Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 24, 1969] How sweet it isn't (November 1969 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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

Rats!

A study just completed by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has concluded that cyclamates may cause bladder tumors in rats.

How does this affect you?

Decades ago, it paid to be plump.  It was a sign of wealth and health.  It was attractive!  These days, we're in the Grape Nuts generation, and it's now all about fitness and being slender.  How to reconcile the popularity of fizzy sweet sodapop and the desire to cut sugar from our diets (despite the Sugar Council telling us it's good for us)?

Early this decade, a slew of soft drinks came out, sweetened not with sugar, but with a blend of artificial sweeteners—saccharin and cyclamates.  Diet Rite and Tab may not have tasted just like Coke and Pepsi, but they did the job and preserved the waistline.

But now, thanks to the HEW report, soft drink companies are all pulling their cyclamate sodas off the market as of February 1, 1970.  Grab your vintage colas while you can, because they won't exist come next spring!

What does the future hold for diet sodas?  Well, for now, saccharin is still legal, though by itself, it's a bit bitter (remember the "sach" tablets Winston Smith put in his coffee in 1984)?  There is talk of putting sugar back into diet sodas…just less of it.

And, since this is a science fiction 'zine, we can always speculate that new and better sweeteners will be developed.  Maybe even on purpose this time—did you know that both saccharin and cyclamates were discovered by accident?  Constantin Fahlberg was researching coal tar derivatives and forgot to wash his hands before going for lunch, when he discovered saccharine was discovered in 1879.  And grad student Michael Sveda was working on anti-fever drugs in 1937; some got on a cigarette, and when he took a drag, it tasted sweet.

Cue the commercials:

Bob: My cigarette just isn't doing it for me anymore.
Larry: Try mine!  It's new.
Bob: Hey! Not bad…sweet!
Larry: You better believe it.


by Jack Gaughan

Of course, with a lede like the one I just wrote, you can guess that the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction is less than palatable.

The Mouse, by Howard Fast

Three-inch aliens descend to Earth in a teeny saucer and smarten up a little mouse to be their telepathic eyes and ears to scout out the world.  When the rodent's work is done, he is heartbroken to find that the aliens must leave, abandoning him to a life of loneliness, the sole example of his kind.  Despondent, he kills himself.

Not only is the story an unecessary downer (the mouse was exposed to the worst humanity had to offer, but also the best—couldn't he have found human friends to love?) but it's written clunkily, as though Howard dashed it off quickly, and didn't bother to correct it.  It's the kind of work I do if I neglect to read my work aloud before sending it in to a publisher.

Two stars.

A Feminine Jurisdiction, by Sterling E. Lanier

The latest Brigadier Ffellowes shaggy dog tale has him stranded just after the Nazi invasion of Crete (how timely!) on an Aegean island lost to time, housing a trio of mythical sisters.  One of them has, shall we say, a stony-eyed gaze.  Of course, we know the Brigadier will escape (how else could he live to tell the tale?) but the fun is in the how.

I could have done without the casual sexism.  World-traveler Ffelowes surely could not have forged his opinion on matriarchies solely on this one stacked-deck example.  Beyond that, the well Lanier plumbed for material is a little mined out.  Still, it's a competent and entertaining yarn.

Three stars.

Penny Dreadful, by Ron Goulart

A ghost writer cum secret agent (or is it the other way around?) is on one of the planets of the Barnum system, a frequent Goulart setting, mostly known from his Ben Jolson stories.  All he wants to do is collect his fee from deadbeats.  In the process, he ends up cleaning up local politics.

Goulart, at his best, does light, spy/detective stuff really well.  This is not his best.  Indeed, it's among his worst—incomprehensible and somehow incomplete.

Two stars.

The CRIB Circuit, by Miriam Allen deFord

A young computer operator, who died of cancer in 1970, is revived after five centuries of cold sleep.  But the Brave New World she wakes up into is not interested in welcoming her as a citizen, but only as a temporary subject of study before she is to be put down again.  Must keep the population constant, you see!  Can Alexandra come up with a way to extend her second life?

I had thought her solution would be a variation on the Scheherazade shtick from 1001 Arabian Nights, but it's actually a bit cleverer.  There's also a nice sting in the tail of the piece.  I should have seen it coming; that I didn't is a credit to DeFord's writing.

Four stars, and my favorite piece of the ish.

Come Up and See Me Some Time, by Gilbert Thomas

A pre-teen genius builds a psychic space ship and prepares to head off into another dimension, presumably to be reunited with his murdered mother.  But not before giving an ostentatious and horrific reply to his father, who we learn is responsible for his wife's death.

Told from the point of view of the father, the tale is just silly.  It's more of a mood piece than anything, and frankly, I didn't care enough about the schmuck to get into his head.

One star.

After the Bomb Cliches, by Bruce McAllister

Martin Potsubay is convinced The End Is Nigh.  So he builds a bomb shelter, and when the air raid sirens begin to blow, ensconces himself inside.  But the trumpets keep blowing, and in the end, there's no way to avoid Armageddon…or the heavenly recruitment officers!

This is definitely my favorite McAllister piece to date, bordering right between three and four stars.  On reflection, I think I'll finally give him the win.

Four it is (but I still like the deFord better!)

The Sin of the Scientist, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor takes Oppenheimer's "physicists have known sin" line and runs with it, defining "sin" in a scientific sense, and discussing which scientists have committed it.  His answer is an interesting one.

Three stars.

Diaspora, by Robin Scott

A catastrophe has rendered the Earth uninhabitable, and just one small colony of 400 humans is left.  Establishing themselves on a kind world, farm yields explode and the settlement prospers.  Yet, their puritannical leader refuses to loosen the reins of privation.  One rebellious type chafes under the tyrant, and so he plots an escape, establishing himself as an independent concern.  This proves instrumental to the colony's success…and as it turns out, all according to plan.

This story is decently written, but the overly deterministic nature of the premise is a turn-off.  The idea that the colony was founded with the expectation that it would need a malcontent to ensure its success, and that a ten-year agenda could be stuck to so as to carry out the plan, beggars belief.  It's the kind of thing I expect from Analog.

Three stars.

After the Myths Went Home, by Robert Silverberg

Future-dwellers get bored of reconstituting historical personages, so they turn to reviving mythical people.  After having their fill of hanging out with the whole panoply of (Western) legends, from Adam to Hercules to JFK, they banish them, too.  But the result is there's never a hero around when you need one…

Silverbob phoned this one in.  It has the veneer of literariness, but it just coats a hollow interior.

Two stars.

Ptui!

Like soda without sweetener, the latest F&SF was a bland mouthful.  Still, the two good pieces are enough to keep me going, albeit with ever fading enthusiasm.

But perhaps next year, the editors will find the right formula to spice up their wares…


by Gahan Wilson




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Science / Space Race

[October 22, 1969] Three for Three! (the flights of Soyuz 6, 7, and 8)

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

(Un?)Lucky Seven

In 1959, NASA unveiled the identities of the first seven astronauts—the folks who would fly the Mercury capsule into space.  Over the course of two years, from 1961-1963, six of them rode a pillar of flame beyond the Earth's atmosphere, one at a time.

This month, the Soviets orbited seven cosmonauts at once.

Like Sputnik, this momentous occasion was not exactly a surprise.  Indeed, since late August, the USSR had put out releases to the effect that cosmonauts would be taking to the skies in record numbers.  The mission started innocuously enough with the launch of Soyuz 6 on October 11 carrying cosmonauts Shonin and Kubasov on their first flight.  Significantly, their flight plan included "experiments…on the methods of welding of metals in a high vacuum and in the state of weightlessness."  Such techniques have application in the development of orbital space stations, the next inevitable phase in space development.


Comparison of the Soyuz booster compared to the ones that launched the Voskhod and Vostok capsules

The next day, Soyuz 7 blasted off with cosmonauts Filipchenko, Volkov, and Gorbatko—like the Soyuz 6 crew, all rookies.  Given the prior Soviet announcements, the successful previous flight and docking of Soyuz 4 and 5, and the maneuvers made by Soyuz 6 on its first day in orbit, the launch of Soyuz 7 was no surprise.  In fact, cosmonauts in both crews had been the back-ups for the cosmonauts on Soyuz 4/5.  It seemed a second docking/impromptu space station mission was in the works.  But was that the plan?

Apparently not, for the next day, yet another Soyuz was launched, this time carrying veterans Shatalov and Yeliseyev, who had actually flown on the last Soyuz mission.  By the 15th, all three spacecraft were in sight of each other.  The stage was set.

And then…

The next day, Soyuz 6 crew did do their welding experiments and then landed.  On the 17th, Soyuz 7 returned to Earth.  Soyuz 8 followed on the 18th.  Though all of the spacecraft jockeyed around each other while in each other's vicinity, no docking was made or, per the Soviets, even attempted!

Can we buy that there was no docking plan at all?  We know from Soyuz 4/5 that adding a docking adapter to the basic Soyuz design means extra weight for the spacecraft.  Soyuz 6, with its "Vulkan" experiment package in the forward science module (that spherical bit ahead of the command module, where the crew sits during take-off and reentry) probably couldn't carry anything more.  But Soyuz 7 and 8 could have, and given their particular crews, it sure seemed like a docking was in the offing. 


An ad hoc space station based on an illustration released by the Soviets—was this what was supposed to have happened?

The actual mission of the three spacecraft is anyone's guess at this point.  Certainly, the coordination of three crews in orbit is a big deal in and of itself, so maybe that was the point.  The knowledge gained from the flight of the three Soyuz will be valuable both in the future construction of a space station and also when/if the Soviets decide to try for their own lunar mission (though, if they need three craft to go to the Moon, that suggests their rockets aren't as big as our Saturn V, necessitating more launches0.

But given that the Soviets love their space spectaculars, and we just had the biggest one of all this summer, with a repeat set for next month, I'd bet rubles to borscht that the Russkies had planned something more dramatic than playing orbital footsie.

I guess we'll see come Soyuz 9/10/11!




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 20, 1969] There was a ship (November 1969 Venture)

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by David Levinson

”There was a ship,” quoth he.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Northwest to Alaska

Almost from the moment Europeans discovered the Americas, they’ve been looking for a sea route to Asia across the top of the continent. Dubbed the Northwest Passage by the English (because they were trying to travel west), the name stuck, and the route has been of interest ever since. The McClure Arctic expedition showed there was a sea route in 1850, though much of it was blocked by ice, and the journey was partially completed by sledge. Roald Amundsen became the first to go from Atlantic to Pacific entirely by ship between 1903 and 1906.

When oil was discovered last year at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of Alaska, attention turned once again to the Northwest Passage. A pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to a mostly ice-free port like Anchorage or Valdez faces a number of technological and legal challenges, so, even though planning is well underway and several hundred miles of pipe have already been ordered, oil companies are taking a look at the viability of shipping through the Northwest Passage.

Enter the SS Manhattan, an oil tanker owned and operated by the Esso company; she’s also the largest merchant vessel registered in the United States. She has been refitted with an icebreaker bow by the Finnish shipbuilder Wärtsilä, which built a huge ice tank to help optimize the design.

The SS Manhattan breaking through the ice of the Northwest Passage.

The Manhattan left Pennsylvania in August and sailed for Alaska under the command of Captain Roger A. Steward. Sea ice in the M’Clure Strait forced her take a more southerly route through the Canadian Arctic archipelago. After she reached Prudhoe Bay, a token barrel of crude oil was placed aboard, and the return voyage began. The ship cleared the Passage on September 14th, becoming the first commercial vessel to make the transit.

Is the Northwest Passage now open for commerce? Maybe, maybe not. The Manhattan required the support of several American and Canadian coast guard icebreakers to get through. Also the legal challenges a pipeline faces may be nothing compared to the sea route. Canada considers all waters in the Arctic archipelago to be internal waters, not an international shipping lane. In fact, at one point a group of Inuit hunters stopped the ship and demanded the captain request permission to pass through Canadian territory. He did so, and permission was granted.

So there are legal problems. Whether the Passage can be used year-round is also unknown. There’s talk of sending another ship this winter to see if the way is open then. Time will tell, but I’m betting on the pipeline.

Involving, but avoiding, calamity

There’s something about a shipwreck that seems to resonate with people. From The Wreck of the Hesperus (the bane of schoolchildren for nearly a century) to A Night to Remember (something of a disaster itself at the box office), wrecks are found all through popular entertainment. Science fiction is no exception, although the ships are usually in space. This month’s Venture offers no fewer than three ship related disasters, not to mention a plane crash and a global disaster.

Thankfully, the issue itself is not a disaster.  Quite the contrary, actually.

Art by Tanner

This issue’s cover is a slight improvement over the last. It’s recognizably science fiction, and there’s a second color.

Plague Ship, by Harry Harrison

The route from the Moon to Mars is supposed to be a milk run. But then a meteorite strike leaves the ship’s doctor, on his first ever space trip, the only surviving officer.  After that, disaster follows fast and follows faster, to paraphrase Poe. The disease hinted at by the title isn’t even the last dreadful thing to befall the ship.

Disaster strikes the Johannes Kepler. Art by Tanner

The constant occurrence of a new disaster every few pages sometimes feels a bit overdone, but that may be the result of the condensed novel format. A full novel would give the characters some room to breathe between incidents. I enjoyed this a lot, but a little voice in the back of my head kept whispering that someone with more of a naval background, say A. Bertram Chandler, would have made this more believable.

A high three stars.

In Alien Waters, by Richard E. Peck

A scoutship crewed by water-breathing aliens crashes on a habitable world. They’re searching for intelligent life, even highly improbable surface dwellers, but don’t sense any. They effect repairs and attempt to take off. Interspersed with this story is a man reminiscing about the wreck of a ship he was on.

A somewhat abstract view of one of the aliens. Art by Keller

This is a decent story, but it’s weakened by the interwoven narratives. It quickly becomes obvious what ship the human narrator is talking about, which leaves the final line without any punch. The story might have been better served if Peck had moved more of that thread to the end, so it isn’t so obvious. That or relied a lot less on the impact of the final line.

Three stars.

IQ Soup, by Larry Eisenberg

Eisenberg inflicts another of his awful Emmett Duckworth stories on us. This one is even stupider than usual. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it’s less than a full page long.

One star

Basic, by Christopher Anvil

Another of Anvil’s tales of the Interstellar Patrol and their unusual methods of recruitment and training. It’s much like the others, and there isn’t much more to say. It’s clearly meant to come before Test Ultimate in the September Analog, but reading order shouldn’t make much difference.

A low three stars.

Escape Velocity, by Robin Scott

Astronaut Hogate struggles to fight down his fears as he sits on the launch pad. He’d be fine if there was something to do, but whenever they pause the countdown all he can do is think about everything that brought him to this place. When his capsule fails to make orbit, he’s forced to try out an experimental escape pod.

Ground Control to Major Tom. Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Art by Keller

You might want to listen to David Bowie’s recent single while reading this one. This is very good, but I’m not sure Scott is quite up to what he was trying to achieve; it falls just short of the four stars it could have been.

A high three stars.

The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone, by James Tiptree, Jr.

In a world apparently devastated by nuclear war, a girl with no arms and a very intelligent wolf undertake a journey to investigate some wild humans. It’s difficult to say much more about this without telling the whole story, but it is so much more.

A girl and her wolf. Art by Bhob Stewart

The timing is difficult, but if this wasn’t written in response to Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog, I’ll eat my hat. I will admit that I’m not entirely sure about what Tiptree was trying to say right at the very end, but it’s an impressive piece. My only complaint is really that the girl manages to do a couple of things much faster than it seems she ought to even with wolf assistance. Initially, that was enough to pull it under the four-star line, but I’ve changed my mind. Either way, Tiptree is now officially an author to watch.

Four stars.

Summing up

Another issue of Venture in the books. It’s getting better, though maybe not quite up to the standards of its parent magazine, F&SF. The biggest improvement has to be in the art. Tanner’s cover is better than the previous issue’s, though it still leaves a lot to be desired, and the addition of other (dare I say better) artists inside is a step up. I’m particularly taken with the two pieces signed "Keller". They’re sort of a combination of psychedelic and Art Nouveau that works very well.

More of all of this, please, except for Emmett Duckworth and maybe Chris Anvil.




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Movies

[October 18, 1969] Cinemascope: We'd Be Tickled to Death to Go (Moon Zero Two and Oh! What a Lovely War!)

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by Fiona Moore

The SF, fantasy and horror genre films of 1969 continue to disappoint, with most being competent at best and risible at worst. The exceptions seem to come in areas which are not normally considered genre; this month, the better movie in our scope is one that I would consider fantasy, but I suspect most would think that's a bit of a stretch.

Let's get the other film over with first.

Moon Zero Two

Moon Zero Two is Hammer Films’ attempt to branch out into sci-fi. While I do generally approve of people and organisations expanding their repertoires, and I'm always happy to support my neighbours in Bray, I’m afraid this isn’t really an encouraging example, and I think they ought to stick to horror.

The story is essentially a Western, set on the Moon in 2021. Our hero, Kemp (James Olson) is a former space explorer for a corporation, which has now abandoned exploration in favour of more ordinary Earth-to-moon travel. Rather than become a shuttle pilot, Kemp is working as a salvager in a beat-up spaceship (the titular Moon 02). He is approached by a wealthy businessman (Warren Mitchell) who wants to secretly crash an asteroid made of pure sapphire into the Moon in order to mine it, and a pretty girl (Catharina von Schell) who is looking for her missing miner brother. Naturally the two plots tie up together in an exciting, if not really very believable, way.

Still of Catharina von Schell in Moon Zero TwoFuture fashions: must they *always* involve coloured wigs?

The main problem with the movie is that it can’t make up its mind if it wants to be a serious movie or a spoof, with decently-researched elements like water mining on the moon to provide oxygen, and a character being murdered by swapping out his suit’s oxygen cylinder for one containing cyanide gas, to comedy scenes like Catherina von Schell walking in on James Olson in the shower or a fistfight in zero gravity consisting of slow-motion combat. We’re told that space travel is “fairly new”, and yet there’s a hotel, saloon and boutiques on the Moon. There’s a troupe of dancing girls who seem to be on stage day and night, with dull choreography that’s not going to give Raumpatrouille Orion any sleepless nights.

The adventure plot is enjoyable but predictable, with a bad guy straight out of James Bond; the modelwork is very nice; the design is pretty but derivative. There are a lot of girls in wigs (including one that looks suspiciously familiar from set photographs of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s new live-action series) and very brief outfits. Presumably in the name of women’s lib, one of the men gets his kit off too, but since it’s James Olson, nobody really cares. There’s also a little cartoon sequence in the opening credits which has very little to do with the movie itself, but is cute.

Zero Two stars.

Oh! What a Lovely War

By contrast, Oh! What a Lovely War is a delightfully creative object lesson in how to make a brilliant film on a tiny budget. Based on the stage play of the same name, itself built around the popular songs of World War One, and shot around Brighton of all places, the movie takes surrealism and absurdity to new levels, deploying the current mania for zany comedy, folk music and all things Edwardian to pointed political ends.

The nature of the movie makes it difficult to summarise. The events and impact of World War One are unfolded through quotes from letters and speeches of the day and musical numbers featuring popular songs of the period, but in bizarre, surreal staging. Britain’s entry into the war is shown through happy punters queueing up to buy tickets to Brighton Pier (with a lit-up marquee designating it WORLD WAR ONE). Characters who are about to die have this fact symbolised by their being handed a poppy. An “everyman” family, the Smiths, form our point-of-view characters, representing the working-class Britons lured into the war by political propaganda and then treated as brute cannon-fodder by their supposed betters. Starkly realistic scenes of trench life are interspersed with darkly comic interludes where, for instance, the French cavalry ride cheerfully to their deaths on a fairground carousel. Troop numbers, casualties, gains and losses are totted up on a football scoreboard. And so forth.

A cavalry charge on a merry-go-roundThe French cavalry charging on merry-go-round horses

All of the surrealism and humour has a sharp point, though. As well as laying bare the absurdity and waste that is war in general and World War One in particular, the movie has some pertinent things to say about class, capitalism, and the way in which the poor are induced to die so the rich can live comfortable lives. A scene where a French soldier begins narrating his letter home, and then, partway through the scene, the same letter is narrated by a German soldier, belies the divisive language of the officers and politicians to show the common humanity of the troops. A fireworks show at a party for the gilded wealthy at home becomes the shelling of a trench in Belgium. The parallels with the experiences of our characters and the events currently unfolding in the Far East are uncomfortably clear, of course, but also with twentieth century conflict more generally. Just as it’s easier, sometimes, to get sensitive political messages across by setting the story in the far future or in a fantasy world, so the surrealism allows the movie to get sharper than a straight production might have done.

Maggie Smith in Oh! What a Lovely warMaggie Smith sets a honeytrap for unwary recruits

The cast blends veterans of stage and screen like John Mills and John Gielgud with relative newcomers like the beautiful Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, Susannah York and Maurice Roeves. The director, Richard Attenborough, is an established actor who is making his directorial debut, and I hope we see much more of him behind the camera as well as in front.

Musical highlights include “One Staff Officer”, featuring infantry officers skipping and leapfrogging; a bitterly ironic rendition of “Pack Up Your Troubles” by a troop of the injured, and the title number, where General Haig and his field staff show their complete indifference to the suffering of the men at the front. I particularly liked the rendition of “Bombed Last Night” by a trenchful of soldiers keeping the horror of their experiences at bay with gallows humour. But the culmination comes in a service in a bombed-out church where parody hymns and an insipid service show starkly how church and state are suborned in the service of war and how the soldiers are, truly, lions led by donkeys.

Five stars.




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 16, 1969] The March Goes On (Heartsease, Masque World, The Shadow People, Avengers of Carrig…and more!)

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

Unusually for the Galactoscope, our monthly round-up of new science fiction publications, we're starting this article with a stop press. It's simply too big an item to ignore.

If you read the papers this morning, you know the big news was that the Mets played the winning game of the World Series last night, against the Orioles. Competing for inches on the front page was the largest, the most coordinated, the most widespread anti-war demonstration this country has yet experienced.


Demonstrators in Washington

One million people, in every state of the union, participated in Vietnam Moratorium Day. Originally planned as a nationwide strike, instead, attendees made highly their protests highly visible—and peaceful. A quarter of a million marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital, echoing Dr. King's march on Washington in 1963. 100,000 gathered in Boston, with similar numbers protesting in New York (where Mayor John Lindsay is rumored to have given tacit support) and Miami. My local rag reported that there were counter-protests, too, but I have to wonder how big they were.

Closer to home, 1,500 gathered in Los Angeles to burn their draft cards. And at Palomar Community College, just ten minutes from my home, hundreds of students gathered for a "Teach-In". When word got out that protestors might take down the flag in front of the student union, a squad of football players was stationed at its base. No altercation occurred.


Protestors at Palomar

Will this demonstration alter the course of a war, which has killed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese? A spokesman for Richard Milhouse Nixon said last night, "I don't think the President can be affected by a mass demonstration of any kind." Comedian Dick Gregory retorted to the crowd in New York, "The President says nothing you kids do will have any effect on him. Well, I suggest he make one long-distance call to the LBJ ranch. "


Card-burners in Los Angeles

In any event, this may be just the first salvo fired in a peace offensive. Washington protest organizer Sam Brown said last night, "If there is no change in Vietnam policy, if the President does not respond, there will be a second moratorium."

And now on to book news—are this month's science fiction titles as noteworthy?


By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Heartease by Peter Dickinson (as serialized in Look and Learn)

Cover of 1965 editions of Ranger and Look and Learn in a red folder
Copies of Ranger and Look and Learn from my collection inside the official binders

Regular readers of the Journey will probably know I am a big fan of British comic books. They may even recognize the name Look and Learn due to it containing the multi-Galactic Star winning Trigan Empire (formerly of Ranger).

However, I have not talked much about Look and Learn itself. It is by far the most expensive comic book on the market at 1/6-, almost triple the price of your standard copy of June or TV Century 21. In spite of this it has retained a significant market presence by presenting itself as an educational magazine for young people, in contrast to the naughtiness of Dennis the Menace, or the pulp space adventures of Dan Dare.

This, however, is not merely a trick. They have both some of the best comic strips on the market and non-fiction articles–better than you see in most magazines aimed at adults. Looking at the contents of a June issue we have:

  • Ongoing comic book adaptation of Ben-Hur
  • How to prevent forest fires and how to apply for a career in forestry
  • A short story on a Gypsy boy winning the Natural History Prize
  • The life of the current Prince of Wales
  • An interview with a Chicago police officer on what crime fighting was like in the 1930s
  • Story of the ship Emile St. Pierre in the American Civil War
  • How the Magna Carta came to be
  • Regular series of identification of coins, planes, stamps and trains
  • Rob Riley comic: Adventures and daily life of English school boys
  • Laugh with Fiddy: Short uncaptioned humour comics
  • Wildcat Wayne: Action adventures of a troubleshooter for an oil company
  • Trigan Empire: Tales from the history of an interstellar empire, centering around its ruling dynasty
  • Dan Dakota – Lone Gun: Western comic
  • Origin and meaning of the saying The Widow’s Mite
  • Diary entries from James Woodforde in 1786
  • The history of RADAR in British aviation
  • Ongoing prose serialization of The Mark of the Pentagram, a tale of slavery in the 18th century
  • How tea came to be imported to Britain
  • Marsh land reclamation efforts on river estuaries
  • How William and Dorothy Wordsworth influenced each other’s work
  • Picture series on how heavy loads have been transported over the centuries
  • Feature on the novel Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
  • About the game Takraw
  • Picture series on Iceland.

As such, it is much easier for a kid to justify dropping their pocket money on this each week when they can also show their parents a page on the lifecycle of a butterfly and give them a series of facts from the life of Jane Austen between reading about spaceflight and the adventures of cowboys.

2 Black and White drawings, one of a two children sheltering from flames with clothes wrapped around their faces. The other of an otter with its tale being bitten by an otter.
Example illustations for I Am David (left) and Tarka the Otter (Right) (uncredited)

However, outside of the comic strips Space Cadet and Trigan Empire, SF content is rare inside. Keeping to its educational mode, it tends towards historical fiction or uncovering the natural world. With serials tending to be works like The Silver Sword, Tarka The Otter or I Am David.

In fact, I cannot recall any prose serials that have been science fiction, before now. As such, with adult responsibilities getting the better of me, I hadn’t paid too much attention to these pieces. It was only when flicking back through them recently that I perked up at the name Peter Dickinson.

Last year he published The Weathermonger, a book that was much enjoyed by the folks here. This was not only by the same author but Heartsease also takes places in England under The Changes. It was serialised in 10 parts (from 8th March to 10th May 1969).

This is set in an earlier time in the history of this world. Whilst Weathermonger is set when The Changes are a well-established way of life, this is in the earlier stages of these events. As we are told at the beginning:

This is a story about an England where everyone thinks machines are wicked. The time is now, or soon; but you have to imagine that five years before the story starts, because of a strange enchantment, people suddenly turned against tractors and buses and central heating and nuclear reactors and electric razors. Anybody who tried to use a machine was called a witch or stoned or drowned.

Margaret on her pony rearing as a bull charges at her.
Illustrator uncredited

In the Cotswolds, Margaret and her cousin Jonathan live with her Aunt Alice and Uncle Peter, plus two servants Lucy and Tim, the latter of which is unable to speak. Near their village, an outsider is found using a radio and is sentenced to be stoned as a witch.

The horror of witnessing the stoning seems to break Jonathan out of the hatred the adults have, so he works with Margaret, Lucy and Tim to free the man condemned for witchcraft. Hiding him he reveals his name is Otto, he is an American sent to investigate the situation in Britain when he was caught. The children agree to get him back to his ship.

However, the local Sexton, Davey Gordon, is still on the hunt for Otto. What’s more he is suspicious of Lucy and Tim, given the latter’s disability. They all form a plan to help him escape using an old tugboat called Heartsease.

Margaret and Lucy running holding petrol cans as the timber on the quayside burns around them
Illustrator uncredited

I can understand why this would appeal to the editors of Look and Learn. With the removal of technology, it resembles historical fiction and does not have the magical elements of The Weathermonger. In addition, it contains information on how locks work, so it can be marketed as educational.

It is a much smaller tale than The Weathermonger, just about young people trying to do the right thing as they get caught up in horrific events. But, for that, it becomes a bit of a deeper tale. As well as having plenty of adventure, it looks at how we treat others and posits some darker reasons why things may be happening than is revealed in the prior novel:

“…they’ve done so many awful things they’ve got to believe they were right. The more they hurt and kill, they more they’ve been proving to themselves they’ve been doing God’s will all along.”

Heartsease 1968 hardback Gollancz book cover
Gollancz book edition. Unknown illustrator

Based on some fag-packet-maths I estimate the word count here is somewhere between a third to a half of what is in the book version, so there is likely more story to be told.

But for this serialized form, I will give it Four Stars.


by Victoria Silverwolf

Bigger and Better?

Two novels that are expanded versions of earlier, shorter works fell into my hands recently. Will this added verbiage improve them? Let's find out.

Worlds of the Wall, by C. C. MacAppp


Anonymous cover art. Human and pterodactyl number one.

This book started life as a novelette called Beyond the Ebon Wall in the October 1964 issue of Fantastic. I reviewed it at the time, giving it two stars. That's not a good omen, but let's not give up hope.

Our hero is inside an experimental starship. He winds up near a planet that seems to be missing an entire hemisphere. Forget all this science fiction stuff, because the rest of the book is pure fantasy.

Landing on the weird world, the guy finds out that the place is divided in half by a gigantic wall. He sees two naked men fighting and an elderly fellow with a scarred face. The latter seems very familiar, which is a clue as to the novel's major plot twist.

The protagonist passes through the seemingly solid wall as if it weren't there. He meets a double for the elderly guy and hears a huge magpie recite an enigmatic poem. This begins an odyssey that involves becoming a galley slave, taking part in a hunt for a gigantic beast (which develops a bond with a hero), and battling a pirate captain allied with a sorcerer. It all winds up where it started.

This is the plot of the novelette, so what's new? The middle section of the novel, detailing the hero's adventures as a galley slave, is much longer. There's a vivid scene of the protagonist and his shipmates climbing down a gigantic cliff.

The new version is a slight improvement on the old one. The explanation for what's going on, involving multiple continua and time travel, still doesn't make much sense, but it's a little less incoherent that before.

Two and one-half stars.

Thbe Avengers of Carrig, by John Brunner


Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Human and pterodactyl number two.

A shorter version of this novel appeared in 1962 as half of an Ace Double, under the title Secret Agent of Terra. It was reviewed by my esteemed colleague Rosemary Benton, who gave the twin volume four stars as a whole.

The setting is a planet settled by human refugees from a nova that wiped out another colony world many centuries ago. The survivors have evolved into a medieval, feudal kind of society. Carrig is the dominant city-state. The place has an ancient ritual of choosing its leaders in an unusual fashion.

Contenders for the title of regent board gliders and try to kill the biggest and strongest specimen of the giant flying beasts that inhabit the planet. (The winner is called a regent because the creature is considered to be the true king.) If nobody slays the animal, which definitely puts up a good fight, the former regent retains the title.

A couple of strangers show up, one of whom easily kills the so-called king with what is obviously highly advanced technology. It's clear to the reader, if not the locals, that they're from another world. Along the way they kill a fellow who discovers their nefarious plan.

The victim was secretly an agent for the folks who keep an eye on refugee planets like this one, being careful to avoid interfering with their natural development, but also making sure other people don't take advantage of them.

When the dead man stops sending messages back to his superiors, they send a fledging agent, along with an older, more experienced one, to the planet to find out what happened. (The young agent is something of a snob and unpopular with the others, so this is one last chance for her to prove herself during what is supposed to be a routine mission.)

They don't know the bad guys are there (they think the deceased agent has gone silent for some other, less sinister reason) so they're taken completely by surprise when an enemy spaceship attacks. The young agent winds up in a frozen wasteland. We don't find out what happened to the older man until later.

As luck would have it, she joins forces with the fellow who was the favorite to become the next regent. Both of them win an unexpected ally in the form of one of the flying creatures, who turns out to be a lot more intelligent than they thought.

Like MacApp's novel, this is strictly an adventure story. The big difference is that Brunner offers a tighter, more unified plot (even if it does depend on some remarkable coincidences.) It's not a complex, ambitious work like Stand on Zanzibar or The Jagged Orbit, but it's highly competent entertainment.

Three and one-half stars.

Masque World, by Alexei Panshin


by Jason Sacks

Last year I reviewed the first book in Alexei Panshin's "Anthony Villiers" series, Star Well . I praised the book for its wry, often post-modern take on heroic fiction, digging Panshin's frequent absurd sidebars and silly takes on events.

Now the third book of the Villiers series is out, and Masque World offers much the same as his earlier book: it's absurd and wise, clever and sometimes frustrating, and a pretty delightful "shaggy dog" story.


cover by Kelly Freas

This time Villiers and his pal, the Trog named Torve (a deliberately odd alien creature who is thoroughly uncanny for most people) have found their way to Delbalso, "a semi-autonomic dependency of the Nashuite Empire," as the introductory text informs us. When there, the duo gets deeply involved in all kinds of affairs in the kingdom, many centered around Villiers's uncle Lord Semichastny who is obsessed and addicted to melons (did you know there are over 100 different types of melons? Semichastny  can tell you all about that topic, and many more, as if he's some sort of savant or young child in adult form).

Cultures are games played to common rules — for convenience. The High Culture, while not superior to very much, is a fair-to-middling game, and that is all.

There's also an angry robot bulter who seems to resent his subservient role and who tells spooky stories to the other mechanical creatures in  Semichastny's castle, and there's a Semichastny friend who gets transformed when he puts on a costume, and there's a cult who seem incredibly happy – perhaps too happy for their own good.

Monism promises only one thing, to make you very very happy. There is a catch, of course. To be happy as a Monist, you must accept Monist definitions of happiness. If you can — you have a blissful life ahead of you. Congratulations.

A lot of this story, therefore, centers around the idea of identity, how to shed identity and how to transform identity; how identity conforms to crowds and how identity stands alone. This all does a wonderful job of showcasing Panshin's elusive commentary on the human condition. As becomes clear by the end, it's the humor and commentary which matter here, not the story.

Do places dream of people until they return?

For the longest time I kind of fought this book, trying hard to make sense of the twists and turns of its plot. Until, that is, I realized that plot is meant to be arbitrary and somewhat confusing. Its twists and turns reflect the mindset of Mr. Panshin, and that and his wordplay – highlighted here as excerpts – are the key things he wants to share with readers.

Holidays are no pleasure for anyone but children, and they are a pleasure only for children only because they seem new. Holidays are no pleasure to those who schedule them. Holidays are for people who need to be formally reminded to have a good time and believe it is safer to warm up an old successful party than to chance the untried.

Masque World is very loose  and fun, a bit arbitrary and silly, and I enjoyed it alright. The book feels a bit indulgent at times, and Panshin's having a bit of a goof, but it's well worth 60¢ and 3 hours of your time.

The ending promises a fourth book in  the series, to be called The Universal Pantograph. I do hope we get to spend more time in this wildly discursve world of the one and only Anthony Villiers.

3 stars

The Shadow People, by Margaret St. Clair


by Tonya R. Moore

I had never encountered any works of fiction written by Margaret St. Clair before reading The Shadow People. The story’s premise is wonderfully dark and imaginative but the reader’s sense of wonder is drowned out by the book’s glaring faults.


cover by Jeff Jones

Aldridge, our hero, descends into a strange and alien underworld in search of his girlfriend who has gone missing. He finds her while navigating this strange dimension, but something about her has been irrevocably altered. Even so, Aldridge seeks a way back to the human world for himself and for the love of this life. When he/they finally returns to the surface, he finds that during his absence, human civilization was twisted into a dark, futuristic dystopia where people are now heavily policed and managed like cattle.

The fact that a female author would center a male character in her work feels like some kind of betrayal. I understand that science fiction tends to be a male-dominated genre, where only men can be the heroes and only men are expected to save the day. But Carol is the one who disappears into the fae realm first. Why does she need to sit on her laurels and wait for The Man to come and save her?

Furthermore, Carol is transformed into a mindless shell of a human, devoid of any ability to express any will of her own or even think for herself. Ultimately, The Man must dictate the woman’s fate. So much for the Women’s Rights Movement. There is a part of me that expects female authors to push back against such demeaning notions and St. Clair, in very bad taste, seems to capitulate to this male chauvinist ideology. Perhaps it was this bias that made it impossible for me to resonate with this story’s protagonist.

Aldridge is a canned character. He is everything a heroic male protagonist “ought” to be and possesses very little depth or complexity in personality. He responds “correctly” to every situation and never seems to doubt or question himself. This leaves a discerning reader with little choice but to question his humanity.

Another possible reason the story rankled was the way elves are portrayed in The Shadow People. St. Clair's version runs counter to the commonly held mental image of elves, portraying them as grotesque and malevolent, instead of beautiful, good-willed, and elegant. St. Clair’s elves are more like the lesser known spriggans of elven lore. This, I agree, is very clever of St. Clair but still, broadly classifying these beings as “elves” felt like needlessly shattering the average reader’s fanciful notions about fae-kind.

There are some disconcerting allusions here to the alienation and institutionalized oppression of the Negro people. As a black woman, I felt that there was a certain lack of sensitivity in drawing these parallels while also side-stepping the cruel reality plaguing modern society.

The imagery in The Shadow People is visceral and draws the reader into every moment. The events of the story are quite dramatic and would make a great film. For some reason, though, none of this resonated with me. I could not fully appreciate or enjoy reading this book nor could I quite rid myself of the vague suspicion that this author had to be a man, a misogynist at that, writing under the guise of a female author.

2.5 stars.

West of Sol


by George Pritchard

Postmarked the Stars


Cover by R. M. Powers

There is a phrase, deja vu, which refers to feeling or seeing something that you have not interacted with before, yet seems intensely familiar. These are now believed to be psychic echoes, but it is a useful term for Andre Norton's latest work, Postmarked the Stars. I was excited to begin this, as the last thing I read of hers was Star Man’s Son, which I enjoyed deeply and still own a copy of.

I want to emphasize that I did not hate this book, nor did I find it incompetent, but reading Postmarked feels like watching a piston engine. Smooth and efficient and automatic, but always quite obviously a machine. This is the fourth entry in the Solar Queen adventures, although no previous books need to be read to understand this one. The previous book in this series came out a decade ago, but I am not particularly familiar with what interest there was, or is.

Dane Thorson, assistant cargo master to the Free Trader ship Solar Queen, discovers that a strange, radioactive box on board is causing the creatures near it to change, becoming larger and more intelligent. Before the crew can figure out what to do with this information, the ship is caught in a tractor beam, and they are dragged to the planet’s surface. Dane, Tau the medical officer, and the psychic cat end up separated into a search party. A group of dead miners are found, an enormous insect monster is battled, before another tractor beam drags them and the planetary ranger onwards towards a secret base in unexplored territory. It all seems to be connected to that strange, radioactive stone!

Is there indeed gold in them thar hills?

One thing I have always enjoyed about Norton's writing, particularly given the genres she works in, is the equal footing she gives to non white characters. Even the names she gives to background characters vary in ways that speak to strength in differences amongst the stars — names from the Indian subcontinent right alongside Welsh, Jewish, and Chinese! For another example, a prospector type is introduced, and it's only mentioned half a chapter later that he is dark-skinned.

This story is a space Western, plain and simple. The recent movie, Moon Zero Two [review coming out October 18] is my immediate point of comparison, but this has been a rich vein in the genre for a long time. The potential for racism in the story is, for better or worse, replaced by that dullest of Westerns, the claim jumper plot, combined with the Pony Express or stagecoach robbery.

Norton has been publishing continuously for almost two decades at this point. Maybe she needs a break, taking a chance to look at the New Wave trends and use them for her own. I know that, given time, she can make them shine the way Star Man’s Son pushed the boundaries of boy’s adventure novels. Norton can do better, and has, but Postmarked the Stars does nothing at all.

Two stars.




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Movies

[October 14, 1969] News Bulletin/No Separate Beds (Review of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice")

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by Victoria Lucas

Good news!

Remember when last year (December 12, 1968) I reported that the submersible Alvin had sunk at around 5,000 feet in the Atlantic Ocean, with bad weather curtailing the search for it?

The Alvin

With money provided by the US Navy, whose vehicle the Alvin is, and who expected to learn whether and how such retrievals might be done, Alvin's caretakers sailed out armed with imaging tools and images, along with equipment and engineers to find and raise the submersible. They succeeded on their Labor Day cruise!

Fortunately for its seekers, the Alvin had landed on the ocean floor right side up, gaping open, so a special tool was lowered into it and remotely sprung open to hold it while it was slowly raised and then towed close to the surface back to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Great care was taken not to disturb the ocean life that had inhabited it, and that was removed and taken to labs for observation, etc.

There was one funny incident: an engineer who had been on the Alvin's host ship on the last trip before its loss and was also on its Labor Day tow ship came back (like most crew) hungry. He accepted a seafood sandwich from the welcoming spouse of a crew member, and while he was eating it a picture was snapped of him with the sandwich. Coincidentally the lunchbox left behind when the Alvin had slipped into the ocean was in the picture.

And someone interpreted that to mean that the engineer was eating the sandwich that had been in the lunchbox (along with an apple) while the submersible was beneath the waves for 9 months. Immediately there sprang up a certainty that the ocean had hitherto unknown powers of preservation. The last I knew someone was talking government grants.

Now for the main event!

No Separate Beds (Review of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice")


Poster showing Gould, Wood, Culp & Cannon as the eponymous characters

Well, I'll be! Someone up and wrote a film script about upper middle-class couples behaving like unsupervised teenagers. (I would have said "well-to-do couples," but that's a bit old-fashioned of me.)

If you've seen the latest Mad Magazine (and I know some of you have) you've essentially seen the above poster for "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"–Robert Culp of "I Spy" resting apparently naked against the headboard of a bed with Dyan Cannon, Elliott Gould, and Natalie Wood, all covered by strategic bits of bedding. (The same artist did both the parody and the original poster.)


The MAD version of the movie poster

At the beginning of the movie, there are Bob & Carol in his sports car driving through beautiful countryside to an expensive retreat they call "The Institute" (a stand-in for Esalen, a school at the vanguard of the "Human Potential Movement"). After a dramatic group therapy "marathon" session we see them and their friends Ted and Alice, back home eating out at a fancy restaurant, living in beautiful masonry shelters (no doubt in nice neighborhoods), consulting an expensive psychoanalyst (the writer/director/producer's real psychoanalyst by all accounts), and experiencing great angst.

Is the angst political, about how many resources they're using up and how they should be giving back? Is the angst medical, cares about health, death and life? No. It's highly personal and laced with guilt. Guilt about political or family matters? No–politics are never discussed, and each couple has one child who is not the center or even (it seems) an important focus of their lives. Like them, each child is privileged and loved and free, even if spending many evenings and weekends with Spanish-speaking help rather than their parents, "extended" families such as grandparents (who probably live far away), or other children.

So why the angst? The joy in the opening music (Handel's "Hallalujah Chorus") comes in anticipation of received wisdom, which appears to them in group therapy to be the practice of honesty, and in some of those honest moments they realize that . . .

They aren't having enough sex.

But I shouldn't make fun of them. They just want what every teenager wants: the privacy and the time to explore–him- or herself as a psychological being, and him- or herself as a sexual being.

Perhaps I should be asking why it took them so long. I think we all know the answer to that: because they weren't allowed to explore when they were teenagers (although a minority of this generation did manage to be either secretive or untruthful enough to get away with it). Think of the kids you know who got married while in high school–or were you one of those youngsters yourself?

I think these wealthy adults (all four starring actors in their 30s, fitting the characters they play) were waiting for the sexual revolution now in progress. They were waiting for permission. Now they have it.


Just in case the movie isn't enough for you

So we have gone from Ricky and Lucy Ricardo sleeping in separate beds while a married couple, never showing Doris Day in bed with anyone but a voice on a telephone, and generally strict rules about how sexual behavior is suggested in non-pornographic films, to: wham! two couples in bed together—albeit just sitting there after a brief bout of playing hide and tickle.

In their innocence they call their foursome an "orgy." I wonder what the scriptwriters, Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker would have done with the group hosting weekly orgies whose members I'm now interviewing for my book. Probably discarded us as an extreme manifestation of the sexual revolution and gone back to using improvisation (by writers only) as a tool for generating dialog (a rumored way of writing the scene with Ted and Alice in which he is horny but she is not).

The film ends with the Burt Bacharach song "What the World Needs Now." As it plays, a crowd of people practice a tool for freedom they can exercise while fully clothed, whatever they mean by it, "love." But wait! There's still the book!

This is a comedy without very much laughing out loud. If you are not offended by the very premise of it, I think it might amuse you. I give it a 4 out of 5 mainly for excellent comedic acting and witty writing.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[October 12, 1969] My country, right or… (November 1969 Galaxy)

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

Justice delayed

The new Supreme Court, whose prime continuity to the old one is the preservation of the name "Warren" in its Chief Justice, is now in session—minus one Justice…for now.

Warren Burger has taken over from Earl Warren, and one can already feel the rightward lurch of our nation's highest judiciary.  Now, President Richard Milhouse Nixon plans to careen the Supreme Court in an even more conservative direction.

Tricky Dick's nomination to fill the seat left when LBJ's nominee, Abe Fortas, didn't get the job, is Clement F. Haynsworth.  Haynsworth is currently a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Atlantic coast of the Upper South), a position he has held since being appointed their by Ike in 1957.  The Senate Judiciary Committee on October 9th approved 10-7 the consideration of Justice Haynsworth.

The road ahead is far from clement for Haynsworth, however.  For one, he bought 1000 shares of Brunswick (the bowling company) just before publishing a ruling he helped make on said company.  After the heightened scrutiny on ethics that accompanied the Fortas nomination, Haynsworth is under an intense microscope.  Labor groups maintained that he should have recused himself from a case involving a textile mill; he owned shares of a company that did business with the mill.

Critics of the storm say this is just tit for tat after the Fortas fight, rather than for any substantive reason.  What's really at stake is Haynsworth is a reactionary.  He affirmed the decision by local authorities to close the Prince Edward County schools to avoid integration, he upheld the constitutionality of school voucher programs used to fund segregated private schools, and he supported the management of the Darlington Manufacturing Company in South Carolina when it closed down to avoid its employees unionizing.

Will Haynsworth make it on the bench?  It's hard to imagine he will.  If a Republican minority was sufficient to deny Fortas a seat, then a Democratic majority will surely roadblock Haynsworth.  If and when this happens, the question is whether Nixon will double down or conciliate.  At stake this season are decisions on the tax exempt status of churches, the death penalty, punitive drafting of war protesters, and the rights of Black Americans.

Stay tuned…

Entertainment delayed

Just as we're playing the waiting game to see the direction jurisprudence goes in America, so the latest issue of Galaxy science fiction makes it clear that the future of SF, particularly in the pages of the former queen of the genre, is as yet uncertain.


by Jack Gaughan (as are, presumably, all of the other illustrations in this magazine)

Downward to the Earth (Part 1 of 4), by Robert Silverberg

The amazingly prolific Silverbob begins a serial that has elements of Delany (the incorporation of music and the choppy presentation…which may be a printing error knowing Galaxy) and Zelazny (the wild, decadent planet and weary protagonist).

Edmund Gunderson used to run Holman's World, a jungle planet with two sentient races—philosophical elephants and brutish apes—in order to collect the serpent worm venom that is a fundamental catalyst of tissue regeneration.

Ten years later, Holman's World is now Belzegor, reverted to the ownership of the pachyderm nildoror.  The human infrastructure is rapidly succumbing to tropical rot, and who knows how long humanity will keep contact with the world?

Amid this backdrop of decay, Gunderson returns to the planet he ruled…purpose unknown.  All we know is that his mission lies somewhere in the backwoods, and he requires nildoror permission to go there.  We find out Gunderson is a bigot who cannot quite abide the idea that the nildoror are sentient beings rather than animals, but he does seem to be trying to break free of his bigotry.  We also learn that the nildoror are now closely associating with the primate sulidor and even employing them as servants.  Finally, it is revealed that drinking raw serpent venom causes the brief transfer of souls between alien and human.  Whether this is imaginary or real is not yet known.

Silverberg has set up a lot of pieces, but not much has happened yet.  The writing is competent, though not gripping.  As with the Haynsworth decision, the jury is still out on this one.

Three stars.

Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes, by Harlan Ellison

Old man Jedediah Parkman is dead at the age of 82, and all of the people he's helped over the years are coming to his funeral to pay respects.  This includes an alien with the power of camouflage and lethal envelopment, who is passing for human for his survival.  At the funeral, he witnesses a beautiful white woman (most out of place given the part of town and the race of Parkman and the other attendees) who takes the silver coins from atop Parkman's eyes.

What is her motivation?  Why is she there?  And just what connection does our storyteller have to Parkman?

This is one of the few Ellison stories that harnesses the writer's great talent to say something beyond what's on Harlan's mind/heart at the moment.  It's also real SF, unlike so much of his work.

Five stars.

The Dirty Old Men of Maxsec, by Phyllis Gotlieb

Outside: the City.  Cramped, stagnant, spartan.  Its only compensation: the citizens are immortal, thanks to "the J."

Inside: MaxSec.  A maximum security community populated by criminals whose only punishment is to be deprived of immortality.

The paradox: the people of MaxSec are reportedly happier, freer, and more innovative than the people of the City.

The story: Fenthree is a somewhat cynical citydweller, blackmailed into infiltrating MaxSec to find its secrets.  He is quickly found out and imprisoned, to be an unwitting vessel for MaxSec's revenge on the outside world.

From there, the perspective of the story grows, now including Corrigan, strongman of MaxSec who is the architect of the retribution plan.  To Linnaeus Ganzer, nearly 400 years old, developing the creeping death for Corrigan's plan.  To Luz, the last lovely woman in MaxSec, catalyst to plans within plans.

A meandering, occasionally flippant, occasionally opaque piece, Gotlieb's is an interesting counterpoint to last month's "The Rock", covering the concept of a coordinated prison exile a la Australia of a couple centuries ago.  That it also manages to make some interesting comments on the effects of immortality on society at the same time is impressive, although the two speculative threads do not interweave perfectly.

Three stars.

How to Kidnap a Moon, by Robert S. Richardson

Richardson is an astronomer whom we normally find in the pages of Analog.  This article details the energy concerns for bringing the two moons of Mars into orbit around the Earth for easier access.

There isn't much discussion of how one might practically arrange such things—it's all just orbital mechanics and erg tabulations.  It is also unclear how it would be easier to bring the rocks here for investigation rather than exploring them in situ.  On the other hand, if we're ever to mine Phobos and Deimos (or by extension, any of the asteroids), I suppose there might be merit to bringing the planetoids home.  If anything, they could be hollowed out and turned into natural space stations.

Anyway, three stars.

Broke and Hungry, No Place to Go, by Ron Goulart

A man whose job is to tell the computer which unnecessary mouths on the dole to eliminate (in the pursuit of efficiency) finds that he is now on the chopping block.

This is the kind of minor tale we might have found in one of the minor magazines last decade.  Ron is phoning it in.

Two stars.

For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, November 1969), by Willy Ley

In this posthumous piece, Willy Ley discusses the suggestion that the death of the dinosaurs was caused by an excess of radiation—from the periodic flipping of the magnetic poles or the explosion of a nearby supernova.  He seems unconvinced, and he even goes so far as to say that the extinctions might not even have been that sudden.

Three stars.

Dead End, by Norman Spinrad

Another bleak man-on-the-dole story.  This time, a fellow who is dissatisfied with having nothing meaningful to do, decides to go to the last natural preserve in the country.  It is a 10 mile by 10 mile stretch of wilderness with none of the comforts of home.  When he decides he isn't enjoying being cold and hungry any more than he was enjoying being bored and fed, he tries to summon a recovery robot.  But his call bracelet doesn't work…may never have been designed to work.  A trap to weed out malcontents?

Mack Reynolds has extrapolated this kind of world with far more success, and Bob Sheckley has written satires like this with far more wit and barb.  Spinrad can be great, but this is lesser Spinrad.

Two stars.

Dune Messiah (Part 5 of 5), by Frank Herbert

Last up, a very short final installment of the third (or second, depending on how you count them) Dune book.  The plotters against Paul Atreides offer him a ghola (resurrected clone) of the newly dead Chani, Paul's true love.  Knowing this will make Muad'Dib a thrall to the shadowy interests of a myriad of anti-Imperial organizations, Paul refuses.  Then he goes out into the desert to die, as is the fitting end for blind Fremen.  The Emperor leaves behind a newborn pair of twins, one male and one female, both fully sapient in the same manner that Paul's sister was conceived, Alia's mother having been high on the spice melange at the time.

In the end, this is very much a bridge book.  All of its bits could have been condensed to a five-page faux encyclopedia article included at the beginning of the next book, with very little action and not a whole lot of interest, save the mildly engaging Duncan Idaho/Hayt bits in the last installment.

So, two stars for this bit and two stars overall.  Just read the summarizing precis (almost as long as this last installment!) and the few pages of the story in this issue, and you'll be fine.

A Cautious Look to the Future

It's even harder to read the tea leaves when it comes to the future of Galaxy.  On the one hand, by the numbers, this issue didn't crack three stars.  On the other, the Silverberg could become a knockout, the Herbert is (blessedly) over, the Gottlieb was interesting, if not stellar (and the first woman-penned piece in how long?), and the Ellison was unusually excellent.  Ley is dead, and that is a blow, but perhaps Richardson will replace him.  His article certainly seems like an audition, though it wasn't as good as other pieces by him I've read in, say, Analog.

So, for news on Haynsworth and news on Galaxy… I guess we're playing the waiting game!

See you then.




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Movies

[October 10, 1969] Everybody's Talkin' At Me: Midnight Cowboy and Urban Tragedy

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Science Fiction Theater Episode #7

Tonight (Oct. 10), tune in at 7pm (Pacific) to see what terrific, sciencefictional goodie the Traveler has got in store for you. A hint: it was made by a real Pal…

 


by Jason Sacks

My friends know I'm a big fan of the emerging "New Hollywood" films which has been mushrooming over the last few years. The new film Midnight Cowboy is an outstanding exemplar of that movement, and I'd like to tell you why this film is so great — and why this film movement is so exciting.

"New Hollywood" has emerged as a term over the last few years for a specific type of film. Coming out of the dual filmic earthquakes of the end of the hated Hays Code and the crumbling of the studio system, New Hollywood films are differentated from their more traditional studio counterparts for a few reasons: New Hollywood films tend to prpesent a narrative focus on the lives of ordinary people, tend to use location shooting to heighten their reality, and tend to present an anti-establishment view of the world.

You might remeber the article from late 1967 by influential Time critic Steven Kanfer which praised that year's Bonnie and Clyde as "a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend."  Kanfer continued, "The most important fact about the screen in 1967 is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema calls 'the furious springtime of world cinema."" That "new trend" has evolved into the New Hollywood movement.

Bonnie and Clyde was the cover story in Time in late 1967, with an accompanying article which described a new cinema which was evolving quickly.

In fact, Bonnie and Clyde was a kind of  siren song of this movement — though other bold new films preceded it (notably the work of John Cassavettes and Robert Downey), this was the first sophisticated feature film which really broke through and really embraced youth culture (to be sure, the films of Roger Corman, among others, embraced youthful rebellion but never with the panache or breakthrough success of Bonnie and Clyde). It also helps that Clyde is also a damn good – and very funny – film.

Since '67, we've seen a plethora of remarkable new films which fall into this new trend, including The Graduate, Targets, Head, the outrageous Putney Swope and the terrifying Night of the Living Dead. Last year's Rosemary's Baby can be called a New Hollywood film. And of course, the most ubiquitous film of 1969 is Easy Rider, a film which seems to be on the lips of everybody under the age of 25. Each of those movies seems to represent a new approach to filmmaking and even to narrative. Head is shockingly surreal. Easy Rider uses innovative editing techniques. Rosemary's Baby explicity satirizes the patriarchy. And Targets literalizes the generation gap between traditional and modern entertainment – and finds terror on both sides.

This new filmic philosophy is an explicit rejection of the dictates of the Hays Code and of the overtly conformist morality of the 1950s. The newer generation of filmmakers feel the freedom to delve into subjects which previously would have been explicitly off-limits. And that makes the film-goers’ life thrilling as we move into a new decade.

Now we get Midnight Cowboy, a film which elevates the New American school, throwing down a new gauntlet for realism, for tragedy and comedy, and for character. I went into this film with high expectations due to strong reviews from critics I appreciate. But it's funny—  Midnight Cowboy both was a lot like what I was expecting and a profoundly different experience.

I was expecting a sad, smart, outsiderly story of two desperate and pathetic souls living on the edge of gay hustler culture in a version of New York that seems teetering on the edge of malaise but hasn't quite tipped over the edge. I was expecting great performances from leads Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, a deep portrayal of what it means to be an outsider in a world that just doesn't care about you, and to see an interesting portrait of a New York suspended between outsider culture and Nixon's silent majority, desperate to flee an urban wasteland.

I got all that, and Midnight Cowboy was poweful as expected; moving and thoughtful and crazily weird at times and often plotless seeming and a particularly intense movie experience.

But I also got a lot of stuff I didn't expect. The first maybe half hour of the film lingers on Voight playing Joe Buck as Buck slowly ambles out of his small Texas town to begin the journey to New York City. That segment of the film takes its time, with long, languid but suffocating shots which make the town feel claustrophobic. His old home town is poised on the edge of an all-encompassing landscape but the human space in that landscape is proscribed.

And yet, and yet: people are friendly; they smile and greet each other and seem to welcome the company of others. The Southwest might be desolate, but the human capacity there seems strong.

So Buck leaves town, but we see elliptical, dreamlike flashbacks which reveal Joe's past life, his obsessions, and his deep sadness. Some of those dreams are representational, some are allusional, but they all take the film to a different level, an unexpected level which sets Midnight Cowboy clearly in that same milieu of modern angst as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider.

Buck isn't just leaving Texas because the big city is beckoning him. He has a traumatic secret connected to his old home town, something which truly tortures him emotionally and pushes him to jump on a Greyhound for the long, lonely journey to the big city.

All the while, the film's now-ubiquitous (in the film and on our radios) theme song keeps playing, illustrating Buck's inner life. True freedom, Nilsson is singing is inside our own heads:

Everybody's talking at me
I don't hear a word they're saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Buck lands in New York, and as you can see from that evocative still posted above, he literally towers above all the people around him. Joe Buck is a big man, with big dreams.

In a more traditional movie, Buck would aspire to be an actor, or strike it rich on Wall Street, or hobnob with the rich and famous. But those dreams would be unrealistic for a man of Joe Buck's means.

Instead. those big dreams lead him to a life where he tries to make some cash by hustling, offering sexual favors to older women who find his cowboy personality a massive turn-on. Joe seems to like the life for a while, as he tries it on, but he has no idea how to actually live such a life, and he ends up living on or near the streets. Desperate for cash, Buck falls in with a loose amalgamation of hookers, hustlers and runaways who inhabit the alleyways and avenues of a fading New York City.

it is in this world that Midnight Cowboy confronts its most surprising element and the aspect of the film which moves it away most from the era of 1950s morality. The Hays Code explicitly forbade even a glancing mention of homosexuality (which didn’t prevent clever filmmakers from depicting homosexual characters onscreen, albeit using winks and nods to the audience). But here gay culture is explicitly shown onscreen, with even a touch of respect and affection for the kinds of struggles Buck has to go through. In the wake of July’s riots around New York’s Stonewall Tavern, this depiction of homosexuality couldn’t feel more contemporary.

Director John Schlesinger tells Buck’s story with angst and grace, but also with a remarkable amount of humor which keeps the proceedings from getting too heavy.

While hustling men and women, Joe Buck meets Hoffman, who plays the unforgettable Ratso Rizzo, a man of pure id and ansgt, a TB-ridden conman who takes Buck under his broken wing and shares an apartment in an abandoned, desolate tenement which seems like it's been waiting for a Robert Moses wrecking ball for decades.

Dustin Hoffman is absolutely astonishing as the motormouthed, self-delusional Rizzo, a man who both seems unique in film history and utterly familiar. Rizzo is every New Yorker who talks nonstop, with an accent and an attitude which embodies his city. But Rizzo has a beguiling tenderness and prickliness, a sort of personal pride and complex inner life that causes the character to pop off the screen.

Rizzo couldn't be further away from Hoffman's character in The Graduate, Ben Braddock. But just as Hoffman seemed to embody our generation of aimless, privileged young men in the earlier film, here he embodies an aimless man utterly without privilege or power, a man swallowed up by the desolate New York streets and his own disease. And where Ben Braddock is driven by a sex drive stuck on his odd relationship with Mrs Robinson, here Hoffman’s Rizzo seems completely uninterested in sex, even bemused by Buck’s bizarre life which centers around sex.

That odd state of bemusement gives a lot of energy to this film. The fast-talking Ratso can’t help but babble in and on about how strange Buck’s life is. It’s as if Rizzo  simply doesn’t understand why people need to have sex and why they make decisions based in that sex drive. And yet, he grows a deep fraternal love for Buck.

it’s often hilarious, often heartbreaking how tight the bond is between these two men who are so very different from each other.

At the heart of the film is the deep friendship between Buck and Rizzo, a frankly shocking level of intimacy these men develop for each other. This relationship inspires empathy in viewers, too, so that when this movie reaches its inevitable ending, we are left adrift like the movie's characters are.

So yeah, Midnight Cowboy is kind of a tragedy, and the ending left people in my theatre sobbing, and it earns its X rating with its story of hustlers and unsensationalized view of sex and its general feeling of grime.

But still: this movie is not a bummer. It's not a bad acid trip. There are many moments which illuminated life with empathy and intelligence and humor. Heck, in fact, the acid trip in this film (at a place similar to Andy Warhol's famous Factory) is a lot of fun as well as a brilliant conceptual counterweight to the rest of the story: some hustlers were able to find kinship and a sense of family with freaks like themselves. And for others a glimpse into that life helps deliver a small sense of grace.

Brit John Schlesinger came over to America to direct this film, and it's easy to sense his comfort in every scene. Best known for his 1965 film Darling, which introduced Julie Christie to worldwide audiences as a headstrong girl in swinging London, Schlesinger seems to be attracted to stories about people who can't quite find their footing in society but remain resolutely themselves: Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd and Billy in Billy Liar are rebels without a clue.

But Schlesinger has never helmed a film like Midnight Cowboy, which seems to reject the very concept of a middle-class life, which seems devoted to its New York-in-decline setting and that city’s bottomless underclass of weirdos, drug addicts and hustlers. Adam Holender's cinematography adds to the beautiful despair, a lovely widescreen tragedy of urban decay.

Ultimately, Midnight Cowboy is suffused with the dream of freedom, which comes into conflict with the deep ennui of our late '60s reality.  We're living in the shadows of the tragedies of '68 and the dimming of the post-War consensus. Yeah, director Schlesinger seems to say, you can be free, you can live outside the law, but the gravity of middle-class normative Americana will always pull you either into death or into conformance no matter how hard you try to resist.  The deeply moving ending of this film reinforces that sense that it’s unbelievably hard to stay an outsider in our modern world, that the lessons of ‘68 show the optimism of ‘67 has given way to a massive societal bummer.

Midnight Cowboy is a remarkable film which represents the great promise of the New Hollywood movement: John Schlesinger’s film is explicitly in dialog with our current era. Yeah, everybody’s talkin’ at us, but we don’t hear a word they’re saying’.

5 stars.

 




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Book, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[October 8, 1969] Suddenly . . . (November 1969 Amazing))

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by John Boston

. . . Amazing has become a normal science fiction magazine. (Stop snickering.) It’s been moving in that direction, but this November issue’s editorial says: “Beginning this issue, our old policy of reprints has been thrown out the window. . . . We will be publishing one, and only one classic story in each issue, and it will be a bonus to the fully new contents of the magazine.” Or, as the cover blurb puts it, “ALL NEW STORIES plus a Famous Classic.”


by Johnny Bruck

That phrase may seem oxymoronic, but here’s how editor White figures it: the magazine, with its new, smaller typefaces allowing more wordage, now contains about 70,000 words of new material, plus another 15,000 words, making a total per issue greater than any of the other SF magazines and allowing him to call the remaining reprints bonuses. Thus the booster’s reach exceeds the mathematician’s grasp, but I’m not complaining.

Promotion aside, congratulations to White for finally prying publisher Sol Cohen loose from his prolonged insistence on filling as much as half the magazine with reprints of (euphemistically) uneven quality. White says he “cannot truly say it was a result of my actions alone”—presumably meaning Cohen had been softened up by the complaints of his predecessors—but good for him for finally getting it done.

So what we have here are one quite long serial installment, a novelet, and two short stories, plus a reprinted short story from 1942, all new, as well as the usual complement of features. As promised last month, there is a science article by Greg Benford and David Book, and as then implied, Dr. Leon E. Stover is conspicuous by his absence, and not missed.

A book review column, shorter than usual but just as vehement, features editor White’s praise of Lee Hoffman’s The Caves of Karst and a new reviewer, Richard Delap, whaling on Bug Jack Barron: “Science fiction’s answer to Valley of the Dolls has now made the scene with all the pseudo-values of its mainstream counterpart unrevised and intact in a transposition to pseudo-sf.” Delap also doesn’t care much for the new collection of old stories The Far-Out Worlds of A.E. van Vogt, but this disappointment is expressed more in sorrow than in gusto. These two reviews are reprinted from a fanzine, but Delap will be contributing regularly to this column going forward.

The fanzine reviews and letter column fill out the issue. In the letter column, White notes that James Blish has moved to England and his book reviews will be less frequent. Other highlights of the letter column include Joe L. Hensley complaining in kind about the misspelling of his name on last issue’s cover, Bob Tucker reviving his 36-year-old beef about staples, to White’s consternation, and both White and John D. Berry, the fanzine reviewer, weighing in on the purpose of that column in response to a complaining reader. White takes issue with a reader who thinks the use of “sci-fi” is only a minor problem, and announces to another reader that he has dropped the movie reviews for the present. He also notes that he continues to write stories but his agent insists on sending them to Playboy—where, I note, nothing by White seems yet to have appeared.

Oh, the cover. I almost forgot. It’s the good cover by Johnny Bruck that we’ve been waiting for—not especially attractive, but very interesting. Foregrounded is an African-looking face peering out from what at first looks like the fur-lined hood of one of the Inuit or other far-North American peoples, but on closer examination is a collage of partial images of pieces of equipment and (I think) living things. It’s a surreal picture that, unusually, doesn’t look like imitation Richard Powers. Provenance is the German Perry Rhodan #250, from 1966.

On the contents page, Greg Benford’s story Sons of Man is listed as “The story behind the cover.” White said last issue that he doesn’t have control over the covers, but he’s been able to commission stories, including Benford’s, to be written around the pre-purchased covers. So I guess Sons of Man is actually the story in front of the cover. Inside, the story is illustrated by none other than editor White—his first professionally published art. It’s adequate, but he shouldn’t quit his day job. In other interior illustration news, Mike Hinge has done small illustrations for the headings of the editorial, book reviews, and other departments.

A. Lincoln, Simulacrum (Part 1 of 2), by Philip K. Dick

The biggest news in this issue is Philip K. Dick’s serial, A. Lincoln, Simulacrum. Per my practice, I won’t read and rate this until both installments are available, but there’s plenty of talk about the novel here. White’s editorial says without elaboration that it is totally uncut—in fact, it’s “slightly revised and expanded” for its appearance here.


by Mike Hinge

White does leave us with a bizarre anecdote. Several years ago, he showed Dick a photo of himself looking rather like Dick (both with full beards and dark-rimmed glasses). Dick asked for a copy, since his agent was after him to provide a photo for a British edition of The Man in the High Castle. So Dick sent the photo of White—and it appeared on the book. White says: “So here’s a chance to say, ‘Thanks, Phil,’ for the chance to associate myself, albeit deceitfully, with one of his best books.”

About the novel, White says:

“. . . Phil told me, ‘I put a lot of myself into this one—I really sweated into it.’ It’s more of a novel of character than any previous Philip K. Dick novel, and in writing and scene construction it approaches the so-called ‘mainstream’ novel. It is also something of a ‘root’ novel, planting as it does in 1981 many of the themes and constructs which pop up in later books of his loose-limned future history. And it is the first and only Philip K. Dick novel to be told in first person by its protagonist.”

Sons of Man, by Greg Benford


by Ted White

Greg Benford’s Sons of Man is a well crafted story using the familiar device of telling two unrelated stories in parallel, gradually revealing that they are not so unrelated after all. In one, Livingstone, who has moved to the northwestern wilderness to get away from civilization, finds a man named King collapsed in the snow near his cabin with severe burn injuries of no obvious origin, then sees a face peering into his window, and later, bare footprints two feet long. King’s been Sasquatch hunting and they seem to be hunting him back.

Meanwhile, on the Moon, Terry Wilk is trying to make sense of the records of an ancient spacecraft that crashed after visiting Earth early in human prehistory. Members of the New Sons of God cult are looking over his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t find out anything heretical. The story reads like it might develop into a series but stands on its own. The style seems a little awkward at the beginning, as if it’s something Benford started earlier in his career and came back to later, but overall, it’s very readable, cleverly assembled, and generally enjoyable. Four stars.

A Sense of Direction, by Alexei Panshin

Alexei Panshin’s short story A Sense of Direction is set in the same universe of “the Ships” as his Nebula-winning Rite of Passage. The interstellar Ships lord it over the people of the colonies that they established. Arpad, whose father married into a planetary culture and left (was left by) his Ship, was reclaimed for the Ship when his father died. He’s miserable in its unfamiliar culture, and makes a break for it during a landing on another planet. But the folkways there are so bizarre and repellent that he quickly changes his mind and sneaks back. So, like most of Panshin’s work, it’s Heinleinian: The (Young) Man Who Learned Better, capably done but just a bit too schematic and pat. Three stars.

A Whole New Ballgame, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell contributes A Whole New Ballgame, a compressed soliloquy on a theme previously aired by Larry Niven (in The Jigsaw Man), with a first-person semi-literate narrator. It’s just about perfect in its small compass and inexorable logic. Four miniature stars.

Sarker’s Joke Box, by Raymond Z. Gallun

The “Famous Classic” this month is Sarker’s Joke Box, by Raymond Z. Gallun, from the March 1942 Amazing. It’s yet another testament to the corrupting effects of Ray Palmer’s editorship. It begins: “Clay Sarker had me covered with his ugly heat-pistol. Kotah, the little Venusian scientist he’d held captive for so long, crouched helplessly chained, there, in one corner of Sarker’s cavernous mountain hideout. My life wasn’t worth the cinders in a discarded rocket-tube.” “Gimme bang-bang” wins out again! Pull out your copy of the June 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction, or the anthology Adventures in Time and Space, and compare Gallun’s much classier Seeds of the Dusk to this one.


by Robert Fuqua

But the story is not a total loss. The narrator is a cop, and he and his buddies have rousted Sarker out of his last stronghold in the Asteroid Belt. Now he’s trapped in a cave on Earth while the other cops are closing in. But Sarker—“that black-souled demon of space”—turns his heat-pistol on Kotah and then on his own apparatus that fills the cave, which blows up quite satisfactorily, then enters a metal cylinder and closes and seals it behind him. When the main body of cops arrive, they try to penetrate it, but—it’s neutronium! They can’t scratch it. And to compound matters, Sarker’s lawyer appears and announces that since they’ve declared Sarker to be in custody, they’ve got to try him within 60 days or he goes free. So the cops redouble their efforts to get through the neutronium. At this point, the story turns into a scientific puzzle without (much) further resort to hokey melodrama. It’s perfectly readable and commendably short. Three stars.

The Columbus Problem, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford’s second appearance in the issue is the first “Science in Science Fiction” article, done with David Book. It’s called The Columbus Problem and it starts out with a quotation from a Poul Anderson novel about a spaceship arriving at a new star system: “The instruments peered and murmured, and clicked forth a picture of the system. Eight worlds were detected.” Benford and Book then explain just how difficult and time-consuming it would actually be to detect the planets of an unfamiliar star system upon arrival at it, with our present technology or likely enhancements of it. They do a fine job of plain English explanation without becoming tedious. It beats hell out of Frank Tinsley’s earlier science articles for Amazing and edges Ben Bova’s. Four stars.

Summing Up

So, deferring judgment on the serial, here’s a lively issue of which much is quite good and nothing is a chore to read. Amazing!

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




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 6, 1969] The Rule of a Mediocracy (Vision of Tomorrow #3)

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By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

The Times is running a series of articles where major thinkers elucidate on what they believe life will be like in 1980. The series started with Arthur Koestler (philosopher most known for his Orwellian novel, Darkness at Noon) who predicts that, in the Britain of 1980, Mediocracy will be the order of the day.

Drawing of Arthur Koestler at a table pointing to a diagram of the human circulatory system
Arthur Koestler by David Levine

By this he means that instead of having a meritocratic system, defined by IQ plus effort, the main ingredients of life will be common sense plus inertia. Institutions will continue in modified forms without revolutionary change. Politicians are more likely to be dentists than demagogues. The family structure will continue but divorce and extramarital relationships will be commonplace. Housewives will have “bugs”, small time-saving robots, to do their household tasks, but they will breakdown so frequently the repairman will be a regular guest.

On a more positive note, he foresees the removal of private cars from cities, to be replaced by automated electric vehicles for hire. Office work will be done from home, with tactile simulators introduced to ensure people do not feel deprived of physical contact. Education will begin shortly after birth and young people will be encouraged to engage in more out-there behaviour before settling into mediocre adulthood.

We will have to wait another decade to see if his predictions come true. But, if the latest Vision of Tomorrow is any sign of things to come, mediocrity is certainly on the horizon.

Vision of Tomorrow #3

Vision of Tomorrow #3 Cover with a drawing of two spaceships over a futuristic city
Cover art by Eddie Jones

Yes, I am also still waiting for issue #2. I am assuming there was some hiccough at the printers.

In his editorial, Harbottle continues to outline his vision for the magazine. Firstly, stories must be “entertaining”, secondly, they should not contain sex. New Worlds this is not!

Let’s see how this translates into prose.

Shapers of Men by Kenneth Bulmer

Drawing of a man in a ruined spaceship that has crashed into the top of a tree
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

Once again, Mr. Bulmer opens the magazine with an adventure tale. This one, we are told, marks the start of a new series. Fletcher Cullen, “galactic bum”, travels across the stars wherever the loot and action take him. In this opening installment, Cullen’s flier is shot down over Sitasz and he finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the humans and the natives.

Man with a gun facing towards us with two alien beings behind him
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

This is a rather old-fashioned kind of interplanetary tale with some attempts at modern touches. Cullen is an untrustworthy rogue, miles away from Flash Godon or Clark Kent, the Sitazans are a well-constructed alien race and there are attempts to bring in modern frames of reference like LSD.

However, it is really boring to read. Generally each chapter will spend most of the time in overwrought descriptions and dull exposition, then a quick escape, followed by a capture by someone else. Even Bulmer’s amusing similes are like fish and guests, starting to smell off after the third time.

A low two stars

Number 7 by Eric C. Williams

Frederick Hasty, technical overseer of demolitions in London, is called to Number 7, Good Peace Road, in New Cross. Its destruction is a necessary part of the rationalization of London currently taking place. Unfortunately, the property is surrounded by an impregnable invisible barrier.

A reasonable little mystery but one that does not amount to very much.

A low three stars

Science Fiction in Germany by Franz Rottensteiner

A one-page summary of the SF scene in both Germanies, covering Perry Rhodan, Utopia Zukunftsromane, translations, fanzines and conventions.

It does the job it intends to but it is not as good as Cora’s coverage.

Three stars

People Like You by David Rome

Drawing of a jeep driving up a mountainous roadside, overlooking a river valley
Illustrated by B. M. Finch

Gail and Gordon Coulton, and their daughter Dorinda, are staying in a holiday home overlooking Cody Canyon when they notice some of their property has been taken. They suspect it is their neighbour, George Abbot. But what could he want with these items?

I was reminded of The People stories, but Rome is no Henderson. It is enjoyable enough, with a nice twist in the tail, but nothing special.

Three Stars

The Impatient Dreamers Part 3: Shadow of the Master by Walter Gillings

With us still waiting for the intervening issue, we skip to the third of Gillings articles, looking here at the emergence of British SF writers and publications in the 1930s, along with his efforts to establish more SF fan clubs.

This continues to be a brilliant series casting a spotlight on an area of SF development I rarely see discussed.

Five Stars

Pioneers of Science Fantasy

Two colour magazine covers: Pearson's: illustrating Winged terror with a giant caterpillar like creature terrorising an Edwardian city Chums: Illustrating Beyond The Aurora showing a plane flying in space with wings filled with rocket boosters

Some special colour reprints and short looks at big names in the history of the genre. A kind of supplement to the prior article.

Fantasy Review

Ken Slater reviews the latest E. C. Tubb interstellar adventure, Escape Into Space. Apparently, it is a disappointment, lacking character and convincing explanations.

Lucifer! by E. C. Tubb

Drawing of a suave man wearing a ring whilst a woman with goat horns looks on behind him
Illustrated by Gerard Alfo Quinn

Speaking of Tubb, this tale tells of Frank Weston, a morgue attendant who manages to get his hands on a ring of The Special People. These rings are a kind of portable time machine, allowing him to reverse time over a short period. Frank uses it to get rich and powerful, but can it really give him everything he desires?

A pretty standard tale of this type, well told. Once again Ted lands straight in the middle.

Three Stars

The Adapters by Philip E. High

Drawing of giant translucent monk like figures standing in the rain with heads bowed
Illustrated by Gerard Alfo Quinn

Roger Pryor is a fugitive from The Invaders. Five years ago, people started falling down totally incapacitated when touched by them. They are huge beings invisible except in very specific temperatures and lighting. They continually tell him they are here to help and rescue him, but what can their real agenda be?

A tense and evocative piece. Not the most original but enjoyable enough to bump it above the general chatter.

A low four stars

The Nixhill Monsters by Brian Waters

Whilst travelling across the Australian outback Alice and Graham swerve to avoid a strange creature, like a glowing transparent humanoid. Stopping in the nearby town they are curious to know more, the townspeople however are determined to kill the monster.

This feels to me like a middle-of-the-road episode of The Twilight Zone, overly simple moral and all. Whilst fairly competently constructed it feels strange that everyone here quickly accepts the existence of an alien, but also wants to murder her simply because she looks weird.

Two stars

World to Conquer by Sydney J. Bounds

A Woman being lifted high into the sky by two creatures who resemble a cross between a human and a pterodactyl.
Illustrated by BM Finch

With the Earth devastated by radiation poisoning, humanity is desperately searching for a new habitable planet to live on. When they finally find the world of Asylum, it is already occupied by the intelligent Fliers. Leo Crane is sent to meet the inhabitants, to discover how easily they can be exterminated.

Whilst some parts of this are very old-fashioned (Marie’s “I’m a woman” speech is particularly excruciating), I found the scientific concepts involved interesting and the question raised about how humanity treats the worlds it finds worth pondering. By the end you want to ask if we would really have the right to survive?

Evens out at a high Three Stars

Prisoner in the Ice by Brian Stableford

Drawing illustrating two men looking on as another man attempts to pick a frozen Saber-toothed tiger out of an ice sheet.
Illustrated by BM Finch

After centuries of battling the encroaching ice, the Earth is finally starting to warm up. On one of these ice sheets three men discover a saber-toothed tiger, frozen in mid-leap.

A much more philosophical story than I was expecting from these pages. The tiger and ice melt are really just metaphors, the main thrust of this piece is a discussion about what people become when they fight to survive. Do they become the winners or merely leftovers?

Interesting to compare and contrast with the previous story.

Four Stars

A Dentist’s Waiting Room

A Woman crawling towards a man who is seated on the floor
An unusual final image from Dick Howett previewing issue #4

So perhaps common sense and inertia are the tools behind Visions of Tomorrow. I feel like little here would be out of place ten years ago, but it is generally competent. Only the Bulmer I found to have any structural flaws.

Whether this middle of the road approach will work in the long run remains to be seen. Being unobjectionable but unremarkable is not necessarily going to get people to drop their 5 shillings for the next issue. As the architect of the NHS Aneurin Bevan said:

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over!




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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction