by Gideon Marcus

Tired of it all

Antiwar protesting isn't just for civilians anymore.

About 25 junior officers, mostly Navy personnel based in Washington, have formed the "Concerned Officers Movement".  Created in response to the growing disillusionment with the Indochina war, its purpose is (per the premiere issue of its newsletter) to "serve notice to the military and the nation that the officer corps is not part of the silent majority, that it is not going to let its thought be fashioned by the Pentagon."

Reportedly, C.O.M. came about because an officer participated as a marshal at the November 15, 1969 Moratorium anti-Vietnam War march, got featured in the Washington Post, and later received an unsatisfactory notation for loyalty in his fitness report.  The newsletter and movement are how other officers rallied in his support.

Because C.O.M. work is being done off duty and uses non-government materials, it is a completely lawful dissent.  According to Lt. j.g. Phil Lehman, one of the group's leaders, there has been no harassment from on high as yet.

We'll see how long this remains the case.

Really tired of it all

After reading this month's issue of Galaxy, I'm about ready to start my own Concerned Travelers Movement.  Truly, what a stinker.  Read on and see why:

cover by Jack Gaughan

I Will Fear No Evil (Part 1 of 4), by Robert A. Heinlein

Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is the mogul's mogul, controlling a vast financial empire.  But he is at death's door, and you can't take it with you.  So he contracts his lawyer to find a brilliant (but pariahed) neurosurgeon and a suitable donor so that he can be the subject of the first brain transplant.  The brain-dead donor is found, the operation is made, and Smith wakes up—young and healthy, and with his memories intact.

But there's a twist…

So begins the first installment of what looks to be a very long serial, this installment alone taking up a good half of this month's issue.  I've given you the synopsis, but how does this meager setup fill 80 pages?

Poorly.  The first three chapters, comprising nearly half the run-time, are superfluous.  Picture Robert Heinlein masturbating in a room filled with Robert Heinleins, each of them pontificating as they pleasure themselves, and you'll get the idea.  It's as if Bob taped himself visualizing that scene as he delivered a stream-of-conscious solliloquy, and then made sure every word of it ended up in this story.

And so, we have Smith being an arrogant, prickly cuss.  We have his attorney dogsbody Jackson being a slightly more circumspect prickly cuss.  We have the secretary, Eunice, being a saucy minx, jiggling with every statement, her (lack of) clothing presented in excruciating detail.

illustration by Jack Gaughan

The story gets mildly interesting when Smith begins his post-operation recovery.  It's clear from the beginning of this section that he's not in the kind of body he expected, and even the dimmest of readers will guess that he has switched sexes.  What is not quite as obvious is the identity of the donor.  The story gets really weird when it turns out the body's former occupant appears to still be a conscious entity, sharing a brain with Smith.  Maybe the soul really is in the heart.

Presumably, this story takes place in the same universe as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just a bit earlier in the timeline.  This draws unfortunate comparisons as Mistress is probably the best thing Bob ever wrote, and Evil…isn't.  Aside from the overstuffed nature of this installment, there are some maddening moments, like when Smith decides to simper like a "typical" female to better suit his new gender.  It's like Change of Mind with a sex rather than race change, but written by someone who had only gotten his knowledge of women from reading Playboy.

I have to wonder how this drek ended up in Galaxy.  I have some ideas.  For one, editor Ejler Jakobsson is spread pretty thin these days, between his flagship, sister mag IF, and the recently restarted Worlds of Tomorrow.  A long serial, no matter the quality, fills a lot of space.

Perhaps, too, Ejler signed a contract with Bob promising no edits.  This would be unusual, given that (per recent correspondence with Larry Niven), Ejler is an impossible editor who demands outrageous rewrites—like Galaxy's first boss, H. L. Gold, but with worse results.  Nevertheless, I can see Heinlein's name being such a draw, especially since Mistress came out in IF, that Jakobsson was willing to take the risk.

Well, now he—and we—are stuck with it.  God help me, this is going to be worse than Dune.

One star.

The Throwbacks, by Robert Silverberg

illustration by Jack Gaughan

Jason Quevedo is a resident of "Shanghai" in Urban Monad (Urbmon) 116, a metropolis-in-a-building sited somewhere between present-day Pittsburgh and Chicago.  The self-contained skyscraper houses 800,000 citizens, each divided into a series of "cities" comprising several floors and numbering around 40,000 residents each.

A scholar, Jacob is researching 20th century morés in support of a thesis: that three centuries of living in high-density structures is breeding a new kind of human, one free from jealousy, proprietary feelings toward partners, and ambition.  But Jason seems to be a kind of atavist, unhappy in his modern life, as if the pre-urbmon days are more his style.  He engages in the urbmon tradition of "nightwalking", entering random apartments after midnight to have sex with the women he finds inside (women who apparently don't mind unplanned sleepless night—or the fact that it is taboo to refuse), but he does so far from his own city, as if he finds the act shameful.  He resents his wife boldly doing her own nightwalking, normally the privilege of the male, as well as her constant nagging and desire to climb socially.

Eventually, things reach a boiling point between the pair.  You'll have to finish the story to find out if the ending is a happy one.

Silverberg is so interesting.  His writing is excellent, and he's pretty deft at drawing future settings.  At the same time, his projections of relations between the sexes are downright reactionary.  I might not have noticed this a decade ago, perhaps, but in these days of women's liberation, Silverberg's world of women fated to be wee-hours sexual receptacles for the quickest, most unimaginative rutting is not only depressing but unrealistic.  This point was driven home recently for me: I caught a roundtable public television show where four women and three men were discussing the traditional roles of the sexes, and the women were chafing mightily.  They noted the changes they wanted, which are already happening in our society.  If 1970 is already different from 1960, one imagines 2370 should be even more so.

This story feels a bit like Silverbob's The Time Hoppers crossed with some Philip K. Dick domestic crisis.  I know David Levinson didn't care for it, but I didn't find it too objectionable, noted objections notwithstanding.

Three stars.

Containers for the Condition of Man, by Laura Virta

The city-in-a-skyscraper has been a staple of science fiction for many years, but now the concept has a hip name: "arcology".  It's a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", and architect Paolo Soleri believes they are the wave of the future.  He's gone so far as to not only design enormous buildings to house a quarter million self-sufficiently, but even to break ground on a test settlement in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti.  The latter will ultimately house 3,000 comfortably on just 10 acres.

It reminds me a bit of that Welsh city-in-a-mall community featured on Our World.  I guess only time will tell if these giant edifices become reality or not.  Personally, I think the initial cost of construction will keep them in the blueprint stage eternally—at least so long as we have space into which to sprawl our suburbs.

Three stars. 

Goodbye Amanda Jean, by Wilma Shore

illustration by Jack Gaughan

A man comes home to find a pile of quartered meat on his stoop, and his wife in tears.  Turns out their daughter was shot by a drive-by sportsman.  It's not the killing that's illegal—it's the fact that the hunter made his kill from a moving vehicle.  The husband vows to take revenge, and he does so in the manner of the world set up by the author.

This is the second tale by Wilma Shore, and it's no better than the first one, published six years prior.  There's no science-fictional content whatsoever.  The extension of acceptable game to include humans isn't the result of overpopulation or societal change.  In fact, the single question presented is "what if hunting of people was legal per the same rules as hunting animals?"  Maybe it's a subtle dig at the sportsman hobby.  Who knows?

One star.

The All-At-Once Man, by R. A. Lafferty

illustration by Jack Gaughan

John Penandrew is resolved to live forever, so he announces to his four friends, brilliant and classically trained, all (with the exception of the one dilettante, who turns out to be the author, himself).  To achieve the ultimate longevity, he plans to combine all of the stages of his life into one present, ageless being.

And he succeeds!  But when one's 3D soul includes the entirety of its 4D lifetime, including the moments after death, the result is not what anyone expected.

This is a fascinating tale, quirky in the way Lafferty delivers when he really commits himself.  The subject matter is perhaps more suited to F&SF, and the style more in the vein of G. C. Edmondson's Mad Friend series (which also includes the author as a character), but I'm perfectly happy with how it goes and where it turned up.

Four stars.

The Hookup, by Dannie Plachta

illustration by Jack Gaughan

The first Yankee-Russkie link-up in space goes awry when an alien vessel beats the Communists to the docking.  Somehow, the Americans don't think to look out their window to see what docked with them.

It's a story that makes zero sense, particularly in this age of in-depth space coverage.  Maybe it would have flown in the '50s, before we became familiar with radars and real-life dockings and rendezvous.

One star.

Ask a Silly Question, by Andrew J. Offutt

illustration by Jack Gaughan

The Cudahy equations have revealed a chink in Einstein's relativity, and humanity has developed a fusion-driven vessel to accelerate its way through the previously considered inviolate speed of light barrier.

The question: where are you when you end up on the other side?

Offutt seems to understand science about as well as Plachta.  If something could go faster than light, and disappear from human ken as a result of doing so, we'd have noticed long ago.  It doesn't take a starship to accelerate to such speeds if relativity is no longer an issue: countless natural and artificial nuclear reactions would do the trick, too.

One star.

Sittik, by Anne McCaffrey

illustration by Jack Gaughan

A little boy is bullied by kids calling him "sittick."  His parents ignore the issue until the child, despondent, takes his own life.  Then the bullies turn on his mother with the same tactic.

Oh!  You thought that was the setup?  No, that's the whole story.

One star.

Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, July 1970), by Algis Budrys

Budrys calls The Ship Who Sang "a pretty good adventure story."  He notes that, despite her handicap, "Helva is, in fact, Wonder Woman.  She can do everything except get felt, and she doesn't have be very smart.  Nor is she…She goes along shouting and singing and heaving great metallic sighs.  She becomes famous throughout the galaxy of course, because unlike all the other ships like her, she does this peculiar thing—she sings.  She's a kind of freak, you see."  I take this to mean Budrys enjoyed the stories, but Helva is a broadly drawn, histrionic caricature.  So stipulated.

The reviewer goes on to note that "Catherine Moore is probably the best lady poet we've ever had in the field…What she lacks as a plotter of commercial fiction can normally be seen only when one looks over the impressive array of really great commercial stories turned out by her and the late Henry Cuttner…But if you would like to see what can be done with superb storytelling ability and an as yet not fully developed sense of plot, then Jirel of Joiry is your girl."

Jirel of Joiry is, of course, the collection of Weird Tales stories about the eponymous sword-and-sorcery heroine.  And even if Jirel represents solo, inexperienced Moore (Budrys suggests that mature Moore is not incapable of plots, as Now Woman Born and Judgement Night demonstrate), she still makes for compelling reading.

Time to sleep

Wow.  I don't know that Galaxy has ever managed a two-star rating in its entire run.  I could look through my statistics, but that would just be a depressing exercise.  With the revival of Worlds of Tomorrow being such a flop, I've got real concerns for the Gold/Pohl/Jakobsson franchise.

Which is a shame, since Galaxy got me started in science fiction.  Surely this can only be a blip in its proud twenty year legacy, right?

You're gonna have to do better than that if you want more of my lucre, Ejler!

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

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