by Gideon Marcus
Government by the Many
Every four years, Americans head to the polls to vote for who they want to lead the Free World. At least, that's what they think they're doing. What really happens is your vote determines if your choice for President wins your state. And then, representatives of the states, the so-called "Electoral College", announce who they've been empowered to choose. Technically, these representatives are not bound to uphold the will of the voter; in practice, bucking the election results has been for protest rather than consequence.
This means that the swingier the state and the bigger the state, the more attention it will get. For instance, California, somewhat evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and currently the most populous state in the Union, is more important to a candidate than, say, a reliable and sparsely settled state like Arizona.
No more? This week, the House passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would make Presidents directly electable. This would mark the first major change to the system since 1803.
It looks like half the Senate is in favor, but it will take two thirds of that chamber plus three quarters of the states for the measure to go through. Opposing such reform are representatives of small states and rural areas, as they wish to retain their outsized impact on the process. With the rapid rate of urbanization, particularly on the coasts, this proposed amendment threatens to wipe out the electoral relevance of most of the central region of our country, from the Rockies to the Mississippi.
But that's precisely why the time for such an amendment has come, its advocates propose. People vote—not acres.
The bill faces an uphill battle, but it's an idea whose time has probably come.
Magazine by the Few
by Ronald Walotsky
Even with an Electoral College, with 50 states, you still get something approximating the will of the people. With a science fiction magazine, you've only got six to fourteen pieces. That means any individual story can dramatically affect your enjoyment of an issue, and the variations in quality can make for a wild ride. Such was my experience reading the latest Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Feminine Intuition, by Isaac Asimov
Susan Calvin, renowned roboscientist, has gone into semi-retirement, passing the torch to the new generation. Said successors develop a robot with flexible programming, one that can make free associations rather than rely on its own hard-coding. Its designers, all male, decide that such fuzzy thinking could only be ascribed to a female, and so they built the robot with feminine curves and a sexy contralto voice. JN-5, or "Jane", is a big hit with all the (male, of course) scientists and politicians.
Jane is employed to determine which of the 5500 stars with 80 light years of Earth would be most likely to be inhabitable so that humanity's limited interstellar capacity can be used most efficiently. Jane fingers three candidates, but she and her maker are killed in a freak accident. Only Susan Calvin can save the day.
The story drips with male chauvinism, but ultimately, that's the point. It's an uncomfortable ride, but wait for the end, which redeems the story.
Three stars.
Come to Me Not in Winter's White, by Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny
A brilliant physicist discovers his wife has but one year to live. He builds a room in which time goes much more slowly so that he will have more time to discover a cure. When the wife gets lonely (since she's by herself for all of…what…a week?) the husband picks out a brilliant but plain woman to be his wife's companion.
Decades later, when the physicist discovers the cure, he returns to the room to find the two women making love. Jealously, he locks the room and accelerates time, leaving his wife to die, his wife's lover to live out the rest of her life with the corpse, and for both of them to be out of the physicist's ken in the blink of an eye.
I didn't like the story much when I read it, and now, having to revisit it for this summary, I realize that I hate it. Not just for the misogyny, but for the absurdity of the premise (there are no spinoff societal effects from inventing time control?!) and the laughability of the final insult—oh no! Wife is not only unfaithful but (whisper it) a homosexual!
One star.
The Movie People, by Robert Bloch
A perennial extra, veteran of 450+ films, spends most of his life at the Silent Movies. He's not just reliving his glory days; it's how he can catch glimpses of his lost love, a fellow extra, who died in 1930, just as her career was beginning to take off.
The fellow knows every movie, every scene in which he and his girlfriend appeared. So why does she start showing up in films she never appeared in before, some that even date to before her start in show biz? And why does it seem she is mouthing messages for him alone? Is she enjoying a kind of celluloid life after death?
A pleasant, sentimental story. Three stars.
A Final Sceptre, a Lasting Crown, by Ray Bradbury
Once transportation via personal helicopter becomes a cheap and ubiquitous reality, everyone moves away from points north of 40 degrees latitude to reside in California, Florida, the Mediterranean, and other like climates. This is the tale of the last man in England, and the friend who tries to convince him to join the other emigrés.
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one—was the Earth growing cold? Had their been a calamity in the Northern Hemisphere? No. People were just leaving wholesale out of personal preference.
Never mind that some people like seasons. Never mind that the tropics can't fit all those people. Never mind that Aleuts and Laplanders haven't left their ancestral homes despite the capability of moving to town if they want to.
Lots of folks like Bradbury. Maybe I started on him too late.
Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Worlds in Confusion, by Isaac Asimov
Wherein the Good Doctor takes on Velikovsky and his ridiculous, religion-cloaked-in-pseudoscience tome, Worlds in Collision. Did Jupiter really eject Venus as a comet? Did that rogue planet stop the Earth in its tracks, causing no ill effects beyond the Ten Plagues and the pausing of the day at the Battle of Jericho? Do people really believe this claptrap?
Four stars.
by Chesley Bonestell
"Russian astronauts have arrived on the rim of Copernicus only to discover that the Americans have already been there …"
The Soft Predicament, by Brian W. Aldiss
A mission to Jupiter finds the gas giant teeming with life. On the Moon, a giant black edifice (made by people, not aliens) sifts human dreams, becoming the repository for archetypes—the goal to find a solution to strife and hatred in the world. On Earth, the globe is split between Communist, Free, and Black domains. The "Free" world is highly regimented, with children taken from their parents after a decade, and marital partners divorced on the same schedule.
Our protagonists, such as they are, are neurotic Westciv citizens, adapted, but not adjusted, to the new way of life. Their collected dreams represent the only way out of the mess technology has gotten us into.
What a lousy story this is. Turgid, mock-momentous claptrap. Budget Ballard. Thoroughly unentertaining, its message buried, and not a lick of science to be found in this so-called science fiction. I recognize that the definition of the genre now goes beyond nuts-and-bolts engineering stories to include softer sciences like psychology and sociology, and that the New Wave is an experiment in bringing a degree of literary-ness to SF, but this is too much of a thing.
One star.
The Man Who Learned Loving, by Theodore Sturgeon
A brilliant engineer-turned-hippie stumbles upon the principle of perpetual motion. In order to keep the discovery from being used for evil, he leaves his life of Bohemian idyll, cuts off his hair, and Makes it Big. Thus armored in respectability, he carefully manages the revolution's global introduction, ensuring peace and propserity for all humanity.
Upon returning to the backwoods town where he left his lady love and a life of languor, his erstwhile paramour chides him for selling his soul for progress when he could have had love.
This is the sort of story Lafferty or Davidson might have played more for laughs, Sheckley more for bitterness. Sturgeon presents it completely straight, and as always, he writes pretty well. His statement seems to be: rather than just be nice and preach love, actually do something to make the world better.
On the surface, he has a point. Free love is all very nice, but aren't those dirty hippies really just parasites on real working society? On the other hand, Sturgeon rigs the deck. His hero discovers the patently impossible after a few days' work. Moreover, there are plenty of believers in the hippie ethic who are working, giving, and improving the world. It's a mentality, not a nationality.
Sturgeon, who predates the Swinging Sixties, obviously bears some resentment toward the new crowd. Kicking straw men is not the answer.
Three stars.
The Electric Ant, by Philip K. Dick
Mr. Poole, executive of a powerful corporation, is in a flying-car accident. When he regains consciousness, he finds he is not a human at all but an "electric ant"—an android. Designed to be a figurehead, all of his memories are programmed, his life a lie.
He becomes determined to find the nature of his ongoing programming and discovers that there are no further limits on his thoughts and activities. He does, however, discover a punched tape spool that controls his sensory input. Poole begins fiddling with it, altering his subjective reality. His ultimate goal is to experience everything in the universe at once, something he thinks, as a robot, he can handle better than a human might.
Dick once again turns in a story about a middle-aged man going through an existential crisis. There is also the drug-use metaphor (Dick is into uppers, I understand). It doesn't make the most sense—the ant's reality is subjective, but the external universe also exists, so what, exactly does the tape spool control? Poole is determined to find out, taking himself on a psychedelic, 2001-esque journey whose mission is to prove or disprove Solipsism. I feel Dick takes the easy, the obvious way out, at the very end.
Three stars.
Get a Horse!, by Larry Niven
Niven returns to the realm of fantasy, but this time, with a completely new character and setup. Hanville Svetz is a hapless time traveler from more than a thousand years from now. Hailing from a polluted, dictatorial future, he has been sent back to 1200 AD to find an extinct beast for the Secretary General's zoo—a simple horse.
What Svetz actually finds, and the troubles that befall him on his quest are interesting and delightful. There is a deft, sardonic touch to this story, and room has been left for many follow-ups. I look forward to them.
Four stars.
Science Fiction for the woodpile
As with last month, the latest F&SF finished on the wrong end of the 3-stars mark. Though F&SF is the shortest of the SF digests, it took me the longest to finish. I just wasn't looking forward to it. I can see why my nephew, David, canceled his subscription a few years back. It's a pity that this twentieth anniversary issue is so dismal compared to the ones that came out when the magazine was young. That said, hope springs eternal, and I would hate to miss stories like Get a Horse!.
I just wish my job would let me skip the stories I don't like…
It probably is time for the Electoral College to go, but don't hold your breath. Even if this amendment gets through the senate, not enough states will ratify it. The weird thing is that Nixon is the impetus behind this. He called for it back in February, though I can't figure out why. Hmm, if Tricky Dick is for it, maybe it isn't a good idea after all.
"Feminine Intuition" had me gnashing my teeth and on the verge of throwing the magazine across the room all the way through. But the ending definitely redeemed the story. I should have remembered that piece Asimov wrote a few months ago that Janice wrote about.
The Ellison Zelazny collab was bad. Harlan seems to be doing a bunch of collaborations with people you think would be a really bad fit. Laumer not too long ago and Chip Delany before that. You know, I couldn't really see him collaborating with Zelazny or Delany, but I can easily see those two working together.
"The Movie People" was a nice story, not great, but nice. Bloch's only lived in L.A. for a few years, but seems to understand it. His descriptions of place really felt like the city I know. All the way through, though, I kept thinking about how Bradbury loves movies and what a maudlin mess he would have made of this. Thank goodness, Bloch wrote it.
Speaking of Ray, I like him in general, but this story was dumb. It's not the first time he's taken something some people would do and turned into something everybody does just so he can make some emotional statement.
Dr. A does a good job of tearing Velikovsky to bits. A pity he has to devote a whole column to such nonsense.
I just don't like Aldiss. I understand why some people do, but I've never found something by him that I've liked more than a tiny amount.
If I'd been handed "The Electric Ant" with no name on it, I'd have said, rightly, that Dick wrote it. All it's missing is a shrewish wife. This is nothing he hasn't said before, but he says it with his usual style.
The Niven was fun. Not sure I'd go all the way to four stars, though. It lacks the depth I expect of that score. It's entertaining, but he's not really saying anything. There is certainly room for more stories about Svetz, but I can also see the gimmick getting tiresome fairly quickly.
Janice, who has read all of the Robot stories (they were her gateway to science fiction), knew what to expect. That may be why she enjoyed it more, giving it a solid four stars.
That's a good point re: Bloch. It feels like a Slesar story, which is impressive.
Aldiss is hit or miss . There have been some of his stories that really worked for me. But when he tries to be cut-rate Ballard, he misses by a country mile.
For Niven, well, I've a soft spot for time travel stories. It's also a hoot.
Wow. You were a lot harsher on this issue than I was. I didn't mind the Asimov or Ellison/Zelazny or Bradbury or Sturgeon or Dick at all. The Niven is light amusement, which is fine. The other stories have faded from memory.
I enjoyed the Asimov and the Dick! And I didn't hate the Sturgeon—I just felt it was unfair.
It's just that there were no really good stories, and after a while, that gets hard to take.
Ellison was a talented guy but unfortunately he had a tendency to fall victim to his own hype. This seems to be one of those moments.
Sturgeon: There was definitely a generational divide here.
Niven: Always good at writing humorous stories.
Asimov: Always great at debunking scientific hoaxes.
The Electoral College: This is going nowhere. Passing a new Amendment requires a two-thirds majority vote and that's not happening with this. (Also, Nixon probably would have won more if Wallace hadn't been running. )
Thank you for tuning in!