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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 16, 1969] Holiday haul (Black Corridor and the December Galactoscope)

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We have a fine sextet of science fiction books for you this month: largely readable, with two clunkers and one superior read…

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

Ace Double 66160

Earthrim, by Nick Kamin

Cover of the book Earthrim. It shows two scary faceless puppet heads with wires and mechanical eyes attached. Text on the cover says: The man who stopped the wars must be stopped in turn!
by Panos Koutrouboussis

A generation or two from now, the Earth is recovering from a devastating war between the Western World and the Chinasian alliance. At first, the latter was winning, surging into Australia and with a plan to cross the Bering Strait. Then things bogged down. Eschewing the use of nuclear weapons (for an unexplained reason), the death rate became fantastic.

One day, the war just stopped. Or, more specifically, someone stopped them. Sounds like a positive development, but whoever did it is now exerting dictatorial control over the globe, futzing with governments, economies, even population growth rates and somehow slowing the age of human maturity!

Now, a decade after the war, Michael Standard, a battered veteran of the Australian front, is the one man who can stop the war-stopper. He is equipped with a prosthetic arm which is set to fire its hand like a cannon when face to face with the entity who styles himself "The Rim".

In many ways, Earthrim is a conventional action yarn, not too different from the series hero paperbacks like the new "Executioner" series. Standard is an irascible brute who lurches from fight to fight, surviving by animal cunning and will to live. The world Nick Kamin (a new author) creates is not particularly visionary. There is one lady character, and she is a prostitute, existing for the sole purpose of 1) being Standard's lover, and 2) getting Standard to Rim.

But Kamin does some interesting stuff. He begins the story with a compelling hook: Standard is put under to have his prosthetic arm's shoulder put back into its socket, which brings a hapless doctor into the plot. Then we get scenes from Standard's past, woven in quite deftly, making his character more interesting and his personality a bit more palatable (though how he acts like a moron most of the time, but can whip out an erudite observation on topology is a bit strange).

The other characters are actually well drawn, from Jeannine the prostitute to Dr. Graystone. Even the cops on the trail of Standard get decently fleshed out, though their role is somewhat incidental. Kamin is also a compelling author. He's got the modern style down pat, and the lurid mode works well for Ace Doubles.

The biggest problem with the book is the revelation at the end that no character has exercised free will. Everything that happens is ultimately the will of Rim or Condliffe, the fellow who equipped Standard with the arm-gun. The journey is interesting. The writing is good. But the story is a steel lattice that the characters can only inhabit, not change.

Three and a half stars.

Phoenix Ship, by Leigh and Walt Richmond

Cover of the book Phoenix Ship. It shows a space station in the shape of a bicycle wheel, but with many more spokes and colors. There is a row of small spacecraft leaving the station.
by Jack Gaughan

The Richmond husband-and-wife team (supposedly, the wife does the typing, with the husband sending telepathic instructions from his living room easy chair) has another Ace Double for us. Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald (S.T.A.R.) Dustin is an Earther, nephew to an asteroid belt-dwelling rabble-rouser named Trevor Dustin. Stan's dad wants his son to be nothing like his uncle, so he enrolls him in an arctic university for a proper indoctrination…er…education. Said education is most unusual. Stan gets weekly "inoculations" and then is given a series of exams. The questions are highly technical—impossible to answer without years of classes. Yes somehow, unconsciously, Stan seems to have the answers floating in the back of his mind.

Not content to let his hindbrain do the work, Stan spends all of his waking hours studying so that he could pass the tests even without the mysterious, subconscious aid. As a result, after four years, Stan has one of the most remarkable minds in the solar system. He finishes his schooling just in time for his uncle to lead a rebellion against Earth, winning independence for the Belt through a series of brilliant space naval maneuvers.

This makes Stan persona non grata on Earth, whereupon the school's headmaster sneeringly informs Stan that he has been drafted into the Marines, and he will have to report for duty in two weeks as one of Earth's finest. Well, Stan won't stand for that—he skips town, heads to orbit, and then off to the Belt…where he has a date with destiny and a second war with Earth.

Written in a much (much!) more juvenile vein than the Kamin, this is an odd duck of a book. With its cardboard characters, mustache-twirling villains, perfunctory inclusion of a single female (to be the love interest, natch), and its basic plot, it feels like something out of the 30s. On the other hand, the loving detail lavished on things like weightless maneuvers, dealing with explosive decompression, and space station construction are pulled from the current pages of Popular Science. There are tantalizing details on living in the Belt. Most interesting was that virtually all of its denizens are scarred or deformed, testament to the hostile environment, but no less human for it. Anderson and Niven have written about Belters, but the Richmonds have taken the first, if clumsy, steps to flesh out living in the Belt, I think.

The problem is neither Anderson nor Niven wrote this book, and the Richmonds really weren't up to it. The subject matter required twice its length. At the hands of a Heinlein, it could have been a second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As is, it's an occasionally entertaining, but largely turgid and by-the-numbers throwaway.

Two and a half stars.

BW photograph of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses and a surgeon mask.
by Jason Sacks

Lord of the Stars, by Jean and Jeff Sutton

Speaking of husband and wife writing teams…  Lord of the Stars is a new juvenile sf adventure co-created by the husband-and-wife team of Jean and Jeff Sutton. Stars is readable and fun, but lacks the fire and flash of the best juveniles.

Like many juveniles, Stars is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of how a young boy discovers a world around him much more complex and interesting than he ever could have expected. As in many of these types of books, Danny has a destiny to fulfill, and as he learns of his destiny, the boy also learns the creature who had mentored him is evil, and he meets his true friends along the way.

Hmm, it occurs to me there is a lot of familiar archetyping in that description. That archetyping is a big part of the strength and weakness of this book. Because sophisticated readers know basically how a story like this will proceed, we're looking for signposts that indicate a different viewpoint or more complexity – as in the recent Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. But the Suttons aren't after the same level of complexity as Panshin was, and that leaves this book as merely an average juvenile sf yarn.

Cover of the book Lord of the Stars. It shows a gigantic alien creature shaped like an amoeba with one huge eye and five tentacles. Below this image, a primitive human runs through a desert landscape under a pink sky.
Cover by Albert Orbaan

The Suttons center Lord of the Stars around Danny June. As we meet Danny, he's all alone on a mysterious planet. He's been lost on the planet since his parents' colonist ship blew up, wandering the planet with the help of an amazing telepathic octopus-creature named Zandro. Zandro has incredible abilities and is extremely intelligent, guiding our boy in his means to survive the planet, and seeming to groom Danny for a greater fate.

But others want Danny as well. The great Galactic Empire, spanning thousands of stars, is after Danny. In chapter two we are introduced to the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire, led by Sol Houston, who see Danny as the kind of creature who can destroy their empire.

That aspect of the book is dully familiar, but at least the Suttons bring in a bit of playfulness with the names of the Galactic leaders. For reasons lost in the fog of time, the names Sol and Houston are legendary, so the leader of the empire is named Sol Houston. And so on, names explained in fun and clever asides which added to my pleasure with this book.

Similarly, there's an amusing tangent in which a set of Empire bureaucrats try to figure out what they can do to affect the lives of Danny and his friends. The bureaucrats fall into an almost talmudic debate about which regs to follow, which rules can be broken. It's in those moments one can see real-life arguments with governments and school boards made manifest. (Jean Sutton works as a high school teacher while Jeff Sutton works as an aerospace consultant, so both know plenty about bureaucracy).

But the core of the book centers around Danny, his great psychic powers, and the attempts by his friends and allies to break Danny away from Zandro's influence. Along the way, Danny battles the plans of Gultur, Lord of the Stars; communicates psychically in subspace with a group of androids; and makes friends.

All of this is quite fun, since the Suttons bring just the right amount of seriousness to bear with Lord of the Stars. This is also a well-written, crisp little novel — no surprise since Jeff Sutton has written fiction and nonfiction since he left the Marines after the War. Still, Danny comes across as bit of a cipher and the plot machinations are a bit creaky.

Overall, a pleasant novel that's a bit of a throwback but still is worth the read.

Three stars.


by Victoria Silverwolf

The Best Laid Schemes o' Mice an' (Space)Men

Two novels in which interstellar voyages gang agley (with a tip o' the Tam o' Shanter to Bobby Burns) fell into my hands recently.  One is by a Yank, the other by a Brit.  Let's take a look at 'em.

The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd

Cover and back cover of the book The Rakehells of Heaven. The full image is a futuristic skyline of smooth, blue, rounded buildings.
Wraparound cover art by Paul Lehr

Atlanta-born Boyd Bradfield Upchurch writes under the penname listed above.  He's whipped out a couple of previous novels quickly.  The Last Starship from Earth came out last year, and The Pollinators of Eden just a few months ago.

This latest work starts with a psychiatrist interviewing a spaceman who came back from his voyage too early.  More concerning is the fact that it was supposed to be a two-man effort, and his partner isn't with him.

The text quickly shifts to first person narration by the astronaut himself.  His name is John Adams, better known as Jack.  (I'm not sure if his name is supposed to be an allusion to the second President of the United States or not.) He's a Southern boy, just like the author.

His missing buddy is Keven "Red" O'Hara, a stereotypical Irishman who has a toy leprechaun as a good luck charm and wears underwear with green polka dots.  (The latter is actually part of the plot.)

We get quite a bit of background about their days before the spaceflight.  Suffice to say that, after an encounter with an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher and his nubile daughter, Jack gets religion and Red gets the girl.  (He actually marries her but, as we'll see, that hardly ties him down.)

Their mission takes them to a planet in another galaxy.  (There's no real reason the place has to be so far away.  In other ways, this isn't the most realistic space voyage ever to appear in fiction.) The inhabitants are very human in appearance, the main difference being very long, strong legs that are used in about the same way as arms.

The aliens live in a logical, technologically advanced society with no apparent form of government.  Society is made up of what are pretty much universities.  The two Earthmen are welcomed, and even allowed to teach classes.

It should be noted that the locals wear extremely short tunics and nothing else, not even underwear.  This very casual almost-nudity (which really conceals nothing) goes along with the fact that they consider sex to be no big deal, just something they do when they feel like it.  Children often result, of course, and never know who their fathers are.

For Red, this is an opportunity to have relations with as many of the beautiful young women surrounding him as possible.  Jack, on the other hand, wants to convert the natives to Christianity.  That includes dressing modestly, courting the opposite sex chastely, etc.

Can you guess that this is going to backfire?

Complicating matters is the fact that Jack falls in love with one of the aliens.  It seems that Earth doesn't consider extraterrestrials to be human unless they meet a long list of very specific conditions. That includes being able to defend their planet from invaders.  (Obviously this is a cynical ploy on the part of Earthlings to be able to enslave any aliens who are weaker than they are.) In essence, Jack is marrying an animal, legally, unless he can prove they meet all the conditions.

Things reach a climax during the performance of an Eastertime Passion Play, meant to convey the story of Christ's sacrifice to the aliens, who are entirely without religion.  (Red, nominally a Catholic, goes along with Jack's evangelism, mostly because he enjoys putting on shows.)

Yep, that's not going to go at all well either.

This is a satiric novel, not quite openly comic although it's got some farcical elements.  There's also quite a bit of sex.  This may be the only science fiction book I've read with a detailed description of a woman's genitalia. 

The last part of the novel, which goes back to the psychiatrist, has a twist ending that doesn't quite make sense.  Maybe the best way to describe this odd little book is to compare it to an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke.

Three stars.

The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock

Cover of the book The Black Corridor. It shows a mosaic drawing of a human figure holding another human figure in their arms. Distorted faces in a dozen colors loom behind them.
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon

Prolific author and controversial editor Moorcock needs no introduction to Galactic Journeyers.

A fellow named Ryan is aboard a starship heading for a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Barnard's Star.  The trip will take five years, and three have already gone by.  He's the only person awake on the ship.  In hibernation are his wife, their two sons, and other relatives and friends.

(We'll find out, by the way, that a couple of the men have two wives each.  This drastic change in Western European society [everybody is British] is taken for granted, with no discussion.)

Flashbacks take us to a future Earth that is rapidly disintegrating into chaos.  Tribalism rears its ugly head.  Ryan, the manager of a toy company, fires a kindly employee just because the fellow is Welsh.  Things get much, much worse as the book continues.  Ryan and the others hijack the starship in order to escape Earth, which they feel is doomed.

Aboard the ship, Ryan suffers nightmares.  These are often surrealistic.  At times, the text turns into words in all capitals that are placed on the page to form other words.  These typographical tricks contrast strongly with the main parts of the narrative, which use simple language to convey truly horrific happenings.

It's hard for me to say much more about what happens, because Ryan is quite obviously experiencing a mental breakdown.  You can't trust that what you're told is real. 

This is a very dark and disturbing book.  The New Wave narrative technique associated with the nightmares is a little gimmicky, but otherwise the novel is compelling in its portrait of both individuals and society in general falling apart.

(It should be noted that, according to scuttlebutt, many of the scenes set on Earth were written by Hilary Bailey, who is married to Moorcock.  He rewrote that material, and added everything set in space.  The resulting work is credited solely to Moorcock, apparently with Bailey's consent.)

Four stars.

by Brian Collins

Only one book from me this month, and unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's also, for better or worse, a familiar face. John Jakes has been writing at a mile a minute this year, with The Asylum World being what must be his fourth or fifth novel of 1969. Unlike some previous Jakes novels (a couple of which I reviewed), which lean more towards fantasy, this one is very much science fiction. If anything, the changing of genres is for the worse.

The Asylum World, by John Jakes

Cover of the book The Asylum World. Text on the cover says: A mind-blowing science fiction satire of our times. The illustration shows a human figure with a mirror instead of a face. A night landscape is visible in the mirror and behind the human figure.
Cover artist not credited.

The year is 2031, and while mankind still lives on Earth, to an extent, a widespread race war between blacks and whites (I am not kidding) has resulted in not only Earth being split into Westbloc and Eastbloc (obviously a futuristic equivalent of our current cold war with the Soviets), but, I suppose on the bright side, a Noah's Ark of humanity has been established on Mars, where people live in domes, more or less in racial harmony. Sean Cloud is young, brash, and a "subadministrator" of this Martian colony. He's also hopelessly in love Lydia Vebren, who likes Sean but is hesitant due to his mixed racial heritage. Sean is half-black and half-white, is apparently unable to pass as the latter, and Lydia has a prejudice against black men.

There's also another, larger problem: a fleet of alien ships is making its way through the solar system, to Mars, possibly for peace, but also possibly to make war. The Martian colony does not have the armaments to defend itself, so Sean and Lydia are sent to Earth to bargain with the leadership in Westbloc, which itself is on the verge of turning to shambles.

The back cover says The Asylum World is satire, which strikes me as a bit odd, because in my experience satire is supposed to a) be humorous, and b) provide a topic on which the author may try to prove a point. No doubt this novel is Jakes's attempt at providing commentary on the current political climate in the U.S., especially racial strife over the past decade, not to mention that yes, tensions between the Americans and Soviets have resulted in us nearly blowing ourselves to bits at least once already. The problem is that I'm not sure what the hell he is trying to say, other than to make some center-of-the-road statements such as, for example, bemoaning the irrelevance of the family unit in this not-too-far future. There's a general sentiment of "Why can't we just get along and learn to speak honestly with each other?" which is all well and good, but men around my age and younger are dying. Sean's mixed racial heritage, which seems like it should be fodder for symbolic meaning (he is, after all, the offspring of two races, and now he must join Westbloc with Mars), but Jakes does very little with this.

I could continue to berate Jakes's political naivete, and I could also delve into how even at 170 pages this novel spins its wheels a fair bit (it really could have been a novella); but instead I'll focus some on how, despite taking place several decades into our future, The Asylum World strikes me as having been written only in the past year, maybe in the span of a month or two (why not? Michael Moorcock has written novels in a matter of days), and that I do not see how it could remain relevant in say, another ten years. When Sean comes to Earth he spends most of the novel at the "Nixon-Hilton." Sure. There's also the "Statue of the Three Kennedys." The bubbling conflict between Westbloc and Eastbloc is more or less what we are now dealing with, despite the very real possibility that the Soviet Union may not exist in 2031. Or indeed the United States. This seems like a novel written specifically to be published in 1969, so that readers may "get it" while it still gives the impression of being timely—at which point, having finished the novel in a day or two, said readers will toss it aside. At least Jakes is now slightly less at risk of having to beg for money on a street corner.

Two stars. I will surely forget about it.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 12, 1969] A More Liberal Society? (Vision of Tomorrow #4)

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By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

A composite of three theatre posters. Top left: poster for the play Hair, showing a reflected head in yellow chiaroscuro. Top right: poster for the play Love, showing two naked men wrestling and two women raising their arms in bliss. Bottom: poster for the play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, showing four women standing next to each other. Behind them is a drawn face of a woman. The poster advertises actress Maggie Smith in big pink letters. The tagline of the poster says: Out of one Jean Brodie would come a whole generation of Jean Brodies... experimenting with sex, society and everything else. All the way to the right of the poster is a drawing of a man looking at the four women.
Just some of the many brands of sex you can enjoy at your local tobacconist theatre

It seems the final death knell for Capital Punishment in the UK will be sounded soon. There is a vote soon in the House of Lords, widely expected to pass, to make the trial period for the abolition of the death penalty permanent. Over the last few years we have seen a raft of reforms, removing Victorian laws and decriminalizing a number of controversial practices. At the same time, censorship is being removed so you can see nudity on the West End or watch young women discussing sex in the cinema. This would seem to be placing Britain into a more permissive society.

Still frame from a Monty Python scene. It shows a policeman talking to two men who are sitting at a table. They're in a room with blue-and-white tiled walls and a hideous yellow door. Through a window on the wall, a portion of a house of red brick can be seen.
“Sandwiches, blimey! Whatever did I give the wife?” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

But that does not seem to be true in all areas. The crackdown on the use of illicit drugs continues apace, with heavy-handed tactics of the police being widely reported. Meanwhile, the Northern Irish MP Bernadette Devlin is currently appealing against a six-month sentence of “inciting persons unknown to commit the offence of riotous behavior” for encouraging resistance to police during the so-called Battle of the Bogside.

As such, it appears this liberalism has its limits. Actors can get their kit off in front of the public but not smoke cannabis in their own homes. Women can get access to the contraceptive pill and abortions (assuming their GP agrees) but they still cannot get a mortgage without a male guarantor. People from more different backgrounds are becoming MPs but political activity outside of official parameters is still viewed with suspicion.

This sense I have of British society also reflects what I am seeing in Visions of Tomorrow. It seems to be throwing off some of its earlier conservatism but has not become a second New Worlds either. Instead, the contents of this issue would not be out of place in Dangerous Visions.

Vision of Tomorrow #4

Cover of the magazine Vision of Tomorrow. The cover illustration shows a rocket over a rocky landscape. There is a greenish-yellow sky in the background, with a small moon and a huge moon. Text on the cover announces the stories Trojan Horse by E. C. Tubb and Psycho-Land by Philip E. High, plus stories by J. Wodhams, C. Priest, and S. J. Bounds.
Cover illustration by Eddie Jones

Now back on its regular monthly schedule, the editor gives us an incredibly dull introduction, discussing whether SF has become a mainstream genre. No more insight is given than the hundred other editorials on the subject for the past 30 years.

The Ill Wind by Jack Wodhams
Ink illustration of The Ill Wind by Jack Wodhams showing a man in a quarantine suit removing his helmet, causing smell lines to come from him, much to the displeasure of a judge and clerk of the court.
Illustrated by Dick Howett

Gongi Wackerman stinks and has been going through many experiments to see if he can be rid of his noxious odour. However, one such test concludes his scent has a psychedelic effect on people and they want to employ him to help mental patients.

Wodhams is not an author I have particularly enjoyed in the past and this continues that trend. It is so silly and dull, it makes his Undercover Weapon, seem like a work of high literature.

One star, only because I can’t go any lower.

Trojan Horse by E. C. Tubb
Ink illustration of Trojan Horse by E. C. Tubb, showing a naked woman inspecting a naked man in a box
G. Alfo Quinn gives us an illustration that seems more at home in New Worlds

In the future, laws and self-censorship have been abolished. People are free to act on their own choices. Even murder is allowed, but classes are taught to ensure that people are smart with their actions as a means of self-defence.

Marlo French is contacted by Ed Whalen, High Boss of Chicago Chemicals. Whalen’s daughter Naomi has stolen their new compound and is hiding out in the impenetrable Staysafe Apartments. As a discreet freelancer, French is tasked with getting back the pills by any means necessary.

Marlo discovers that Naomi has a penchant for Mannikins, robotic male blow-up dolls, and so proposes to impersonate one in order to get inside her flat.  But this case may not be as simple as he believes.

This is a much darker and more complicated tale than I expected from these pages or Ol’ Edwin. He posits a world without laws or morality but makes it feel real and vivid, not a cardboard cutout for a simple point. The case itself has a great atmosphere and consists of the kind of twists and double-crosses you would expect from hard-boiled detective fiction. I hope we get more exploration of this future, as it is more fascinating to me than Raynolds’ People’s Capitalism or Anderson’s space navy tales. 

I am not sure if he is getting better, or if I am getting more tolerant as I age through my thirties, but I found this to be his second exemplary tale in as many months.

A High Four Stars

Ward 13: A Tale of the first Martian by Sydney J. Bounds
Ink illustration of Ward 13 by Sydney J bounds as a man is held back by two people in the shadows, as he looks at a woman bathed in light.
Illustrated by Dick Howett

In City Seven Hospital, Dr. Kirby is part of a team that collects on scene organ donations before they are stolen by illegal freeze-wagons. One night, on his way home, he finds one of his nurses under attack by a gang. In attempting to rescue her, he is kidnapped and put to a surprising purpose.

I don’t think it was just me grooving to a Zappa record that meant I had trouble concentrating, I found it over-described and dull. Also these kind of panicky stories about organ transplants and population explosions have become so common they already feel more cliched than ray guns and flying saucers.

A moderately interesting twist in the tail keeps it just off the bottom rating.

A Low Two Stars

Breeding Ground by Christopher Priest
Ink illustration of Breeding Ground by Christopher Priest showing a space-suited man walking between a space scene and one filled with small hairy spirals
Illustrated by Dick Howett

Luke Caston, a space salvager, comes across the wreck of the Merchant Princess, a lost ship fabled to carry tons of gems. However, the ship is infested with Space-Mites, three-inch hairy coils that reproduce at an extraordinary rate when they find a source of electrical energy. They also happen to be Caston’s biggest fear.

A reasonable story, reasonably told. Not revolutionary but atmospheric and enjoyable.

Three Stars

Trieste: SF Film Festival by John Carnell

Whilst much of the rest of the SF community were eagerly watching the Apollo 11 mission in July, the New Writings editor John Carnell was attending an SF film festival in Trieste, Italy. The award winners were as follows:

Best Film: The Last Man (France)
Best Actress: Taja Markus – The Time of Roses (Finland)*
Best Actor: Tobias Engel – You Imagine Robinson (France)
Animated Short Film: Cosmic Zoom (Canada)

Others he calls out of note include The Illustrated Man, Mr. Freedom and Windows of Time, whilst pouring scorn on the British entry The Body Stealers and giving a mixed review of an Italian adaptation of The Tunnel Under The World.

An interesting look at films that might otherwise pass us by. I will certainly be keeping my eyes peeled for showings at the BFI.

Four Stars

*Luna fanzine gives the winner as a different actress from the same film, Ritva Vespa.  I have not been able to ascertain which report is accurate.

The Impatient Dreamers 4: Science Fiction Weakly by Walter Gillings
Cover for the magazine Scoops. It shows, in red-and-blue chiaroscuro, a gigantic robot towering over a city's skyscrapers. The text at the top of the cover says: Britain's Only Science Story Weekly. Next to the robot's hand is text that says: The Story Paper of To-morrow. Text at the bottom announces the story Creation's Doom.
Reproduction of a cover from Britain’s short-lived attempt to get into the SF game. Artist unknown.

The recitations of Gillings’ memories of SF yesteryear reaches 1934.  He tells us of the short-lived weekly magazine Scoops, his own early attempts to get an SF magazine off the ground, and serialisations of Burroughs and Conan-Doyle.

By this point you know what to expect from Gillings, and this untold history continues to impress me.

Five Stars

Time-Slip by Eric Harris
Drawn illustration. The words Time Slip appear in big black letters next to the top half of a naked prehistoric man. The bottom of the image has a baby's face looking at the reader with a disturbingly stern expression.
Illustrated by Dick Howett

Constable Paul goes with an Arunta tracker called Nungajiri to try to find a family lost in the outback. Whilst four of the party are found, the baby remains unaccounted for. Even though the rest of the police think he is crazy, Paul and Nungajiri are determined to see if they can bring the child home.

This is a strange kind of tale. It starts of as a standard mystery story and evolves into one involving geometry, nodal-points in the timestream and the concept of Dreamtime. It felt to me like a cross between Picnic at Hanging Rock and an early HP Lovecraft story. One that I am not sure I understood but I am pretty sure I am not supposed to either.

I am afraid I am not particularly familiar with depictions of aboriginal Australians (having never visited the country myself and I have no familiarity with the Arunta religion) and as such I do not feel particularly qualified to comment on it. I will say this felt somewhat cliched to me but not meanspirited, although that is only a personal sense.

A tentative Four Stars, at least until someone with more knowledge than me can fill in the gaps.

Psycho-Land by Philip E. High
Ink illustration for Psycho-Land by Philip E. High showing a man all in shadows walking into a gaggle of angry faces, crashed cars and flames.
Illustrated by Dick Howett

Peter Carton, a sufferer of dementia praecox, has taken control of a machine that makes people in range subject to paranoia and irrational anger. With thirty thousand lives in jeopardy, the government is forced to call on William Charles Hopwood, a noble prize-winning physicist and ardent pacifist, as possibly the only person qualified to both resist the impulses and turn off the machine.

Devices affecting brain waves have become a common feature of SF recently, but this manages to elevate itself above the pack in a few different ways. Firstly, the atmosphere. As it indeed says in the text, High makes a small city seem like an alien world. Secondly, pacificists rarely have an active role in SF stories, so it was fascinating to see how this concept could be used. Finally, the twist in the tail is a good one, I will be thinking about it for some time.

A High Four Stars

Takeover by Harold G. Nye
Drawn illustration. It shows a TV set superimposed over a zoomed-in series of ripples resembling a fingerprint.
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

Charlie Adams is a grumpy hypochondriac who finds himself in the midst of a plan by television sets to destroy humanity.

I am reliably informed this is a pseudonym of Lee Harding, an unprolific but solid writer. As a piece of satire on modern society and religion it is more subjective than most pieces. The silliness didn’t land for me but may appeal more to others.

Two Stars

Prime Order by Peter Cave
Ink illustration of Prime Order by Peter Cave showing a large robot carrying a woman through shallow water in the style of Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Illustrated by Dick Howett

On a routine mining expedition, one of the team caught space fever and then proceeded to murder the crew and destroy the ship. In order to avoid another such incident, Martin Stone at Amalgamated Electronics is asked to design one of the most intelligent and powerful robots ever. It also has one significant difference to all prior models. Asimov’s first law of robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Is replaced with:

The Robot must be able to protect the majority of the party at all or any cost.

The result is Robot R.E.D. 197, who appears to work perfectly in testing. However, when he and a mining crew crash land on an uncharted planet, his logic circuits are pushed to their limit.

At first glance this seems a more traditional tale that would fit snugly into Analog’s pages. However, it is lifted up by the cynicism of the people involved and the darkness of the ending.

A high three stars

Fantasy Review
Ink illustration of white on black showing a spaceman in a tight craft surrounded by a wide array of controls.
Illustration by Jeeves

Ken Slater reviews John Brunner’s Quicksand, which he highly recommends, Peter Weston raves about Larry Niven’s collection Neutron Star and Kathryn Buckley praises Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight (with the caveat of allowances for being a newcomer to novels). Meanwhile, John Foyster has mixed feelings about the contents of Carr & Wollheim’s latest World’s Best SF, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and the multi-authored Conan of Cimmeria, but is full of praise for Harry Warner, Jr.’s All Our Yesterdays.

A New Era?
Ink illustration of Life of the Party showing a man in an RAF bomber jacket walking emerging from a white portal.
Preview illustration by Eddie Jones for next month’s short novel, Life of the Party

So, this marks a slight change of direction for Vision of Tomorrow. Gone are the Kenneth Bulmer swashbucklers—in their place are atmospheric tales of ambiguous morality. The kind of pieces Harlan Ellison would probably be happy with.

Whether this trend continues or reverses into the 70s will probably be a reflection of where British society heads. On the one hand, all the recent court cases and laws on censorship have been on the side of more liberality. On the other, there are prominent voices that decry the current obsession with “pills and pot” in the media.

A black and white promotional photo for Noel Coward's This Happy Breed on BBC2 in 1969. Newspaper photograph announcing the TV show This Happy Breed. It shows a woman in a dress and a hat, looking straight ahead while a man standing behind her is talking.
Last night, BBC2 went with more traditional fare: This Happy Breed to celebrate Noel Coward's 70th Birthday

Anyway, there will be many years ahead to worry about that. For now, I wish you all the joy of the season and, if I don't see you sooner, a happy new year!

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 10, 1969] Night Gallery: A Frightening Tableau

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by Amber Dubin

As we close in on the end of the final year of the 60s, it seems the lengthening nights are seeping into my psyche more than usual. I find myself wishing I were more hopeful for the coming of a new decade, and maybe if I paid less attention to politics or the state of the world I could retain more resistance to the gloomy morale of our divided and unrested country. Thankfully, a timely distraction arose: just think how pleasantly surprised I was to discover that there was to be a diverting new work from Rod Sterling to grace our airwaves November 8, 1969!

I was a step beyond devastated when Twilight Zone left the air, as it remains one of my all-time favorite science fiction pieces to date. To know that Rod Sterling would once again be on my television just before the dawn of a new decade sparked a hope in me that’s just enough to disrupt the gloom I’m feeling at the end of this one.

Title card for the TV series Night Gallery. It shows the words Night Gallery in cursive script over a stylized drawing of cathedral in pale pink.
Rod Serling's "Night Gallery", shown on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies

Given the climate of our cultural atmosphere, however, I am not surprised that although the work that Rod Sterling chose to create is star-studded in cast, it is otherwise physically and emotionally dark. The macabre tone sets in right away as an eerie opening theme tinnily whines from the upper register of a harpsichord. The audience is led down a black and white drawing of a hallway, interrupted regularly by the chalky outlines of featured actors, not unlike how it would feel if one were to walk through a series of taped off crime scenes with final resting places similarly marked in each. This tense opening sequence maintains stress on the audience as the illustration gives way to the darkly enshrouded silhouette of the show’s host and final name featured in the credit sequence, Rod Serling.

Serling returns to the small screen, six years after he left it, in the resolute and deliberate fashion we’ve come to expect from him. Ever our guide through the mysterious and strange, he acts as curator of the mysterious in a black void of a presentation room featuring nothing but three portraits, their faces glamorously shrouded in red velvet curtains. He describes each of these covered works of art as suspended “in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.”

Entering the scene associated with the first painting, "The Cemetery," this description is immediately validated as we are confronted with a room occupied by a once wealthy patriarch, bound both by a wheelchair and the living death that is the cognitive and physical decline of age. The elderly man, Mr. Hendrix, is waited on with care by famed film and TV veteran Ossie Davis (Mr. Ruby Dee), playing the sharply dressed and precise butler Osmond Portifoy. In a heartbreakingly relatable way, the rich and ailing painter is depicted as incapable of speaking, walking, or even holding a paint brush as he barely clings to life in his old-monied estate home. By contrast, we are confronted by his shiftless rapscallion of a nephew downstairs, who we are made to immediately dislike as he twitters about the house, disrespectfully upsetting its previous order and chirping our patient butler’s name in mockery as he puts his cigarettes out on the tray of discarded food he is carrying away from Mr. Hendrix’s room.

Still frame from the TV series Night Gallery. It shows actor Ossie Davis playing the character Portifoy. He's a Black man with a moustache, wearing a suit and tie.
Portifoy is not amused

The obnoxious youth wastes no time in murdering his uncle once he has confirmed his inheritance of his estate, brazenly directing his uncle’s view to the window overlooking the family cemetery so the poor man can ‘view his future residence’ as he is slowly poisoned by the cold air from the purposely opened window that his frail body is unable to withstand. The greedy nephew makes no attempt to hide his disrespectful glee when the man dies, and he rudely directs the responding home-doctor and estate manager to hastily clear away as many traces as possible of the deceased man’s control over his wealthy home. Condescendingly, he allows Butler Portifoy to stay on staff, despite their obvious and open distaste for one another. However, Portifoy finds it almost more curse than blessing that he is allowed to continue to serve the Hendrix Estate under new management.

Just when it appears nothing could stop the young man’s wonton disrespect for all things dignified, his drunken carrying on hitches on a disturbing detail he notices in one of his uncle’s paintings hanging over the hallway stairs. When his uncle is interred in the family cemetery, it appears that the estate painting changes to depict an open grave in the corresponding area of the portrait. At first, he tries to brush off this change as a trick of the light, or his faulty memory, but the more time he spends in the home, the more fixated he becomes on the painting. When his paranoia grows to the point of inducing sleeplessness, he lashes out, ripping it off the wall and throwing it into the fireplace, only to find it back on the wall where it was before. He responds with violence to Portifoy’s insistence that there is nothing wrong with the painting and burns the man, finally breaking the man’s tolerance for his behavior. Portifoy quits on the spot, leaving the younger man to continue swiftly losing his mind alone in this apparently haunted house.

Still frame from the TV series Night Gallery. It shows the character Portifoy talking to a white man in a red smoking jacket.
A rather satisfyingly contentious dynamic

In predictable fashion, the man fares poorly on his own, and he eventually succumbs to the battle with the paranormal forces at play, launching himself off the staircase entangled in the canvas of his dead uncle’s likeness. To my surprise, however, this is not where the story ends, and it appears that the doomed youth was not the only man in the house compelled by greed and willing to play with paranormal forces he did not understand. It's a twist too good to spoil here.

The second story, “Eyes,” features the fascinating combination of a winning performance by storied actress Joan Crawford and the professional debut of a young director named Steven Spielberg. Although it was rumored that this segment’s veteran star was originally reluctant to take a chance working with the inexperienced director, it appears her fears were unfounded. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the direction of this segment was Rod Serling’s best choice of the featured three. From the elevator door closing on Joan’s character’s disgruntled employee as we open the scene, to the acrobatic shots we get from the ceiling looking through chandelier crystals, the cinematography and dynamic story telling are movie-quality.

Still frame from the TV series Night Gallery. It shows a close-up of a hanging glass ornament. In it we can see an upside-down reflection of a man walking down a hallway.
An ambitious shot that inverts the surgeon as he has inverted his moral code.

The story in question revolves around the aging debutant Miss Claudia Menlo, played by Joan Crawford, whose nightmare appears to be the life-long curse of blindness. It seems as if the finery she surrounds herself with and the technology with which she’s been able to make her life self-sufficient has steadily transformed into bars of a gilded cage. She has become so obsessed with the idea of the sight that she has been robbed of, that she interprets it as a cruelty that she must turn into a weapon to settle the score. It is from this space that she discovers an opportunity to right the universal wrong, and she stops at nothing to seize it.

Through the perspective of the conscripted surgeon, we discover that Miss Menlo has bribed, extorted and blackmailed enough professionals and poor slobs to direct a procedure to take place where one man will lose his vision forever to give her but twelve hours of precious sight. It’s clear we are meant to condemn Joan Crawford's character’s actions, and to be sure her victim is pathetic enough to deserve all of one’s compassion, but I cannot help but understand her desperation. Yes, her vanity, decadence and aggressive way of tearing through everything that gets in her way is indefensible, but it’s hard to say if given the same circumstances I wouldn’t make similar choices. As a senescent ice queen of an empty decaying palace, the woman that life has made of her is twisted into an unlovable shape now, but I cannot help but imagine what torture it must have been to live a whole life of such beauty without the ability to see any of it.

No matter how thoroughly we are meant to have shut her out, I cannot help but feel a pang of ache when she screams about color, while decorated in such fine examples of the same. I understand the bad intentions she paved to her own destruction, but when the irony she earned comes to call, I cannot fully say it would have been a doom I could have avoided myself.

Still frame from the TV series Night Gallery. It shows a close-up of a white, red-haired, middle-aged Joan Crawford wearing elegant jewels and screaming in anger.
I am always hesitant to call a woman a nightmare, but when the shoe fits…

The last story for me is the weakest of the three. “Escape Route” features an ex Nazi officer from a concentration camp hiding out in Buenos Aires after the end of World War II. As many men with this description did (do?) in real life, he is haunted by paranoia of being found and held responsible for his cruelty and past actions as he lives a life of poverty and insignificance in a foreign country he does not seem to enjoy any aspect of. I felt like this had the least compelling premise because even if he wasn’t a war criminal, the protagonist seems to be a completely irredeemable, unlikable nightmare. While he is haunted, he appears remorseless and even defensive of his past behavior. It also seems to have turned him into a miserable, belligerent drunk who verbally abuses the only person in his life that knows his secret: his consistently drunk, lady-of-the-night neighbor. Even though she is the only one who seems to tolerate him, she still uses his secret to twist the knife of insults she slings right back at him.

Still frame from the TV series Night Gallery. It shows a man standing outdoors at night, looking in anxiety at whatever could be on the other side of a wire mesh fence.
A well-deserved haunting

One day, in hiding from the detectives attempting to get him to answer for his crimes, he seeks refuge inside a closing museum and is unexpectedly moved by a painting of a fisherman who he hallucinates as having his face. It is here that his personal moment is interrupted by an elderly Jewish man emotionally connecting with another painting that expresses the agony of a holocaust victim. Based on how often he is drunk and/or hallucinating, I am not entirely convinced that the other man, Herr Bleum, isn’t a physical manifestation of the ex-Nazi’s guilty conscience.

In fighting against the web of his own weaving, he predictably hangs himself, using the thread of magic he has discovered in his story to yoke himself to a punishment far worse than any he could have received at the hands of real-life avengers.

Still frame from the TV series Night Gallery. It shows Rod Serling in a suit and tie, talking to the camera. There is a red curtain behind him.
Rod Serling, in all his glory

Whatever unevenness exists in this trio of stories is overwhelmed by the sheer quality of production, and also the joy at having an old master back at the game. The gilded tapestry Rod Serling has woven with The Night Gallery is a welcome masterpiece capable of warming my heart in these cold and dark winter months. The papers say that Serling is uninterested in serialized television work after Twilight Zone, and that these three episodes were a one-off set. However, after turning out such well-crafted, well-acted and well-directed gems as these, I cannot imagine this vignette not inspiring a sequel or two in the coming decade, either penned by Serling or a successor he designates. That hope alone gives me something to look forward to as the curtain draws this year to a close.

5 stars

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Science / Space Race

[December 6, 1969] Here comes the Sun (and Moon) — Orbiting Solar Observatory, Apollo, ESRO, and Explorer 41!

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

With the Apollo missions taking so much of our attention (there were four flights this year), it is understandable that unmanned missions and science have gotten short shrift.  I'm going to try to address this oversight now.

Far out!

Do you remember Pioneer 6 (launched Dec. 16, 1965) and Pioneer 7 (launched Aug. 17, 1966)?  They are deep space probes designed to observe the Sun from widely different vantage points.  In fact, we've been a bit remiss: since '66, two more identical Pioneers have gone up: Pioneer 8 (December 13, 1967) and Pioneer 9 (November 8, 1968).  A fifth and final Pioneer was launched August 27, 1969, but its carrier rocket exploded.  The loss of that one is pretty bad; whereas the others are all spread out fairly equidistantly around the Sun, more or less as far away from it as the Earth, Pioneer "E" was going to be put in an orbit that kept it close to Earth, where it would be used to give as much as a two-week warning of dangerous flare activity.

Nevertheless, NASA is blazing along with four satellites.  Indeed, thanks to the longevity and spread-out positions of Pioneers 6 and 7, they were able to perform an unique experiment.  On Nov. 6, the two satellites were 175 million miles apart on a common line with the Sun, and scientists observed the difference in behavior of solar wind particles due to their passage through space in opposite directions.  In a similar vein, on Dec. 2, when the spacecraft reached points on a common spiral line leading out from the Sun (the star rotates, so it flings out particles in a spiral rather than linear fashion), scientists measured different kinds of solar particles coming from the same events on the Sun.

We'll have to wait for the journals to publish any papers, but this is the kind of large-scale, long-term science made possible by the Pioneer probes!


Another cool example of Pioneer science

Far in!

While the Pioneers study the Sun far from Earth, there are a host of spacecraft monitoring our home star from Earth orbit.  For instance, we haven't talked about the Orbiting Solar Observatories (OSOs) for a while, but there have been six so far.  They were the first heavy satellite series to be launched by NASA, providing nearly continuous coverage of the Sun since 1962, in wavelengths we can't observe from Earth because they are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere: ultraviolet, X-Ray, and gamma ray.

Why was the Sun such an early focus?  Three major reasons: 1) understanding the dangers posed by flares and their relation to the high energy particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field is critical to ensuring astronaut safety, 2) surveying the Sun and comparing changes on the solar surface with fluctuations of space weather near Earth tell us both about the interactions of the two as well as the nature of both, and 3) the Sun is the closest star at hand, and what we learn about the Sun as a star can be applied to the millions of other stars we can observe.

The revelations OSO have given us are not easily conveyed.  It's not like Explorer 1, which discovered the Van Allen Belts—a hitherto unexpected phenomenon—or the TIROS weather satellite, which discovered storms we hadn't even known about.  Rather, they give us a huge body of data with which we can refine our understanding of how the Sun works, and also so that we can better predict space weather.  What's called "basic research."

OSO 1 operated continuously from March-May 1962, and intermittently on to August 1963, returning data on 75 solar flares—most importantly, what events preceded, succeeded, and coincided with them in many different wavelengths, a fingerprint of an eruption, so to speak.


(ground-taken picture of the Sun flaring)

OSO 2 expanded its coverage to the corona, that bright bit of the Sun you can only see during a lunar eclipse.  Its launch was delayed until February 3, 1965 because the original OSO B was damaged in a launch explosion, April 14, 1964, that killed three technicians!  Though OSO 2 returned data for nine months, I can't find a single article on the Sun that stemmed from it.  There's one on about 20 other stars observed by the satellite, though, and the difficulties of seeing through the Sun's glare to them.

OSO 3, the one that launched March 8, 1967, and not the one that failed to orbit in August 1965, was more successful.  It returned interesting solar data, for instance finding solar X-ray sources that weren't flares, determining that the chromosophere (visible surface) didn't necessarily heat up before a flare, and monitoring the change in the solar spectrum over the course of its 28-day rotation.

And the onboard gamma ray experiments told us a lot about the universe.  For instance, the torrent of gamma rays streaming in from the universe is highly confined to the galactic plane, and particularly toward the Milky Way's core, which means it must be galactic in origin.  OSO 3 also observed X-ray bursts from a star (maybe stars) that isn't the Sun: Scorpius X-1, later determined to be a neutron star, and Lupus XR-1 (which may or may not be the same source—the literature is unclear).  The satellite stopped working just last month.

OSO 4 went up October 18, 1967, and was the first OSO to carry an international experiment—a University of Paris device that measures the Sun in the ultraviolet frequency that best shows solar activity ("Lyman-alpha").  Indeed, it was the first OSO to scan the Sun in ultraviolet at all.  Also really cool is that its X-ray resolution is such that it could watch flares in X-ray wavelengths as sharply as we could see it on the ground in the visual spectrum, so scientists could make one to one comparisons.

You'll note the use of past tense—the satellite is still in orbit, but its tape storage failed in May 1968, and last month, OSO 4 was ordered into standby mode.

That brings us to the OSOs we haven't covered yet.  OSO 5 went up on January 22, 1969, and has the ability to scan the Sun in the X-ray range more quickly and thoroughly.  OSO 6 went up August 9.  I don't have too much to say about them because it's too early for papers.  NASA reports both did their jobs fine, and they're still operating.  Like OSO 3 did, they not only study the Sun but also galactic X-ray sources…so stay tuned.

Small satellites are doing their part, too.  For instance, Explorer 41, the latest in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform series, launched June 21 into a high orbit that goes almost halfway to the Moon.  The Sun this satellite examined has been unusually quiet, an expected trait of the "solar maximum"—the time in the Sun's 11-year cycle of highest output.  On the other hand, low-energy galactic cosmic rays rates fluctuated more than usual, and interplanetary conditions appeared to be more disturbed.  The satellite is still operating.

Finally, and only tangentially related to the Sun, there are the missions of Aurorae and Boreas, launched October 3, 1968 and October 10, 1969, respectively under the auspices of the European Space Research Organization (ESRO).  They report on the brightness of Earth's aurorae, the composition and temperature of the ionosphere, and the charged particle environment in orbit.  The first satellite is still working just fine, but Boreas went into a lower than expected orbit, and it reentered on November 23rd.  Still, the mission was deemed successful.

Rocks to dig

Veering back into the manned space program, there was some exciting coverage during the Apollo 12 flight that I didn't have a chance to relate.  As Conrad, Bean, and Gordon finish their three weeks in quarantine (joined on Dec. 2 by 11 scientists and technicians who had accidentally been exposed to lunar samples), this is a good time to talk about what we've learned from Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Walter Cronkite had, as a guest on his programming, Dr. John O' Keefe—a geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Center.  The visibly excited O'Keefe stated that the most extraordinary aspect of the Moon rocks is that they are deficient in nickel and cobalt as compared to the Sun, that latter body presumably being representative of the nebula that originally coalesced and formed our solar system.

Why is that significant?  Well, the Earth's crust is similarly lacking in nickel and cobalt (and other "precious metals" that dissolve easily in iron, collectively called "siderophiles").  We know Earth has a dense iron core because nothing else would account for the planet's mass with respect to its volume, and also, it explains why the planet has a magnetic field.  While our planet was first cooling, it makes sense that the siderophiles melted and mostly sank to the center of the planet.

The Moon has no core—we know this because its density (volume divided by mass) is too low, and it has no appreciable magnetic field.  That the Moon's surface rocks correlate to Earth's surface rocks, and because its density appears to be constant from crust to center, that suggests that the Moon was somehow formed from Earth's crust.  It is, in fact, a piece of our planet's outer surface that somehow spun off into orbit and formed its own little, low-density world.

What causes this is still unknown.  Perhaps the Earth was spinning so fast when it was formed that its middle flew off.  Or maybe a rogue planet smashed into the Earth.  What we do know is that the composition of the Moon rocks puts paid the hypothesis that the Moon formed separately from and at the same time as Earth, since we'd then expect its crust's composition to either be more like that of the Sun, or for our moon to have a dense core.

We also know that whatever created the Moon happened quite early in Earth's history.  The lunar rocks have been dated as 4.6 billion years old.  That's very close to the estimated age of the Earth.  What I found particularly exciting is that the Moon rocks must be the very oldest rocks we've ever encountered, except maybe for meteorites.  That's because erosion and vulcanism are constantly erasing the Earth's surface, and the oldest rocks I know of down here are somewhere around 3 billion years old.

As we continue to explore the cosmos, we shall find more data points with which to create an holistic view of the universe, something that would be impossible were we to stay Earthbound.  I am happy that I live in the Space Age, when our scientific knowledge is expanding exponentially.  Who knows what new discoveries 1970 will bring!

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 4, 1969] "Weed" and Weirdness (July–December 1969 Playboy)

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by Erica Frank

The science fiction haul at Playboy has gotten smaller, although this half-year batch is fairly good.

Cover of Playboy, October 1969 issue.
Playboy's October 1969 cover–the trick with the cord is cute.

Slaves or Masters? by David Rorvik (July)

This is an article about the future of robotics. The word robot comes from the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum´s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek; it's derived from a word that means "worker."

This article gives an overview of the history of robots (dreams of robot workers go back to the Iliad and the "mechanical golden girls" serving Hephaestus), discusses what separates them from mere machines — and goes on to assign them human emotions.

Text from the story, describing a robot on the edge of a "nervous breakdown" before it is repaired.
Machinery does not have "nervous breakdowns," and nervous breakdowns are not fixed by circuit changes.

Robot emotions aside, they are a welcome addition to the labor force, as they can be assigned tasks that are too dangerous or difficult for humans. They can lift heavier objects and be designed to reach into places that human hands cannot. So despite the worries of some fiction, they’re not “stealing human jobs” – they’re reducing human risk and allowing precision that humans can’t get.

However, the author seems to think that, in 15 years or so, we'll have a Jetson's-style Rosie-the-Robot in every household. Three stars; the writing is good and the details are solid, but the conclusions don’t match the data available. Four stars, if you really like robots.

A Breath of Lucifer by R. K. Narayan (July)

Sam the nurse is helping our nameless protagonist recover from eye surgery by being his 24/7 attendant and eyes. He gets paid 8 rupees a day… a little more than one dollar, with which he supports a wife, 8 children, two sisters, and a niece. Sam talks of his past in wartime, on campaigns, but does not mention which war, which locations. Sam integrates himself in family visits and seems oddly jealous of the other nurses, and keeps returning to his story of portraying Lucifer in a play.

Like many Playboy stories, this is pleasant to read and goes nowhere. It is unclear if there are any fantastic elements in this other than Sam's exotic stories. Three stars.

Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? by Robert Sheckley (August)

A middle-class housewife gets a surprise delivery from Stern’s Department Store. She is upset that someone bought her a (boring) vacuum cleaner when she already has one. She plugs it in and it announces its identity and abilities.

Text from the story, describing the future functions of the robot vacuum cleaner
In the future, vacuum cleaners will wash dishes, sew buttons, iron your clothes, and take out the trash.

After removing a stain on her clothing, the vacuum notices Melisande was tense, and gives her a massage with several attachments directed at different muscle groups. She is grateful for the assistance, but concerned about how it feels… “Should it feel so good?” The robot tells her it’s a side effect of the treatment. “Pleasure is sometimes unavoidable in the pursuit of health.” It proceeds to… address her health… at great length.

She demands to know who sent him, and he says he sent himself, that he saw her shopping and fell in love. "And now we have found each other, despite inconceivabilities…. We must make plans."
The ending has a nice twist — Melisande is no man's toy — and I think only the not-quite-declared robot-enhanced orgasm earlier allowed this story to work its way into Playboy, because it doesn’t normally carry much in the way of feminist themes. Four stars.

A woman's legs, her skirt raised high, with a robot vacuum cleaner draping itself lovingly around her.
Illustration by Hy Roth

The Dannold Cheque by Ken W. Purdy (September)

A dealer of antiquities combines “autograph, artifact, photograph” to sell for very high prices. (One piece: a holograph of a 1938 letter by Winston Churchill mentioning a drought; a small clipping of grass from the area, and a photo of the man himself.) He discusses a project with Mr. Dannold: Dannold once chanced to thwart an assassination attempt against the Prime Minister, and has a voided £250,000 cheque to commemorate the event.

He was going to receive the hefty award, but before it got to him, he admitted that he didn’t vote for the prime minister and considered his election an “unmitigated disaster.” The cheque was cancelled before he could reach a bank; it was a worthless novelty he carried for decades before he found the antiques dealer. He sold it for 50,000 francs. (About $10,000 – quite a lot of money, enough to buy several new cars, but nothing compared to the almost $600,000 value of the original!)

This is a fascinating example of a science fiction setting with no science fiction themes at all. A sprinkling of technological terminology is scattered throughout the story; a mention of a painter from 2068… but the story is a bog-standard “sold an interesting curio to a pawn shop” tale. And it was rather difficult to put the timeline of events together, possibly because I kept waiting for something science-fictional other than “this is set in the future.” Two stars.

Alice & Ray & Yesterday's Flowers by Saul Braun (October)

This is the story about the people behind the song Alices’s Restaurant, which shot Arlo Guthrie into fame. Apparently the song takes some artistic license with the story… there weren’t any handcuffs. And the second half of the song – Arlo vs the Draft Board – was pure fiction when the song was written, and did not become fact later, even if parts of it were used as inspiration. The movie takes even more license with the story.

The article here is about life with Alice & Ray in their church-converted-to-a-residence, a hippie haven that sounds very colorful and festive:

The radical activists are the same old noise, but the others are new, and, friends, they are turning. Only from within is it possible even to find them— and to know that are witnessing here is a major turning. While our astronauts fly to the moon, these other pioneers fly to a place of altered perceptions and altered relations, of altered being, of extreme presentness, virtually without past or future.

It’s a nice blend of exposition and contemplation, taking the personal experiences of a handful of people and using it as a showcase of a broader movement and shift in cultural awareness. Three stars.

Pot: A Rational Approach by Joel Fort, MD (October)

On May 19, 1969, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was unconstitutional. Notably, it’s unconstitutional to require people to incriminate themselves, and the MTA did exactly that.

The article makes a strong argument that marijuana should be legalized: that its health benefits are certainly no worse than alcohol, that the penalties for it are often excessive (rape can get a person five years in prison; selling a matchbox of weed can be 50 years), that there is no solid evidence that its use leads to harder drugs, and so on. It’s extensive and well-written, and it will convince nobody but its carefully selected audience of wealthy men who like to think themselves intellectuals. Three stars.

1970 Jazz and Pop Poll (October)

This is provided just for fun; we are long past the deadline for the actual poll. Please avail yourself of a copy of this ballot, complete with a stunning cover page starring Janis Joplin, and discuss your choices with your friends.

Nine Lives by Ursula K. Le Guin (November)

A pair of interstellar miners, after searching and working alone for years, have found their target planet and their support crew arrives – a tenclone of five males, five females, all with the same beautiful bronze body and attractive face and genius mind. Ten identical twins whose entire lives are focused only on each other.

Until a mining accident kills nine of them, and the one who’s left has to try to figure out how to be a person without the only family – the only sense of self – he’s ever known. A fascinating and haunting story that explores the nature of identity and companionship. Five stars.

Five identical androgynous people, tilting to the right.
They’re all John Chow, but they need a way to identify each other. The men were Aleph, Kaph, Yod, Gimel and Samekh; the women Sadhe, Daleth, Zayin, Beth and Resh.

Cordle to Onion to Carrot by Robert Sheckley (December)

Howard Cordle was a milquetoast sort of man who got pushed around a lot, until he met the god Thoth-Hermes (definitely a god, not a hallucination, not a stoned hitchhiker) who told him that “the Stew” (metaphor for all reality) needs both “carrots” (aggressive bullies) and “onions” (passive victims like himself). After a moment of enlightenment, he decides to try his hand at carrothood.

A cartoon depiction of the events in the story

Cordle is polite, friendly, and accommodating – until he faces discrimination because he doesn’t seem high-class enough for whatever venue he is visiting, at which point, Cordle invokes his inner carrot and becomes what is colloquially known as an “obnoxious asshole.” He does wind up with better service this way, but almost drives away the woman he loves, who thought he was not like that. When they are married, he takes his vacations alone.

There is almost no science fiction here, although Sheckley is an accomplished SF writer and the tone and style come through. The story is enjoyable but has no real resolution, with a potential message of “being an asshole can get you what you want; the cost is… being an asshole.” Three stars.

Episode & Postscript by Timothy Leary (December)

This is a memoir, of sorts, recounting some of the events following his & his family’s 1965 arrest for less than an ounce of marijuana. (The ultimate result of this case was the Supreme Court ruling that nullified the MTA.) He begins not by focusing on the legal hassles involved, but on the concept of pleasure vs reward.

A psychedelic-pastel scene of flowers and mushrooms
The first several pages are decorated with flowers and mushrooms. 

He does not denounce the sense of accomplishment that goes with rewards, but wants people to be more in tune with the natural sense of pleasure of just being themselves, not requiring external stimuli and game-systems to feel at peace.

This is an engaging read, although he shows the racism expected of a white man with an elite education: He praises black people for being more in tune with “natural fleshly pleasures.”

His understanding of the laws around psychedelics is interesting, and his accounting of the events make it clear that he believes everyone is playing out their roles, which he intends to disrupt.
In between his philosophical meanderings, he manages to tell the story of his arrest, and how he made the decision to challenge the constitutionality of the marijuana laws rather than accept a plea bargain and get off with a few years of probation. They had a system, you see, and Leary declined to go along with it. He got a 30-year sentence that was put on hold while he challenged the law itself.

Four stars if you have an interest in drug laws or hippie philosophy; three stars otherwise.

I think I'm done reviewing Playboy. They're very expensive for so little science fiction, and I'm not fond of most of the interviews and the humor. I am glad I read this set, though; the Le Guin story was wonderful, and both the Sheckley stories were fun.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 2, 1969] Communication Breakdown (January 1970 IF)

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


by David Levinson

Free press

American readers and those who follow American politics are no doubt well aware of President Nixon’s speech on the “Vietnamization” of the war in Indo-China. All three national networks carried the speech, of course, and followed it up with analysis and commentary. This apparently didn’t sit well with the White House.

On November 13th, Vice President Spiro Agnew addressed a regional Republican committee in Des Moines, Iowa, in which he attacked the networks, accusing them of political bias in their news coverage. He complained that the president’s speech had been subjected to “instant analysis and querulous criticism” without giving the American people time to digest the speech for themselves. Agnew accused “a small and unelected elite” of exerting undue influence on public opinion without any check on their power. He even called it a form of censorship.

Vice President Spiro Agnew addressing the Midwest Regional Republican Committee.

Some television executives accused Agnew of attempting to undermine the freedom of the press and intimidate a form of journalism that requires a government license in order to broadcast. I’d say the intimidation was at least partly successful, since all three networks carried the Vice President's speech. However, the networks are also fighting back. The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes devoted a full hour to rebutting Agnew’s charges.

When asked if anyone in the administration had an advance look at the speech, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler denied it. He also said that the White House would have no reaction to statements by other members of the administration and that Nixon and Agnew had not discussed the speech. That’s nonsense. A speech like this would never be made without approval at the highest levels, and if it had been, the White House would have promptly issued a statement distancing Nixon from the remarks or at least trying to soften them. I’d say the administration has fired a shot across the bows of the news media.

White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler

Seeking common ground

Carrying on the love theme from last month, this month’s IF offers us two romances. But the real focus is on learning to communicate, especially without a common point of reference. It also gives us two sequels to stories from several years ago.

Suggested by “This One”. Art by Gaughan.

Diary Found in the St. Louis Zoo, by Robert Bloch

Bob Bloch gives us his report on the Worldcon, held in St. Louis this year. It’s his typical mix of name-dropping and bad jokes. I generally enjoy Bloch’s fiction (I met him once, and he was very nice), but his humor is just awful. Unlike the delightful and funny drawings by Jack Gaughan that accompany this article. If you want to know what really happened in St. Louis, read the Traveler’s con report. It was timelier and much more informative.

Barely three stars.

A photorealistic portrait of Harlan Ellison. Art by Gaughan

Whipping Star (Part 1 of 4), by Frank Herbert

The ConSentiency is an interstellar society composed of several intelligent species. Among them are the Caleban, a strange people who seem to be only partially in this dimension. Only 84 of them have ever been seen, but they are very important, because they gave the ConSentiency jumpdoors, which allow people to travel vast distances. Now, 83 Caleban have vanished, leaving millions dead in the disappearance of each one.

Enter Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinaire (the Bureau of Sabotage keeps government from becoming too efficient, so that nothing happens without due deliberation). He makes contact with the last Caleban, who calls herself Fanny Mae, and learns that she has entered a contractual relationship with the wealthy and sadistic Mliss Abnethe. In an attempt to treat her sadism, Mliss was conditioned so that she cannot stand to see another sentient suffer, but Calebans can barely be perceived and do not outwardly show suffering.

The problem here is that the flagellations are killing Fanny Mae, and if she undergoes “ultimate discontinuity,” every being that has ever used a jumpdoor—which is almost everyone—will die. To complicate matters, the BuSab is not allowed to interfere with private individuals, which seriously limits Jorj’s options. To complicate things even further, Fanny Mae declares that she has fallen in love with Jorj. To be continued.

Some Gaughan-esque abstractions. Art by Gaughan

We’ve seen McKie and the BuSab before, in the story “The Tactful Saboteur,” which the Traveler gave a mere one star. This installment is better than that, though it’s mostly just Herbert setting the scene. It can be difficult reading at times, thanks to Fanny Mae’s odd speech patterns and the difficulties she and Jorj have finding common referents to understand each other, but that appears to be the point of the story.

Three stars for now, mostly because of the interesting philosophical questions about language and understanding.

By the Falls, by Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison has written a J.G. Ballard story. There is an unexplained natural phenomenon—in this case a waterfall that makes Niagara look like a faucet with a slow leak—and a bunch of suggestive, but not obvious symbolism that is never clarified. Line by line, the writing is fine; I might have liked it if I had any idea what Harrison was trying to say.

Two stars.

By the falls, like it says on the tin. Art by Gaughan

If a Man Answers, by Richard Wilson

Doctoral candidate Walter Hurd takes a job in remote western New York, hoping to finish his dissertation. For an hour a day he beams messages into space, and for another hour he monitors reception. The isolation soon gets to him, and along with the mathematical formulas he starts sending poetry and, eventually, thoughts from his own journal. When he starts receiving a female voice sending out her thoughts, he quickly falls in love.

More abstracts. Art by Gaughan

Here’s our first love story. Parts of it are rather silly, especially the reason Walter’s Star Girl speaks English, but it doesn’t ignore things like the speed of light. It’s a bit long and highly improbable, however there is some nice writing.

A low three stars.

Child’s Play, by Larry Eisenberg

The deeply annoying Emmett Duckworth returns. This time, the implausible chemist has figured out how to create life, including a six foot tall rabbit. I do not like these stories. I’d sooner read the most formulaic of Retief stories or a full novel of Paul Atreides contemplating the grains of sand in his navel. That said, this is the least stupid story of the series. It almost makes sense, and is just readable.

A generous just barely three stars.

Aunt Sam? Art by Gaughan

This One, by James Sallis

A human linguist falls in love with an alien woman. They’re torn apart, and he must search the galaxy to find her again.

I keep trying to see more than one face here, but it doesn’t work. Art probably by Gaughan

Our second love story was highly touted last month. Call me hard-hearted and unromantic, but I hated it. It’s overwrought and melodramatic. With very few changes, it could be a Victorian tale of a man searching the seraglios of the Near East for his lost love.

A low two stars.

O Kind Master, by Daniel F. Galouye

Centuries ago, spherical energy beings conquered the Earth. Now, humans are pampered pets. A group of wild humans have a plan to destroy the Spheres, but they need to know if the tame humans can handle the loss of their masters.

A wild human dwelling with a city of the Spheres in the background. Art probably by Gaughan

This is a sequel of sorts to “The City of Force” from 1959. The Traveler thought that one was solid, but not outstanding (no star ratings in those days). I say this story is only a sequel of sorts, because in the earlier tale, humans were pests, not pets. That story also left humans with powers equal to the Spheres.

It’s all horribly old-fashioned, even by the standards of 1959. Add in a solution to beating the Spheres that should have been found back during the initial invasion and my general vague dislike of Galouye’s work, and I didn’t like this one.

Two stars.

The Story of Our Earth: The Coming of the Dinosaurs, by Willy Ley

Ley’s survey has reached the Triassic and the first dinosaurs. He starts off with a discussion of the importance of jaws in paleontology, and then runs through both early dinosaurs and the mammals of the period, as well as some marine creatures. Interesting, but a bit perfunctory.

Three stars.

Summing up

Maybe the worst issue that editor Ejler Jakobsson has overseen. Some of that may just be me being curmudgeonly. There’s also a lot that isn’t here. We’re told that there’s no letter column due to the length of Bloch’s con report. That may also be why there’s no preview for next month and why Lester del Rey’s book review column is barely more than a page, with little of the depth he usually has. There’s also no new author this month. I’ve liked Jakobsson’s work so far, so hopefully this is just an aberration. Fingers crossed for next month.

In lieu of a preview, have a fanigator. Art by Gaughan

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 30, 1969] Capstone to a decade (December 1969 Analog)

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

Atrocities in Vietnam

The news has been brewing for a while, and now it's on the front page: 1st Lieutenant William J. Calley Jr., a 26-year-old platoon leader stationed in Vietnam, has been "life or death" court martialed for the murder of 109 South Vietnamese civilians "of various ages and sexes."

head shot of a smiling Lieutenant Calley, in uniform

This so-called "My Lai incident" took place northeast of Quang Ngai city on March 16, 1968 in a village called Song My—code-named "Pinkville".  Calley, enraged at the death of his chief sergeant, appears to have ordered his unit to eliminate everyone in the hamlet.  Several of his men went on a bloody spree; others did what they could to avoid involvement.  One even shot himself in the foot so he could be medivaced out.  A number came forward with the story, which was investigated and then dismissed by the 11th Infrantry Brigade.  Letters to Congress have prompted the reopening of the case and investigation into the original investigation.

If Calley is convicted, he faces no less than life imprisonment, and death by firing squad is on the table.

The court martial comes on the heels of the July 21, 1969 charge of Green Beret commander, Col. Robert Rheault, and six of his officers with murder and conspiracy for the secret execution of a Vietnamese spy suspect.  Those charges were dropped two months later when the CIA, whose operatives were key witnesses, refused to cooperate.  Whether the government's tacit support of brutality increases or decreases the odds of Calley facing the music remains to be seen. 

Mediocrities in Print


by Kelly Freas

December's final magazine is Analog.  Let's hope this makes for pleasanter reading that the newspapers.

Turning first to the book review column, and skipping the editorial (for those who want recapitulations of Campbell's latest blatherings, go buy the collected volumes that have recently come out), P. Schuyler Miller offers up some nice coverage of translated Perry Rhodan books from West Germany.  He goes on to cover a Silverberg collection of antediluvian tales called The Calibrated Alligator.  They were written back when Silverbob was writing 50,000 words a week and rapidly killing himself.  The quality of his work was moderate; he devoted most of his energies to the kinds of books once sold below the counter, but which are now on brazen display in New York newstands.

Miller liked Timescoop, though he thought it lesser Brunner (but not least Brunner).  Pretty much what Jason said when he wrote about it.  He also thought much of Isle of the Dead, by Roger Zelazny, as did Victoria Silverwolf early this year.  Finally, before dispatching a bunch of reprints, he gives middlin' praise to Mack Raynolds' Time Gladiator, which is really just the serial Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes, a People's Capitalism story so old, it still has Joe Mauser in it!  I liked the story, but I find Reynolds' near-future predictions fascinating, even if his writing is often just workmanlike.

This, by the way, is why I like Schuyler so much—he agrees with us!  (And he doesn't play favorites; coming out first in Analog doesn't automatically increase the score).

In Our Hands, the Stars (Part 1 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by Kelly Freas

That dopey looking sub-ship on the cover and as the headline illustration is, in fact, a submarine turned into a spaceship.  How did it happen?

Arnie Klein is an Israeli researcher who develops…something.  So explosive is this secret (literally—the story begins with his invention blowing up his laboratory) that he flees to Denmark, seeks asylum, and enlists the aid of his friend, Nobel Prize winner Ove Rasmussen.  The two work together to build a woking model of the contraption, and then install it in a submarine.

Pretty early on, it's obvious what the thing will do: generate antigravity.

All of this takes us to about Page 40 of the serial, and none of those pages are necessary.  The information conveyed in those dry ~10,000 words of text could easily have been woven into an in media res beginning—and Harrison is fully up to the task.  That he padded things out so much, with uninteresting characters and inconsequential events, suggests he's in it for the per-word rates.

Anyway, after the Blæksprutten is commissioned, a trio of Soviet cosmonauts find themselves marooned on the Moon with a limited oxygen supply.  Klein and Co. take their ship up to Luna and rescue them.  Meanwhile, down on Earth, there's some Cold War spy machinations of limited interest.

Harrison can do much better.  This is like cut-rate Mack Reynolds, really.  Anyway, 3 stars, I guess, but if it's all like this, we're going to end up in the 2.5 zone.

Is Biological Aging Inevitable?, by Capt. John E. Wrobel, Jr.

This is an interesting piece on what we think causes mortality (lots of options), what's being done about it (not that much, surprisingly), the effects of immortality on society (only positive ones listed), and the mythological underpinnings of mortality acceptance (quite interesting).

I found the article quite graspable, and the use of chapter divisions greatly improved readability.  Let's hope this becomes a feature for future nonfiction pieces.

Four stars.

Mindwipe, by Tak Hallus


by Vincent DiFate

"Tak Hallus" returns for his sophomore tale (his first, also appeared in Analog.) In this one, space-hand Ernest Schwab is on trial for a heinous crime: blanking the mind of the Terran governor of the planet Paria.  It turns out Schwab is one of the very few telepaths known to humanity—even he didn't know he had this power.  Now it is up to Public Defender Benson to prove that he was manipulated into action by another telepath rather than acting of his own volition.  Doing so will take Benson on an adventure, from the courtrooms of Earth to the tunnels of the burrowing indigenes of Paria…and place a bullseye on his own head for meddling!

This is a pretty neat piece.  It suffers for being rather workmanlike in execution, as if it were a little rushed, and I found the society of the future a bit too similar to that of the present (particularly the role of women).  Nevertheless, it captures interest and offers up a decent mystery as well as, in the process, presenting an interesting alien race.

Three stars.

Testing … One, Two, Three, Four, by Steve Chapman


by Leo Summers

A bird colonel, stuck in service to an electronic brain, is given the task of overseeing a trio of servicemen who are undergoing computerized tests qualifying them for extraterrestrial deployment.  What he doesn't realize (but what is obvious fairly early on) is that this assignment is, in fact, a test of his capabilities.

Not bad.  The sort of thing Chris Anvil might have come up with.

Three stars.

Superiority Complex, by Thomas N. Scortia


by Leo Summers

Things fall off a cliff for these last two vignettes, probably accepted more for their useful length than quality.  This one takes us to a time several generations after The Bomb wiped out half of humanity.  Researchers are trying to revitalize the race through eugenics, specifically tracking down the descendants of "Phil Jason", an exceptional man who wrote screenplays in old Hollywood until he blew his own brains out.  If society could manufacture more of his type, then perhaps it could be rejuvenated.

Turns out that "Phil" was really "Phyllis", and the spirit of her genius lives on throughout the human race…explaining why women always seem to rule from the shadows, preferring the power behind the throne rather than the throne itself (this is the story's contention, not mine).

A dumb, sexist piece.  One star.

Any Number Can Play, by Richard Lippa


by Vincent DiFate

A meteorologist man-and-wife team investigate anomolaus weather off the coast of Florida and find the wreck of an enemy warship that had been creating the storm.  Portentous intonations of "could this be happening globally?"

Weather control is all the rage these days, in fiction and nonfiction.  Personally I can't buy that all the silver iodide crystals and laser beams will have half the effect that, say, a century of industrial society is having on the Earth.  But I also take issue with attibuting harmful weather to malevolent foreign entities.  That road leads to Silly Science.  We had enough of that with folks like Lysenko.  What's next?  Railing against vaccinations?

One star.

End of the line

And so ends the last magazine of the calendar year—not with a bang, but with a 2.7 star whimper.  This puts it above Vision of Tomorrow (2.8), Fantastic (2.1), and the shockingly bad New Worlds (1.9), but well below Galaxy (3.1), If (3.2), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.4), and The New S.F. (3.6)

Now that all the magazines are done, I can give you a sneak preview of what the Galactic Stars will look like.  Here are all of the mags/anthologies in order of average:

  1. New Writings 3.679824561
  2. Fantasy and Science Fiction 3.102574451
  3. IF 3.070572755
  4. New Worlds 3.030241097
  5. Galaxy 3.005917367
  6. Vision of Tomorrow 2.921091331
  7. Venture 2.824404762
  8. Analog 2.688902006
  9. Fantastic 2.645528083
  10. Amazing 2.622086594
  11. Orbit 2.571428571
  12. Famous 1.897435897

As you can see, Analog finished pretty close to the bottom, barely acing out the Ted White mags (which are on their way up).  Campbell's going to have to do better than this if he wants to keep his ~170,000 readers, I imagine.

In other statistics, women wrote just 3% of the new fiction this month, and the four and five star pieces would fill three small digests (out of the eight published).  Not an auspicious way to end the decade, but perhaps the '70s will offer up a New New Wave.

See you on the other side!

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 28, 1969] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan

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[We are proud to introduce our newest associate, late of Texas and now a confirmed Golden Stater. Don't let her self-effacing first paragraph mislead you—Winona is not only a brilliant young engineer, but she has a talent for prose, as you will soon see…]

A photo portrait of Winona Mendezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Several weeks ago, I was plucked from obscurity off the streets of San Diego by the Traveller himself. He was quite taken to hear that I was a long-time fan of the same books and magazines, and I had quite a lot of thoughts on them, if only anyone cared to listen. Wasn’t it fortunate, then, that he did know lots of people who might care? You can call it a chance encounter, serendipity, dumb luck–but me personally? I think somebody up there likes me.

He invited me to cut my teeth on something easy, something that was near and dear to my heart. And so, I’d like to start with one of my favorites, a satirist’s take on religion, morality, and free will. This one is not a recent publication but I do find myself going back to it, clinging to it when it feels the world is spinning a little too fast.

The book cover. In the foreground, there is a technological orb with cables and a trail of flying rocks in front of a woman with long hair, her hands behind her head and her ayes closed. There are two other less visible characters behind the first one, and the silhouette of a tall and narrow structure. The cover, along the title and the author's name, sports the tagline "A remarkable and terrifying novel of how life might be for the space travallers of the future".

The Sirens of Titan is the second of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, first published in 1959. It is a convoluted interplanetary melodrama centered on the life of Malachi Constant, the richest man in America through no merit of his own. Having inherited and further amassed a staggering fortune through sheer luck, he finds himself enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle while quietly, passively longing for a lightning-bolt of fate to give his life a higher purpose. This lightning-bolt does come – from the apparition of New England billionaire Winston Rumfoord, whose pleasure-seeking space expeditions have turned him and his faithful dog into incorporeal, semi-omniscient wavelengths and sent them undulating throughout the solar system.

The plot unfurls erratically, as though Vonnegut himself is along for the ride as much as his characters. Constant is invited by Rumfoord on a planet-hopping journey through space, promising him adventure and treasure and women of incomparable beauty. But when Constant declines, already not being in want of anything on Earth, he is told that he will have no say in the matter. His fate has been decided for him, and his life will culminate in a meeting with Rumfoord on Titan regardless of any actions he takes to the contrary–all that remains to be seen is the in-between.

Malachi, along with the cast of characters whose stories entwine with his, are plucked from their lives and scattered like chess pieces across the solar system. Our spoiled, iniquitous protagonist with the world at his feet is suddenly a hapless pawn in a cosmic journey so sprawling and incomprehensible that each move from one place to the next feels chosen at random. As a result, the culmination of each loose end being gathered up one-by-one and woven seamlessly back together in the ending is masterfully executed. Any disorientation felt by the reader as unwitting characters are flung through spacetime by the narrative is replaced by a deeper, longer-lasting discomfort as the machinations of fate are slowly unveiled to be much more deliberate, though no less insipid.

Still, the novel is dotted with moments of lucidity on the parts of the characters, whose determination to understand and derive meaning from their lives only grows as it becomes increasingly clear how little control they have over their own destiny. These moments are as stars in a sky of absurd nihilism, and it is left to Constant and company—and the reader—to string them together into constellations of meaning.

Vonnegut’s satirical voice, whetted on his first novel (Player Piano, 1952), is wielded now with the skill and precision of a scalpel. Darkly ironic humor disarms the reader just enough for them to be thrown full off-kilter by a constant subversion of expectations. The ridiculously circuitous route the novel takes to find its conclusion seems fitting; the answers to the questions the book raises are even more elusive and slippery in real life. It’s a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless to read our own struggle for meaning through the lens of a protagonist whose comical shortcomings as a self-absorbed chauvinist make him a difficult character to like, at least in the beginning. If the illusion of free will must give way to an existential nightmare against which we must find our own meaning, it may as well be funny.

Sirens of Titan is over a decade old by now, but there’s never a wrong time to come to terms with the futility of your own existence. Maybe, like me, it can help you find your footing in an ever-changing world. Five stars.

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Science / Space Race

[November 26, 1969] From the Earth to the Moon…and back (Apollo 12)

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

Just four months ago, men first set foot on the Moon, fulfilling a millennia-long dream of humanity as well as culminating a decade-long Space Race between the superpowers. And the question on everyone's lips: how do you top that?

It's important to remember that the flight of Apollo 11 was not the end, but only a beginning—just as John Glenn's orbital flight, Gus Grissom's mission in Gemini 3, Wally Schirra's in Apollo 7 were all beginnings. The Moon Port is open, and it is time to start the exploration of the cosmos in earnest.

Appropriately, the flight of Apollo 12 was planned to mark an incremental expansion upon the prior mission's success. Scheduled for a November 14 launch at 11:22AM Eastern time months in advance, the second lunar mission would include the following improvements:

  • Time spent on the Moon would be 32 hours, half again more than the 21 hours spent by Apollo 11.
  • There would be two Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) rather than one.
  • The astronauts would set up a series of experiments designed to operate for one year from the lunar surface.
  • The Lunar Module (LM) would execute a pinpoint landing at Site 7 in the Sea of Storms, as opposed to the less precise touchdown made by Eagle in July
  • As a result, the astronauts would be able to recover the TV camera from Surveyor 3, which had soft-landed on the Moon two years prior.
  • The Moonwalks would be televised in color this time.
  • After lunar exploration, Apollo 12 would spend an extra day in lunar orbit photographing future landing sites.

In all, Apollo 12 promised to be only slightly more ambitious than its predecessor, but how much more ambitious than a flight to the Moon do you need?

Crew and Capsule

The astronauts selected for this mission included two veterans and a rookie, the first time since Apollo 9 that an Apollo crew has included a newcomer. The mission commander was Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr., an irrepressibly cheerful and talented fellow who almost made the Mercury 7. He was pilot on the Gemini 5 endurance mission and commander on Gemini 11, which conducted docking and microgravity experiments. Richard "Dick" Gordon served as Command Module Pilot, and since he had been Conrad's pilot on Gemini 11, it must have seemed like old times. The newcomer was Alan Bean, who, like Gordon, had been part of the third group of NASA astronauts. His job was to pilot the Lunar Module down to the Moon's surface.

A promotional color photograph of astronauts Conrad, Gordon and Bean, in their spacesuits minus gloves and helmets, in front of the Apollo 12 Lunar Module.
Left to right: Conrad, Gordon, and Bean

The timing for this crew's mission was determined by quirks of fate, only becoming set in stone in December. NASA has a protocol of assigning back-up crews (stand-ins who will replace mission crews in an emergency) to live missions three flights later. Originally, Conrad and Gordon had been the back-up crew for Apollo 8, along with third group astronaut Clifton Williams. Apollo 8 was supposed to test the LM in Earth orbit. But after the successful flight of Apollo 7, which tested the Command and Service Modules, and with the threat of an impending Soviet circumlunar flight, Apollo 8 was bumped to the 9th slot, and the December 1968 flight was reprogrammed for a mission around the Moon.

Conrad and Gordon backed up the delayed Apollo 9 flight, along with Alan Bean, who replaced Clifton Williams, who had died in a test flight October 5, 1967. Nine plus three is twelve, and so those three were put on the second lunar lander mission. But if Williams had not died, and had Apollo's missions gone as schedule, then it would have been Conrad and Bean to set the first steps on the Moon.

As with the prior Columbia and Eagle, NASA wanted proud names for the Apollo 12 vessels. Thousands of NASA employees and contractors sent in their suggestions, and the all-Navy crew decided on Yankee Clipper for the Command Module and Intrepid for the Lunar Module. This marks the first time that a NASA ship has shared a name with one that appeared on Star Trek—namely, the Vulcan-crewed starship in "The Immunity Syndrome". Of course, Intrepid has also been used for American naval vessels since the country's founding, but one has to wonder if Trek's outsize impact on popular culture wasn't a factor. I guess we'll see if we ever get a spaceship called Enterprise…

Official crew insignia for the mission. It is circular with concentric thin blue, thin white then thick yellow edges, the latter sporting the text Apollo 12, Conrad, Gordon, Bean. The center of the insignia consists of a drawn picture of a clipper ship in space in front of the Ocean of Storms area of the Moon, where the Lunar Module was to, and did eventually land. The clipper ship was chosen because the all crew comes from the Navy.

The crew were intimately involved in the creation of the Apollo 12 patch. The blue and gold motif was chosen to honor the U.S. Navy. The Eagle was featured on the last patch; this time, Yankee Clipper got to star. Al Bean went to the library to round up suitable ship references for the clipper and worked closely with the artist to ensure it had a truly "American" look, nixing the first draft as looking too much like the Argo from Greek myth.

Stormy weather

In 1949, President Truman chose Cape Canaveral in Florida to be the nation's spaceport as it allowed launches over the Atlantic rather than over populated regions; it is also as close to the equator as you can get in the continental United States, which means space launches get the most boost from the Earth's rotation.

But it also rains a lot in Florida, and an approaching storm front threatened to delay the Nov. 14th launch date. There was a four and a half hour window that day; if rain grounded the launch beyond that point, the back-up date was Nov. 16th, with a different landing site.

An internal problem reared its head, too: one of the fuel cells (a kind of refillable battery) on Yankee Clipper was leaking hydrogen and had to be replaced.

A color photograph of Apollo 12's Saturn V lift-off from Kennedy Space Center. The sky is completely overcast. The fuel burning at the back of the launcher makes a bright spot in the center of the photograph, with fumes and steam on the sides of the launchpad. Two birds are passing in the frame, near the photographer.

Nevetherless, at 22 minutes past the 8:00 (Pacific time) hour, Apollo 12's Saturn V spurted flame and began its ascent, President Nixon in attendance with his family. The rocket was almost immediately lost in the clouds. Moments later, ABC anchor Frank Reynold's voice went tremulous. He reported that an electrical shock, perhaps caused by a lightning strike, had shot through Apollo 12, taking the fuel cells off-line. Worse, the inertial navigation platform "eight-ball", common to air and spacecraft alike, went haywire. Without these, the mission would probably have to be scrubbed.

A picture of the Flight Director Attitude Indicator. It serves to know at any given moment the relative position and direction of a spacecraft in space.
Flight Director Attitude Indicator: the "platform" or "Eight-ball"

Apollo Commander Conrad, to his credit, retained his cool. "I always like to start out behind the eight-ball and get ahead," he joked as the spacecraft slid into its first orbit around the Earth.

Moonward, Ho!

Once in orbit, a reset brought most of the affected systems back on line, and bright stars were used to realign the platform once Yankee Clipper had passed into night time. Conrad and Bean thoroughly checked their lunar module, entering it ahead of schedule, to ensure there was no lightning damage. That survey complete, they blasted out of orbit into a "free-return" trajectory that would take them around the Moon. On the way, they snapped this picture of the Earth:

A photograph of a crescent Earth taken by Apollo 12 crew on their way to the moon.

They also conducted two color broadcasts, Dick Gordon donning shades to deal with the solar glare. Although we've seen it before, I always marvel at the spaciousness of the Apollo/LM complex compared to prior spacecraft. That one can travel fifteen feet now without hitting anything seems like incomparable luxury compared to the cramped Gemini and Mercury capsules.

After three days, Yankee Clipper decelerated, entering lunar orbit. Apollo 12 was now at that scary juncture, out of radio contact for 45 minutes every hour and a half as the spacecraft ducked behind the Moon. And, as CBS anchor Walter Cronkite never failed to remind us, if the Service Module's engine did not fire, the astronauts would be stranded a quarter million miles from home.

While looping the Moon, the Apollo 12 crew returned live TV shots, gawking at the stark beauty of the horizon, whose peaks looked like distant clouds to them, and at the pebbled landscape, which Conrad described as cotton candy someone had shot BBs at.


The big crater, Copernicus, ejecta of which ridged the Apollo 12 landing site


Fra Mauro, potential future landing site of Apollo 13

Stormy approach

As Intrepid undocked from its mother ship and began its hour-long descent to the lunar surface, two concerns sprung up: firstly, a solar flare had erupted, threatening radio communications, if not the lives of the astronauts; secondly, Alan Bean got a congested nose—but a decongestant pill kept trouble at bay.

Then the LM was on its way, the two Navy aviators, Conrad and Bean, as jovial as any two spacefarers have ever been. Cronkite noted to former astronaut Wally Schirra that the spacemen seemed particularly jocular this flight, to which the Navy Captain replied that that's the way it should be; astronauts shouldn't have to be stuffy.

At first, the spaceship flew almost perpendicular to the lunar surface, not so much landing as orbiting. In fact, until a final burn at about 50,000 feet, Intrepid was in an orbit just nine miles high, such a feat being possible because the Moon has no atmospheric drag.


See how the ship is sideways for most of it?

Once the landing burn commenced, the Intrepid began slowly arcing toward vertical, its engine spewing close to its maximum thrust: some 9000 pounds of force. As the lunar horizon came into view, the astronauts burst into excited exclamations. The target crater was right where it was supposed to be, and they were bang on course. Pete Conrad maneuvered the LM closer and closer to the lunar surface, Bean calling out altitude checks and attaboys in a constant stream. As the module descended, a huge cloud of black dust billowed up—a feature of that site, as Surveyor 3 had found previously. At last, Intrepid landed in "Pete's Parking Lot" just 600 feet from Surveyor 3 with 7% of its fuel left in the tanks, a healthy margin. The pinpoint landing had worked out perfectly.

Going for a walk

Unlike Apollo 11, no post-landing rest period was planned for the astronauts. Who could restrain them anyway, at this point? Just four hours after touchdown, Pete Conrad was out the hatch and making his descent down the ladder. This happened around 3:30 in the morning for me. I have to wonder what viewership was like for this flight given that coverage started at 10 PM. Luckily, Amber works third shift, so we kept each other company on the phone, and when I fell asleep around 11:30 PM, she kindly gave me a wake-up call when the Moonwalk began.

True to style, Pete's first words as he lit on the lunar surface were, "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" I watched the astronaut toodle around, in color and at 30 frames per second, for a while, but then fell back into unconsciousness around 4 AM. No worries, I thought. The exciting stuff wouldn't happen until the second EVA…


Hard to tell, but that's Conrad jumping down to the surface

Except when I woke up and watched the news, it turned out Alan Bean had accidentally set up the camera on a tripod pointed directly at the Sun. In short order, the picture tube had burned out. So much for color TV from the Moon.

I'd actually missed the deployment of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), which included a seismometer, a magnetometer, and a spectrometer for measuring the solar wind. The last instrument, in particular, would return data that would be compared with that being returned from Explorer 35, which has been in lunar orbit since 1967. This will tell us if the Moon, itself, generates or conducts any electric fields that can't be detected from space. All are powered by a SNAP-27 nuclear reactor that creates electricity from radioactive decay. The solar wind experiment was, in part, built by Marcia Neugebauer, whom you may recall was responsible for similar devices on the Venus probe, Mariner 2.


Diagram of ALSEP components laid out on the Moon

I did not miss, however, the astronauts walking into Surveyor 3's crater. As they bounced around, Bean noted that they looked like they were in one of those overcranked silent films of the '20s. They collected samples, uttering profound statements like, "That's a good rock!" The landing site is particularly good for selenology (the lunar equivalent of geology, natch), because the terrain is rather varied; ejecta from Copernicus crater when it was formed fell over the site, creating a mixed set of soil.

Then they found Surveyor and, as planned, began taking a hacksaw to it to bring some pieces home with them. Interestingly, they noted that it was no longer white, but a kind of tan. A trick of the light or erosion? We don't know yet. The metal also seemed to have crystallized, becoming more brittle than it had been on Earth.

The astronauts blasted off from the Moon and, with almost blasé affect, docked with Yankee Clipper. Bean and Conrad rejoined the more laconic Gordon, and they jettisoned Intrepid's top half. Shortly thereafter, they activated the half-LM's engines and plowed the vehicle into the Moon in a test of the ALSEP's seismometer. So much for that ten million bucks. The result was a Moonquake that lasted a good hour, so long that NASA scientists believe the impact may have triggered a landslide. Either that, or the material of the Moon is unique such that, instead of dampening shock waves, as on Earth, it actually amplifies them.


Intrepid as seen from Yankee Clipper; sorry for the monochrome—I snapped this shot off my black and white TV

After a day of photographing the Moon from orbit, Yankee Clipper fired its main engine, broke lunar orbit, and began the three day trip to Earth. On the way, the space trio gave us one final broadcast and also snapped a shot of the Earth as it eclipsed the Sun. All the while, the astronauts suffered from runny noses and wheezy breath, the consequence of lunar dust ending up in the capsule.

On the morning of the 24th, Yankee Clipper sailed into the Earth's atmosphere and the typical radio blackout. Three minutes before splashdown at 12:58 Pacific time, cameras from the U.S.S. Hornet recovery carrier, 1200 miles south of Hawaii, spotted the three orange and white parachutes, just two and a half miles away. This ties Apollo 8 for the closest recovery. The command module touched the roughest waves ever encountered on an Apollo recovery, immediately inverting. Recovery was swift and efficient, the Hornet's helicopter #66 making its fourth Apollo astronaut pick-up (previous ones included 8, 10, and 11).

Once the spacemen were on the carrier, we got to see that they were not wrapped up in suits, but merely wearing respirators. They jauntily waved to the cameras as they entered their quarantine trailer, where they will stay for five days, before transferring to a larger facility for thirteen more days. Missing were the folks in protective suits immediately washing away their bootprints. One has to wonder if they'll even bother with quarantine after this mission. They don't seem to be taking it very seriously this time.

President Nixon called the astronauts to congratulate them. He capped the conference with an on-the-spot promotion. This is customary for spacemen after each flight, but I think this is the first time the President has done it. Conrad, Bean, and Gordon are all now Navy Captains.

There was some concern that Apollo 12's systems might have been permanently damaged by the lightning that struck on take-off. Nothing seems to have been hurt at all, but there is still a clamor to launch the next missions in clearer weather to avoid another strike.


The lightning strike was caught on camera after launch but not discovered by NASA until later

It is an amazing and saddening thing that the public seems already somewhat tired of the Apollo missions. NBC's David Brinkley and CBS' Harry Reasoner could barely keep the disdain out of their voices as they described the astronauts gallivanting on the Moon, as if they were personally wasting taxpayer money. Conrad and Bean's casual mien, rather than charming the public, seems to have belittled the enterprise in the public's esteem.

Beyond that, NASA itself is in turmoil. They are demoralized at what they see as the end of an era, rather than the beginning of a new one. Vice President Agnew may be gung ho on going to Mars, but President Nixon refuses to make any commitments. To quote Music Scene's David Steinberg, who said this about Nixon's Vietnamization speech, "We would like to go out of our way to salute President Nixon, who in his speech exactly one week ago had the courage and the confidence to believe that he actually said something."


After that comment, an FBI agent stepped up and snapped his picture. This became a running gag.

NASA scientists feel that they have not been listened to, and that the Apollo missions stress engineering and political issues over the acquisition of knowledge. Indeed, many prominent researchers have quit, and others have been laid off.

Nevertheless, the money has been paid and the Saturns have been built. Apollo 13 is scheduled to launch next March to some spot scouted by Apollo 12, and we'll have at least four more missions after that (Apollo 20 has been cancelled; Apollos 18 and 19 may be on the block). I, personally, am excited that travel to the Moon has become routine. We are very much at a similar juncture as when Schirra flew his textbook Sigma 7 flight, and he didn't even make the front page. You know what? I am okay with taking the spectacle out of things. Let's get down to the real business: exploration and utilization of space. It's not about the missiles anymore, but humanity.

The kind of humanity down-to-Earth heroes like Conrad, Bean, and Gordon represent. Hear, hear, folks.


The astronauts enter their quarantine trailer, one of them miming a pistol shot at the crew




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 24, 1969] The Wind That Shakes The Snottygobbles O: New Worlds December 1969

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Tune in at 12:45 pm Pacific for LIVE splashdown coverage of Apollo 12!

Photo portrait of Fiona Moore. She is a white woman with long curly dark blonde hair. She has glasses and is wearing a light blue blouse under a sleeveless green velvet vest.
by Fiona Moore

Once again, greetings from London. The big news this month is that Britain is now a space power! Yes, thanks to the launch of the Skynet 1-A satellite, we now have our very own presence in orbit. Can regular rocket launches from Woomera be far behind?

BW photograph of Skynet 1A satellite. It is cylindrical with solar panels making out all of its visible shape.
Skynet 1-A is GO!

In news that’s closer to home, Royal Holloway College has acquired a colour television for the student lounge, and I’ve been taking advantage of my position as Staff Advisor to the Film Club to make use of it. The students’ new favourite programme is a delightfully surreal children’s stop-motion SF tale called The Clangers, featuring aliens that look like pink mice and live on an asteroid. I much prefer it to Monty Python, myself. One of my more enterprising students has worked out a knitting pattern to make her own; I’m sure an official one will be not long in coming. I shall keep an eye on the Radio Times.

Photo from the show. Standing on a desert grey ground, pink mice-shaped aliens with red and gold vests are looking up and raising their arms. There are a few stars visible in the sly. The aliens seems to be made out of fabric.The Clangers, I love them all

On to this month’s, sadly rather thin, issue of New Worlds. Sadly, Britain’s new space-faring ways are not reflected in the magazine’s content. I tend to like New Worlds best when it’s being a SF magazine with a literary sensibility, but this month it is thinking of itself as a literary magazine with a few weird or surreal touches, so I found this issue disappointing. I even found myself missing the Jerry Cornelius segment!

Cover of New Worlds for December 1969. There is the shape of a person with unkempt hair in black on yellow. The cover reads: New Worlds Number 196 3s 6d Special new writers issue Plus: Ballard on Hitler Sladek on God Harrison on Pot Moorcock on Neophiliacs Platt on the Underground & more!Cover of New Worlds for December 1969

Although it is advertised as a “new writers’ issue”, only two new writers are actually included. Once again, book reviews take up almost a third of the publication. There is no art this issue, only photographs, and by only two photographers, which makes me wonder if they’re saving money by not commissioning drawings.

Their 1970 preview advert suggests they should be back in more SF territory with the next issue, which purports to “look ahead to 1980”, and I hope that’s not wrong.

Lead-in

A short one this issue, mostly highlighting the two new writers, C.R. Clive and Michael Biggs, and encouraging people to buy the abovementioned 1970 first issue, promising us Brian W. Aldiss, Pam Zoline and Thomas M. Disch as well as the usual suspects. We all know how well that went last time, so I’m not holding my breath.

Rise and Fall by Marek Obtulowicz

BW photograph of a man with closed eyes. He seems to be sleeping.Photo by Gabi Nasemann

A man named Lykke goes on a few dates with his neighbour, Janet. They have sex and a lot of rather pretentious conversations about autumn leaves. It’s all really rather banal. I struggled to see the point of it all. Two stars.

Hemingway by Michael Biggs

As the title suggests, a Hemingway pastiche about a reporter going to Vietnam. It’s a skilful enough evocation of Hemingway’s style and fairly exciting, and I suppose it’s got the subtext of comparing the current ongoing, seemingly neverending, conflict with the wars Hemingway himself covered. I’m not a huge Hemingway fan but it at least held my attention. No illustrations. Three stars.

Graphics and Collages by Ian Breakwell

Illustration by Ian Breakwell A collage with patterned paper, BW photographs and a text in capital letters covering the whole piece. The text reads: Follow my lead said the old electrician have a stake in the wrecked roomOne of the better collages

As the title suggests: collages of text and pictures forming illustrated short-short stories or prose poems. A portrait of squalor, a joke about an electrician, something about sports and physical culture, a factual article about skin grafts juxtaposed with images of radios and televisions, a piece of what looks like found poetry about business. As with a lot of these things it didn’t really appeal to me, though apparently it appeals to the editors of New Worlds. Two stars.

The Last Awakening by C.R. Clive

Photo by Gabi Naseman BW photograph of a white man. He's looking down to the left of the picture.Photo by Gabi Nasemann

This is the only story this issue that could really be described as SF, a postapocalyptic narrative mostly involving a forty-four-year-old man leching over a teenage girl with the excuse that they’re the only ones left alive. If I didn’t know the author was 27 I would have put it down to wish fulfilment. The prose is pretty good, with some nicely evocative touches about the postapocalyptic landscape, but I wish it had been put in the service of something less predictable. Two stars.

The Wind in the Snottygobble Tree Part II (a Jack Trevor Story)

Photo by Roy Cornwall BW photograph of a street. There are houses and vehicles. A pedestrian is crossing the street in the background.Photo by Roy Cornwall

Not much of an improvement on part I, really, other than that there’s less improbable sex and more time devoted to making it ambiguous whether our protagonist, Marchmont, is a secret agent or just an innocent caught in the crossfire. Apparently it’s to be continued next month. I can’t say I’m terribly looking forward to it. One star.

Book Reviews

Our esteemed editor has told me that I don’t need to review the book reviews, so I won’t go into too much detail about these. However, there are a couple this issue that are worth checking out. J.G. Ballard reviews Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, treating it as a psychological portrait of a man obsessed with hygiene and pseudo-biology. Elsewhere, John T. Sladek reviews Erich von Daaniken’s Chariots of the Gods, getting more and more scathing as he gets further and further into the weeds; as someone who absolutely loathes that book and rues the impact it has had on some of our more impressionable undergraduates, I giggled all the way through it. Finally, Michael Moorcock has a go at The Neophiliacs, which is somewhat more long-winded than Sladek’s review of von Daaniken but no less scathing.

Advert for John and Yoko's Wedding Album. BW purple tinted photograph of Ono and Lennon in front of a flight of stairs. They are looking at the camera and surrounded by people in suits.Advert for John and Yoko's Wedding Album, because I can.

In closing, I shall torment the Yoko Ono anti-fan club in my audience by revealing that the last page is an advert for her and John Lennon’s Wedding Album. Sorry, people; she’s here to stay. I understand that her husband is handing back his MBE in protest at the British government’s positions on Biafra and Vietnam. Sadly, I don’t think it’ll make much difference.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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