Tag Archives: 1970

[January 10, 1970] Time On My Hands (February 1970 Fantastic)

photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

What Time Is It?

That's a question that you can answer with more confidence than before, if you're willing to shell out a whole bunch of bucks.  On Christmas Day the Japanese company Seiko introduced the world's first quartz wristwatch.  (There have been clocks using quartz crystals, but not anything this small.)

As I understand it, quartz crystals vibrate in a precise manner when voltage is applied to them.  Thus, the tiny bit of quartz inside the watch, powered by an itty-bitty battery, provides an unvarying pulse that supplies extraordinary accuracy.

The Quartz Astro 35SQ keeps time to within five seconds per month, which is said to be about one hundred times better than a mechanical watch of good quality. 

The catch?  You have to pay 450,000 yen for it.  That's well over one thousand dollars.  You can buy a nice new car for the price of two watches.

photograph of a gold watch with a brown leather strap. In the center of the face, letters spell out Seiko-Astro
Quite a stocking stuffer.

If you like, you can use your fancy new timepiece to measure how long it takes to peruse the latest issue of Fantastic.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

Or maybe the publishers can measure how much time they saved by copying the cover art from yet another issue of Perry Rhodan instead of waiting for an artist to create a new one.

Cover of Fantastic: illustration of a spacesuited man on a pink lunar surface grappling with a blue robotic, treaded tank with a big eye stalk and two grasping tentacles.
The title translates to The Cannons of Everblack.  Note the use of English for what I presume is the name of a planet.

Editorial, by Ted White

This wordy introduction wanders all over the place.  The editor states that the magazine is getting a lot more mail from readers.  (See the letter column below.) He says that he doesn't like the name of the magazine, and suggests changing it to Fantastic Adventures, the name of the old pulp magazine from which reprints are often drawn.  (The sound you hear is me screaming No!)

He discusses the old problem of defining science fiction as distinguished from fantasy.  The essay winds up complaining about an article by Norman Spinrad that appeared in the girlie magazine Knight.  Apparently Spinrad griped about SF fans and pros being hostile to the New Wave.  Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me.

No rating.

Double Whammy, by Robert Bloch

The author of Psycho leads off the issue with another shocker.


Illustration by Michael Hinger.

A guy who works at a sleazy carnival is afraid of the geek.  If you don't know what a geek is, you haven't read William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, or seen the movie adapted from it the next year.

A geek is an alcoholic who has fallen so low that the only work he can get is pretending to be a so-called wild man and biting the heads off live chickens. 

Our slimy protagonist seduces a teenager.  When she tells him she's pregnant, he refuses to marry her, leading to tragic results.  The girl is the granddaughter of a Gypsy fortuneteller, who has a reputation for supernatural revenge.

This is an out-and-out horror story that may remind you of the 1932 film Freaks. (Like that controversial film, it features a man without arms or legs.) The author saves his final punch to the reader's gut until the last sentence.  If you don't like gruesome terror tales, it may be too much for you.  I thought it accomplished what it set out to do very effectively.

Four stars.

The Good Ship Lookoutworld, by Dean R. Koontz

This space opera begins with a fight to the death between a human and a weird alien, apparently just as a sporting event.


Illustration by Ralph Reese.

This violent scene is just a prelude to a yarn in which the triumphant human recruits the narrator (another human) to join him in a mission to salvage a derelict alien starship.  The vessel was operated by an extinct species of extraterrestrials who seem to have been nice folks.  They just traveled around the universe bringing entertainment.  Too bad a disease wiped them out.

The starship turns out to contain the headless skeletons of its crew.  That's mysterious and scary enough, but when our heroes journey back to their homebase in it, parts of the ship disappear, one by one.  Can they survive the long voyage before the whole thing vanishes?

This is a fast-paced adventure story with a twist in its tail.  Given a few clues, you might be able to figure out the surprise ending.  It's a little too frenzied for me, but short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Three stars.

Learning It at Miss Rejoyy's, by David R. Bunch

The narrator has dreamed about visiting the place named in the title since childhood, when his dad told him about it.  The stunningly desirable Miss Rejoyy promises him an intimate encounter with her if he can meet the requirements.  He has to pay to enter a room where his reactions to pain and pleasure will be measured.

The narrative style is less eccentric than usual for this author.  The content, however, is just as strange.  There are some really disturbing images.  The point of this weird allegory is a very pessimistic one, which is likely to turn off many readers.  Still, it has an undeniable power.

Three stars.

Hasan (Part Two of Two), by Piers Anthony

Here's the conclusion of this Arabian Nights fantasy.


Illustrations by Jeff Jones.

Summing things up as simply as I can, the title hero went through many adventures before stealing away with a woman who could turn herself into a bird, hiding the bird skin that gave her this power.  More or less forced to marry him, she had two sons with him.  She eventually found the skin and flew off to her native land with the children.

In this installment, he sets off on an odyssey to find her.  This involves a whole lot of encounters with strange people and supernatural beings.  In brief, he gets involved with a magician, rides a horse that can run over water, rides on the back of a flying ifrit, meets a group of Amazon warriors, faces an evil Queen, takes part in a huge battle, and witnesses an explosive climax.


Some of the many characters in the story.

A wild ride, indeed.  This half of the novel has a fair amount of humor.  The magician and the ifrit are particularly amusing.  The plot turns into a travelogue of sorts, as Hasan journeys from Arabia to China, then to Indochina and Malaysia, winding up in Sumatra.


A helpful map allows you to follow the hero's travels.

A lengthy afterword from the author explains how he changed the original story from One Thousand and One Nights.  He also offers several references.  One can admire his scholarship. 

The resulting story is entertaining enough.  I'm still a little disconcerted by the fact that Hasan kidnaps the bird woman, and that she eventually decides that she loves him anyway.  A product of the original, I suppose.

Three stars. 

Creation, by L. Sprague de Camp

This is a very short poem about various legends concerning the creation of humanity by an assortment of deities.  It leads up to a wry punchline.  Not bad for what it is.

Three stars.

Secret of the Stone Doll, by Don Wilcox

The March 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this tale of the South Seas.


Cover art by J. Allen St. John.

The narrator winds up on a paradisical Pacific island.  He falls in love with a local beauty after rescuing her from drowning. 


Illustrations by Jay Jackson.

Everything seems to be hunky-dory, but his new bride insists that she must make a journey to a part of the island kept separate from the rest by a stone wall.  Because the islanders have a strong taboo against discussing fear or danger, she can't tell him what it's all about.  Along the way, they meet a madman with a sword and the object mentioned in the title.


Apparently, he's a visitor to the island, just like the narrator.

I found this exotic, mysterious tale quite intriguing.  The revelation about the woman's journey surprised me.  (There's an editor's footnote — I assume it's from the original publication — that tries to offer a scientific explanation.  This is just silly, and the story works much better as pure fantasy.  The new editor's suggestion that it relates to something in Frank Herbert's Dune also stretches things to the breaking point.)

Maybe I'm rating this story higher than it might otherwise deserve because I wasn't expecting much from this issue's reprint.  Unlike a lot of yarns from the pulps, it isn't padded at all, with a fairly complex plot told in a moderate number of pages.  Anyway, I liked it.

Four stars.

According to You, by Various Readers

As the editorial said, there are a lot of letters.  Bill Pronzini offers an amusing response to a reader who didn't like his story How Now Purple Cow in a previous issue.  I didn't care for it either, so I'm glad he's a good sport about criticism.

The other letters deal with all kinds of stuff, besides talking about what kind of stories they want to see (offering proof that you can't please everybody.) One speculates about a combination of Communism and Christianity.  (The editor dismisses this as unlikely.) Many react to an editorial in a previous issue about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers TV show.

No rating.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Alexander Temple

Just like Fred Lerner did in the last issue, Leiber praises Lin Carter's Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings for its history of fantasy fiction, and condemns Understanding Tolkien by William Ready, while admitting that it has a few good insights.  He praises The Quest For Arthur's Britain by Geoffrey Ashe and Isaac Asimov's The Near East: 10,000 Years of History as fine nonfiction books with subjects relating to fantasy fiction.

Temple very briefly discusses The Demons of the Upper Air, a slim little book of poems by Leiber.  It's a lukewarm review, talking about his occasional careless choice of words . . . hardly to be compared with his prose and recommends it for Leiber fans only.

Worth Your Time?

This was a pretty good issue, with nothing below average in it.  I imagine others will dislike some of the stories, but I was satisfied.

While admiring your new thousand dollar watch, don't forget to get a new calendar as well.  I wonder how long I'll be writing 1969 on checks.


Did you make it to either of these groovy concerts?



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


Follow on BlueSky

[January 8, 1970] Slow Sculpture, Fast reading (the February 1970 Galaxy Science Fiction)

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

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

A little off the top

And so it begins.  For eight years, NASA enjoyed an open budget spigot and, through persistence and endless shoveling of money (though a fraction of what's spent on defense, mind you), got us to the Moon.  Now the tap has been cut to a trickle, and the first casualties are being announced.

Black and white photo of Apollo manager George Low speaking into a microphone in front of a NASA press backdrop.
Apollo manager George Low at a press conference on the 4th

Of the 190,000 people employed at the space agency, a whopping 50,000 are going to get the axe before the end of the year.  Saturn V production is being halted.  Lunar missions are going down to a twice-per-year cadence (as opposed to the six in thirteen months we had recently).

Apollo 20, originally scheduled to land in Tycho crater in December 1972, has been canceled.  Astronauts Don Lind, Jack Lousma, and Stuart Roosa now get to cool their heels indefinitely.  Apollos 13-16 will go up over the next two years followed by "Skylab", a small orbital space station built from Saturn parts.  Then we'll get the last three Apollo missions.

After that… who knows?  If only the Soviets had given us more competition…

Oh, and in the silly season department:

Cartoon drawing of a man holding a newspaper looking out at an apple core shaped moon. The paper reads IT COULD SAY A GREAT DEAL ABOUT THE MOON TO THE VERY CORE. NASA SCIENTIST DECLARES INTENT TO PROPOSE NUCLEAR BLAST ON THE MOON.

On the 6th, Columbia University's Dr. Gary V. Latham, seismologist and principal seismic investigator for Apollo program, withdrew his proposal that an atomic bomb be detonated on the Moon.  You'll recall Apollo 12 sent the top half of Intrepid into the lunar surface so the seismometers Conrad and Bean had emplaced could listen to the echoes and learn about the Moon's interior. 

Latham got some pretty harsh criticism of his idea, so he dialed things back, suggesting NASA should find way to hit the Moon hard enough to create strong internal reverberations. Let's hope they don't use Apollo 13…

A sampling from the upper percentiles

The news may be dour on the space front, but the latest issue of Galaxy is, in contrast, most encouraging!

The February 1970 cover of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine featuring a long-haired abstractly drawn woman in a psychedelic art style that resembles stained glass.
by Jack Gaughan, illustrating "Slow Sculpture"

The Shaker Revival, by Gerald Jonas

In the early 1990s, America has become a hollow shell, spiritually.  All of the worst elements of our modern day have amplified: the hippies have sold out to become consumers, Black Americans are confined to walled Ghettoes, kids are dropping out in growing multitudes.

Into this era, a movement is born—the New Shakers.  They live the Four Noes: No hate.  No war.  No money.  No sex.

Pencil Drawing of a man and a woman side by side. The woman has long hair and shaded cheeks. The man wears a hat, has a long moustache and holds a saxophone.
a riff on American Gothic by Jack Gaughan

This hero of this tale, such as there is one, is a journalist who is doing a series of interviews on the movement.  As time goes on, we learn that he is also tracking down his missing son, whom he believes has been inducted by the growing cult.

It's fascinating stuff, but there's no end, nor is the piece indicated as "Part One of [N]".  On the other hand, it is concluded with "MORE TO COME", which is less dispositive than it might be since that phrase gets used often in the story proper.

Black and white photo of two men in suits sitting side by side. the photo reads GERALD JONAS INTERVIEWING HARLAN ELLISON AT THE NYCON.

I'm going to give it four stars on the assumption that we're going to see more stories in this world a la Silverberg's Blue Fire series.  If this turns out to be a literary cul de sac, then we can drop the score retroactively.

Slow Sculpture, by Theodore Sturgeon

Photocopied image of an open book with a black and white illustration of a womans face. Her hair flows upward and off of the pages. The lefthand page reads SLOW SCULPTURE by Theodore Sturgeon.
by Jack Gaughan

Ted Sturgeon can write.

There are some stories your read, and you just know it's going to be superlative.  I've felt guilty these last few months, handing out five-star reviews so sparingly, wondering if my standards had gotten too high.  And then I read something that is truly superior, and I realize that, for five stars to mean anything, it's got to be saved for the very best.

I shan't spoil things for you.  It's about a man and a woman, the former an engineer, the latter a cipher, both troubled.  It involves electricity and bonsai and an understated romance (no one writes romance like Ted Sturgeon), and it is the best thing I've read in a dog's age.

Five stars and a warm glow.

Sleeping Beauty, by A. Bertram Chandler

Image of an open book. The lefthand page is a black and white illustration of a large mantis-like creature, and a man in a vest half the size standing beside. From the center in bold letters is SLEEPING BEAUTY. The top right page reads A. Bertram Chandler. A paragraph of text runs down.
by Jack Gaughan

Another bi-month, another sequel, this one involving Lieutenant Grimes in command of the Adder courier ship.  As a result of his last adventure, Grimes is (supposed to be) no longer in the passenger business.  Instead, he is sent to a nearby star to meet with an insectoid Shari queen.  Unfortunately, the cargo they ask him to transport is…a pupate Shari princess.

This is all fine and good, so long as the nascent queen remains in cold stasis.  A power outage causes her to hatch, however, and she soon has the crew in her thrall.  Worse, she has increasing interracial designs on the young Lieutenant!

Yet another pleasant but unremarkable adventure.  We're definitely going to see a fix-up Ace Double half, I'm sure.

Three stars.

The Last Night of the Festival, by Dannie Plachta

Image of an open book. An art nouveau style black and white illustration of a young couple walking surrounded by rounded shapes in the forest fills both pages. They wear long gowns and large hats.
by Jack Gaughan

Two archetypes, Dawn and Dusk, walk through a macabre parade filled with hedonistic and gory spectacles.  Each scene is punctuated by an italicized interstitial with some oblique reference to Nazi Germany.  The story is illustrated like a picture book such that the text only fills perhaps a third of the page.

Like much of Plachta's work, it's an abstract and abstruse piece.  Are the two on their way to Hell?  Do they represent actual people?  I'd appreciate it more if I knew what he was trying to say.

Two stars.

Downward to the Earth (Part 3 of 4), by Robert Silverberg

Image oF an open book. the top lefthand corner is shaded in pencil. The Top right page is illustrated by a drawing of a small creature overlooking a ravine. The text below says DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH.
by Jack Gaughan

Continues the journey of Edmund Gunderson toward the mist country of the planet he once administered as a mining colony.  The key beats include a reunion with his lover, Seema, who stayed behind when he left.  She has become enamored with the planet, surrounding her station with a garden of native life.  She is also caring for her husband, Kurtz, who was horribly distorted by his attempt to participate in the Rebirth ceremonies of the elephantine indigenous Nildoror.

Another key beat is his entry into the misty cold of the temperate zone.  It is implied that Rebirth involves the swapping of consciousnesses between the Nildoror and the simian Sulidoror, the other intelligent race on the planet.  We learn that Gunderson plans to emulate Kurtz—to offer himself as a Rebirth candidate as a sort of expiation for his sins against the indigenes.

This section is more episodic and Heart of Darkness than the prior ones, and it left me a bit cold.  I do appreciate how much time Silverberg has spent developing a truly alien world, however, and the anti-colonialist sentiment is welcome.  I just have trouble relating to or even buying the characters, and that deliberate abstraction, distancing, gives the whole affair a shambling sleep-walk feel to it.

If that's your bag, you'll love it.  For me, we're at three stars for this installment.

After They Took the Panama Canal, by Zane Kotker

Drawn image of a woman and two cartoonishly drawn men in the background, man on right wears a top hat and holds a bird. Caption reads MOST STORIES OF CONQUEST ARE WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS OR THE VANQUISHED. THIS IS NOT.

America is conquered by the Soviets.  Rape, re-education, and reduction ensue.

All this is told compellingly from the point of view of Myra, a not particularly bright (by design) woman, who is selected to be a consort to several conquerors, and to bear several of their children.  In the end, she helps lead a revolt of sorts.

I cannot tell the sex of the author from the name, but the style is unlike those employed by any male authors I know.  In any event, the narrative is reminiscent of 1954's A Woman in Berlin, a harrowing autobiographical account of a journalist in Germany's capital when the Russians came.

Four stars.

Sunpot (Part 1 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

Open page image of Comic Sunpot Featuring images of Apollo and Captain Belinda Bump's bare breasts.

Here we've got a tongue-in-cheek space adventure starting Captain Belinda Bump, who for some reason is topless throughout the strip.  Actually, it seems quite natural to go nude in space—after all, Niven's Belters are nudists.  However, prurience seems intended: Bump is referred to as "Nectar Nipples" and "Wobble Boobs", and the overall style feels something like a black and white version of what fills the final pages of Playboy each month.

In this short installment, Captain Bump runs across the next Apollo mission.  High jinks ensue.

The art is fun, and I want to like the characters, but Bodé needs a new letterer.  Maybe he can borrow Sol Rosen from Marvel.

Three stars.

Doing the math

While nothing in this magazine quite hits the highs of Sturgeon, and Plachta keeps swinging and missing (no one I've talked to has managed to decipher Ronnie's intent), it's still a pleasant read from front to back.  I have a suspicion Galaxy will outlive Apollo.

That's something, at least!



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


Follow on BlueSky

[January 6, 1970] Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

photo of a woman with glasses and straight, brown hair trimmed to just above the shoulders
by Janice L. Newman

The term “vast wasteland” has become something of a catchphrase for Journeyfolk, a reference to Newton Minow’s castigation of the offerings on television all the way back in 1961.

There have been quite a few good shows in the interim, including standouts The Twilight Zone, Dangerman (aka Secret Agent) and of course our favorite, Star Trek. We’ve also seen cases where television has been used to educate and bring awareness to social issues, such as the NET Journal series and the special, The Rejected.

Maybe it’s because so many theatrical releases are targeting adults these days, or maybe it’s just an idea whose time has come, but a group of educators, philanthropists, and television producers have turned their eyes toward the glass teet as a way to educate and entertain the very youngest of us. The idea, as I understand it, is to harness the things that make television addictive and use them to teach basic educational concepts as well as important life skills. The show began airing on November 10, 1969. I didn’t catch its premier episode, but I did manage to sit down and watch a couple over the following weeks.

still photo of a sign reading 'Sesame Street'
There's a signpost up ahead…

Sesame Street is a bit like a daily Laugh-In for the five-and-under set. It’s a conglomeration of short pieces, most of them independent of each other and self-contained. Some pieces have live actors in them, some have puppets, some have both people and puppets interacting with each other. These pieces are interspersed with animated or live-action movies that are a bit like commercials – if commercials taught “counting to ten” or “words that start with the letter ‘D’”. Many of the pieces are funny, and some have an unexpectedly surreal aspect that I found wildly entertaining.

still illustration of two brown hands with six digits extended, below the number six
still illustration of bands of colors radiating out in a kaleidoscopically mirrored fashion, from the number nine
still illustration of ten formula-one cars, all lined up at the ready, with the number ten emblazoned on the foremost driver's car and helmet
Stills don't convey the frenetic feeling of some of these shorts, like this one about counting to ten

For example, the first skit features “Gordon”, one of the actors, playing a good-natured joke on “Ernie”, one of the puppets (voiced by Jim Henson). Indicating four items, three plastic instruments and a banana, Gordon asks Ernie which one doesn’t belong with the others. Ernie chooses the banana, carefully explaining his reasoning. Gordon suggests Ernie try playing the banana like an instrument, whereupon Gordon honks the bike horn he has hidden behind his back, leading the startled Ernie to believe that his banana can toot, until Gordon shows him the trick.

still photo of a Black man (Gordon) proffering a bicycle horn to an orange puppet with unkempt hair (Ernie) holding a banana
Gordon shows Ernie what makes the banana go toot

Ernie chortles, and the two of them decide to play the same joke on another puppet, a passing blue monster. The blue monster, however, proceeds to eat the plastic instruments and somehow play the banana such that lovely flute music fills the air, leaving Gordon and Ernie very confused. “Nice tone on that banana,” the monster comments, “and the harmonica was delicious!”

still photo of Gordon and Ernie of looking in disbelief at the blue furry puppet's tootling
Cookie Monster plays the banana

It is absolutely hysterical, even with the repetition of ideas which form the foundation of the skit, and it makes me wonder if the show is targeting parents along with their children. (I did also wonder if showing the blue monster eating the small plastic instruments was a good idea. I can imagine children swallowing plastic whistles and harmonicas in imitation.)

The rest of the skits and interstitials weren’t quite as funny to my adult eyes, but many still had a slightly surreal edge. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sesame Street becomes popular with college-age kids who enjoy mind-altering substances.

still photo of the collision between a car, a boat, and a locomotive
Three muppets demonstrate three types of vehicles…and then smash them into each other

The other episode I saw featured an ongoing story where “Oscar the Grouch”, an orange puppet who lives in a trash can (apparently by choice), loses his trash can lid. The lid, he is careful to explain, is round. If there were any doubts about the Laugh-In connection, they are put to rest when Oscar says he’s going to go play his ukelele (which starts with the letter ‘U’, we are reminded) to feel better. He disappears into his can and the strains of “Tip-toe Through the Tulips” issue forth from it. Oscar’s full story is told in skits interspersed with more of the same frenetic “shorts” about letters and numbers, a cross between commercials and Laugh-In’s “Quickies”. Reinforcing the “educational commercial” idea, each episode has a “this episode was brought to you by” a particular letter and number at the end.

still photo of a graying White man in a shopkeeper's apron (Mr. Hooper), a White woman (Jenny), a Black woman (Susan), and a Black man (Gordon) all flanking an furry orange puppet with a hobo's bindle
Oscar is planning to leave, now that his trash can is no longer a home.  Most of the cast are here: (l. to r. Gordon, Susan, Jenny, and Mr. Hooper)

It’s fun, but does the show do what it sets out to do? Obviously, a couple of episodes is not enough to tell whether the lofty goal of improving early education (especially among underprivileged children) will be achieved. For that, we will have to wait a year or two and compare the progress of children who watched the show to those that didn’t. From the two episodes I watched, though, I saw more than just numbers and letters and animal sounds being taught. The cast is made up of people of different races, with Black and White actors working together as equals. The puppets are both human-looking and monstrous, but most of the monsters are actually kind and shown to be people just like everyone else. Some of the stories identify and give names to emotions: sadness, anger, fear, happiness. Themes of kindness, sharing, and cooperation are subtly interwoven into many of the skits.

still photo of two puppets facing one another, one with brown paper sack, and the other with a pile of jelly beans
Two muppets demonstrate the value of sharing

I don’t know if educational television will save the world, but I’m looking forward to seeing the world it helps create. Hopefully it will be one a little bit closer to that place where, as the theme song says, “the air is sweet”: Sesame Street.

This article brought to you by the letters "G" and "J", and the numbers "1", "6", and "1970".

still photo of Gordon and Susan sitting by the stoop, waving goodbye, as a child skips rope on the sidewalk
Susan gets the last word and waves goodbye from Sesame Street



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


Follow on BlueSky

Illustration of a thumbs-up

[January 4, 1970] Word for the Day: ARPANET


by Victoria Lucas

OK, kiddies, the word for today is ARPANET. Well, yes, good point, it’s not a word, is it? It’s an acronym jammed into an abbreviation. But a juicy one.

I found out what it means because Mel (my husband) and I have these friends in Orinda, California (a town east of Berkeley, nice place). Sharon is more of a stand-up comedian than a housewife, who uses her housewifery–-and sometimes herself–-as the butt of her jokes. Dick Karpinski is a fuzzy bear of a man who is the first computer programmer I ever met. We don’t get to their place too often, since it’s off our beaten track between SF/Berkeley and Fortuna that we usually run on the weekends and holidays (or when neither of us has an active temp job in the Eureka area).

Photograph of an older white man with gray curly hair and a thick white beard.
Richard Karpinski works for the University of California at San Francisco, supporting users of the IBM 360 and other tasks

At a recent visit, Dick was quite excited, and Sharon was complaining about her “three years of back ironing.” I don’t have much to say about the ironing, but once Dick had explained to me the reason for his excitement I admitted to some buoyancy myself. I wonder how you will feel about it.

With its initial transmission in October last year, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) is the first large-scale, general-purpose computer network to link different kinds of computers together without a direct connection. Not only that, but different kinds of networks are coming online following this one. But who cares, right? I mean who of us has ever even seen a computer?

Black-and-white photograph of a young woman sitting at an office, working with an old computer that is the size of a refrigerator.
The IBM 360 with operator

FAR OUT!

Up to now you could only connect the same kind of computers, and then only by special-purpose cables and outlets in the same building, unless you could connect your computer to a "modem” (modulator-de-modulator) that converts digital (computer talk) to analog (telephone signaling) and back again when connected to your telephone line. The same protocols and hardware can connect a computer to “terminals,” boxes that can interact with a computer but do not have the smarts to actually process data. Multiple people could use the same computer at the same time (the miracle of "time sharing" that Ida Moya talked about a few years back, but again, only at the same site or by telephone. No matter what, connections were direct: point to point and dedicated. If you wanted to interact with another computer, you had to go to another terminal hooked up, directly or via modem, to the new machine.

Photograph of a push-button landline telephone with its handset placed atop another device, which is connected to computer cables.
An electronic translator of one type of signal to another, the modem

But what if you wanted to access multiple other computers from a single terminal? What if you wanted your computer to talk to another, farflung computer of a different make (ie connect an IBM to a CDC?) Here’s where Dick had to bring out his yellow pad and start writing and drawing.

Dick draws a box on his pad. “One computer, right?”* he says. “And here’s another” as he draws another box to make #2. Now you could connect a single terminal to any number of computers using a newly developed "protocol" for connection. (A protocol, drawn as lines from that word toward the boxes, is a set of rules or instructions about how to do something, and it’s above a program, which is more of a detailed list of steps to use when doing something.) Rather than using specific hardware, the protocol allows computers to "speak" a common language, over phone-lines lines… regardless of computer make or location!

As Dick, the “Nitpicker Extraordinaire,” might have written at the top of his pad (I’m a little fuzzy about how the conversation progressed), the first set of computers involved in the evolution of this network would have belonged to the US Department of Defense as part of its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an almost direct result of the success of Sputnik. When NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Agency) was formed in 1958, most of ARPA’s projects and funding were moved to that group. That left ARPA with high-risk or far-out projects, such as computer networking. I can't tell you which computers are involved, nor the details of the protocol (even if I understood them) because they're classified. The main reason for the ARPA network is to test the survivability of communications in the event of a nuclear war. Because if one big computer is destroyed, someone could just use their terminal to contact a different one to complete a process.

Talk to any computer anywhere, without a telephone

Photograph of a switchboard with dozens of buttons and dials. The board is labeled: Interface Message Processor.
An ARPANET processor

While this exciting technology is limited to the ARPA for the moment, technology tends to spread to civilians eventually. Just think about it! The ARPA network and others like it will make it possible to distribute programs and data widely without printing it out and mailing it. As long as a computer can talk back, you can get and send data from and to it. Even more amazing, the initial transmission speeds showed that messages were being sent to a place 350 miles away 500 times faster than local data was traveling before. It was so fast that the initial speed caused a system crash, followed by a rebuild to handle the velocity, all during the very first transmission. It's not faster than light, but it's a darn sight better than having a computer operator working on far-out national research projects for ARPA fall asleep on his or her keyboard waiting for an answer.

What miracles could you work with a fast, smart, terminal that could connect to any computer in the world? Now that’s exciting!

*To Dick’s other friends. Yes, I know Dick, but I don’t remember any specific conversation like this. Any mistakes or misrepresentations are my responsibility.



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


Follow on BlueSky

[December 8, 1969] Do Better (January 1970 Amazing)


by John Boston

The January 1970 Amazing continues in its newly-established course—“ALL NEW STORIES Plus A Classic”—though it’s fronted in the all-too-long-established manner, with another capable enough but generic cover by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1965 issue of Perry Rhodan. Editor White has acknowledged this practice and, I suspect, is looking to end it when circumstances and the publisher permit.

Cover of Amazing Stories for January 1970. The illustration, by Johnny Bruck, shows a team of astronauts walking away from a crashed rocket on a desert with a pink sky. The text on the cover announces the stories Questor by Howard L. Myers, Moon Trash by Ross Rocklynne, Merry Xmas and Post/Gute by John Jakes, a novel by Philip K. Dick, and the essay Science in S F by Greg Benford and David Book.
by Johnny Bruck

The usual complement of features are here, starting with a long editorial meditation about the Moon landing, reactions to it, the progress (or lack thereof) of technology generally, and a note of cogent pessimism about the future of the space program: we can do it, but will we? The book reviews continue long and feisty, with White slagging James Blish’s generally well-received Black Easter, concluding: “At best, then, Black Easter is not a novel, but only an extended parable. At worst, it is a tract. In either case, it pleads its point through the straw-man manipulations of its author in a fashion I consider to be dishonest to its readers.” The milder-mannered Richard Delap says that Avram Davidson’s The Island Under the Earth “isn’t a horrid book like some of the dredges of magazine juvenilia we’ve seen recently; it’s soundly adult and imaginative but just too uneven and incomplete to be a good one.” Damning with faint praise, or the opposite? New reviewer Dennis O’Neil, a comic book scripter and “long a friend of SF, and a one-time neighbor of Samuel Delany,” compliments Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration: “Of all the adjectives which might be applied to Camp Concentration—‘artful,’ ‘brilliant,’ and ‘shocking’ come to mind—maybe the most appropriate is ‘heretical.’ ” He then reads the book in terms of Disch’s assumed religious background. “Catholicism is a hard habit to kick. James Joyce didn’t manage it, and neither does Tom Disch.”

The regular fanzine reviewer, John D. Berry, is on vacation, so White turns the column over to “Franklin Hudson Ford,” apparently a pseudonym of his own, for a long and praiseful review of Harry Warner’s fan history All Our Yesterdays. The letter column is even more contentious than the book reviews, with one correspondent addressing “My Dear Mr. Berry: You and your coterie of comic-stripped idiots” (etc. etc.). John J. Pierce, he of the “Second Foundation” and denunciations of the New Wave, explains that he really does have some taste: “If the romantic, expansive traditions of science fiction are to be saved, they will be saved by the Roger Zelaznys and the Ursula LeGuins, not by the Lin Carters or the Charles Nuetzels”—a point I had not realized was in contention. William Reynolds, an Associate Profession of “Bus. Ad.” at a Virginia community college, tries to correct White about the operation of the Model T Ford and provokes a response as spirited as it is mechanical. One Joseph Napolitano complains about “new wave stories”: These new wave writers “don’t want to work. Its [sic] not easy to come up with an idea for a story and they just don’t want to take the time and use what little brains they have to do this.” (Etc. etc.)

After all this amusing contention, it is unfortunate to have to report that the fiction contents of this issue are pretty lackluster.

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

I’m a great admirer of Philip K. Dick’s best work, and some of his less perfect productions as well. So it’s painful to report that A. Lincoln, Simulacrum, is a bust. It has its moments, but there aren’t enough of them and they don’t add up to much, even though the novel’s themes reflect some of Dick’s long-standing preoccupations.

Protagonist Louis Rosen is partner in a firm that manufactures and sells spinet pianos and electric organs. But now his partner Maury is branching out into simulacra—android replicas of historical persons, designed by his daughter Pris. They’ve started with Edwin M. Stanton, President Lincoln’s Secretary of War. How? “. . . [W]e collected the entire body of data extant pertaining to Stanton and had it transcribed down at UCLA into instruction punch-tape to be fed to the ruling monad that serves the simulacrum as a brain.” Ohhh-kay.

More importantly, why? Because Maury thinks America is preoccupied, in this year of 1981, with the Civil War, and it will be good business to re-enact it with artificial people. Pris is now working on a Lincoln simulacrum.

Sepia drawing by Michael Hinge. It shows a man in a business suit talking on a telephone while he smokes a cigarette, and the face of a woman also talking on a telephone.
by Michael Hinge

Staying over at Maury’s house, Louis meets Pris, recently released from the custody of the Federal Bureau of Mental Health, which provides free—and mandatory—treatment for people identified as mentally ill per the McHeston Act of 1975. Louis mentions that one in four Americans have served time in a Federal Mental Health Clinic. Pris was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and committed, in her third year of high school.

Louis asks her to stop her noisy activities because it’s late and he wants to go to sleep. She refuses, and says, “And don’t talk to me about going to bed or I’ll wreck your life. I’ll tell my father you propositioned me, and that’ll end Masa Associates and your career, and then you’ll wish you never saw an organ of any kind, electronic or not. So toddle on to bed, buddy, and be glad you don’t have worse troubles than not being able to sleep.” Louis thinks: “My god. . . . Beside her, the Stanton contraption is all warmth and friendliness.”

In a later encounter: “Why aren’t you married?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you a homosexual?”
“No!”
“Did some girl you fell in love with find you too ugly?”

In addition to this finely honed nastiness, Pris is also capable of considerable depression and self-pity. After the Lincoln is completed:
“Oh, Louis—it’s all over.”
“What’s all over?”
“It’s alive. I can never touch it again. Now what’ll I do? I have no further purpose in life.”
“Christ,” I said.
“My life is empty—I might as well be dead. All I’ve done and thought has been the Lincoln.”

Louis is shaken by these encounters. He sees a psychiatrist and gives a paranoid account of events to date, threatening to kill Pris. Further: “I was not kidding when I told you I’m one of Pris’ simulacra. There used to be a Louis Rosen, but no more. Now there’s only me. And if anything happens to me, Pris and Maury have the instructional tapes to create another.” Later he reiterates, in a conversation with the Stanton: “I claim there is no Edwin M. Stanton or Louis Rosen any more. There was once, but they’re dead. We’re machines.” The Stanton acknowledges, “There may be some truth in that.”

And if you’ve missed the point about humans and simulacra, here it is from the other direction. The Stanton says he would have liked to see the World’s Fair. Louis says: “That touched me to the heart. Again I reexperienced my first impression of it: that in many ways it was more human—god help us!—than we were, than Pris or Maury or even me, Louis Rosen. Only my father stood above it in dignity.”

The characters get involved with Sam Barrows, a rich guy who is the talk of the nation, in hopes of a profitable business relationship. Barrows is selling real estate on the Moon and other extraterrestrial locations. He sensibly trashes Maury’s idea of Civil War re-enactment, but his proposal is hardly an improvement; he wants to create simulacra of ordinary folks to go live in his off-planet housing developments and make them seem homier to potential buyers. (Sounds very practical, right?)

Pris then takes up with Barrows and begins calling herself Pristine Womankind. Meanwhile, Louis is getting progressively crazier, propelled by his obsession with Pris, and eventually winds up committed to the Federal Bureau of Mental Health—and is glad. There are a few more events and revelations I won’t spoil.

So, what follows from this prolonged but foreshortened precis?

First, this is not a very good SF novel, because it doesn’t follow through on its SFnal premises and also doesn’t make a lot of sense in general. It starts with the premise that historical replicas can be convincingly manufactured, and can exercise volition and easily adapt to a world a century in their future. OK, show me. But Dick doesn’t. We actually see relatively little of the Stanton and the Lincoln over the course of the novel. Further, we’re told that these artificial people are variations on models developed by the government. For what? And where are they and what are they doing? There’s no clue about the effects of this rather monumental development, other than allowing an obscure piano company to tinker with it.

The novel’s envisioned future doesn’t add up either. We’re told the setting is the USA in 1981, but there is routine space travel and colonization of the Moon and planets. More mind-boggling, there is the Federal Bureau of Mental Health—created by statute in 1975!—under which the entire population must take mental health tests administered in schools, and those deemed mentally ill are committed to a mental health clinic. As already noted, a fourth of the population has been committed at some point. And what political or cultural crisis or revolution has not only countenanced such an authoritarian regime, but also come up with the money for such a gigantic system of confinement?

Dick also seems to have made up his own system of psychiatry. Louis is diagnosed with a mental disorder requiring commitment through the James Benjamin Proverb Test. While interpretation of proverbs is sometimes used in psychiatric diagnosis, I can’t find any indication that this Benjamin Test exists anywhere besides Dick’s imagination.

Louis is asked to interpret “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

“ ‘Well, it means a person who’s always active and never pauses to reflect—’ No, that didn’t sound right. I tried again. ‘That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral statute won’t grow stale.’ He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, ‘I mean, a man who’s active and doesn’t let grass grow under his feet, he’ll get ahead in life.’
“Doctor Nisea said, ‘I see.’ And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.’”

Turns out the correct answer—which Louis says he really knew—is “A person who’s unstable will never acquire anything of value.” But if any of the other interpretations of this deeply ambiguous platitude—or acknowledgement of its ambiguity—proves one a schizophrenic, I guess I’d better turn myself in. (Cue soundtrack: “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.”)

The doctor goes on to explain that Louis has the “Magna Mater type of schizophrenia”:

“ ‘The primary form which ‘phrenia takes is the heliocentric form, the sun-worship form where the sun is deified, is seen in fact as the patient’s father. You have not experienced that. The heliocentric form is the most primitive and fits with the earliest known religion, solar worship, including the great heliocentric cult of the Roman Period, Mithraism. Also the earlier Persian solar cult, the worship of Mazda.’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding.
“ ‘Now, the Magna Mater, the form you have, was the great female deity cult of the Mediterranean at the time of the Mycenaean Civilization. Ishtar, Cybele, Attis, then later Athene herself . . . finally the Virgin Mary. What has happened to you is that your anima, that is, the embodiment of your unconscious, its archetype, has been projected outward, unto the cosmos, and there it is perceived and worshipped.’
“ ‘I see,’ I said.”

Now, nowhere is it written that an SF writer can’t invent future psychiatry, any more than future physics or sociology, or alternative history. But plopping this scheme down in the America of 12 years hence, without support or explanation of how we got there from here, is incongruous and implausible. And the nominal date of 1981 is not the issue. The novel is firmly set in the familiar USA of today or close to it, with androids, spaceships, and psychiatry based on ancient religions in effect stuck on with tape and thumb tacks.

Of course, absurdity and incongruity are far from rare in PKD’s work, but they generally appear in the context of madcap satire or grim lampoon (consider Dr. Smile, the robot psychiatrist-in-briefcase in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, whose function is not to cure, but to drive the protagonist crazy so he can evade the draft). But that’s not what’s going on here. This novel, though it has its witty moments, presents overall as thoroughly sober and serious, assisted by Louis’s flat first-person narration.

So, if it’s not good SF, is it good anything else? Editor White said in the last issue, “It’s more of a novel of character than any previous Philip K. Dick novel, and in writing and scene construction it approaches the so-called ‘mainstream’ novel.” Pris is an appallingly memorable character, both for her conduct and for her effect on others, and her part of dialogue is finely honed. A novel that closely examined her and her effect on those around her might be quite impressive. But in a novel that starts out with android historical figures and ends up in a national coercive mental health system, with spaceships and moon colonies along the way, there’s too much distraction for Pris and her relationships to be adequately developed.

The bottom line is that the author has mixed up elements of SF and the “mainstream” novel without developing either satisfactorily or adequately integrating them.

In the last chapter, the author makes a conspicuous effort to bring the novel’s disparate elements together, and winds things up in the most quintessentially Dickian fashion imaginable. In fact, it all seems a little too pat. But wait. Remember editor White’s cryptic statement in last issue’s editorial that this serial was not cut, but was “slightly revised and expanded” for its appearance here? There’s a rumor that this last chapter was not actually written by Dick, but was added by White. True? No doubt we’ll find out . . . someday.

A readable failure. Two stars.

Moon Trash, by Ross Rocklynne

Ross Rocklynne (birth name Ross Louis Rocklin) started publishing SF in 1935 and became very prolific in the 1940s, placing more than 10 stories most years through 1946, many in the field leader Astounding Science Fiction, but most in assorted pulps. After that his production fell off, he disappeared from Astounding, and ceased publishing entirely from 1954 to 1968, when he reappeared with a burst of stories in Galaxy. He was a heavyweight by production, but seemingly a lightweight by lasting impact. Only five of his stories were picked up in the explosion of SF anthologies of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, and to date he has published no books.

Sepia drawing by Ralph Reese. It shows two boys wearing astronaut helmets looking at a strange, tall alien creature with many tentacles and huge eyes.
by Ralph Reese

Moon Trash is a contrived piece about young Tommy, who lives on the Moon with his cranky old stepfather Ben Fountain; his mother seems to be dead though it’s not explicit. Tommy has bought the official ideology of keeping the Moon spick and span, and Ben gets annoyed when Tommy picks up things that Ben has dropped along the way. Then Tommy finds a bit of trash that somebody dropped about a million years ago, and it leads them to a cave full of artifacts of an alien civilization, including precious gems.

Ben’s not going to tell anybody and is going to see how he can make money from this find, but in his greed he pulls a heavy statue over and it kills him. Tommy reports that Ben fell down a crater wall, returns the artifact Ben had taken to the cave, tells no one about it, and resolves he’s going to work and become a big shot on the Moon. The obvious subtext of the title is that even on the Moon there will be people who are down and out or close to it—people like Ben are the Moon trash, though young Tommy is a class act. Three stars, barely.

Merry Xmas, Post/Gute, by John Jakes

John Jakes had been contributing to Amazing and other SF magazines, mostly downmarket, since 1950, to little notice or acclaim until he devised his Conan imitation Brak the Barbarian for Fantastic. In his very short Merry Xmas, Post/Gute, an impoverished author tries to get the last remaining book publisher to read his manuscript, only to be told it is closing its book division as unprofitable. It’s as heavy-handed as it is lightweight. Two stars.

Questor, by Howard L. Myers

Howard L. Myers—better known by his very SFnal pseudonym, Verge Foray—contributes Questor, a semi-competent piece of yard goods of the sort that filled the back pages of the 1950s’ SF magazines. Protagonist Morgan is part of a raid brigade attacking Earth, without benefit of spaceships, which are passe in this far future. He’s a Komenan; Earth is dominated by the Armans; it's not clear why we should care. Morgan is special; his assignment is to pretend to be a casualty and fall to Earth; but he’s hit by a “zerburst lance” and both he and his transportation equipment are injured. He lands in a Rocky Mountain snowbank and emerges, after some recuperation, to find himself in a valley he can’t climb out of.

Sepia drawing by Jeff Jones. It shows a human figure shooting lightning from a bazooka.
by Jeff Jones

But all is not lost. A talking mountain goat, named Ezzy, appears (intelligence and fingers engineered by long-ago humans), and offers to help him out. We learn just what Morgan is looking for on Earth—it’s called the Grail! Or, the goat says, “it can be called cornucopia, or Aladdin’s Lamp—or perhaps Pandora’s Box. . . . The only certain information is that it has vast power, and has been around a long time.” Morgan later adds, “We only know it appears to assure the survival and success of whatever society has it in its possession.” Can we say pure MacGuffin? And of course there is a wholly predictable revelation at the end involving the goat. Two stars for egregious contrivance.

The People of the Arrow, by P. Schuyler Miller

Sepia drawing by Leo Morey. It shows a prehistoric battle with spears and clubs between minimally dressed humans and apes. A steep mountain can be seen in the background.
by Leo Morey

This month’s “Famous Amazing Classic” is P. Schuyler Miller’s The People of the Arrow, from the July 1935 Amazing, and it does not impress. Kor, the leader of a migrating prehistoric tribe (having recently dispatched his elderly predecessor), returns with a hunting party to discover that their camp has been attacked by ape-men (he can tell by their footprints). They have wreaked terrible carnage and have carried off the women they did not kill. So the hunting party pursues the ape-men and wreaks terrible carnage on them with their superior armament (see the title). Miller does make a credible attempt to suggest the workings of Kor’s mind and his appreciation of the changing landscape he traverses, but it’s all pretty badly overwritten and mainly notable as a large bucket of blood. Miller—now best known as book reviewer for Analog and its predecessor Astounding—did much better work later. Two stars.

The Columbus Problem: II, by Greg Benford and David Book

Last issue’s “Science in Science Fiction” article asked how difficult it would be to locate planets in a star system from a spaceship traveling much slower than the speed of light. This issue, they ask how difficult it would be from a spaceship traveling much faster—say, a tenth of light-speed. (The authors say flatly: “To the scientific community, . . . FTL is nonsense.”) Then they take a quick turn for several pages of exposition about how an affordable and workable sub-light spaceship could be designed. The Goldilocks option, they suggest, is that proposed by one Robert Bussard: a ramscoop (magnetic, since it would need about a 40-mile radius) to collect all the loose gas and dust floating around in space and channel it into a fusion reactor.

Sounds great! Once you solve a few technical problems, that is. And then finding planets is a breeze. They’ll all be in the same plane, as in our solar system—it’s all in the angular momentum. Approach perpendicular to that plane, and Bob’s your uncle. Then a fly-by can reveal basics of habitability—gravity, temperature, what’s in the atmosphere—but looking for existing life and habitability for terrestrials will require landing, preferably by remote probes of several degrees of capability.

This one is denser than its predecessor, but as before, clear, clearly well-informed, and aimed at the core interests of, probably, most SF readers. Four stars.

Summing Up

So, assuming one agrees with me about the serial, there’s not much of a showing here for this resurrected magazine, though it’s far too early to be making any broad judgments. Promised for next issue are (the good news) a serial by editor White, who has demonstrated his capabilities as a writer, and (the bad news) a story by Christopher Anvil! No doubt a Campbell reject. Let’s hope the promising overcomes the ominous.



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