![[March 14, 1970] <i>To Venus</i> and <i>Hell's Gate</i>… are we <i>Out of Our Minds</i>?](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700314covers-672x372.jpg)
by Gideon Marcus
To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell
cover by John Schoenherr
Warning: the latest Ace Double contains Communist propaganda!
The premise to David Grinnell's (actually Ace editor and Futurian Donald Wolheim) newest book is as follows: it is the 1980s, and the latest Soviet Venera has confirmed the initial findings of Venera 4, not only reporting lower temperatures and pressures than our Mariner 5, but spotting a region of oxygen, vegetation, and Earth-tropical climate.
And they're launching an manned expedition there in less than two months.
Of course, NASA doesn't believe the obvious Russian lies, but since they were planning on sending a nuclear-powered unmanned Mariner to the Planet of Love at the same time (taking advantage of the favorable orbital relationship between Earth and Venus that occurs every 19 months), why not put a three-man crew onboard? That way, the Stars and Stripes can beat the Sickle and Hammer to put first boots on the superheated ground.
But upon landing, the Mariner descent module stumbles and wrecks, stranding the three Venus-nauts "in an analogue of Hell". Now their only hope is to make the 100 mile trek to the Soviet landing site and hope there are actually cosmonauts there to help.
To Venus is a highly technical book, closely related to, say, Martin Caidin's Marooned (recently turned into a big-budget but turgid picture). The characters are so much cardboard, only developing the rudiments of a personality on the Big Hike. Much of the setup beggars imagination. Setting aside an even partially inhabitable Venus, the idea that a manned mission to the second planet could be trained for and launched in 43 days is absurd. Recall that Pioneer 5, originally intended for Venus, was turned into a generic long-distance probe because it couldn't be built and launched in time.
For the most part, though, the technical descriptions seem pretty reasonable. This is the first story set on "real" Venus I've read apart from the first of the subgenre, Niven's "Becalmed in Hell" (interestingly enough, included in Wollheim's anthology of 1965's best science fiction—coincidence?) The Have Spacesuit, Will Travel-esque journey portion, which comprises the latter half of the book, is genuinely thrilling.
I think three stars is appropriate, maybe another half star if any of the above elements are your bag.
The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb
cover by Kelly Freas
Blink and you miss it—just two and a half years ago, Britisher E. C. Tubb introduced the starfaring adventurer, Dumarest. I quite enjoyed his first outing, The Winds of Gath, and Blue found the sequel, Derai to be passable.
Well, here we are, 18 months later, and I find we've missed books 3 and 4 of the Dumarest series, and I've already got #5 in my hands! We're talking Moorcock/Silverberg levels of prolific here.
Once again, the setting is a hellish world plagued with poverty. This time, it is Scar, orbiting closely around a red sun with a rotation period of 120 days. Thus, each "season" is really a quarter of a day. The reason people inhabit the planet, which alternates between savage heat, monsoon rains, and bitter cold, is the profusion of fungi on it. All manner of molds and mushrooms cover the land, blooming in the brief summer. They offer foodstuffs, medicines, hallucinogenics. Above all, people seek "the golden spore", whose product is the most valuable.
The cast of characters come from the same castes as in the first novel (and presumably the other books, too). We have native partners, driven by profit-motive. We have representatives of the United Brotherhood, whose creed emphasizes paucity, but whose adherents sometimes chafe at that requirement. We have a cyber, akin to the mentats of Dune, devoid of emotion but not ambition…and fierce loyalty to the computerized hive mind of his kind. And we have fate-obsessed Jocelyn, heir to the throne of the poor planet Jest, along with his harsh and grasping new bride, Adrienne.
Dumarest's immediate goal is to raise sufficient funds to get off the world. His ultimate mission, as it has been since Book #1, is to locate Earth among the hundreds of thousands of possible systems in the galaxy. Suffice to say, he does not locate Terra in this volume—but he does get just the least bit closer to divining its location.
This really is a fun series. While this installment is not as compelling as the first book, and it shows every sign of having been composed in haste (particularly the inelegant repetition of certain turns of phrase, and the reusing of stock characters), I have to say that I am rather hooked by the series, which is sort of a cross between Dune (politics and technology) and Earthblood (the run-down worlds and the quest for Earth).
Three and a half stars.
by Amber Dubin
Hell's Gate, by Dean Koontz
Cover by Kelly Freas.
Although Dean R. Koontz' first full-length work was only recently published in 1968, Koontz has already built a reputation as a true science fiction suspense thriller novelist. Hell’s Gate keeps up a pulse-pounding pace throughout its pages, fraught with action, violence, mind-bendingly creative integration of complex subplots, beginning with a psychological thrilling secret agent assassin, tying in an alien invasion, and even taking the time to incorporate a tender romance. Throughout, what maintains the tension is the fact that this story is accurately named, as the hero spends the whole of it desperately trying to close the gate separating the world as we know it from a certain doom of a merger with a fireless inferno.
Our unlikely protagonist is Victor Salsbury, a creation of yet-to-be-known scientific technology who appears like a 30 year old man. The history that has been loaded into his memory is that of a successful artist, whose real body has yet to wash up in a small-town American river in the fall of 1970. After a rather jarring awakening in an apple orchard down the river running through said small town, Victor blindly follows his internal programming, which guides him to sneak into an old house and murder its lone occupant. After retreating to a nearby cave to hibernate and heal his wounds suffered in the struggle, Victor awakens again to receive further orders from a computer hidden in the cave with him.
Victor goes on to make use of the implanted memories, orders, supplies and only slightly super-human powers of healing, reflexes, and combat competency to further the objective of the computer, buying the house from a beautiful real estate agent whose uncle happened to be the man he killed. As he gradually acclimates himself to humanity and reality, our hero discovers that he has been placed in this house as a sentry to guard a portal in the basement to a morally bankrupt alien world, intent on sending a force through this gateway to establish a foothold of control on earth.
The developments that ensue are all very straightforward until about two thirds of the way through this ride, when the reader suddenly takes an incredible left turn into a “Land of the Giants” meets “Planet of the Apes”. It was an incredibly inventive and entertaining romp, but I found myself counting the remaining pages because I felt skeptical that the author could successfully explore the sudden digression and still have enough time to return to its original objective in a satisfactory manner.
My only true discomfort with this story was the way it resolved. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that the conclusion, while artful and delicately laid, doesn’t provide a comfortable wind down of the action. I didn’t exactly expect a neat and detailed epilogue, based on the tone set by the rest of the book, but I did find myself wanting at least a break in the rip-riotous pacing to take a step back and exhale. I understand that it probably would have been hard to make an ending that matched the energy and creativity of the rest of the story, but I did feel like more of an effort could have been made to satisfy the reader. That may be my personal bias, because all of my favorite books have the type of comforting, well-knit endings that make me feel like I just put down a comforting cup of hot chocolate and am now no longer thirsty or cold. I did feel a little of both when I closed and replaced this book on the shelf.
I would like to give this work 5 stars for the adrenaline rush, originality and consistently engaging plotline but I am particularly partial to stories with soft landings or at least ones that don’t end abruptly enough to give me whiplash from its final words.
4 stars
by Brian Collins
Out of Their Minds, by Clifford D. Simak
Cover by Richard Powers.
Horton Smith writes for a living, but has been having trouble with his current book-in-progress; so he decides to return to his hometown of Pilot Knot, which he has not seen in a good while now. While there he hopes to pay a visit to an old friend of his, an eccentric academic (but then don't we all have that friend) named Philip Freeman. Freeman has some funny ideas about the evolution of homo sapiens, or rather had, because it turns out Philip Freeman is dead. The reason for Freeman's death is implied to be much stranger than a mere heart attack, or even foul play. A run-in with a large dinosaur while on the road tells both Smith and the reader that something very unusual is going on, and the dinosaur, which disappears about as quickly as it appeared, is only the beginning. Mythical figures and fictitious characters, from Don Quixote to Satan himself, start flooding into the real world, and these figures largely and inexplicably have it out for Smith. What an unlucky guy.
This is another science-fantasy novel from Simak, who over the past few years has been determined to use his novels as canvases for blurring the line between the genres. I call Out of Their Minds "science-fantasy," but it is really rationalized fantasy, of the sort that frequently appeared in the long gone but not forgotten magazine Unknown, which I don't think Simak ever got to appear in. I could be mistaken.
Freeman, from beyond the grave, provides a scientific explanation for why made-up characters and things from the distant past (at one point Smith finds himself in the middle of Gettysburg, as in the American Civil War battle) have been appearing in "our" world, but it's such a loose explanation that I don't think even Simak believes it. Maybe buying into the explanation is not the point. These figures are unbelievable because they're quite literally figments of the human imagination that have been given flesh, at least temporarily. The only thing more unbelievable than Smith having a casual conversation with Satan (one of the best scenes in the novel, by the way) is his fast-growing relationship with Kathy Adams, a local teacher at Pilot Knot who becomes his designated love interest.
I've been reading Simak for the past 15 years, pretty much ever since I started reading science fiction with enthusiasm, and with one or two exceptions his novels are not him at his best. Indeed, it seems like he uses the novel format as a pretext for indulging himself rather than writing his best work. If you want Simak at his best, you read his short stories (his masterpiece, City, is really a bunch of short stories and interludes rather than a proper novel); but with his longer works, you encounter almost a different writer. Out of Their Minds, had it appeared thirty years ago in Unknown, would have probably been condensed to novella-length, which would have suited it best. On a scene-by-scene basis, it's rather enjoyable, especially once we actually arrive in Pilot Knot (it takes surprisingly long to get there) and a goblin-like creature known as the Referee appears. But even at just 190 pages, it's constipated in its pacing. It could be that, as with most of Simak's other novels, Out of Their Minds is still structured like a short story—one that's been stretched almost to the breaking point.
Yet, for all its apparent flaws, there is something basically admirable about not only Simak's breaking down of what is and is not SF, but his cautious optimism about the human imagination. For the past few years, since I started writing seriously about genre fiction, I've called Simak the anti-Lovecraft (incidentally H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu himself get mentioned in this novel) in the sense that he seems to believe it's not the vast, barren, amoral universe we should be worried about, but rather human folly. Conflict in Simak's fiction, nine times out of ten, arises from human error, and so it makes sense that the menaces in Out of Their Minds spawn from the human mind. Even so, with the drawbacks that come with it in mind, both Simak and Freeman believe that human creativity is ultimately both good and necessary for the race's survival. I have to admit, there is something deeply affirming about that message, even if it comes packaged in an overlong novel such as this.
Three stars. I'm a Simak fan, so I'm biased. You may feel differently.
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