Tag Archives: 1968

Fashion, music, politics, sports

[June 12, 1968] 2 Late Reviews: John Cage (concert January 16), Lenore Kandel (1966 book)

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by Victoria Lucas

A Busy Time

These reviews are very late what with all this moving, looking for a place to buy/live, and working as temps when my husband Mel and I can in Humboldt County, California (with nearly weekly trips to the San Francisco Bay Area). Still, maybe you won't have attended/heard about the reviewed subjects, so perhaps they will still give you some information you didn't have before.

I think I'll start with the concert, since if you hang this up I'd rather you do it when I'm nearly done–and the second review is of a book that is controversial to say the least.

Electronic Music!


Another use of the Art Gallery space

First, John Cage was not present at the concert of his work "Variations VI" given at Mills College (Oakland, California) on January 16. It was unusual in so many aspects I hardly know where to start. I guess the physical space is as good a place as any. As you may or may not know, Mills has a perfectly good auditorium that they regularly use for music. This wasn't held there. It was in an art gallery that had absolutely nothing in the space except: (1) some pillows, (2) synthesizers and other electronic gadgets, (3) long tables in a square to define a central performance space, and (3) what seemed like hundreds of patch cords draped over rolling clothing racks.


This is why the racks of patch cords–the Buchla 100 Series

Walking into this space was like visiting an alien landscape. It was like no concert I've ever seen before or since. Although Cage was not there, his collaborator David Tudor was, along with other electronicists. People (audience) were lining up along the walls around the performance space, some sitting on the floor. The pillows were taken. The floor was too hard to spend the entire concert sitting on it, so Mel and I wound up walking around as the musicians performed.

Pioneers of a New Musical Frontier


David Tudor, electronicist

Sometimes many performers were playing, sometimes a few. Knowing Cage's compositions, we could have predicted that there would be many silences. Sometimes there would be only one sound from one synthesizer or other electronic or electrical device, surrounded by silence.

I would not have known the Buchla 100 ("Music Box" above) had I not seen it before. I don't remember exactly when, but it must have been in 1965 I was hanging out at intermission in the tiny lobby of the San Francisco Tape Music Center on Divisidero and noticed that composer Morton Subotnik was standing near a small table they used for taking cash and dispensing tickets, then empty. A man I had never seen before came in with something under his arm that he deposited on the table. It looked like one of the two modules shown above, like a tiny telephone switchboard but with something like a keyboard showing.

I remember that I was close enough to hear the man carrying it (turned out to be Donald Buchla himself) explain that the metal strips that looked like keys did not depress but responded to a hovering finger. The expression on Subotnik's face was priceless, and I remember that he literally jumped for joy. I later learned that this meeting constituted the delivery of a piece of equipment commissioned by Subotnik and Ramon Sender of the Tape Music Center and paid for ($500) by a Rockefeller Foundation grant.

I know, I'm weird, but I enjoyed the music in the gallery tremendously and hungrily watched the patch cords as they were deployed on different instruments by different performers. Tudor was the only one I could recognize in the mix of (mostly) men dodging back and forth from the hanging cords to the instruments. Here is the list of performers from the front of the program: Tudor, Martin Bartlett, Charles Boone, Anthony Gnazzo, William Maraldo, Edward Nylund, Judy Ohlbaum, Ivan Tcherepnin, and Ron Williams. Unfortunately for those of us who are mad for tape and electronic music, the instruments were not identified.

The Future of Music

I tell you all this, because music is changing. Although I don't expect much change (especially for some years) in traditional orchestras, some part of musical performance won't ever be the same again. The Moog synthesizer and Buchla Box (for instance) on display at this concert are prototypes of instruments of the future. The future ones won't look the same, because these are too hard to play as they are if you aren't an electronics engineer. (Hence the patch cords–on most there are no keys that depress, no place to blow, nothing to bow or pluck.) At least some of the music of the future will be very different, but I'm sure I will still enjoy it. This music in this performance? 10 out of 10!

Book Review of an Illicit Pamphlet

On to the second review, of a book by poet Lenore Kandel that has been out since 1966. It's very hard to obtain, because it keeps getting confiscated by police as obscene. Unlike some religions, our Protestant Christian variety has no place for sacred sexuality (although Kandel read some excerpts from Roman Catholic mystics at her trial).


Lenore Kandel with Her "Book"

Her The Love Book is a small pamphlet of poetry (8 pages of 4 poems) that treats religious sex seriously ("sacred our parts and our persons"), using some ordinary and some made-up words, but also many words and phrases that are believed to be anathema to polite society because they do not disguise the activities they extol.

What can I say about these well crafted turn-ons that I finally managed to find for sale? Only that they harm no one, are meant for adults, and display a reverent, eccentric beauty. Since Kandel's tiny paper booklet started being repeatedly ripped off by the authorities, sales have increased anywhere the book could be found. Kandel's reaction? In thanks to the representatives of authority, she contributes 1% of her proceeds to the Police Retirement Association. As for this book–like the music, once I was able to get hold of it I experienced it as 10 out of 10 for its rare, raw, honest description and exaltation of feelings.

I hope myself to have a book of transcribed interviews on female sexuality coming out, but it might not be for a year or two. Maybe I'll need to get a guest to review it for me.

Toodle-oo till next time,

Vicki




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[June 10, 1968] Froth and Frippery (July 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

A little goes a long way

Science fiction has a reputation for being a serious genre.  In tone, that is–it's still mostly dismissed by "serious" literary aficionados. Whether it's gloomy doomsday predictions or thrilling stellar adventure, laughs are usually scarce.

There is, however, a distinct thread of whimsy within the field.  Satire and farce can be found galore.  For instance, Robert Sheckley was a master of light, comedic sf short stories in the '50s (he's less good at it these days).  In moderation, fun/funny stories break up a turgid clutch of dour tales.

On the other hand, when you put a bunch together, particularly when only one of them is above average…

You get this month's issue of Galaxy.

You're too much, man


by Jack Gaughan

Before we get to the stories, in his editorial column Fred Pohl reminds Galaxy readers to submit proposals for the ending of the Vietnam War…in 100 words or fewer.

It makes me want to send something like this (with apologies to Laugh-In:

How I would end the War in Vietnam, by Henry Gibson.

"I would end the War in Vietnam by bombing the Vietnamese.  I would bomb them a lot.  When there are no more Vietnamese, we would win."

Thank you.

A Specter is Haunting Texas (Part 1 of 3), by Fritz Leiber


by Jack Gaughan

The lead piece is the beginning of a new serial by one of the old titans of science fiction.  It tells of one Christopher Crockett de la Cruz, an actor from a space colony orbiting the moon.  He has come down to Earth to ply his trade, a very risky endeavor as even lunar gravity is uncomfortable for him.  De la Cruz requires an integrated exoskeleton to get around.  That plus his emaciated, 8-foot frame makes him look like nothing so much as Death himself.  A handsome, well-featured Death, but Death just the same.  (Hmmm… a handsome, gaunt actor–I wonder on whom this character could be based!)

As strange as De la Cruz is, the situation on Earth is even stranger.  He makes touchdown in Texas, now an independent nation again in the aftermath of an atomic catastrophe in the late '60s.  Its inhabitants have all been modified to top eight feet as well (everything is bigger in Texas, by God's or human design), and they claim sovereignty of all North America, from the Guatemalan canal to the Northwest Territory.  And over the Mexicans in particular, who not only are excluded from the height-enhancing hormone, but many of whom are forced to live as thralls, harnessed with electric cloaks that make them mindless slaves.

Quickly, De la Cruz is embroiled in local politics, unwittingly used to spearhead a coup against the current President of Texas.  Along the way, the descriptions, the events, the setting are absurd to the extreme–from the reverence paid to "Lyndon the First", father of the nation, to the ridiculous courtships between De la Cruz and the two female characters.

It shouldn't work, and it almost doesn't, but underneath all the silliness, there is the skeleton of a plot and a fascinating world.  It doesn't hurt that Leiber is such a veteran; I've read froth for froth's sake, and this isn't it.  I'm willing to see where he goes with it.

Three stars.

McGruder's Marvels, by R. A. Lafferty


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

The military needs a miniaturized component for its uber-weapon in two weeks, but the regular contractors can't guarantee delivery for two years.  The colonels in charge of procuring reject out of hand a bid that will provide parts for virtually nothing and almost instantly.  It is only when they start losing a global war that they grasp at the seemingly ludicrous straw.

Turns out the fellow who made the bid used to run a flea circus.  Naturally, now he's into miniaturization.  His parts really do work, and they really are cheap, but as can be expected, there's a catch.

If I hadn't known this story was written by Lafferty, I'd still have guessed it was written by Lafferty.  After all, he and whimsy are old companions.  It's more of an F&SF fantasy than SF, but it at least has the virtue of being memorable.  Three stars.

There Is a Tide, by Larry Niven


by Jeff Jones

The best piece of the issue is this one, featuring a new Niven character (the 180-year-old space prospector Louis Wu) in a familiar setting (Known Space).  This is set later than the rest of the stories, past the Bey Schaeffer tales, contemporaneous with Safe at Any Speed somewhere close to the year 3000.

Wu has gotten tired of people, and so he has gone off in his one-man ship to explore the stars.  His motive is fame–he wants to find himself a relic of the Slavers, the telepathic race of beings who ruled the galaxy and died in an interstellar war more than a billion years ago.  In a far off system, his deep radar pings off an infinitely reflective object in orbit around an Earthlike world.  Assuming it's a Slaver treasure box, kept in stasis these countless eons, he moves in for the salvage.  But a new kind of alien has gotten there first…

Once again, Niven does a fine job of establishing a great deal with thumbnail, throwaway lines.  In the end, Tide is a scientific gimmick story, the kind of which I'd expect to find in Analog (why doesn't Niven show up in Analog?), but the personal details elevate the story beyond its foundation.

It's funny; I read in a 'zine (fan or pro, I can't remember) that Niven writes hard SF that eschews characterization.  I think Niven writes quite unique and memorable characters and hard SF.  It's a welcome combination.

Four stars.

Bailey's Ark , by Burt K. Filer

by Brock

Now back to silliness.  Atomic tests have caused the oceans to flood the land.  After a few decades, only a few mountaintop communities are left, and soon they will be inundated.  Fourteen humans have been chosen to be put into cold storage for 1500 years, to emerge when the waters have receded.

All the animals have died, except for a few caged specimens, and no effort has been made to preserve them through the impending apocalypse.  It's up to one wily vet to save at least one species by sneaking it into the stasis Ark without anyone noticing.

Everything about this story is dumb, from the set up to the execution.  Its only virtues are that it's vaguely readable and that it's short.

Two stars.

For Your Information: Interplanetary Communications, by Willy Ley

This is a strange article which never quite makes a point.  The subject is sending messages from points around the solar system, but ultimately, Ley presents just two notable things:

1) A table of interplanetary distances (available in any decent astronomy book, and without even a convenient translation of kilometers to light-seconds/minutes/hours).

2) The assertion that satellites, artificial or natural, will be necessary as communications relays as direct sending of messages from planetary surface to planetary surface is prohibitively power-intensive.  It is left to the reader's imagination as to why that would be.

Sloppy, rushed stuff.  Two stars.

Dreamer, Schemer, by Brian W. Aldiss

Two captains of industry vie for control of a city.  One offers a collaboration; the other takes advantage of the offer, double crosses the offerer, and leaves him penniless.  When the double-crosser gets second thoughts, he subjects himself to a "play-out", a sort of mind trip where he gets to recreate and re-examine his decision in a fantasy world scenario.  The double-crossed, coincidentally, engages in a "play-out" at the same time, for the same reason.

This concept was done much more effectively more than a decade ago in Ellison's The Silver Corridor.  Two stars.

Factsheet Six, by John Brunner


by Jack Gaughan

A callous capitalist comes across "Factsheet Five", a rudely typed circular that details all the horrible injuries caused by the defects in various companies' products.  This and the prior Factsheets have had harmful impacts on the companies listed, from financial loss to outright bankruptcy.  The capitalist, who has his own industrial empire (and attendant quality-control issues), wants to find the author of the Factsheets so he can get inside knowledge to make a killing in the investor market.

Of course, we know who will be featured in Factsheet Six…

This is the kind of corny, Twilight Zone-y piece that shows up in the odd issue of F&SF.  I was sad to find it here.

Two stars.

Seconds' Chance, by Robin Scott Wilson


by Brand

Ever wonder who cleans up after the James Bonds and Kelly Robinsons of the world, settling insurance claims, smoothing diplomatic feathers, etc.?  This is their story.

Their rather pointless, one-joke-spread-over-too-many-pages, story.

Two stars.

When I Was in the Zoo, by A. Bertram Chandler


by Vaughn Bodé

Here's a shaggy dog story, told White Hart style, about an Aussie fisherman who gets abducted by jellyfish aliens, exhibited in a zoo with a collection of terrestrial animals, and then seduced for professional reasons by one of the lady jellyfish.

Frankly, I'm not quite sure what else to say about it other than it's the sort of tale you'd expect from A. Bertram Chandler writing a White Hart story–competent, maritime, Australian, and forgettable.

Three stars.

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Lester del Rey

The issue ends with a review panning 2001 as New Wave nihilism, meaningless save for the vague suggestion that intelligence is always evil.  This is a facile take.  It's possible 2001 is what I call a "Rorschach film", like, say, Blow Up, where the director throws a bunch of crap on the screen and leaves it to the viewer to invent a coherent story.  However, there are enough clues throughout the film to make the film reasonably comprehensible.  Moreover, there is a book that explains everything in greater detail.

I'm not saying 2001 is perfect, and I imagine those who had to sit through the longer, uncut version enjoyed it less (save for Chip Delany, who apparently preferred it.  I'll never know which I would have liked best, since the director not only trimmed down the film after release, but burned the cut footage!) But it is a brilliant film, extremely innovative, and it's worth a watch.

Starving for a bite

After eating all that cotton candy, with only the smallest morsel of meat to go with it, I am absolutely famished for something substantial.  Thankfully, I'm about to hop a Boeing 707 for a trip to Japan, where not only the food will be exquisite, but I can catch up on all the 4 and 5 star stories recommended by my fellow Travelers in earlier months.

Stay tuned for reports from the Orient!




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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[June 8, 1968] Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968)

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by Gideon Marcus

Robert F. Kennedy is dead.

I wasn't even a fan of Kennedy, not really. Until last week, I'd regarded him somewhat with disdain. After all, he'd stayed out of the presidential fray until Senator Gene McCarthy had cleared the way, jumping in as if to steal his lunch. He had none of the urbane wittiness of his late brother, looking rather like a bad caricature of Jack Kennedy.

But as I followed the race, I came to develop respect for the man. The newspapers did not cover his speeches in depth, for RFK's speeches were about policy, and policy is boring. I like, policy, however. I like a candidate who lays out his priorities. I like a candidate who appeals to the most downtrodden of Americans, who risks being branded a rabble-rouser or "dangerous" in his efforts to bridge the race gap.

And he clearly was resonating, from his surprise victory in Indiana, to his follow-on win in Nebraska, to his narrow loss to McCarthy in comfortable, suburban, white Oregon.

Bobby came to San Diego last week. I think McCarthy was here, too. Kennedy talked of uniting their efforts against Humphrey to take the country in a new direction. McCarthy responded, per my local newspaper, that he prefered to go it alone and see what happens.

Well, McCarthy's gotten his wish, though he can't be happy with how it happened.

I did not vote for Kennedy in last week's primary, but I would have cheerfully voted for him had he survived to win at the convention. I did not dwell overmuch about Kennedy before last week. Now, I cannot think of the man without blinking away tears.

He did not deserve to die. This is the fifth time in six years that an assassin's bullet had cut down a hero in his prime (JFK, X, Evers, King, and now RFK) At this point, I'm not sure how much more we can take. As President Johnson tearfully said in a nationwide address last week:

"Let us, for God's sake…put an end to violence and to the preaching of violence."


by Victoria Silverwolf

It has happened again.

Robert Francis Kennedy, Senator from the state of New York and Presidential candidate, was pronounced dead early on the morning of June 6, a day after being shot multiple times after speaking to supporters in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.


The candidate addressing supporters not long before the murder.

Political assassinations are supposed to be something Americans read about in history books. Lincoln, Garfield, Mckinley. Those of us who were around three decades ago may recall the murders of Mayor Anton J. Cermak of Chicago and Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana. Old news, or so it seemed just a few years ago.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: November 22, 1963.

Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz): February 21, 1965.

Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.: April 4, 1968

Only two months after the latest of these atrocities, we once again have to ask ourselves why such horrors plague us so frequently.

I should feel sorrow. I should feel rage. No doubt I will experience these emotions very soon. Today, I am numb.

Perhaps it is best if I end with words spoken by Kennedy himself, on the day Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.


Senator Kennedy announces the death of Doctor King to a crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana. Some claim the wise and gentle words of this impromptu speech kept the city from exploding into violence.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.


by Victoria Lucas

The Real World Invades the Land of Make Believe

In case you haven't been watching children's TV lately, Daniel Striped Tiger is Fred Rogers' sock-puppet alter ego that he voices for his Misterogers' Neighborhood PBS program and public appearances. Daniel is mostly seen in the show's make-believe section that Rogers carefully distinguishes from the "real" parts of his "neighborhood" to help children understand the difference. But sometimes the real world enters the inner world of Lady Aberlin (Betty Aberlin) and King Friday XIII (another puppet), as it did earlier this year when an anti-war protest happened in this part of the show (as reported by me in this piece).

Lady Aberlin Comforts Daniel


A nose rub helps

After Daniel gets another worry off his chest about whether all the air could go out of someone, making them cease to exist, he gets to the real concern bothering him. He asks his friend Lady Aberlin what "assassination" means. "Have you heard that word a lot today?" asks Lady Aberlin. The answer, as you can imagine, is "yes." His friend defines the term in words a child could understand, and soon attempts to move on and talk about a picnic two other denizens of the make-believe world are about to have. But Daniel is too sad to go to the picnic–very uncharacteristic of this childish, sensitive, and highly social character.

Rogers Will Speak Frankly Tonight

In another uncharacteristic move, NET has announced a half-hour prime-time special this evening for Rogers to speak–not, as he usually does, to children, but to adults, and specifically to parents, about caring for their children during this trying time. Although I don't have children (yet), I want to learn how to be sensitive to the needs of our friends' little ones.


Fred Rogers

And I don't know about you, but I'm going to try to find a neighbor with a TV who wants to watch tonight, since Mel and I still don't have one of our own. I can hardly think of anything more soothing than the voice of Mr. Rogers, speaking slowly and deliberately, attempting to comfort and inform. In the meantime I will be thinking about Bobby Kennedy and how excited I was looking forward to voting for him.


Bobby Testifying

Rest In Peace, Mr. Kennedy. I think history will treat you kindly.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 6, 1968] The Stalemate Continues (July 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

This July Amazing—wait, what?  You thought Amazing appeared in even-numbered months?  No more.  The mis-dating of the April issue as June means that what was to be the June issue has been pushed back—or at least the cover date has been—to avoid the confusion and likely loss of display time and sales had the publisher released a second issue dated June.  And Fantastic is pushed from July to August to keep these bimonthly magazines in alternate months rather than in direct competition. 

This issue looks a little better than the last.  There’s a new and seemingly higher grade of paper; the pages look less pulpy and the magazine is a bit thinner.  The cover, by Johnny Bruck, is lighter and more attractive than his usual; even though there’s a line of guys waving ray guns, for the foreground he’s borrowed another sort of cliché from Ed Emshwiller—guy with firm jaw, determined expression, and clenched fist staring out towards the viewer, like he just stepped off an Ace Double.  Relatively speaking, it’s a relief.


by Johnny Bruck

Once more, all but one item of fiction are reprints, though this issue’s exception is more considerable than some: House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany, described as a short novel (at 33 pages!) on the cover and contents page, though editor Harrison acknowledges in the letter column that it is actually an excerpt from Delany’s new novel Nova, forthcoming from Doubleday.  Delany’s name is misspelled on the cover and contents page and in Harrison’s editorial, spelled correctly on the story’s title page and in the letter column.  Are you getting tired of all this nit-picking?  So am I.  But the persistent sloppiness of this magazine continues to irritate.

Editor Harrison, clearly chafing under the reprint regime, continues to tout the non-fiction contents (seemingly the only part of the magazine that he actually controls) on the cover—“New Feature by HARRY HARRISON” (an editorial) and “New Article by ROBERT SILVERBERG POUL ANDERSON and LEROY TANNER” (the book review column).” There are also a new “Science of Man” article by Leon Stover (see below) and a London and Oslo Letter by Brian Aldiss, recounting his travels in Scandinavia.  The book review column includes Robert Silverberg’s thoughtful review of Brunner’s new novel Quicksand, Poul Anderson’s slightly celebrity-struck review of Asimov’s Mysteries, and two reviews by “Leroy Tanner,” a Harrison pseudonym.  One is a perfectly reasonable review of James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s A Torrent of Faces.  The other, of Algis Budrys’s The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, spends more space (about a page!) denouncing Budrys for his review in another magazine of a book Harrison co-edited than it does on Budrys’s book.  This is distasteful to read and represents notably bad judgment on the editor’s part.

Harrison’s editorial, titled The Future of the Future, picks up where last issue’s mistakenly truncated editorial left off, reiterating his division of the world into SF-1, SF-2, and SF-3, and proceeding mostly to a series of platitudes.  (“SF-3.  This is wide open now and there are no rules. No one school is SF-3 and no one particular style or clique is any more important than the others.”) He does amusingly recount that he asked J.G. Ballard to tell him what inner space is, and he was about to answer, but just then someone interrupted them and the answer never came.  The letter column, with its traditional title Or So You Say, is back as well, for those who care.

House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany

Delany’s excerpt House A-Fire is about a bunch of overprivileged kids who are seemingly able to gallivant around the galaxy at whim.  We first meet Lorq von Ray, son of a mining magnate in the Pleaides Federation (Earth is in Draco), as a child.  Lorq’s parents are big shots in local politics.  They vacation (or something) on an off-the-map world called Brazillia where things are a little primitive; one of the local amusements is a variation on cockfighting.  There, he meets two other children, Prince Red and his sister Ruby Red; their father, Aaron Red, is a hyper-wealthy spaceship mogul from Earth, proprietor of Red-shift Ltd. (I guess Acme was taken.) Prince has an artificial right arm and is belligerently sensitive about it. 


by Gray Morrow

Young Lorq is of course brilliant and among other things, when he’s a little older, has his own spaceship, which he races in the New Ark regatta, coming in second, before heading off to a party thrown by Prince on Earth—in Paris, at the Ile St. Louis.  (“Caliban can make Earth in three days.”) He and his crew arrive and Prince immediately recruits them to rescue Che-ong, “the psychodrama star,” and her hangers-on, who have gotten stuck in a snowstorm in the Himalayas and upon rescue, prove to be a bunch of stereotypically air-headed teenagers.

At the party, everyone must have masks, and Prince has prepared an elaborate pirate mask for Lorq.  Delany has hinted to the reader, but kept Lorq in the dark, about Lorq’s father being involved in piracy.  A bit later, Lorq encounters Ruby Red, who has gotten pretty grown up since last seen, and who lets him in on the joke.  Prince shows up and tells Lorq to get away from his sister, they have a fight, and Prince lays Lorq out and messes up his face with his prosthetic fist.  Lorq’s crew carries him away and Ruby shows up on the river in her skimmer-boat and takes them all to the spaceport.  Later, in a final scene, we see Lorq, now back home, rich, and scarred, and contemplating his future.

This all sounds in summary like an overripe pulp space opera, but it is framed in some striking visualization and writing, as one would expect from Delany.  Like Lorq’s first glimpse of the mature Ruby Red:

“Then there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheek bones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face.  Her chin was wide, her mouth thin, red, and wider.  Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind—and watching her, he became aware of the river’s odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of a young woman.  But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away.  Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful sick with jealousy.”

Yeah, a bit hokey, but it’s good hokum, suitable to our modern age.  And keep in mind that this is obviously all stage-setting for what one can hope are more substantial doings in the novel it is mined from.  Four stars, optimistically.

Locked Worlds, by Edmond Hamilton

Next up, straight from the September 1929 Amazing Stories Quarterly, is Edmond Hamilton’s Locked Worlds, all 50 pages of it.  It’s a sort of mad scientist story.  Dr. Adams, head of Physics at Northeastern University (a real place!), brilliant but widely disliked, discovers that the seemingly loose electrons sometimes found in atoms are really evidence that matter partakes of two worlds; our world’s electrons going around in one direction, the other world’s going in opposite directions.  Room for everybody! 

The rest of the profession isn’t having it and mocks Adams, who is determined to show them and get his own back.  Shortly he disappears, leaving his apparatus and a pile of bluish clay behind.  His assistant Rawlins comes to narrator Harker with an awful suspicion—and the newspaper clippings to prove it, sort of—that Adams has fled to the other world and that he’s planning his revenge there (the clippings refer to large and small piles of blue clay found at various places around the Earth).  So what to do for Rawlins and Harker but reconstruct Adams’s apparatus, follow him into whatever world he’s gone to, and thwart him?

And so they do, finding themselves on a mostly barren world with a blazing white sun overhead and blue clay under their feet.  And then—the giant spiders attack! 


by Frank R. Paul

Now Hamilton does not seem just to be trading on arachnophobia here.  Going forward, he refers to these giant spiders as spider-men, and shows them with a fairly advanced civilization.  But still, they signify that a cliched plot is about to take off, featuring captivity, aerial escape, pursuit, return in force with Earth’s new allies the bird-men (the birds and spiders engage in a dogfight), confrontation with the mad Dr. Adams, some literal cliff-hanging, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

Well, that was tedious.  It’s not for lack of enthusiasm on Hamilton’s part.  A sample, as our heroes escape the spiders with Nor-Kan, the bird-man, in the latter’s aircraft:

“He whirled to the craft’s controls, opened its speed lever to the last notch, and sent the air-boat racing on toward the south in a burst of added speed.  The great flying-platforms swiftly leapt after us, hurtling through the air at immense speed and slowly drawing ever closer toward us moving obliquely toward our own course.  Closer they came, and closer, air-boat and flying-platforms cleaving the air at a velocity unthinkable; now we saw from the foremost of the platforms behind us a shaft of brilliant orange light that burned toward us at the same moment.  Nor-Kan swerved the air-boat to avoid it.  He turned toward us, motioned swiftly toward the long tube-like projector mounted on a swivel at the stern of our own air-boat, and which I had already noticed.

“ ‘The static-gun!’ he cried.  ‘There are a few charges left in it—try to stop them with it!’ ”

Back in 1929 that would have been enough to get everyone’s blood up.  But in this decadent age, hot pursuit by ray-bearing airborne spiders just doesn’t seem to make it any more.  Or maybe it would take Delany to bring the spider-men to life.  Two stars.

The Genius, by Ivar Jorgensen


Uncredited

The other reprints in this issue are all from the 1950s, which is not necessarily good news.  Ivar Jorgensen is present with The Genius, from the September 1955 Amazing, except that Mr. Jorgensen is not really present because he doesn’t exist, being a house name used variously by Howard Browne, Harlan Ellison, Paul W. Fairman, Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg, and Henry Slesar.  It is alleged in some circles that Randall Garrett is the mystery guest this time.  The story is a caveman epic, about old Zalu, who is trying to prove he’s still worth feeding so his grandson Cabo won’t bash his head in to get rid of him.  His plan doesn’t work, but Zalu does something rather significant en route to getting his head bashed in.  It’s short, readable, and mildly amusing.  Three stars.

The Impossible Weapon, by Milton Lesser


by Julian S. Krupa

None of the above can be said about Milton Lesser’s The Impossible Weapon (Amazing, January 1952), which is the kind of silly finger-exercise fluff that filled the back pages of the lower-level SF magazines in the 1950s.  Earth is losing a war to the League (League of what?  I forget), and our hero Stokes has figured out how to counter their super-weapon, but no one will listen to him, so in cahoots with a spaceman he meets in the wake of a barroom brawl, he commandeers a spaceship and takes off and proves he can do it.  Yeah, that oversimplifies a bit, but mercifully.  Stokes’s invention is silly, as is the supposed scientific rationale for it, as are all the other events from the beginning of the story to the end, so much so that I can’t bear to recount them.  Read the damn thing yourself if you must.  One star, too generously.

This Is My Son, by Paul W. Fairman


by Tom Beecham

Paul W. Fairman’s This Is My Son is from Fantastic for October 1955, during his two-year absence from the editorial masthead of that magazine.  It too is pretty dreadful.  Protagonist Temple, a young physicist with a fixation on getting a son, and his new wife are trying to reproduce, without success.  Temple has a great career opportunity and signs a contract taking him to South America for five years.  Jill is not pleased.  She wires him four months later that his son is due in five months.  But he can’t go back under his contract and if he breaks it he’ll be blacklisted.  After the five years he heads home to meet his son, and everybody’s happy, until he finds the manufacturer’s receipt for the android child, and reacts xenophobically.  Jill slaps him across the chops and then leaves after telling him, double-edgedly, that the child is as human as he is.  So he’s miserable for years, finally begins to see the error of his ways and sends the kid a gift.  Then the kid lands in the hospital after saving a couple of other kids from a fire.  Temple beats it to the hospital, the kid’s on the brink, so he offers an “old-fashioned blood transfusion” instead of the bottled plasma the nurse is about to give him.  Curtain, music swells, everything’s going to be fine.  It’s ridiculously contrived, sentimental, and manipulative, but at least demonstrates a little more craft than The Impossible Weapon.  Grading on the curve, barely two stars. 

Killer Apes—Not Guilty! , by Leon E. Stover

After the last two I am definitely in the mood for the contentious Dr. Stover, whose “Science of Man” article, Killer Apes—Not Guilty!, is suitably abrasive.  He takes on Robert Ardrey’s best-selling African Genesis from a few years ago, and he clearly has been waiting for his chance.  Ardrey attributed the bloody-minded and -handed character of homo sapiens to the apes from whom we descended.  Not so, says Stover; the apes were peaceful vegetarians (though not averse to the occasional grub or worm mixed in with their roughage), and the next step up (homo erectus) were carnivorous browsers, not carnivorous hunters.  We sapiens achieved our predatory status all on our own. 

Along the way Stover asserts with confidence a great deal about such subjects as the effect of domesticating fire on prehistoric social life, though without much explanation of how the dots were connected.  But he is also happy to patronize those of a different view, such as Ardrey’s favorite, the distinguished Professor Raymond Dart, late of the University of Witwatersrand: “Everybody is more than willing to let the old gentleman play with his pet theory that Australopithecus stood up to adult baboons and clouted them with humerus bones taken from antelopes.  Few take it seriously.” Good times!  Three stars.

Summing Up

Once more, business as usual at Amazing: signs of editorial vitality struggling to be seen beneath the clammy wet blanket of the publisher’s reprint policy, against the backdrop of negligent or indifferent production.  The stalemate continues.




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[June 4, 1968] (Doctor Who: The Wheel In Space [Part Two])

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By Jessica Holmes

Here we are at the end of another serial and another series of Doctor Who. For sure, it’s had its ups and downs, but does the series end on a high note? Let’s look at the ending of Doctor Who: The Wheel In Space.

EPISODE FOUR

With the astronauts mind controlled, the next stage of the Cybermen’s operation can go ahead. Inadvertently helping them is Jarvis, whose reluctance to listen to reason has turned into pathological denial. Even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the threat, he simply refuses to see it. This comes in handy when the Cybermen try to Trojan-horse their way aboard the Wheel in a crate of bernalium.

When things immediately start going very badly aboard the Wheel he sinks into a catatonic state and ceases to have any bearing on the plot, leaving it to Corwyn to pick up the slack. She has the good sense to listen to the Doctor when he suggests putting up a force-field around the operations room to protect it from the Cybermen.

The Cybermen waste little time killing some of the crew and mind-controlling others. They take over the workshop and see to it that the engineers restore the laser to full working order, before ordering one of them to go up to the operations room, infiltrate it, and wreck the outbound communications equipment—killing himself in the process.

Zoe, meanwhile, realises that the meteorite storm will hit them sooner than anticipated, reporting to Corwyn in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Corwyn questions her on her seeming coldness, but it seems it’s really just a case of a miscommunication. Zoe was trained to prioritise the cold hard facts of a situation over her emotional reaction to it. For space exploration it makes perfect sense. You want someone who can work the problem, not someone who runs around like a headless chicken the moment things go wrong.

There’s a parallel being drawn here between Zoe, who has had the emotions trained out of her, and the Cybermen, who have had theirs programmed out. Unfortunately the serial doesn’t really do anything with it. As of the end of the serial, her rationality has been neither a help nor a hindrance. It’s just a trait that people around her are treating as inherently bad. So, she’s a little different. So what?

Upon learning that the astronauts have brought a cache of bernalium back to the Wheel, the Doctor is quick to realise that the Cybermen are on board the station. It’s too late for the chaps down in the workshop, but as for the others the Doctor gets everyone to make small shields to wear on the back of the neck. They’ll block the mind control waves.

I’m not entirely clear on why they had to go and check that yes, the Cybermen did indeed come aboard in the bernalium crate, but the Doctor and Jamie head down to the cargo bay all the same. They find the false-bottomed crate the Cybermen smuggled themselves in. And then they hear the heavy footsteps of an approaching Cyberman…

EPISODE FIVE

The handy thing about not being able to move their necks is that this generation of Cybermen are really easy to sneak past. The Doctor and Jamie do just that. They get back to the operations room to discover that the meteorite storm is heading for them a lot faster than previously anticipated.

Fortunately, the Cybermen are kindly supervising the effort to repair the laser. By this point the Doctor is pretty sure that the Cybermen are after something more than destroying the Wheel, but can’t figure out what.

Zoe starts fretting over her lack of ability to think on her feet, feeling rather useless. Her training emphasised rote memorisation of facts and figures over developing critical problem-solving skills; another Cybermen parallel, and this one feels deserved. This whole time, the Cybermen we see on screen haven’t actually been coming up with their own plans. They aren’t programmed for that. A Cyber-Planner has been feeding them instructions.

This is a pretty interesting facet of the Cybermen, this emphasis on conformity and following orders. They don’t seem capable of creative thought. In a way it serves as a strength, enabling them to cooperate without butting heads over differing opinions or succumbing to infighting. On the other hand, it’s probably also their greatest weakness, and the thing that lets the Doctor defeat them time and time again. It’s pretty troubling to think that apparently back on Earth, young minds are being trained to behave in this way. What kind of society does Zoe come from?

The Doctor has an idea for stopping the Cybermen, but he needs the Time Vector Generator, which he seems to have dropped at some point. Jamie is going to have to go back to the rocket ship with Zoe in order to fetch it. I don’t know, has he tried having a rummage through the lost and found?

With the laser back in working order, the Cybermen have no further need for the station’s crew. Well, except for a stooge, whom they order to poison the ship’s oxygen supply. However, Corwyn happens to be in the right place at the right time to overhear them, and she uses the video comms to warn the Doctor. Sadly for Corwyn, the Cybermen catch her, and the Doctor gets a front-row seat to her death.

EPISODE SIX

Despite the kids still being out in the vacuum of space, the Wheel goes ahead and starts blasting away the incoming asteroids. The Doctor is of course horrified, but as one of the crew points out, he’s the one who sent Jamie out there. Luckily, they only hit the space rocks and not our favourite Scot.

The Doctor informs the crew about Corwyn and warns them to swap to the backup oxygen supply, thwarting the Cybermen’s plans.

Oh, and Jarvis is dead. He decided to go walkabout and walked right into a Cyberman.

With their plot gone to pot, the Cybermen realise that someone on the station must have advance knowledge of their methods, and start investigating the personnel on board the station. They soon know the source of their difficulties: the Doctor. They need to deal with him.

But they’ll need to lure him out first. They have a mind-controlled minion give the operations room a call. He claims that he’s managed to trap the Cybermen in the workshop and is heading up to the operations room. This will give the Doctor the opening he needs to fetch the spare radio components from storage so as to repair the Wheel’s outgoing communications.

Yes, the plots in this serial are rather convoluted, aren’t they?

Jamie and Zoe overhear this from the control room of the wheel, which for some reason is still receiving communications from the Cyber Planner. Don’t they know you should turn off your appliances before heading out? Going to have an electrical fire if you’re not careful.

However, the Doctor is a smart cookie, noticing the stooge’s monotone delivery and dead-behind-the-eyes expression, and warns the others to grab him when he gets to the forcefield and put a shield on him. At least someone’s paying attention.

The Doctor makes it down to the storage room all right, and finds some convenient mercury for the TARDIS before grabbing some equipment for his plan. He had better hurry. Another ship has appeared: a massive Cyberman invasion ship carrying a fleet of smaller vessels.

Jamie and Zoe return to the Wheel, coming across Corwyn’s body on their way back to the operations room.

The Doctor gets in contact with the crew, very relieved to see that Jamie is alive and well. Mostly because he likes Jamie, but also because Jamie has the TVG and the Doctor really needs it right now.

While Jamie heads down to meet the Doctor, the Cybermen pay a visit to their old friend.

The Doctor greets his guests quite civilly, and over the course of the conversation pieces together the entirety of the Cybermen’s plan.

Are you ready? Here we go.

Step One: Commandeer a rocket ship, set it adrift, use it to deliver cybermats to the Wheel, wait while they destroy the Wheel’s laser and bernalium supply. Get lucky when Jamie wrecks the laser for you.

Step Two: Blow up a distant star to create a tsunami of asteroids, despite the fact that space is definitely far, far too big for this to actually work. (If you have the technology to blow up a star, why in the world are you bothering with all this other faff?)

Step Three: Assume that rather than evacuate, the crew of the wheel will recklessly board your rocketship to look for bernalium to repair their laser.

Step Four: Smuggle yourselves on board in a crate, then hypnotise some crew to repair the laser so that the Wheel doesn’t actually get destroyed.

Step Five: Hypnotise one guy into destroying the Wheel’s outbound communications. He did it in a pretty haphazard way, so you’re lucky that the inbound comms still work.

Step Six: Kill the crew via a method that is quite easily averted by switching to the supplementary oxygen supply.

All this, so that the incoming invasion fleet can follow the radio signals from Earth, without which they can’t enter Earth’s atmosphere for…reasons. You mean to tell me that these supposedly ‘superior’ beings somehow have the ability to blow up distant stars but can’t calculate their own orbital trajectories and re-entry angles? We have people on Earth right now who can do that by hand!

So yes, this excessively convoluted plan serves more or less to turn the Wheel into a big signpost so the invasion fleet doesn't get lost.

Still, Troughton is really great in this scene. I love when he gets to come face to face with a villain. He has this air of being scared but trying very hard not to show it, with a slightly trickster-ish undercurrent of having a card hidden up his sleeve. The scripts may disappoint me, but Troughton never does.

And the Doctor does indeed have a trick up his sleeve, as he invites the Cybermen to destroy him…only to activate a trap. The first Cyberman steps right into an energy field, electrocuting it. The other stays back, but cannot get near the Doctor, and so leaves to await reinforcements. It’s the best bit of the serial.

Jamie then arrives with the TVG, and the Doctor can finally save the day. He plugs it into the ship’s laser in order to amplify the beam from the TVG, while Jamie goes to head off the incoming army of Cybermen approaching the cargo bay. He subdues the one Cyberman still on board with quick-set plastic, but the others are attempting to breach the cargo bay doors.

The Doctor finishes augmenting the laser, which fires on the Cybermen’s ship, blasting it to smithereens. As for the invading Cybermen, the crew of the Wheel activate a forcefield, repelling them from the cargo bay doors and out into the void.

I wonder how long they can survive out there?

Another enemy defeated, the Doctor and Jamie head back to the TARDIS, but they have a stowaway. Zoe wants to go with them. However, the last teenage girl the Doctor took with him ended up traumatised from her experiences. Is Zoe sure she can handle it?

To test her, the Doctor plugs himself into a device that displays his memories on a screen. He decides to start by showing her the Daleks…


Final Thoughts

Dear, dear, dear. This is not the ending I hoped for for this episode, nor for the current series as a whole. It’s proved to be a prime example of the mortal sins that have plagued this serial: it is badly paced, uninspired, and frankly boring. It doesn’t even use the Cybermen to their full potential, instead flattening them down into generic alien invaders. So, two stars for this one.

Zoe has some potential as a companion, I think. It might be interesting to have a girl around who can keep up with the Doctor’s wits. I like her, at any rate.

Perhaps after a little break the team behind Doctor Who will be able to come up with some fresh stories, but if they can’t, then I have real worries about the longevity of the programme. Doctor Who has a unique opportunity to be potentially unending—as long as there are always new stories to tell.




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[June 2, 1968] Necessary Evils (July 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

The Baltimore Nine

You may recall one of the more spectacular draft protests last October when Father Philip Berrigan and three other men forced their way in a Selective Service office in Baltimore, Maryland and poured blood into filing cabinets containing draft records. Father Berrigan has acted again, this time along with eight others. The group included Tom Lewis, who was also part of the earlier protest, Berrigan’s brother Daniel, also a priest, and two women.

The Baltimore Nine shortly after their arrest. Fr. Philip Berrigan is 2nd from the left in the back row.

On Friday May 17th, the group entered the Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland and began stuffing several hundred A-1 draft records into wire incinerator baskets. Clerk Mary Murphy tried to stop them, but was restrained by one of the protestors. They then made their way back outside and set fire to the records using home-made napalm while quietly reciting the Lord’s Prayer. A short time later, they were arrested, and firefighters extinguished the fire. The following Monday, they sent flowers and a letter of apology signed “The Baltimore Nine” to Mrs. Murphy and the other clerks.

On one hand, the escalation to fire is concerning. Imitators may be less inclined to ensure that no one is harmed. On the other hand, the sight of a group including two priests and a monk defying what they call an unjust war and an unjust law may make people think, especially Catholics. These aren’t a bunch of hippies and long-haired college students who just don’t want to fight in a war.

Of war and women

Two themes run through this month’s IF: war as a necessary evil and female characters who are present solely as motivation for male characters. To be fair, there are as many female protagonists as there are plot pawns, but the latter outweigh the former.

Abbott and his men are the first to reach the Sleeper’s chamber. Art by Gray Morrow

The Sleeper with Still Hands, by Harlan Ellison

For 600 years the Sleeper has rested in a chamber beneath the Sargasso Sea, reading everyone’s thoughts and smoothing out ideas of aggression and war. Now, two men, Leaf and Laurrayne, believing that the enforced peace has held humanity back and stopped progress, have learned to shield their thoughts from the Sleeper and taught the skill to others. Each has sent a group to be the first to find the Sleeper and turn off his prying mind so that “Man’s Destiny could be fulfilled.”

Is this the true path of progress? Art by Gaughan

This is far from Harlan’s best work, but it’s still decent (if you like Ellison). He’s trying to say something profound at the end, but he’s being too obscure in the execution.

Three stars.

We Fused Ones, by Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr.

Twins Rebecca and John Ellents were captured by the Bewegal and converted into organic micro-computers. Together they tell their journey from targeting computer to child’s toy and how they hope to rescue humanity from the alien threat.

Bodé’s style works surprisingly well in this horrific picture. Art by Vaughn Bodé

Chapdelaine’s sophomore effort improves on his first. It’s still a bit long, and we could have done with less of the gruesome conversion process. Maybe the most interesting part is watching the steady downgrading of military technology to increasingly less important civilian tasks.

Three stars.

If—and When, by Lester del Rey

Most science fiction, according to Lester del Rey, asks either “what happens if” or “what happens when.” In this new feature, he’ll be looking at various items in the news that fit those categories and how they might apply to science fiction. This time he offers an interesting study on keeping the immune system from rejecting transplanted organs, quasars, and the idea that there is matter that decreases in mass as it approaches the speed of light. It’s not unlike Ted Thomas’ Science Springboard over in F&SF, though del Rey seems to have a better grasp on some of what he’s talking about. Maybe because he doesn’t really go beyond the “That’s interesting” point. We’ll see how this feature shakes out over the next few months.

Three stars.

Gone to the Graveyards, Everyone, by Paul M. Moffett

Thanks to the Life Maintainer, war has become a competition. Death is almost never Permanent, and the Limited War is an important part in the world’s economy. What happens when there’s a shift in economic needs?

A killed soldier on his way back for repair. Art by Wehrle

This month’s new author is clearly inspired by Mack Reynolds, both the latter’s Joe Mauser stories and economic themes. Not bad, though it could have used a bit of tightening here and there and fewer capital letters. I wouldn’t object to more from this author.

Three stars.

The Muschine, by Burt K. Filer

Metal is extremely rare on the planet Isolde, so the human colonists have made do with organic machines, from the muscles that turn the screw on protagonist Luke Owens’s ship to intelligent biobots like Rudder, who steers it. Something has started wrecking boats along the coast, and it’s going to take expensive help from Earth to solve the problem. Even that may not be enough.

Luke and the man from Earth try to negotiate. Art by Brand.

After some rocky early stories, Filer may be improving. This is a fair, if flawed, tale whose greatest sin is that it’s too long.

A low three stars.

The Soft Shells, by Basil Wells

Vahni is a Turman, moving on from finlin childhood to adolescence as her people move from the sea to the land. To her distress, she is assigned to the household of the Soft Shell Jackson, the only one of his kind on the planet. At first, anyway. Her new father’s greatest concern is what will happen when more of his kind arrive.

The Turmans return to their land city. Art by Wehrle

Wells started out in the 1940s and took a break for the first half of the 1960s. Since his return, he’s tried to write stories that fit more modern tastes with limited success. This is probably his best effort so far, though the open ending is a bit unsatisfying.

Three stars.

The Hides of Marrech, by C.C. MacApp

Judson Kruger is undercover on the planet Marrech, trying to track down the ring selling the hides of the otter-like natives.

Kruger has a run-in with some of the locals. Art by Vaughn Bodé

Presumably, this is the same protagonist as Inspector Kruger from a couple of earlier stories. The good news is that, while the tone is light, MacApp isn’t trying to be outrageously funny in a Ron Goulart style. It’s a serviceable story.

Three stars.

In the Oligocene, by John Thomas

A man’s obsessive love drives him to invent time travel after the object of his affection is killed.

Oligocene fauna are mostly harmless. Art by Brock

Thomas’s second outing is so different from the first, you might think they were written by different authors. It’s hard to say much about this story without giving the whole thing away. My biggest problem is that Paula is more plot device than person. Events happen to her, and nothing she says or does has any effect. On the other hand, that might be intentional; it would be appropriate.

Three stars.

The Cure-All, by Win Marks

Nick has a summer job at NASA as an orderly who collects samples from returning astronauts. Then an astronaut who went out an albino and returned black-haired and brown-eyed sneezes on him.

Mildly amusing, but it’s too long, and the quarantine procedures are absurdly lax.

A low three stars.

Rogue Star (Part 2 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson

Andy Quamodian has rushed back to Earth at the behest of Molly Zalvidar. Cliff Hawk, the man she chose over Andy, has created a rogue star, a sentient star which is not part of the galactic community. The rogue has absorbed Cliff’s consciousness and decides it’s in love with Molly. A bunch of pointless stuff happens, and it kidnaps her and takes her to a highly radioactive cave. To be concluded.

The rogue inhabits a mining machine to interact with Molly. Art by Gaughan

Ugh. Molly is completely passive except when she does something stupid to put herself in greater danger. Protagonist Andy Quam is little better, running around with his hair on fire and achieving nothing. This collaboration between two good authors is so much less than the sum of its parts.

Two stars.

Summing up

There it is: a lukewarm heap of mediocrity with a bad finish. For a while there, it felt like IF was turning into a magazine that deserved those back-to-back Hugos, but there’s been a marked decline in the last couple of months. Maybe it’s just the serial. Meanwhile, the new feature has potential, though the first offering is a bit scattered. I’ll give it time to find its feet. Our Man in Fandom seems to be gone, which is all right. It felt like Carter had run out of things to say. Still, Pohl could have acknowledged his contribution over the last couple of years.

Chandler will probably be serviceable. Maybe Zelazny can lift us out of the doldrums.




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[May 31, 1968] Euler's Issue (June 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Constants

The universe is based on a host of magic numbers.  Without them, the cosmos would be entirely different and probably uninhabitable.  Some of these "constants" are familiar to the layman, Pi perhaps being the most so.  Engineers are familiar with electron-Volts and atomic masses.  Chemists know Avogadro's number, the relationship between atomic mass and metric mass.  Mathematicians know e.

e is a truly fascinating number.  Roughly equal to 2.71828, it is the fundament of exponential growth. For example, if you have a $1 compounded annually at 100% interest, at the end of a year you'll have $2. If you have $1 compounded monthly at 100% interest, at the end of the year you'll have $2.62. If you have $1 compounded continuously (i.e. over an infinite number of instants), you will have $2.71828 at the end of the year.

In calculus, if you integrate the function e to the x power, you get… e to the x power!  Conversely, of course, the derivative of e to the x is e to the x.  That means that e to the x is the one function whose rate of change is the same as its position is the same as its acceleration.

What does this have to do with Analog Science Fiction, particularly this latest issue?


by Kelly Freas

Well, when you have the same editor for 30 years, and he hires the same writers every issue, and he has a rigid editorial policy that eschews innovation and prioritizes certain pseudo-scientific fetishes, you end up with a certain kind of consistency.  Not necessarily a desirable consistency, but consistency nevertheless.  Read on, and you'll see what I mean.

e gad

The Royal Road, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

You know you're in trouble when Chris Anvil gets the cover.  Actually, this continuan of the saga of Captain Roberts and his crew of two isn't so bad.  Previous installments had the trio serendipitously developing a mind-control ray and using it to wrest a planet from a despotic computer.  Then the three posed as nobility to sway said planet further.  It was all very glib and distasteful, and I didn't like it.

This story spends two thirds of its length rehashing the events of those stories for new readers and then bringing the trio back, making it a quartet (with Bergen from a story in the December 1967 issue), and unleashing them on a new problem.  A somewhat primitive planet is fractured into more than a dozen petty kingdoms, and the Interstellar Patrol needs a majority of them to agree in order to establish a base.  In the last third of Royal Road, we get the solution to this conundrum. It mostly involves creating an economic catastrophe that only kingdoms favorable to the Imperial Patrol are equipped to address, thus putting these kingdoms on top.  Anvil does note that the gambit could have killed millions, so at least things aren't quite so glib as before.

At least now the quartet of Captain Roberts has been transformed into a sort of Retief series.  Anything's an improvement.  Anyway, I didn't hate it.  A low three stars, I guess. 

No Shoulder to Cry On, by Hank Davis


by Leo Summers

After the vastly superior alien federation shows up on Earth, a sociologist is brought back to see what he assumes will be their advanced technology.  Instead, it turns out that humans have been quite a bit more successful than the ee-tees, at least in one vital field.

A Twilight Zone episode writ small, but inoffensive.  Three stars.

Duplex, by Howard L. Myers


by Kelly Freas

Kent is a person with a literal split personality.  His left half is under the control of a silent partner, dubbed "Pard", while Kent, nominally the "dominant" personality, runs the right half.  Together, they lead a pleasant life as an extremely successful concert pianist.  That is until Pard gets them both tangled up in a spy conspiracy that threatens not just the world…but themselves!

I liked the story's handling of mental handicaps, and it's a pleasant piece overall.  Three stars, but the highest three stars in the issue.

It's RIGHT Over Your Nose!, by Ben Bova


by Kelly Freas

In this science-ish article, Bova suggests that quasars, highly red-shifted quasi-stellar radio sources, may in fact be Bussard ramjets run by aliens.  Thus, rather than being natural phenomena of tremendous power far outside the galaxy, they are artificial phenomena of middlin' power within.

I tend to prefer natural over artificial solutions to problems.  Plus, why is every star-drive in the galaxy going away from us?

Still, it's readable, if breathless.  Three stars.

The Mind Reader, by Rob Chilson


by Leo Summers

Robot mini-planes prove to be decisive in the next Southeast Asian war.  This story is told mostly in dialogue between two people in a sort of "As you know, Bob…" fashion.

The concept is interesting and unique.  The story is not compellingly told.  Two stars.

Satan's World (Part 2 of 4), by Poul Anderson


by Kelly Freas

Finally, we have the next installment in Satan's World, which started last month.  The crew of Muddlin' Through was split up when David Falkayn was abducted by Serendpity Inc., a galactic information clearing house.  This provoked Polesotechnic League magnate Nicholas Van Rijn to take a personal hand in things, sending Adzel the saurian centaur to retrieve the poor lad. 

Turns out Falkayn (predictably) had been brainwashed.  It also turns out that Serendipity is working with, perhaps in the thrall of, a race of mysterious aliens known as the Elders.  The ulterior motive of this ostensibly neutral organization suggests some new power may be planning some kind of galactic conquest.

Meanwhile, Chee Lan the foul-mouthed Cynthian and Falkayn head to the world Serendipity told him about in part one–the frozen world in a cometary orbit that is closing in on its star, Beta Crucis.  This will cause its cryosphere to melt, revealing a mother-lode of precious metals.  But Van Rijn's team isn't the only one interested in the world, aptly dubbed "Satan".  Twenty UFOs have just dropped out of hyperspace in the vicinity, and they don't look friendly…

Anderson has a lot of tics I don't like, particularly his drawing of characters as…well, assemblages of tics.  Adzel is a placid Buddhist, Falkayn is a cipher, Chee Lan is a salty Little Old Lady from Pasadena, and Van Rijn is a lustier, more Dutch version of Raymond Burr's Ironside.

The author also devotes lots of ink to the physical descriptions of his astronomical creations, which I'm sure are fascinating to some, but perhaps are most gratifying for the three cents a word they earn him.

That said, just as I start to get bored, I find myself turning the page and reading on.  So, another three star segment.

Less than Three

So, just like the constant "e", Analog clocks in at just under three.  Indeed, that's how I feel about the magazine as a whole lately.  Sure, there are better issues than others, and sure, there are some standout pieces, but for the most part, I find myself doing anything–cleaning the bathroom ceilings, cataloging my 45s, sorting stamps–rather than read Analog.  Not that I hate the experience when I get to it.  It simply doesn't give the thrill of anticipation that Galaxy still gives me after all of these years.  Even F&SF, which hasn't been terrific since 1962, retains residual goodwill.

Of course, this month's Analog clocks in at 2.9 (rounding up 2.85), which is better than Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.6).  But it's worse than Galaxy (3.1) and IF (3.3).

It was a really thin month for magazines, and out of the four that were published, the better-than-three-star stories would barely fill one of them.  At least women wrote 11% of new fiction pieces, which is on the higher end lately.

Well, here's hoping that next month's Analog picks a different constant to ape, if it can.  And let's hope it's not Planck's Constant!




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Science / Space Race

[MAY 26, 1968] EUROPA AD ASTRA (EUROPEAN SPACE UPDATE)

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by Kaye Dee

The recent launch of the ESRO 2B scientific satellite on 17 May (more on that below) reminds me that it has been a while since I wrote anything about the European launcher development programme being carried out in Australia. There have also been major developments in Europe’s space plans over the past few months, which look like they will significantly change the future of the European space programme.

For readers in the United States and other parts of the world, who may not be familiar with the European space programme, let me take a few moments to introduce the major players and provide a bit of background before talking about recent developments.

Cousins Rather Than Siblings: ELDO, ESRO and CETS
The two most important space bodies in Europe are the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) and the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). ESRO’s focus is on developing scientific satellites for space research. ELDO looks to develop an independent satellite launch capability for Europe through the Europa rocket, conducting its test flights from the Woomera Rocket Range in Australia.

The French acronym CERS stands for Conseil Européen de Recherche Spatiale

These roles would appear to be complementary, and I have occasionally referred to ELDO and ESRO as “sister” institutions in previous articles, since they have grown up in parallel and have several member states in common. However, I’ve come to think that they are perhaps best considered as “cousins”, as they operate and forward plan quite separately from each other, resulting in a lack of co-ordination across Europe's space activities. While ELDO was established with an assumption that ESRO would be one of the customers for its launch services, ESRO has not waited for a European launcher to become available from ELDO: ESRO 2B has been launched under NASA’s auspices on a Scout vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base and for the foreseeable future all planned ESRO satellite launches will be on US rockets.

The French acronym CECLES stands for Conseil européen pour la construction de lanceurs d'engins spatiaux

Mention also needs to be made of the European Conference on Telecommunications by Satellites (CETS), the third space organisation in Europe, which is playing a role in pushing for some of the proposed changes in Europe’s space plans. Unlike ESRO and ELDO, CETS is not active in developing space technologies and vehicles, but provides a forum for European Post, Telegraph and Telecommunications agencies (PTTs) to consider the role of communication satellites and discuss the European role in the INTELSAT global telecommunications satellite system.

ESRO and ELDO: Parallel Lives
Stemming from initiatives taken in 1959 and 1960 by a small group of scientists, led by Italian Prof. Edoardo Amaldi and French physicist Prof. Pierre Victor Auger, ESRO was set up in the early 1960s. Like ELDO, it formally came into existence in 1964. ESRO’s member countries are Belgium, Denmark, West Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, and Britain, and the organisation’s focus has been on strictly civil scientific research. Four ESRO members (Britain, France, Italy and West Germany) also have their own national space programmes.

ESRO has already developed a number of technical facilities: the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, is the newest, opened on 3 April. ESRO has also begun to establish its own space tracking network, ESTRACK, and has its own sounding rocket launch facility, ESRANGE (established in 1964), near Kiruna, Sweden.

The opening of ESTEC on 3 April by HRH Princess Beatrix and her husband Prince Claus included the royal couple being presented with a model of the ESRO 2B satellite

ELDO, on the other hand, was very much a British initiative in 1960-61, seeking partners in Europe for the development of an independent satellite launcher that would use as its first stage the UK’s then-recently cancelled Blue Streak missile. ELDO’s member states are Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Australia, despite being a non-European country, is also an ELDO member because of its role providing the test launch facilities at Woomera.

The first Blue Streak launch from Woomera in 1964, designated as ELDO F-1, the inaugural test flight of the Europa rocket's first stage

Both organisations operate with a policy of “juste retour” – allocating work to industry in member countries in proportion to their share of financial contribution to the organisation.

So you can see that, unlike the US civilian space programme, under the control of NASA, and the Soviet programme, under central control from the Politburo, there are many fingers in the European space pie, with many complementary and yet competing interests and national agendas.

Not Going Up from Down Under
When I last reported on the ELDO programme, it was to cover the loss of the ELDO F-6 launch in August last year. At the time, I mentioned that a reflight – designated as F-6/2 – was already in planning. Scheduled for December 5, 1967, the first attempt to launch F-6/2 was aborted just 12 seconds before lift-off due to a power failure.



Although successfully launched at 6 a.m. the following morning, the second stage failed to ignite after separation from the first stage. The vehicle then crashed down into the upper reaches of the Simpson Desert, repeating the failure of Europa F-6/1. This was the second failure of an active French Coralie second stage, and an investigation is still underway to determine the cause.

Despite this failure, the next Europa launch – designated F-7 – is still planned for October or November this year as the first test flight with three active stages. Let’s hope that the issues with the second stage have been resolved by then!

Has Britain Lost Its Way in Space?
Since coming to power in the October 1964, the Wilson Labour Government has shown itself to be considerably less enthusiastic about European space activities than its Conservative predecessor. This would appear to be in large part due to the struggling UK economy, but also a response to the lack of success of Britain’s attempts to join the European Economic Community in 1963 and 67, for which UK participation in European space was supposed to be a sweetener.

In 1965, when the cost of completing the original ELDO programme had already climbed to twice the early estimates, France began to call for a revised – and more expensive – programme to develop the Europa vehicle into a launcher capable of placing satellites into geostationary orbit. Calling the Europa I launcher “obsolete”, as it can only place satellites into polar orbit, France has proposed a more sophisticated and powerful Europa II vehicle that would enable Europe to launch communications and other applications satellites without reliance on the United States (which has already given indications that it will take measures to protect its monopoly on the use of geostationary satellites).

Applications satellites, especially for international communications (as demonstrated by INTELSAT), are almost certainly the way of the future in space developments outside human spaceflight, and West Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have agreed with the French view. This resulted in a July 1966 proposal to complete ELDO’s Europa I programme and add a Europa II development programme.

The British Government, however, began to express severe doubts about the “technological use and the economic viability” of the ELDO programme and opposed the French-led changes. In 1966, it signalled that Britain would not participate in any further financing of ELDO programmes after present projects were completed. Britain also reduced its financial contributions to ELDO from 38.79% (the largest contribution to ELDO’s budget) to 27%, with the difference being made up by the other four paying members (Australia being a non-paying member, on the basis of providing the Woomera facilities).

The reduction in the British financial clout within ELDO, and the desire for an equatorial launch facility, has been a factor in ELDO planning to move away from Woomera to France’s national launch facility in Kourou, French Guiana, at the completion of the ELDO I programme, anticipated in 1970. This has greatly disappointed my friends at the WRE, who spent considerable effort in preparing plans for a launch facility near Darwin, in the Northern Territory, to support an equatorial launch capability in Australia for the Europa II programme.

The first launch from France's Kourou facility, the future home of the ELDO programme, took place on 9 April this year, with the firing of a Veronique sounding rocket

British Space Industry Weighs In!
In November last year, a report from the National Industrial Space Committee, which represents the space interests of British industry, recommended that the British Government should not reduce, but expand its spending on space research and development, in order to stop the brain drain from the UK and obtain a share in what is already being seen as the lucrative space technology business. It recommended that spending on space-related R&D should be increased by around a 25% increase from the present $A60 million to between $A75 million and $A87.5 million said the committee. Comments at the time from Mr Kenneth Gatland, vice president of the British Interplanetary Society, indicated that a major row was looming between industry and Government over Britain's failure to lead Europe into the commercial field of communication satellites. Although the Post Office, which controls British telecommunications, has expressed “severe doubts” about the commercial benefits of space-communication, this seems a bit strange when the Post Office is also the British signatory to INTELSAT, and the UK is the consortium’s second largest shareholder. “Government advisers”, Mr. Gatland said, “were being accused of leaving Britain high and dry through inept policies, allowing France and West Germany to benefit at Britain's expense.” Instead of the “national scandal” of Britain having spent an estimated $A124,707,500 on ELDO without any tangible end project in view, Mr. Gatland has suggested that Britain should give ELDO a target which would bring a return for the large capital investment.

A European Symphonie?
Whatever Britain’s misgivings regarding satellite communications, France and Germany are eager to move into the field of communications satellites to break INTELSAT’s monopoly on international satellite telecommunications. They have embarked on their own joint communications satellite project, known as Symphonie. As this project has taken options on two Europa II launches for its two satellites, it is, at present, ELDO's only customers! Mr Gatland has urged Britain to join France and Germany in the Symphonie project, which will promise a satellite in three to five years.

An early design for the Symphonie communications satellite, which is intended to be three-axis stabilised

Italy has decided to go it alone on the development of a telecommunications satellite known as Project Sirio. The design will apparently be based on the experimental telecommunications satellite that Italy was originally going to develop for ELDO, before that aspect of the programme was cut to reduce overall costs.

ESRO is also reported to be interested in moving beyond scientific satellites into the applications satellite area, in conjunction with CETS, which has expressed interest in the development of a satellite for television distribution.

Whither or Wither, Europe?
With all this history in mind, Europe’s space plans for the future have undergone considerable change in the past few months. According to a report released in March, Europe's space club has mapped out an ambitious programme for the next 10 years that would include telecommunications satellites for television, broadcasting and telephone calls, meteorological, air traffic control and Earth resources satellites, and large numbers of astronomical and other scientific satellites. This programme, which involves a 10 per cent annual increase of expenditure on European space projects, is intended to be discussed when Science Ministers from the 17 member states of ELDO, ESRO and CETS, meet in Bonn, West Germany, in June.

However, the ambitious proposals released in March evolving as originally anticipated is now unlikely, given the most recent events. On 18 April, Britain's Labour Government announced cuts in spending on space research and cast further doubts on the future of ELDO. Although the Government indicated that it would maintain its contribution to the current ELDO programme at the existing level, it could “see no economic justification for undertaking further financial commitments to ELDO after the present programme,” which is due to conclude in 1970.

This (not totally unexpected news) was followed by an announcement from ESRO on 26 April that it was cancelling its plans for its two largest satellites scientific satellites – a major blow for European space co-operation. The two massive TD 1 and TD 2 satellites (the TD stands for Thor Delta, the intended launch vehicle), each weighing 990 lbs, were to have been built under a 100 million franc (about Aus$17,800,000) contract by an international consortium including Hawker Siddeley Dynamics of Britain, the French firm Matra, the West German group ERNO, and Saab of Sweden.

TD1, scheduled for launch in 1970, was designed to study the relationship between earth and sun. TD2, planned for launch the following year, was focused on research into solar ultra-violet radiation and electromagnetic phenomena in the upper atmosphere. The reason for the satellites’ cancellation seems to be connected with disagreements within ESRO in regard to the juste retour allocation of work for the project.

ESRO’s First satellite in Orbit!
Despite the uncertainties about its future space plans, Europe is currently celebrating the launch of the first ESRO satellite to make it to orbit! ESRO-2B was launched 17 May from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a Scout B rocket.

This flight occurred almost exactly one year after the loss of its predecessor ESRO 2A on 29 May, 1967. Also launched from Vandenberg on a Scout B, ESRO 2A was lost due to a malfunction of the rocket’s fourth stage, which prevented the satellite from reaching orbit. These first European satellites were launched on Scout vehicles due to an offer from NASA to launch the ESRO's first two satellites free of charge as a ‘christening gift’ for the organisation (and no doubt to woo ESRO towards continuing with US launchers even when ELDO's Europa rockets become operational!)

ESRO 2B, also known as Iris (International Radiation Investigation Satellite), Iris 2 and ESRO 2, is an astrophysical research satellite developed to study solar and cosmic radiation and their interaction with the Earth and its magnetosphere. This will provide continuity to the solar radiation observations of earlier satellites and continue similar particle measurements carried out by the UK’s Ariel 1 satellite. It is the first mission controlled by teams at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.

ESRO 2B being prepared for launch

Placed into a highly elliptical near-polar orbit, with an orbital period of 98.9 minutes, ESRO-2B is about 33.5 inches in length, with a diameter just on 30 inches. It weighs 196 lb and is spin-stabilised, with a spin rate of approximately 40 rpm. The satellite is powered by 3456 solar cells on the outer body panels, supplemented by a nickel/cadmium battery. The satellite carries the same seven instruments as its lost predecessor: to detect high-energy cosmic rays, determine the total flux of solar X-rays, measure trapped radiation, investigate Van Allen belt protons and cosmic ray protons. And if you’re wondering why ESRO 2B is the first European satellite and what happened to ESRO 1, the simple answer is that ESRO 1 has yet to be launched! Difficulties in the development of the payload for the polar ionospheric satellite ESRO 1, designed to study how the auroral zones responded to geomagnetic and solar activity, meant that it was eventually agreed to launch ESRO-2 ahead of it. ESRO 1 is due for launch around October this year, so we here at Galactic Journey will cover its story soon. ESRO 2B being tracked at the ESOC mission control centre










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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 24, 1968] How Low Can You Go? (Battle Beneath the Earth and The Astro-Zombies)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Notes From Underground

The English have a great hunger for desolate places.
— Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia

And I have a great hunger for the desolation of cinematic wastelands.

Need evidence? Consider my interest in things like Teenagers From Outer Space, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, and Women of the Prehistoric Planet.

I rest my case, although I could name many more.

I recently dived deep down into the abyss of Z-grade filmmaking with a pair of inept science fiction films. Grab your flashlight and come spelunking with me into the bottomless cavern of movie malfeasance.

Dig We Must


And it can stay there!

Battle Beneath the Earth

This subterranean smorgasbord of silliness begins with stock footage of the casinos in Las Vegas. Two cops drive by and get a call to investigate a listening disturbance [sic]. That's a situation I don't recall ever appearing on Dragnet.


"Be sure not to help this guy, everybody! Just stand around and stare at him!"

In what is very clearly a set, and not Las Vegas, we see a fellow with his ear to the ground. He's raving about something that sounds like ants underground. Understandably, the cops drag him away as a kook, and he winds up in a mental hospital.

(By the way, the sanitarium has slot machines, for use by compulsive gamblers. At this point, I had to wonder if the film was a deliberate spoof. Unfortunately, I don't think so.)


Then they tell you what movie you're watching, in case you wandered into the theater by accident.

Our hero is a naval officer, recently assigned to lab duty on land after an experimental underwater habitat was destroyed in an earthquake. (Hint: It wasn't a natural disaster.) The sister of the listening guy happens to be his assistant. She tells him that her brother keeps asking to talk to him.


Peter Arne, as Arnold Kramer, in bathrobe, and Kerwin Mathews, as Commander Jonathan Shaw, in uniform. "Before I listen to your crazy story, allow me to remind you that I was the star of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which was a much better film."

It turns out that the guy isn't a paranoid nut, but a seismologist who has figured out that (wait for it) a Chinese general and his minions have dug their way under the Pacific Ocean and most of the way across the United States. The plan is to fill the tunnels with atomic bombs and, I don't know, rule the world, I guess. (We find out he's planted similar bombs under Peking, so he's working on his own, like any proper megalomaniac.)


A minion inside a Chinese digging machine. "Peek-a-boo!"

After a few skirmishes underground (excuse me, I mean a battle beneath the Earth), the good guys figure out that the general's supplies are coming from some place in the middle of the Pacific. They use their own digging machine to raid the place.


Carefully labeled, in case some swabby thinks it's a tank or something.

Along for the fun is our Good Girl, a Hawaiian geologist. She doesn't do much, really, except look pretty and fall into the arms of our hero.


"Gee, Miss Yung, you're beautiful without your glasses!" The character has a Chinese last name, but is played by Viviane Ventura, a British/Colombian actress. A small hint of casting problems to come.

The raid is a fiasco, with a bunch of Marines getting killed. Our hero gets captured by the bad guys.


Martin Benson as General Chan Lu. "Before I explain my sinister plan, in the proper manner of any James Bond villain, allow me to remind you that I had a small role in Goldfinger, which was a much better film."

At this point, our movie's Bad Girl enters. She hypnotizes our hero, using what is very obviously one of those little battery-operated handheld fans you use to cool yourself off on a hot day. She recites this bit of doggerel over and over, in order to wash the hero's brain thoroughly.

Red is green
Green is red
The East is sunrise
The West is dead

I don't think Robert Frost has any competition to worry about.


"I will control your mind through the power of a refreshing breeze!"

I should note that this character (Dr. Arnn) is played by Paula Li Shiu, a Chinese actress. All the other Chinese characters (except a few minor nonspeaking roles) are played by Occidentals. This kind of casting is embarrassing, but if Christopher Lee can play Fu Manchu, I guess anything goes.


The general in the tube gizmo he uses to descend to the underground tunnels. "The next wise guy who says 'Beam me up, Scotty' is going to get it!"

The bad guy has all kinds of supposedly Chinese stuff decorating his underground headquarters, just in case you forget what nationality he's supposed to be. He also has a pet hawk, just to show you how evil he is.


"The next wise guy who says 'This movie is for the birds' is going to get it!"

Will the good guys win? Oh, come on, you know the answer to that already.


Nothing like an atomic bomb for a happy ending.

Quality of film: Two stars.
Level of derisive amusement: Four stars.

All the Way Down to the Bottom


What happened to the word "The" and the hyphen between "Astro" and "Zombies"?

The Astro-Zombies

This cheapskate epic begins with a woman driving down the road. Get used to this kind of thing, because we'll have plenty of scenes that go on and on where people do ordinary things. Eventually, she winds up in her garage, where she's killed by a guy in a skull mask.


This, ladies and gentlemen, is an astro-zombie.

We then get our opening titles, oddly filmed over scenes of toy robots.


Nothing says quality like dime store special effects.

Cut to some science types and some government types talking in an office. Long and confusing story short, it seems there was a project to transmit thoughts from folks on Earth to brains in artificial bodies in spacecraft.


Government guy, played by Wendell Corey, looks concerned. He had a similar role in Agent For H.A.R.M.

It seems that one of the scientists working on the project got kicked out, and is now on his own. He's played by John Carradine, of course.


"You want me to play another Mad Scientist? How much does it pay?"

Naturally, Carradine has a hunchback for an assistant. Believe it or not, his name is Franchot.


"My parents could have named me 'Fritz' or 'Ygor,' but no . . ."

Franchot grabs a dead guy out of a car wreck and drags him back to the lab. If I've managed to follow the plot correctly, he wants to put a brain into his body and create another astro-zombie. Apparently, the previous one had a murder's brain and went on a killing rampage.


There's also a woman in a bikini strapped down on a table in the lab. She has nothing to do with the plot.

Meanwhile, foreign spies are after Carradine's secret. A lot of the running time is spent with the good guy spies and the bad guy spies fighting each other. The leader of the bad guys is played by the amazing Tura Satana, so memorable in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!


Tura and one of her minions.

I have to say something about Tura's appearance here. She wears tons of makeup, including gigantic false eyelashes. Her fingernails look like daggers. There's a special credit for her costume designer, who really did an interesting job.


Tura in pink. Is she auditioning for Star Trek?

No opportunity is lost to put her remarkable body on display.


A little something for the leg men in the audience.

Anyway, let me get back to the plot. We've got a couple of heroes, of a sort, as well as a heroine/potential victim.


Here they are, in a time-killing scene at a nightclub in which they watch a topless dancer covered in body paint. Is it really cricket for a guy to take a woman out to see a stripper?

They come up with a plan to have the heroine act as bait for the astro-zombie who's slaughtering women left and right.


"Uh, guys? I don't think that's such a good idea. And which one of you is supposed to be my boyfriend, anyway?"

Stuff happens. The funniest scene is when the astro-zombie runs out of energy, and has to hold a flashlight to his head in order to charge his photoelectric cells.


"Thanks, Eveready!"

Boy, this is a dreary little movie. Only the presence of Tura Satana makes it watchable.


One more cheesecake shot for the road.

Quality of film: One star.
Level of derisive amusement: Five stars.




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Movies

[May 22, 1968] Finding a New Way: Witchfinder General

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by Fiona Moore

Witchfinder General is a real game-changer not just for British horror but for horror films in general. This is a movie without monsters, ghosts, psychopathic killers or, even, witches (at least real ones). The terror comes from people’s belief in witches, and what that belief makes them do to other people, and, in making that change, this film is an artistic statement that transcends genre.

The story is set, as a clunky (and rather unnecessary, since the same information is conveyed in the first few scenes) voiceover at the start tells us, in 1645, the height of the English Civil War. It is ostensibly based on the life of a genuine historical figure of the time, Matthew Hopkins, the so-called “Witchfinder General”. He is a minor landowner who made his career travelling around Southeastern England identifying witches using bogus techniques and confessions extracted under duress. In fact, the story bears almost no resemblance at all to the known facts of Hopkins’ life, barring his name, that of his assistant Stearne (in real life their roles were reversed), the location (East Anglia) and the methods used to extract confessions from witches. This is a minor complaint, however—and might not even be a complaint, as the story the movie tells is possibly more disturbing than Hopkins’ actual biography.

Vincent Price and Robert Russell as Hopkins and Stearne

The film’s main positive figure, at least at the outset, is Richard Marshall, a young Roundhead soldier engaged to Sarah Lowes, the niece of a small-town Church of England priest. Sarah’s uncle is accused of witchcraft by his neighbours (we never learn the specific reason for this, which chillingly suggests that it’s a fairly banal local conflict that escalates to horrific extremes) and Hopkins and Stearne arrive, arrest and torture the accused. Sarah, desperate to save her uncle, sleeps with Hopkins; when Stearne, envious and sadistic, rapes her, Hopkins discards his promises to Sarah and has her uncle executed. Richard, hearing of the tragedy but arriving too late to stop it, marries Sarah and swears vengeance on Hopkins. Matters escalate, leading eventually to a bloody confrontation which clearly brings home that violence only begets more violence, and that no one in this story is going to escape without severe damage.

Ian Ogilvy (right) as Richard Marshall

The civil war backdrop is sketched in matter-of-factly. Perhaps surprisingly, given that subsequent British popular culture tends to dislike the Parliamentarians (in Sellars and Yeatman’s phrase, the Cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantic, and the Roundheads Right but Repulsive), the film resists the temptation to lay the blame for the witch hysteria at Cromwell’s door. Richard and his men are more or less positively portrayed, as is Cromwell himself when he turns up for a brief cameo after a successful military campaign. Some of the film’s power arguably lies in the fact that they, and Hopkins, are all ostensibly on the same side, and, while we see very little of the atrocities of the war itself, it is clearly part of what is fueling the communities’ drive to turn on their own. The viewer is also left to fill in some details themselves: for instance, the absence of a lord of the manor in the village where Sarah and her uncle live suggests he was a Royalist, possibly also hinting at why relationships have broken down between the villagers and why Sarah’s uncle is now accused of heresy.

Hilary Dwyer as Sarah Lowe

In casting terms, Vincent Price is credibly chilling as Hopkins, largely because of the way he underplays his role: he talks about torture and murder in the same banal tones as one might discuss a land boundary dispute, and he pretends hypocritically to be serving the public interest. Robert Russell as Sterne is a much more familiar figure from horror films, loathsome and sadistic, but provides a necessary contrast to Price, acting as a kind of expression of Hopkins’ id. Newcomers Ian Ogilvy and Hilary Dwyer, as Richard and Sarah, are very pretty to look at, but they also have the acting chops to handle their characters’ descent as they are subjected to increasing torment and degradation.

Sarah in a beautiful landscape

Michael Reeves’ direction works well, contrasting the beautiful scenery of Southeast England with the awful behaviour of its inhabitants. His best, albeit hardest to watch, efforts come in the film’s climactic scene. In it, Hopkins escalates his method of execution from simply hanging witches to burning them—not at the stake, but strapped to a ladder slowly lowered into the fire. As this takes place, the camera turns its pitiless gaze around the crowd, showing a variety of different reactions: from religious rapture, to horror, to fear, to pleasure. Most horrifyingly, it also shows children absorbing the violence around them. We later see the same children roasting baked potatoes in the execution fire, a detail that is terrifying in its matter-of-fact presentation.

Child spectators at an execution

The story’s contemporary relevance is also clear. Sexism visibly fuels the witch-hunting activities, and prejudice against women and fear of their sexuality in the wider culture allows the likes of Hopkins and Stearne to flourish. Desensitisation to war, as we are seeing in America and elsewhere, allows people to condone and commit acts of violence in their own communities. Revelations after the collapse of the Nazi regime, and reports from behind the Iron Curtain, show clearly how petty grievances between neighbours can, under totalitarian rule, lead to arrests and torture. The viewer can’t leave the cinema thinking it could never happen here: clearly it not only can–it has.

The witch-burning scene

The film makes the most of its economical 86 minutes, and is definitely not for the faint-hearted. By mining British folk culture and history, and by focusing on human evil itself rather than monsters and spirits, Reeves has opened up the possibilities of a whole new kind of horror movie and paved the ground for a new, artistic subgenre; I can’t wait to see what this new pioneer of British cinema will come up with next. Five out of five stars.




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