On September 7th 1968, Debra Barnes, also known as Miss Kansas, won the crown of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, sharing the spotlight with protestors that managed to hang banners during the live broadcast and spark a nation-wide controversy over women's liberation.
“The personal is political.”
This astute piece of wisdom, born of deep discussions in the rising New York Radical Women group this summer, was voiced by one of its leaders, Carol Hanisch. She’s the feminist mastermind behind the Miss America Pageant protest that happened just two weeks ago on the Atlantic City boardwalk outside of the live broadcast of the event on the seventh of September.
When it comes to a woman’s image, she couldn’t be more on the nose. Women’s beauty has been touted as the ultimate symbol of the successes of nations, militaries, companies, and men. Even the origins of the Miss America Pageant are rooted in consumerism and marketing.
Miss America has two key duties after her coronation. Product placement and stimulating the economy is the origin of the pageant, and no surprise now includes brand sponsors such as Pepsi. Her other obligation, however, is touring the U.S. troops. The New York Radical Women call the latter a "death mascot."
In 1921, the first Miss America pageant was held just after Labor Day to lengthen the resort season and bring more revenue to the New York and Jersey coasts. The contest was described as an evaluation of a woman’s “personality and social graces,” with an initial round of judgment conducted by photograph–a medium, I should mention, that is hard pressed to showcase either of these laudable traits.
Within a score of years, the requirements for the pageant became clearer, though surely they were a requirement from the start. A contestant was to be a white woman in good health, never married, between the ages of 18 and 28. All the accolades that she brought with her were expected to be mildly bland, uninspiring, and only the sort of polite conversation one has with their in-laws. The Goldilocks Rule aboundeth: Not too hot, and not too cold. This contradictory manner was invented to define the Modern Woman by none other than Charles Dana Gibson, a male illustrator-turned-editor for Life magazine, once again linking the idea of women's beauty, national identity, and consumerism from the male point of view.
When Women Are Jurors, studies in expression by Charles Dana Gibson, 1902.
When New York Radical Women organized the protest outside of Boardwalk Hall, the history of the pageant was baked into its message of decrying the tradition's inherent sexism. Performances of being shackled and mopping the boardwalk with an infant in hand, for example, were meant to visually represent the unending pressures of Western women. Caricatures of the contestants were labeled as a cattle auction, and even a sheep draped in a banner that read “Miss America” was paraded around the picket line throughout the day.
But perhaps the most provocative element of the protest was the now infamous Freedom Trash Can.
Protestors throw their objects of oppression into the Freedom Trash Can on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Contrary to popular belief, no bras were burned that day, though organizers claim they'd wanted to do so in solidarity with recent draft card burnings.
Yes, the one into which women threw their objects of oppression: lash curlers and fakies, nylons and office pumps, girdles, wigs, lipstick, gloves, the Cosmopolitan… The one you’ve no doubt read mention of in the Atlantic City Press’s scorching article, “Bra-burners blitz boardwalk.” The assumption that women burned their effects seems trollish sensationalism from my point of view, though. In looking through statements from Carol Hanisch, she mentions they had intended to burn them, much like veteran draft cards in the protests on the lawn over the summer, but were instructed not to. The protest happened on a wooden boardwalk, after all.
The image of burning one’s brassiere is so striking that it will surely live in infamy, and I won’t be surprised if it happens during feminist protests in the future. Truthfully, it’s already become a double-edged sword. While women might choose to honor the efforts of the activists who came before them through bra-burning, their critics will latch onto it as well, claiming it a symbol of anarchy. To think, choosing one’s own most personal garments could be such a political threat.
However, harking on the Miss America Pageant alone only tells half of the fascinating tale of this year’s beauty brawl. The New York Radical Women’s protest revolved entirely around the misogynistic use of women as a patriotic trophy and how it signaled to American women what mainstream beauty standards should be in the eyes of male judges. But focusing on the pageant by nature necessitated the whole-cloth exclusion of brown and Black women who, as I laid out in the rules of the pageant, were barred from participation.
While white women in the United States have been oppressed by the gender extremes of our society for centuries, Black and brown women haven’t been included at all in the definition of ideal beauty. This means their struggle has been two-fold, balancing the incorrigible partnership of the legacy of slavery and a beauty standard that expects their hair, features, and physique to mold itself after the white ideal.
Phillip Savage (center) plans a civil rights march in 1963 with collaborators Cecil B Moore (left) and A. Philip Randolph (right). Savage cofounded the Miss Black America pageant with J. Morris Anderson. The poster below is undated, though this style of poster and rhetoric was ubiquitous throughout the events of September 7th.
Just down the street from the Miss America Pageant broadcast, there was another event being held: the first annual Miss Black America Pageant.
While the New York Radical Women’s protest challenged the male gaze and has received immense derision from (mostly male) newsrooms, the Miss Black America Pageant has enjoyed public success so far. J. Morris Anderson of Philadelphia decided to organize the event when his daughters lamented over not being able to participate in the long-standing contest. He, Phillip Savage, and others, came together to make a space for the Black beauty ideal on the American stage. They didn’t directly oppose Miss America and its whiteness. Rather, much like Thurgood Marshall in his Supreme Court hearings last year, they circumvented the argument altogether.
I can’t help but think that male involvement in the Miss Black America Pageant was critical to its warm reception, especially since men were barred from participating in the protests down the street. (New York Radical Women even forbade male journalists from interviewing participants.)
The strategic differences between the two events couldn’t have been more stark, nor the message more similar. While the Miss America Pageant protests on the boardwalk were meant to cast derision on men’s control of women’s bodies, the Miss Black America Pageant aimed to take ownership of Black beauty. Both events were after the same goals: to give women a voice in their own image, the power to decide what makes them feel powerful, and the platform to enact change for their communities.
Miss Saundra Williams, crowned the first Miss Black America, gave a monologue entitled “I Am Black,” performed an African dance, and wore her hair in a natural halo of curls. Miss Williams took ownership of her roots before, during, and after her coronation. Rather than the event pressuring its contestants into following the more marketable approach of the longstanding Miss America Pageant, the organizers and contestants took it as an opportunity to speak directly to their own demographic and define beauty on their own terms.
Whether it's suffrage, the right to divorce, or the profit of our bodies, women have been fighting the same battles head on for centuries with abysmal results. Truly, if we’re fighting the same stigmas in the next century, it will come at no surprise.
Maybe the Miss Black America pageant has the right idea. We learned in looking at fashions of the Civil Rights Movement (of which many of its leaders were involved in this pageant) that the old saying holds true: it’s easier to catch flies with honey. I don’t believe that Miss Black America capitulates to the structure of how white America judges beauty, but rather makes room, and in doing so, diminishes the power of the mainstream.
While New York Radical Women and other women's liberation movements battle the mainstream head on, efforts such as the invention of Miss Black America flank our culture. In a trench war so long and grueling, I have no doubt that these mainstream ideals will sadly stand the test of time…
But they'll also be fighting for oxygen with every new space we create.
Saundra Williams speaking at the 369th Regiment Armory in Harlem New York, 1968.
Being something of a geography buff, one of my favorite games is to go to a thrift shop and inspect their globe collection. I can generally tell what year a globe was manufactured from the configuration of countries. And while we haven't had anything like the banner year of 1960, when more than a dozen African states sprang into existence, nevertheless, there are still enough changes every year to keep the game going.
For instance, this month, the Kingdom of Swaziland with its 400,000 denizens, achieved independence from the United Kingdom. The second-smallest African country, is not entirely free, of couse. It is completely surrounded by South Africa, with all transportation lines running through Pretoria. The money is South African. All telegraph lines go through South Africa. As for their economy, it's mostly propped up by British hand-outs.
But they do have sovereignty, something South Africa tried to snatch from them time and again, but which was thwarted by the British. Plus, the new country has vast mineral reserves of asbestos and iron, plus forests and fertile soil. So King Sobhuza I just might make a go of things.
Going the other way, the people of West Irian (formerly Netherlands New Guinea) have has been annexed as Indonesia's 26th province. Six years ago, the United Nations stepped in to stop a budding conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesians, who both laid claim to the region. Now the 800,000 poverty-stricken inhabitants are officially under the auspices of General Suharto. Sometime soon, they will be given the choice between independence and a union with their neighboring would-be superpower. It is anyone's guess how free and honest the local elections can be under the Suharto dictatorship (i.e. don't expect a free West Papua any time soon…)
The Morning Star Flag—which you won't see flown until and unless the Irians get independence…
Bruce Cheeseborough, Jr. is a private dick operating some time in the near future. While in the course of waging a one man crusade against the new crime boss, Lester Dunhaven Sinclair, a certain meddler crosses his path. Said meddler first appears as a nebbishy, softish man, but he quickly betrays himself as a protean blob, possessed of all manner of wondrous powers. The "Martian" offers to help the detective, granting him invulnerability, the gift of flight, time dilation…but Cheeseborough finds the tilting of the scales unsporting.
Still, when the detective makes his final assault on Chez Sinc, it's going to take every resource he has, from human wit to alien marvel, to come out the other end alive…
The Meddler is a brilliant piece of genre hybridization, combining hard-boiled noir with cunning science fiction. Every piece of the story's myriad puzzles is meticulously laid out, so that an astute reader can figure out the revelations just before they materialized. Beyond that, the piece is funny as well as perfectly paced.
Five stars, and a nice broadening of the author's talents.
Time Was, by Phyllis Murphy
Picture a man so obsessed with saving time, that he applies the art of speed reading to life. You know: skipping over most of it, trying to absorb only the salient points. Except, how do you know which bits are the important ones? And what if you lose the ability to focus on any given thing in the pursuit of apprehending everything?
This story reminded me of a friend who insisted a person must do several things at once to be truly efficient. If she read the paper, she listened to the radio. When we watched television together, she'd inevitably crochet. Remarkably efficient…except half the time, she lost track of the show's plot and had to ask us what was going on.
Three stars.
The Wide World of Sports , by Harvey Jacobs
They say that football is a bloody sport, but it's nowhere near as bloody as whatever Jacobs is describing in this story, featuring machine guns, the slaughter of all audience members of a certain name, and general mayhem.
This story would be more effective if it made a lick of sense and/or had a plot. Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Coffee Break, by D. F. Jones
There's a Laugh-In bit where the projected news break underneath the action runs, "The United Nations today voted unanimously on everything; UN police are still looking for who put grass in the vents."
This story covers the exact same ground, but it takes much longer to do it, and not in nearly as funny a manner.
Two stars.
Dance Music for a Gone Planet, by Sonya Dorman
Fiddling after Rome is burnt? A tinge of hope for a post-apocalyptic ode?
I'm not sure—I found this one a bit too obtuse to understand. Maybe I'm the obtuse one.
Two stars.
Possible, That's All!, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Other Good Doctor takes umbrage at Asimov's assertion that nothing can go faster than light. He offers up some counterexamples, but they're honestly rather feeble, and the article is not particularly coherent.
Eddie Burma is an empath, life of the party, and he has so much to give. Folks are drawn to his magnetic personality like moths to flame, but, unknowingly, each takes a little bit from Burma in each encounter. This is the price of popularity: eventually, there can be nothing left of you, the you behind the glamor and charm, because no one wants you. They just want what rubs off.
If you've heard this refrain before, it's because Ellison delivered a soliloquy on the subject in his last collection, From the Land of Fear. Harlan is afeared that no one really loves him; they just love The Talent that resides within his physical husk. Readers of that collection also have encountered Knife in its embryonic form, a snippet of it among the story fragments at the beginning of the book.
Anyway, I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your soul overlaps with Harlan's, then his writing resonates with you as The Truth. If you are much unlike the man (as, for instance, I am), then you can admire the way he strings words together, but they don't move much.
Organ transplants are the topic du jour in both science and science fiction. I find it particularly interesting that much is made of the muddled identity of a person when they incorporate the parts of other humans (viz. Van Scyoc's A Trip to Cleveland General in this month's Galaxy). This time around, Asimov takes things a step further: are humans less human if they have metal hearts? And are robots more human if they incorporate biological components?
I liked this story, one of the better pieces Dr. A has done since largely going on fiction hiatus after the launch of Sputnik.
Four stars.
The Ghost Patrol, by Ron Goulart
Speaking of crossed genres, Ghost Patrol is the latest in the Max Kearny series about an art director who solves occult crimes in his spare time. These yarns range from hilariously clever to limp.
This one, about a free doctor beset both by celebrity ghosts and Bircher anti-freeloaders, belongs, sadly, in the latter category.
Two stars.
Little Found Satellite, by Isaac Asimov
This month's piece is worth it for the funny anecdote that forms its preface. The rest is a pleasant, if not particularly deep, history of Saturn's telescopic observation. The piece culminates in the discovery of Saturn's tenth moon, Janus, just outside the ring system.
At a recent convention, my daughter led a panel entitled "Plants vs. People", in which the panelists and audience discussed green menaces of various kinds. Triffids, killer ragweed, stuff like that. I wish I'd had Fangs as an example, as it's a good one.
Zen Holbrook is runs a plantation on a world countless light years from Earth. His trees produce a valuable, hallucinogenic-juiced fruit. They're also quasi-sentient, something like ultra-advanced Venus Fly Traps. Though he tries to keep his relationship with his trees strictly business, he can't help ascribing them personalities, giving them names, and treating them like pampered pets.
Which makes it all the more difficult when he gets news that all of the trees in Sector C have been afflicted with "rust", a disease that not only spells their impending death, but has the risk of spreading throughout the whole planet. Holbrook must kill his friends lest an entire world's economy die. Further complicating the matter is his 15-year old niece, Naomi, who would rather die than see the grove decimated.
It is implied, though never specifically stated, that there is no less destructive way to solve the problem: not only must the trees die, but so must an entire species of benign hopper-bear—a link in the infection cycle. Lord knows what that will do the local ecosystem, but "the needs of the many…"
It's an interesting, thought-provoking piece, composed with Silverberg's usual excellence, though I'm not quite sure which side we're supposed to take, if any. Like, do we all need to grow up and realize that ecological destruction is a valid and important necessity? Or is Zen actually the villain? I could have done without so much of the Uncle's attraction for his niece, too, even if it was supposed to say…something…about Zen's character. I know that the word for people who ascribe the emotions of an author's creation to the author himself is "moron" (at least, per Larry Niven), but Silverbob sure includes a lot of just-pubescent minors in his stories…
Four stars.
Whaddaya make of that?
If you read judiciously, this month's mag is terrific, kind of like how, if you parse the news in just the right way, it's all positive developments. Look deeper, and the seams show. Still, whether the news or the magazine are half full or empty all depends on your temperament, I suppose.
I guess I'll leave with the wishy washy conclusion that's always true: things could be worse!
Emil Petaja is an American writer of Finnish ancestry. His best known works are a series of novels based on the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. (Saga of Lost Earths, The Star Mill, The Stolen Sun, and Tramontane. These were all published from 1966 to 1967.)
Petaja's latest novel, although not part of this series, also deals with themes from Finnish mythology.
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
Doctor Stephen McCord is an anthropologist. Although he's the only major character who isn't of Finnish descent, he's studied the culture and knows something of the language.
Before the novel begins, his college buddy Art Mackey took off for a remote area of Montana, in search of his girlfriend Ilma, who mysteriously returned to her old homestead. Stephen gets a tape recording from his friend, giving him a few hints as to what's going on. (It also serves as exposition for the reader.)
It seems that the former logging town of Hellmouth, inhabited by Finnish immigrants, was completely destroyed in a huge forest fire in 1906. When Art arrived in search of Ilma's nearby farmhouse, he found the place looking exactly the way it did six decades ago, with some of the former citizens still alive and kicking.
Intrigued by this mystery (and wondering if his pal has gone nuts), Stephen makes his way to the supposedly vanished town. He discovers that Hellmouth is indeed still around. Furthermore, the inhabitants worship Ukko, the chief god of Finnish legend. (Roughly comparable to Zeus or Thor, I believe.)
Stephen finds Art, and they both search for Ilma. Things get weird when they actually run into what seems to be Ukko, a being whose presence is so overwhelming that it's almost impossible not to fall to one's knees in adoration. The apparent god promises to make Earth a utopia, in exchange for worship. Ukko also has plans for Stephen.
What happens involves Ilma's elderly father Izza, her hunchbacked brother Yalmar, the local schoolteacher/librarian, and the steel plate inside Stephen's head, a souvenir of his time as an ambulance driver during a conflict in Southeast Asia. (Maybe Vietnam, as the story takes place just a little bit in the future, some time in the 1970's.)
The author writes clearly and elegantly. I always knew what was going on and was able to keep track of the characters. There are many vivid descriptions of Petaja's home state of Montana. (He now lives in San Francisco, which is also depicted excellently in the early part of the book.)
Besides having a compelling plot that kept me reading in one sitting, the novel has some intriguing and controversial things to say about the nature of deity and its relationship with humanity. Even at the very end of the text, Stephen still isn't sure if opposing Ukko was the right thing to do.
Four stars.
Comedy and Tragedy
The latest Ace Double to fall into my hands (designated as H-85, for those of you keeping score) offers a pair of short novels with contrasting moods. One is lighthearted, the other is serious. Let's start with the humorous one.
David Grinnell is actually the well-known fan, writer, and editor Donald A. Wollheim. He also created the Ace Double series, so he must feel right at home.
This novel was published last year in hardcover.
Cover art by Michael M. Peters.
The protagonist is a filthy rich and rather egotistical fellow named Ajax Calkins. A little research reveals that Wollheim (without co-author Carter) has been writing about him since 1941, sometimes under the pen name Martin Pearson. Most recently, this old material was recycled into the novel Destiny's Orbit. The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review a while back, calling it a juvenile space opera.
In the current volume, Ajax is the king of an asteroid that is actually a gigantic spaceship built by the civilization that was destroyed when their home planet blew up long ago, creating the asteroid belt. He and his fiancée Emily Hackenschmidt are on Earth, leaving the asteroid in the hands (so to speak) of their loyal Martian friend, a spider-like being called Wuj.
Dastardly amoeba-like aliens, the inhabitants of Saturn, are the sworn enemies of Earth. (In a touch of satire, we find out that they were perfectly nice folks until they learned aggression from humans.) Two of the Saturnians disguise themselves as Ajax and Emily and convince Wuj they're the real thing. They set off for Saturn, eager to uncover the ancient spaceship's secrets and use its advanced technology to conquer the solar system.
What I've failed to convey is the fact that this is a comedy. Ajax manages to save the day, of course, but he's also something of a fool. The more levelheaded Emily is often exasperated at him, with good reason.
The novel is written in a dryly tongue-in-cheek style that is more amusing than the usual science fiction farce. There are quite a few witty lines. I'm not a big fan of comic SF, but this one is better than some.
Let's flip the book over and take a look at something without laughs.
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
The cover proudly announces that this is the novel's first book publication. I assume that's true, but there's also a British hardcover edition that came out this year.
Cover art by Colin Andrews.
The story takes place a few hundred years after society fell apart, for reasons not apparent until later in the novel. Humanity has managed to build itself back up, but there's been a strange change in people. They're divided up into castes. Again, the explanation for this is unknown.
Roughly half of the population consists of Norms; ordinary folks. The other half are Delinks; murderers and other violent criminals. Some Norms and Delinks are also Scuttlers. These are people who have an intense phobia about the sky, and can't bear to look at it.
A small number of folks are Stinkers. Everybody else hates these people; so much so, that few of them survive. Those who do isolate themselves and protect their lives with various resources.
Michael Craig is a Stinker. (That looks like an example of nasty graffiti, doesn't it?) He gets a message from the police (by mail; if he came anywhere near them they would try to kill him) asking him to try an experiment. The cops want to know what would happen if two Stinkers met. Would they loathe each other on sight?
Michael agrees to meet Geo Hastings, a Stinker who lives in Africa. The oddly named Geo turns out to be an attractive woman. If you think the two are going to fall in love, give yourself an A in predicting familiar plot developments.
Besides not trying to kill each other, the two discover that they can communicate telepathically. Things would seem to be turning out nicely, if it were not for the Geeks.
A Geek is a type of human being that has just appeared recently. They are physically superior, tend to be cold-bloodedly calculating, and are intent on wiping out the rest of humanity. In particular, they are bent on destroying the Stinkers; not for the usual reason (pure, unexplained hatred) but as part of their plan to conquer the world.
Without giving anything away (although you may be able to predict the novel's plot twists), let's just say the reason for all these weird happenings is revealed. Can Norms, Delinks, and Stinkers work together against the Geeks and the secret menace behind them? Not to mention the Scuttlers, who have a vital role to play.
This isn't a bad novel. Not great, but not bad. The story held my interest. (I haven't mentioned Michael's three heavily armed robot birds, who are the most charming characters.) It's worth reading once.
Science fiction may be my first love, but I read other genres as well. And so my latest pick-up at the local import bookstore was a crime novel entitled God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake. The reason I bought the book is that it just won the prestigious Edgar Award, i.e. the mystery genre's equivalent to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, for the best crime novel of the year, beating out Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. Any novel that can beat a juggernaut like Rosemary's Baby is certainly worth checking out, so I picked it up. And reader, I was not disappointed.
The Most Gullible Man in New York City
The protagonist of God Save the Mark is one Fred Fitch, who must be the most gullible man in New York City. Fred is a magnet for con artists and there's not a scam in existence that Fred will not fall for.
The novel opens with Fred getting a phone call from a lawyer that his Uncle Matt has died and left Fred more than three hundred thousand US-dollars. This makes even the extremely gullible Fred suspicious, especially since he does not have an Uncle Matt.
So Fred alerts his friend his best and probably only friend, Detective Jack Reilly of the NYPD's "bunco squad", i.e. the police department dealing with fraud. Reilly tells Fred to go to the appointment with the fake lawyer, so Reilly can arrest him red-handed. Alas, Fred is late for the meeting because he got scammed… again and it turns out that the lawyer is not a fraud after all, but the real deal. As is the will of the late Uncle Matt. Fred really did inherit more than three hundred thousand US-dollars.
However, there's a catch or rather several. For starters, Uncle Matt was a con artist himself and the black sheep of the family, which is why Fred has never heard of him. What is more, Uncle Matt, though terminally ill, was murdered. Which makes Fred the prime suspect.
A City of Con Artists
The situation quickly escalates. To begin with, Fred's new found riches make him a target for even more would-be con artists, including a childhood sweetheart who intends to hold him to a marriage proposal made as a kid or sue him for breach of promise and a neighbour who wants to publish his alternate history novel Veni, Vidi, Vici with Air Power via a predatory vanity press. Worse, whoever murdered Uncle Matt is now taking potshots at Fred. Finally, Fred also finds himself entangled with two very different women, Gertie Divine, a former stripper who was the late Uncle Matt's nurse, and Karen Smith, Reilly's bit on the side who still hopes he'll marry her someday, once he gets over his Catholic guilt induced reluctance to divorce his wife.
The intense pressure under which Fred finds himself finally makes him wise up. He tells off several would-be con artists and also puts his skills as an independent researcher to use to investigate Uncle Matt's murder himself, since he no longer trusts the police.
However, there are still many twists and turns ahead, including a hilarious chase scene where Fred steals a child's bicycle to escape his pursuers and ends up tumbling headfirst into a pond in Central Park.
This was the first novel by Donald E. Westlake (who also writes as Richard Stark and under a number of other pen names and has even dabbled in science fiction on occasion) that I read, but it certainly won't be the last, because this book is laugh out loud funny and a complete and utter delight.
In many ways, God Save the Mark is a reminiscent of the screwball comedies of thirty years ago, yet it is also a solid mystery that plays fair with the reader and delivers plenty of red herrings as well as all the clues needed to solve it. The novel also offers an excellent overview of the various cons and scams going around, some I was aware of and others that were completely new to me. The ending is a perfect fit.
A Deserving Winner?
So is this novel better than Rosemary's Baby? Well, the two books are difficult to compare, because they are so very different. But all in all, I'd agree with the verdict of the Mystery Writers of America that God Save the Mark is a most deserving winner of the 1968 Edgar Award.
A fluffy, frothy caper that will leave you rolling on the floor laughing and guessing till the end.
Sometimes as a reviewer you just don’t quite trust yourself when you encounter something totally unexpected. When you read a work which feels sui generis for science fiction, a book which draws comparison to literary fiction like Dos Passos, Burges and Nabokov, it’s hard to assess that book in its own context.
John Brunner’s fascinating new novel Stand on Zanzibar is the spiritual successor to those modernist writers.
Brunner’s novel reads as part pulp fiction and part assault-the-senses bursts of information. Zanzibar is a prophecy and a critique, a satire and a work of deep seriousness. It has plot lines and complex emotions and an energy that won’t quit, and at 576 pages of very short chapters, it somehow felt exhausting and left me craving more. It’s also extremely hard to describe, so be aware I’m barely skimming the surface here, and I welcome anybody who’s willing to add their own comments in an LoC to this magazine.
Let’s start with the easy parts to describe. On its most basic level, Stand on Zanzibar is about the problem of overpopulation. When we all were in diapers, if stood side by side, all of humanity could take up a space roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. By the distant year of 2010, however, as Brunner writes, "If you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space of one foot by two, you could stand us all on the 640 square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar."
There’s so much information contained in one sentence. You get one of the key themes of the novel and also a feeling of Brunner’s approach to his writing. Like Burgess’s punks in Clockwork Orange, the characters in this book chatter and mumble in an invented slang which feels clever and becomes part of the larger reading experience of the book. (Brunner admits a strong influence on him from Burgess.) The language forces readers out of our comfort zones and therefore pay closer attention to the often fractured way Brunner chooses to tell his tale. (A codder is a certain type of man and a shiggy a certain type of woman and an appleofmyeye is a child, by the way.)
Mr. Brunner
The other key piece of information in that sentence above how fears of world overpopulation has led to strong laws against procreation. Those restrictive rules in turn have created a vast black market in child-rearing, as citizens are shown considering traveling to the state of Puerto Rico to have kids, much as one might escape their home state for an abortion or divorce to defy difficult local laws. World society also angles towards eugenics, forced sterilizations and genetic modifications. Can suicide booths be far behind?
All of the above is mere background – though thoughtful, fascinating background – for the main thrust of this sprawling exercise. Much of the book tells the story of the small calm African country of Beninia, population 900,000, which has become the main staging point for refugees from wars in three neighboring countries. Those refugees despise each other, but the country has a kind of tenuous peace under the benevolent rule of President Zadkiel F. Obomi. However, President Obomi wants to retire. And when he retires, what will happen to the peace he worked so hard to broker?
Enter another key aspect of this book’s fascinating plot. Obomi is good friends with American Ambassador Elihu Masters, and as they discuss the problem, Masters comes up with an unexpected suggestion: what if American corporation General Technics (motto: "The difficult we did yesterday. The impossible we're doing right now") took over the country? What if the country exchanged its vast offshore mineral and oil reserves for education and infrastructure creation?
Parts of the book alternate between reveries by Obomi and the life in New York City shared by roommates Donald Hogan and Norman House. House is “Afram”, African-American, and has astutely used his race and his native intelligence to gain himself a powerful role inside GT. That means he will be on the ground while GT moves operations to Beninia – that is, of course, if Norman can shake his deep feelings of melancholia and dissatisfaction with his life and his career. Hogan, meanwhile, seems innocent since he spends most of his days at the New York Public Library. But in fact Hogan is a “Dilettanti”, a spy recruited by the government because of his preternatural skills at discovering patterns in seemingly normal experiences. Hogan is passive until “activated” by the government, and he worries about that aspect of his life.
Until he actually is activated and sent to Socialist Asian country of Yatakang, where the government has announced how eminent geneticist Dr. Sugaiguntung has invented a way for everybody around the world to give birth to perfect children. But is their assertion true, or it just a lie on top of all the other lies circulating in this complex world? Can Donald prove the Yatakang government’s announcement is a lie? Can he persuade the people of Yatakang to support the leader of a guerilla rebellion which is happening in the country’s mountains?
Shades of ol' Fidel
*Whew.* There’s so much there just in the plot. I’m sure you can see the pulpy outlines of a Le Carre style spy novel, as well as chances for Swiftian social satire in both storylines I’ve described, and yet all that description barely scratches the surface of this most profoundly wild novel. Because underpinning this entire book is a deeper critique of world society, a society full of selfishness and cheap thrills and tawdry media which creates false reality in its shows.
Most damningly, Brunner presents a world in which people seem constantly interconnected and yet somehow deeply distant from each other. Hogan and House, for instance, despite being roommates, scarcely know anything about each other. The media consumed by the people in this world prevents them from being social, and that gap has vast societal consequences. When people can literally project fictionalized versions of themselves on fantasy television shows, what attraction does the real world have? Drugs are all pervasive. Suburbs are collapsing. The planet is groaning from the weight of all the people living upon it. Yet the vast majority of men and women in this world care much more about the shows they consume than they do about the world they have created.
And there’s so much more here. There’s Shalmaneser, the super computer which makes critical decisions on Earth (wonder if Brunner heard about Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001 ideas?). There’s the muckers, a group of random people who go on killing sprees for no reason. There’s a drug which forces people to tell the truth which is given to a bishop who spends a Sunday mass telling everyone his real feelings about God. I could go on and on, and dear reader, I know I’m skipping one of your favorite elements of this book.
But I grow filled with a bit of despair that I could do an adequate job of explaining any element of this book; even more, I despair at the idea a mere plot summary would be useful to anybody who might be considering reading this astounding book.
So let me sum my feelings up this way. Like many of us here at the Journey, I’ve long been a fan of Mr. Brunner’s writing. But Stand on Zanzibar takes all of John Brunner’s writing abilities and takes them to a quantum level. He displayed massive potential in many of his earlier works, but here Brunner shows that potential paid off in spades.
No matter the context, on first read, Stand on Zanzibar Brunner has delivered the wildest, weirdest, most successful book of the year so far. Previously I called Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage the best book I had read in 1968 up to that point. Brunner’s achievement far exceeds Panshin's. I hope to be rereading this book in that far-flung future of 2010 and seeing how many of Brunner’s prophecies came true.
Five stars.
[And new to the Galactoscope, we are pleased to introduce poet and author Tonya R. Moore, who has dived into New Wave's deep end with her first brush with Chip Delany….]
Nova was my first encounter with the work of Samuel R. Delaney who has, thus far, proven himself exemplary of the originality and innovativeness one would expect from the current New Wave of Science Fiction writers. Set in a distant future where humans have migrated to other worlds, this book paints a chaotic but beautiful picture of human turmoil and adventurousness in an ever expanding universe.
Lorq Von Ray is a born upstart from a family of nouveau-riche propelled into high society by their ill-gotten gains. He makes friends and, eventually, enemies with Prince and Ruby, quintessential Earth-nobility driven by power, greed, and a keen sense of self-entitlement.
Von Ray grew up haunted by constant reminders of the social stratum wedging a vast chasm between himself and the siblings. Ever ambitious, Von Ray pits wills and wits against Prince and Ruby, aiming to upset the economic balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.
Further embittered by their twisted and broken friendship, he sets out, with dogged determination, to hit the motherlode of interstellar treasures in the form of illyrion, the ephemeral byproduct of a nova and the most valuable and potent energy source known to mankind.
Should Von Ray succeed in this second attempt to capture this precious material in abundance from the nova, his payload promises to transform the economy of the Pleiades system and upend Prince’s monopoly on interstellar travel technology which allows them to hoard most of the wealth and stratify the balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.
This book introduces a motley cast of characters who are destined to be enmeshed in the many dangers and high drama that comes along with being employed by Von Ray.
Mouse, for example, is a nomadic troubadour eking out a meager living while playing interplanetary hopscotch in the Draco system. He winds up on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, while seeking employment on one of the spaceships bound for other star systems and greater opportunities.
Here, Mouse encounters Lorq Von Ray, scion of the richest family in the Pleiades system and jumps at the opportunity to join the ragtag crew of cyborg studs on Von Ray’s spaceship bound for the heart of an exploding star.
Ruby Red and Prince don’t appreciate Von Ray’s intent to rise above a station they consider beneath them, not to mention shift humanity’s prosperity from Draco to the Pleiades system. A cargo hold filled with seven tons of illyrion would certainly help him achieve that.
Mouse and his syrynx, a musical instrument that conjures holographic imagery, bear witness to the changing times while the melodrama of a twisted love triangle unfolds among Von Ray, the selectively diffident Ruby Red, and the pridefully neurotic Prince.
The gypsy troubadour playing his syrynx is a recurring motif representing the backdrop humanity's culture and history against which the story unfolds. The syrynx, a stolen object, ironically foreshadows the climax of the story where it is once again stolen then turned into a weapon.
Delany’s command of astrophysics and the science behind supernovas is reasonably solid. He proves himself a master of using literary language to describe scientific concepts and the murky dynamics of human interpersonal entanglements but there are elements of Nova that make little sense.
Ruby Red’s complicity with Prince’s cruelty and neurotic behavior seems arbitrary, for instance. As a character, she seems to lack a will of her own. Despite her prominence in the story, we’re never given a real glimpse inside the mind of the woman. What does Ruby Red want? Why does she do the things that she does?
Ultimately, Nova is a beautifully chaotic and original tale rife with vivid, sometimes visceral prose, exuberant dialogue, and an intriguingly colorful cast of characters.
Our longest, hottest summer began early with the shooting of Bobby Kennedy. It heated up to the sound of Soviet bullets and tank treads in Czechoslovakia and reached a crescendo with the fiasco of a Democratic Convention in Chicago, shuddering in synchronicity with the quake in eastern Iran that killed 10,000. Meanwhile, radioactive rain from the French H-bomb test soaks Japan, Pete Seeger's daughter, Mika, has been in a Mexico City jail for two months (for participating in anti-police protests), and the 82 crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo are still locked up in North Korea (for participating in unauthorized offshore fishing exercises).
But, hey, thanks to the war in Vietnam, unemployment is at its lowest rate since Korea. And America has a new Queen, Miss Judith Ford, formerly Queen of Illinois.
Her "subjects" demonstrated a properly American sentiment toward the coronation. Spurred by a collective called the New York Radical Women, several hundred protesters tossed "beauty" accoutrements into the "freedom trash can": bras, girdles, high-heeled shoes, fake eyelashes, etc. So there was a bright spot, of sorts.
I wouldn't sent a knight out on a dog like this…
I apologize for coming off sour. It's not just the season. I've got a humdinger of a virus, and the latest issue of Galaxy is only making me feel worse.
by Douglas Chaffee
The Villains from Vega IV, by E. J. Gold and H. L. Gold
by Jack Gaughan
Fred Pohl, editor for Galaxy, likes to talk about how Gold, the founding editor for the magazine, was legendarily zealous with his red pen. Not a single story made it through the slush pile (or any other) without looking like it had been through a Prussian duel. Now, one could argue that there was merit to this approach: much of vintage Galaxy is superlative.
However, when Gold first submitted a story for an anthology Pohl was putting together, Fred could not help taking delight in a bit of revenge. He contrived to mark everything, even innocuous conjunctions and prepositions. When it was done, there was more red than black and white. The dedication this must have taken!
Reportedly, Gold called Pohl up, and said something to the effect of, "Fred, you're the editor, and I'll defer to your judgment, of course, but…Jesus!"
In any event, it couldn't be this story to which Fred was referring since Villains was co-written by both Gold and his son, Eugene (but not, as I initially thought from the initials, his wife, Evelyn). It's the silly story of Robert E. Li, President of Vega IV, who comes to Earth to find his young bride, who has run off to be in pictures. Andytec, a diffident young android, is dispatched to accompany him as bodyguard and detective.
There are some interesting concepts, like the Vegan tradition of 36 year olds marrying 18 year olds, who themselves find new partners upon reaching 36. At 54, one is then free to marry whomever one likes. And there's the Bird of Perdition, a chimerical creature biologically rooted into the heads of former criminals (including, surprisingly, the Vegan President). Semi-intelligent, they spout Poe-derivative prose when alarmed.
But all in all, the story is not funny enough, nor does it break enough ground (indeed, it feels vaguely like a washed out A Specter is Haunting Texas) to sustain its novelet length. One good bit, however:
"Turn that bloody thing off!" he shouted at me.
"Off, sir?" I said vacantly. "You can change channels and make it louder, but you can't turn it off. With the 3V off, what would there be to do? And it would be so lonely."
Things look up a bit, as they always do, with Niven's latest. An L.A. cop is trying to decode the recent rash of murders and suicides, all spontaneous, few logically motivated. The timing suggests a connection with Crosstime, the company that just began producing vehicles that can transit parallel time tracks. In addition to bringing back marvels from other histories—worlds where the Confederacy won the Civil War, or where the planet has been bombed into searing radioactivity—it has also discovered a philosophical crisis. If everything that could ever be does exist somewhen, does anything you do really matter?
And would you kill/die to find out?
As usual, the value of the tale is in Niven's crisp telling. I particularly liked the revelation that the world our detective inhabits is not our Earth. There's not quite enough to the story to make it truly memorable. It's more of an idea-piece (or, per the author, an anti-idea piece; he doesn't buy the idea of parallel universes, nor does he appreciate their implications. This is the ad absurdum extension of the concept.)
Of course, I think there is a middle ground: probabilities do exist. Just because there are two options doesn't mean their chance of occurring is 50/50. Or as I tell folks, if I flip a coin, it's 50% likely it comes up heads or tails. But it's 100% likely the coin falls down rather than up.
So while there may be an infinity of universes, it would seem they would all remain confined to the possible, and the preponderance tend toward the probable. I could also see timelines sort of merging back together if they were close enough.
Anyway, a good story, and thought-provoking. Four stars.
Thyre Planet, by Kris Neville
by Dan Adkins
One day, an alien race called the Thyres all, suddenly, disappeared. They left behind an inhabitable world and a working, planetary teleportation booth grid. Of course, humans jumped at the chance to settle the planet.
The hitch: each use of the booth has an infinitesimal but non-zero chance of killing the traveler. Hundreds die each year. A Terran scientist is dispatched to solve the problem. Convinced it is tied to some abstruse physical law, he secures billions in funding to crash-start a Manhattan Project to rewrite cosmic law. The endeavor takes on a life of its own, ultimately eclipsing the original problem. Said problem remains unresolved until the end, and it turns out to be caused by something completely different.
I found this a deeply frustrating story. Is it a satire of scientific institutions? A cautionary tale advising us to look for simple explanations before complex ones? A screed against hasty colonization? it all muddles together without a satisfactory payoff. Maybe I read it wrong.
Two stars.
Homespinner, by Jack Wodhams
by Joe Wehrle, Jr.
Boy, this was a hard one to rate. It's about a fellow who lives in a future where houses can be done up in a day, rooms completely redecorated as quickly as one might, today, swap out a picture on the wall. Said fellow is annoyed that his wife keeps changing his home on a weekly basis. All he wants is some consistency in his life. Indeed, you can't help wondering why the couple are together at all, so incompatible they seem. The husband also seems awfully sexist, expecting his wife to stay at home and do virtually nothing but greet him cheerfully after work.
Of course, you'll figure out what's up with their relationship before it's revealed, and that bit is reasonably clever. The problem is, the getting there is repetitive and unpleasant. I get why, but I feel a more skilled author could have put it together better.
For some reason, however, I appreciate it enough to give it three stars.
Criminal in Utopia, by Mack Reynolds
by Brand
In yet another story exploring "People's Capitalism", the American welfare state of the 1980s, a citizen embarks on a crime spree to improve his lot. After all, in a system where everyone is supposed to be equal, the only way to get ahead is to cheat.
The question is: in an economy where income is strictly tied to each person, and all transactions are electronicized and trackable, can a person get more than he deserves?
As usual for Reynolds, a mildly diverting story and some very interesting technologies. Three stars.
For Your Information: The Orbit of Explorer-1, by Willy Ley
Despite the sexy subject matter (I dig space stuff), this piece on…well…the orbit of Explorer-1…is pretty dull stuff. I think Ley's heart just isn't in these articles very often anymore.
Three stars.
I Bring You Hands, by Colin Kapp
by Virgil Finlay
A rather amoral fellow is a Hands merchant. These are tape-programmable, robotic hands that can do a physical task an infinite number of times. Perfect for replacing assembly line workers, tailors, cooks, you name it. Along the way, the salesman has an affair with one of the workers whose job he causes to be roboticized. The end is not a pleasant one for the Hands dealer.
I had a lot of hopes for this story. I thought it was going to make some sort of statement about mechanization, the ensuing unemployment, and how society adapts to change. Instead, it was all thrown away for a cheap, obvious, macabre finish.
Two stars.
A Visit to Cleveland General, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc
by Jack Gaughan
Two brothers were in an air-car accident. Just one emerged. So why does Albin have trouble distinguishing himself from the deceased Deon? Why does he need to take a pill every morning "for memory"? And what are those aerosols Miss Kling, the nurse at Cleveland General, keeps spraying to affect everyone's mood and recollection? Particularly in surgery, where body parts are shuffled into various people, muddling the identifies of donor and recipient?
Visit is a decent enough piece, thematically and literally, though you'll guess what's going on very quickly. Scientifically, it makes no lick of sense.
Three stars.
The Warbots, by Larry S. Todd
by Todd
You'd think I would be quite keen on a fictional history of legged assault vehicles. This one, however, is both too goofy and far too long to scratch that itch.
My first thought upon reaching this final piece was, "Oh, great—a Chris Anvil epistolary story."
And that thought was justified.
It's about how a prospector on New Venus discovers that eating the raw stomach of a desert rat allows the consumer to digest water from grass, but the proud scientific community doesn't like the way the research is done and impedes progress. All of the scientists are made of straw, you see.
I was surprised not to find this in Analog—I guess sometimes things are too lousy even for Campbell. On the other hand, Campbell gets the credit for tainting Anvil so that he's now worthless wherever he publishes.
One star.
Dimmer than a thousand squibs
2.4 stars. Not only is that dismal, but recall that an issue of Galaxy is half-again as long as a normal mag.
There's a reason I paused for breath halfway to tear through The Weathermonger (and that is a good read!) Anyway, all things pass, and summer's only got five days left to it. Surely next season will see an improvement, yes?
You don't have to be a sociologist to realize that the past few years have been one of cultural upheaval. The hippies, the struggle for civil rights, protests against the war in Vietnam; I could go on and on.
An example happened one week ago, when hundreds of women protested at the Miss America pageant. They asked to be treated as human beings, not as stereotyped images of artificial standards of beauty.
Members of the emerging Women's Liberation movement toss things like stiletto heels, makeup, and copies of Playboy magazine into a symbolic garbage can.
A recurring theme of these social changes is the desire for freedom. It can even be seen in popular culture. For nearly a month, for example, the number one song in the USA has been People Got to be Free by the Rascals.
They seem very serious about it.
This is a laudable goal, of course, and there's a long way to go before we can truly say that oppressed groups are liberated. An optimist might say we're halfway there.
Speaking of halfway . . .
Four of One, Half an Octad of the Other
I've been griping for quite a while about Fantastic filling its pages with reprints, along with one or two new stories per issue. Maybe somebody at the magazine heard me. Of the eight stories in the latest issue, only half are reprinted. That's progress!
Cover art by Frank R. Paul.
You can see the cover screaming New at you. Ironically, the cover art is old. It served as the back cover of the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.
As you can see, they reversed it, covered up a pretty big part of it, and just generally made it look worse.
Did I say halfway? The four new stories take up somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the magazine. They're all clustered together at the front.
The Sound of Space, by Ross Rocklynne
A spaceman returns from a two-year voyage to Alpha Centauri. He shows up at Triton, a moon of Neptune, where his fiancée is waiting for him.
Illustration by Jeff Jones.
She's upset because he hasn't aged at all. (This is supposedly an effect of weightlessness, which seems unlikely to me.) She also doesn't like the fact that space travelers are notorious for being irreligious. She takes him to church, and tells him that she's going to marry the pastor unless he goes back to Earth and ages in its gravity. The spaceman comes up with a wild scheme to show the woman and the pastor what deep space is really like.
The premise of gravity being the cause of aging isn't exactly plausible, to say the least. The story is written in an odd style, with verbal quirks. The woman inserts a fair amount of French into her speech. People often talk in flowery language that doesn't sound like anything anybody would really say. Folks are often referred to as Sir So-and-So (such as Sir Preacher); the spaceman even calls mortality Sir Death.
As an example of the care with which the magazine is put together, the cover and the table of contents call this yarn The Dragons of Tesla (note the change in spelling.)
Anyway, this is the latest in a series of science lessons disguised as fiction featuring the clever Ensign De Ruyter. In this tale, he and his captain explore the planet Telsa (not Tesla). It's hot and has an atmosphere without oxygen. There are a huge number of dangerous reptilian predators around.
(Herds of hundreds and hundreds of predators? That seems unlikely, given the typical predator-to-prey ratio you'd expect.)
After wiping out a whole bunch of the beasts with their ray guns, the unlucky pair run out of the energy that powers their weapons. They go hide in a cave, which just happens to have exactly the stuff that De Ruyter needs to save the day.
As I may have suggested above, the plot depends on a pretty outrageous coincidence. (Gosh, the cave has a pool of liquid rubidium and an object that's shaped like a shallow bowl! Just what we need to play Mister Wizard!)
It's not a big secret that K. M. O'Donnell is actually Barry Malzberg, the magazine's new assistant editor. He's had a few New Wave stories published here and there.
This epistolary tale relates the misadventures of a sort of social psychologist, for lack of a better term, among aliens. He goes through a ritual, not understanding what's going on, leading to a bizarre climax.
I've supplied a pretty bad synopsis, because it's not easy to figure out what's going on. The nature of the so-called Oaten, for example, is particularly puzzling. Then there's that ending . . .
I really don't know what to make of this thing.
Two stars.
Where Is Mrs. Malcolmn?, by Susan A. Lewin
The magazine proudly announces that this is a first publication. That's not always a good sign. In another example of careful editing, the table of contents spells the character's name Malcolm, which looks more normal to me. The text makes it clear that it's really the less likely Malcolmn.
Uncredited photograph, one of three accompanying the story that pretty much all show the same thing.
A woman recovering from a heart attack investigates what she thinks is a water tower that appears out of nowhere. If you've ever read any science fiction before, you'll know exactly what happens.
There's not really much to say about this extremely predictable first story. Was it written just to go with the photographs? Lots of room for improvement, I suppose.
One star.
So much for new stuff. On to the reprints.
Lords of the Underworld, by L. Taylor Hansen
The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this yarn.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
Three guys are fooling around in the California desert, doing archeological stuff. One of them very casually mentions that he's built a time machine. The main character (the other two disappear from the story quickly) sends himself back thousands of years.
Illustration by St. John also.
This leads to a rip-roaring adventure, as the hero defeats an evil empire nearly by himself. There's a beautiful princess to help him, a sinister cultist to destroy, vampire bats, a saber-toothed tiger, and, yes, a dinosaur. Lots of stuff goes on.
It's all nonsense, of course. There are some nice descriptions, but the whole thing is pretty darn goofy. The open-ended conclusion suggests a sequel, but I don't think there was one.
Two stars.
Between Two Worlds, by Milton Lesser
The December 1955 issue of the magazine is the source of this fantasy story.
Cover art by Edward Valigursky.
A meek fellow has dreams about being Jason from mythology. Of course, he really is living as the legendary hero. He falls in love with the warrior maiden Atalanta, fights with Hercules, wins the golden fleece, and so forth. If you've seen the nifty movie Jason and the Argonauts, you know what to expect. There's a surprise ending that's not surprising.
Illustration by Louis Priscilla.
This piece comes from a brief, odd period in the history of Fantastic when it was dedicated to wish fulfillment stories. Or, as you can tell from the cover, male fantasies. It's not as openly voyeuristic as the other stories seem to be, judging by their descriptions, although Atalanta is stark naked at one point.
As a retelling of an old story, it's OK. Otherwise, there's not much to it.
Two stars.
Bandits of Time, by Ray Cummings
This wild and wooly adventure comes from the December 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Rod Ruth.
A mysterious fellow approaches a reporter and his blind girlfriend. He promises them a wonderful life if they'll meet him at a certain place in the middle of the night. He also says he'll restore the woman's sight.
Illustration by Ruth as well.
Understandably, the reporter is suspicious. He takes his girlfriend home and shows up at the designated place with a fellow newsman, hoping for a big story. Instead, he discovers that the woman has been kidnapped. She and the two reporters are sent two million years into the future.
The weird man who approached them has a mad scheme to set up his own private empire in a distant future when humanity has devolved to a primitive state. He takes along male criminals from all periods of history, as well as kidnapped women to mate with them.
Can the two heroes escape being executed by the insane dictator? Will the woman regain her sight? Will the seductive would-be empress prove to be an enemy or a friend?
Two time travel yarns from 1941, both of them full of nonstop action. This one isn't quite as wacky as the first one, although there's a revelation about the madman's identity that comes out of nowhere.
Two stars.
The Monument, by Henry Slesar
We finish up with a mood piece from the July 1956 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Ed Valigursky.
A small group of tourists are on a spaceship headed for the Moon. A couple of them complain a lot. The captain opens the observation window to show them something.
Illustration by William Llewellyn.
The plot is very simple. The story accomplishes what it sets out to do. Maybe that's enough.
Three stars.
Half Empty or Half Full?
Either I'm in a bad mood or this was a very weak issue. Maybe I should have given out some three star ratings to some of the stories, maybe not. My time might have been better spent making a sandwich.
A full loaf of diet bread counts as half a loaf of regular bread, doesn't it?
I have been spending a lot of time lately at the Institut Français, both for their interesting lectures and films, and because they have a comfortable reading room which is handy for the universities and museums. This means I have been perusing more than a few copies of the comic magazine Pilote when I’m in town for a lecture.
While Pilote, edited by René Goscinny of Asterix fame, has an excellent variety of styles and artists from Francophone Europe, it’s very rare for it to venture into science fiction.
However, this seems to be changing, with the introduction late last year of a new series, written by Pierre Christin and drawn by Jean-Claude Mézières: Valérian, Agent Spatio-Temporel. Although possibly it ought to be called Valérian et Laureline, for reasons I’ll explain below. So far we’ve had one complete story and one nearly-completed: Les Mauvais Rêves (Bad Dreams) serialised from 9 November 1967 to 15 February 1968, and La Cité des Eaux Mouvants (The City of the Shifting Waters), which began on 25 July this year and is clearly moving towards a climax.
There's robots. Did I mention the robots? Les Mauvais Rêves is more loosely sketched, in all senses of the word, than its sequel. The story takes place in the year 2720, when the instantaneous teleportation of matter through time and space has been achieved. The result is that that the inhabitants of Galaxity, the planet-spanning empire, have no need to work, except for a small cadre of bureaucrats and agents who are mostly charged with protecting society from time-traveling pirates and scouting for new resources on distant worlds. Everyone else entertains themselves through dreaming.
When people start having nightmares, it transpires that the former head of the dream service, Xombul, has sabotaged the dream computers and fled to medieval France in the year 1000. Agent Valérian pursues him there, where he finds that Xombul is disgusted by humanity’s softness and addiction to dreams. Having learned a set of spells from a medieval magician that will turn humans into monsters and make them follow him blindly (this is, shall we say, not a historically accurate representation of eleventh-century France), Xombul plans to return to the future and take over as emperor of Galaxity. With the aid of a local young woman, Laureline, Valérian must thwart his plans.
Valerian and Laureline enjoying the benefits of the leisure society.
In the second story, Xombul escapes from custody and flees again into the past, but this time, more cleverly, he has gone into the “Forbidden Zone” of 1986. We learn that the explosion of a hydrogen bomb in that year led to a four-century-long dark age on Earth, which the spatio-temporal agents are not supposed to visit. Valérian and Laureline, the latter of whom has now become a fully-fledged space-time agent, pursue him, of course, to a flooded mid-Eighties New York ruled by looter gang leader and free jazz enthusiast Sun Rae, but what Xombul is doing with his army of robots in the former UN headquarters remains a mystery so far.
Sun Rae in apocalyptic New York.
The series as it currently stands shows a lot of promise. Unusually for a European comic, Galaxity is populated by people of all ethnicities who are represented without caricaturing or stereotypes: the same is also true of 1986 New York. There’s an explicit nod to the emerging sub-genre of African and African-American SF and fantasy in the character of Sun Rae, who is based on jazz musician and SF creator Sun Ra. He is portrayed as a shrewd political leader, who is possibly the only one in New York to have realised that the most valuable thing in the city is not the jewels and precious metals, but information and scientific knowledge.
The treatment of women is also exceptional: while there are only two women with speaking roles in the story, and while Laureline does tend to wear figure-hugging costumes, she is never a passive or helpless victim, and so far she has rescued Valérian from danger more times than he has rescued her. The relationship between the two, while affectionate, is also clearly professional, hence why I suggested that they might be regarded as co-protagonists rather than the male agent taking the most prominent position.
Laureline serving dinner with a soupçon of sarcasm.
There are also some interesting hints at the way in which the story might develop. Galaxity is plainly not the utopia it claims to be, if most of the population are simply dreaming their lives away: totalitarian though Xombul is, one can see why he finds it so frustrating. It also appears to be governed by small, petty bureaucrats with whom it’s difficult to sympathise. We have not seen any aliens so far, and one wonders if this is a universe with only humans, or if their absence hints at something darker. I’m not quite sure what to make of the apparently unproblematic existence of magic in the story, where medieval France is apparently full of wizards and monsters: whether it’s a confusing mixture of genres or a clever, New Wave, challenging of what we interpret as science.
The story also has a pleasing wit, for instance a rather delightful sequence in La Cité des Eaux Mouvants where Laureline explains how she got from Brasilia, where she arrived in the past, to New York, where her lighthearted narrative of borrowing a plane from the President and hiding it in the suburbs, is belied by the cartoon panels showing her stealing the craft and crashing it into a barn.
Sun Rae's first appearance…
So far, the most problematic aspect is the variable character art. While Mézières’ landscapes and cityscapes are beautifully rendered, whether a luxury pleasure-garden on Venus or an apocalyptic New York bleakly studded with advertisements, the characters are strange, often grotesque, and change shape from panel to panel. Sun Rae, for instance, gains a bewildering amount of weight between his first and second appearance in the comic. The writing, also, seems on firmer footing in the second story than the first, with Les Mauvaises Rêves involving a lot of plot conveniences and contrivances.
…and Sun Rae's second appearance.
Despite this, I certainly plan to keep following the series, and I hope an English translation will soon be forthcoming, to bring it to a wider international audience. Comics aren’t just for kids, and Valérian shows how the graphic medium can be used to build a sprawling spatio-temporal SF epic.
[With Takumi Shibano the first Trans-Pacific guest of honor at a Worldcon (Baycon, this year), it is appropriate that we at long last present our first Japanese correspondent: science fiction fan and jazz enthusiast, Yo Aoyama!]
by Yo Aoyama
Hello! Yo Aoyama here: 26 and a lifelong resident of Japan. As a lover of music, novels and movies, I am honored to be able to participate in this journey from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
When Gideon told me about his fanzine the last time he and his wife were in Japan, I knew I had to join the Journey. Japanese movies and science fiction have already been featured many times, but now you've got a home-grown correspondent to tell you the latest information about Japanese science fiction movies, novels, comics, and more!
The rice field near my home.
It is relatively recently that the genre of science fiction has been recognized in Japan, but it has been booming in recent years. "UchūJin ("Cosmic Dust")" by Takumi Shibano, mentioned in Alison's article last month, was launched in 1957, and "SF Magazine" was launched by Hayakawa Shobo in 1959. At first, "SF Magazine" mainly introduced overseas works, but since 1961, they have held contests for new writers in Japan and have been discovering many talents. In 1963, the Japanese Science Fiction Writers Club was also established, and now science fiction is becoming a major genre in Japan.
For this installment, I want to tell you about The Girl Who Leapt Through Time from the short collection of the same name released in March last year by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who was selected as an honorable mention in the second SF contest and is also active in publishing a fanzine himself.
The cover for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
When you think of time travel, what works come to mind? Wells' Time Machine? Or is it the hit movie Planet of the Apes that came out earlier this year? Unlike those workers, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was initially announced as a children's literature for junior high and high school students, but adults are beginning to realize its charm, and it is a work everyone on the Journey should know about!
The star of this work is Kazuko Yoshiyama, a girl in her third year of junior high school (9th grade). One day, while cleaning the science room with two of her classmates, the scent of lavender drifting from the laboratory test tube causes her to faint. Three days later, Kazuko discovers her ability to jump through time after almost being hit by a truck, finding herself exactly 24 hours before the incident. How did she gain this power? How is it related to the scent of lavender? And if it is all the result of a suspicious experiment, who is responsible? Moreover, how does it connect to the string of mysterious events happening around her, including a terrific local earthquake. Initially confused by the ability she has suddenly gained, she is determined to solve the mystery by making full use of it.
"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" blends many genres beyond science fiction: romance, mystery, children's literature, but the charm of this work is that deep knowledge of (and utilization of the elements in) the science fiction genre. This is largely conveyed through the character of Fukushima-sensei, Kazuo's science teacher.
Fukushima-sensei describes himself as "a person who collects and researches mysterious phenomena…not a scientist, but a researcher, just recording what happened as it is." Interestingly, when describing the phenomenon, he references a David Lang, who suddenly disappeared in front of his wife, two children and two friends, as described in the book, "Mysteries of the Supernatural", by Frank Edwards, published in Japanese by Hayakawa Publishing in 1963. Clearly Fukushima-sensei (and Leapt author Tsutsui) have a firm grounding in both contemporary science fiction and 'weird' books.
"Mysteries of the Supernatural—BUT THAT HAPPENED!"
In this way, Fukushima-sensei plays a commentary role while also moving the story along by hinting at the true nature of Kazuko's mystery. He explains the phenomenon using the terms "teleportation" and "timeleap". I have not seen the word "timeleap" elsewhere, and it is likely a sort of author-coined 'Japanglish'. Compared to the common term "time travel", it is a perfect expression for the events of this work, which mainly involve travel in short periods of time without using tools such as time machines.
"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" is published as the 5th book in the ten-volume "Junior SF" series published by the Tsuru Shobo company, many of which I have read. These 'children's books' have a charm that is anything but childish. Science fiction is no longer just for adults. And with books like these, the boys and girls who read them will be inspired to one day create a reality that mirrors the stories they read in their youth.
"May you live in interesting times" is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse, even though the proverb is completely unknown in China.
But be that as it may, we are certainly living in very interesting times, because it has been a long, hot summer of protests and violence here in Europe as well as abroad. Whether in Paris, Prague, Zurich, Rome, Warsaw, Bonn or West Berlin, whether on the western or eastern side of the iron curtain, it seems as if every single day there is another protest, another riot and the violent response of the authorities in the news.
The massive protests against West Germany's new emergency powers act did not just attract university students. Here we have a group of priests protesting the new law.Former concentration camp prisoners donned their old prisoner uniforms to protest the West German emergency measures act. A similar law was abused in the 1930s and paved Hitler's way to power.Soviet tanks crush protests in Prague, CzecheslovakiaMassive protests in Paris on May 1.Student protesters clash with the police in Paris.A burned out bus during students protests in Mexico City.A sit-in in Zurich where protesters took over an empty department store.
Burning Streets and Sappy Songs
Maybe the fact that this has been such a violent year is the reason why the pop songs dominating the West German charts are so extremely saccharine. Songs by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones regularly hit the West German charts, but the breakout star of 1968 in West Germany is a young Dutch singer known as Heintje (real name Hein Simons) who just celebrated his thirteenth birthday last month.
Now young Heintje has a beautiful voice – at least for now, because puberty will eventually hit. However, the songs he is made to sing are painfully saccharine. His breakout hit was "Mama", a song that's already thirty years old and was originally written for Beniamino Gigli. His follow-up "Du sollst nicht weinen" (You shall not cry), a version of "La Golondrina", a Mexican song that is already more than a hundred years old, is currently topping the West German charts. And Heintje (or rather his manager) have even more plans. A new song called "Oma so lieb" (Grandma so kind) is coming out soon and Heintje will also appear in the movie Zum Teufel mit der Penne (To Hell With School).
Meanwhile, enjoy this performance of his breakout hit "Mama":
Escape at the Newsstand
While some are seeking escape from the violence on the news in sappy pop songs, others head for the spinner rack at their local newsstand to peruse the offerings and lose themselves in fantastic worlds.
A typical West German newsstand.Another example of a typical West German newsstand.
I've written before about the so-called “Heftromane”, digest-sized 64-page fiction magazines sold at newsstands, gas stations, grocery stores and wherever magazines are sold. West German newsstands carry a bewildering array of "Heftromane" in variety of genres. Westerns, crime novels, war novels and romance novels with subgenres such as aristocratic romance, Alpine romance and medical romance are still the most popular, but there are also a number of science fiction series to be found.
The State of the United Galactic Empire
The eight hundred pound gorilla of West German science fiction is still Perry Rhodan. The series launched in September 1961 and is still going strong seven years later. In fact, I just picked up issue No. 366 today.
Perry Rhodan's own Solar Empire and the Great Empire of Perry's Arkonian allies joined forces to form the United Galactic Empire. However, this new Empire continues to be beset by crises from within and without. And so Perry Rhodan and friends have been travelling to distant galaxies and also tangling with time cops.
A major internal crisis facing the United Galactic Empire was the revolt of the planet Plophos. Under the rule of the tyrannical Iratio Hondro, the Plophosians managed to shoot down Perry Rhodan's flagship Crest, imprisoned the crew and tried to poison them. However, Perry Rhodan managed to escape with the aid of Mory Abro, daughter of a Plophosian opposition leader.
Perry Rhodan's future wife Mory Abro is caught in the embrace of a bug-eyed monster on Jonny Bruck's cover for issue 186.
Initially, Mory and Perry disliked each other intensely, but during their perilous flight they fell in love. Eventually, Perry Rhodan and Mory Abro were married and had twins, a girl named Suzan Betty and a boy named Michael Reginald. So Perry Rhodan finally found some happiness after losing his first wife Thora all the way back in issue 78.
Since Perry Rhodan and most of his supporting cast are near immortal due to their cellular activators, time moves fast in the series and so the twins are already adults in the current issues. Suzan Betty studied mathematics, founded a chain of banks and eventually married the brilliant but scatterbrained scientist Geoffry Abel Waringer, initially against her parents' wishes.
Suzan Betty Rhodan poses with Gucky the telepathic Mousebeaver and Gucky's son Jumpy on the cover of issue 302.
Unlike his sister, Michael Reginald Rhodan chafed against finding himself in the shadow of his father. He ran away from home several times as a boy and finally left for good at age twenty-four. Fascinated by the French Revolution, he took the name Roi Danton, started dressing in eighteenth century garb for reasons best known to himself and joined the Free Traders, eventually rising to their king.
Michael Reginald Rhodan a.k.a. Roi Danton displays his rather unusual sense of style on the cover of issue 300.
Since the death of Thora, Perry Rhodan was sorely lacking in regular female characters, so Mory Abro and Suzan Betty Rhodan are welcome additions to the series. Even more welcome would be women authors, for the writing staff of Perry Rhodan is still all male. Which is a massive oversight, especially since West Germany does have female science fiction writers such as Lore Matthaey, prolific writer, translator and editor of the Utopia Zukunftsroman series, or the writer behind the pseudonym Garry McDunn, who I have on good authority is actually a woman.
Perry Rhodan's Rivals
Success breeds imitators and so other "Heftroman" publishers launched their own science fiction series, all inspired by Perry Rhodan and all inevitably starring square-jawed spacemen.
I already wrote about Ren Dhark, the Martin Kelter publishing company's foray into the science fiction genre. The brainchild of Perry Rhodan writer Kurt Brand, the saga about Terran colonists who crash-landed on the planet Hope is still going strong two years later. By now, the Terrans and their leader Ren Dhark have found not only traces of intelligent aliens they've named the Mysterious (because no one knows what they look like) but also a giant spaceship called Point of Interrogation. Ren Dhark and his crew repaired and launched the Point of Interrogation and are currently searching for both the Mysterious and Earth, which Ren Dhark, who was born in space aboard the colony ship Galaxis, has never seen.
Ren Dhark is enjoyable enough and has gradually also established its own identity as more than just a Perry Rhodan copy. The mystery behind the mysterious Mysterious is certainly compelling, though I hope the resolution, when it eventually comes, lives up to the mystery.
In November 1966, Bastei Verlag entered the science fiction arena with Rex Corda – Der Retter der Erde (Rex Corda – Saviour of the Earth). The brainchild of West German science fiction author H.G. Francis (real name Hans Gerhard Franciskowsky), the series finds Earth first near destroyed in a nuclear war and then caught in the middle of an intergalactic conflict between the Laktones and the Orathones, which has lasted for millennia. The titular characters Rex Corda is a US senator who tries to save the Earth from getting destroyed by the two warring factions.
The cover for the first issue of Rex Corda.
Rex Corda is a lot more political than either Perry Rhodan or Ren Dhark and the parallels to the war in Vietnam are more than obvious. Maybe this is why Rex Corda only lasted for thirty-eight issues, ending last year.
Don't worry, the attractive woman Rex Corda is protecting from an intergalactic petrodactyl is his sister.
The End of Utopia
After the cancellation of Rex Corda, H.G. Francis and his writing team launched a new science fiction series in the pages of the long-running science fiction anthology series Utopia Zukunfsroman.
Ad Astra – Chet Morrows Weg zu den Sternen (Ad Astra – Chet Morrow's Way to the Stars) started last year. The series is set in a solar system not unlike what could be found in the pages of pulp magazines like Planet Stories twenty years ago. Chet Morrow serves as an ensign aboard the interplanetary spaceship Dyna-Carrier, which is beset by saboteurs. After unmasking the saboteurs, Chet Morrow is promoted to Second Lieutenant and has many adventures around the solar system, while finding traces of alien visitors. Eventually, Chet Morrow becomes commander of the interstellar spaceship Sword of Terra and heads the first expedition to Alpha Centauri, which not only turns out to be inhabited, but also houses a human colony consisting of the descendants of ancient Romans who were abducted by aliens.
The cover for the first Ad Astra novel "Sabotage at the Dyna-Carrier" looks very much like a Perry Rhodan cover.
Ad Astra was certainly thrilling, and indeed the quality of the two H.G. Francis science fiction series Rex Corda and Ad Astra was higher than the average Perry Rhodan clone. Alas, Ad Astra was prematurely cut short, when Utopia Zukunftsroman was cancelled earlier this year after fifteen years. Worse, Ad Astra ended on a down note with the Earth and much of the solar system seemingly destroyed by a rogue comet.
Utopia Zukunftsroman may be history, but its competitor Terra Science Fiction is still being published, though the anthology series was rebranded as Terra Nova this year. The publisher Zauberkreis Verlag also entered the science fiction anthology market with Zauberkreis SF two years ago.
The final issue of Utopia Zukunftsroman featured a German translation of "Objectif Tamax" by French science fiction author Peter Randa.
But even if the West German "Heftroman" market does not look too promising for any science fiction series not named Perry Rhodan, a very interesting series in another genre just launched.
Things Get Spooky
Silber-Krimi (Silver Mystery) is a long-running crime fiction anthology series which started in 1952. Over the years, several recurring sleuths popped up in the pages of Silber-Krimi, the best known of them FBI Agent Jeff Conter and the crime-solving Butler Parker. But while the crimes in Silber-Krimi may occasionally seem far-fetched, they are still happening in our world.
This changed with issue 747 in July, when the regular Silber-Krimi bore the subtitle "Silber Grusel Krimi – Ein Roman für starke Nerven" (Silver Spooky Mystery – a novel for readers with strong nerves). Intrigued, I picked up the issue and was treated to "Das Grauen schleicht durch Bonnards Haus" (Horror creeps through Bonnard's house) by the appropriately named Dan Shocker.
After a spooky opening with a young man being pursued by beings unknown, the novel introduces us to Larry Brent, an FBI agent on holiday in France. FBI agents are popular protagonists in West German crime fiction, likely due to the enormous success of the "Heftroman" series G-Man Jerry Cotton.
However, it's very much a busman's holiday for Larry Brent, for no sooner has he arrived in France than he finds a body, completely drained of blood. Regular readers of spooky stories will find this quite ominous. And indeed, Larry Brent is attacked by a bona fide vampire soon thereafter. He vows to stop the bloodsucking fiend and finds that he is not the only one who is investigating the vampire killings. No, an agent of a mysterious organisation named PSA (short for Psychoanalytische Spezialabteilung, i.e. Psychoanalytic Special Unit) is also on the case. The story ends with the vampires vanquished and Larry Brent becoming on agent of the PSA himself.
"Das Grauen schleicht durch Bonnards Haus" is a satisfying horror novel, though the author clearly has no idea what psychoanalysis is and that it has nothing to do with investigating paranormal phenomena and everything with Sigmund Freud. Nonetheless, the novel proved popular enough that Larry Brent is getting a second outing this month.
But who is the author behind the outlandish pseudonym Dan Shocker? Well, it turns out that he is Jürgen Grasmück. Though only twenty-eight years old and using a wheelchair since his teens, Grasmück has already had a lengthy career. He started writing science fiction novels at sixteen and was a staff writer on both Ad Astra and Rex Corda. Grasmück tended to include horror elements into his science fiction novels and has clearly found his calling with the Larry Brent novels.
Quo Vadis, Heftroman?
Even though Perry Rhodan continues to be popular, other science fiction series have had a hard time in the West German "Heftroman" market. Will we eventually see another challenger to Perry Rhodan arise or was Ad Astra the last attempt to establish an ongoing science fiction series?
Meanwhile, occult investigator Larry Brent is an intriguing new character to arrive in the pages of the rather staid Silber-Krimi. Will his adventures continue, or will Larry Brent's second case also be his last?
After eight days of the GOP and then the Democratic conventions, it was sure nice to go to a place where everyone was normal…at least, per our definition of normal.
Worldcon exploded in attendance last year, in part thanks to the influence of Star Trek, and it shows no sign of fading. Nearly 1500 people came to the Claremont Hotel in placid, undramatic Berkeley, California for a weekend of fan interaction.
Anne McCaffrey, Leigh Brackett, Blanche Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson. From Fanac
There was an auction: Philip José Farmer got $210 for his Esperanto translation of Tarzan of the Apes while Kelly Freas got $160 for his painting, "The Royal Road"—the second highest art price in Worldcon history.
Most Humorous: Cory Seidman as a bottle of Cor(rection) Flu(id). From Fanac
Contemporaneous with the Baycon was a Medieval event held by the Society for Creative Anachronism. This Bay Area organization has a lot of cross-over with the science fiction community, with a lot of fen sporting Middle Ages alter egos.
Aiding the…otherworldly attitude of the convention was the infusion of mind-altering substances. While at Nycon, there was some partaking of grass, Baycon marked the arrival of magic little pills from Los Angeles sold at 50¢ a pop. Everyone was trying them, including Philip K. Dick. Supposedly, they were filled with THC—turns out it was actually PCP! This tidbit courtesy of Ted White.
I'm not sorry Lord got the top spot, though reviews have been more mixed of Zelazny's work than of Delany's. As for the others, Thorns was a bit too unpleasant for me, though Vic Silverwolf liked it, The Butterfly Kid was fine…as a bit of Greenwich Village fanfiction, and the less said about Chthon, the better.
This is one of the worst years for alignment between The Galactic Stars and the Hugos. Let's hope future history looks to us for guidance rather than Worldcon voters.
Here, we end up in much closer alignment between Stars and Hugos. I am quite surprised that "Damnation" ended up here; I can only assume Zelazy has knee-jerk support from his fans. Also, "Purple Wage", while Victoria Silverwolf loved it, she did not love it enough to nominate it for the Star…and neither did anyone else.
What a divergence here! Only Leiber made the Stars list (and there was debate behind the scenes on that one), although the Dick made it as an Honorable Mention. Still, it's nice to see Norton on the ballot, even if that's not the work I would have chosen as her best from 1967 (Moon of Three Rings)
Last year, we had, what? Seven entries to choose from? Only having three short story nominees (for comparison, the Stars had thirteen just in the Novelet category) really does the field a disservice.
As for the choices, well, Harlan's story is certainly memorable, and we've no complaints about the Gomorrah. There's nothing wrong with "The Jigsaw Man", but it's not one of the best stories of 1967. Indeed, per Larry, it wasn't even a final draft. He wanted to polish it before sending it on to a magazine, but Harlan, soliciting stories for Dangerous Visions, said he'd liked it raw.
If there's one thing the Hugos show, though, it's that Ellison has an outsized influence on the Hugo nominators. Nearly half of the sub-novel nominees came from DV, and two more pieces were penned by the man (and see below…).
"Harlan's ego grew three sizes that day…"
Best Dramatic Presentation
Winner: Star Trek – “The City on the Edge of Forever” [Desilu] Directed by Joseph Pevney; Written (sort of) by Harlan Ellison
Nominees
Star Trek – “The Trouble with Tribbles” [Desilu] Directed by Joseph Pevney; Written by David Gerrold
Star Trek – “Mirror, Mirror” [Desilu] Directed by Marc Daniels; Written by Jerome Bixby
Star Trek – “The Doomsday Machine” [Desilu] Directed by Marc Daniels; Written by Norman Spinrad
Star Trek – “Amok Time” [Desilu] Directed by Joseph Pevney; Written by Theodore Sturgeon
Talk about outsized influence! Last year, there was a lot of worry in the community that Trek wouldn't win since there were five nominees, three of which were Trek episodes. The concern was that the Trek vote would get split such that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Fahrenheit 451 would win.
No such trouble this year! City would not have been my top choice, however. It wasn't even in the top five for me. I'd have picked Doomsday Machine as it is both stellarly SFnal and quite good. Mirror, Mirror is even better, but it requires a knowledge of Trek to fully appreciate, whereas Spinrad's script does not.
I do appreciate all the big SF names in this line-up. Trek really is our show.
This is, with the exception of the addition of F&SF, an exact duplicate of last year's slate. IF seems to be floating on inertia since last year marked the beginning of its decline. On the other hand, 1967 was a pretty middlin' year for mags anyway, so I suppose any pick is a fair one.
I'm not sure why Jack won–he's not bad, but he's easily my least favorite of this group (Schoenherr is my favorite, but Freas, being #2, tries harder–there are whole issues of Analog that only have his art in them!)
Frazetta does't do magazines, but he does do a lot of high profile book covers. Gray Morrow's work is always consistent, always pretty good. I'm surprised not to see Virgil Finlay here, but I suppose his comeback didn't start until later last year.
Best Fanzine
Winner: Amra ed. by George H. Scithers
Nominees
Australian Science Fiction Review ed. by John Bangsund Lighthouse ed. by Terry Carr Yandro ed. by Robert Coulson and Juanita Coulson Odd ed. by Raymond D. Fisher Psychotic ed. by Richard E. Geis
Sadly, Lighthouse is no more (though its final issue had an hysterical piece by Ellison, the last word in Adam & Eve stories). Yandro remains consistent, and a good source of Trek news. I like ASFR when I can get a copy.
Offhand, I'm not familiar with the rest. I do note the conspicuous absence of Galactic Journey…again!
I'm quite excited about this list. Ted, of course, is a polarizing figure, but he's never boring. He is also quite friendly to fellow fen, even if he is now also a "filthy pro", and we have had a long and enjoyable correspondence for years.
Ruth Berman, of course, is both a superfan AND a big Trek booster. She practically wrote Inside Star Trek. We became acquainted this year, and she is a delight.
Harry Warner has been around since the dawn of time, and I always look forward to his FAPA (Fantasy Amateur Press Association, natch) contribution (Horizon). He lives in Hagerstown, not far from my mother-in-law. I should visit him someday…
Best Fan Artist
Winner: George Barr
Nominees
Bjo Trimble
Johnny Chambers
Steve Stiles
Arthur “ATom” Thomson
Barr, in addition to being a prolific cover artist, does the comic "Broken Sword", which appears in the fanzine, Trumpet. I've seen Trimble's art in various zines, clean and cute lineart. Johnny Chambers does the 'zine Ymir, Steve Stiles' work appeared in Cry of the Nameless (which just got revived!), and you probably know UK artist ATom from Hyphen.
Where next?
One of the most important items of business at any Worldcon is the determination of where the next Worldcon will be held. The one bid I'd heard advanced as an alternative to St. Louis was Columbus, Ohio. In the end, St. Louis trounced Columbus 393 to 5 (with a few votes going to such places as Tel Aviv, Leningrad, and Deer Knuckles, British Columbia, etc.—maybe year after next).
Incidentally, it was also decided that Worldcons would happen overseas every fifth year. For those waiting eagerly for a West Berlin convention (unless you want Berlin, Maryland), it'll be a while.
Anyway, we already have a Guest of Honor for '69: artist Jack Gaughan. Fan Guest of Honor will be Ted White. Two fan/pros. Interesting.
Hope to see you there, but if you can't make it, remember that a supporting membership is just $2 (enjoy it while you can—they're gonna vote to raise it to an outrageous $3 next year…)
Back in April, I reported on the early days of the “Prague Spring,” First Secretary Alexander Dubček’s effort to reform Czechoslovakian communism and create “socialism with a human face.” Dubček managed to keep his plans afloat through the spring and much of the summer, but—as anyone who has been following the news is aware—the Soviet bear has flexed its claws and put an end to ideas of openness and freedom of speech. But not without creating a few cracks in the Warsaw Pact.
A Soviet armored vehicle comes to a fiery end.
The first sign of trouble came in June. Military maneuvers by Warsaw Pact forces took place in Czechoslovakia as scheduled, but Soviet troops were slow to leave the country after the conclusion. A number of communist leaders visited Prague over the course of a week in early August; some, like East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht and Hungary’s János Kádár, probably trying to bring Dubček to heel, while Yugoslavia’s Tito and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu were no doubt more encouraging. Ceaușescu certainly was, since he signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Czechoslovakia and has loudly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the last few days.
It’s not clear what straw broke the camel’s back, though the announcement that Czechoslovakia was considering loans from the World Bank might have accelerated things. In any case, at 11:00 PM on August 20th Warsaw Pact forces rolled across the border in numbers not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. Dubček and other reformist leaders were arrested, and the Soviets tried to install a puppet government, but the people of Czechoslovakia weren’t having it. On the 22nd, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia met hastily and elected a new central committee and presidium, which then unanimously re-elected Dubček as First Secretary.
Somewhat more peaceful resistance.
The invasion triggered protests around the world, even by some Communist parties in western and neutral countries. In Czechoslovakia, although the military was never ordered to oppose Warsaw Pact forces, the invaders have been met with protests and violence. Alas, it was not enough. The arrested leaders signed an agreement to roll back their reforms on the 26th, and after returning to Prague on the 27th, Dubček gave a tearful radio address, asking Czechoslovakians to end their resistance as well as for their forgiveness for his surrender. As I write, that is where things stand, and like Hungary a dozen years ago, Czechoslovakia has been brought back into the fold.
Lost in the fog
A couple of the protagonists in this month’s IF spend their stories wandering in a daze. Unfortunately, the far less successful of the tales takes up nearly a third of the magazine and feels like a lot more, overwhelming an otherwise decent issue.
Scientists on Mars make an unexpected find. Art by Chaffee
A group of scientists investigate an ancient Martian temple and discover that the jeweled eyes of the sculptures contain moving holographic images. Meanwhile one of their number, linguist Rimkin, suffers a severe mental breakdown.
Art by Gaughan
Normally, I’d complain about the idea of an ancient Martian temple, but Delany’s writing is just so gorgeous I don’t care. He also has the skill to keep the viewpoint entirely with a man slowly losing his mind, keep the story coherent and include a discussion of information storage that ties the whole thing together. Not his best work, but still excellent.
Four stars.
Report on Japanese Science Fiction, by Takumi Shibano
Top Japanese fan Takumi Shibano (for more on him see last month’s article by my colleague Alison Scott) tells us about the state of science fiction in Japan. The first half of the article offers a brief history of the genre in Japan, from the inter-war years to today; the second half is a run-down of the authors in the field today and the sort of things they write. The history is very good, while the second half is a bit dry. But maybe something in there will catch a publisher’s eye and prompt a translation or two.
A high three stars.
Deathchild, by Sterling Lanier
A baby named Joseph is the ultimate weapon; anyone who comes into unprotected contact with him dies horribly. Is he enough to keep a surging communist China from conquering all of Asia and bring them to the negotiation table?
Feeding time. Art by Virgil Finlay
After a slow start under John Campbell’s tutelage, Lanier seems to have come into his own as an author. There’s certainly some good writing here, however it’s too long. Worse, the concept behind Project Inside Straight is utterly absurd. The quality of the line-by-line writing is just enough to keep the story’s head above water.
Three propped-up stars.
Paddlewheel on the Styx, by Lohr Miller
From the title, I was expecting something in the mode of John Kendrick Bangs or Riverworld. Instead, we have the tale of an attempt to rescue a crashed spaceship on the shore of a river of molten metal on Mercury. It’s beautifully poetic, but it falters a bit right at the end. I will forgive the lapse, though, because this month’s new author is very new indeed: he won’t be 14 until sometime in November. This is very well done for someone so young, and I hope we see more from master Miller in the future.
A solid three stars.
The Proxy Intelligence, by A.E. van Vogt
Space vampires and some nonsense about intelligence. ‘Nuff said.
The head vampire meets the scientist and his beautiful daughter. Art by Gaughan
This unasked-for sequel to Asylum (Astounding, May 1942) is a confused mess. The protagonist wanders through the story in a daze due to his exposure a vastly superior intelligence, but unlike with Delany’s story the reader comes away knowing even less than the “hero.” In desperation, I tracked down the original story. While it did clarify who all the characters are, I can’t say it helped otherwise.
Barely two stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, del Rey looks at what is coming to be known as materials science, the study of improving the materials we use to make things and developing entirely new ones. He covers a wide variety of topics, such as building materials that can be eaten in a pinch, metals that dampen impacts, materials that can be induced to return to a given shape, and many more ideas. This was all inspired by The New Materials by David Fishlock, which he makes sound very interesting indeed. But then, this is a field I’ve long had something of an interest in.
Four stars for me, maybe slightly less if your interests are different.
Dom Priego is a university student doing a hitch in the military. His unit is tasked with boarding an enemy spaceship carrying a matter transmitter and keeping them from sending through a huge mass of men and equipment.
Dom fights his way through the enemy ship. Art by Adkins
On the surface, Harrison has given us an entertaining space opera, but underneath it is the philosophical question of why we fight. Overall, this is very well done, but I think it’s the wrong length. Either the combat scenes need to be tightened up, reducing the story by a couple of pages, or it needs to be a lot longer, so we can get to know Dom better, say some stuff from before he signed up and why he did so.
In this sequel to The Mother Ship, more aliens come to Earth. First some blue lizards who leave behind some mysterious missile-like objects, followed by the Siggies, who everybody likes. Earth people start picking up aspects of the alien culture, and then things start to go wrong.
Siggie religion features quaint rituals. Art by Brand
I liked this one a bit more than the first story. Maybe that’s because I have an easier time accepting the underlying premise. In any case, it’s a pithy tale dealing with both religion and the effects of colonization.
Three stars.
Summing up
This could have been a pretty good issue. All but one story are average to very good. Even the low score for “Deathchild” is mostly due to the highly unbelievable premise; up until that is revealed, it’s a good read. But then there’s van Vogt. A “complete novel condensation in a special section” it says on the cover. As I said, if it’s condensed, they took out too much. As for the special section, the magazine is the same length it always is; the story just squats right in the middle like some sort of unpleasant toad. Can we please go back to serials?
Three out of the four have potential, but I’d rather have the whole Zelazny.
![[September 22, 1968] Pageantry and Picket Signs](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/59724995ab6cf.image_.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 20, 1968] It comes and goes (October 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/680920cover.jpg?resize=651%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 18, 1968] Dangerous Visions (Not Those Dangerous Visions!) (September 1968 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/680920books.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 16, 1968] Siriusly? (October 1968 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/680910cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 14, 1968] Half a Loaf is Better Than None (October 1968 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/coverREDUCED.jpg?resize=427%2C295&ssl=1)
![[September 12, 1968] I’ll See You In My Dreams: Valérian, Agent Spatio-Temporel](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-04-at-13.23.11.png?resize=672%2C366&ssl=1)
![[September 10, 1968] Across time and space… (<i>The Girl Who Leapt Through Time</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/680916cover.jpeg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 6, 1968] Adventures for a Dime: Science Fiction and Horror Dime Novels in West Germany](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/UTOPIA_SF_568.jpg?resize=349%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 4, 1968] Open your Golden Gate (Baycon: Worldcon 1968)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/680904program.jpeg?resize=500%2C261&ssl=1)
![[September 2, 1968] What might have been (October 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IF-1968-10-Cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Scientists on Mars make an unexpected find. Art by Chaffee
Art by Gaughan
Feeding time. Art by Virgil Finlay
The head vampire meets the scientist and his beautiful daughter. Art by Gaughan
Dom fights his way through the enemy ship. Art by Adkins
Siggie religion features quaint rituals. Art by Brand
Three out of the four have potential, but I’d rather have the whole Zelazny.