By Jessica Holmes
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s all change in the new season of Doctor Who: new Doctor, new companion, new visuals. And it's now in colour!
But is it worth the increased rent on my new television set? Let’s catch up on “Spearhead From Space”.
Continue reading [January 26, 1970] Over The Rainbow (Doctor Who: Spearhead From Space)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
You may look at the byline for today's book of mine and wonder if your eyes are deceiving you; but no, that really is T. L. Sherred, who some older readers may remember as having written a few SF stories more than 15 years ago. Indeed, it has been so long since Sherred last appeared that it seems as if JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF had been born and then crucified in the interim, what with how much the field has changed since 1955. Now Sherred comes to us with what is apparently his debut novel.
Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred
The gist of it is that humanoid aliens, called the Regans, have come to Earth, in the name of a kind of cultural exchange; it just so happens that they've landed in Sherred's home state of Michigan. Dana Iverson holds part-time jobs as a barmaid and cafeteria worker, but secretly she works for the CIA, thus acting as our eyes and ears for the story that unfolds. A barfly buddy of Iverson's, Ken Jordan, gets randomly (or at least it seems random) selected as Earth's ambassador for the meeting with the Regans. For the Regans' part, they've provided the unrealistically gorgeous space captain Lee Kay Lukkari. The idea is that Jordan and Lukkari merge personalities and memories, quite literally, such that they learn of each other's cultures in about as direct and intimate a way as one can imagine. The neutral ground, which Jordan soon enough transforms into a kind of Xanadu, is the island of the book's title, positioned on the US-Canada border, just outside Michigan.
What could possibly go wrong? Actually, quite a lot.
Readers with good memories may recall a very good story of Sherred's from a very long time ago, "E for Effort," which involves a seemingly innocuous invention (a time-viewer that the characters use to their economic advantage) but which soon comes to have apocalyptic consequences. I have to say I'm a bit confused as to why Sherred, who for all I know has spent the past 15 years selling used cars, should suddenly emerge from hibernation with this specific novel. It's not that Alien Island is a bad novel exactly, but rather that while it follows a similar trajectory to that minor classic of Sherred's that I mentioned, and while it seems to come from the same place of pessimism regarding humanity's future in the wake of the atomic bomb, this is a narrative that doesn't benefit whatsoever from being rendered a novel. Certainly it would have worked better as a novella, given the small cast of main characters, the claustrophobic setting, and the single-mindedness of its message. The sad part is that it's by no means a bad message.
The other question I have to ask is why Sherred waited until, say, the past few years to write this novel of his. True, there are passages wherein the characters discuss sex, in a pretty inoffensive fashion (those expecting steamy human-on-space-babe intimacy will come away disappointed), but the language is more or less clean. I will say, it's not often you read an SF novel by one of "the old guard" these days and have the protagonist/narrator be a woman; that much of Iverson's conflict comes from her jealousy of Lukkari and her ill-hidden affection for Jordan is not as steep a price to pay as it sounds. Another thing to its credit is that Alien Island is a satire with a point to make, which I understand is going off of a low bar, but it still distresses me how many alleged satires strike me as utterly vacuous. Similarly to "E for Effort," this is basically a story about the pinhead humanity stands on, between nuclear annihilation and possibly ascending to a higher place. With "E for Effort" it was a time-viewer, whereas with Alien Island it's intervention on the part of some benign, if hard-to-read aliens.
One more thing: Without giving away specifics, I was worried that Sherred's novel would repeat the black hole of nuclear doom that "E for Effort" headed for by its end; but this novel's ending, which has a strangely biblical resonance, could be considered cautiously optimistic. Incidentally, "cautiously optimistic" is how I also feel about Sherred returning to the field after so long.
Three stars, but I was hoping for more.
by Winona Menezes
Ace Double 89250
The Winds of Darkover, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
by Kelly Freas
This month’s Ace Double gives us the fifth story set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover universe. A standalone story, The Winds of Darkover requires no prior knowledge of the series.
Generations removed from the colonists from whom they descended, the people of Darkover, a little waystation planet, live in an archaic feudal society lorded over by a ruling class with psychic abilities. Deep in the mountains, one of these noble families is thrust into turmoil when a bandit tribe lays siege to Storn Castle, and to save her family Lady Melitta of Storn is forced to flee in search of aid.
Seemingly unrelated, high above the planet a disgraced spaceport dispatcher named Dan Barron is unceremoniously relieved of his position after a paralyzing psychic vision renders him useless in an emergency and endangers the lives of several pilots. To salvage his employment he is sent on a humiliating planet-side mission at the request of the Darkovan Lord Valdir to instruct his men in the construction of lenses used in telescopes. Barron agrees reluctantly, but the psychic visions that cost him his job continue to plague his mind and body.
Bradley’s setting is dazzling; Darkover is unmistakably reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but filled with enough alien wonders and ancient history to give the impression that this world is much bigger than the little story it contains. The story, unfortunately, does its world little justice. Each event feels cobbled together out of necessity, and the sum of the parts is a story that jerks from one scene to the next with little regard for cohesion. The third act is so brief that the resolution feels unearned. My biggest issue, however, was the baffling choice to write one of its main characters out of importance.
Melitta of Storn is driven from her besieged home with the fate of her family entirely dependent on her wit and bravery, and seems like the obvious candidate for the heroine of a pulp fantasy. Rather than do the obvious, however, Bradley is apparently content to allow Melitta to gradually fade into the background with little impact on the plot. Until, of course, it is time for her to be the milquetoast half of a romance with Barron so under-baked I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped any pages.
The Winds of Darkover is a serviceable but ultimately skippable installment in the Darkover saga. It is buoyed only by its fantastical setting, and the story a disappointingly uninspired patchwork of genre fantasy staples. Two stars.
The Anything Tree, by John Rackham
by John Schoenherr
The other half of this Ace Double is The Anything Tree by John Rackham, and I found myself enjoying this one a lot more than I thought I would upon reading the opening pages. The first few paragraphs describe the heroine flippantly enough that I thought the rest of the book was going to be dismissive of her, but once the plot picked up I was pleasantly surprised.
Selena Ash is a covert agent sent on a mission by her father’s company to locate the planet of a tree with miraculous properties, and she does so under the guise of a thrill-seeking socialite who enjoys interplanetary racing. A mysterious sabotage sends her ship crash-landing onto a lush forest planet that she believes to be uninhabited… until she runs into Joe, a fellow explorer who has inexplicably “gone native” and made this planet his home, loincloth and all. Joe acts as Selena’s guide as they traverse this obscure planet to escape her adversaries, and she slowly begins to understand that Joe has a certain kinship with the plant life that populates this planet. As she grows to share his affinity for the friendly alien flora, she realizes that his solitary existence might be less lonely than she had initially believed.
Some of the inciting incidents of the plot feel a little contrived, but I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy this fantastically verdant paradise of a planet. Selena’s awareness of the existence of a kind of sapience possessed by the plants, not so much intelligence as base creature instinct, grows gradually enough to coax the reader along into an unwitting empathy with vegetation. Even the romance feels earnest and sweet, as the two protagonists are brought mentally and spiritually into togetherness by willingly joining the plants in their blissful existence. This unfamiliar way of existing is joyful in its inhumanity, compelling enough for me to ignore any plot contrivance or cliché and just be one with the greenery.
Maybe the contempt at the beginning of this story was justified, by Selena and all of humanity, me included. Rackham’s reverent wonder for the criminally unappreciated plant rings clear as a bell, compelling enough for me to set aside my dumb human logic and be reminded by the flowers of the joy of existing as a living creature. Four stars.
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
Enchantress From the Stars, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl
Today, 230 young women are undergraduates beginning their Spring semester at Yale where this time a year ago, none were. The education of women is a profession as old as learning, but has only recently been taken up by a range of our nation's institutions of higher learning. Stories about young women's minds, as opposed to their bodies or the uses men find for them, are as welcome and necessary as air.
Enchantress from the Stars is a story of a young woman's exploration of her world through the worlds – and worldviews – of others. This story has three alternating perspectives but Elana's view is the central one, with scenes through Jarel and Georyn's eyes weaving around it but never overwhelming the forthright and careful way Elana approaches her story.
This is a story fans of Star Trek would deeply enjoy, with its Federation and moral imperatives not to interfere, its mix of timelines and technologies, and most of all, its earnest heart. It brings a duty-bound respect for and curiosity about all living things that fans of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant Uhura – as well as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov – might enjoy.
Elana's world is divided into thirds, with her society at the top, as those who have control over the power of both machines and minds. Jeral's society is second tier, with control over mechanicals like space ships and mining engines and laser weapons, but no psychic powers. Georyn's world languishes in the bottom third of the power hierarchy, medieval with no machines and no mental powers, but he does hold a belief in magic that allows him to understand the world around him in some ways that are initially lost on Jeral.
The "dragon" that appears early in this story shows the deep potential for this tripartite frame. First, we hear of a dragon from Georyn and the number of people who have gone to fight it and never returned. Then we see through Jarel's eyes it is a fire-breathing forest clearing machine from the empire he serves in a junior capacity, and that the people Georyn has lost to the "dragon" are actually imprisoned by Jeral's colonizers. Finally, and most complexly, we understand the dragon through Elana's eyes, as both the monster of myth and of man, its terribleness and terror flowing from both wellsprings.
Enchantress from the Stars invites readers to engage in the kind of profound and transformative empathy that the best of science fiction and fantasy can draw from us. We see events from our own views as readers, from hers, from those of her father and coworker and the people she seeks to protect and those whose aggression she seeks to defuse. As I read, I found myself reinterpreting everything Georyn and Jeral said through Elana's view, a pleasant mental and emotional stretch that only grew more satisfying the more practice I had at it.
That juxtaposition between science fiction and fantasy is in a way at the heart of what makes Enchantress from the Stars so magical and remarkable, because the genre shifts depending on who is telling the story. Georyn's fantasy is Jeral's horror is Elana's science fiction. Most books ask us to walk in one stranger's shoes, and leave us better off for doing it; Enchantress from the Stars invites us to several views and gives us the tools to truly understand them.
In this moment where professors are having to learn to address their students as "ladies and gentlemen" and not merely "gentlemen," I believe we could all use as much practice expanding our worldviews as possible, to include new genders, new perspectives, and as many new ways of being as we can in a never ending effort to fully understand what it means to be human.
Americans today live under a constitution that does not once include the word "she" or "woman" or "girl." It has been nearly 50 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced and it still, still has not passed. Maybe some of those young women at Yale will get it passed or their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, which is celebrating its 100 year anniversary of admitting women this year, will see it through.
Like Elana's world, ours is unequal. It is full of dangers and arbitrary death, patriarchies that bind and urge conformity and restrict human potential. It is also full of girls like Elana, boys like Georyn and Jeral, young people who are willing to challenge what they can see with their own eyes is wrong in the world. Who are willing to take what they are given by their fathers, older brothers, commanders, and societies and say: no, this is not for me; for me, I choose another way.
Enchantress from the Stars gives them and us the time and space to question, to discern what our worlds are and should be and can be. It is a novel that gives us readers a breath of time, a bare string of moments, to consider: what have we received today that we will reject, reform, and remake tomorrow? Who will we teach ourselves and others to be? Who will we become?
Who do we want to be?
(Four stars)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Fiona Moore
February’s rain and sleet freeze the toes right off the feet, as Flanders and Swann once sang. Still, there’s reason to celebrate: the Family Law Reform Act has come into effect, reducing the age of majority from 21 to 18 for most purposes, homosexual sex being a notable exception. Decimalisation continues apace, with the half-crown coin being taken out of circulation (don’t worry, you can exchange it at most banks).
Term has resumed at Royal Holloway College and my students are attacking the writings of Margaret Mead with their usual enthusiasm. However, there is also widespread unease among our Nigerian foreign student community over the capitulation of Biafra: many of them have had no news of their families, and are also concerned about when they will be able to go home. The university is rallying round to make sure everyone is housed, and there are jobs aplenty in Southwest London if they need to stay a while, but it is still an anxious situation for them.
Jubilant street scene in Lagos upon the news of surrender, January 12, 1970
No news of Yoko Ono after December’s festive anti-war campaign. Rumour has it she and her husband have gone off to New York for some reason, so I expect I’ll be covering her activities less often. What all this means for her husband’s band, I’m not sure.
On to New Worlds, which continues its trajectory back to being an SFF magazine, but unfortunately almost every story is suffering from a lack of originality this month.
Cover by Roy Cornwall
Lead-In
Mostly introducing new writers and illustrators to the magazine, as well as showcasing the pieces by Ballard and Watson, and drawing the reader’s attention to a new, presumably ongoing, feature of the publication—of which, more later.
Journey Across a Crater by J.G. Ballard
A piece about a crash-landed astronaut finding his way to civilisation. There are resonances with Ballard’s earlier story “You and Me and The Continuum” (Impulse Magazine 1:1, 1966), and also some vivid sexual imagery about car crashes, which makes sense given that the Lead-In tells us Ballard is currently working on a novel about these. Interesting enough as a revisitation of familiar Ballard themes but no new ground broken. Three stars.
Soul Fast by Gwyneth Cravens
Illustration, artist uncredited (possibly Charles Platt)
A story by a woman in New Worlds is always worth remarking on, particularly a woman who is a current editor of the New Yorker. However, I can’t help but notice that women writers in New Worlds always seem to get pigeonholed into writing about domestic or otherwise nurturing themes. This one, for instance, is about food and the role it plays in relationships. There are some interesting satirical commentaries on race and how over-privileged White Americans with superficial attitudes towards spirituality crib from Black and Asian cultures, which makes it worth checking out. Four stars.
Japan by Ian Watson
Illustration by Judy Watson
This is the standout piece of the issue. Watson, a Tokyo resident, introduces Japan to English readers in a surreal, outré travelogue emphasising the weird SF-ness of living in a country where the atmosphere isn’t breathable, earthquakes and fires are endemic, sexual fetishes are catered to in the mainstream media, and consumerism takes on the status of art. The illustrations are by Watson’s wife Judy. It’s beautifully written, though, having been to Japan once or twice myself, I worry that it’s over-emphasising the strangeness of the country to a point where it might simply confirm Europeans’ stereotype that the East is a bizarre and hostile place. Nonetheless, five stars.
Apocrypha by D.M. Thomas
A poem about the life of Jesus. It’s not terribly original, but I did find it engaging and nicely written. Three stars.
6B 4C DD1 22 by Michael Butterworth
Illustration by Alan Stephanson
Another not-terribly-original piece in the vein of “let’s drop acid and describe the resulting trip as an SFF story.” The mind-altered protagonist lurches back and forth between several different realities, some more surreal than others, with recurring characters playing different roles. I like Butterworth’s way with prose, and some of the metaphors and descriptions are genuinely arresting, but I’d like to declare a moratorium on anyone using Alice in Wonderland as an acid trip metaphor; it’s been done to death. Similarly, while I really like the accompanying art, it looks exactly the same as every other set of illustrations intended to show an acid trip (see above). Four stars.
A Spot in the Oxidised Desert by Paul Green
Illustration by John Bayley
A short prose poem from the point of view of a dying sentient tank in a future desert battlefield. Possibly the most innovative piece this issue. Four stars.
The Bait Principle by M John Harrison
Illustration by Ivor Latto
Patients in an asylum begin to share each other’s delusions, and, in doing so, bring them into reality, leading to an ailurophobe being tormented by human-sized cats. This is an amusing twist on the familiar crazy-people-are-actually-seeing-the-truth genre, but at the end of the day that’s all it is. Two stars.
The Wind in the Snottygobble Tree: Conclusion by Jack Trevor Story
Illustration by Roy Cornwall
Finally this serial lurches to an end, with some heavy-handed satire about the Catholic and Scientologist churches, spies and the police. I have the feeling that the story-so-far summary is in fact retroactively adding elements, but I’m not interested enough to go back and find out. The eponymous tree finally appears (it's a species of yew, apparently), but I don’t think it’s got much to do with the story apart from being a bit gross. One star.
A Vid by James Sallis
A short poem which didn’t really do much for me. Two stars.
Books
By Mike Walters, John T. Sladek and Douglas Hill. There’s a delightfully excruciating pun on the first page, although Walters has to contort his review in order to fit it.
Music
As regards the new feature I mentioned above: New Worlds now has a music column! This is certainly a welcome innovation, and I look forward to seeing whether the New Wave has a particularly distinctive take on album reviews.
Overall, I’d say the magazine is suffering this month from a lack of originality. Everything is competently written at worst and sometimes really beautiful, but most of it is things that have been done before. Even the music column is something we see over and over in other magazines, and whether the fact that the reviewers are from the usual New Worlds crowd will make a difference is uncertain.
Is the New Wave played out? Can it (and Mr. Yoko Ono’s musical career) survive into the new decade? Time will tell.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
Up in the sky!
There are some intrepid women whose names are household words: Willa Brown, Jerrie Mock, Amelia Earhart. Others are not so familiar. The other day, I read the obituary for a pioneering soul I'd not known of before.
Blanche Stewart Scott was born in 1885. A native of Rochester, she was 25 when she drove a 25-horsepower Overland stock car from New York to San Francisco, her 69 hour journey marking the second time a woman had made a transcontinental drive.
This attracted the interest of aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss, who took her under his wing (so to speak) and trained her to fly. Apparently, Mrs. Scott had never seen an airplane before her coast-to-coast jaunt; she was caught in a traffic jam outside Dayton, Ohio, caused by a flying exhibition out of Wright Field.
After just three days of instruction, she made her first solo flight on September 5, 1910, from an airfield in Hammondsport—what may well be the first time an American woman piloted an aircraft.
Over the next four years, until she gave up flying, she suffered 41 broken bones in a number of crashes. She was one of the lucky ones: "Most of the early women fliers got killed," she once observed.
Scott's later career included working as a scriptwriter, film producer, and radio broadcaster in Hollywood. In 1948, she became the first woman to ever ride in a jet aircraft. During the '50s, she combed the country for vintage planes to stock the U.S. Air Force Museum near Dayton.
She died on January 12 at Genesee Hospital in her native town of Rochester, New York.
Down in the mud
by Michael Gilbert
Another pioneer of sorts had something of a flutter, if not yet a brush with death (I hope). The latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction is pretty bad…
Continue reading [January 20, 1970] Jolly good Ffelowes (February 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
The Long Loud Silence, by Wilson Tucker
It's been a while since we've heard from Wilson Tucker, fan-turned-pro-but-still-very-much-a-fan. Hence, I was delighted to see that he had a new book out last month. Except, of course, it's not new at all, as I soon found out.
By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall
The news to start this decade seems to be unrelentingly gloomy. The crisis in Biafra is only worsening, Mainland China and the USSR are at each other’s throats, and, at home, the government appears paralyzed on how to deal with inflation or the Unions.
But I want to take a break from grim reality and talk briefly about one of my favourite new TV programmes of recent months, Strange Report.
It stars the unlikely team of Anthony Quayle (regular star of war films) as retired police detective Adam Strange; Kaz Garas (relative newcomer) as student and jack-of-all-trades Hamlyn Gynt; and Anneke Wills (Polly from Doctor Who) as model and artist Evelyn McClean.
Together the trio solve unusual crimes together. These have included such cases as a kidnapped Chinese diplomat, murders by witchcraft and the killing of a student demonstrator behind the Iron Curtain.
There are several reasons this appeals to me, and would to other SF fans I imagine. Firstly, even though it never becomes SFnal, the cases work from a viewpoint that feels very scientific. That no matter how odd things may seem, they will always have a rational explanation.
Secondly, the cases are willing to address complicated issues, without attempting to preach. Even in dealing with some clearly despicable characters, there is an attempt made to understand their point of view and give both sides of the argument. To me it feels like the writers have their own ideas but don’t want to patronise the viewer, we are encouraged to make up our own minds.
Finally, is the dynamic between our triumvirate of heroes. Much like in Star Trek, you get the sense that, in spite of their different viewpoints they all clearly care for and respect each other. It would have been easy to have Strange constantly belittling Evelyn and her trying to show that women could do things for themselves. But, instead, there is a respect and a willingness to listen. Perhaps that is what the terrible world outside our windows really needs?
Back in the pages of SF publications, we have our own strange reports. One coming in from Vision of Tomorrow and the other from New Writings:
Vision of Tomorrow #5
Cover by Gerard Alfo Quinn
The only point of interest in the introduction is it labelling itself as Britain’s only original SF magazine. I guess it is a point of debate if New Worlds still counts as science fiction or not.
Dinner of Herbs by Douglas R. Mason
Illustration by Jeeves
Fenella, a thought chandler at a dianetics lab, has gone to a villa to have a tryst with engineer Gordon Reid. Also staying with them is their domestic servant, a former psychologist android. But is three a crowd?
A darker and more complex tale than it first appeared. However, I think it would benefit from toning down the descriptive prose and upping the character work.
Three Stars
Technical Wizard by Philip E. High
Illustration by Alan Vince
Two empires in space have come into contact, the more technically advanced human empire and another larger one, populated by fox-like creatures. A single human is sent into the fox people’s empire on a broken-down old ship to warn them. A parapsychic plague has spread through the human empire almost destroying society. Gelthru and Feen have to determine if the human is telling the truth, or if it is all a magic trick to keep them from invading.
An interesting concept and I enjoyed how it made the human the other and the fox-people the protagonists. However, I feel like it needed some more editing to rise above the pack.
Three Stars
Flanagan's Law by Dan Morgan
Illustration by Jeeves
Capt. Terence Hartigan of the freighter Ladybug is finally given clearance to leave Calpryn, a planet where the main occupation, and entertainment, is lawsuits. However, five hours before blast-off O’Mara goes missing. Hartigan sets off to find him before they find themselves in more legal hot water, but the captain quickly becomes entangled in the planet’s labyrinthine bureaucracy.
I have previously failed to find Morgan’s satires either poignant or funny. This continues that trend but with the addition of some questionable Irish stereotyping.
One Star
Fantasy Review
Uncredited illustration
Kathryn Buckley reviews New Writings in SF-15, which she liked but not as much as I did, and John Foyster gives praise to The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum, Outlaws of the Moon by Edmond Hamilton, Kavin’s World by David Mason and Needle by Hal Clement.
One of the Family by Sydney J. Bounds
Illustration by Alan Vince
Having completed the terraforming of Phoebe-Four, Richard Daniels takes his wife Jane and son Kenny to the neighboring Phoebe-Five for a holiday. Whilst it is meant to be uninhabited they find an intelligent alien, who they call Alan. He quickly becomes like one of the family, but Dick finds his presence both annoying and a cause for concern.
A bit of an old-fashioned tale, but well-told and with a reasonable twist. Wouldn’t have looked out of place as an episode of The Outer Limits.
Three Stars
On Greatgrandfather's Knee by Jack Wodhams
Illustration by Dick Howett
Six-G GFM Frank (that is Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather on your mother’s side) tells Furn tales of early space travel. But with longevity meaning all the kids having over a hundred great relatives, these tales of adventure are a dull chore.
Whilst Wodhams captures well the boredom of kids having to visit older relatives, I am not sure what the point of it all is.
Two Stars
The Impatient Dreamers: Hands Across the Sea by Walter Gillings
Insignia of Gernsbeck’s Science Fiction League, designed by Frank R. Paul
This month Gillings discusses Gernsbeck’s Science Fiction League’s branches in England, the early days of New Worlds, fanzine Scientifiction and Gillings' talks with publishers to get a new British SF magazine off the ground.
I continue to adore this series.
Five Stars
Incubation by Damien Broderick
Illustration by Eddie Jones
Clive Soame notices a strange ad in the personals and concocts a scheme to sleep with a rich woman and take her money. However, the assignation Rogel and Silver were communicating about was much more complicated than he first thought.
Whilst not revolutionary, an interesting enough take on the lecherous man and alien conspiracy genre. Surprisingly, more than the science-fictional elements, I found myself enjoying the descriptions of Sydney. Very well painted.
Three Stars
Life of the Party by William F. Temple
Illustration by Eddie Jones
In San Remo, business magnate Mannheim and reporter Don both notice a jet disappear in mid-air. Following its route, they find themselves on a strange coastline, with a giant white cube standing alone by a desert. Entering the cube, they discover a translucent liquid wall leading to a kind of theatre-cum-hotel. The missing jet passengers are there but aged and confused. Don and Manny assume it will be simple to escape, but some force is determined to keep the visitors from leaving.
Taking up over a quarter of the magazine, this is easily the longest piece here, but it makes good use of its length, creating an eerie sense of the uncanny. However, the story is a pretty old one (at times I was recalling The Odyssey) and I was disappointed with the way the women characters were written.
Evens out at Three Stars
After Ragnarok by Robert Bowden
Illustrated by Gerard Alfo Quinn
The final piece is from an author who I believe is new (at the very least I have not seen him covered by my GJ comrades). After Ragnarok, the world lays shattered. Ottar and Ragnar sail the seas in their ship powered by the ancient technology of the diesel engine. There is a rumour that long ago, some of the gods escaped across the Bifrost, also called Orbit. But could it be possible they are returning? And what will that mean for the world?
Yes, it is another piece of post-apocalyptic-medieval-futurism (try saying that after a few drinks!) However, it has a good style and I have a soft spot for this type of story. The level of cynicism involved also makes it appeal to me.
Four Stars
Tomorrow’s Disasters by Christopher Priest
Instead of our usual preview of next issue’s contents, Priest gives us a short review of Three For Tomorrow. Needless to say, he adores it.
So that is it for the relative newcomer to the scene, but what about the old hand?
New Writings in SF-16, ed. by John Carnell
Even if we accept the contention that Vision of Tomorrow is the only British SF magazine, New Writings still helps keep up the national side with its regular doses of Carnellian science fiction. According to John Carnell, all the stories in this issue deal with problems that are galactic in scope. Let us see if that makes them Galactic Star worthy.
Getaway from Getawehi by Colin Kapp
Things don't get off to a great start with the return of Colin Kapp's Unorthodox Engineers. Here they are hired to help rescue a construction crew from Getawehi, a planet with an impossible orbit, where gravity is not perpendicular to the surface and 1+1=1.5079.
At almost fifty pages, reading through this was a major slog. These tales must have their fans, but I was personally glad when they disappeared from New Writings a few years back. According to our more learned editor, the concept is very, very, broadly viable, which raises it just above rock bottom for me.
A very low Two Stars
All Done by Mirrors by Douglas R. Mason
George Exton has developed a method of producing mirror images of himself, able to independently work on multiple tasks with the same degree of knowledge and skill as the original. But what is the cost to someone of doing this?
A well-worn trail is being beaten here, and not particularly effectively either.
Two Stars
Throwback by Sydney J. Bounds
Since the Great Change all humans have had the ability to connect via ESP. All that is, except for one person who is completely opaque to all psychic phenomena. Out of pity he is made the keeper of the Museum of Language, with access to all the books and knowledge of the world. Even though he gives weekly lectures, few care about anything other than the present. But when strange lights appear in the sky, only he can save the planet from total panic.
A tightly-told little tale. A bit obvious but enjoyable nonetheless.
Three Stars
The Perihelion Man by Christopher Priest
Capt. Farrell is grounded after an accident near Venus dulls his senses. Whilst pondering what to do with his life now, he is offered a unique opportunity to go back into space. 250 old nuclear satellites have been stolen and are now orbiting the sun, and Farrell may be the only person who can get them back.
This is Priest’s most impressive work to date. He has managed to skillfully produce an exciting adventure story that also has some interesting political elements. That is not to say it is as deep as a New Worlds piece, but it is a fun ride.
Four Stars
R26/5/PSY and I by Michael G. Coney
Hugo Johnson is an agoraphobe who has not left his apartment in two months and is believed to be at risk of killing himself. As such his psychoanalyst provides him with a roommate, robot R/26/5/PSY, or Bob for short. However, Bob is not designed to make Johnson’s life easier, not at all….
An interesting little psychological short. It felt like a combination of I, Robot, a Zola story, and The Odd Couple.
Four Stars
Meatball by James White
And we finish off with the return of White's Sector General and, as the name suggests, their continued explorations of the planet Drambo, nicknamed "Meatball". With the Drambons brought to the hospital station, they must now learn to interact with the numerous other species on board. At the same time Conway has to work out how to deal with the nuclear destruction taking place on the planet below.
It is possible that my memory is cheating me, but I don’t recall other Sector General tales focusing on a single case so much before. Maybe it is planned to be a novel fix-up? This piece definitely has the feel of a staging section, it spends a lot of time recapping earlier events and ends abruptly. Still rather interesting but does not stand alone or feel complete by the end.
Three Stars
Strange Brew, Read What’s Inside Of You
Evelyn and Strange ponder what we have just read
Whether on the page or the screen, it seems that if you put a group of talented people together and ask them to deal with imaginative scenarios, they can often strike gold…or at least silver. Even if there is little here that is likely to win a Galactic Star, there is plenty worth checking out.
Here's to many more years of Vision, New Writings, and Strange Report. The seventies may not be looking much like a decade of peace and harmony, but it can at least be one of good solid entertainment.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
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.
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.
The title translates to The Cannons of Everblack. Note the use of English for what I presume is the name of a planet.
Continue reading [January 10, 1970] Time On My Hands (February 1970 Fantastic)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
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.
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:
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!
by Jack Gaughan, illustrating "Slow Sculpture"
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.
There's a signpost up ahead…
Continue reading [January 6, 1970] Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?
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).
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?
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.
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
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!]
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![[January 10, 1970] Time On My Hands (February 1970 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/COVER-672x372.jpg)
![[January 8, 1970] Slow Sculpture, Fast reading (the February 1970 <i>Galaxy Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/700108galaxycover-672x372.jpg)
![[January 6, 1970] Can you tell me how to get to <i>Sesame Street</i>?](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/700106banana-672x372.jpg)
![[January 4, 1970] Word for the Day: ARPANET](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/arpanetprocess-672x372.jpg)