Tag Archives: anne mccaffrey

[June 10, 1970] I will fear I Will Fear No Evil (July 1970 Galaxy)

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Tired of it all

Antiwar protesting isn't just for civilians anymore.

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

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

Copy of a Concerned Officers Movement newsletter dated April, 1970.

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

We'll see how long this remains the case.

Really tired of it all

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

Cover of July 1970's Galaxy Science Fiction, featuring a red cover depicting the bald head of a man held by electrodes floating in the background while a short haired woman stands in front. The cover depicts the titles,
'Robert A. Heinlein's
Latest and Greatest Novel
I WILL FEAR NO EVIL

THE ALL-AT ONCE-MAN
R.A. Lafferty

THE THROWBACKS
Robert Silverberg
cover by Jack Gaughan

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

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

But there's a twist…

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

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

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

Black and white illustration of a dark-haired woman clinging to a tall fair-haired man in a confined room.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

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

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

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

One star.

The Throwbacks, by Robert Silverberg

                                                Black and white illustration depicting a city of densely packed squares and rectangles. The caption reads,
'THE THROWBACKS
ROBERT SILVERBERG'
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

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

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

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

Three stars.

Containers for the Condition of Man, by Laura Virta

Image depicting a large, diamond-shaped, multi-faceted skyscraper.

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

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

Three stars. 

Goodbye Amanda Jean, by Wilma Shore

Simple black and white illustration depicting a small grill with the caption 
'GOODBYE AMANDA JEAN

WILMA SHORE
If you've ever had a hard time saying goodby
this may be your story...'
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

One star.

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

Illustration depicting a mans face split between child on the left, adult in the middle and elder on the right. The caption reads
'THE ALL-AT-ONCE MAN
R.A. LAFFERTY
'I've decided not to die in the natural order of things,' John Penandrew said, 'The idea appeals to me strongly...'
and goes on
'...let him know that the word translated 'everlasting'by our writers is what the Greeks term aionion, which is derived from aion, the Greek for Ssaeculum, an age. But the Latind have not ventured to translate this by secular, lest they should change the meaning into something widely different. For many things are called secularwhich so happen in this world as to pass away even in a short time; but what is termed aionion either has no end, or lasts to the very end of this world.
THE CITY OF GOD- SAINT AUGUSTINE'
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

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

Four stars.

The Hookup, by Dannie Plachta

Sketchy illustration of an astronaut with helmet labeled 'A connection' looking over to another astronaut reaching out to an object in the background.
the caption reads 
THE HOOKUP
DANNIE PLATCHA
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

One star.

Ask a Silly Question, by Andrew J. Offutt

An illustration of a starfield divided into panels while a scribbled ship trails dots in the foreground. The title reads,
ASk A SILLY QUESTION
ANDREW J OFFUT
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

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

One star.

Sittik, by Anne McCaffrey

Illustration of a wide-eyed boy, whose shadows are made fromt he overlapping letters fromt he word 'SITTICK'. The caption reads,
'Todays young have a word for everything. Do you?
SITTICK
ANNE MCCAFFREY'
illustration by Jack Gaughan

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

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

One star.

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

 Title of Galaxy Book Shelf, Algis Budrys, depicted as a stamp with small star and planet etching.

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

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

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

Time to sleep

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

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

Galaxy Science Fiction mail-in subscription form.
You're gonna have to do better than that if you want more of my lucre, Ejler!



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


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[April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins)

A young white man with short hair wearing a navy P-coat, blue polo collar, and green t-shirt.
by Brian Collins

There must be a growing demand for original anthologies of science fiction, because they keep coming—both standalone titles and series. Infinity One is, going by its title, the first in yet another series of these, although notably there is one reprint between its covers (really two reprints, as you'll see), a story that many readers will already be familiar with. Robert Hoskins is an occasional author-turned-agent-turned-editor, whose high position at Lancer Books has apparently resulted in Infinity One. Will there be future installments? Does it really matter? We shall see.

The tagline for Infinity One is “a magazine of speculative fiction in book form,” which strikes me as a sequence of words only fit to come from the mouth of a clinically insane person. This is a paperback anthology and nothing more nor less. I mentioned in my review of Nova 1 last month that Harry Harrison claimed that he simply wanted to put together an anthology of “good” SF, although I’m not sure if Hoskins had even such a basic goal in mind.

Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins

Cover of Infinity One. Against a black background, an bubble-helmeted astronaut in silver dances in front of a stylized circuit board, flowing into the shape of a rocket above, and a red planet below. Beside this illustration, in an all-lowercase font, reads the following legend: 'introduction by isaac asimov/a short novel by poul anderson/infinity one/new writings in/speculative/fiction/edited by/robert hoskins/plus/anne mccaffery/robert silverberg/gordon r. dickson/r.a. lafferty/kris neville/k.m. o'donnell/ron goulart/katherine maclean/miriam allen deford/featuring/arthur c. clarke'. Clarke's name, and the title, are in yellow. The other names are in pink, red, and turquoise.
Cover art by Jim Steranko.

Continue reading [April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins)

[January 12, 1970] A Glimpse into the Future: Drug of Choice by John Lange and Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson


by Cora Buhlert

A New Decade and a New Hope

It's January 1970, the start of a new decade, and at least in West Germany, it also feels like the start of a more hopeful time.

The new chancellor Willy Brandt and his social-democratic/liberal coalition government have been in power for not quite two months yet and the wind of change is already in the air, as the Brandt government has initiated talks with the governments of East Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries to thaw the ice of the Cold War a little.

A store selling fireworks in West Germany in 1969
Fireworks for sale
Fireworks over Delmenhorst on New Year's Eve 1969
The town of Delmenhorst welcomes the new year and the new decade with fireworks.
People dancing at a New Year's Eve ball in 1969
Some people welcomed the new year and the new decade with glamorous balls.
People are sitting around a table in a living room in West Germany in 1969, celebrating New Year's Eve.
Meanwhile, many private New Year's Eve celebrations in West Germany looked a lot like this: a family or a group of friends gathered in a living room decorated with paper streamers to celebrate… while at least one person fervently wishes they were somewhere, anywhere else.

And so the annual New Year's Eve celebrations felt a little cheerier, the fireworks were a little brighter and everybody seemed more optimistic, even though much of West Germany is currently covered in a thick layer of snow.

Adults and children are frolicking in the snow on wooden sleds
Old and young are frolicking in the snow on sledding hills around West Germany.
A child stands on skis, while another pulls a sled.
You're never too young to learn to ski.

But before New Year comes Christmas and this year, Santa left two new books under my tree, both of which offer a glimpse into a future that is not quite as optimistic as West Germany feels at the moment.

A Paranoid Nightmare: Drug of Choice by John Lange

Drug of Choice by John Lange

One of the brightest rising stars of the thriller genre is John Lange. He burst onto the scene in 1966 with the heist novel Odds On and has been delivering entertaining thrillers, usually set in exotic locations and often laced with science fiction elements, at a steady clip since then. I reviewed two of them – Easy Go and Zero Cool – for the Journey.

Eventually, we learned that John Lange was the pen name of a young Harvard medical student named Michael Crichton, who released a novel under his own name last year. The Andromeda Strain, reviewed here by my colleague Joe Reid, was unambiguously science fiction and also drew on Crichton's medical knowledge, since it is about a deadly microbe from outer space.

A Case of Need by Jeffrey Hudson

What is more, Lange/Crichton also wrote a medical thriller called A Case of Need under yet another pen name, Jeffrey Hudson. The novel deals with a controversial issue, namely illegal abortion and the fact that it often leads to the preventable deaths of young women, which is probably why Crichton chose a different pen name to distance it from his John Lange thrillers and the novels under his own name. In spite of the controversial subject matter, A Case of Need won a highly deserved Edgar Award last year.

But whatever name he writes under, John Lange a.k.a. Michael Crichton a.k.a. Jeffrey Hudson is always worth reading. And so I was excited to read his latest novel, Drug of Choice.

Drug of Choice once more draws on Lange/Crichton's medical experience, for protagonist Roger Clark is a medical resident at Los Angeles Memorial Hospital. One day, a Hell's Angel is brought in, comatose after a motorbike accident. It seems like just another day in the emergency room, until Clark notices that the biker has no visible injuries…. and that his urine is bright blue. Clark assumes that some unknown drug is to blame for the young man's condition. However, the next day the biker awakes from his coma as if nothing had happened… and the colour of his urine is back to normal.

The case is certainly strange, but Clark quickly moves on. But then it happens again. Up and coming actress Sharon Wilder is brought to the hospital, comatose for unknown reasons. And her urine is blue. This triggers Clark's inner Sherlock Holmes and he begins to investigate. Clark learns that both Sharon and the biker were patients of the same psychiatrist. Contrary to medical ethics, Clark also gets involved with Sharon herself and winds up accompanying her on holiday to San Cristobal, a new island resort in the Caribbean, which is billed as the perfect vacation spot.

San Cristobal indeed seems to be paradise and Clark enjoys wonderful days with Sharon Wilder. But absolutely nothing is as it seems at San Cristobal, for instead of a luxury resort, the hotel is just a few dingy rooms where the guests are kept in a state of comatose bliss by a mysterious drug, which also has the side effect of turning urine blue. Behind everything is the mysterious Advance Corporation… who want to recruit Roger Clark to work for them and they won't take "no" for an answer.

Similar to A Case of Need, Drug of Choice starts out as a medical thriller, dealing with a hot social issue, in this case drug abuse. However, once Clark gets to San Cristobal and sees the disturbing reality behind the glamorous façade, the novel takes a turn into Philip K. Dick territory – a world of paranoia, drugs and shadowy powers that one man cannot beat… or can he? Indeed, if you'd given me the novel in a plain brown paper wrapper and without an author name, I would have assumed that this was Philip K. Dick's latest novel. Except that from a purely stylistic point-of-view, Lange/Crichton is a better writer than Dick.

From the entertaining adventure thrillers of a few years ago via his Edgar winning A Case of Need to last year's The Andromeda Strain and now Drug of Choice, John Lange/Michael Crichton keeps getting better and better and is quickly becoming one of the most exciting new voices in both the thriller and science fiction genre.

Supposedly, Michael Crichton earned his doctorate last year, which means that the reason he started writing, namely to pay his way through medical school, no longer applies. Nonetheless, I sincerely hope that he will keep writing, under whichever name he prefers, because John Lange/Michael Crichton is too good a writer to lose him to medicine.

A paranoid nightmare of a thriller in the vein of the best of Philip K. Dick. Four and a half stars.

Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

Crime Prevention in the 30th century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

Another hot button issue of our times, particularly in the US, is rising crime rates that plague particularly the big cities and plunge their citizens into fear. However, crime rates are also rising in West Germany, albeit more slowly, and those crimes which most impact the average citizen such as burglary and theft also have fairly low detection rates, whereas the 1969 West German crime statistics boast high detection rates for offences such as abortion or sex between adult men (recently decriminalised) which many people believe should not be criminalised at all

In his introduction to the anthology Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, Hans Stefan Santesson, former editor of Fantastic Universe and The Saint Mystery Magazine and therefore familiar with both science fiction and crime fiction, addresses the fact that many people in the US and elsewhere fear rising crime rates, but also points out that crime isn't a new phenomenon, but has always been with us and always will. Just as there will always be a need for police officers and detectives to investigate those crimes.

"Jack Fell Down" by John Brunner

Science Fiction Adventures March 1963

First published in the March 1963 issue of Science Fiction Adventures, this novelette introduces us to Marco Kildreth, a cybernetically enhanced engineer who is out fishing in a ferocious storm on the Atlantic, when he makes an unexpected catch – a dead body. A closer examination reveals that the dead man did not drown, but was dropped into the sea from a great height. What is more, Marco recognises the dead man as one Jack Yang, member of a delegation from the colony planet Morthia who was on Earth for an important conference. Marco Kildreth not only happened to attend the same conference, but negotiations to give Morthia and its neighbour planet a so-called Builderworld, an automated factory planet to supply all needs of the population, were blocked by the Morthian delegation, giving Marco a motive to want to get rid of Yang.

Marco Kildreth did not murder Jack Yang. But after some investigations of his own, he has a pretty good idea who did…

John Brunner uses the structure of the traditional murder mystery to tell a greater story about the post-scarcity Earth of the future and the colony world Morthia which is governed by a genetically determined feudalism. The establishment of an automated Builderworld to produce anything the impoverished population of Morthia needs would threaten the elevated position of Morthia's ruling elite, which is why the Morthian delegation is vehemently opposed to this.

As a science fiction story, "Jack Fell Down" is an excellent look at one or rather several future societies and manages to create a vivid setting in only 39 pages. As murder mystery, however, it is unsatisfactory. We do learn who committed the murder and why, but the clues are never properly planted.

Two stars, mostly for the background world.

"The Eel" by Miriam Allen deFord

Galaxy April 1958

First published in the April 1958 issue of Galaxy, this story follows the titular Eel, a particularly slippery thief who is wanted on eight planets in three different solar systems. The Eel does not operate on his homeworld Earth, though Galactic Police there wants him, too, to extradite him to the worlds where he committed his crimes.

After twenty-six years, the Galactic Police finally get lucky and catch the Eel. There's only one problem. Where should he be extradited, considering that he committed crimes on eight different planets, all of which are extremely interested in putting him on trial and punishing him according to their respective laws?

The Eel is finally extradited to Agsk, a world which does not have the death penalty, but which punishes criminals by executing the person they love most in front of their eyes. There is only one problem. The Eel has neither family nor friends and apparently never loved anybody except for himself. But just when the Agskians are about to execute the person the Eel loves most, namely himself, the Eel reveals that he has one more ace up his sleeve…

"The Eel" perfectly shows off Miriam Allen deFord's gift for dark humour and the solution for how the Eel wiggles out of his punishment is ingenious.

Five stars.

"The Future Is Ours" by Stephen Dentinger

The first mystery posed by this story is "Who on Earth is Stephen Dentinger?" The resolution to that one is quite simple: Stephen Dentinger is a pen name of prolific mystery writer Edward D. Hoch (the "D" stands for Dentinger) who also dabbles in science fiction and horror on occasion.

The story follows a police officer named Captain Felix who is about to test drive the time machine, or rather chronological manipulator, invented by one Dr. Stafford. Captain Felix plans to travel to New York City in the year 2259 AD to learn about new techniques for police work. What he finds, however, is not at all what he had expected…

This very short (only three pages long) tale is a typical example of the "twist in the tail" story that was popular twenty-five years ago, but has become rare since. This type of story relies on the twist being good and in this case it is.

Three stars.

"The Velvet Glove" by Harry Harrison

Fantastic Universe November 1956

First published in the November 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe, this novelette follows Jon Venex, an unemployed robot living on a future Earth beset by anti-robot prejudice. One day, Jon responds to a job ad asking for a robot with his specific skills, and gets much more than he bargained for, when he finds himself strapped to a bomb and forced to work for a gang of drug-runners. Worse, he finds the remnants of his predecessor.

Jon uses all his robotic skills to alert the authorities without violating his innate programming never to harm a human being. But even if he succeeds, will a robot ever be treated as an equal on this future Earth?

Like John Brunner's "Jack Fell Down", Harry Harrison uses the structure of a crime story to present his vision of a future Earth. However, Harrison is a lot more successful at blending science fiction and crime fiction and "The Velvet Glove" manages to work as both. What is more, Jon Venex is a very compelling protagonist.

Four stars.

"Let There Be Night!" by Morris Hershman

Saint Mystery Magazine, November 1966

Morris Hershman is another author better known for mysteries than for science fiction. His vignette "Let There Be Night!" first appeared in the November 1966 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine.

Curt Yarett is unhappily married to Edna, an alcoholic. However, alcohol abuse is a criminal offense in this brave new world of the future and so Curt has the perfect way to get rid of his wife by reporting her to the authorities…

The focus of this brief vignette is less on the "crime" committed and more on changing mores and laws, particularly with regard to intoxicating substances and how what is illegal in one time may well be considered perfectly acceptable in another. Considering the rise in drug use in recent years, this is certainly an important topic. However, the story itself is too brief to truly delve into the questions it raises.

Two stars.

"Computer Cops" by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch puts in his second appearance in this anthology—this time under his own name—with this tale about a crime-fighting agency called the Computer Investigation Bureau, CIB for short, fighting electronic crime in the not too far off future of 2006 AD.  It is one of the two non-reprints in the anthology.

One day, Carl Crader, director of the CIB, is summoned by Nobel Kinsinger, one of the richest men in the world, for someone has been using his SEXCO machine, a computer used to buy and sell stocks at the New York Stock Exchange, without authorisation. Crader quickly homes in on two likely suspects, John Bunyon, Kinsinger's assistant, and Linda Sale, his secretary. However, the truth turns out to be quite different…

Of the various stories in this anthology, "Computer Cops" matches the theme – how will law enforcement agencies investigate and hopefully prevent crime in the future – the closest. "Computer Cops" is very much a so-called police procedural, i.e. a type of mystery which delves into the methods the police uses to investigate crimes. To me, it felt very much like a futuristic version of the popular West German pulp crime series G-Man Jerry Cotton. "Computer Cops" also succeeds both as a science fiction and a crime story.

However, there are two problems with this story. The first is that the female characters are relegated to secretaries in miniskirts or bodystockings – all the investing and investigating is done by men. Compare this to Tom Purdom's "Toys", which features a female police officer, and John Brunner's "Jack Fell Down", which features a woman as the Secretary of Extraterrestrial Relations as well as a female professor of sociology and which also casually notes that not everybody in the future is white.

The other problem with this story is that 2006 AD is not very far off at all, only thirty-six years in the future, which means that many of us may well live to see it. As a result, this also means that many of the predictions that Hoch makes, either as part of the plot or casual off-hand remarks, may well turn out to be completely and hilariously wrong. Of course, it's reasonable to assume that New York City's World Trade Center, currently under construction and the tallest building in the world, once completed, will still be standing in 2006. Using computers to make deals on the stock market seems quite likely and billionaires getting involved into politics to the point of bankrolling or even leading invasions of independent countries sadly isn't too farfetched either. However, the assumption that Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba will crumble in the next few years may well turn out to be premature.

Probably the most successful blend of science fiction and crime fiction in this anthology.

Three stars.

"Apple" by Anne McCaffrey

The second new story is Anne McCaffrey's novelette, which opens with a seemingly impossible crime. A priceless fur coat, sapphire necklace, haute couture gown and jewelled slippers, have been stolen from the display window of a high-end department store in the brief time lag between security camera recordings.

The only way this crime could have been committed is via telekinesis. This is what brings in telepath Daffyd op Owen of the North American Parapsychic Center, an organisation which identifies and trains people with parapsychic talents and also works to end prejudice against them. All Talents at the Center were present and accounted for, when the theft occurred. This means that the thief must be a so-called "wild Talent", i.e. a Talent who's unregistered and unknown to the North American Parapsychic Center. Worse, this crime endangers the passing of a bill providing legal protection for Talents.

So the hunt is on for the telekinetic thief. Daffyd op Owen's Talents quickly zero in on an apartment block in a deprived part of town and find an apartment full of stolen goods – but not the thief. One of the Talents tracks the young woman – it is quickly determined that the thief must be female, because a man would only have taken the necklace and fur coat, but not the dress or the shoes – to a train station, where she uses her abilities to throw a baggage cart at her pursuer and crushes him. In spite of the girl killing one of his people, op Owen wants to bring her in alive and unharmed. But sometimes, there are no happy endings…

In recent years, Anne McCaffrey has been more interested in the dragons of Pern than in good old Earth, but she has also written a few stories about the Talented and their struggle for recognition.

"Apple" clearly shows McCaffrey's strengths as a writer. The action scenes are frenetic and there is some interesting characterisation, too, in the scenes where op Owen and his police counterpart Frank Gillings butt heads. However, this story also displays the issues I've always had with McCaffrey's work, namely latent prejudice that underlies much of it – ironic in a story that is about overcoming prejudice. And so the thief is the proverbial bad apple, because she is a) poor and b) of Romani descent, though McCaffrey uses a much less polite term.

A otherwise good story, marred by some of McCaffrey's persistent issues.

Three stars.

"Rain Check" by Judith Merril

Science Fiction Adventure May 1954

Originally published in the May 1954 issue of Science Fiction Adventures, "Rain Check" follows a shapeshifting alien who was brought back from Mars and is being taken to see the US president aboard a secret express train. However, the alien escapes during a refuelling stop – not for malicious reasons, but out of pure curiosity.

After some time spent as a large package on the platform, the alien takes on the shape of a human woman and wanders into an all-night diner. However, the alien's appearance attracts the attention of Mike Bonito, the man behind the counter, who promptly tries to chat up what he thinks is an attractive woman.

Turns out Mike Bonito is a civil defence warden, when he's not bartending, and was specifically told to be on the lookout for the runaway alien, though all they have to go on is a vague description of a male human. However, there will be an important meeting of all civil defence wardens in the city later that day. The alien, now named Anita, gets herself invited to come along, after manifesting a civil defence badge.

The American astronauts who captured the Martian believe that the alien's special abilities will help them win a war. However, "Anita" has a reason of her own for wanting to explore Earth.

This is not so much a crime story, but a cloak and dagger type spy story. Of course, being a Judith Merril story, it's also very well written and "Anita's" observations about life on Earth and particularly the persistent rain, so alien to a Martian, are fascinating.

Five stars.

"Toys" by Tom Purdom

Analog October 1967

"Toys" begins with a hostage situation. A group of children and their "pets" – an elephant, a gorilla, two dragons (created via genetic engineering) and two tigers – have taken a family hostage and demand that a committee made up of parents negotiate with them. Meanwhile, various adults are congregating outside and threatening to enter the house and beat up the children.

Police officers Charley Edelman and Helen Fracarro are called in the deal with the situation. They storm the house and find themselves fighting off both the "pets" and the children who have transformed their educational toys such as genetic engineering kits into surprisingly effective weapons. Will Charley and Helen be able to diffuse the situation before someone – adults, kids or pets – gets killed?

Our founder Gideon reviewed this story upon its original publication in the October 1967 issue of Analog and also adds some interesting background notes from author Tom Purdom who is a good friend of the Journey.

"Toys" is an action-packed story and offers some interesting speculation about how even in an increasingly affluent world, there will always be those who have less than others, even if they would have be considered wealthy as recently as thirty or forty years ago. Anne McCaffrey's "Apple" makes a similar point and is also largely set in a modern housing estate like those that are increasingly replacing the slums of old, raising the living standards of the working class, while not changing their economic status.

"Toys" also succeeds at blending science fiction and police procedural. Charley and Helen are compelling protagonists and I wouldn't at all mind a series of Charley Edelman and Helen Fracarro futuristic police procedurals.

That said, I also had a big problem with this story and that is that I intensely dislike stories about evil children. Now fear of children and young people is a common theme in science fiction. With the children of the postwar baby boom now in their teens and early twenties, an age when they begin to have political opinions and demands that don't necessarily match their parents', we have seen an uptick in dystopian stories about tyrannies set up by young people such as Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson or the movie Wild in the Streets. But there are older examples as well such as the 1944 story "When the Bough Breaks" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore about a couple terrorised by a superhuman baby. "Toys" certainly fits into the tradition of science fiction terrified of young people having a mind of their own. But though it is well written, I just don't care for stories of this type.

Three stars.

"Party of the Two Parts" by William Tenn

Galaxy August 1954

First published in the August 1954 issue of Galaxy, this story is an epistolary tale in the form of a galactogram from one O-Dik-Veh, a patrol sergeant on duty out in the galactic boondocks, to Hoy-Veh-Chalt, desk sergeant at headquarters and O's cousin, wherein O recounts his latest case.

O has been assigned to watch over the third planet of Sol a.k.a. Earth to make sure that its inhabitants don't blow themselves up before they have matured enough to be inducted into the great galactic community. Much like "Anita" from Judith Merril's "Rain Check", O finds Earth damp and unpleasant. What is more, the patrol office had to be erected on Pluto, a planet O describes as "a world whose winters are bearable, but whose summers are unspeakably hot". These few paragraphs tell us both clearly and very entertainingly that whatever O and Hoy are, they are very much not human. O also refers to their commissioner as "Old One" and is mentioned to have tentacles, so I imagined O and Hoy as something like H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, only as a cop.

O's latest problem started when L'payr, a career criminal from the planet Gtet, escapes on the eve of the trial that will put him behind bars for life, steals an experimental spaceship and ends up on Earth, specifically the suburbs of Chicago. However, L'payr, who is basically a telepathic amoeba, can't survive on Earth for long, so he needs supplies to get his ship spaceborn again. So L'payr telepathically lures high school chemistry teacher Osborne Blatch to his hideout to trade alien pornography for chemical components from the high school lab. Though Blatch is less interested in the pornography – it is amoeba pornography, after all – and more in learning about where the mysterious puddle-shaped alien came from. L'payr, however, doesn't stick around to discuss the state of the galaxy with Blatch, but legs it once he has all the chemicals he needs. Blatch, meanwhile, finds an excellent use for the amoeba pornography he acquired and publishes a biology textbook with detailed illustrations of amoebas reproducing.

We haven't heard much of William Tenn lately, ever since he became a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. This is a pity, because Tenn's satirical science fiction has always been a delight. And indeed "Party of the Two Parts" starts out utterly hilarious, but then gets bogged down in a lengthy debate whether pornography is pornography, if it doesn't titillate anybody due to not depicting remotely the correct species and whether a crime has been committed that allows for L'payr to be extradited back to his homeworld. The way that O entraps L'payr and L'payr – with some help from Osborne Blatch – tries to wiggle out of his extradition are both ingenious and funny, but the story is still longer than it needs to be.

Four stars.

Police Work of the Future

All in all, this is a solid anthology of stories blending science fiction and crime fiction. That said, the title Crime Prevention in the 30th Century is something of a misnomer, since the stories are more focussed on police officers solving crimes or criminals committing crimes and trying to evade the law than on the prevention of crimes. What is more, none of the stories are explicitly set in the 30th century.

Nor is this anthology particularly useful as a blueprint for policing techniques of the future – only Edward D. Hoch's "Computer Cops" even remotely offers a look at what actual police work might look like in the future. However, Crime Prevention in the 30th Century is not a police academy textbook, but a science fiction anthology and as such it offers an entertaining look at several very different futures. I find that the stories which are at least somewhat humorous work better for me than the more serious tales.

Three and a half stars for the anthology as a whole.

A man leans to a shed drinking a cup of coffee next to several skis also leaning to the shed.
After a long day of skiing, nothing is better than a hot cup of coffee, preferably fortified with something a little stronger.


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


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[May 31, 1969] When eras collide (June 1969 Analog)

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Huzzah!

It's hard to believe it was just six years ago that the Renaissance Pleasure Faire started in the suburbs of Los Angeles:

"Counterculture" didn't even have a name yet (I think we were calling it "contraculture"), but already, there were folks weary of the modern age, casting their eyes back to a simpler time.  You know, when there were far more things that could kill you, and much fewer opportunities to escape drudgery…

Anyway, I reported on our last foray into the past a couple of years ago.  These days, the back-to-then movement is stronger than ever, with the Society for Creative Anachronism exploding (do they have a thousand members now?) and Renaissance Faires catching on.  They are a good fit for the Pagans and hippies and folks looking for an escape.

We're not immune to the lure.  Here are some scenes from this month's event:










You may recognize the fellow in blue

What really makes the Faire such a delight is the attention to detail.  Everywhere you go, there are actors and actress really playing a part, making the whole thing an exercise in living history.  Of course, as my "character" styles himself a member of the Habsburg clan, you can bet I razzed the Queen when she paraded by with her foppish retinue.

Nevertheless, I hope the Faire retains its purity, prioritizing the spirit of the event rather than descending into a kind of cynical capitalism.  Though, I suppose, that's what the original faires were all about…

Alas!

Speaking of cynical capitalism, I feel that Analog editor stays on the job these days just for a paycheck (and a podium for his irrascible editorials—which he then compiles and sells in book form!) While the latest issue isn't terrible, it certainly doesn't scrape the heights it achieved "back in the day."


by Leo Summers

Artifact, by J. B. Clarke

The name of J. B. Clarke is unknown to me.  Perhaps he's Arthur Clarke's little brother (sister?) His writing isn't bad, nor even is the premise, but the execution of this first tale of his…


by Leo Summers

A beach ball-sized orb appears in interplanetary space.  When an Earth spaceship tries to pick it up, it zips away at faster-than-light speeds a couple of times, as if to demonstrate that it can, and then becomes docile.  After it is picked up, the humans assessing the artifact determine that it was deliberately sent to jump-start our technology.  But was the rationale benevolent or otherwise?

This would have been a great story had not Clarke explained from the very beginning that the scheme was a plot by the evil Imperium to instigate a diplomatic incident a la the Nazis asserting a Polish attack against the Germans on September 1, 1939.  This would give the rapacious aliens legal precedent to annex our planet.  Moreover, we learn that an agent of the "Web", the galactic federation of which the Imperium constitutes a small portion, is already on Earth, guiding our assessment of the artifact.

As a result, there's no tension.  We know everything will turn out fine.  Indeed, it's a strangely un-Campbellian story in that humans aren't the smart ones in the end.  But because there are no decisions to be made, no suspense to the outcome, the story falls flat.

Two stars.

Zozzl, by Jackson Burrows


by Leo Summers

This one gets closer to the mark.  It stars a big game hunter whose quarry is a telepathic beast.  The creature's natural defense is to access your fears and throw pursuers into a nightmare world, repelling them.  It's a neat concept, and Burrows (another name with which I am unacquainted), renders the dream sequences quite effectively.

While we learn a bit about our hero's past and motivations, he never really has to solve any puzzles to win his prize.  He just wins in the end.  There needs to be more.

Still, I really dug the idea, and there's definitely potential for Jackson.  Three stars.

Dramatic Mission, by Anne McCaffrey


by Leo Summers

Here's the latest installment of the The Ship Who.  This series stars Helva, a profoundly disabled woman who, at a young age, was turned into a cybernetic brain for a starship.  Together with a series of "brawns", the human component of the ship's crew, she has been on all kinds of adventures.

In this story, we learn that brain-ships can earn their independence (paying off the debt of their construction) and fly without brawns, and that many vessels strive for this status.  But Helva prefers to ride with company—indeed, she insists on it.

Well, her wish is granted.  Short-listed for a priority mission to Beta Corvi, Helva is tasked to transport a troupe of actors to a gas giant in that system, where they will perform Romeo and Juliet for a bunch of alien jellyfish in exchange for an important chemical process.

The problem is the drama that unfolds before the drama: Solar Prane, the star, is dying from chronic use of a memory-enhancing drug.  His nurse is deeply in love with him.  His co-star and ex-lover is jealous and stubbornly insists on sabotaging the production.  It is up to Helva to be the grown-up in the room and save the day.

There is so much to like about this story, so many neat, unique things about the setting and characters, that it's a shame McCaffrey can't help getting in her own way.  She loves writing waspish, unlikeable characters, and her penchant for including casual, off-putting violence reminds me of what I don't like about Marion Zimmer Bradley.

This is one of those pieces I'd like to see redone by someone more talented and sensitive.  Zenna Henderson, maybe, if I wanted to see the soft tones enhanced, or Rosel George Brown (RIP) if I wanted something a little lighter and funnier.

Three stars.

The Nitrocellulose Doormat, by Christopher Anvil


by Peter Skirmat

The planet of Terex has turned into a death trap for the terran Space Force.  Invited in to deal with an insurgency problem, a combination of religious proscriptions against advanced technology and a flourishing black market that loots what munitions are allowed in, the human troops are not only made into sitting ducks but laughing stocks.

Enter a canny colonel of the Interstellar Corps, whose bright idea is to suffuse all incoming logistics with explosives so that, when they are stolen, they explode.  Deterrent and humiliation, all in one.

It may seem that I've given away the plot…and I have.  It's given away fairly early on, and the rest of the story is simply an explication of the plan's success.

I should have liked the story less than I did, but it reads pretty well.  Three stars.

The Ghoul Squad, by Harry Harrison


by Leo Summers

A rural sheriff digs in his heels at the notion of government agencies harvesting the organs of newly dead victims of traffic accidents in his jurisdiction.  He sticks to his principles even at the cost of his own life, decades later.

This story doesn't say anything Niven hasn't said (much) better in The Organleggers, The Jigsaw Man, and A Gift from Earth.

Two stars.

Jackal's Meal, by Gordon R. Dickson


by Leo Summers

The human sphere of stars has begun to brush against the part of the galaxy claimed by the loosely knit Morah, aliens with a talent for profound modification of bodies, internally and externally.  In the middle of sensitive negotiations between the two empires over a contested bit of space, a bipedal creature runs amok at the space dock.  It is impossible to determine if the being is a Morah made to look like a human or a human made to look like a Morah.  Ultimately, the fate of the two empires rests on this hapless person.

Easily the best story in the issue, both interesting and well written, though it still rates no more than four stars.

Give me the past

Short story SF appears to be on the decline in general, with only four magazines out this month.  Of them, Fantasy and Science Fiction was by far the best, garnering 3.4 stars, but Fantastic and New Worlds both barely made three stars, and Mark, who covers the last mag, has been grumbling about all the newfangled, outré stuff.

As a result, you could fill just one digest-sized magazine with all the good stuff that came out this month.  In other statistical news, women produced just 8% of all the new fiction this month.

It's enough to make you long for the (romanticized) good ol' days…but who knows what the future holds?






[April 18, 1969] A new look at dragons… (Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight)


by George Pritchard

I warn you all that I am not the most up-to-date person when it comes to SFF. But a friend recommended this book after seeing I had a dragon-shaped object d’art, and thought I might like this. Soon after, I encountered the Traveller, who has kindly granted me a space here.

Far from our mutual friend’s reviews of its Analog run [q.v. for the plot synopsis], I found it an extremely engaging story, able to play in the waters of both science fiction and fantasy. I have occasionally run across McCaffrey’s work before, it seems—going back through reviews indicates I have indeed read one or two of the Helva stories in the past, though I have not revisited them. Not because they were bad, but like so many stories, they ended in a way that seemed comfortably complete.

In Dragonflight, not only was I engaged and fascinated the whole way through, but I wanted to reread it immediately upon finishing it. One of my favorite things was that there were so many stories, interlocking and existing beside each other. That was something that frustrated me about Dune: the characters seemed to not exist off of the page. It reminds me of a professor I had in college, pure Boasian, and he said that no people are truly illogical, but they work from a specific logic of their own. The rules that are there are not truly arbitrary, but are created for a reason, and once we understand that reasoning, we can move into asking whether the rule should be kept or not.

The author seems to be doing this as well, adding what works as need be, and removing what doesn’t. Depending on your feelings, this can be either exciting and intriguing, seeing what’s kept on versus scattered to the winds. This is a warning to the reader—Dragonflight has a variety of continuity errors, most notably between the first two sections. At least one off-page character switches gender, for instance. The threat and impact of perpetual violence comes up in the first section, but afterwards, there is a stronger emphasis on peaceful (or at least nonviolent) solutions. If you enjoyed Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son / Daybreak – 2250 AD, I think you will enjoy this book very much.

In my opinion, what makes Dragonflight more of an SF novel than a fantasy one is how essential problems are solved. What SF truly is or is not will always be debated, but one of the main differences between SF and fantasy is based on the way things are solved. Fantasy tends to rely on outside intervention to carry the day, while SF relies on knowing how things work in order to experiment and negotiate a solution — in other words, applying the scientific method. What does it matter, then, if the characters wear tunics rather than spacesuits?

Beyond the dragons (and the watch wehrs), my favorite thing about Dragonflight was actually the various songs included in the story, and that things are largely taught through poems recited or sung. In my time, I have read many, many terrible poems crowbarred into stories, and I assure you, these are not bad at all. In fact, I have found myself singing many of the Dragonflight songs to myself since I started reading the book (to melodies of my own devise.)

Our mutual friend has made it clear what he dislikes about Dragonflight in his reviews of the Analog series, and I hope I have shed some light on what I loved about it. In the same way that the often disagreeing characters of Dragonflight compare and contrast the information that they have to contribute to the common good of their planet, I believe that our differing reviews can combine to provide a more complete picture of the book. In addition, it is my understanding that the serial omitted some of the book's material, and it's for certain that Campbell added a few editorial touches of his own—so if you're going to try Dragonflight out, please read the original!

4.5 stars.






[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)


by Fiona Moore

I was interested in reading this month’s Ace Double because I’d never read any Rackham, but had heard some good things about his writing. Ipomoea turned out to be a mixed bag, a pacy adventure story with some interesting themes that didn’t quite live up to its early promise.

Cover of the short novel Ipomoea
Cover of Ipomoea

The story takes place in a future society where interplanetary travel is as easy as taking an ocean liner is now, and a small number of people are making it rich on a trio of exoplanets which are within easy reach of Earth’s solar system. Our protagonist, Sam Hutten, is the son of one of those exoplanetary billionaires, but he has rejected his father and is now working as a sociologist on Earth. He receives, and obeys, a request to visit his father but clearly the request is more than social: assassination attempts, and contact with mysterious government agents investigating a new super-addictive drug going by the name of “Happy Sugar” (and derived from plants of the Ipomoea genus, hence the title), are to follow. When Hutten’s father turns up dead, Hutten investigates and finds a plot for universal domination by another of the billionaires, involving the drug and some gems capable of mentally conditioning their wearer.

There’s some very good and timely ideas here. The drug plot clearly draws on anxieties in the news about the possibility that the “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture of today might make people susceptible to influence by Communists or worse. There are also some good SFnal touches of imagined technology, with humanoid robots and a character who has, Frankenstein-like, been formed through melding three different people (meaning he lacks an ego and is therefore conveniently immune to psionic suggestion).

However, what I found most intriguing about the novella was the initial setup of a world where Japan has become the dominant economic and cultural power. Rackham’s argument is that the Japanese will come to this position through their production of cheap goods at low prices: “They made their stuff cheap not in competition, not to undercut anyone else, but because it could be made cheap.” Through pursuing excellence for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of conquest, they become top nation. While I’m not thoroughly convinced at the idea that the Japanese are non-competitive, the country’s recent technological and economic progress suggests that a Japanese-dominated twenty-first century might not be an outside possibility. This idea that success is achieved through non-competition and selflessness becomes a thematic link through the book, in that the villain enslaves his victims psionically through appealing to their subconscious desires, and it is only through sublimating the ego that one can resist.

Unfortunately, a lot of this early setup goes by the wayside. Apart from a few brief scenes, we don’t actually get much sense that this world is Japanese-influenced. Although this might be excused on the grounds that the villains, on the exoplanet, appear to be Europeans and into the idea of racial purity, one would expect a bit more comment on the distinction between their worlds and Earth from our protagonist.

Furthermore, we never get much exploration of why Hutten became estranged from his family, or why he became a sociologist beyond that this allows him long passages of exposition on the nature of society. Indeed, by about three-quarters of the way in Hutten’s profession appears to have been forgotten, as the story takes a sharp twist into James Bond territory. Hutten and his special agent friends must bring down a villain who is depressingly keen on making speeches explaining his plans for universal domination, and the resolution is telegraphed rather obviously to the reader.

It’s even more disappointing since, early in the story, Hutten argues, based on the rise of the Japanese, that “world domination will not work, either through force or persuasion… No government can long persist against the will of the governed,” which suggests that, if that theme were pursued, the villain would be defeated through collective action on the part of the people. Instead, we get superheroes with convenient powers saving the day, without any challenge to the economic status quo that, for all Hutten’s speechifying about the Japanese values of doing well by doing good simply for its own sake, has allowed eight billionaires to dominate its economy. A more self-aware novella might have made something of the cognitive dissonance between Hutten’s theories and the fact that the world he’s in doesn’t work that way at all (to say nothing of Hutten’s complete obliviousness of this problem), but not this one.

Two and a half stars, mostly for the setup.

Cover of the short novel The Brass Dragon
Cover of The Brass Dragon

I won’t say too much about the second half of the double, The Brass Dragon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It’s an oddly good fit with the Rackham but for the wrong reasons, namely that it also sets up an intriguing mystery only for the revelation to prove rather disappointing.

The story revolves around Barry Cowan, a young man who turns up in a Texas hospital with no memory of his past life other than a vague impression that he used to live in California, a few disconnected memories of some place that may or may not be Earth, and a little brass statue of a dragon in his pocket. The mystery builds as he is found by his (very normal) family and returned home, but is stalked by strange people apparently looking for something in his possession, and who threaten him and his family. Is he a time-traveler? An arrival from a parallel universe? An alien in human form?

About halfway through the narrative, his memory is restored, and everything falls into place for himself and for the reader. In case anyone here is planning on reading this, I won’t reveal too much other than to say that it becomes a fairly straightforward, even banal, space adventure. I’m also not quite sure who the intended audience is: the age of the protagonist (eighteen) suggests it’s supposed to be a juvenile, but there’s no real reason why he couldn’t be an adult.

Two stars, again mostly for the buildup.



By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Six Gates from Limbo, by J.T. McIntosh: A Comparison

Six Gates To Limbo Cover depicting Adam and Eve in a glass bowl full of sea creatures
Cover Design by Colin Andrews

A funny thing happened to me on the way to my magazines recently. I had already read my copy of Six Gates From Limbo, from Michael Joseph when I saw it was being serialized in If. I delayed my reading of these issues but I did look at my colleague David’s reviews of them. This is when a few odd things occurred to me.

Firstly, it took place over two issues which also contained many other stories, yet my issues of If were not particularly thick to make up for this. In addition, I noticed David’s reviews stated how rushed the story seemed, when no such point had occurred to me.

Now I know magazines do cut down stories, but this had no explanation as this was essentially a novella version. When New Worlds is forced to cut down, they have given summaries of what has been excised and have been the subject of attacks in fanzines for losing parts of the original content. I have not yet seen anyone had comment on this in the case of If.

So, in the obsessive way I like to do things, I performed a chapter-by-chapter wordcount comparison to see what was lost. By my estimation, the serialized form constitutes only around 40% of the novel length!

Covers of magazine and book versions of Drowned World and Flowers for Algernon

This is not as much of a change between the novelette and novel versions of Flowers For Algernon but not dissimilar to the different versions of Drowned World. As such I thought some in-depth investigating was in order.

To start with, where have the changes been made? The answer is, throughout. The only chapter which appeared to be in-tact is the final one. This makes some sense as the final discussion between Rex and Regina is necessary to accentuate the themes. In addition, it is the shortest so there is less to remove.

Jack Gaughan illustration from the magazine serial showing Rex in the cathedral in Mercury

The only other without much cut from it is the next shortest chapter, Rex’s return to Limbo from Mercury. From the rest, all have between 40 and 80% of their content removed.

As such, the central plot remains predominantly the same. Three people awake in an idyllic artificial environment with six portals to other planets. They investigate through them but find each flawed in some way. They have to work out what has happened and what they will do about it.

What changes between the novel and magazine versions are the details and emphasis. To take the “return to Limbo” chapter that I mentioned before, the start provides a good example of what is often removed:

Here are the first few paragraphs in its serialized form:

His awakening in Limbo was the worst of the three he had experienced, but there was one good thing about it. Regina was there. She was crying. Vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…

He went down in his pajamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

And in the book form:

Regina got him back to the house with some difficulty. She was crying – vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days. In Limbo it was night. She had rushed to the Gateway in her nightdress the moment she sensed his return.

This awakening was the worst of the three because he had no sleep and little food on Mercury. Only some twelve hours after the ordeal of transference, it had been repeated. The thirst was familiar, and the hunger, but this time there was also a desperate lassitude and weakness that put talking out of the question, other than the occasional gasped word.

Again he had his memory unimpaired and he wanted to restore himself the way that seemed natural to him, by crawling in the bushes, chewing fruit, drinking clear water and bathing in the lake. But the lake, Regina reminded him, was seven miles away, and the house less than one mile.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…It couldn’t be fresh killed meat, because Regina on her own would certainly not have killed a cow or a bull but it smelled far fresher than anything he had smelled in Mercury.

He went down in his pyjamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

As you can see the facts given are largely the same, but the serialized form lacks any reasoning or flavour. You do not need to know that Rex welcomes the return to the naturalness of life in Limbo compared to the artificiality of Mercury via his thoughts on food as a restorative, but it highlights the themes and makes him a more fleshed-out character.

But are there more substantive changes? Limbo is much more thoroughly explored in the novel, with details of the flora and fauna greatly expanded, along with the nature of their maintenance. With this it is also made explicit the parallels with Adam and Eve, with Regina believing the gateways are the serpent, along with many references to Greek mythology.

Another key element is that the magazine does not contain Rex’s vivid dreams. I can see that they could seem superfluous but I would argue they are, in fact, important for understanding the ending.

I do feel the book length version is more likely to appeal to the hippy crowd, with its rejection of society and the ecological themes.

As David noted, many of the planets get short shrift in the magazine version and that is definitely a notable difference. In addition to much more detail and complexity applied to the transfers, the six gateway worlds are expanded, even Mercury which had the longest section in the magazine. Along with the aforementioned discussions on the artificiality of food, there are also mentions of isolation, suicide kiosks, people overdosing on Pex and other such features of the city.

Possibly the most frustrating excision is almost an entire chapter laying the groundwork about the people on Cresta, why they are central to the final plan and then subsequent sections on what happened as a result. It is instead reduced to Rex making the gateway switch and saying he told someone on the planet about it. Which, even with the final chapter intact, likely makes it confusing for most readers.

So, would my opinion be that the book version is better? Unfortunately not, for there is another element that was expunged by Pohl and it is one I wish McIntosh had not included in his novel: the poor treatment of Regina. (Those of a sensitive disposition may be advised to skip the rest of this section).

Jack Gaughan illustation from the magazine of Regina dancing on stage in a skimpy outfit whilst people throw things at her
Regina in sexual slavery on Landfall. Not linked to her womanhood in magazine form.

McIntosh’s restrained descriptions of Regina in the serial brought praise from David. Unfortunately, this is definitely not the case in its book form. There Rex sees her as a “girl”, a young nineteen to his twenty-five, with regular descriptions of how pert her breasts are and “child-like” her body is. This is until she is almost raped and turned into a sex slave on Landfall. It is only at that point he can see her as a woman.

Unfortunately, this isn’t even the first rape scene. After his return from Mercury, Rex attempts to rape Regina declaring:

I waited, remember? But after a man and woman are wed, with or without ceremony, after they made love, he can’t rape her. You’re mine, Regina.

Mr. McIntosh is certainly not a devotee of Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir.

If you want my judgement each version succeeds and fails in different ways. Somewhere there is a full length-version which removes the questionable details but continues to expand on the more interesting themes and ideas McIntosh draws out.

Two Stars for both variations



by Brian Collins

Both of the novels I got for this month did not work out, sadly; but interestingly they're failures of different breeds, or rather they fail in different ways. I've read much of what Anne McCaffrey has written over the past few years while this is my first time reading Kenneth Bulmer. Both are pretty close in age, indeed being of the literary generation that preceded the New Wave. How have they adapted—or more importantly, how have they not?

Decision at Doona, by Anne McCaffrey

Cover by richard Powers depicting a psychedelic image of what seems to be a cat icon.
Cover art by Richard Powers.

Anne McCaffrey technically debuted over fifteen years ago, though she has only been writing consistently for the past few years. In those few years she has built quite the following. She became the first woman to win a Hugo in any of the fiction categories, and her Pern and "The Ship Who…" stories have undoubtedly been popular. I'm not a fan.

Decision at Doona is a new standalone novel from McCaffrey, with a premise that will sound familiar for those who remember the Good Old Days of science fiction—the early '50s, incidentally when McCaffrey sold her first story. It's the future, and humanity is scouting for habitable planets, mainly because there's no room left on Earth. Humans live in alcoves, like bees, and have basically depleted the planet's resources. Finding a planet fit for human colonization would already be difficult, but there's an extra criterion: the planet must be devoid of intelligent life comparable to mankind. Doona at first seems like the perfect candidate—until it isn't. The Hrrubans, a race of cat-like aliens, already live on Doona, keeping their existence secret from the first human scouts. The Hrrubans are about as "civilized" as the humans, but that's not going to help either party, as mankind finds itself at an impasse.

So, a first-contact narrative in which, by sheer coincidence, two advanced races meet on a planet which doesn't strictly belong to either of them. The humans are haunted by the collective memory of having encountered another intelligent race before, the Siwannese, which ended tragically. I will say, how the Siwannese became extinct is not what you would expect if you're familiar with colonialism in the Americas. Then again, I'm not sure McCaffrey did much research with regards to real-world colonialism. To give McCaffrey some credit she does delve into the subject, which is an inherently thorny one, with characters even referring to Christopher Columbus with some shame. The central question of the novel, though, that of whether the Hrrubans are indigenous to Doona (if they are then the humans must pull out, and if not then there's room for cooperation), is an odd one that assumes would-be colonizers have the best intentions with a would-be indigenous population.

The strangely tone-deaf optimism and belief in colonizers as basically good people (as opposed to people actively perpetuating a system of death and imprisonment) is a tune that will sound familiar to Analog subscribers. Indeed it's here where I think McCaffrey's key to success lies. While I'm not personally fond of McCaffrey's writing, it's not hard to see why she has become so popular in the past few years. Reading her must be a comfort for a lot of people. After all, in McCaffrey's world it's 1959 and not 1969. Ike is still in office, and Jack Kennedy is a strapping young senator—and alive. Vietnam is a country without any acreage in the minds of suburban Americans. Unfortunately Jack Kennedy is dead and so are we, in some metaphysical sense. We have cast the runes against our own souls. But for McCaffrey, and indeed for the humans within this novel, nothing much has changed since 1959. The distant future will not be too different from how it was in the Good Old Days. Now isn't that a comforting thought?

To make matters more worrying, McCaffrey is just not a very good writer. Even comparing her to some other conservatives (and I do believe McCaffrey is a conservative) in the field, like Poul Anderson and Larry Niven, her worlds and aliens are not as vibrant. Anderson, whose politics are very different from mine, can still be interesting because of his moodiness and at times surprising moral complexity, whereas McCaffrey might be living under a rock. The Hrrubans reminded me somewhat of Niven's Kzinti, but whereas the Kzinti can be easily distinguished from spacefaring humans, McCaffrey's aliens are more analogous to American indigenous peoples. And Doona itself is such a boring location, with barely any thought or writing given to description and mechanics. Surely we deserve better than this.

Two stars.

The Ulcer Culture, by Kenneth Bulmer

A rough drawing of a human with what appears to be seven breasts. Do I count seven breasts?
Cover artist not credited.

I got mailed this new Bulmer, a British import, because Kris Vyas-Myall is a Bulmer fan and I've not read any of his work before. This may have been a bad idea for a starting point. Firstly, what the hell is this cover? Who is responsible? The artist is uncredited so I'm actually not sure. The novel itself is evidently an attempt on Bulmer's part to get hip with the kids, so to speak. The Ulcer Culture is a dystopian SF novel all about drugs (especially drugs), sex, and violence; and yet I was still bored for much of it.

The plot doesn't really exist, and anyway it would be hard to summarize. The world of the novel is more the point, ya know. It's the future, in what I have to think is fish-and-chips merry goddamn England, and it's "the Age of Material Plenty." There are two groups of people, the Uppers (haha) and the workers, with the former keeping the latter in check with a hallucinogen called Joy Juice. The welfare state has gotten out of hand, with workers lounging around experiencing lifelike hallucinations, having a far-out time as it were. The real problem starts when, for no apparent reason, these hallucinations which normally would provide fantasies for the workers start turning nightmarish. Is the drug supply going bad? Are people's bodies adapting to the drug and having adverse effects? Who really killed Jack Kennedy? Why am I asking you?

Now, science fiction has had a storied history with drugs. When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World almost forty years ago, he theorized that drugs could be used to pacify the proletariat and reinforce subservience, through a Freudian understanding of pleasure. Baby wants nipple, baby cries until he gets nipple, baby acquires nipple, baby stops crying. Huxley would later change his mind profoundly on the subject of drug use, although it seems Bulmer has not gotten the memo. The problem for the reader is that The Ulcer Culture reads like a middle-aged conservative's attempt at trying to understand the hedonistic antics of the younger generation. This is a "New Wave" novel, but within limits. Sexuality plays a major role, yet women only appear in the margins and to a symbolic capacity; and despite the lack of female interest there's no mention of homosexuality. I thought the British were all about buggering each other. Is that the word? And there's basically no swearing either—no "cock," no "pussy," not even a token "fuck" thrown in as a treat.

At first I was led to believe Bulmer knew what he was doing, but then I realized he's merely puppeteering the corpse of some nonexistent New Wave writer with this outing—which, mind you, is a failure in writing that was not due to laziness or cowardice. I don't like it, but I at least respect the effort.

Two stars.



by Cora Buhlert

Conan with a Metafictional Gimmick: Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, by Gardner F. Fox

Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox

There has been an invasion at my trusty local import bookstore, an invasion of scantily clad, muscular Barbarians, sporting furry loincloths and horned helmets and brandishing gigantic swords and axes, while equally scantily clad maidens cling to their mighty thews.

The genre that Fritz Leiber dubbed "swords and sorcery" was born forty years ago almost to the day, when Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom" was published, instigating a veritable invasion of sword-wielding heroes and heroines into the pages of Weird Tales, Strange Tales and Unknown. The first Barbarian boom only lasted a little more than ten years, cut short by the death or defection of many of its authors as well as World War II paper shortages and changing reader tastes.

However, in the past ten years, Barbarian scouts have occasionally made forays into a landscape dominated by science fiction, making camp in the pages of Fantastic in the US and Science Fantasy in the UK, recruiting fans and authors penning new adventures for modern day Barbarians. Then, four years ago, the walls were breached with the runaway success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Barbarian hordes invaded the bookstore. Nowadays, there is more sword and sorcery on the shelves than there ever was during the genre's heyday in the thirties.

These days, whenever I go to my local import bookstore, half-naked Barbarians greet me from the paperback spinner rack, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, J. Jones or their lesser imitators. And I have to admit that I inevitably reach for the books with these striking covers to read the blurb on the back. For while not every scantily clad Barbarian can hold a candle to Robert E. Howard's Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser or even John Jakes' Brak, even the lesser entries into the genre are at the very least entertaining.

The latest Barbarian to invade the bookstore shelves is the aptly named Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, penned by pulp and comic book veteran Gardner F. Fox with a stunning cover by the talented J. Jones. The tagline promises that Kothar is "the mightiest fantasy hero of the enchanted, terrifying world before – or beyond – recorded time". With such hyperbole, how could I resist?

Two Distinguished Scholars – or are they?

However, the slim paperback does not open with Barbarian action. Instead, we get an introduction penned by one Donald MacIvers PhD. There are a lot of literary scholars in the world, but the number of academics who take pulp fiction and science fiction and fantasy seriously can be counted on both hands and Donald MacIvers PhD is not one of them. Fascinating…

MacIvers opens his introduction with a quote from Albert Kremnitz, whom he describes as "a German philosopher who is no longer widely read". Indeed, Albert Kremnitz is so little read that even my sixteen volume 1908 edition of the encyclopaedia Der Große Brockhaus has never heard of him. Hmm, the plot thickens…

MacIvers quotes Kremnitz stating that even though the Industrial Revolution would seem to have driven mysticism back, while science, technology and reason reign supreme, mysticism would rise again roughly in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing about a new Age of Heroes. For someone not even Der Große Brockhaus has heard of, Albert Kremnitz is certainly prescient.

MacIvers then informs us that this new Age of Heroes will lead to "the recreation of mythological supermen, or, as [Kremnitz] predicted with amazing insight, the invention of heroes so magnificent, so fantastically endowed with super-powers, that they exist only in the fantasy projections of man. Such a superhero is Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman."

At this point, I was beginning to suspect that Gardner F. Fox, who after all created the original Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and many other superheroes for National Comics, was pulling our collective leg here and that both Donald MacIvers PhD and Albert Kremnitz, a German philosopher so obscure that even Der Große Brockhaus has never of him, were in truth just alternate identities of Gardner F. Fox, who promptly describes himself as a "distinguished American writer".

But rather than begrudging Mr. Fox this little metafictional game, I was instead amused, especially since I have engaged in similar subterfuge, passing myself off as the American pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore on occasion.

Besides, Fox in the guise of Donald MacIvers PhD actually makes an interesting point here, namely that the disenchantment of modern life has given birth to our desire for larger than life heroes, be they the costumed superheroes of comic books, the square-jawed spacemen and brass-bra wearing maidens of golden age science fiction or the muscular and scantily clad Barbarians that have invaded our newsstands and bookstores of late. The reasons these stories are so popular, no matter how much literary scholars may decry them, is because we need them to escape our day to day reality for just a little while.

To quote MacIvers or rather Fox, "Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman is an epic hero for any age, but it would appear that our age needs him more than any other."

Bad Luck Barbarian

After this introduction, we get – no, not sword-swinging action, but a prologue informing us that "The Universe is old. Old!" just in case we didn't get it the first time. Fox sets the stage by telling us that Kothar's adventures take place eons after mankind has conquered the stars and "an empire of Man was spread throughout the universe. This empire died more than a billion years ago, after which man himself sank into a state of barbarism." So Kothar's world is closer to Jack Vance's Dying Earth than Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age.

Once this prologue, billed as a fragment of "The Lord Histories of Satoram Mandamor", is over, we at last meet our hero, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman. Though it seems that Kothar is not long for this world or any other, for at the beginning of the story "The Sword of the Sorcerer" (like the Conan, Kull or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, the novel is a fix-up of three novelettes) the sellsword Kothar is grievously wounded, having just lost a battle. On the run from enemy soldiers intent on capturing him and flaying him alive, Kothar stumbles into an ancient crypt, where he encounters the shrivelled corpse of the sorcerer Afgorkon. Raised from the dead by Queen Elfa, Afgorkon bestows upon Kothar the magical sword Frostfire, forged from a meteorite and able to cut through any substance, even steel. However, the blade comes with a curse, for as long as he wields Frostfire, Kothar must remain poor and possess nothing. Since Kothar is a mercenary, who fights strictly for gold and treasure, this is of course a problem.

However, before Kothar can figure out how to lift the curse upon his sword, he first has to defeat Lord Markoth, who has dethroned Queen Elfa. To no one's surprise, he succeeds, but not without picking up a second curse in the form of Red Lori, a beautiful witch in the employ of Markoth, whose spirit keeps haunting Kothar by day and night, appearing in a cup of ale and in his dreams, even though her body is imprisoned in a silver cage in Queen Elfa's castle.

The relationship between Kothar and the vengeful witch who haunts him is fascinating, especially since Red Lori is not above occasionally aiding Kothar, for none shall harm him until Red Lori has had her vengeance. It's almost a twisted love story.

After restoring Queen Elfa to her throne, Kothar, his devoted horse Greyling and the magical sword Frostfire, take off for more adventures and are hired to find "The Treasure in the Labyrinth", a treasure which happens to be guarded by all sorts of traps and monsters. After fighting his way through these traps and monsters – and rescuing a lovely and grateful maiden – Kothar faces the final guardian, a Minotaur straight out of Greek legend. Naturally, Kothar prevails and slays the Minotaur, but he is in for a surprise, for the Minotaur turns into a beautiful woman, the lover of a sorcerer who was cursed by his rival. Kothar has managed to lift this curse, though he still cannot lift his own and is promptly double-crossed by his employers, too, losing the treasure to them. However, Kothar's treacherous employers don't get to enjoy the treasure for long, before poetic justice strikes again…

In the final story, Kothar meets "The Woman in the Witch Wood", Lady Alaine of Shallone, who is forced to live alone in the woods, unable to leave due to a spell cast by the villainous Baron Gorfroi. Lady Alaine asks Kothar's help to free her and her people from this evil spell and sneak into the castle to slay the Baron and retrieve the means by which Lady Alaine is kept imprisoned, a lock of her white hair kept in a golden coffin. Unsurprisingly. Kothar succeeds, only to find himself double-crossed yet again by Lady Alaine who uses her magic to turn him into a dog. However, this time around, Kothar expected betrayal and in turn tricks the Lady Alaine…

Pure Barbarian Fun

Regardless of what Donald MacIvers PhD has to say, the adventures of Kothar are not as good as the works of past masters like Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith nor are they quite up to the standard set by the best of the modern practitioners of the genre such as Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny or Joanna Russ.

That said, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman, is a lot of fun. It's the sort of book you will devour in one sitting – I did, interrupted only by consulting Der Große Brockhaus about the mysterious Albert Kremnitz – and smile throughout. Kothar may not be the most original of heroes, though there is enough to distinguish him from the other Barbarians clogging up bookshelves, and his adventures may not be the most original either, though there is usually at least one or two surprising twists. And while "the distinguished American author Gardner F. Fox" may not be Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber – but then who is? – he is a skilled enough writer to weave thoroughly entertaining tales. He is certainly a better writer than Lin Carter who pens similar stories.

I was debating how to rate this book. It's not a masterpiece nor Hugo material, but is so much fun that I shall give it four stars anyway. And should Mr. Fox ever decide to revisit Kothar – who after all is still suffering from the dual curse of sword-induced poverty and a sexy witch haunting him – I will certainly pick up further adventures of the sellsword from Cumberia.

Pure entertainment. Four stars.






[February 12, 1969] Slick stuff (March 1969 Galaxy science fiction)


by Gideon Marcus

The Bad Kind

For 12 days, 21,000 gallons a day of crude oil spilled into the Pacific ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara.  Only on February 8 was the leaking undersea well finally capped. This debacle, courtesy of the Union Oil Co., has blackened the harbors and beaches of the San Gabriel Valley coastline, killing hundreds of sea birds.  Even Governor Reagan is declaring this mess a disaster, making federal funds available for cleanup.

Newspaper picture of Coast Guard Admiral Chester Bender and Senators Muskie and Cranston inspect the oil slick at Santa Barbara Harbor

Nevertheless, the Governor did not relieve the oil company of its obligation to the government agencies and private citizens harmed by this catastrophe.  It will likely take more than 1000 men three weeks to clean up the mess.

The silver lining is that only about 1% of the local seabird population has been affected, and virtually none of the seals.  Indeed, the damage is only about a quarter of that caused two years ago when the super tanker Torrey Canyon broke up off the coast of Southwest England.

Still, if the best we can say is that this crisis is not as bad as the worst, I think we can do better.

The Good Kind

In refreshing contrast to the environmental incident described above, the latest issue of Galaxy is anything but a tragedy:

cover featuring a bird-like aircraft floating on an ocean, with a man on top. Similar aircraft are flying in the distance.
by Douglas Chaffee illustrating The Weather on Welladay

And Now They Wake (Part 1 of 3), by Keith Laumer

In 1981, just as broadcast power switches on for the first time, an inmate by the name of Grayle makes a daring escape from a New York prison.  He is an enigmatic man, an inmate who looks 35, but who has been incarcerated since before World War 2.  He also possesses an uncanny ability to heal from wounds.

At the same time, another fellow with similar powers stumbles drunk out of a bar, making his way to a steam room where he miraculously heals a profound set of scars and ejects an antique Minie ball from a wound in his back.

These events are coincident with the appearance of a tremendous water spout in the middle of the Atlantic, and interwoven with tales from a thousand years ago of a renegade from the Galactic Fleet named Thor, and his comrade-turned-betrayer, Loki.

Viking era scene where a slave is beset by a haughty noble while others watch. Backdrop is a long ship which has just made shore.
by Jack Gaughan

Who are these two immortals, and why has their story suddenly come to a head?  I don't know…but I'm hooked!

Four stars, so far.

The City That Loves You, by Raymond E. Banks

The Alpha Centauri city of Relax offers everything to its twenty million inhabitants—comfort, company, computerized guidance.  But what happens when a citizen wants to leave?  What if every inducement, soft and hard, is made to keep him there?  Does the fellow really have a choice in the matter?

I read the whole story waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I was not displeased with the result.  In the end, for a place to truly be paradise, there must be a way out.  The socialiast utopias of the world, from Bulgaria to Beit Ha Shita, might take note.

Four stars.

Leviathan, by Lise Braun

An advanced submarine, akin to the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea rescues a primitive fisherman lost at sea in the Atlantic Ocean.  This inadvertently gives rise to a number of familiar legends.

This is an old-fashioned story; it would have been right at home in Imagination in 1954.  I do like the clever, organic way Braun conveys that the action takes place thousands of years in the past, and the reading is pleasant, if not extraordinary.

Three stars.

The Weather on Welladay, by Anne McCaffrey

illustration of a woman in a skin-tight, belted suit, gripping her shoulder. She stands in what looks like a big rock formation. A man in a black, skin-tight suit is behind her, arm oustretched.
by Reese

The sodden, storm-lashed world of Welladay seems too bleak a world for settlement.  However, schools of whales that inhabit it produce a valuable radioactive substance prized for medical applications.  A team of hardy fishermen taps these whales for their lymphic treasure, braving the waves and weather.

But some pirate has been draining the whales dry, decimating the population and threatening the economy and health of the Federation.  Is it one of the four fishers?  The mysterious woman space pilot shot down at the beginning of the tale, who crashes on a lonely archipelago?  Or someone else?

This is definitely one of McCaffrey's better stories, with far more atmosphere (no pun intended) and far less barely suppressed violence and hokey romance.  It goes on a little long, and I find it improbable that this vast planet seems to have exactly six people on it, but I enjoyed it.

Three stars.

For Your Information: Collision Course, by Willy Ley

Mr. Ley's piece this month is on asteroids that cross Earth orbit, particularly Icarus, which precipitated the 49th end-of-the-world scare since the birth of Christ.

Interesting and useful, though rather brief.

Three stars.

four-panel image depicting the stages of crater formation, from meteorite impact, to explosion, to resulting crater.

The Last Flight of Dr. Ain, by James Tiptree, Jr.

A sick scientist and his dying love make a multi-stop air flight around the world.  At each landing, he makes sure to expose as many people as possible to what appears to be an aerosol for cold symptoms, and he feeds bread crumbs to migratory birds.  As the story unfolds, told mostly in third-party reports, we learn the scientist was working on a deadly disease, and that he thinks of humanity as a blight on the Earth.

There's no subtext to the story—it's all on the surface—but it's beautifully told and very eerie.  I liked it; my favorite from Mr. Tiptree so far.  Four stars.

The Theory and Practice of Teleportation , by Larry Niven

drawing of various teleport booth configurations: E and F face each other, a man shooting a gun into E and getting hit in the back of the head from F; C is on top of a cliff, A and B are on the ground, and D is on a railroad track

Adapted from a lecture Niven gave at Boskone in front of the MIT Science Fiction Society, this is an interesting look at the effects of teleportation, in all its potential developmental paths, on society.

Four stars.

Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts, by Brian W. Aldiss

A darkly humorous story set in the near future, satirizing the world of executives. They all hate each other but are not allowed to express it or complain, so they do things that they can claim are generous as an act of passive aggression.

For instance, one gifts another with a genetically tailored midget Tyrannosaurus…which promptly eats the recipient's leg.  Said giftee then names the dinosaur after the giftor's coquettish wife and turns up at the giftor's funeral with the creature to terrorise people, but in doing so claims it is a lovely tribute.

Rather obtuse and pointless.  I didn't like it.

One star.

(with thanks to Kris for co-writing this review-let).

Godel Numbers, by J. W. Swanson

three men in suits look at an enigmatic black flat cuboid that looks like a bar of dark soap
by Jack Gaughan

200 miles west of Cairo, archaeologists have dug up what they're calling the "Cairo Stone".  It is a black tablet, obviously artificial, clearly advanced, and meticulously carved with a series of scratch marks.  Dated to 3000 B.C., it could not have been made by a contemporary terrestrial civilization.  It's up to three scientists, a melange of linguists and computer engineers, both to crack the code of the tablets and to fend off Soviet agents.

In the end, the tablet serves much the same purpose as the monolith(s) in 2001, jump-starting humanity's progress.  It's an amiable, old-fashioned sort of tale, and so esoteric that it probably would have done well, if not better, in Analog.

Three stars.

Cleaning up

All in all, the latest Galaxy makes for pleasant, if not outstanding, reading.  I would certainly much rather read about Godel numbers, teleportation, immortals, and isotopic pirates than oil slicks any day!






[February 2, 1969] Winners and Losers (March 1969 IF)


by David Levinson

A different civil rights struggle

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

Continue reading [February 2, 1969] Winners and Losers (March 1969 IF)

[January 28, 1969] Slidin' (February 1969 Analog)


by Gideon Marcus

Mudslides

Winter is the wet season for Southern California, and we've been just drenched these past weeks.  I understand seven inches of rain fell in the Los Angeles area, causing terrible mudslides, property damage, and injury.  Apparently, things were made worse by a spate of arson last year that got rid of the stabilizing undergrowth.

Ontario's Foothill Boulevard looking west toward Red Hill Country Club Drive, flooded. (Daily Report photo)
Ontario's Foothill Boulevard looking west toward Red Hill Country Club Drive, flooded. (Daily Report photo)

I've had many friends ask if we're alright, afraid we might have been swept downstream in the torrent.  Rest assured that Vista is disaster-proof (knock on wood), and our house is at the top of a hill.  We had some deep pools of water in the backyard, but they've since drained.  Our neighbors have gotten invaded by bugs seeking refuge from the storm, though.

A man runs past a station wagon that was washed two blocks down Carnelian Avenue, along with part of the road surface. (Daily Report photo)
A man runs past a station wagon that was washed two blocks down Carnelian Avenue, along with part of the road surface. (Daily Report photo)

Ups and Downs

If the physical world is getting washed away, one edifice that manages to stand firmly, if not always proudly, is Analog, science fiction's most popular magazine.  Has this month's issue slid at all, or is it holding fast?  let's see:

Analog cover featuring drawing of woman holding a baby swathed in christmas light glows/><br />
<small><small>by Kelly Freas</small></small></p>
<p><b><big><a href=A Womanly Talent, by Anne McCaffrey


by Kelly Freas

We're back in the world of psionic talents, perhaps related to the stories that involve ladies in towers.  A pair of politicians want to pass a law protecting and enabling the psionically adept, legitimizing things like professional prognosticators and psychic manipulators.  A Luddite strawman, name of Zeusman, is against it.

Meanwhile. Ruth is the wife of Lajos, a precog.  She is frustrated because she has an unidentified talent, and also because she really wants to be a mom.  Eventually, the latter frustration is relieved, and her daughter ends up demonstrating what Ruth's power really is.

Aside from the tale beginning with ten pages of conversation that reads more like a Socratic dialogue than a story, I just find McCaffrey's writing so flat and amateur.  I'm sure all the psi stuff was music to editor Campbell's ears, including lines like "Those who truly understand psionic power need no explanation. Those who need explanation will never understand," but it doesn't work for me.  Beyond that, McCaffrey's attitudes on the relations of the sexes is so atavistic, although I suppose she gets points for talking about sex at all.  Maybe Campbell likes that, too.

Two stars.

You'll Love the Past, by J. R. Pierce

Illustration for You'll Love the Past with a bunch of heads of the characters in the story
by Leo Summers

A time traveler from the 21st Century takes a trip in a time machine to the 24th Century.  A war has transformed society: America is now largely mixed race, with the whitest of the population an inbred and stupid group.  Socially, the continent is organized into placid socialist cooperatives run by religious Brothers, advanced technology provided by the Japanese.  It's the sort of world one can be happy in…provided one is favored by the status quo.  Every so often, one of the non-favored tries to escape.

Not a bad story, even if it seems to be obliquely casting aspersions on Communists of darker hue.

Three stars.

The Man Who Makes Planets, by G. Harry Stine

picture of Ken Fag holding a globe of Mars he has painted in front of a large globe of Saturn he painted./><br />
<small><small>Photos by G. Harry Stine</small></small></p>
<p>A nifty piece by <i>Analog's</i> resident rocket enthusiast about a fellow who makes model planets for a living.  I'd get one for my house, but they're a bit pricey—a quarter of a hundred large!</p>
<p>Four stars.</p>
<p><b><big><i>Extortion, Inc.</i>, by Mack Reynolds</big></b>	</p>
<p><img decoding=
by Leo Summers

Yet another piece set in the (anti-) Utopian future of People's Capitalism, where North America has become a stratified welfare state, and money is a thing of the past.

Rex, last of the private dicks, is engaged by a government minister to find out who stole the plans for a miniaturized nuclear bomb, and why said criminal is blackmailing him, threatening to distribute the plans should a ransom not be paid promptly.

The solution to this mystery is actually trivial, and the story isn't quite long enough for what it's trying to do.  Nevertheless, I always find this setting interesting.  And perhaps prescient.  There was piece in last week's newspaper about the National Urban League's proposal for a universal income…

Three stars.

Wolfling (Part 2 of 3), by Gordon R. Dickson

illustration of the main character teleporting into a space, wearing a beret and tartan, surprising two alien soldiers and their leader
by Kelly Freas

Back in part one, Jim Kiel was sent from Earth to study the intergalactic empire whose fringes were discovered when a Terran probe made it to Alpha Centauri.  An anthropologist and ubermensch, Jim is essentially a spy, though the High Born of the empire don't know that—they think that he's an interesting curiosity, favored for his bullfighting skills and independent thinking.

This installment begins just after Jim's first encounter with the Emperor, a genial, capable man who, nevertheless, seemed to suffer a stroke.  A stroke that no one but Jim noticed.  Much of this middle installment is devoted to Jim's navigation of High Born society, attempting to master the reading machines to determine if Earth really is a long-lost colony of the empire or something else, and also how he discovers and foils an insurrection attempt with designs on incapacitating the empire's leader.  In the last portion, Jim is promoted to the equivalent of a Brigadier General and sent to quell a rebellion.  This is actually a trap designed to kill him, but he neatly sidesteps it.  Now he wants to know why he's marked for death.

The pot continues to boil.  There's a lot of the flavor of Dickson's Dorsai series, but with a different, perhaps even more interesting, setting.

Four stars.

A Chair of Comparative Leisure, by Robin Scott

illustration of a suit-vested professor and little bubbles surrounding him illustrating seens from history
by Leo Summers

A stammering professor somehow manages to be the most magnetic, as well as effective at conveying information.  Does his technique go beyond the verbal?

(Yes.  He has the power of psychic projection.  Whoopee.  Two stars.)

Calculating the damage

Japanese ad for a Hitachi computer with a Japanese woman leaning over a machine

You win some, you lose some, and this month's issue clocks in at exactly three stars.  While nothing could compare with the superlative four-star Fantasy and Science Fiction, three stars is still lower than New Worlds (3.3) and Galaxy (3.2).  It does beat out IF (2.8) and Fantastic (2.2), however.

You could fill as many as three issues with good stuff out of the six that were put out—in large part thanks to how great F&SF was this month.  Nevertheless, women contributed very little of that, with only 6.67% of new fiction written by female writers, most of that Anne McCaffrey's drudge of a story.

Still, in an uncertain world, I can't complain too much.  Especially since, mudslides or no, the Post Office still manages to get me my magazines on time!






[December 22, 1968] What wonders await? (January 1969 Fantasy and Science Fiction)


by Gideon Marcus

Where'd you get those peepers?

Few things excite the imagination more than adventures in space.  In particular, we love to hear about doings in the cosmos that can't be done on Earth.  And one of the main things we can't do on Earth is see the sky.

Oh sure, when you look out at the starry night, you think you're witnessing infinity.  In fact, your eyes barely apprehend a tiny fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum.  We are blind to radio waves, to ultra violet, to X-rays, to infrared.  Our sophisticated telescopes are similarly handicapped.  Even the mighty 200 inch telescope on Mount Palomar can't see in most of light's wavelengths, for they are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere.  In the X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, and cosmic ray bands, the glass seeing-eye tubes are as sightless as we are.

Which is why the launch of the Orbiting Astronomy Observatory (OAO) on December 7, 1968, was such an exciting event.  Dubbed "Stargazer", it is the very first space telescope.

Well, technically, it's the second.  The first one went up on April 8, 1966, but its power supply short circuited shortly after launch, and it never returned any data.  This is a shame, as there were some nifty experiments on board, including a gamma ray experiment similar to the one carried on Explorer 11, another gamma ray counter supplied by NASA's Goddard center, and a Lockheed-made X-ray counter.  But, the main experiment, a set of seven telescopes designed to look in the ultraviolet spectrum, provided by the University of Wisconsin, was duplicated for OAO-2.

This telescope cluster will be used for long-term observation of individual stars, something that only recently became possible with the perfection of star tracking technology.  In addition, the Smithsonian has provided an additional package of four telescopes for the investigation of large masses of stars, up to 700 per day, to get an overall UV map of the sky.

Think of how revolutionary it was when the first radio observatories began mapping the heavens.  We learned about the existence of quasars and weird storms on Jupiter and also a lot more about the stars we had been observing visually for centuries.  Stargazer is about to give us a whole new view of the universe.

That's exciting—truly science fiction made fact!

Jeepers Creepers

While we wait to see what excitement OAO 2 returns from the heavens, let's turn to the latest F&SF to see what terrestrial treasures await us this month.


by Gahan Wilson

A Meeting of Minds, by Anne McCaffrey

We return to the world of "The Lady in the Tower", one of my favorite McCaffrey stories, for the lead story this issue.

Damia, the daughter of that first story's protagonist, is 20 and humanity's strongest telepath.  As tempestuous as she is beautiful and brilliant, she has refused the attentions of men, holding out for something…better.

That's when she meets Sodan, an alien inexorably approaching the Terran sphere from far, intragalactic space. Thus ensues a completely mental courtship, and Damia becomes infatuated with the foreign entity.  But Afra, an experienced mentalist, who has been secretly in love with Damia for ages, is suspicious.  What if the being is simply manipulating Damia so that Earth's greatest defense will be neutralized?

The stage is set for a cosmic battle, and a realignment of Damia's priorities.

I really wanted to like this story.  I was anticipating an "Is There in Truth no Beauty?" romance where two beings find love despite fundamental physical differences.  Instead, the viewpoint shifts from Damia's to Afra's early on, and all we get is his certainty that Sodan is up to no good, which is vindicated.  Then, after the battle, Damia realizes the worthy that's been under her nose this entire time and, of course, gives him her love.

Of late, there has been a shallowness to the emotion displayed in McCaffrey's writing that just puts me off.  Also, a sort of petty volatility.  All of her characters snipe at each other constantly.  But the real nadir of the story comes at the end:

Shyly, her fingers plucking nervously at her blanket, Damia was unable to look away from an Afra who had altered disturbingly. Damia tried to contemplate the startling change. Unable to resort to a mental touch, she saw Afra for the first time with only physical sight. And he was suddenly a very different man. A man! That was it. He was so excessively masculine.

How could she have blundered around so, looking for a mind that was superior to hers, completely overlooking the fact that a woman's primary function in life begins with physical submission?

I feel like if Piers Anthony had written that, we'd have given him the Queen Bee.  Two stars.

A Brook in Vermont, by L. Sprague de Camp

De Camp muses poetically on the Carboniferous, and what future beings, millions of years hence, will burn the coal being formed today.

I think the author missed a real opportunity to imply that we would be the anthracite mined in the far future, suggesting that we run the very real risk of leaving nothing to the ages but our combustibility.

Three stars as is.


by Gahan Wilson

Black Snowstorm, by D. F. Jones

This is nothing more, nothing less, than an extremely well-told story of a plague of locusts. There's no satire, no metaphor, no literary experiments. Both shoes drop simultaneously, though slowly, gradually, rivetingly.

Five stars.

Unidentified Fallen Object, by Sydney Van Scyoc

One day, a small UFO falls with the snow, and a precocious teen boy picks it up to examine.  As he handles the small craft, flakes of it come off, perhaps sliding into his very pores.  Soon, he begins to radiate a frightful miasma, inciting hatred in all approach him.

Including his teacher, who has also touched the fell ship…

"Object" is a chilling, effectively written little horror.  It's not particularly to my taste, and it's a bit one-note, so it's just a three-star story for me.  Others may find more to like (for those who enjoy a sense of dread).

How I Take Their Measure , by K. M. O'Donnell

In the future, everybody's on relief…or administering it.  This is a little slice-of-life story about a sadistic relief worker, who gets off on the tenterhooks he hangs his relief applicants on.  No Brock, George C. Scott's kindhearted social worker from East-Side, West-Side; this guy is a real bastard.

This is my favorite story about terminal unemployment that I've read since one in IF a decade ago (the one about the guy who gets a job tightening all the screws on the buildings in the cities—which have been systematically unscrewed by some other schnook the night before…).

Four stars.

Santa Claus vs. S. P. I. D. E. R., by Harlan Ellison

Here's St. Nick like you've never seen him before.  In the style of Ian Fleming's James Bond series (though not Edward S. Aaron's Sam Durrell, Harlan offers up Agent Kris Kringle, a hard-stomached, oversexed, lean killer whose red suit is filled with every lethal device known to Elfkind.  His nemesis is S.P.I.D.E.R., an international organization devoted to evil.  This time, their nefarious scheme involves mind control: they have brainwashed LBJ, HHH, Nixon, Daley, Reagan, and Wallace into doing the most horrid deeds, and only the jolly agent from the North Pole can defeat them.

Okay, it's a bunch of silly fluff, probably written between bonafide adventure yarns Ellison probably writes under another name like "Rod Richards" or "Length Peters".  I did appreciate how every cruddy thing in the world is ultimately attributable to S.P.I.D.E.R.—humanity is basically good and cuddly.  Only the nefarious "them" subvert our goodness.

I've often noted that comic books and spy novels offer an easy way out for readers.  It's tough to deal with everyday problems, with economic malaise, with systemic issues that cause crime and misery.  How much easier to topple the goon of the week to get our cathartic kicks.  Ellison lets us know he understands the flavor of his own cheek with the subtlety within the broadness.

That said, it's a one-note joke, and once you've gotten the punchline, I don't think the story bears much rereading, especially since it is so very much of a very specific moment in our history (as Judith Merril notes in her book column, August 1968 already feels like an age ago).

Three stars.

The Dance of the Satellites, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor continues his examination (see last month's piece) of what the Galilean moons of Jupiter might look like from the innermost moon, Amalthea.  This time, he focuses on eclipses, the appearance of the moons in Jupiter-shine, and more.

Interesting cosmic data, of use to writers and laymen alike.  Four stars.

The Legend and the Chemistry, by Arthur Sellings

The 3607th (or was it 3608th) interstellar exploration mission from Earth seems like it will be yet another humdrum operation.  In all the expeditions, though many aliens have been found (most humanoid), all have been planetbound, none of them having reached our space traveling level of technology.

This latest planet is no exception, its humaniform denizens possessing a primitive tribal culture.  But they have no less pride than any other race.  What happens when the very existence of far superior beings constitutes an unpardonable affront?  And who is responsible for the catastrophe that ensues?

A decent, moralistic yarn from the late, great Arthur Sellers.  This may well be his last work published (unless he has a posthumous career like Richard McKenna) as he died recently.  While Legend is not the best thing he's ever written, it has its own kind of power.

Three stars.

Wild ride

There are a lot of vicissitudes in this first F&SF of the year.  The strong points cancel the weak points, and the magazine ends in positive territory, but because the lack of consistency makes things a bit sloggish.

Well, that's why I do this, right?  To be your guide to ensure you only get the highlights!