This week, the regional news has been filled with the death of a local hero. Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon, a resident of Sealab III off the coast of La Jolla, died while diving 610 feet to repair a helium leak in his undersea home.
It wasn't a matter of foul play or (so far as is currently known) an accident. The 33 year old Cannon, subject to the rigors of a deep dive and 19 times the pressure out of water, simply succumbed to a cardiac arrest. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.
The three other divers who had gone with him had no physical troubles. The repair effort had come shortly after the habitat had been lowered to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean pending long-term habitation by eight aquanauts. Cannon was a veteran of the second Sealab experiment, back in 1965.
We talk a lot about the space program here on the Journey, but it's important to know that humanity is pushing at all the frontiers, from Antarctica to the sea bottom. And in all such dangerous endeavors, there are tragedies as well as triumphs. Sacrifice is part of the bargain we make for survival of the species, but it never goes down any easier. Especially for his wife, Mary Lou, and their three children…
Davy Jones has company
In less tragic news, the latest issue of F&SF is filled with the kind of madcap, surreal adventures you might expect to find on the (sadly cancelled) The Monkees, particularly the first tale:
by Ronald Walotsky, illustrating the title story
Calliope and Gherkin and the Yankee Doodle Thing, by Evelyn E. Smith
Like, far out—two Greenwich Village type 17 year-olds, the Jewish "Gherkin" and his Black girlfriend "Calliope" are set up to take the biggest trip of their life. Like, they don't trip out on acid or pot, but literally are snatched for a jaunt to the stars, where they hook up with some of the sexiest green-furred cats you ever did saw.
Was it all an illusion? Or were they really summoned beyond the stars for stud duty? The plot thickens when Calliope begins to show in a motherly way…
This is the first I've seen of Evelyn E. Smith since she was a frequent star of Galaxy in the early '50s. Her chatty, droll style translates pretty well into the modern day, with her madcap, satirical melange of race relations, drug culture, and extraterrestrial high jinks. It runs, perhaps, a bit overlong, and also overdense, but it's not unenjoyable. Welcome back!
Three stars.
Party Night, by Reginald Bretnor
Carce is a scheming woman-user, all veneer and bitterness. When his multi-year attempts to seduce the woman he wants from her husband fails, he goes on a driving jag that plunges him further and further into a night determined to karmically repay him. The pay-off is horrific, though appropriate.
Typical Twilight Zone or Hitchcock stuff, but nicely presented.
Four stars.
by Gahan Wilson
After Enfer, by Philip Latham
A milquetoast of a man, paralyzed by fear, decides (at the urging of his wife) to find a better job than the museum position he's been stuck in for 16 years. He is recruited to explore the Nth Dimensions with an eye toward opening up tesseractal space for colonization, the world being intensely overcrowded.
We never get no details of the trip; we just know that no one has ever managed to deal with the terror of 3D+ space before. Frankly, without that, the story is just sort of frivolous and a let down.
Two stars.
The Leftovers, by Sterling E. Lanier
The latest Brigadier Ffellowes shaggy-dog-story-told-in-a-pub-setting is the least of the three Lanier has written thus far. This time, it's about a Paleozoic race of sinister, intelligent bipeds that inhabit the southern coast of Arabia, and how the Brigadier and his Sudanese sidekick narrowly escape their pursuit.
Lovecraft was doing such stories better many decades ago. A low three stars.
An Affair with Genius, by Joseph Green
Valence is a gifted biologist, plodding and methodical. For twelve years, he has been estranged from Valerie, a volatile genius in the same field, with whom he had shared a brief but remarkable relationshop. Success tore them apart, as she got the credit for their landmark discovery, and then seemingly abandoned him for a senior professor.
So, when she reappears in his life on the desiccating planet of Tau Ceti 2 where Valence had been researching the colony life forms that eke out a bleak existence, he is shattered, even to the point of contemplating her death.
Fate intervenes in the form of a sudden sand storm, and Valence must save Valerie's life. In the ensuing moment he comes to the realization that without her, he was nothing–just a persistent technician, while Valerie had all the real talent.
But the truth is more complicated; sometimes, it takes yin and yang to make a complete unit…
This is a beautiful story. Perhaps I'm just the intended audience, but I loved it. Five stars.
Just Right, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor offers up, this month, a piece on the square-cube law—explaining why it's not possible to simply shrink or grow the scale of an object and think it will be subject to the same physical laws. He lambasts the TV show Land of the Giants in the process, as is appropriate.
It's a good article, and the final sentence is hilarious. Four stars.
The Day the Wind Died, by Peter Tate
An old man squats on his roof, in a senile dream reliving his days as an ace in World War I, planning to soar on artificial wings he has just purchased. His son Charlie, a harried weatherman, drops a mirror while shaving. His son notices that the wind around their house has abruptly stopped, and he believes his father caused it. He tells his friends.
And the plainclothes agents for the Bureau for the Investigation of Weather Incidents takes notice, certain that Charlie has stilled the wind for nefarious purposes—to ensure his father falls to his death when he takes to the sky on his wings.
Is Charlie a wizard? Who are these agents? Is this our world at all?
A surreal, rather puzzling story. I give it three stars.
Maxwell, an English teacher, wakes from cold sleep two centuries hence only to find the world crammed with people and utterly lacking in color. But beauty exists as long as poetry is possible, and Maxwell makes sure that his multi-great grandson has the power of simile before the teacher is sent to the euthanasia chamber at age 70.
The story is written in a hopeful tone, but the subtext is entirely cynical. As usual, McAllister shows promise, but there is still a rawness that holds his work back from greatness.
Three stars.
Coming up for air
A good issue, this, and thankfully, no one had to risk perishing to explore these frontiers. Then again, perhaps it is prose daydreams like the ones in F&SF that drive men to explore onward. No coin is without two sides, I suppose.
Here's to future expeditions, both literary and actual, and safe travels to all who undertake them!
This week’s episode of Star Trek will likely turn many members of the audience into devout Buddhists. It’s an episode which stands as a reminder of the destructive nature of desire and why the devotees of the Buddha eschew that emotion. “Requiem for Methuselah” showcased a level of desire that proved more contagious and damaging than any infectious fever.
The show started with the Enterprise in orbit of Holberg 917-G, in the Omega system. 3 crew members had died and 23 were sick with Rigelian Fever. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beamed down the planet in search of ryetalyn, a mineral that could cure the ill.
As they were about to split up to locate the vital substance, a hovering robot reminiscent of Nomad, from “The Changeling”, showed up and fired on them. It rendered their weapons useless and had them cornered until “Do not kill!” was shouted by a voice whose owner was out of view.
"You are the Kirk? The Creator?"
A finely dressed older man with a Caesar haircut revealed himself, demanding that they leave the planet. Kirk and crew would not be deterred and threatened they would take the ryetalyn if they had to. The man, named Flint, said that he could kill Kirk, implying that the crew and the starship were no threat to him. McCoy pleaded with Flint, saying that Rigelian fever was on par with Bubonic plague. This caused Flint to think back to the city of Constantinople and what the plague had done to the people there. Flint relented and allowed the crew to stay, while his flying robot, M-4 (likely unrelated to M-5 from “The Ultimate Computer”), went off to gather ryetalyn. Flint promised that M-4 could gather the materials faster than they could. Being that those who were sick on the Enterprise had only four hours before the disease progressed, McCoy and the others agreed to allow it.
"What else can I get you? A bag of reds? Keys to my Mercedes? An original copy of the U.S. Constitution?
Flint took the trio to his castle. Inside Spock noticed a treasure trove of classic art. Art from DaVinci. Music from Brahms and other fineries. Flint left them alone to enjoy some brandy, after telling them that he lived alone with only M-4 as company, while in another part of the castle, a lovely young woman watched Kirk and the others on a screen.
"I do so love that Johnny Carson!"
Flint entered the room and spoke to the young beauty, named Rayna. She looked on the other men with desire and said she wanted to meet them, since she had never met other people besides Flint.
As M-4 returned with the ryetalyn, Spock continued to marvel at the priceless art pieces housed in the castle, but he also noted that they were created using modern materials and not ancient ones. Flint then entered and sent M-4 away to prepare the ryetalyn, with the promise that it would be completed faster than it could be on the Enterprise.
As an apology for his initial rudeness, Flint introduced Kirk and the others to Rayna, her very presence being as a gift to the men in attendance. At first sight, desire for the beautiful young woman flooded Kirk’s eyes. Flint’s method of apology apparently landed well with Kirk in particular.
Rayna teaches Kirk how to hold his stick
The introduction of Rayna started the main arc of the episode in earnest. Her beauty and intelligence seemed to have stirred something in Kirk rather quickly. She in turn began to explore emotions that she had never felt before due to Kirk’s focus on her.
The desire between Kirk and Rayna was visible and out in the open, whereas Flint was a man filled with deep desires that he protected viciously. The story also revealed him as a man of many secrets, holding so many of them that it was not until we finally learned the truth about him and also about Rayna, that the real danger of the episode took hold.
In the end, the painful desire and vast longing on display in this episode brought one character to complete ruin and threatened to destroy the rest in their wake.
In conclusion, outside of the insane speed at which Kirk falls for Rayna, this episode had an interesting plot and premise. The characters seemed compelling and the type of people that would be tempting to see on adventures of their own. Suffice it to say, that Rayna and Flint didn’t feel disposable to me as other characters often do. Also, the narrative twists and surprises near the end were not overly foreshadowed. They took me by surprise and I appreciated that. Now, if I can just find a Buddhist temple to ensure I remain free of what happened in this episode.
Four stars
What Could Have Been
by Janice L. Newman
“I’m tired of broken episodes,” my daughter said wearily after the credits had finished rolling. I couldn’t help but agree. For the past several weeks, we’ve had frustrating episode after frustrating episode, made all the more dissatisfying because in every case, we can see what could have been.
With shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the plots are generally silly enough not to be taken seriously. But we’ve seen just how good Star Trek can be, and it’s obvious that the script writers are trying. Sadly the most recent batch of episodes has been filled with poor characterization of our beloved crew, plots that made no sense, stories that tried to Say Something but stumbled over their words, and things that…well…just didn’t feel like Star Trek!
The most recent episode suffered from many of these ailments. For one, it had two conflicting plots: the epidemic on board the ship and the mystery of the old man and his ‘daughter’ on the planet. A competent version of the script would have played these two threads off of each other, keeping the viewers in suspense about whether the captain and his men would be able to bring back the cure in time. But since all three crewmembers treat the epidemic situation casually, it’s hard for the viewers to take it seriously or become invested in it. We never see anyone sick on the ship, so it’s up to Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley to give us a sense of urgency. Instead, Spock is intrigued by the mystery surrounding Flint and Kirk far too quickly becomes enamored with Rayna. Their constant distraction feels out of character and irresponsible to the point of dereliction of duty. Yet it could have been good with a few changes.
Then, too, the plot thread of Rayna’s humanity could have been great. Star Trek has played with the idea of androids or computers with emotions before, but mostly it's used the concept as a plot device where such feelings can be leveraged as tools to trick or confuse hostile mechanical beings. Rayna’s awakening to human emotions could have been poignant and meaningful. Instead it felt cheap and forced. I could even have accepted her becoming infatuated with Kirk since he was one of the first humans she’d ever met besides Flint. But Captain Kirk returning her feelings is patently ridiculous, particularly given the extremely short amount of time they knew each other, her utter lack of personality, and the fact that his entire crew were hours away from painful deaths. By making the story mainly about Kirk’s feelings instead of hers, the writer really missed the mark. Two of the major problems could have been easily fixed if Kirk was focused on helping his crew while Rayna actually expressed her growing feelings for him (or for another character—either Spock or McCoy would have been a more interesting choice).
Flint watches his home-made stag film; good thing his peep show has a good cinematographer!
The interplay between Spock and McCoy was good as always, partly because Kelley is such a pro in his delivery, while Nimoy’s ‘stoic face’ is excellent. But Spock’s choice at the end killed any good will the story had managed to scrape together. The idea that Kirk, no matter what he said in a moment of weakness, would willingly submit to having his memory erased is ludicrous. Even setting aside the events of Dagger of the Mind, where he had his memory toyed with, this is a starship captain we’re talking about. I cannot believe that he would truly want a memory, even a painful one, removed. And I likewise cannot believe that Spock would do such a thing without permission. It was an interesting idea, but once again the execution fell flat because it felt all wrong. If it had been a different crewmember, McCoy for example, and if he’d given his permission, it could have been an amazing moment. Instead, it was ugly and nauseating. Quite simply, it didn’t feel like Star Trek, or at least not the Star Trek I love: where women are treated with respect, Spock would never take advantage of his captain even in the name of ‘helping’ him, and Kirk actually cares about his crew.
Two stars, because inside the bad episode there was still a good episode trying to get out.
Just Another Pretty Face
by Lorelei Marcus
I found Louise Sorel's depiction of Rayna to be vaguely reminiscent of another blonde android I'd seen on TV a few years before: her stiff head tilts and unfocused gaze reminded me of Julie Newmar's Rhoda, the superhuman, do-it-all robot thrust into Bob Cumming's unwilling care on My Living Doll.
As Rhoda's guardian, Cummings had to ensure her artificial nature was kept secret, but this became increasingly difficult due to Rhoda's extraordinary abilities. The show shouldn't have worked, but despite Cummings' off-putting performance and his character's incompetence, it hung together—thanks to Julie Newmar's incredible physical comedy and skill. Be it the countless amusing ways Rhoda misinterpreted commands, or her incredibly mixed up piano performance, or the way she instantly slumped whenever anyone pressed the little "off button" on her back, Rhoda was a wonderfully funny character and (more importantly) individual, and she was the reason I tuned in every week to watch the show.
The same, sadly, cannot be said for Rayna. While it's true that wacky humor wouldn't suit the character nor the tone of the episode, any form of charisma would have made Rayna better than the blank slate we got. The only details we know about her are the number of degrees she has, and that she would have liked to have had a conversation with Spock—something she never actually gets to do.
Instead, she's whisked into a forced, 20-minute romance with Kirk, in which we continue to learn nothing about her personally. Then she dies, unable to make a single choice for herself because of the clashing desires of other people. Bleah.
For all that we've had too many Kirk love interests this season, I'm going to make the unpopular assertion that this one could have worked. I think Rayna could have so bewitched Kirk that he would lose sight of the urgency of saving his ship and crew, but for that to work, she would have needed to make us fall in love with her, too. Reduced to a pretty face, without initiative nor personality, I can't imagine she'd be able to seduce Ensign Chekov, much less Captain Kirk! For the missed opportunity of an interesting character, and the loss of integrity of everyone else's character as a result, I give this episode 1.5 stars.
"Train up a child in the way that he should go" — King Solomon
by Erica Frank
I planned to write about Rayna – about the utter ridiculousness of "the equivalent of 17 university degrees in sciences and art" as judged by one man. About her claim that Flint is "the greatest, kindest, wisest man in the galaxy," based on her vast experience of… an hour spent in the company of three other men.
Those made more sense after she was revealed as an android, programmed rather than taught. Others have already mentioned how bland her robotic tabula rasa personality was, without managing to be quirky or entertaining.
I find myself more interested in Flint. The man who claims to be (presumably is, in the Star Trek universe) Methuselah, Solomon, Lazarus, Alexander the Great, Merlin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Brahms. An artist, inventor, and wizard: his ultimate creation is the woman he falls in love with.
Did he invent the paper-thin large-screen television as well? Can I get one of those?
…Whom he promptly loses to a broken heart; he failed to teach her anything about how to make hard choices, how to find a solution when both options will hurt someone. …Just what did those 17 degrees cover? Any study of history should be packed with examples of art made in despair after facing choices with no good outcomes.
But why should she be facing a no-good-options choice? After six thousand years of human life, in an array of different cultures, can he not contemplate a relationship with more than two people? Solomon had 700 wives, but Flint today cannot handle the idea of a wife with two husbands?
Flint despairs that Rayna might care for someone other than him.
Ah, but Rayna doesn't see him as a husband yet—no surprise, since he's been telling her he raised her from childhood, like a parent. If she was to be his mate, why didn't he teach her that: "Someday, when you are ready, we will be married—full partners who love each other." She would've been looking forward to some unknown change, some nebulous marker of full adulthood, to take her place by his side. (With or without Kirk as a harem-boy on the side.) Instead, he treated her like a daughter, like a student, not like someone intended to be his peer.
Setting aside all of that—and much more that I didn't mention—once he had perfected Rayna, why didn't he just make another one after Kirk left? Even if he's limited to a normal human lifespan now, there's time to try again.
The current Rayna is 17. One more and she's legal!
Two stars. The idea of Methuselah changing identities and living throughout human history is fascinating, but it is bungled here.
Too Many Beaches to Walk On
by Gideon Marcus
One of our readers sends us letters after every episode. He has developed a rating system not on quality, but on the number of times an element or device is used in an episode. For instance, "Wig Trek" (if there are wigs in evidence), "Cave Trek" (if there is a subterranean setting), etc.
He recently introduced a new scale: "Love Trek". More and more often, we see one member of the crew or another falling in love. This theme has been used to good effect in shows like "This Side of Paradise" (Spock falls in love, or at least, is able to express his love), "The City on the Edge of Forever" (a better case of "Tahiti Syndrome" than "The Paradise Syndrome", honestly), and "Spectre of the Gun" (Chekov and the saloon girl, whose name I can't remember.) It is less tolerable in any case involving Scotty, as the engineer, when lovelorn, becomes a moron. C'est l'amour, I guess.
It is least tolerable when it's Captain Kirk. Oh sure, the Enterprise's skipper has developed a reputation for randiness over the course of the last three years, but usually, said reputation is actually undeserved. For the most part, Kirk is the pursued rather than the pursuer, or he uses sex as a weapon, kissing antagonists until they submit. First season Kirk was positively chaste, and he recognized that his supreme obligation was to the Enterprise. Afflicted by the alcohol-like effects of the Psi 2000 disease in "The Naked Time", Kirk laments that he has no time, no capacity for love—"no beach to walk on."
It's something of a tragedy, but it's also a poignant and useful character trait. The scene in "This Side of Paradise", when Kirk's fidelity to his ship shakes the influence of the Lotus-Eater spores of Omicron Ceti Three in "This Side of Paradise", is still perhaps my favorite of the series. In "Elaan of Troyius", when Kirk is made a thrall of Elaan by her love-inducing tears, the audience knows he will break their influence once his ship is put in danger—and he does.
So howthehell does Kirk find the love of his life in less than five minutes of dancing with Rhoda Rayna the Robot? Especially such a bland, nonentity of a not-woman? (If she'd been played by Julie Newmar, there might have been some—not much, but some—justification.) Kirk's entire crew is dying. He is dying. His crew is his ship. Yet he carouses, drinks brandy, banters about Brahms and Da Vinci with Spock, and generally acts as if he is on shore leave rather than less than four hours from the death of his first and greatest love.
These three really look like they're worried about the imminent death of the Enterprise crew…
The episode is not utterly horrible. As Janice notes, there are some intriguing elements. That it has some resemblance with Forbidden Planet doesn't do it any favors, but both share an ancestry that goes back to The Tempest, so I can forgive that.
But the utter savaging of Kirk's character, not to mention Spock's uncharacteristic blasé attitude, his sudden role as a love guru, and his casual use of the Vulcan Mind Touch (remember when using such was all but tabu?) makes me hate this episode in hindsight all the more.
1.5 stars.
[Come join us tomorrow (February 21st) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
This week’s episode of Star Trek had me asking myself two questions; the first: will that girl be a woman soon? The second question is how many ghosts does it take to reach escape velocity on the planet Zetar? My answers to those questions: not soon enough (apologies to Neil Diamond) and one hundred respectively. To check my answers and my impeccable math, I urge you to read on.
The Enterprise was en route to a planetoid called Memory Alpha, a place analogous to an outer space branch of the Library of Alexandria. Any foreshadowing on my part for this analogy is intentional.
The captain’s log started with an explanation of the mission to Memory Alpha and then went into the love life of ship’s engineer Mongomery Scott, and how queer it was that he had found a girlfriend at his age.
Lieutenant Mira Romaine was her name. A womanly girl-woman on whom Scotty smoothly spread sugary compliments as if he were frosting a cake. And boy was she ever eating up those sweet nothings, showing the feelings were mutual.
"Do you think it would cause a complete breakdown of discipline if a lowly lieutenant kissed a Starship Chief Engineer on the bridge of his ship?"
While the crew was amusing themselves with the affectionate antics of the elder engineer, the Enterprise encountered what appeared to be a multicolored storm of twinkling lights in outer space. This twinkle-storm, which could move faster than the speed of light, quickly overtook the Enterprise and entered the bridge. The lights then incapacitated everyone in mysteriously different ways, but eerily entered the eyeball of Lieutenant Mira Romaine, causing her to faint on the bridge.
"Blast it, Scotty—you kissed her too hard!"
After the crew recovered and the light storm flitted away, Dr. McCoy examined Lt. Romaine, who at this time was getting agitated by the attention on her and wished to be left alone by everyone except Scotty. Weirdly, this is when the crew took to calling her a girl, but I digress. The chase was on for the twinkle-storm that was soon discovered to be heading directly toward Memory Alpha. The undefended library couldn’t be reached in time and the storm poured out over it, sapping all life signs from the planetoid. While this dreadful situation unfolded, Lt. Romaine was given a vision of a dead humanoid splayed in a chair.
Memory Alpha is known for its wild frat parties
After the lights left Memory Alpha, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scott beamed down to offer help to the staff. All the inhabitants truly had died save for one woman who was still dying and showing similar signs as Lt. Romaine after her encounter with the lights. Kirk summoned “the girl” down to Memory Alpha, and soon Lt. Romaine materialized nearby. To her horror, she found the dead body from her vision and understood that they were all in danger. She also knew that the storm would soon return. The men present didn’t believe the grown woman Lieutenant until Sulu reported that they were indeed about to be overtaken by the deadly light show, which had changed course to return to the outpost. This established that the space lights were not a natural phenomenon as previously believed. Also, that “the girl” was connected to it in some way. The rest of the episode took the crew and “the girl” into mortal danger to discover the true nature of the space lights. That, along with more honeyed proclamations of love from Scotty.
"Lass, I'm not patronizing you because of your sex. I'm patronizing you because of your rank."
Suffice it to say, I found this episode annoying. Not because of Scotty’s antics, which only mildly skirted the line between comedic and pitiful for me. It was the crew constantly referring to this lovely grown woman as a “girl”. Although commonplace in some circles, it has never sat well with me, just as grown men being called “boy” is unpleasant to my ear. The second annoyance of this episode was regarding the revealed nature of the lights of Zetar, and the contrived way that the crew overcame the threat posed by them. The solution to the dilemma seemed to be cut from whole cloth. It was another case of expedient writing to quickly end an episode to fit the hour. This happens more than I would like for this show. “The Lights of Zetar” was lacking due to its character treatment of a trained officer and it could have benefited from better pacing. If they revealed the nature of the threat sooner in the story it would allow the crew to demonstrate their brilliance, finding better ways to solve their problems. Lastly, regarding the 100 ghosts mentioned earlier: watch the episode to find out. Check your local listings.
It's either Trek or reruns of Gunsmoke…"Good night, Marshall Dillon. And you too, Lucy!"
It may sound like I hated the episode, I didn't. It's like pizza or sex. Even when it is not great, you are still glad that you got some. Star Trek is that way in my mind. I thought "Zetar" was worth watching even though it was not great. The performance by the actress that played Romaine was well done. She came off as a good match for Scott. The effects were successful in giving the episode an eerie feeling, and the direction was unique. Despite my personal hang ups, it’s worth a watch.
Three stars
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
A Woman Worth Watching
Like Joe, I found the infantilization of Lt. Romaine irritating. As he said, like the use of the term “boy” for grown men, calling an adult woman “girl” scores of times in under an hour is disrespectful, makes our favorite characters sound painfully bigoted, and is beneath the theoretically evolved culture of the Federation.
But like many women demeaned by men around her, Lt. Romaine is far more interesting than what is done to her or said about her. Her struggle to retain her identity in the face of a force which murdered anywhere from dozens to hundreds to thousands of people — and her success — were profoundly moving.
It was a beautiful example of science fiction how ugly she and the technician allowed themselves to become. The hoarse, reverberating glottal-moan of the Zetarian’s early attempts at control was one of the most eerie and memorable parts of this episode. But what really clinched it for me was her back-against-the-wall death struggle to remain herself in the face of life forms claiming she was their only chance of a second shot at corporeal life.
"I said 'NO VACANCY'"
The abortion metaphor felt both subtle and powerful to me. Two years ago, I wrote a short story for this community’s zine, The Tricorder, about Yeoman Rand getting a futuristic abortion via transporter, storing the fetal life pattern in a computer cluster much like Memory Alpha. The experience of writing that fiction as a fan made me enjoy this episode more I think, though it did make the violent ending feel, as Joe implied, truncated and cheap.
Couldn’t a world like Memory Alpha hold the patterns of the ghosts of Zetar? As transporter beams, as recognized objects of study, perhaps even as medical patients, awaiting an android or sufficiently intelligent dog to take them on one last real-world ride? Why did the crew of the Enterprise need to crush them to death?
Enjoying while not enjoying, seeing what is there and imagining what could be, reveling in the glimpses of true human strength and courage that infantilized women on TV are sometimes allowed to show, these are the voyages of a star story fan, whose enduring mission is to see her sex treated as equals not just in pretty words, but in the world. This episode had its flaws but Lt. Romaine’s performance was a full meal for this woman watcher. I hope to see her on my screen again.
I can’t help but think the woman co-writer of the episode, Shari Lewis, had something to do with Lt. Romaine’s increasingly and incredibly layered character. I also very much hope to see more parity behind the camera on this and other productions. This was a good start.
Four stars.
A Sinking Ship (and a Sinking Heart)
by Janice L. Newman
It’s only been a few days since I watched “The Lights of Zetar”, but already I found myself struggling to remember what happened in it, even needing a reminder from my co-writers. Recent Star Trek episodes have committed the sin, not of being bad, exactly (though I am hard-pressed to call this episode “good”), but being forgettable. I still vividly recall “The Trouble With Tribbles”, “Is There in Truth No Beauty”, “A Piece of the Action”, and many of the other great episodes we’ve watched over the past seasons. Even the early “Naked Time” left a strong impression. Yet somehow, I found myself saying, “Wait, was this the episode with the impractically-dressed outpost commander, or…?” Considering that only a month ago we had the sublime and memorable “Whom Gods Destroy”, it’s amazing how quickly and how far Star Trek has fallen. Hopefully next week’s episode will stop the plunge into mediocrity or worse.
That being said, what really made this episode frustrating was the sharp left turn the plot made three-quarters of the way through. Narratively, a certain resolution was set up from early on. Lt. Romaine (“the girl”) was being taken over mentally by the aliens. Kirk suggested using this connection against them, a logical and clever solution. I had guessed that the connection would be used to predict the aliens’ actions and counter them accordingly, but there were lots of ways the connection could have been used to stop the aliens. The connection gave the crew the option to communicate and potentially influence the beings, after all.
Instead, out of nowhere, Lt. Romaine is put into a pressure chamber with an unrealistic number of Gs pushing on her and…squeezing the aliens out? Which somehow kills them?
"Pressure, Spock. PRESSURE!"
I don’t mind fantastical technology or far-fetched explanations, but I would like some explanation of what’s going on. Why was the relatively interesting thread of “we will use Lt. Romaine’s connection against them” dropped almost entirely for a solution that made no sense?
My theory is that the original script had Lt. Romaine die, and the producer or someone with authority decided he didn’t like that at the last minute, thus requiring a hasty re-write. This is just a guess, though: speculation without data. Mr. Spock would be disappointed in me!
Regardless of the reason why, the poorly-done narrative solution to the story brought the entire thing down. As with last episode, some interesting new special effects were employed, and again, effects alone were not enough to save the story. The clever set up would have netted three or more stars if it had been competently carried through. Instead, it was dragged down to two.
We've seen the plot where disembodied aliens take over human bodies and then find them too irresistible to relinquish. What's frustrating about this one is that Kirk, who makes a living trying to convince aliens/computers to take alternate, less destructive courses, does not make much of an effort to dissuade the Zetarians.
Which is a shame. These are beings who can travel Warp 10 with ease, evade shields, and communicate telepathically. As friends, they would be tremendous allies. Couldn't they be happy with android bodies? And if not, could we not grow biological bodies for them, or find suicidal volunteers to offer their corporeal forms?
We don't even learn who the Zetarians are, other than that it's a planet where all life had died. There are so many holes in the episode, which suggests on-the-day rewrites or significant edits, as I understand happened in "The Alternative Factor".
Memory Alpha, a repository for all the Federation's knowledge, is a neat idea. While its defenselessness is explained and justified, boy, does that seem like an invitation for a hit and run raid from a hostile race. Of course, now the station is damaged, and most of that information lost. I wish the Enterprise crew had been a little sadder about it than we saw.
Plot holes aside, the biggest problem with this episode is that it's a bit dull. Even when things happening on the screen should have held interest, I found my mind wandering. Again, this points to editing issues and the need to pad.
By the way, I have it on good authority (thanks, Ruth Berman!) that writer Shari Lewis is the Shari Lewis who played Lamb Chop on Captain Kangaroo some years back. And from another authority, apparently Lewis and husband Jeremy Tarcher are currently…shall we say…following in the steps of Dr. Timothy Leary. That explains a bit of the trippiness of the episode.
Shari Lewis and two puppets from Captain Kangaroo: Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse
Two stars.
[Come join us tonight (February 14th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
For 12 days, 21,000 gallons a day of crude oil spilled into the Pacific ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara. Only on February 8 was the leaking undersea well finally capped. This debacle, courtesy of the Union Oil Co., has blackened the harbors and beaches of the San Gabriel Valley coastline, killing hundreds of sea birds. Even Governor Reagan is declaring this mess a disaster, making federal funds available for cleanup.
Nevertheless, the Governor did not relieve the oil company of its obligation to the government agencies and private citizens harmed by this catastrophe. It will likely take more than 1000 men three weeks to clean up the mess.
The silver lining is that only about 1% of the local seabird population has been affected, and virtually none of the seals. Indeed, the damage is only about a quarter of that caused two years ago when the super tanker Torrey Canyon broke up off the coast of Southwest England.
Still, if the best we can say is that this crisis is not as bad as the worst, I think we can do better.
The Good Kind
In refreshing contrast to the environmental incident described above, the latest issue of Galaxy is anything but a tragedy:
by Douglas Chaffee illustrating The Weather on Welladay
And Now They Wake (Part 1 of 3), by Keith Laumer
In 1981, just as broadcast power switches on for the first time, an inmate by the name of Grayle makes a daring escape from a New York prison. He is an enigmatic man, an inmate who looks 35, but who has been incarcerated since before World War 2. He also possesses an uncanny ability to heal from wounds.
At the same time, another fellow with similar powers stumbles drunk out of a bar, making his way to a steam room where he miraculously heals a profound set of scars and ejects an antique Minie ball from a wound in his back.
These events are coincident with the appearance of a tremendous water spout in the middle of the Atlantic, and interwoven with tales from a thousand years ago of a renegade from the Galactic Fleet named Thor, and his comrade-turned-betrayer, Loki.
by Jack Gaughan
Who are these two immortals, and why has their story suddenly come to a head? I don't know…but I'm hooked!
Four stars, so far.
The City That Loves You, by Raymond E. Banks
The Alpha Centauri city of Relax offers everything to its twenty million inhabitants—comfort, company, computerized guidance. But what happens when a citizen wants to leave? What if every inducement, soft and hard, is made to keep him there? Does the fellow really have a choice in the matter?
I read the whole story waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I was not displeased with the result. In the end, for a place to truly be paradise, there must be a way out. The socialiast utopias of the world, from Bulgaria to Beit Ha Shita, might take note.
Four stars.
Leviathan, by Lise Braun
An advanced submarine, akin to the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea rescues a primitive fisherman lost at sea in the Atlantic Ocean. This inadvertently gives rise to a number of familiar legends.
This is an old-fashioned story; it would have been right at home in Imagination in 1954. I do like the clever, organic way Braun conveys that the action takes place thousands of years in the past, and the reading is pleasant, if not extraordinary.
The sodden, storm-lashed world of Welladay seems too bleak a world for settlement. However, schools of whales that inhabit it produce a valuable radioactive substance prized for medical applications. A team of hardy fishermen taps these whales for their lymphic treasure, braving the waves and weather.
But some pirate has been draining the whales dry, decimating the population and threatening the economy and health of the Federation. Is it one of the four fishers? The mysterious woman space pilot shot down at the beginning of the tale, who crashes on a lonely archipelago? Or someone else?
This is definitely one of McCaffrey's better stories, with far more atmosphere (no pun intended) and far less barely suppressed violence and hokey romance. It goes on a little long, and I find it improbable that this vast planet seems to have exactly six people on it, but I enjoyed it.
Three stars.
For Your Information: Collision Course, by Willy Ley
Mr. Ley's piece this month is on asteroids that cross Earth orbit, particularly Icarus, which precipitated the 49th end-of-the-world scare since the birth of Christ.
A sick scientist and his dying love make a multi-stop air flight around the world. At each landing, he makes sure to expose as many people as possible to what appears to be an aerosol for cold symptoms, and he feeds bread crumbs to migratory birds. As the story unfolds, told mostly in third-party reports, we learn the scientist was working on a deadly disease, and that he thinks of humanity as a blight on the Earth.
There's no subtext to the story—it's all on the surface—but it's beautifully told and very eerie. I liked it; my favorite from Mr. Tiptree so far. Four stars.
The Theory and Practice of Teleportation , by Larry Niven
Adapted from a lecture Niven gave at Boskone in front of the MIT Science Fiction Society, this is an interesting look at the effects of teleportation, in all its potential developmental paths, on society.
Four stars.
Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts, by Brian W. Aldiss
A darkly humorous story set in the near future, satirizing the world of executives. They all hate each other but are not allowed to express it or complain, so they do things that they can claim are generous as an act of passive aggression.
For instance, one gifts another with a genetically tailored midget Tyrannosaurus…which promptly eats the recipient's leg. Said giftee then names the dinosaur after the giftor's coquettish wife and turns up at the giftor's funeral with the creature to terrorise people, but in doing so claims it is a lovely tribute.
Rather obtuse and pointless. I didn't like it.
One star.
(with thanks to Kris for co-writing this review-let).
Godel Numbers, by J. W. Swanson
by Jack Gaughan
200 miles west of Cairo, archaeologists have dug up what they're calling the "Cairo Stone". It is a black tablet, obviously artificial, clearly advanced, and meticulously carved with a series of scratch marks. Dated to 3000 B.C., it could not have been made by a contemporary terrestrial civilization. It's up to three scientists, a melange of linguists and computer engineers, both to crack the code of the tablets and to fend off Soviet agents.
In the end, the tablet serves much the same purpose as the monolith(s) in 2001, jump-starting humanity's progress. It's an amiable, old-fashioned sort of tale, and so esoteric that it probably would have done well, if not better, in Analog.
Three stars.
Cleaning up
All in all, the latest Galaxy makes for pleasant, if not outstanding, reading. I would certainly much rather read about Godel numbers, teleportation, immortals, and isotopic pirates than oil slicks any day!
I'm convinced Star Trek is cursed. Around the same time every season, the episodes drop off in quality, going from engaging teleplays each week to bottom of the barrel Hollywood hack. Of course, the divide isn't quite so clear cut, but there is a distinctive shift as the producer runs out of his stellar front-runners and begins scrounging for TV-writer backlog to fill space.
I had hoped Season 3 would be an exception to this given its new producer and absolutely sublime first half ("Spock's Brain" notwithstanding!) but alas, the proverb remains true: the bigger they are…the harder they fall.
Now, granted, the recent decline has not been a degeneration of ideas, which often carry promise and interest, but their clumsy and contradictory execution. We as the audience are baited in on hooks, reeled in on the currents of the episode, and then discover, too late, that the answer at the end of the line is more convoluted and less inspired than the theories we'd developed during the journey.
And "That Which Survives" is no exception.
We begin with the Enterprise circling a newly discovered planet anomaly: it has an atmosphere and plant growth despite its young geologic age and small size. Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and senior geologist D'Amato (an exciting new face—but don't get too attached) beam down to study the planet.
As they're being beamed, however, a mysterious woman (Losira, played by Lee Meriwether, lately of Time Tunnel) pops aboard and kills the transporter technician! The landing party makes it down anyway and ends up in the center of a vicious earthquake. The Enterprise experiences a similar tremor and is flung 990.7 light years from the planet.
"Wait! Let's shake hands, first!"
Spock is more concerned about rounding errors than the ship's current predicament, chastising Lt. Rahda for describing the distance as "1000 light years".
The landing party immediately began protocol for a survival situation after failing to detect or contact the Enterprise. Sulu and McCoy both pick up odd readings on their tricorders: "Like a door opening and closing." At the same moment, D'Amato sees a beautiful woman—the same one from the transporter room—who claims "she is for him" and tries to touch him. She succeeds, and he drops dead, every cell in his body disrupted. His corpse is soon discovered by the other three, but the woman is nowhere to be found.
Arthur Batanides is both delighted not to be cast as a mook this week, and dismayed that he's about to die
While the landing party scenes are the most interesting part of the episode, not much more happens. The woman eventually reappears and tries to attack Sulu, but Kirk and McCoy intervene, discovering in the process that the woman can't hurt anyone but the person she is targeting. She disappears and reappears again, going after Kirk this time, but Sulu and McCoy successfully protect him. For no apparent reason other than a limited runtime, the three are then allowed access to the planet's defense control center, and they learn the truth of the mysterious woman. It turns out the original builders of the planetoid accidentally invented a disease which killed off their race thousands of years ago. The commander left behind a computer imprinted with her personality and programmed it to kill any intruder. Kirk manages to destroy the computer before it can kill them, and all is well. A fine solution, though rushed and poorly explored, the episode would have hung together alright…if the scenes on the Enterprise didn't destroy all meaning in it.
"Wait! Maybe I can talk it to death. It's worked with every computer before…"
Shortly after the Enterprise is flung 1000 light years away, the death-robot woman appears on the ship, is implied to read the mind of a technician, kills him, and sabotages the matter/anti-matter combustion tubes. This raises questions like:
"How did the woman travel so far from the planetoid?"
"Why did she bother to attack the ship when it was no longer anywhere near the planet? Isn't 1000 light years far enough away for the computer to no longer see the Enterprise as a threat?"
It would have made more sense if the ship had simply been damaged from teleporting (logical, since it was never explained how the feat was done) and Lee Meritwether's lost screen time could have been made up for on the planet with additional scenes of the landing party unraveling the mystery of the lost civilization.
I haven't even mentioned the terribly dull scenes of Scotty trying to save the Enterprise from a Losira-induced explosion. Every party of that sequence felt like an artificial addition to stretch runtime. To summarize, Spock tells Scotty how to do his job, Scotty hesitates, runs into some roadblocks, then finally, in the last ten seconds does the job and saves the Enterprise. That's it.
"I've found the leak, Mr. Spock! I canna change the laws of plumbing!"
Once again, this is an area that could have been improved with some minor changes. Instead of the whole ship blowing up, have it simply be stranded. The tension comes from whether Scotty can fix the ship in time without getting himself killed. Have Spock as a commander wrestling with whether to eject the pod Scotty's working in because a wire's accidentally been tripped and now the whole ship is at stake. That would have been compelling storytelling.
This episode had so much promise: the promise of another ancient civilization and 4-D beings (Losira's teleportation effect is genuinely neat), of new cool characters and cameos of old beloveds like Sulu and Dr. M'Benga, of survival plot interwoven with futuristic technology. Indeed, there were a lot of pieces to love.
But, like a robot who is only beautiful on the surface, the actual experience was less than pleasant. Three stars—2 for the episode, and 1 for Merriwether's great acting. Hopefully, next week will be better.
by Gideon Marcus
Full reverse!
Remember the execrable episode, "The Galileo Seven"? There, we were meant to believe that Spock had never held a command in his life, and when forced to lead just six stranded crew on a hostile planet, he kept tripping over the basic emotional needs of his human comrades.
Now recall "The Tholian Web", where a much-improved Spock handled Captain Kirk's presumed death with tact and even compassion, officiating a funeral, commiserating with McCoy, and generally earning the respect of his crew. Scotty even called him "Captain", in a tear-inducing moment.
Heck, just recall last week's "The Mark of Gideon". While in no wise a good episode, Spock carried out negotiations with Chairman Hodin with reserve and acumen. This was a man who could, when the need arose, handle the center seat without issue. And we know from "Court Martial" that people in blue shirts sometimes become starship captains…
This week, the Enterprise is imperiled, Spock's two best friends and the ship's Third Officer are missing and presumed dead, and yet the half-Vulcan pedantically harps on decimal points and the human compulsion to be thanked for carrying out their duties. He is a cold fish, inspiring no loyalty. He also never seems in much of a hurry to do…well…anything! It is absolutely inconsistent with his demeanor as acting-skipper established over the last two seasons. Moreover, it is inconsistent with his ever-deepening bond with Kirk and McCoy. The real Spock would be mad with worry…and covering it up with a stoic and efficient veneer, welding together a 430-man team whose sole purpose is to retrieve the distressed landing party.
But it was easier to write a caricature. As one of our guests last week noted, it was as if the episode had been written by someone who hated the characters and wanted to lampoon them.
"Is it already time to harass someone else? Goodie!"
Then, of course, we get the egregious bit where it's Spock who tells Scotty how to fix the failed matter/antimatter regulator. As Joe Reid has noted many times, Kirk often gets the pleasure of being the smartest person in the room, suggesting solutions to folks who should be telling him how to solve problems. This time, Spock is the beneficiary of this irksome trend. At least in "The Doomsday Machine", Scotty is ahead of Kirk in the figuring out of things, and he beams admiringly at his captain as if at a promising student. In "That Which Survives", Scotty has considered and discarded Spock's solution—manually fixing the antimatter flow—as too dangerous. With no other solutions, what, exactly, is it more dangerous than?
Blech.
While we're at it, Kirk was quite the jerk to Sulu on the planet. Perhaps this was because he was distraught from the potential loss of the love of his life (the Enterprise), but at least he could have said he was sorry, as he has done in every other instance where he has snapped at crew under tension.
2.5 stars.
by Janice L. Newman
Slivers of Silver
While I agree with my esteemed co-writers about the poor characterization and plot holes in this episode, there were some good new special effects that I don’t recall seeing before.
I always enjoy looking at the props, especially after having read the interview with the man responsible for creating them in one of the many fanzines. The blue-tipped grass on the planet was pretty and interesting, giving it a slightly alien feel. The effects with Losira disappearing by seeming to fold up into a black line were new and intriguing. When Scotty went to fix the broken warp engine, a neat ‘blue lightning’ effect made a barrier across the tube. The flickering red and green lights on his face, though a bit headache-inducing to watch, also aided the illusion and increased the tension of the scene.
"There's your problem, Mr. Spock—a green gel light!"
Losira’s costume was cleverly-designed, but felt strange and wrong for her role. Several of my friends commented on the fact that she didn’t look at all like the head of a distant outpost whose members had just been killed off by a plague. With the cutouts in her shirt and her elaborate hairdo and makeup, she did not have much of a ‘last survivor’ or ‘hearty commander’ feeling. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being feminine, and for all we know she may have dressed up in her race’s version of formal wear before giving her final report. Still, it clashed uncomfortably with the plot for many of us, even if the seamstresses among us were mentally trying to figure out how to re-create the look.
Unfortunately, well-done effects cannot carry a story, and, while the episode was mildly-engaging, it didn’t leave much of an impression. Two stars.
Are There Men on This Planet?
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
I was not the only viewer disappointed by some stand-out moments which highlighted that, progressive though Star Trek is, it still has weak spots. In particular this week: sexism. Losira is a replica of a commander, the last survivor of a disease-struck station. Her costume, while intriguing in design, conveyed none of that. Sulu comments when first threatened that he “doesn't want to shoot a woman.” As chivalrous as the helmsman is, by the time of starships and alien worlds, I would hope that humans no longer treat women differently than men, deadly touch or not. And then too, the repeated focus on beauty. A storm can be beautiful and deadly, but observing a force of nature is not the same as McCoy, Sulu, and Kirk making a point to comment on how Losira looks. These are the same crew who get excited about flying into the heart of a giant amoeba or historical facts from centuries past. After all they experienced on this not-a-planet, it seems improbable to focus on whether or not they found an alien woman attractive. As explorers and scientists, why not marvel at the mysterious botanical and geological feats, the design of the defense system, or the fact that that defense system was able to send the Enterprise through a molecular transporter and 990.7 light years away! Or wonder why a defense system would be calibrated to perfectly match a target, and seemed as equally focused on unifying as destroying?
(sings) "What intrigues a man about a woman is elusive…"
Despite the flaws, and feeling put off by the attitude of the men, I still enjoyed the episode. Characters had time to share the spotlight and pull on threads from previous episodes. I love seeing the crew operate the Enterprise when the Captain is away, and how different officers handle command. Lt. Rahda did a fine job as helmsman, and it was nice to have Dr. M'Benga return to the screen. Logically, a ship this size must have multiple doctors, but this episode confirmed that a minimum of three were present, despite us usually only seeing McCoy and Nurse Chapel. (Maybe the ship could spare one to give Spock a check-up after that bump to his head.) I also noted Kirk's persistent focus on supplies—he brought up the need for food and water at least four times—which may have been in part due to his experience on Tarsus IV, which started with a crop blight: something that is bound to leave a lasting impression regardless of whether he talks about it.
The overarching plot was lacking, and I would have liked to have gotten more explanation or simply explanation spaced out better. However as an episode among a larger story, it gave us a great look at the workings of my favorite starship and crew.
3.5 stars
[Come join us tonight (January 31st) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
Winter is the wet season for Southern California, and we've been just drenched these past weeks. I understand seven inches of rain fell in the Los Angeles area, causing terrible mudslides, property damage, and injury. Apparently, things were made worse by a spate of arson last year that got rid of the stabilizing undergrowth.
Ontario's Foothill Boulevard looking west toward Red Hill Country Club Drive, flooded. (Daily Report photo)
I've had many friends ask if we're alright, afraid we might have been swept downstream in the torrent. Rest assured that Vista is disaster-proof (knock on wood), and our house is at the top of a hill. We had some deep pools of water in the backyard, but they've since drained. Our neighbors have gotten invaded by bugs seeking refuge from the storm, though.
A man runs past a station wagon that was washed two blocks down Carnelian Avenue, along with part of the road surface. (Daily Report photo)
Ups and Downs
If the physical world is getting washed away, one edifice that manages to stand firmly, if not always proudly, is Analog, science fiction's most popular magazine. Has this month's issue slid at all, or is it holding fast? let's see:
A Womanly Talent, by Anne McCaffrey
by Kelly Freas
We're back in the world of psionic talents, perhaps related to the stories that involve ladies in towers. A pair of politicians want to pass a law protecting and enabling the psionically adept, legitimizing things like professional prognosticators and psychic manipulators. A Luddite strawman, name of Zeusman, is against it.
Meanwhile. Ruth is the wife of Lajos, a precog. She is frustrated because she has an unidentified talent, and also because she really wants to be a mom. Eventually, the latter frustration is relieved, and her daughter ends up demonstrating what Ruth's power really is.
Aside from the tale beginning with ten pages of conversation that reads more like a Socratic dialogue than a story, I just find McCaffrey's writing so flat and amateur. I'm sure all the psi stuff was music to editor Campbell's ears, including lines like "Those who truly understand psionic power need no explanation. Those who need explanation will never understand," but it doesn't work for me. Beyond that, McCaffrey's attitudes on the relations of the sexes is so atavistic, although I suppose she gets points for talking about sex at all. Maybe Campbell likes that, too.
Two stars.
You'll Love the Past, by J. R. Pierce
by Leo Summers
A time traveler from the 21st Century takes a trip in a time machine to the 24th Century. A war has transformed society: America is now largely mixed race, with the whitest of the population an inbred and stupid group. Socially, the continent is organized into placid socialist cooperatives run by religious Brothers, advanced technology provided by the Japanese. It's the sort of world one can be happy in…provided one is favored by the status quo. Every so often, one of the non-favored tries to escape.
Not a bad story, even if it seems to be obliquely casting aspersions on Communists of darker hue.
Three stars.
The Man Who Makes Planets, by G. Harry Stine
by Leo Summers
Yet another piece set in the (anti-) Utopian future of People's Capitalism, where North America has become a stratified welfare state, and money is a thing of the past.
Rex, last of the private dicks, is engaged by a government minister to find out who stole the plans for a miniaturized nuclear bomb, and why said criminal is blackmailing him, threatening to distribute the plans should a ransom not be paid promptly.
The solution to this mystery is actually trivial, and the story isn't quite long enough for what it's trying to do. Nevertheless, I always find this setting interesting. And perhaps prescient. There was piece in last week's newspaper about the National Urban League's proposal for a universal income…
Back in part one, Jim Kiel was sent from Earth to study the intergalactic empire whose fringes were discovered when a Terran probe made it to Alpha Centauri. An anthropologist and ubermensch, Jim is essentially a spy, though the High Born of the empire don't know that—they think that he's an interesting curiosity, favored for his bullfighting skills and independent thinking.
This installment begins just after Jim's first encounter with the Emperor, a genial, capable man who, nevertheless, seemed to suffer a stroke. A stroke that no one but Jim noticed. Much of this middle installment is devoted to Jim's navigation of High Born society, attempting to master the reading machines to determine if Earth really is a long-lost colony of the empire or something else, and also how he discovers and foils an insurrection attempt with designs on incapacitating the empire's leader. In the last portion, Jim is promoted to the equivalent of a Brigadier General and sent to quell a rebellion. This is actually a trap designed to kill him, but he neatly sidesteps it. Now he wants to know why he's marked for death.
The pot continues to boil. There's a lot of the flavor of Dickson's Dorsai series, but with a different, perhaps even more interesting, setting.
Four stars.
A Chair of Comparative Leisure, by Robin Scott
by Leo Summers
A stammering professor somehow manages to be the most magnetic, as well as effective at conveying information. Does his technique go beyond the verbal?
(Yes. He has the power of psychic projection. Whoopee. Two stars.)
Calculating the damage
You win some, you lose some, and this month's issue clocks in at exactly three stars. While nothing could compare with the superlative four-star Fantasy and Science Fiction, three stars is still lower than New Worlds (3.3) and Galaxy (3.2). It does beat out IF (2.8) and Fantastic (2.2), however.
You could fill as many as three issues with good stuff out of the six that were put out—in large part thanks to how great F&SF was this month. Nevertheless, women contributed very little of that, with only 6.67% of new fiction written by female writers, most of that Anne McCaffrey's drudge of a story.
Still, in an uncertain world, I can't complain too much. Especially since, mudslides or no, the Post Office still manages to get me my magazines on time!
"Gideon"—the very name connotes greatness. Grandeur. Brilliance. Romance. Surely, any world with that namesake must be a living paradise. So it is no wonder that the Federation bought the reports sent from planet Gideon declaring it to be just that. No wonder that the Federation would tie itself in knots so as not to jeopardize the chances of welcoming Gideon to the Federation.
Unfortunately, Gideon has other plans.
From the moment Captain Kirk, the sole allowed representative of the Federation, beams down to Gideon, "The Mark of Gideon" catches your attention. We've seen Kirk on an empty Enterprise before—in "This Side of Paradise", "By Any Other Name", and (sort of) "Wink of an Eye", but it's no less effective for its repetition. Sure, it's just a re-use of the standing sets on Stage 9, but then so was "The Tholian Web", "The Omega Glory" and "Mirror, Mirror". Indeed, because we have seen the sets used to represent other ships and other dimensions, the audience has already been trained to think in terms of historical precedents rather than the true situation.
That true situation, of course, is that Kirk is actually in a fantastically detailed replica of the Enterprise, so good that it takes him a (credulity-stretching given how quickly Spock figures things out) long time to figure out that he's not on his beloved ship. But fairly quickly, the episode's focus returns to the real Enterprise and Spock doing his usual sterling job in command, the "Mark of Gideon" becomes less "Where is Everybody?" and more "Stopover in a Quiet Town" (respectively, the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and one of the very last).
The plot is quite simple: Gideon was once Heaven-on-Earth, but it has since become a Malthusian nightmare due to the one-two punch of no native diseases and a fanatical reverence for life. Only the very privileged get a few square meters of space to themselves (Holy Shades of the Soviet Union, Batman!) So, the Gideon council hatches a plan to capture Kirk, withdraw some of his blood, and use the lingering, though harmless, remnants of Vegan Meningitis therein to infect Odona, the council chair's daughter. She will then serve as an example and a vector to infect the rest of the population of Gideon, which presumably will be devastated before natural immunity kicks in (or enough Gideonites stop wanting to be sick).
"Father, could I have a Bayer? No other aspirin works better."
The real problem with this episode is not the story, nor the effective bits with Kirk and Odona on the empty ship, nor the entertaining segments featuring Spock sparring with Chairman Hodin. It's that the plot and the events don't match up.
Regarding the disease: it's not stated what happens if mortality turns out to be 100%, or what the Gideonites will do once the disease loses its lethality.
It's never explicitly stated, either, why (or how) the Gideonites went through the trouble of building a replica of a starship on their surface for the purpose of letting Kirk wander around in it. If all they need is his blood, he could have been kept unconscious for the nine minutes required to take his blood and then sent back to the Enterprise with some kind of cover story. Did the plan really require that Odona join Kirk in the simulated halls of the starship? Did she really need to fake falling for him?
"I have. to. kiss you. Odona. It's in…the script."
I really want this episode to work. Not just because it bears an absolutely terrific name, but because it is genuinely entertaining to watch from beginning to end. Our crowd advanced a few hypotheses that I like. The best was that the ship was Odona's idea, and like the Dolman from "Elaan of Troyius", she could be refused nothing. Moreover, there was an intense voyeuristic desire on the part of the Gideonites to see beings in a truly open space, so this plan killed two birds with one stone. Another is simply that Kirk was drugged when he woke up, and the mock-up didn't need to be perfect (a la last year's Assignment: Moon Girl).
As for the idea that it is hypocrisy for the Gideonites to value life yet hatch a scheme to indirectly kill billions (trillions?), I am reminded of the orthodox Jew who could not turn on a light switch himself on the Sabbath, so he cannily lifted his infant son (too young to be bound by mitzvot) to within flicking range of the switch. And religion is, indeed, in the crosshairs of this episode, for did not Pope Paul VI this summer enjoin Catholics from using The Pill, humanity's main hope of stopping the population boom?
I'm writing this piece in the cold light of day, when I should be more inclined to savage the episode in light of its inconsistencies and absurdities. But I find myself feeling charitable—perhaps it's because director Jud Taylor finally seems to be finding his sea legs (even if Shatner. did. employ many. unnecessary pauses. last week).
Three stars.
Deeply Creepy
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
Maybe it was the feral cats yowling over my fence in the middle of the episode, but this is for my money the creepiest episode we've seen yet. Something about those yearning, horrifying disembodied faces just got me right in the shivvers.
It also had me thinking about ferality, about what happens when something once tamed becomes unruly. Consider pigeons. Tamed and bred by humans for 10,000 years as messenger birds, companions, and beauties, only to themselves over the course of a bare century transition back to a wild world that they had never been prepared for.
The people of Gideon likewise seem to be at the devastating mercy of a too-too civilized society whose very progress towards perfection endangers their lives. Yes, I felt the storytelling placed too heavy a burden on just telling us that they love sex too much to prevent vicious overcrowding — a cultural quirk that felt too big to swallow. But the feeling of confinement, of encroachment and enclosure came through loud and clear.
In a way, their whole society had become feral: bred and evolved for specific purposes and suddenly set adrift with all of that breeding and evolution still in place, but none of the supports and expectations which allowed it to happen in the first place. The individuals seemed civilized enough, grading on a curve of aliens we've seen thus far, but the entire concept of a society so desperately, brutally crowded seemed fundamentally wild to me.
Let's get to the criticism. As beautifully creepy as the premise was, the synthetic bodysuits and wobbling crowded walks outside the windows were closer to funny than horrifying. The question of where they got space to build a 1:1 model of the Enterprise also beggared belief. Some science fiction and fantasy writers believe you get one big lie, a total of one shocking premise that the audience will just go with you on because, hey, it's a genre story, them's table stakes. But you only get one.
For me, the Big Lie of this episode was that Kirk was lost and wandering around a completely empty Enterprise. That was disturbing enough. But then it turns out many of the assumptions we'd taken on faith as an audience were false and that just felt like being crudely manipulated. I watch shows to be manipulated, but I like it to feel earned, not like I'm being rushed from plot point to plot point, each more giddily hideous than the next. She's not just a fake damsel in distress, she's the weirdo ruler's daughter! And a national hero! And dying of some exotic disease! That she wanted! So they could cull their society like a dairyman shrinks his herd when the price of milk is down!
That's just too many additional premises in one story for me.
Even Spock is incredulous of this episode
I wish we'd kept the lens tightly on Kirk and the crew and the mysterious woman. I wish the weirdo ruler's throne room had given us a hint that claustrophobia was going to be the enemy of the day. And I wish we'd gotten more of the woman actress, she was doing so much with so little. I hope we see more of her.
Overall, this piece will be memorable for its premise and a few fine lines, but the execution was lacking.
2 stars.
How Crowded Is This Place?
by Erica Frank
Odona says, "There is no place, no street, no house, no garden, no beach, no mountain that is not filled with people." This sounds like the Earth of Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!: an overcrowded world, very little privacy, and extreme government measures to cope with the seemingly infinite population. (Can you imagine living on a planet with seven billion people, as we're expected to have on this planet by the year 2000?)
However, we get glimpses that imply it's worse than that. We are led to infer, from the masses of people in plain bodysuits visible behind the High Council room, that the planet is literally so crowded that they don't have space for a few rooms for office work. That aside from their fake Enterprise, there is no empty 20'-by-20' room on the planet.
The real question isn't "are there really that many people" but "why do they have a viewing window into the High Council room?"
I reject this notion. I believe Gideon is crowded, yes, but not that it's so packed that most adults spend their waking hours packed like sardines, slowly bumbling around in huge crowds.
If that were so, how would they even find space to make the fake Enterprise? What happened to the people displaced by it? No, while I can accept that Gideon is "full of people," I cannot believe they are literally shoulder-to-shoulder across the planet, nor even "…except for special cases" like childbirth and whatever space is needed to design and sew the High Council's uniforms.
Perhaps they're made of hexagons because they can be assembled by hand — no space for a sewing machine necessary.
Do the people have jobs? Families? How are children raised? How do they maintain a culture focused on the "love of life" if they are just walking around staring at nothing all day?
My answer: The people we see are probably tourists — visitors to the Capitol, hoping for a rare view of the Council chambers, which is separated by one-way glass. They may be required to keep moving; that gives everyone a chance to see the Council when the glass is raised, perhaps a few times a day.
This is a ridiculous conclusion, but the whole episode is ridiculous. A culture that refuses birth control on ethical grounds will use a fatal disease to cull their populace? How will they decide who to infect — will they be selected by computer and told to line up for it, as in A Taste of Armageddon? Or will they volunteer to die, these miserable people who reject diaphragms, IUDs, and condoms because life is too sacred to prevent?
The individual scenes of this episode were fascinating but the underlying story just doesn't add up. Two stars.
Old Fools
by Joe Reid
The story this week was about a people claiming to love life so much that they couldn't harm one another, and so long-lived that they developed an overpopulation problem. Overpopulation so severe as to cause them to lure a Starfleet captain who survived a deadly space disease to their planet to infect them with the pox. Why? Perhaps this seemed like the most interesting way to die? For people who love life their treatment of every life seemed to be just the opposite.
Let’s start off on the grand scale. Unlike most of the technically advanced races in the galaxy, the Gideonites lacked the most basic imagination when it came to needing more space. If there isn’t enough space where you are, go somewhere else and find some. Am I to believe that a people who could perfectly reproduce a spaceship as a ruse weren’t able to produce their own ships to take them to other planets to spread out? What weak imaginations these advanced humanoids must have had to not consider that most basic of solutions. During his career Kirk had been to dozens if not hundreds of worlds where a hardy race like the Gideonites could expand.
The next charge affirming the utter hypocrisy of the Gideonites had to do with how freely they lied. Although it might not be fair to lay this charge at the feet of all the people, their leaders certainly were not honest Abes. They lied about transport coordinates. The location of the captain. The girl lied about her origins, claiming to know nothing about Gideon. The entire fake ship was a lie. They only ever resorted to the truth after each specific lie was uncovered, and not a minute sooner. It might explain how these leaders came to power. Even in our world, you don’t come to power by telling the truth. It makes me wonder if the planet was even named Gideon, although saying, “welcome to the planet Marcus”, doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
[Au contraire, mon ami. We've already had a planet Marcus 12 in "And the Children Shall Lead". If Odona emigrated from planet Gideon to planet Marcus 12, she'd be "Odona Gideon Marcus 12" (ed.)]
"Not only have we no space, but I am using the planet's only hairpiece!"
If they really did love life, it must only have been the lives of their own people. These Gideonites showed a complete lack of basic empathy for anyone who wasn’t them, for example, concocting a plan that lured an alien captain to their world to kidnap, imprison him, and bleed him dry. These actions sure sound out of character for the "lovers of life" they purport to be. In truth, the Gideonites were unimaginative in every sense of the word. Trapping their own people on a planet that can’t support them is evil for an advanced technical society. Using misdirection and bad faith negotiation tactics to carry out their shortsighted plan was contemptible. Making the incarceration and blood letting of an unsuspecting victim their plan to save a planet was morally bankrupt. Attempts by the leader's daughter to redeem their reputation by choosing to sacrifice herself in the end fell flat for me. There wasn’t enough good in the episode to salvage it from the bottom.
One star
[Come join us tonight (January 31st) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
The last quarter of 1968 had the newsmen on tenterhooks. After the flight of Zond 5, many suspected the Russians would try for a flight around the Moon. Would they get there before the hastily rescheduled Apollo 8?
They did not, and now it seems they are taking a different tack, trying to progress in endeavors closer to home. On January 14, the Soviets launched Soyuz 4 into orbit carrying a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Shatalov. This was ho hum stuff—the putatively multi-man Soyuz was once again carrying a single occupant. Ah, but on the 16th, Soyuz 5 took off with cosmonauts Boris Volnyov, Aleksey Yeliseyev, and Evegenii Khrunov, the first three-seat flight since Voskhod 1, four years ago.
More than that, the two craft docked in orbit, the first time two piloted craft have managed the feat. Then Yeliseyev and Khrunov donned space suits, opened their hatch, and walked next door. They weren't visiting for a cup of borscht; they were there to stay, and they bore gifts: newspapers and letters from after Shatalov had taken off! The next day, Soyuz 4 landed with the two new passengers. As of this article's going to press, Volnyov should have landed his Soyuz 5—safely, I trust.
The Soviets are already beging to hail the mission as the construction of the first station in space, and there's no doubt that a lot of firsts have been scored. On the other hand, the two Soyuz craft were only linked for a few hours, and there was no easy way to get between the two craft. Really, they haven't done anything that couldn't have been done during our Gemini program.
That said, this may only be the beginning. Unlike Voskhod, which only comprised a couple of flights, there have been a number of Soyuz missions, both manned and unmanned, so it's probably only a matter of time before a truly ambitious trek is managed, perhaps a real space station.
What's more impressive? American boots on the Moon, or a permanent Soviet presence in near Earth orbit? You be the judge.
Mail's in!
The latest issue of F&SF offers a myriad of treats that are, in some ways, as exciting as today's space news. Let's dive in:
Another splurty cover by Russell FitzGerald
Attitudes, by James H. Schmitz
Azard is one of the Malatlo, the group of peaceniks who have divorced themselves from the Federation of the Hub. Years ago, the Malatlo were given their own planet, far away, but next door to the Raceels, an up-and-coming race, so that the separatists might not be too lonely.
Now war has destroyed both worlds, and Azard is being escorted by three representatives of the Federation to a new world. It's a magnanimous mission…so why is Azard contemplating the murder of his benefactors? And is all really what it seems?
I found the telling of the story a bit talky and stilted, and yet, when I was done, I found the thing stuck with me, some of the scenes vivid in the extreme. So, four stars for a fine opening piece.
by Gahan Wilson
The Cave, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Per Sam Moskowitz' introduction, this is the tale of the end result of Communism as envisioned by a dissident writer in 1920 Leningrad. As winter sets in, an impoverished citizen in the "equal" society wrestles with the urge to steal wood from an advantaged neighbor. Soviet Marxism thus results in reversion to Stone Age sensibilities.
An interesting curiosity. Three stars.
Nightwalker, by Larry Brody
Frank Whalen is a super-spy with a secret: his body shoots off electricity at will. He also has a super suit, which confers stealth, but also has the annoying side effect of causing an all-over itch. This tale rather straightforwardly details an adventure Whalen has behind the Bamboo Curtain, and how he escapes from a Red Chinese jail.
Probably the first in an ongoing series, there's not really enough of Whalen yet to hang on to, character-wise. If you like superhero comics, you'll probably enjoy this one, in a superficial sort of way.
Saxton is an English author whose work generally fails to resonate with me, but this time, she channels her inner Pam Zoline with this beautiful, stream-of-consicousness story. It deals with a prematurely old widow struggling with inexplicable migraines, deep depression, and an uncaring medical system that seems tailor-made to perpetuate the problem with useless nostrums and a callous ear.
The solution? Wine and a bit of angelic help.
It's a beautiful, moving piece, and it was well on its way to five stars before the typically British, bummer ending. Still four stars.
Drool, by Vance Aandahl
Justice Stewart once observed (essentially) "I can't tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it." Aandahl proves that, "when correctly viewed, everything is lewd" (thank you Tom Lehrer) in this effective vignette.
Four stars.
Twin Sisters, by Doris Pitkin Buck
A short poem personifying the rain. I liked it. Four stars.
Pater One Pater Two, by Patrick Meadows
Two 21st Century disasters combine to doom the 24th Century: a doomsday weapon renders all of the Earth uninhabitable save for Greece and Asia Minor, and a birth control initiative backed by technology has gone awry, preventing all new births. It's up to Jacson and Marya from the island of Xios to topple the remnants of the past to save the future.
An interesting, innovative tale. Four stars.
Uncertain, Coy, and Hard to Please, by Isaac Asimov
For this piece, I felt it was important to have a female perspective—you'll understand why…
by Janice L. Newman
Asimov’s most recent “Science” article is on feminism. He never uses the word, but feminism is what it argues: that men and women are inherently equal, and that it is only cultural and artificial distinctions that keep them from being equal. It’s an excellent screed. For many women it would be a revelation, particularly if they have had no prior contact with feminist ideas.
Some might take exception to the description of the male/female relationship as slavemaster/slave, but I do not. For too long women have been considered property, unable to own anything: not money, not land, not their own work and discoveries, not even their own bodies. Even today a woman cannot open a checking account at the vast majority of banks without her husband’s or father’s signature. Consider how crippling this is for an independent person in modern society.
I can’t agree with every argument Asimov makes. While I concede that courtly love is an artificial construct, one need only look to the animal kingdom to find plenty of animals that mate for life, and which become despondent if one of the pair is removed. Nor can I dismiss fatherly love as purely cultural. Children look like their parents, after all, and men who cared for partners and offspring were more likely to have children that made it to adulthood.
However, these are minor quibbles. Overall the piece is well thought-out and logical and usually right, and I believe it should be required reading for all fen…indeed, all persons.
Including its author.
Asimov is well-known for groping women at conventions: grabbing their backsides or their frontsides, even seizing and kissing women who had approached him in the hope of getting an autograph. I am certain that he thinks such behavior is flattering–indeed, he lists the "smirk and the leer" as among the petty rewards of being a woman in today's society. I cannot speak for all women; likely some did feel flattered by such attentions. But having talked with some of his victims, I know that this was not so in many cases.
I have never met Asimov in person. Perhaps friends have deliberately kept me away from him at conventions to protect me. At this point, it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever meet him. But if I ever do, I would like to say to him, “You, too, wield the power of the slavemaster. The very ‘silliness’ that you decry as an artificial defense mechanism is exactly what is coming into play when you kiss a woman and she blushes and laughs awkwardly. Hers is a conditioned response born, at its heart, out of fear.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Asimov apparently can’t make the extra leap to apply his reasoning to his own behavior. As excellent and revelatory as this piece is, it seems to come entirely from Asimov’s mind without any discussion with actual women. In fact, it’s unlikely that he’s had much opportunity to see things from a ‘feminine perspective’, considering the vast majority of media is from a male point of view. Not surprising, but it is saddening and frustrating.
I don’t know if I could convince him that he is not exempt, that however unthreatening he may think himself, society nonetheless places the slavemaster’s whip firmly in his hand. But perhaps, someday, he can: I think the man capable of writing such an important feminist piece could learn from his own words.
Five stars.
by Gideon Marcus
After All the Dreaming Ends, by Gary Jennings
A simple boy meets girl episode in wartime, just before the boy is to ship off to the European Theater of Operations. Except the girl isn't there—she's dying in a hospital bed 25 years later. To sleep, perchance to dream…and what a beautiful, romantic dream.
A sweet, wistful piece. I'm a sucker for love stories. Five stars.
A pleasant recounting
Well now—not a clunker in the bunch, and some Star material to boot. Indeed, this is the first 4-star issue of F&SF in the history of our reviewing the magazine! That's exciting news in the skies above and on the ground, and definitely enough to keep us renewing our subscription—to F&SF AND Aviation Weekly.
Star Trek has given us some great episodes this season. Sadly, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was not one of them. It was ineptly written, poorly directed, and both ham- and heavy-handed in its delivery.
We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month. Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production. Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff! Enjoy:
From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.
The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.
Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.
The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.
In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.
Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.
All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.
I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.
Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.
Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.
Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.
The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.
At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.
Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel
Cover by Albert Nuetzell
Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.
Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.
The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.
With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.
By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.
Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.
Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.
Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.
The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.
Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.
Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela
Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.
Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.
On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.
In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.
Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.
Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.
Dean Koontz
Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.
First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.
Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.
This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement. Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.
Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.
Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).
Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:
Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.
As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.
Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:
He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.
Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.
Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:
That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?
This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.
Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:
While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.
Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.
There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.
However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.
The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:
Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.
The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.
I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?
Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.
Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.
Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.
Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.
The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.
Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.
Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.
An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.
Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.
In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.
Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.
Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.
They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.
Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?
We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.
(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)
The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.
Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.
Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.
The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.
The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.
Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.
(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)
Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.
Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.
This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.
The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.
As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.
About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.
The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.
There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.
Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.
Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.
(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)
Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.
What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.
Three stars.
There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.
![[February 22, 1969] Good and Bad Trips (March 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690222cover-665x372.jpg)
![[February 20, 1969] The Old Man and the She (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Requiem for Methuselah")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690220title-672x372.jpg)
![[February 14, 1969] Like a circle in a spiral; like a wheel within a wheel (<i>Star Trek</i>: "The Lights of Zetar")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690214title-672x372.jpg)
![[February 12, 1969] Slick stuff (March 1969 <i>Galaxy</i> science fiction)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690212cover-662x372.jpg)
![[January 31, 1969] Clinging to life (<i>Star Trek</i>: "That Which Survives")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690131title-672x372.jpg)
![[January 28, 1969] Slidin' (February 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690128cover-672x372.jpg)
A Womanly Talent, by Anne McCaffrey
![[January 18, 1969] (February 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690118cover-663x372.jpg)
![[January 16, 1969] Mixed messages (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield")](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690116title-672x372.jpg)
![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers-672x372.jpg)
