Tune in, starting November 13, for twelve days of Apollo 12 coverage!
by Gideon Marcus
Happy Anniversary
A year ago, Richard Milhouse Nixon won the Presidency in part on his "secret plan" to get us out of Vietnam. A few months into his term, besieged by increasingly strident demands for progress, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger urged patience. If things weren't resolved by November, then we would have cause to complain.
Last week, President Nixon revealed his plan for "Vietnamization" in a prime time television address. It called for eventual turning over of the reins of war to the South Vietnamese. However, the President refused to set a timetable for this turnover, saying that such would lead to undue Communist advantage. Nixon suggested that America might step down its bombing by, say, 20%, and see if the North Vietnamese match our draw-down, but the Paris peace talks are dead, and the U.S. would stay the course as long as was necessary.
The President concluded by asserting that the "silent majority" of Americans was behind his plan, and that no foreign power could defeat the United States: defeat could only come from within.
Well, you can imagine that this statement, tantamount to a continuation of President Johnson's pre-1968 policies, did not sit well with a lot of folks, including a host of Congressmen. The unquiet minority also plans to make their voices heard in a second Moratorium march in a few days. We'll see if it has more impact than the last one.
In Other News
If Nixon's address was something of a disappointment, in contrast, the latest issue of Galaxy makes for consistently pleasant reading:
by Jack Gaughan and Phoebe Gaughan
Editor Eljer Jakobsson introduces a new act by artist Vaughn Bodé. Looks like it will be funny, nudie, SF cartoons. Sure, why not?
Also of interest is Budrys' Bookshelf column. I often don't agree with his taste, but I generally enjoy the way he writes his reviews. I found it interesting that Isaac Asimov's unwanted advances toward women have now become so commonplace that Budrys felt he had to alloy his review of the Good Doctor's latest, Opus 100, in his very first paragraph:
"Now you take Isaac Asimov… Well, taking him from the pages of Opus 100, his hundredth book (Houghton Mifflin Company, $5.95), one finds him so various, so beautiful and new that it is only with a wrench of the mind one recalls the last time he pinched one's wife's bottom."
By the way, there is no Willy Ley column (RIP), and they have not found a replacement science writer.
Jamboree, by Jack Williamson
In the future, robots rule, adults are forbidden, and children are raised in Boy Scout-styled prison camps. Two twelve-year-olds attempt a revolution, but quickly learn the futility of resistance.
A bleak story with a downer ending, but at least it's memorable.
This novella is heralded as a "novel complete in this issue." It is, at least, a complete story, and not a bad one.
The premise: five thousand years from now, three trillion humans infest the planet. They all live underground, the surface being reserved for the cultivation of crops. Virtually no animals have survived into this dark future, so the few remaining individuals, the "I people", living on the surface, mostly get their protein from cannibalism. The underground people have all been evolved for docility, a trait phenotypically displayed by a lack of a fifth toe (presumably the pinky toe). These four-toes are known as "Nebishes".
When I first read about this setup, I assumed this was going to be a satirical, tongue-in-cheek story. It's not, except maybe for a few, farcical touches here and there. What it is is the story of Moses Eppendorff, a comparatively enterprising four-toe, who discovers a new food source and is rewarded with a trip Outside. Eschewing the typical Outside activity—going on a Hunt for I people—he instead takes a hike up a mountain, experiencing solitude for the first time.
He also encounters Moon, a 200+ year-old I person, his 200+ year-old dog, and a sentient spear from the before-times who calls itself Toothpick. Encouraged to abandon the underworld, Moses wanders with these companions, learning about the world including some fascinating biological changes the surface dwellers have evolved to avoid capture/kill. Ultimately, in the most jokey, but blessedly understated, part of the book, Moses, carrying his staff, leads the I-people to what they think is the promised land.
It's actually a pretty good yarn, one of the better overpopulation stories out there. It does an interesting job of contrasting modes of humanity by population density, and Bass creates a compelling world. The prose is occasionally clunky, and the transitions are such that the individual segments don't always dovetail seamlessly, but for a new writer (his first story came out last year), he shows a lot of promise.
Three stars.
Eternity Calling, by John Chambers
An alient bloodsucker, a semi-independent member of a sentient collective, happens upon a human starship. Its one inhabitant is a preacher looking for souls to save. By the end, the shaken terrestrial leaves convinced that the alien has a closer analog to a soul than he does.
This story starts so promisingly, with the extraterrestrial viewpoint vividly drawn. The latter half of the story is a simple dialogue, and not a particularly impactful one at that.
A terran explorer is drawn to a star for its pulsating bursts of energy. It turns out the inhabitants have a tradition of celebrating every quarter century with a pyrotechnic display. Specifically, they detonate nuclear bombs in orbit!
Of course, such activities are purely for their aesthetic appeal. Like the Chinese and their gunpowder firecrackers, the aliens wouldn't dream of using such devices for warfare. At least, they hadn't thought of it until humans gave them the idea…
Rather a silly story, and not as clever as the authors think it is. Two stars.
Continuing the tale of Edmund Gunderson, former bigwig at the former company colony on steamy Nildoror. Last installment, Gunderson was seeking permission from the native elephantines to travel to the Mist Country, where the Nildoror are reborn, though we don't know why Edmund wants to go there. His request is granted, provided he return with a human named Cullen, who has committed a nameless crime.
So, with a Nildoror escort, Gunderson goes on a long trek across the countryside. A highlight of this jaunt include Edmund's recounting of the event that shocked him into accepting the sentience of the natives, despite their having no formal civilization. Another is when he comes across two dying humans, hosts to an extraterrestrial parasite, and has to decide whether to put them out of their misery.
I wasn't sold on the piece last time, but I now feel I've gotten over the hump and can really live inside not just Gunderson's mind, but also that of his guide, the Nildoror named Srin'gahar. I prefer brooding Silverbob (q.v. The Man in the Maze and Hawksbill Station) to Zelazny look-a-like or borderline-smut Silverbob.
Four stars for this bit, and elevating the work as a whole.
Human Analogue Robot, Life Input Equivalents (HARLIE) is a sapient machine designed to mimic as well as analyze the thought processess of people. One day, Harlie goes on a jag, producing reams of nonsense poetry. These outbursts always follow the mass intake of human-produced modern art.
But is the problem the torrent of non-rational input, or is there something broken inside the computer? Is it a malfunction at all?
I'm not sure that I'm completely sold on the premise or the story, but I have to concede, it feels very modern. David Gerrold, by the way, is the hip young man who penned the script for the Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles". I think this is his first traditionally published science fiction.
Three stars, and let's see where he goes next!
Horn of Plenty, by Vladimir Grigoriev
The inventor, Stepan Onufrievich, happens upon a decayed sign in Moscow, which exhorts citizens to deposit their scraps. It depicts a cornucopia with a man shoveling scrap into one end, producing consumer goods out the other.
Inspired, Onufrievich sets out to build a real Horn of Plenty…and he succeeds! But, this being the Soviet Union, happy times do not last long.
Of course, this story is fantasy, not science fiction, but the satire is nicely biting. I am surprised this one made it past the censors. I am also quite impressed with the translation job: the story reads breezily and charmingly.
Four stars.
Doing the math
Per my Galacto-sliderule, this issue finishes at a modestly entertaining 3.1 stars. That's a little deceptive as the novella and the Silverberg really are at the high end of their ratings, and the two-star stories are short. I feel that Jacobsson is transforming his magazine into something more current. Pohl did an admirable job, but the new Galaxy may end up once again in the vanguard of science fiction digests.
Just in time for the 20th anniversary of the magazine. Keep it up, Eljer!
Every four years, Americans head to the polls to vote for who they want to lead the Free World. At least, that's what they think they're doing. What really happens is your vote determines if your choice for President wins your state. And then, representatives of the states, the so-called "Electoral College", announce who they've been empowered to choose. Technically, these representatives are not bound to uphold the will of the voter; in practice, bucking the election results has been for protest rather than consequence.
This means that the swingier the state and the bigger the state, the more attention it will get. For instance, California, somewhat evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and currently the most populous state in the Union, is more important to a candidate than, say, a reliable and sparsely settled state like Arizona.
No more? This week, the House passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would make Presidents directly electable. This would mark the first major change to the system since 1803.
It looks like half the Senate is in favor, but it will take two thirds of that chamber plus three quarters of the states for the measure to go through. Opposing such reform are representatives of small states and rural areas, as they wish to retain their outsized impact on the process. With the rapid rate of urbanization, particularly on the coasts, this proposed amendment threatens to wipe out the electoral relevance of most of the central region of our country, from the Rockies to the Mississippi.
But that's precisely why the time for such an amendment has come, its advocates propose. People vote—not acres.
The bill faces an uphill battle, but it's an idea whose time has probably come.
Magazine by the Few
by Ronald Walotsky
Even with an Electoral College, with 50 states, you still get something approximating the will of the people. With a science fiction magazine, you've only got six to fourteen pieces. That means any individual story can dramatically affect your enjoyment of an issue, and the variations in quality can make for a wild ride. Such was my experience reading the latest Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Susan Calvin, renowned roboscientist, has gone into semi-retirement, passing the torch to the new generation. Said successors develop a robot with flexible programming, one that can make free associations rather than rely on its own hard-coding. Its designers, all male, decide that such fuzzy thinking could only be ascribed to a female, and so they built the robot with feminine curves and a sexy contralto voice. JN-5, or "Jane", is a big hit with all the (male, of course) scientists and politicians.
Jane is employed to determine which of the 5500 stars with 80 light years of Earth would be most likely to be inhabitable so that humanity's limited interstellar capacity can be used most efficiently. Jane fingers three candidates, but she and her maker are killed in a freak accident. Only Susan Calvin can save the day.
The story drips with male chauvinism, but ultimately, that's the point. It's an uncomfortable ride, but wait for the end, which redeems the story.
A brilliant physicist discovers his wife has but one year to live. He builds a room in which time goes much more slowly so that he will have more time to discover a cure. When the wife gets lonely (since she's by herself for all of…what…a week?) the husband picks out a brilliant but plain woman to be his wife's companion.
Decades later, when the physicist discovers the cure, he returns to the room to find the two women making love. Jealously, he locks the room and accelerates time, leaving his wife to die, his wife's lover to live out the rest of her life with the corpse, and for both of them to be out of the physicist's ken in the blink of an eye.
I didn't like the story much when I read it, and now, having to revisit it for this summary, I realize that I hate it. Not just for the misogyny, but for the absurdity of the premise (there are no spinoff societal effects from inventing time control?!) and the laughability of the final insult—oh no! Wife is not only unfaithful but (whisper it) a homosexual!
A perennial extra, veteran of 450+ films, spends most of his life at the Silent Movies. He's not just reliving his glory days; it's how he can catch glimpses of his lost love, a fellow extra, who died in 1930, just as her career was beginning to take off.
The fellow knows every movie, every scene in which he and his girlfriend appeared. So why does she start showing up in films she never appeared in before, some that even date to before her start in show biz? And why does it seem she is mouthing messages for him alone? Is she enjoying a kind of celluloid life after death?
Once transportation via personal helicopter becomes a cheap and ubiquitous reality, everyone moves away from points north of 40 degrees latitude to reside in California, Florida, the Mediterranean, and other like climates. This is the tale of the last man in England, and the friend who tries to convince him to join the other emigrés.
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one—was the Earth growing cold? Had their been a calamity in the Northern Hemisphere? No. People were just leaving wholesale out of personal preference.
Never mind that some people like seasons. Never mind that the tropics can't fit all those people. Never mind that Aleuts and Laplanders haven't left their ancestral homes despite the capability of moving to town if they want to.
Lots of folks like Bradbury. Maybe I started on him too late.
Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Worlds in Confusion, by Isaac Asimov
Wherein the Good Doctor takes on Velikovsky and his ridiculous, religion-cloaked-in-pseudoscience tome, Worlds in Collision. Did Jupiter really eject Venus as a comet? Did that rogue planet stop the Earth in its tracks, causing no ill effects beyond the Ten Plagues and the pausing of the day at the Battle of Jericho? Do people really believe this claptrap?
Four stars.
by Chesley Bonestell
"Russian astronauts have arrived on the rim of Copernicus only to discover that the Americans have already been there …"
A mission to Jupiter finds the gas giant teeming with life. On the Moon, a giant black edifice (made by people, not aliens) sifts human dreams, becoming the repository for archetypes—the goal to find a solution to strife and hatred in the world. On Earth, the globe is split between Communist, Free, and Black domains. The "Free" world is highly regimented, with children taken from their parents after a decade, and marital partners divorced on the same schedule.
Our protagonists, such as they are, are neurotic Westciv citizens, adapted, but not adjusted, to the new way of life. Their collected dreams represent the only way out of the mess technology has gotten us into.
What a lousy story this is. Turgid, mock-momentous claptrap. Budget Ballard. Thoroughly unentertaining, its message buried, and not a lick of science to be found in this so-called science fiction. I recognize that the definition of the genre now goes beyond nuts-and-bolts engineering stories to include softer sciences like psychology and sociology, and that the New Wave is an experiment in bringing a degree of literary-ness to SF, but this is too much of a thing.
A brilliant engineer-turned-hippie stumbles upon the principle of perpetual motion. In order to keep the discovery from being used for evil, he leaves his life of Bohemian idyll, cuts off his hair, and Makes it Big. Thus armored in respectability, he carefully manages the revolution's global introduction, ensuring peace and propserity for all humanity.
Upon returning to the backwoods town where he left his lady love and a life of languor, his erstwhile paramour chides him for selling his soul for progress when he could have had love.
This is the sort of story Lafferty or Davidson might have played more for laughs, Sheckley more for bitterness. Sturgeon presents it completely straight, and as always, he writes pretty well. His statement seems to be: rather than just be nice and preach love, actually do something to make the world better.
On the surface, he has a point. Free love is all very nice, but aren't those dirty hippies really just parasites on real working society? On the other hand, Sturgeon rigs the deck. His hero discovers the patently impossible after a few days' work. Moreover, there are plenty of believers in the hippie ethic who are working, giving, and improving the world. It's a mentality, not a nationality.
Sturgeon, who predates the Swinging Sixties, obviously bears some resentment toward the new crowd. Kicking straw men is not the answer.
Mr. Poole, executive of a powerful corporation, is in a flying-car accident. When he regains consciousness, he finds he is not a human at all but an "electric ant"—an android. Designed to be a figurehead, all of his memories are programmed, his life a lie.
He becomes determined to find the nature of his ongoing programming and discovers that there are no further limits on his thoughts and activities. He does, however, discover a punched tape spool that controls his sensory input. Poole begins fiddling with it, altering his subjective reality. His ultimate goal is to experience everything in the universe at once, something he thinks, as a robot, he can handle better than a human might.
Dick once again turns in a story about a middle-aged man going through an existential crisis. There is also the drug-use metaphor (Dick is into uppers, I understand). It doesn't make the most sense—the ant's reality is subjective, but the external universe also exists, so what, exactly does the tape spool control? Poole is determined to find out, taking himself on a psychedelic, 2001-esque journey whose mission is to prove or disprove Solipsism. I feel Dick takes the easy, the obvious way out, at the very end.
Niven returns to the realm of fantasy, but this time, with a completely new character and setup. Hanville Svetz is a hapless time traveler from more than a thousand years from now. Hailing from a polluted, dictatorial future, he has been sent back to 1200 AD to find an extinct beast for the Secretary General's zoo—a simple horse.
What Svetz actually finds, and the troubles that befall him on his quest are interesting and delightful. There is a deft, sardonic touch to this story, and room has been left for many follow-ups. I look forward to them.
Four stars.
Science Fiction for the woodpile
As with last month, the latest F&SF finished on the wrong end of the 3-stars mark. Though F&SF is the shortest of the SF digests, it took me the longest to finish. I just wasn't looking forward to it. I can see why my nephew, David, canceled his subscription a few years back. It's a pity that this twentieth anniversary issue is so dismal compared to the ones that came out when the magazine was young. That said, hope springs eternal, and I would hate to miss stories like Get a Horse!.
I just wish my job would let me skip the stories I don't like…
[And now, for your reading pleasure, a clutch of books representing the science fiction and fantasy books that have crossed our desk for review this month!]
by Victoria Silverwolf
Ye Gods!
Two new fantasy novels, both with touches of science fiction, feature theological themes. One deals with deities that are now considered to be purely mythological, the other relates to one of the world's major living religions. Let's take a look.
Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty
Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.
The title of this strange novel comes from a book written by Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Christian mystic of the sixteenth century. This work, known as The Interior Castle or The Mansions in English, compares various stages in the soul's spiritual progress to mansions within a castle. From what I can tell from a little research, the Fourth Mansion is the stage at which the natural and the supernatural intersect.
(I'm sure I'm explaining this badly. Interested readers can seek out a copy of Saint Teresa's book for themselves.)
I understand that Lafferty is a devout Catholic, so this connection between his latest novel and what is considered to be a classic of Christian literature must be more than superficial. Be that as it may, let's see if we can make any sense out of a very weird book.
Our hero is Fred Foley, a reporter who is said to be not very bright, but who seems to have some kind of special insight or perception as to events beyond the mundane. (A sort of Holy Fool, perhaps.) He gets involved in multiple conspiracies of folks, who may be something other than just ordinary human beings, out to change the world.
There are four such groups, said to be not quite fit for either Heaven or Earth. Each one is symbolized by an animal.
The Snakes, also known as the Harvesters, are a group of seven people who blend their psychic powers to influence the minds of others. They are intent on bringing about a sort of hedonistic apocalypse. Their connection to Foley and other characters allows for telepathic communication, and sets the plot in motion.
The Toads are folks who are reincarnated, or somehow take over new bodies. (It's a little vague.) Foley's investigation into one such person starts the novel. They intend to release a plague, wiping out most of humanity and ruling over the survivors.
The Badgers are people who are something like spiritual rulers of a kind of parallel world that most ordinary people can't perceive. Foley pays a visit to a couple of these seemingly benign people for information. In one case, this involves a trip to a mountain in Texas that shouldn't be there.
The Unfledged Falcons are would-be fascists, military leaders trying to take over the world by force. Only one such person appears in the book, a Mexican fellow named Miguel Fuentes. He gets involved when the Snakes try to influence an American named Michael Fountain (see the connection in names?) and wind up entering his mind by mistake.
I would be hard pressed to try to describe all the bizarre things that happen. Lafferty has a way of describing extraordinary events in deadpan fashion. (We're very casually told, for example, that one character brought a dead man back to life when he was a boy. One very minor character is a demon, and another one is an alien.)
The book's combination of whimsey and allegory is unique, to say the least. There's a lot of dialogue that sounds like nothing anybody would ever say in real life. Did I understand it all? Certainly not. Did I enjoy the ride? Yep.
Four stars.
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
Cover art by James Starrett.
Zelazny's recent novel Lord of Light offered a futuristic twist on Buddhism and Hinduism. This one makes use of ancient Egyptian gods, as well as a bit of Greek mythology. There are also a lot of original concepts, making for a very mixed stew indeed.
The time is the far future, when humanity has settled multiple planets. Don't expect a space opera, however.
We begin in the House of the Dead, ruled by Anubis. He has a servant who has lost his memory and his name. Anubis gives him the name Wakim, and sends him to the Middle Worlds (the physical realm) to destroy the Prince Who Was A Thousand. Meanwhile, Osiris, who rules the House of Life, sends his son Horus on the same errand.
You see, Anubis and Osiris keep the population of the Middle Worlds in balance, bringing life and death in equal amounts. The Prince threatens this system with the possibility of immortality. Although the two gods have the same goal, they are also rivals, so their champions battle each other as well as the Prince.
This is a greatly oversimplified description of the basic plot. A lot more goes on, with many equally god-like characters. There's a sort of scavenger hunt for three sacred items, with the protagonists hopping around from planet to planet in search of them.
Zelazny experiments with narrative techniques, from poetry to a play. There's some humor, as demonstrated by a cult that worships a pair of shoes. (They actually play an important role in the plot.) The pace is frenzied, with plenty of purple prose.
Full understanding of what the heck is really going on doesn't happen until late in the book, when we learn the actual identities of Wakim and the Prince. Suffice to say that this requires a lengthy description of apocalyptic events that took place long before the story begins.
Some readers are going to find this novel disjointed and overwritten. Others are likely to be swept away by the richness of the author's imagination. I'm leaning in the latter direction.
Roger Zelazny’s been busy this month! His new novel Damnation Alley expands his novella of the same name into an action piece which is exciting enough but ultimately unsatisfying, a sort of postapocalyptic pony express with futuristic vehicles and implausible characters.
Cover of Damnation Alley by Jack Gaughan
The story is set in a relatively near-future USA after a nuclear war which has split it into isolated states within a radiation-ravaged wasteland, the only relatively safe passage through which is a corridor known as Damnation Alley. There are pockets of radiation, giant mutant animals and insects, tornadoes and killer dust storms. The descriptions of these is the book’s real strength, with some of them verging on the genuinely poetic. Our protagonist is Hell Tanner, a former Hell’s Angel who is offered a pardon for his crimes by the State of California, if he’ll deliver a shipment of vaccines to Boston, which has been hit by an outbreak of plague. Of course, this necessitates driving through Damnation Alley, but never fear, Tanner is also driving a super-tough vehicle bristling with weaponry.
The whole thing is almost laughably macho in places, and I say that as someone who really quite likes both cars and adventure stories. Tanner is that implausible archetype, the bad guy who nonetheless somehow has other people’s best interests at heart. However, there’s also some nice contrasts set up between Tanner and the criminal world he inhabits and the much more normal parts of society he encounters on his journey, where people seem to be on the whole generally decent and kind, making Tanner’s casual violence seem all the more out of place.
The book has a lot of problems. Some are clearly the result of padding it out to novel length, with several episodes which go nowhere and add little to the story. The characterisation of everyone aside from Tanner is weak to nonexistent. In particular, the main female character, Cordy, is a frustrating cipher: she is a woman who Tanner essentially abducts, and yet she shows none of the emotions one might expect under the circumstances, while Tanner seemingly comes to think of her as his girlfriend despite neither of them making any moves in that direction.
However, the biggest problem is that there are too many holes in the story for it to stay afloat. Despite the devastation of the land around it, the state of California somehow still has the resources to build giant armoured cars bristling with every kind of weapon from bullets to flamethrowers. Only two human beings are apparently capable of making the trip from California to Boston, which is surprising given the aforementioned level of technology and that there is clearly no shortage of young men with a death wish. Tanner makes it almost to Boston before encountering anyone who makes a serious effort to steal the vaccines, which I also find somewhat implausible. And so on, and so on.
Damnation Alley held my attention for the duration of a train journey and had nicely surreal, well-paced prose in places, but it was just too unbelievable for me to really enjoy it. Two and a half stars.
by Brian Collins
Since he returned to writing some half a dozen years ago, Robert Silverberg has tried to reintroduce himself as a more “serious” writer. This is not to say his rate of output has slowed down in favor of more refined work; if anything the past few years have been the busiest for him since the ‘50s. This year alone we have gotten enough novels from Silverberg that a bit of a catch-up is in order. The first on my plate, Across a Billion Years, hit store shelves a few months ago, from The Dial Press (I believe this is Silverberg’s first book with said publisher), and it seems to have flown under the radar—possibly because there’s no paperback edition, and also it might be aimed at younger readers. The second book we have here, To Live Again, is from Doubleday, and it too is a hardcover original; but unlike Across a Billion Years, To Live Again is a new release, fresh out of the oven.
It’s the 24th century, and humanity has not only spread to other worlds but encountered several intelligent alien races along the way. Tom Rice is a 22-year-old archaeologist on an expedition to find the ruins of a bygone race called the High Ones, who apparently lived a billion years ago (hence the title) but who have since vanished. Whether or not the High Ones have gone extinct is one of the novel’s core mysteries, although Silverberg takes his time raising this question. The novel is told as a series of diary entries, or rather messages Tom sends to his sister Lorie. In a curious but also frustrating move, Lorie is arguably the most interesting character in the novel, yet we never see or hear her, as she’s not only away from the action but stuck in a hospital bed for an indefinite period. Lorie is a telepath, and enough people are “TP” to make up their own faction, although telepathy only works one-way and Tom himself is not a telepath. The one positive surprise Silverberg includes here is finding a way to tie telepathy together with the mystery of the High Ones, but obviously I won’t say how he does it.
As for bad surprises, well…
Even taking into account that Tom is a young adult who also has personal hang-ups (his father wanted him to enter real estate), his treatment of his colleagues is abhorrent in the opening stretch. He dismisses the aliens on the team as mostly “diversity” hires and has a standoffish relationship with Kelly, the female android on the team, whom he more than once compares to a “voluptuous nineteen-year-old.” Why someone of Tom’s age would make such a comparison is befuddling…unless you were really a lecherous man approaching middle age and not a recent college graduate. There are a few other humans here, but the only human woman present is Jan, whom Tom gradually takes a liking to—just not enough to do anything when he sees Leroy, a male colleague, sexually assault Jan near enough that he could have intervened. This happens early in the novel, and I have to admit that Tom’s indifference regarding Jan’s wellbeing, a weakness in character he never really apologizes for, cast a cloud over my enjoyment of the rest of the novel. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop. That Tom and Jan’s relationship turns romantic despite the former’s callousness only serves to rub salt in the wound. The bright side of all this is that while some of Silverberg’s recent work has bordered on pornographic, Across a Billion Years is relatively tame, almost to the point of being old-fashioned.
Indeed, this feels like a throwback to an older era of SF, even back to those years when Silverberg (and I, for that matter) had not yet picked up a pen or used a typewriter. In broad strokes this is a planetary adventure of the sort that would have been serialized in Astounding circa 1945. We’re excavating alien ruins on Higby V, a distant planet where High Ones artifacts have been supposedly found. During a drunken escapade one of the alien diggers stumbles upon (or rather breaks into) a piece of High Ones technology, something akin to a movie projector, not only showing what the High Ones look like but revealing a clue as to the location of their homeworld. This should sound familiar to most of us, and I suspect Silverberg knows this too, because this novel’s biggest problem and biggest asset is how it uses perspective. We’re stuck with Tom as he sends messages to Lorie, recounting events in perhaps more detail than he has to, knowing in advance that his sister won’t receive these messages until after the fact. As with a disconcerting number of Silverberg protagonists, Tom can be annoying, and honestly quite bigoted; and since he is the perspective character we’re never relieved of his oh-so-interesting remarks. But, and I will give Silverberg this, he does put a twist on the epistolary format very late in the novel, which does the miraculous thing of making you reevaluate what you had been reading up to this point.
In other words, this is not an exceptional novel, but it does have its points of interest, and with the exception of an early scene and its ramifications (or lack thereof), nothing here made me want to throw my copy at a nearby wall. For the most part this is inoffensive—possibly even decent. Three stars.
Those who want a bit more sex with their science fiction can do worse than this one, which looks to be the fourth (or maybe fifth—I’ve lost count) Silverberg novel of 1969. It’s the near-ish future, and the good news is that for those with enough money, death is not necessarily the end. Courtesy of the Scheffing Institute, a person can have their memories stored periodically, making copies or “personae” of themselves, which can be transplanted to the brain of a living host. The host and the persona will cooperate, lest the latter erase the former’s personality and become a “dybbuk,” using the host’s body as a flesh puppet.
The infamous businessman Paul Kaufmann has recently died, with his persona waiting to be claimed. Paul’s nephew, Mark, and Mark’s 16-year-old daughter Risa each see themselves as ideal candidates for Paul’s persona, but one of the rules at the Institute is that close family members can’t host each other’s personae: the implications of, for example, a teen girl hosting her grandfather’s persona, would be…concerning.
While we’re on the lovely topic of incest, let’s talk more about Risa, who must be one of the thorniest of all Silverberg characters, which as you know is a tall order, not helped by the fact that Silverberg describes, in almost poetic detail, every curve of this teen girl’s nude body—and she does strut around naked a surprising amount of the time. Risa is such a depraved individual, despite her age, that she at one point tries seducing an older male cousin and rather openly has an Electra complex (they even mention it by name), which Mark is understandably disturbed by—with the implication being that Mark has lustful thoughts about his own daughter. This is the second Silverberg novel I’ve read in two months to involve incest, which worries me.
The only other major female character is Elena, Mark’s mistress, whom Risa sees as a rival for her father’s affections and who (predictably) starts conspiring against Mark. Not content to ogle at just 16-year-olds, Silverberg also takes to describing the nuances of Elena’s body in wearying fashion, which does lead me to wonder if he was working the typewriter one-handed for certain passages. It’s a shame, because there’s an intriguing subplot in which Risa acquires her first persona, a young woman named Tandy who had died in a skiing accident—or so the official record claims. Tandy, or rather the persona of Tandy, recorded a couple months prior to her death, suspects foul play. Of the women mentioned, Tandy is the least embarrassingly written, but then she is only tangentially related to the plot and, what with not having a physical body, Silverberg is only able to ogle at her so much.
I’ve not even mentioned John Roditis and his underling Charles Noyles, business rivals of Mark’s who are clamoring for Paul’s persona. You may notice that this novel has more moving parts than Across a Billion Years, and certainly it’s the more ambitious of the two, the problem being that its shortcomings are all the more disappointing for it. Silverberg raises questions that he can barely be bothered with answering, and he alludes to things that remain mostly unrevealed. Much of To Live Again is shrouded in speculation, which is to say it uses speculation as a night-black cloak to cover things we sadly never get to see.
Another rule at the Institute is that a persona has to be of the same gender as its host, a rule that characters mostly write off as bogus. And indeed why not? Why should a male host and female persona not be able to coexist? Or the other way around. The prohibition has to do with transsexualism, which is certainly uncharted water for the most part. There has been very little science fiction written about transsexualism or transvestism—the possibility of blurring and even crossing gender lines. Unfortunately the novel does little with the ideas it presents. There are multiple references to religion and mythology (the word “dybbuk” refers to an evil spirit in Jewish mythology), including lines taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a minor subplot about white Californians appropriating Buddhist practices, in connection with the Institute, but this is so tangential that the reader can easily forget about it.
Finally, I want to mention that I was reminded eerily of another novel that came out this year, Philip K. Dick’s masterful and deranged Ubik, which I have to think Silverberg could not have known about when he was writing To Live Again. Both take cues from the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, although in Dick’s novel people who have died are kept in a state of suspended animation called “half-life,” whereas Silverberg’s characters die the full death, or “discorporate,” only that their personalities (up to a point) are kept intact. Not to make comparisons, but given that Silverberg’s novel is longer than Dick’s I have to say he does a fair bit less with the shared material. Of course, these are both talented writers, who at their best do very fine work indeed. Silverberg has become a major writer, but sadly he is not firing on all cylinders with either of the novels I’ve covered.
This book made me think of a Bulwer-Lytton novel for the Space Age.
This book could make Damon Knight take back everything he said about van Vogt.
This book made me long for the complexity of Commander Cody shorts.
This book’s style is so out of date that I think it fell out of the TARDIS.
This book wishes it had the character depth of a Lin Carter work.
And yet, I can't hate it the way I hated Light A Last Candle. That book was one mass of forgettable hate, but The Glass Cage is not hateful. It's incompetent at every turn, from line editing to plot development (I really don't know how it got the hardcover copy I received), but the overall effect is an oral record of a children's game.
There's this guy, Stephen, he’s twenty! He's a neophyte to the priests of the computer, TAL! It keeps life going in the city beneath its glass dome! Stephen is a perfect physical specimen, and his only flaw is being too curious about things. But that's because he’s secretly a spy for the Rebellion outside the glass dome!
The sentences are short and rarely have the benefit of internal punctuation. The characters are, generally, exactly how they appear — wicked characters with their close-together eyes, good characters with their strong jaws, straightforward manner, and perfect blonde hair. If this is chosen for adaptation, Tommy Kirk is made for the lead part.
The treatment of nuclear power seems to come from another time, where the leaders of interstellar development are in the Baltimore Gun Club rather than NASA. The giant computer, TAL, is attached to a nuclear bomb, to go off at a certain date, destroying the whole glass dome and the people within! No need to worry, though, Stephen and his various Rebellion people get most everyone out in time, except for the bad guy head priest of TAL, who is determined to die with his machine. Stephen and the gangster leader of the in-Dome Rebellion try to get him out, but to no avail! The nuclear bomb is about to go off, so the two of them hop on their air-sled, turn it skyward, and smash through the glass dome, just as the nuclear bomb goes off! Luckily, the nuclear bomb just pushes them a few miles away from the blast, where they are safe and unharmed.
One point of the book that is surprisingly forward-thinking is its treatment of one of the main characters being severely disabled. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, he is a leader of the Rebellion, commanding through his immense psychic ability. But that cannot keep me from giving it…
Two stars
[A bit of a downer note to leave on, but at least there's some fine stuff upstream. See you next month, tiger!]
The market has been changing violently over the past few years—perhaps for the better, perhaps not. As someone who came to love science fiction through the magazines little over a decade ago, it pains me to see those magazines either discontinued or struggling to adapt with the times. There are, of course, one or two exceptions. For those who see fresh potential in original anthologies, though, it's hard to argue with the results—even if, say, Damon Knight's Orbit series has offered mixed results.
The latest one-off anthology, Three for Tomorrow (the editor is uncredited, but I've heard rumors that Robert Silverberg is the mastermind behind this volume), features three new novellas from Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, and James Blish, plus a foreword from Arthur C. Clarke explaining the anthology's intriguing premise.
In just a couple pages, the venerated Arthur C. Clarke sums up what the ‘60s will probably be remembered for: a historical text written in blood. Clarke cites, among other things, the Charles Whitman shooting back in ‘63, that massive blackout in the northeast back in ‘65, and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Clarke then asks a rather curious question: “When will some Lee Harvey Oswald attempt to assassinate a city—or a world?” Thus the following stories will presumably share a theme of sorts, although as we’re told in the editor’s introduction, Silverberg, Zelazny, and Blish wrote totally independently of each other.
The first novella is also the longest, at a solid eighty pages. More of a tapestry than a focused narrative, we follow a number of characters in San Francisco after a disgruntled man taints the city’s water supply with an experimental drug—said drug causing selective amnesia. The year is 2003, where robots handle much of the manual labor and people get their news through the “data-net,” the problem now being that not everyone remembers it’s 2003. We follow, among others, a famous sculptor who has sunk into a hilarious amount of debt with several corporations, a magician or “mnemonist” who has an existential crisis after part of his memory has been wiped, a doctor who has been guilt-ridden for the past decade because of a family tragedy he holds himself responsible for, a decorated war veteran who only drinks bottled water out of paranoia (I suspect this is a deliberate reference to Dr. Strangelove’s General Ripper), and I could go on a bit more. None of these characters could be considered “the hero,” but while the story is short on anyone individually sympathetic, we do get a rather colorful ensemble cast as compensation.
Silveberg has been writing at a furious pace for the past few years, apparently having come to maturity since he started writing fiction again back in—was it ‘63? I was impressed with The Man in the Maze when it ran in If last year, and “How It Was When the Past Went Away” further hints at a growing maturity, although it has a few issues that weigh on it.
The most immediate problem is that it is overstuffed for a novella, with more characters than the reader could reasonably keep track of, most of them one-note. The women (the wives and secretaries, as nobody else of the female persuasion seems to exist here) get it the worst. Silverberg is able to conceive a believable future San Francisco in which technology has largely been computerized and creditors come in the form of robots with automated messaging, but for some reason he struggles to conceive female characters who do not exist simply to be stared at. There is a curious subplot in which a husband and wife have forgotten getting divorced, because of the drug, and so work to reform their relationship; but again it feels undercooked, because the wife is written less like a person and more like something to be gained. Overall this story would not win awards for character psychology.
I’m prefacing my complaints just to get them out of the way, because what Silverberg does right is certainly commendable. Between this and some other recent stories (especially the novels), Silverberg has been hunting intellectual big game. The San Francisco of 2003 is vividly and believably realized, sort of coming off as like a Stand on Zanzibar in miniature, but the thematic implications of the drug at the story’s center are ultimately what give it a certain heft and a sense of foreboding. Silverberg seems to posit that if we really value our own happiness that we would choose to forget our past trauma, or at least some of it; yet the fact that characters struggle to come to terms with forgetting part of their pasts implies that we do value something more about ourselves than our happiness. If only we could articulate what that is. Alienation has been a recurring theme for Silverberg since at least “To See the Invisible Man,” but here he tethers it to our sense of memory and how our memories can connect us with other people. The shared amnesia for the people in this story becomes its own moment of collective memory for them, which I have to admit is a lovely idea. If we were able to forget then we would be happier, but then would we also become slightly less human? And would the inverse be true, that by remembering we become more human?
A high three stars, but I feel Silverberg could have very feasibly tweaked it to bring it up to four. I also would not be surprised if we see a novel expansion in the future.
He’s only been around half a dozen years or so at this point, but Zelazny has quickly become one of my favorite writers to have coincided with the New Wavers. I do fear, however, that despite still being quite young he has already taken to repeating himself. To make a long story short, “The Eve of RUMOKO” (so named “after the Maori god of volcanoes and earthquakes”) is about Project RUMOKO, in which nuclear explosives are used deep underwater to raise up volcanic islands. In “How It Was When the Past Went Away” society’s stability is threatened by a tainted water supply, but with Zelazny’s story the underlying problem is overpopulation. Project RUMOKO may provide additional land for human habitation, but the ecological consequences of these new islands could be severe—never mind the effect on societies that already live in undersea domes. Our narrator/protagonist, “Albert Scwheitzer” (he makes it clear that this is not his real name, which we never learn), has been brought on ostensibly as an engineer, but his real job is as a private detective—in the case of Project RUMOKO, to find the culprit behind what seem to be attempts at sabotage.
To give credit where credit’s due, we don’t often see SF and detective fiction cross-pollinating, for reasons that have mostly to do with the fact that you have to provide both suspense and plausibility when writing a mystery in an SF setting. Or to put it another way, how would you provide a plausible mystery in a setting where presumably developments in technology would make it harder to get away with a crime? Zelazny sidesteps this by having the setting be mostly grounded, as in not too different from what we now recognize, other than that humanity has become overcrowded enough that even the aforementioned undersea domes have proven to not be enough. Given how islands are naturally formed, it isn’t too far a stretch to imagine man-made islands as a possible solution to overpopulation. Whatever other problems this story has, at least it remains internally consistent. Zelazny, when he tries, has an imagination that can be disarming.
Unfortunately, while the bones of the story are arguably new territory, the meat and organs are not. “The Eve of RUMOKO” is a Frankenstein monster comprised of at least three previous Zelazny stories, namely “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” “This Moment of the Storm,” and “The Keys to December,” each of these a very good story in its own right. The problem is that when you throw these three stories into a stew to form a fourth, the result reads like Zelazny is coasting for the most part. It doesn’t help that “Schweitzer” might be the moodiest and most insufferable protagonist in what is becoming a rather long line of moody and insufferable Zelazny protagonists, all men, all interchangeable: He smokes like a chimney, is cool with the ladies, and is even able to outsmart a couple of goons in a drawn-out interrogation sequence. I’m also becoming tired of Zelazny’s penchant for using mythological symbolism as a crutch, especially (such as here) when he cribs from non-European cultures for his material. Overall I found the experience concerning—not in a vacuum but rather in conjunction with Zelazny’s previous work.
Taken simply on its own it’s a perfectly fine story, perhaps three stars; but with Zelazny I expected a lot more.
Blish’s story is the shortest and darkest of the bunch, both in its premise and implications. It’s also the best. This is the only story of the three which follows through on Clarke’s foreword, in the sense that technology has actually contributed to apocalyptic conditions. Blish speculates here that if humanity is doomed, it’s because of the sheer amount of waste we produce, and how much of that waste can’t be destroyed. We’re told that by the end of the 1980s sea levels will have risen enough to submerge the world’s coasts, including Manhattan, which aside from the crunched timetable (I seriously doubt people will be traveling via canoe in the city in thirty years’ time) sounds plausible enough. The problem is twofold: how much waste we produce and how we might (or might not) be able to dispose of said waste. For example, nuclear power is perhaps more efficient when it comes to producing waste than burning coal, but nuclear waste is hazardous long-term, and there isn’t a foolproof way to dispose of it. Thus, Blish posits, we (or at least Earth) will be doomed in the end.
The protagonist is a union leader who has been called on to pick three men and six women to board a shuttle for the moon—no children allowed. The idea is that while Earth may be doomed, tiny colonies of humanity can be saved. People are chosen based on fertility and each group leader’s personal preference, children and presumably the elderly being left behind. The situation is bleak. I do have a few quibbles first, none of which I could consider a major issue at least by itself. Aside from the crunched timetable there are some odd asides made via the third-person narrator, such as a certain bureaucrat being singled out as “an obvious homosexual,” along with the few female characters at times being described in unflattering terms. Characters are also fluent in what we would call Expositionese, and a fair portion of the wordage is spent on monologues detailing how the world got to this sorry state. I also have to warn the reader that this story stops abruptly, quite literally in the middle of a sentence such that I was unsure at first if this was deliberate or a misprint; but I’ve since come to think the abrupt (and hopeless) ending is quite deliberate.
Something SF and horror have in common is the capacity to ask disturbing questions, in that these questions dislodge the reader’s complacency. Blish asks a simple but brutal one: “Would mankind be able to survive without our possessions, and even our waste?” Would we be able to bury Shakespeare, or even personal items which possess only sentimental value, for the sake of the race’s survival? Blush supposes we wouldn’t. While there is a tangible irony to the plot, along with stylistic flourishes (there’s a cat named Splat!, with the exclamation point as part of the name) that suggest Blish is trying to fit in with the New Wave crowd, the impending doom of “We All Die Naked” evokes the God of Abraham rather than a comedy act. This is Blish at his most merciless, even if his shortcomings as a writer (his inelegant dialogue, his uncharitable attitude towards his female characters) work to form cracks in the armor.
It’s imperfect, but it still has a haunting power. Four stars.
[We received this review of the novel version of "Up the Line" at almost the same time as we received John Boston's commentary on the serialized version. We considered both articles to be worth reading, even if "Up the Line" might not be… -ED]
But we're not done with Silverberg! He's said recently that he refuses to write anything purely for money now, which implies artistic integrity, but that hasn't slowed down his output much. His latest novel, Up the Line, started its serial run in Amazing Stories a couple months ago, but you can now read the full novel, uncensored (it's a very dirty novel) and in paperback. Unfortunately this might be the worst novel Silveberg has written since he returned to writing half a dozen years ago. It's such a misshapen creature of a book that I honestly have to wonder what Silverberg meant by it.
Cover art by Ron Walotsky.
Ever since the invention of time travel, one's notion of objective time has broken down, with only "now-time" being taken into account—in this case now-time is 2059. Judson Elliott III is a new recruit as a Time Courier, whose job basically involves being a guide and babysitter for a bunch of rich tourists. Time travel has been commercialized such that notable events in history are industries unto themselves, especially the deaths of famous people. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the assassination of Huey Long are just two examples, in which the crowds gathering around the slain historical figures are at least partly comprised of time travelers.
Silverberg goes to great lengths to rationalize how such a business would work, so much in fact that for about the first seventy pages of this 250-page novel the plot is all but nonexistent. This isn't necessarily a negative, or at least it didn't have to be. We grow accustomed to Jud's new profession, the rules he is expected to follow, and the few friends he makes among the fellow Couriers, including Sam, a white man's idea of a black man, and Capistrano, a melancholy fellow who fantasizes about committing suicide in a rather odd fashion—by going back in time and murdering one of his own ancestors, thereby preventing his own birth.
Up the Line works on the presumption that you, the reader, are already thoroughly familiar with the time travel genre. The Time Patrol, a police faction whose job specifically calls for making sure the Couriers and their clients don't destroy mankind through some paradox, could be a hat tip to Poul Anderson's own Time Patrol, or even the late H. Beam Piper's Paratime Police. And why not? Any time travel story written in the past five years or so would have to draw comparisons with, among other things, Robert Heinlein's masterful "'—All You Zombies—'," which similarly concerns sex and how it might act as a catalyst for time paradoxes. However, while the sex in Heinlein's little jewel of a story is kept offscreen, there are quite a few scenes in Silverberg's novel that could be considered pornographic. Something Jud quickly learns about the Time Service is that the Couriers are almost too busy chasing tail to look after their clients, and the women they chase after are (somehow) always willing. The biggest hedonist of them all has to be Themistoklis Metaxas, a senior Courier who, quite opposite from Capistrano, goes out of his way to bed the female members of his own ancestry. Incest ends up playing such a prominent role in the novel that it's basically responsible for the plot even starting in earnest, as Metaxas's roguish behavior inspires Jud to think about the incest taboo with regards to his own ancestry.
The problem with Up the Line is that it's quite a bad novel, to my mind, and yet it's easy to see how other readers might think it's another victory for Silverberg. Who doesn't love a good time paradox? Not to mention the rampant sex, which will draw in younger readers and those who are predisposed to think about sex regularly (and I admittedly fall into both of those groups), while at the same time reminding us that the New Wave is here to stay. The locations are exotic, especially the fulcrum of the action, that being Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul across the centuries, the city which Metaxas frequents so often as to have residency there. There are constipated passages in which the action ceases so that Jud (read: Silverberg) can educate us on, for example, what rural life was like in 12th century Byzantium. The amateur historian's passion for his subject can be infectious, which I think was what Silverberg was counting on, so that he might distract us from how uneventful this book really is. If I were to keep only the necessary background information and Jud's quest to trace his family lineage backwards, I would have cut the novel in half, to have it squeezed nicely into one half of an Ace Double. Remove most of the sex scenes and historical tangents, and you would have maybe a long novella. It doesn't help that by lingering so long on the mechanics of his time travel business, Silverberg invites us to poke holes in it. Indeed, why are the Time Service and Time Patrol separate organizations? Why is it so easy to abuse such a fragile system? How have we not been devolved to the state of primordial ooze thanks to some tourist stepping on a butterfly?
So there isn't enough action to sustain this 250-page novel. So what? The ideas are ambitious, and deliberately headache-inducing. What about the characters? Indeed, what about them. As I was reading Up the Line, I was intrigued but also at times disgusted—intrigued by the precarious relationship between the Couriers and the fabric of time they play with, and disgusted by the Couriers themselves. Jud starts out as sex-starved and only becomes more preoccupied with the notion of bedding a distant ancestor of his, namely the 17-year-old Pulcheria Dulca, in Byzantium. "It was lust at first sight," as Jud tells us; and of course Pulcheria, despite being married, is perfectly eager to go to bed with him. Truth be told, I've become concerned that Silverberg does not see women as fully autonomous beings, with their own interior lives and ambitions. The women in this book are granted even less personality than Sam, who himself is a caricature, with even Pulcheria barely qualifying as a character. There are also some comments Jud makes about a few female characters younger than Pulcheria (including a disturbing episode in which he encounters his own mother as a five-year-old) that I found revolting. I do mean this with the intention of giving some offense when I say Up the Line reads almost more like a Piers Anthony novel than Silverberg.
Pains me to say this, but I must give it two stars.
When Ireland gained independence in 1922, six predominantly Protestant counties in the north of the island opted to remain part of the United Kingdom, forming what is today known as Northern Ireland. In the almost 50 years since the partition, there have been tensions both between the two parts and within Northern Ireland between those who want a unified Ireland—predominantly Irish Catholics—and those who prefer the status quo: predominantly Protestants whose ancestors emigrated from Scotland. There have been riots and armed attacks over the decades, but the last few years have been relatively peaceful.
Irish Catholics in the north face discrimination in housing and employment, their political power is diluted by carefully drawn electoral districts, and they are grossly underrepresented in the police, which are backed by Protestant paramilitary units. In the last few years, a civil rights campaign has developed in an effort to right these wrongs. The first of several civil rights marches took place last August. In October, a march took place in Londonderry (called by its older name of Derry by the Irish) despite being denied permission. Television cameras caught images of police attacking the peaceful marchers, sparking outrage around the world.
Spurred by those images, a group of students at Queen’s University in Belfast formed People’s Democracy. On New Year’s Day, they began a march from Belfast to Derry, in imitation of Dr. King’s Selma to Montgomery marches. Along the way, they were met by counter-protests and occasionally attacked. On the 4th, as they approached a bridge in the village of Burntollet a few miles outside Derry, they were attacked by 200-300 Ulster Loyalists (a group not unlike the Citizens’ Councils in the American South) wielding stones, iron bars, and sticks spiked with nails. Meanwhile, the police stood by and did nothing.
Counter-protesters armed with sticks and iron bars attack civil rights marchers while the police look on
That evening, the police stormed into the Bogside neighborhood, attacking Catholics in and outside their homes. Residents forced the police out and set up barricades. Police were denied any access to “Free Derry,” as it came to be known, for nearly a week. Eventually, the barricades came down and police patrols resumed, but tensions remain high.
At this point, a political solution seems unlikely, certainly not one from the Parliament of Northern Ireland. Proposals thus far have been not enough for the nationalists and too much for the loyalists.
A winning issue
At the 1966 Worldcon, IF won the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine. To celebrate, editor Fred Pohl trumpeted a Hugo winner’s issue. He didn’t quite succeed; Frank Herbert wasn’t able to contribute due to a health issue, and the whole thing was weighed down by an installment of a not very good Algis Budrys serial. IF won again the next year, but there was no comparable issue. Last year, the magazine took its third straight best prozine Hugo, and Fred decided to try again. This time, he got every winner to contribute, and I do mean every. Even the winners in the fan categories are here. Let’s see how it all stacks up.
The Steel General rides again. Art by Best Professional Artist Jack Gaughan
Down in the Black Gang, by Philip José Farmer
Mecca Mike is a member of the black gang, the engine crew for The Ship. (That’s an old term for the coal-engine stokers that now refers to the whole engine crew; the reason it applies to Mike might be a little different.) A shortage of hands means that he gets reassigned to Beverly Hills when a huge thrust potential is discovered there. If he can successfully develop that potential, there’s a promotion in it for him.
The thrust potential is in one of these apartments full of squabbling neighbors. Art by Gaughan
Farmer was co-winner in the Best Novella category for “Riders of the Purple Wage.” He’s dabbling in metaphysics again, which seems to be a favorite topic of his, but much better than he usually does. He even managed to bring the story to a successful ending, something he often has trouble with. Great ideas, incomplete execution, but not this time. This one’s right on the line between three and four stars, but I think I’ll be generous.
Four stars, but probably not a contender for the Galactic Stars.
Phoenix Land, by Harlan Ellison
Red is staggering through the desert on an expedition to find the risen ruins of an ancient civilization. He’s already buried his best friend and is now saddled with an ex-girlfriend and her husband, who financed the expedition. Unfortunately, he cut some corners. Whether or not they survive is an open question.
Harlan came away with two Hugos: Best Short Fiction for “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (which ran in the first Hugo winners issue I mentioned earlier) and Best Dramatic Presentation for “The City on the Edge of Forever” (which he’d probably rather not have). A lot of other winners and nominees also appeared in Dangerous Visions, which he edited. This particular story is full of that trademark Ellison anger, but the bite at the end doesn’t hit the way he wants it to.
A low three stars.
Authorgraphs: An Interview with Harlan Ellison
An interesting interview, but for a guy who can write tight, terse stories, he sure does like to run his mouth. Also, Harlan, my friend, you’re getting a little long in the tooth to be an enfant terrible.
Best Novella co-winner Anne McCaffrey (for “Weyr Search”) brings us another story about Helva, who is essentially a brain in a box operating a ship that has become her body. This time she’s investigating the disappearance of other brain ships while also dealing with the realization she made a bad choice in her new partner.
Helva has a chat with the bad guy. Art by Brock
Unfortunately, these stories have gotten progressively worse. They started from a very high mark, so they’re still readable, but this one barely makes the grade. Helva spends more time being unhappy about her choice of Brawn than she does worrying about disappearing ships. She succeeds mostly through coincidence and is unconscious for the key action.
The centaur-like Senechi have colonized Earth, trapped in a new ice age. Looking for a quick score, two of them are investigating native legends of a valley where it is always summer, full of gold and gems, and guarded by a goddess. To the man she has held captive for centuries, she is simply “the witch.” Who, if any, will manage to escape?
The witch turns the skeletons of those who invade her valley into golden ships. Art by Virgil Finlay
Redd is the only fiction author in this issue not to have won a Hugo. Powerful women in frozen landscapes seems to be a recurring theme with him, and all of his stories, on that theme or not, have a strange beauty to them. This one is no exception.
Four stars.
The Faithful Messenger, by George Scithers
George Scithers is the editor of Amra, which took home the Best Fanzine Hugo. Although he’s had stories printed in various fanzines over the years, this is his first professional sale, making him this month’s IF First author. As I understand it, Amra focuses on sword-and-sorcery tales; they carry a lot of critical articles on Conan and the like. Scithers’ story, on the other hand is more an old-fashioned SF tale of two human scouts encountering a robotic mailman on a distant planet. It’s well-told and nowhere near as hokey as it sounds.
Three stars.
Endfray of the Ofay, by Fritz Leiber
Someone is diverting supplies intended for poor Blacks to the white reservations around North America, always with the message “Courtesy of the Endfray of the Ofay!” When these antics start to interfere in the war “between North America and Africa to Make the World Safe for Black Supremacy,” the Empress in Memphis (the one in Tennessee) demands something be done.
Her Serene Darkness is displeased. Art by Gaughan
Fritz Leiber (Best Novelette for “Gonna Roll the Bones”) offers us another satire in the vein of A Specter is Haunting Texas. For me, this is much less successful. Most of the humor stems from the pun where Pig Latin and Black slang overlap, with very little elsewhere. I’m also not sure a white author should be poking into some of these corners. It’s often hard to tell if he’s mocking or perpetuating some stereotypes.
A low three stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
Lester del Rey has never won a Hugo. Of course, he wrote most of his best stuff before the award existed. In any case, this month he looks at the differences between robots in the real world and in science fiction. Those in SF are much more mechanical men than machines. If we ever get machines that actually think, how might that differ from the way we do?
Three stars.
Saboteur, by Ted White
Mark Redwing has developed a method for manipulating public opinion and government policy through things like blackmail, riot, and assassination. It’s not entirely clear what his ultimate goal is. Nor is it clear just who the saboteur of the title might be.
Mark Redwing and his trusted assistant Linda. Art by Best Fan Artist George Barr
Ted White won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer. Even filthy pros still write for the fanzines occasionally. This story is fully in pro mode, and it’s a good one. It should make you think and come back to you when you least expect it.
Four stars.
Creatures of Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
Zelazny (Best Novel for Lord of Light) wraps up the issue and his strange tale of Egyptian gods who are actually human beings in the far future. It’s impossible to say much about this convoluted story in the space available here, but it has that quintessential Zelazny-ness to it. It’s probably best read along with the other two bits, since characters have more than one name, and it’s sometimes hard to remember who is who. There are also clearly pieces missing from a larger whole. I look forward to seeing it all in one place.
Four stars, with the potential for five when it’s complete.
Osiris brings his greatest weapon to bear against Typhon. Art by Reiber
Summing up
There it is, a contribution from every single one of last year’s Hugo winners, fan and pro. One or two feel a bit dashed off or could have benefited from more time for another rewrite, but none are bad. On the whole, it’s a success. If every issue could be this good, IF would be guaranteed to walk off with a fourth Hugo this year in St. Louis.
Has it been long enough since the last Retief story for a new one to feel fresh?
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.
It’s official. As if it weren’t already clear from the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia over the summer, the Soviet Union has now openly declared that no communist nation in the Soviet sphere of influence will be allowed to go its own way or engage in any sort of reforms not approved by Moscow. Addressing the Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party on November 13th, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated, “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” That’s the justification for military intervention wherever the U.S.S.R. feels like, especially within the Warsaw Pact. We all know who will get to decide if something is a move towards capitalism.
Leonid Brezhnev after addressing the Soviet Central Committee earlier this year.
The backlash has already begun. After years of strained relations, Albania formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Of course, they have Yugoslavia as a buffer state, and the close proximity of Greece and Italy probably also offer a deterrent. As we go to press, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu has publicly condemned this new doctrine as a violation of the Warsaw Treaty. Only time will tell how this shakes out.
Forget the past
Forgetfulness seems to be the theme of this month’s IF. The issue is book-ended with stories featuring protagonists with amnesia, while two of the remaining three stories offer a man who doesn’t know his name and an entire year blotted from everybody’s memory.
Just some random art not associated with any of the stories. Art by Chaffee
A man awakens naked in a field with no idea who he is or how he got there. It proves to be a pleasant place about 50 miles in circumference, surrounded by a dome of gray mist. He dubs the place Limbo. Set in the dome, about 20 feet above ground are six ovals that he believes to be portals. Eventually, he also finds a house with a well-stocked kitchen, a library full of books (printed on Earth, all before 3646), and three bedrooms, two of which have women’s clothes in them.
In the basement, he finds three coffins with windows set in the lids. One is empty and is labeled Rex, giving him a name. The second, labeled Regina, contains a very pretty woman, while the third holds a beautiful woman apparently named Venus. Regina comes to, already knowing her name and also with the ability to know where anything (and anyone) is.
After a time, Rex passes through one of the gateways. He discovers a huge city called Mercury, which is laden with a sense of doom that depresses all its inhabitants. On his return, Rex discovers a freezing sub-basement with clues that the gateways are portals to other planets. Regina deliberately triggers Venus’s awakening, and the three get along fairly well, without Venus interfering in the relationship between the other two.
As this installment ends, Rex and Regina pass through another portal and find themselves on a hot, desert planet. While investigating an immigration office, Rex blunders and the police – or worse – are summoned. To be concluded.
Rex investigates the first portal. Art by Jack Gaughan
McIntosh has given us an interesting set-up and an intriguing mystery, but I don’t see how he’s going to extract Rex and Regina from their current predicament and explore four more worlds in just one installment. I’m eager to see the rest of this. But one thing really stood out to me. Take note Robert Silverberg and many other authors, in and out of science fiction: McIntosh makes very clear to the reader that Regina is quite petite without once referring to her breasts or hips, nor is there anything describing her as childlike. He does describe her once as a girl in comparison to Venus, but Rex clearly views her as an adult. Similarly, we know that Venus is voluptuous without any reference to her secondary sexual characteristics.
A high three stars.
The Year Dot, by William F. Temple
Bart Cabot grew up an orphan in a small town. His fascination with the X-men in the next valley repeatedly gets him into trouble with the Sheriff. He’s also curious why the year 1978 is missing from all the records in the library, but nobody else seems to see a discrepancy. Finally, he pushes the Sheriff too far, and only intervention by one of the X-men saves his life. Bart learns a lot about what’s going on and has a choice to make.
Doesn’t look like any of the X-Men I know. Beast maybe? Art by Brock
The story’s well told, if nothing special. There’s a strong implication that what’s going on is global, but the focus of the story makes it feel entirely local. The missing year thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. And calling the aliens in the next valley X-men is just confusing to anyone with a passing knowledge of comic books.
Three stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, Lester del Rey looks at changes in agriculture. Sure, we have things like corn that produces large, uniform ears, strains of plants that grow in soil that was once unsuitable, and fertilizers to replenish exhausted fields. But do those fertilizers replenish minerals that occur in vanishingly small amounts; do the new strains take up those sorts of minerals, if the soils they now grow in even have them? Maybe that will affect taste (ask a vintner about how the tiniest variation can affect their product) or maybe the lack of those “unimportant” minerals will have unsuspected health effects. Lots to think about.
Zelazny picks up where Creatures of Light left off. Wakim, the servant of Anubis, desperate to find out who he once was, and the Prince Who Was A Thousand do battle in time. Eventually they are transported to another planet, where Horus, son of Osiris, comes also seeking to kill the Prince, as does the Steel General, who supports the Prince merely because he is the underdog.
Anubis doesn’t want Wakim to learn who he really is. Art by P. Reiber
Now Zelazny has me hooked. The intermediate material following Wakim leaving the House of the Dead that weakened the previous story might have fit better at the beginning here, but this works without that, too. Although the ending is something of a cliff-hanger, there’s enough here to make a complete tale, and it’s a doozy. Poetic, mythic, Zelazny at his best.
A high four stars.
Operation High Time, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Simes are an offshoot of humanity who must take life energy from normal humans, or Gens (short for Generators; Sime from symbiote maybe?). The process was once fatal, but the two groups have found ways to live together, with many restrictions on the Simes. Protagonist Farris is a Sime who has found a way to ease some of those restrictions. His lobbying in Washington leads to his strongest opponent in the Senate being kidnapped. Following a hunch, Farris is kidnapped as well.
Farris is imprisoned with his political nemesis. Art by Brand
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been complaining about badly-done exposition by authors who should know better. This month’s new author shows how to do it right. The exposition in this story comes in small, natural chunks, giving just enough for the story to make sense while hinting at much more. The rest of the story is also done quite well. This is probably the best IF First debut since Larry Niven.
A very high three stars.
In the Shield, by Dean R. Koontz
The latest from Dean Koontz starts off with an amnesiac man in a spaceship filled with weapons that have no maker’s marks on them. In short order he winds up with two unexpected companions and then follows post-hypnotic orders to go to one of the main worlds in the galaxy.
That was the look on my face at about this point in the story. Art by Reese
The story starts off fine, but quickly brings in two astronomically unlikely coincidences, and then goes completely off the rails, descending into a sophomoric attack on religion. Koontz keeps missing the mark, but he does aim high. Maybe he should aim a little lower until he has the chops to match his ambition.
Right on the line between two and three stars. I’ll be generous and give it the lowest three stars possible.
Authorgraphs: An Interview with Roger Zelazny
Zelazny on himself, science fiction, writing and so on. According to the editor’s blurb this was transcribed directly from a recording of him answering questions (which we don’t get). Interesting and informative, if a bit shallow.
Three stars.
I wonder if he’s always this dapper. Art by Gaughan
Summing up
Yet another middle-of-the-road issue. I’m starting to come around on McIntosh, but he’s on probation until next month. Zelazny managed to pull me in, where I had been less interested, and we got a very impressive debut from an author I hope to see more of. But there are times when I feel like Galaxy gets all the choice stories, and IF is left with the dregs.
Around the turn of the century, the British in Egypt set out to regulate the flooding of the Nile by building a dam at Aswan, near the First Cataract, a little under 150 miles north of what is today the border between Egypt and Sudan. They limited the height of the dam in order to prevent the submergence of the island of Philae and the many monuments there, but still raised the height twice by the mid-1930s. The reservoir nearly overflowed the top in 1946, and it became increasingly clear that the dam’s storage capabilities were insufficient for modern Egypt.
King Farouk favored the construction of dams in Sudan and Ethiopia, where cooler temperatures would mean less loss of water due to evaporation, but when he was overthrown, the new government under Nasser preferred a larger dam at Aswan under Egyptian control. One of the reasons for the nationalization of the Suez Canal was that shipping fees would pay for the new dam. The change in plans alarmed archaeologists, who pointed out that the entirety of the ancient province of Nubia would be flooded, inundating numerous ancient monuments and sites. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan appealed to UNESCO for help, and thus was born the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia.
The most impressive of the monuments to be rescued are the temples of Abu Simbel, built by Ramses II in the mid-13th century B.C. to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh. Best known is the Great Temple, dedicated to Amun, Ra-Horakty, Ptah and the deified Ramses himself. The entrance is flanked by four statues of the pharaoh, each over 65 feet tall. Nearby is a temple dedicated to Hathor and Ramses’ favorite wife Nefertari.
Ramses gets a face lift.
But how do you rescue something like that? A freestanding temple can be taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt elsewhere. This was done with the temple of Kalabsha, in work funded and supervised by West Germany. The Ramesseum was carved into sandstone cliffs. One suggestion was to build a clear freshwater dam around the temples and create underwater viewing chambers. Instead, an international team of archaeologists, engineers, and heavy construction experts have spent the last four years carefully carving the entire site into enormous blocks with an average weight of 20 tons and moving the whole thing to a new site some 650 feet back from the Nile and over 200 feet higher. The work is finished, and on September 22nd the reconstructed Ramesseum was opened to the public. Let’s hope that the many other rescue projects are just as successful.
Optimists and pessimists
This has been a rough year all around the world, and so it’s natural to turn to our entertainment to make us feel better. Unfortunately, the trend in science fiction seems to be toward unhappy endings, and this month’s IF seems to lean more to the pessimistic side. It also takes us to Ancient Egypt in the far future.
Regular readers of the big American SF magazines will be familiar with Mack Reynolds’ People’s Capitalism, in which every citizen is granted Inalienable Basic shares that pay dividends that are enough to live off, while the more ambitious can earn Variable Basic shares and move up in the world. Meanwhile, the Universal Credit Card serves all economic and identification functions. All of that is made possible by a massive computerized data bank. What if a hostile power could tap into that data bank, or worse yet change or erase the data?
Action in the subway of abandoned Manhattan. Art by Gaughan
This first half of Reynolds’ new novel is delivered mostly in the form of lectures telling the protagonist things he already knows. Reynolds can usually make this sort of thing interesting, but normally he doesn’t rely on pages of dialogue for his exposition. Much of it seems to be based on Vance Packard’s The Naked Society from a few years ago, which he explicitly mentions. This is interspersed with a couple of action scenes, one of which is overly detailed to the point of being interesting only to practitioners of karate, and the other is largely taken from the recent Among the Bad Baboons. All in all, not Reynolds’ best work, but I don’t see how the second half can be anything but story, so the whole thing should be better.
A low three stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, del Rey delves into the science of ecology, which studies the interrelationships of living things and their environment. It’s the sort of thing that will be crucial in establishing a colony on another planet, but it’s rarely dealt with in science fiction, except as an occasional aside. It’s also sadly neglected in the real world, though that’s beginning to change. There’s a lot here for SF writers to explore.
Four stars.
Creatures of Light, by Roger Zelazny
Sometime in the distant future, all of humanity lies between the poles of the House of Life, ruled over by Osiris, and the House of Death, ruled over by Anubis. Now, an old threat is returning from outside, and various factions must take steps to stop it.
Anubis and Osiris determine the fates of humanity. Art by P. Reiber
The obvious comparison here is to Zelazny’s Lord of Light, though the “gods” here make the spacemen pretending to be the Hindu gods look like apemen banging rocks together. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote in a letter to Science earlier this year, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s all very Zelazny in terms of style and construction. However, there’s no actual story here; it’s just the author introducing various characters and establishing the conflict.
It says on the cover that this is an excerpt from an upcoming novel. That’s enough to save its rating, but the Lord of Light excerpts that ran in F&SF were much more successful as stand-alone pieces. I’m probably interested in seeing the whole thing, but something with a bit more of a traditional structure (if possible) would have been better.
Everyone is familiar with those times when you set out to get a lot done, and suddenly it’s the end of the day and you’ve accomplished next to nothing. That happens to writer George Belk every day until his agent puts him in touch with someone who can help.
I suspect Schmitz was inspired by a couple of days like those George describes. It’s a cute story, but it doesn’t play to any of the author’s strengths, especially his ability to create characters.
Three stars.
Now That Man Is Gone, by James Blish
The Waw has been nine years old for over 2,000 years. Humanity has been extinct for 1,994 years. The aliens who care for him call him the Waw, because he is the Next-to-Last, but there is no sign of the Ya. Until now.
Art uncredited
This is the most optimistic story in the issue, which seems odd coming from Blish, though it is tinged with melancholy as well. It’s also the inverse of a concept that forms the core of many Ray Bradbury stories. Nice enough, but nothing special.
Three stars.
Wizard Ship, by F. Haines Price
Primitive tribesman Hin bravely boards a ship of the gods which has descended from the sky. He soon figures out that the gods are mere mortals who plan to sell him into slavery. The three unscrupulous spacers aboard also don’t realize that primitive isn’t the same as stupid.
Price is this month’s new author, and it shows in his writing. The story is too long, and the darkly ironic ending isn’t worth the trip.
A low two stars.
Bookmobile, by Charles L. Harness
A report from an alien librarian describes how humanity lost the ability to read thanks to everything moving to audio.
What an incredibly stupid story; nothing about it makes any sense. It ignores the fate of the deaf when everything is spoken and nothing is written, which is odd considering a key point is that the librarian can’t hear. I’m also not sure how you look things up when it’s all audio. Harness is an attorney, you’d think he would find that important.
One star, because it makes me angry every time I think about it.
The Perfect Secretary, by Mike Kirsch
On the day Albert Willis opens his new business, a strange man offers him a free trial of an automatic secretary. It can write articles and letters, retrieve reference materials from a host of locations, and pretty much do his job for him. It’s rather more than he or its makers suspect.
Willis is presented with his new secretary. Art by Wallace Wood
An awful story about awful people being awful. And it comes with another dark ending. Kirsch seems to be another new author, though maybe he’s sold things in other genres. The writing is decent enough, but all the characters are horrible.
Two stars.
Summing up
That’s another month of IF in the bag. There sure are a lot of familiar authors here not putting their best foot forward. And Zelazny’s piece really deserves a grade of Incomplete. There’s not even enough there to tell us what the rest is going to be like. Add in all the attempts at being dark and gritty, and the whole thing’s rather unsatisfying. At least the serials are back.
Science fiction from A(simov) to Z(elazny). That Zelazny piece might be another part of the new novel.
One of the German Empire’s colonies before the First World War was German South West Africa, nestled between what are today South Africa, Angola, and Botswana. After the war, South Africa was granted a mandate over the colony by the League of Nations, similar to Britain’s control over Palestine or France’s over Lebanon and Syria. The League was dissolved in 1946 and replaced by the United Nations. In general, mandates were intended to be replaced by United Nations Trusteeship, and the General Assembly recommended that South West Africa be one of those, however South Africa refused. In 1949, South Africa declared that it was no longer subject to U.N. oversight where South West Africa was concerned, as they began to extend their apartheid system into the former colony. The following year, the International Court ruled that the U.N. should exercise supervision in the administration of the territory in place of the League, but South Africa rejected the Court’s opinion and has refused any involvement by the U.N.
A political cartoon from after the First World War.
Independence movements have swept through Africa over the last decade, and as I noted in January of last year, South West Africa is not immune. The predominant organization is the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and they have been lobbying the U.N. for several years. In 1966, the General Assembly terminated the mandate, giving the U.N. direct supervision of the territory. Last year, they established the United Nations Council for South West Africa to administer the territory until independence. South Africa remains recalcitrant. And so, on June 12th, the Assembly approved Resolution 2372, which, in accordance with the wishes of the people as represented by SWAPO, changed the name to Namibia. Well, that, some finger-wagging at South Africa and the nations supporting the illegal occupation of Namibia, and a request that the Security Council do something to get South Africa out. Don’t hold your breath.
Sam Nujoma (r.), President of SWAPO, shakes hands with Mostafa Rateb Abdel-Wahab, President of the Council for Namibia
Noir, nonsense, and the blatantly obvious
The stories in this month’s IF range from the patently obvious to those that leave the reader wondering why the author bothered. There are a couple of mildly entertaining stops along the way, and the high point may surprise you (even if it is more molehill than mountain).
Supposedly for Rogue Star, which doesn’t have a starship crash. Or this many characters. Art by Chaffee
Whaddya Read?, by H.L. Gold
The founding editor of both IF and Galaxy offers a defense of modern science fiction. Maybe the new stuff isn’t as different as most people seem to think. It’s just better written.
Three stars.
Getting Through University, by Piers Anthony
A few stories ago, dentist Dr. Dillingham was kidnapped by aliens and has since bumbled around the galaxy, from one emergency patient to the next. Now, he’s been given the opportunity to attend dental school and gain proper accreditation. All he needs to do is pass the entrance exam.
The doctor deals with a difficult case instead of prepping for his exam. Art by Vaughn Bodé
Surprisingly, given the previous stories and the author’s general output, I rather liked this one. A lot of what happens is ridiculously obvious, but it doesn’t lead to quite where you might suspect. This is almost the quality that Cele Lalli used to get out of Anthony. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.
A somewhat above average three stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, del Rey looks at Project Orion, the idea of using nuclear bombs to propel a starship. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, but he’s not shy about discussing some of the problems connected with a successful launch of the project (including the hundred billion dollar price tag). This is a clear-headed look at an interesting idea full of possibilities for science fiction authors.
Three stars.
In Another Land, by Mary Urhausen
Seeking to escape a regimented society and a failed love affair, the narrator attempts suicide only to find himself in a utopia. That utopia feels like the sort often imagined 50 or 60 years ago, but this month’s first time author does what she can with it. The shift from first person perspective to third person is slightly jarring, but gives the story what little bite it has. New author Urhausen shows definite skill. Here’s hoping she can hone it into something a little meatier.
Commodore John Grimes just wants to go home, but the strangeness at the Rim of the galaxy keeps throwing adventures in his way. This time, it’s a habitable planet with no sun, where everything is out of a bad fairy tale, and everyone speaks in rhymed couplets.
It comes as no surprise that Dan Adkins can’t draw a fire-breathing dragon. Art by Adkins
I generally enjoy the Grimes stories, but this is just silly – and that in a series that has had intelligent rats and an appearance by the Olympian gods. Of course, Chandler knows it’s silly and does get some humor out of the Commodore’s grumpiness about the situation. (He really should have ended a sentence with the word “orange,” though. Let’s see them rhyme that.) Overall, a disappointment; the more so because Chandler teased us with a story from the very beginning of Grimes’s career, but has since stuck with the older man near the end of his service. Let’s see some more of the younger man, whether wet behind the ears or just coming into his prime.
A low three stars.
Merlin Planet, by E.G. Von Wald
Sticking with fantasy pretending it’s science fiction, we have the story of the new man on a Terran trading team on a world where the locals can do magic (thanks to some psychic handwaving; what hath Campbell wrought?). Fortunately, the wizards can be stopped for a time by doing complicated math in your head. Unfortunately, instead of the requested mathematician, headquarters has sent a business law expert.
That’s not how you use a magic staff. Art by Wehrle
If you can get past the magic, the story isn’t terrible. However, it is twice as long as it needs to be. I saw the solution as soon as the new guy revealed he couldn’t do high order math. The rest was just an interminable wait until he figured it out. Right on the line between two and three stars, but the length drags it down for me.
Zelazny takes us into the mind of a man who either betrayed Earth to alien invaders or carried out a clever stratagem to defeat them. The problem is that he never engages with his theme. The ambiguity of the ending could be read a couple of ways. Pretty, but shallow.
A low three stars.
What the Old Aliens Left, by D.M. Melton
Here’s our first tale with strong noir elements: an honest cop, a corrupt system, a dangerous dame. The lure of great wealth? The technology left behind by a dead alien civilization.
Most of the action takes place in a bar, too. Art by Brand
Melton continues to improve. He’s never going to get to the point where I’m excited to see his name on the cover, but at least it’s a sign of a probably-entertaining read. He might be getting a handle on writing women, but he’s working from a strong template here, one that’s not necessarily great, but at least gives them their own motives. On the whole, the story probably could have been tightened up here and there. Less going back and forth from the bar, for instance. Still an entertaining read.
Three stars.
West Is West, by Larry Tritten
The inhabitants of the planet West wallow in the cliches of old-school westerns and have names like Randolph Scott Cartwheel, even if many of them are duck-billed saurians. Sheriff Matt Cooper has to bring in Cartwheel for the unprovoked killing of another saurian. Then things go a bit noir, with a femme fatale and the Maltese Longhorn Steer.
A shootout is about the only thing missing from this story. Art by Wehrle
Tritten appears to be another newcomer, though he’s not acknowledged as an IF First. The parody here is laid on with a dumptruck and feels dated. The cliches are familiar, but the western genre has largely moved on from them. There’s no room for Clint Eastwood’s man with no name (though Rowdy Yates would likely feel at home). Ron Goulart could have pulled this off.
A low three stars.
Rogue Star (Part 3 of 3), by Fredrik Pohl and Jack Williamson
This thing doesn’t deserve a recap. I’ll merely note that the climax features actual stars battling each other. The flaws are many, but I’ll limit myself to just two. For starters, “protagonist” Andy Quam should have just stayed home. Everything would have turned out exactly the same, and he wouldn’t have had to deal with all the stress. There are also a number of unresolved subplots, most notably the strange behavior of Earth’s sun. We’re told why it’s happening, but nothing is done about it.
Two stars for this installment and barely two stars for the novel as a whole.
Edmond Hamilton just smashed planets together. What a piker. Art by Gaughan
Summing up
If you told me that, in an issue with stories by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jack Williamson, the one I would like best was by Piers Anthony, I’d have laughed at you. Look, it’s not a great story; it’s just the one that annoyed me the least. Maybe the summer heat is making me cranky.
Change appears to be coming to Czechoslovakia. Faced with growing dissatisfaction last year, First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party Antonín Novatný invited Leonid Brezhnev to visit Prague last December in the hope of shoring up his position. Instead, Brezhnev was shocked by Novatný’s unpopularity and pushed him to resign as Party Secretary (he remained President).
Alexander Dubček was elected as the new First Secretary on January 5th and soon began on a course of reforms. On February 22nd, in the presence of Brezhnev, Dubček announced that steps would be taken to bring about “the widest possible democratization of the entire socio-political system.” A few days later, the Party adopted the first draft of an action program which allows greater freedom of speech (much of the resistance to Novatný came from the Writer’s Union) and more autonomy for Slovakia (the Czech Novatný had tried to curb Slovakian culture and language; Dubček is Slovakian). February ended with the release of the first uncensored magazine by the Writer’s Union.
Alexander Dubček addresses the nation after taking office.
On March 4th, the Party Presidium voted to dismantle press censorship, and by the end of the week the papers were calling for Novatný to step down as President. On the 14th, the Party voted to politically rehabilitate party members who had been purged in the 1950s. By the 22nd, the pressure was too much for Novatný and he reluctantly resigned as President. He will be replaced by Ludvík Svoboda, who had been purged, but rehabilitated at the request of Khrushchev.
The reaction in the East Bloc has been as might be expected. A Warsaw Pact meeting was hastily called for the 23rd in Dresden. The Poles, in particular, seemed unhappy with Dubček’s reforms. They may be nervous due to the student protests in Warsaw and elsewhere in the country. The word “counterrevolution” was mentioned and the specter of Hungary was raised. Dubček seems to have calmed fears for now.
Can Dubček keep the Soviets at arm’s length and bring about his reforms? Tito managed it, but Yugoslavia isn’t in the Warsaw Pact and doesn’t have a border with the Soviet Union. Only time will tell.
Seeking answers
The stories in this month’s IF grapple with deep questions. Some are big, such as expedience versus morality or the meaning of bravery and sacrifice; others are more personal. And Poul Anderson calls everything we think about the future into question.
Supposedly for Dismal Light, which doesn’t even have two male characters. Generic art by Pederson
Limiting Factor, by Poul Anderson
In a guest editorial, Anderson starts off looking at the limits of extrapolation as a tool for science fiction and winds up warning us about the limits of growth. Not population growth, as you might expect, but rather technological growth. A conservative estimate says that industry in North America alone will raise the average temperature of the Earth by 3°C. He warns, “You needn’t extrapolate far before you see the polar icecaps melting and the continental shores flooded. A little farther, and the entire planet swelters… A little farther, and life is threatened.”
Three stars.
Where the Subbs Go, by C. C. MacApp
When humanity discovered a faster-than-light drive, the Eje appeared with the Beam, allowing even faster travel across the galaxy, and established an outpost on Pluto. They also offer medical care for those injured in space. Those injured seriously enough are given substitute bodies, all identical with tremendous healing ability. These people are known as Subbs and are generally looked down on. Ralse Bukanan is one of the richest men in the galaxy; unknown to all but his closest business partners, he is also a Subb.
When Ralse’s son is kidnapped, he has to push his company to the brink of collapse and take some huge risks to rescue the young man. Add in some stolen Eje weapons, and the stakes get even higher.
Ralse questions one of the last people to see his son. Art by Jeff Jones
This is pretty good. MacApp can write good adventure when puts his mind to it, and he handles the more philosophical parts with equal skill. What we learn about the motives of the Eje turns everything upside-down and forces Ralse to change a lot of his priorities. The story is a little long, though. It’s right on the line between three and four stars, but probably good enough to go high.
A low four stars.
New Currents in Fandom, by Lin Carter
Our Man in Fandom takes a look at some new trends among fans. He starts off with the giving of fan awards at the latest Worldcon. He does try slightly to defend calling the awards Pongs, but I do share his hope that fan awards will continue to be given. After a quick look at some adjacent fandoms—which he’s covered before—Carter tells about an effort to print a portfolio of the late Hannes Bok’s work. Finally, he mentions a group of medieval reenactors known as The Society for Contemporary Anachronisms (sic; it’s Creative Anachronism). They’ll be holding a tournament at the Worldcon in Oakland on the afternoon of Labor Day.
At the behest of Earth, Francis Sandow turned a bare hunk of rock orbiting Betelgeuse into the barely livable world Dismal, which Earth turned into a prison. The unnamed narrator stuck around after his sentence was up to keep working on a project to figure out the secret of a strain of extremely fast-growing rice. When an evacuation is announced because Betelgeuse is about to go nova, he drags his feet, saying he hopes to answer the question plaguing him. It may be more personal than rice.
One of the dangers faced by the narrator. Art by Brock
Zelazny gives us another of his smart-mouthed narrators. It’s starting to become a key feature of his work that he ought to use a little less frequently. The story is told with all the usual skill we expect from this author, but it fell a little short for me. That may be because the deeply personal question the narrator is struggling with didn’t resonate with me.
A very high three stars, but others may well give it a fourth.
Past Touch-the-Sky Mountain, by Barry Alan Weissman
Sommerfield, John is a merchant in the Chinese empire. On his way from his home base on the west coast of the New World (discovered by Marco Polo) to the British territory of Standish, his trip is interrupted by a police officer who has never heard of such nonsense.
Weissman is this month’s first-time author. Although forgettable, the story is well-written and has enough of a twist at the end to make it enjoyable.
Three stars.
Cenotaph, by D. M. Melton
As the shuttle bringing passengers down to Mora II swings past the Cenotaph Satellite, Steve Mendes reflects on the events that took the lives of the three people memorialized there, saving the lives of a full ship of colonists. Deservedly or not, he carries a lot of guilt.
Passing the Cenotaph when possible is tradition. Art by Eddie Jones
Melton’s output thus far has been a consistent low three stars. He’s taken a big step forward here. The events that took the lives of some of the forward team may not be terribly believable, but the characterization and internal monologue of the narrator are very well done.
A very low four stars.
The Creatures of Man, by Verge Foray
Hard-shelled, metal-spitting creatures have come to the world. After discussing things with a spider, a butterfly decides it is time to summon Man.
The butterfly and spider discuss the new creatures. Art by Wehrle
There’s a dreamlike quality to the narrative that, I suppose, reflects the different thought processes of the insect characters. However, the story was painfully obvious, too long, and the butterfly’s knowing of the “now-moment” didn’t really make any sense to me.
Richard Muller was one of Earth’s top diplomats when he was sent to make contact with the first aliens humanity had discovered. On his return, he discovered that no one could stand to be around him for more than a few minutes, because the emotions of his deep subconscious radiate from him. In disgust, he retreated to the desolate planet Lemnos and the heart of a million-year-old city surrounded by deadly traps. Now his services are needed again. Charles Boardman, the man who sent Muller on the mission that gave him his affliction, and Ned Rawlins, the son of Muller’s late best friend, have come to recruit him.
Ned gradually gains Muller’s trust, feeding him the lies carefully constructed by Boardman. Eventually, he is overcome with guilt at the deception and reveals all to Muller. This was definitely not in Boardman’s plans. Is it possible to convince Muller to undertake this vital mission? If he goes, will he be healed? Can he rejoin humanity?
Ned may have gone too far to gain Muller’s trust. Art by Gaughan
Silverberg wraps up his retelling of Philoctetes strongly, though not as strongly as I had hoped. The final chapter, which focuses on Ned, is very, very good; it’s just that getting there wasn’t entirely satisfying. The whole thing is still excellent, and I’ll be putting it on my shelves when the novel comes out.
A high four stars for this segment and a very high four for the novel as a whole.
Summing up
At the beginning of the year, editor Fred Pohl promised a number of new features would be coming. So far, all we’ve seen is the introduction of the SF Calendar. Now for the first time since the October 1965 issue brought us the end of Skylark DuQuesne and the beginning of Retief’s War, the end of one serial hasn’t shared the issue with the start of a new. I’m not sure I’d call that a positive innovation, but I suppose Galaxy going monthly means Fred now has two vehicles for serials.
In any case, this is another strong issue for IF. Fred’s probably worked through the dross he’d already bought before the demise of Worlds of Tomorrow and now doesn’t need to buy filler. I hope having more pages to fill every month with 50% more Galaxy doesn’t change that.
Oh, dear. Are we going back to The Reefs of Space? Well, new Delany and Chandler is good.
![[November 12, 1969] Leadership initiatives (December 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691110galaxycover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 22, 1969] Unsmoothed curves (October 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690922fsfcover.jpg?resize=658%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 16, 1969] September 1969 Galactoscope](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690916covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Cover art by Barry Martin.[/caption]
![[February 2, 1969] Winners and Losers (March 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IF-1969-03-Cover.jpg?resize=574%2C372&ssl=1)
Counter-protesters armed with sticks and iron bars attack civil rights marchers while the police look on
The Steel General rides again. Art by Best Professional Artist Jack Gaughan
The thrust potential is in one of these apartments full of squabbling neighbors. Art by Gaughan
Art by Gaughan
Helva has a chat with the bad guy. Art by Brock
The witch turns the skeletons of those who invade her valley into golden ships. Art by Virgil Finlay
Her Serene Darkness is displeased. Art by Gaughan
Mark Redwing and his trusted assistant Linda. Art by Best Fan Artist George Barr
Osiris brings his greatest weapon to bear against Typhon. Art by Reiber
Has it been long enough since the last Retief story for a new one to feel fresh?![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[December 2, 1968] Forget It (January 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1969-01-IF-cover.jpg?resize=560%2C372&ssl=1)
Leonid Brezhnev after addressing the Soviet Central Committee earlier this year.
Just some random art not associated with any of the stories. Art by Chaffee
Rex investigates the first portal. Art by Jack Gaughan
Doesn’t look like any of the X-Men I know. Beast maybe? Art by Brock
Anubis doesn’t want Wakim to learn who he really is. Art by P. Reiber
Farris is imprisoned with his political nemesis. Art by Brand
That was the look on my face at about this point in the story. Art by Reese
I wonder if he’s always this dapper. Art by Gaughan
Can’t say anything here really excites me.![[October 2, 1968] Future History Lessons (November 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/IF-1968-11-Cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Ramses gets a face lift.
The Waw is bored. Art by Vaughn Bodé
Action in the subway of abandoned Manhattan. Art by Gaughan
Anubis and Osiris determine the fates of humanity. Art by P. Reiber
Art uncredited
Willis is presented with his new secretary. Art by Wallace Wood
Science fiction from A(simov) to Z(elazny). That Zelazny piece might be another part of the new novel.![[July 2, 1968] What’s the Point? (August 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/IF-1968-08-Cover.jpg?resize=505%2C372&ssl=1)
A political cartoon from after the First World War.
Sam Nujoma (r.), President of SWAPO, shakes hands with Mostafa Rateb Abdel-Wahab, President of the Council for Namibia
Supposedly for Rogue Star, which doesn’t have a starship crash. Or this many characters. Art by Chaffee
The doctor deals with a difficult case instead of prepping for his exam. Art by Vaughn Bodé
It comes as no surprise that Dan Adkins can’t draw a fire-breathing dragon. Art by Adkins
That’s not how you use a magic staff. Art by Wehrle
Most of the action takes place in a bar, too. Art by Brand
A shootout is about the only thing missing from this story. Art by Wehrle
Edmond Hamilton just smashed planets together. What a piker. Art by Gaughan
That’s a promising lineup.![[April 2, 1968] Asking the big questions (May 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/IF-1968-05-Cover.jpg?resize=569%2C372&ssl=1)
Alexander Dubček addresses the nation after taking office.
Supposedly for Dismal Light, which doesn’t even have two male characters. Generic art by Pederson
Ralse questions one of the last people to see his son. Art by Jeff Jones
One of the dangers faced by the narrator. Art by Brock
Passing the Cenotaph when possible is tradition. Art by Eddie Jones
The butterfly and spider discuss the new creatures. Art by Wehrle
Ned may have gone too far to gain Muller’s trust. Art by Gaughan
Oh, dear. Are we going back to The Reefs of Space? Well, new Delany and Chandler is good.