a spy story, which in turn is disguised as science fiction. The futuristic elements, such as personal hovercars, are irrelevant. The espionage plot is just an excuse for lectures about socioeconomic issues.

I wish I liked this story more than I do. Reynolds is one of the few authors willing to deal with such topics, and he does so in a sophisticated way. He also has the rare virtue, for an American writer, of being cosmopolitan. His foreign settings and characters are authentic and vividly portrayed. Too bad this isn't really a work of fiction.

Two disappointed stars.

We'll Meet Again

I may have to take back what I said at the start of this article. Editor Pohl plans to continue the magazine for a while, or so he says.

That contradicts everything I've heard about the impending demise of the publication. We'll see which one of us is the better prophet.

Looking back on the magazine's history, it's a very mixed bag. There were a few excellent works of fiction, along with a lot of lesser pieces. Among the very best were All We Marsmen by Philip K. Dick (now available in book form as Martian Time-Slip; To See the Invisible Man by Robert Silverberg; The Totally Rich by John Brunner; The Worlds That Were by Keith Roberts; and The Star-Pit by Samuel R. Delany. I may have forgotten other outstanding stories. The frequent nonfiction articles were not as noteworthy.

Whether Worlds of Tomorrow shows up again in a few months or not, I am grateful that the Noble Editor gave me the opportunity to trip the light fantastic with it.


Let's tango!



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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[April 6, 1967] But what of Star Trek? ("The Alternative Factor")

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by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek has given us some of the best science fiction on television. It’s also, like any weekly show with scripts written by different authors, had some mediocre episodes. But watching with a large group every week, we’ve found that even episodes that had many detractors still had at least a few fans among us.

Until now.

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 4, 1967] Transitions (May 1967 IF)

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by David Levinson

A fumbled hand-off

Americans are taught that the true importance of the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 is that this was the first peaceful transfer of power between rival politcal parties in history. Whether or not that’s the case, such a transfer is seen in the modern era as an indicator of a successful democracy. Apart from in the white colonial governments in Rhodesia and South Africa, this has yet to occur in sub-Saharan Africa, but for a brief moment it looked as though it was going to happen.

On March 17th in Sierra Leone, the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party lost a close election to the All People’s Congress under Siaka Stevens. Four days later, Governor-General Henry Josiah Lightfoot Boston swore Stevens in as the country’s new Prime Minister. Later the same day, Brigadier David Lansana staged a coup, ordering the arrest of Stevens and Boston and declaring martial law. In the wee hours of the 23rd, a counter-coup arrested Lansana and announced that the country would now be ruled by an eight-man National Reformation Council. Initially, they said that the new head of state would be Lt. Colonel Ambrose Genda, who was part of the Sierra Leonean mission to the U. N. He was quite surprised by the news, but as he boarded a plane in London on the 27th, it was announced that the head of the council would be Lt. Colonel Andrew Juxon-Smith, who was on the same flight. Had Stevens taken power and ruled within the constitution, Sierra Leone could have been an example to the rest of post-colonial Africa. Alas, it was not to be.


Siaka Stevens (top left), Governor-General Henry Josiah Lightfoot Boston (top right), Brigadier David Lansana (bottom left), Lt. Colonel Andrew Juxon-Smith (bottom right)

Steady state

There's not much variation in the quality of the stories in this month’s IF. It's more of a smooth plane with one small ding in it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but neither is it really good.

What are these robots up to? Art by Gaughan

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[April 2, 1967] On The Immortality Of The Crab (Doctor Who: The Macra Terror)

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By Jessica Holmes

In Spanish, there’s a rather delightful way to say you’re daydreaming: ‘Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo’. It literally means ‘thinking about the immortality of the crab’.

The Macra Terror by Ian Stuart Black is a serial that I think will quite often have you pondering on crab immortality, and I don’t mean that it’s thought-provoking.

The first thing you’ll notice about this serial is that there are BIG CHANGES AFOOT. Not in anything trifling like the main cast, but they’ve gone and changed the style of the opening titles. Now they flash up a great big picture of Patrick Troughton’s mug on the screen, in case we forget what the main character looks like.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[March 30, 1967] The Peacekeepers (Star Trek: "Errand of Mercy")

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by Gideon Marcus

Star Trek offered a mirror to our present day world of Cold War tensions with its latest episode, "Errand of Mercy".

The episode begins with two mighty star nations, the United Federation of Planets ("a democracy") and the Klingon Empire ("brutal, savage") about to go to war.  And not a border skirmish, but a full on, fleet vs. fleet conflict that may see one of the parties laid to heel.

In between them, strategically located, is the planet of Organia.  Its inhabitants are humanoid, seemingly primitive.  As chance would have it, the Enterprise gets there before the Klingons, and Kirk (accompanied by Spock) attempts to persuade the Organians to accept a Federation protectorate, in exchange for defense, technology, education, and other benefits of enlightened society.

The Organians rebuff a bemused Kirk, assuring him that there is no danger.  Whereupon the Klingons arrive, quickly establishing a military governorship.  Unable to convince the Organians to fight for their freedom, Kirk and Spock attempt a two-man resistance effort.  They are quickly sold out by the Organians, but then rescued from prison by the self-same natives. The Klingon Commander, Kor, orders the slaughter of 200 Organians every hour until they are returned. Again, the Organians assure our heroes that nothing amiss is occurring.

Ultimately, two mighty battle fleets square off in the vicinity of Organia.  This proves to be the last straw.  The people of Organia demonstrate heretofore unseen power, their spokesman, Ayelborne, appearing in person on the Klingon and Federation homeworlds, announcing the immobilization of all combatants.


The Organians reveal their true power

In a nice moment, Kirk and Kor express their outrage at not being allowed to settle their differences through war.  They quickly come around when it is clear they have no choice.  In the final act, Kirk broods over his belligerence, feeling much chagrined.  Spock explains that they have many millennia to go before they, too, can become Gods.

We've seen many episodes where the Enterprise meets much more advanced races: "Charlie X", The Squire of Gothos", "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Arena", "Shore Leave".  Some might even be tired of the theme (I am not–we should expect half of the beings we encounter to be far beyond us; cosmic timescales favor this).  But "Errand of Mercy" is the best of this type of show we've seen so far, illuminating our frailties as a species beautifully.

"Errand" is aided by some of the best casting we've seen in the show.  John Abbott imbues Ayelborne with dignity and strength, suffused with a penetrating mildness.  And John Colicos, who I've seen before on Mission: Impossible, is affably delightful as Commander Kor.  By turns irritated and almost entreating, Kor comes across as, if anything, a lonely man.  He is isolated by his rank, by his position as an obvious intellectual and aesthete in an Empire of thugs.  Kor seems to want nothing more than to have a friend, and the only person who might qualify is his mortal enemy, Captain Kirk.  To echo Mr. Spock, "fascinating."

I appreciated the justifications for war laid out by both sides, as they appealed to Ayleborne to allow them to continue their fight.  The Klingons, Kirk says, raided planets.  The Federation, Kor insists, was hemming the Klingons in, cutting them off from territory that had always been theirs.  Yes, the American/Soviet parallels are strong (to the point that Kor boasts that the Klingons will win due to their unswerving dedication to their state, and their positions as cogs in its system).  Juanita Coulson, in the latest Yandro, praised the show for its economy of writing, how much they pack into almost throwaway lines.  This episode does a lot with a little.  In this, they are aided by director John Newland, who did most of this year's excellent (but abortive) spy show, The Man Who Never Was.


And Sulu took the center seat again!

There were some complaints voiced about the show during our viewing.  Two observed that Kirk was too quick to take the Organians at face value, asking the wrong questions (when he asked any) as to why they felt so secure.  To that, I note that 1) Kirk is, as he says in the episode, "a soldier, not a diplomat"; his behavior is entirely consistent with what we've seen in prior episodes (viz. "The Squire of Gothos" and "Arena").  2) A war had just been declared, with shots already fired.  Kirk's focus was, shall we say, narrow.  This also may explain why Spock was unusually accommodating in his impromptu guerrilla role.

Indeed, that's what I love about this episode.  The Organians put themselves into a form humans can understand, and yet it's still not enough.  Both Kirk and Kor (an intentional similarity of names?) are irritated with these beings who do not behave as they "should".  The only beings with whom they share any common ground are each other!


"In another life, I could have called you 'friend'.  Wait.  Wrong episode.

Another viewer noted that the Federation, as American analogs, would have simply taken Organia, as the Klingons ultimately did (or tried).  And perhaps they would have.  I like to think the humans (and Vulcans) are better than that.  At the very least, Kirk tried to persuade them peacefully.  But given the deliberate portrayal of the Klingons as the Federation through a glass darkly, I think the viewer may have had a point.  And probably one intended to be gotten by the writer.

Speaking of which, Gene L. Coon is a name that has popped up several times recently.  Between writers Coon and D.C. (Dorothy) Fontana, it does seem that Star Trek is reaching a consistent maturity.  Gone are references to "Earth" (though the "Federation" has a single homeworld, per Ayelborne the Organian).  The show seems to have settled on "Vulcan" over "Vulcanian".  The characters are firmly established.

With the arrival of the Organians, one wonders if the character of the show will change drastically.  Are the Organians a galactic phenomenon, or do they only care about their sector of space?  That they didn't intervene in the war with the Romulans suggests the latter.  If the Organians are strictly local, will the Federation and Klingons find other frontiers to fight about?

I can't wait to find out!  Five stars.

A Peaceful Fantasy


by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

I've written before about alien cultures reacting to Federation colonialism – from the Horta last week to the Gorn a few weeks before. In this episode, we got to see what Captain Kirk hoped was the beginning of if not colonization, then as Gideon puts it, "protectorate status."

And we saw the Organians gently reject this and all such overtures. Over and over again, we hear varions of of, "Captain, I can see that you do not understand us. Perhaps…" and "We are in no danger."


"Mellow out, man.  Everything's cool!"

At first, like Captain Kirk, I thought the Organians unbearably naive. But it turns out that Captain Kirk, and I, were arrogant. They were in no danger; capable of unilaterally ending a war that promised galaxy-wide devastation with a thought. They were ably prepared to defend themselves and the two societies who so wished to do violence around them.

Of all of the god-like aliens we have seen, I liked these the best. No capricious squires or whiny, cruel children; the Organians had a philosophy, the discipline to live by it, and the power to ensure they remained unbothered by outside forces while on their paths. I can imagine the Horta or the Gorn would have envied those powers, though as Commander Spock pointed out, "it took millions of years for the Organians to evolve into what they are. Even the gods did not spring into being overnight."


Spock comforts Jim for being a primitive.

I find these forms of power fantasies deeply satisfying. Every day, we see the power of violence, of guns, of bombs, of war. To see, if only for a few, technicolor minutes, a power to stop war? To prevent violence? To ensure cultural continuity and security in the face of attempts to colonize? That is a fantasy I enjoy a great deal. Lest I sound too star-struck, I will note that I would have preferred to see any Organian women, any evidence of many cultures mixing together, of creativity, of growth, rather than the mild stasis that seemed to characterize their society. But for what it was, it was good to see.

Just don't ask me to live there.

Four stars.

An Actually Superior Superiority


by Elijah Sauder

In this episode of Star Trek, we saw not just the most powerful god-like-beings we have seen, but also the most compelling. In our previous encounters, the god-like-beings' powers were potent, but only in a localized region of space. In this episode the Organians immobilized the entire Space Force and Klingon Empire’s armies. To quote (approximately) Kirk, “We never had a chance; the Organians raided the game.”


"Mooom!  He started it!"

As humans we want to feel in control and to exert such control through whatever means necessary; we meddle, we fight. But the Organians did not exhibit the same behavior. They expressed disgust at the thought of meddling, and when they meddled, it was in the most pacifist of ways. This gave them a suggestion of superiority far greater than that of the previous powerful beings, who flaunted their power in a way that was nothing more than human.

I very much enjoyed this episode through and through–not just as a show, but as a writer’s vision of what we should strive to be. Looking around at the violence and overreach of global superpowers we see today, what would it look like if we could transcend our primal nature to something better?

I give this episode 5/5.

The Dittoverse


by Lorelei Marcus

A crucial part of the science fiction genre is aliens, and Star Trek gives them to us in great variety.  We have the completely unfamiliar aliens like the salt-monster from "The Man Trap" or the silicon-based carpet monster from "The Devil in the Dark".  Then there's the God-like beings, which display evolution well beyond the people of the Enterprise.  My favorite aliens, though, are the humanoid ones, because their existence suggests a great deal about the Star Trek universe.

The Klingons are the third race of aliens we've seen that seem to be technologically and evolutionarily similar to the humans of the Federation.  First were the Vulcan(ians), and then the Romulans, though there is strong evidence that the Romulans are distant relatives of the Vulcans, and thus constitute one species.  The Klingons seem to have a similar relationship to humans based on their appearance, customs, and technology.  Perhaps the Klingon Empire is the result of a colony ship like Khan's, launched during Earth's warring period.  Yet I suggest there is a larger mystery afoot.

Minor differences aside, there is also a distinct resemblance between humans and Vulcans [and apparently an ability to interbreed (ed.)].  Initially, one could attribute this to the limitations of Star Trek's make-up department, but I propose there is an explanation for not just the connection between humans and Vulcans, but every humanoid alien seen and to be seen on the show.


Amazing fashion sense aside, the Klingons are remarkably humanoid.

This answer lies in "Miri" (the episode, not the character).  "Miri" introduces that 'mirror Earths' exist, worlds that appear exactly like the Federation's homeworld, yet with distinct populations and even timelines.  While we've yet to see another identical Earth like the one in "Miri", we have seen many habitable worlds and humanoid aliens.  What if a common ancestor of the humans, the Klingons, the Vulcans, all started from the same place, on the same world, at a certain early point in its evolution?  Then, this proto-Earth was progressed countless times in separate timelines, each evolving into the cultures and creatures we know.  Each of these separate Earths were somehow folded into one space, perhaps with some space-time affecting technology like a Starship's warp drive.  We already know time travel is possible using the Enterprise.  Why not an accidental collapse of the fourth dimension as well?

There is a simpler solution, of course.  All of these identical worlds could be deliberate constructs for some higher being's experiment.  Personally, I think this explanation is less interesting, but with the number of God-like aliens we've seen, probably the more likely.

Either way, I love science fiction that makes me speculate on the very fabric of the universe.  This episode is definitely a great additional piece to the puzzle that is Star Trek.

Four stars.

I have no idea what to make of this next episode of Star Trek.  Come join us tonight at 8:30 PM (Eastern and Pacific) and help us figure it out.

Here's the invitation!



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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction