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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 14, 1968] Triple John (February 1968 Galactoscope)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson

Drugs seem to be everywhere these days in science fiction. From Aldiss’ Acid War stories in New Worlds, through Dick’s Faith of Our Fathers in Dangerous Visions, to Brunner’s Productions of Time in Fantasy & Science Fiction. Some days I wonder if I am the only person in fandom that isn’t getting high and floating up among The Stars That Play with Laughing Sam’s Dice.

As such, it was only a matter of time before we got a real hip novel that fully blurs the boundary between fantastic and the psychedelic. Anderson is the one to give it to us.

One Pill Makes You Larger

So, what is this book about? On a basic plot level it is about Chester and Mike (fictionalised versions of the author and his sometimes co-writer) who seem to be sort of hippies living in 1977. They discover people affected by a mysterious new drug called Reality Pills, which cause psychedelic hallucinations to physically appear, such as a kid able to create butterflies and another person with their own halo. They set about tracking down the source of this, which, as the cover gives away, turns out to be extra-terrestrial.

As you can imagine, this gets very surreal quickly. Here is a sample conversation:

“Excuse me,” said another tall blue lobster, making its way to the john.
“One of yours?” I wondered. “I thought it was one yours.”
“I don’t like blue lobsters.”

Your willingness to just go with these kinds of sections without any prelude will likely dictate your enjoyment of the novel.

One Pill Makes You Small

But that, for me, isn’t what the book is really about. Rather, it gives us a window on to a subculture, the lives of dropouts and experimental rock groups in Greenwich Village right now. As I have not been there myself, I cannot speak to the reliability of Anderson’s vision but it is a vivid one imbued with a feeling of time and place, just as clear as if someone was talking to me about Middle Earth Club in London.

That is not to say I understood it all, and New Yorkers may well be able to “dig” more of it than I do, but it feels real and lived in, in a way so much science fiction does not.

And The Ones Your Mother Gives You, Don’t Do Anything At All

There are certain parts that do not work as well for me. It is filled with a lot of references to New York life and pop culture, some of which I understood (e.g. use of an obscure Tolkien simile) but other meanings were totally lost on me.

Perhaps more importantly, I am not certain if it is really “about” anything much. With its style and boundary pushing content, it is clearly aiming more for the literary than Campbell-esque end of the market. But Last Exit To Brooklyn this is not, whilst the current trial for that book’s UK publication hinges on its merits as a great work of literature, I cannot help but feel that argument could not be made in this case. Scenes like the Goddess Fellatia attempting to rape a police officer feel added more for the sake of shock value than any complex point being made.

Remember What The Dormouse Said, “Feed Your Head!”

Having said all that, I believe it still passes Sturgeon’s Law and is better than 90% of science fiction on the market. It is not perfect by any stretch and falls down in a number of areas. But it is still quite a groovy trip to take.

Four Stars

Here are some damning short takes from Kris and Jason–and both involve Lin Carter and Belmont Books!

The Thief of Thoth, by Lin Carter, and …And Others Shall Be Born, by Frank Belknap Long

"Belmont Double? Don't Bother. Dead Boring, Better-off Dreaming!"

Tower at the Edge of Time, by Lin Carter

"Ugh I just can’t get into this stupid barbarian book. Lin Carter’s writing is so full of stereotypes and clichés. I’ve tried a few times to get through it and can’t. I’m tagging out for this month."


by Gideon Marcus

Ace Double H-40

Here's another shortish take, simply because this Double doesn't merit more:

C.O.D. Mars, by E. C. Tubb


Art by Jack Gaughan

The first interstellar journey results in horror: of the five crew, only three remain alive. The other two are carriers of an extraterrestrial disease, or perhaps worse–unwitting vessels of an alien invasion.

Someday, someone might write a superb book or series of books about a private investigator who jaunts through the asteroid belt, trying to thwart a Martian plot to weaponize alien technology (in the guise of infected humans) to gain an upper hand against Earth. This one isn't it.

It's not bad, but it's back to the humdrum potboiling that's associated with Tubb (sad, because we know he, and Ace, can do better–viz. The Winds of Gath). Part of the issue is the length; this is really a long novella, and the ending is rushed and pat–probably as a result.

Three and a half stars.

Alien Sea, by John Rackham


Art by George Zei

A ruined ship crewed by extra-terrestrials, the last survivor of a devastating planetary conflict, makes a close approach to their alien sun. As its hull chars and the crew and passengers succumb one by one to the heat, their only hope is that their cometary orbit will swing it quickly back for a rendezvous with their doomed world. But when they reach home, they find the doomsday weapons have sunk the two warring continents. All that is left is waves…and survivors on an enemy satellite. Together, they must build a new society, one free from strife.

Great premise! I was certainly hooked. Sadly, that's just the first chapter.

Then there's a jump of two millennia, and the focus is on a human conflict. Earthers have arrived on this alien world, unaware of the planet's history or inhabitants, intending to establish a fueling station. But rivals from Venus, peopled by intellectual exiles from Earth, have made contact with the indigenes. They are putting together an alien/Venusian invasion force to take Earth for their own.

The main body of the text, involving a telepathic sensitive who records experiences for television audiences at home, as well as the panoply of beautiful and topless (but at least capable) women he encounters, reads like a tepid planetary adventure from the '50s, complete with two-page digressions to lovingly describe some new piece of technology.

Two and a half stars.


by Fiona Moore

Chocky, by John Wyndham

John Wyndham’s latest novel, Chocky, an expansion of a novelette of the same name published in Amazing Stories in 1963, will be something of a disappointment to fans of the blend of cutting social commentary and dystopian science fiction which has characterised most of his novels to date. It’s much more in the mode of Wyndham’s earlier short fiction, but stretched out to the point where the conceit fails to hold the reader’s attention.

Plotwise, not an awful lot happens. A young boy, Matthew Gore, develops what his father, our point-of-view character, takes to be an imaginary friend, Chocky. It’s fairly apparent to the reader, though not so much to his family and teachers, that Chocky is an alien scout who is investigating the Earth through a telepathic rapport with Matthew. Chocky asks a lot of questions about things like geography, internal combustion engines, and gender; in return Chocky teaches Matthew sophisticated mathematical concepts like binary systems, and is sometimes able to take him over and impart abilities he doesn’t naturally possess. After a couple of incidents where Chocky, working through Matthew, does something which winds up in the national press, the family comes to wider, and possibly more sinister, attention.

And… well, that’s it. The action never gets exciting enough to be a thriller. Matthew and his family are never well-developed enough for this to become a poignant character piece. Details like the fact that Matthew is adopted are introduced but never achieve wider relevance. Matthew’s collection of busybody relatives lurk in the wings as a threat to Chocky’s privacy, but that’s all they remain: a minor complication. There’s very little sense of peril or threat from Chocky as there was from the children in The Midwich Cuckoos; the alien is just here to observe, not to take over. The setup, with a cosy suburban family, suggests that Chocky will upend that cosiness and force their prejudies and banalities into the open, but we’re disappointed on that score too. Wyndham does have some of his usual fun with the foibles of middle-class British society, but he never really twists the knife.

It’s frustrating because this could have been a much more exciting and relevant book. A story in which a little boy’s life is torn apart by scientists and politicians desperate to make first contact with aliens could have been heartrending; a story in which a lonely child’s isolation is used for sinister ends by a non-human being likewise. The first part of the book focuses so heavily on the social pressure Matthew’s parents felt to have children that one thinks this will be one of the themes of the story, however, this isn’t paid off either.

But there’s not much point in speculating about what Chocky could have been. It is what it is—an overextended novelette that promises much but delivers little, and is a disappointment compared to the works which made Wyndham famous. Two out of five stars.



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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 14, 1967] Threat level: High (October Galactoscope)

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by Gideon Marcus

We've got a triple (maybe quadruple) play for you this morning.  Dig in and enjoy the bounty!

Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Arthur Wheeler

With so many new books coming out, it's not often that we at the Journey can devote inches to older titles.  However, the original Fail-Safe has been staring me in the face for the past four years, and when I finally picked it up, I found I couldn't put it down.  Morever, the events depicted in the book are supposed to take place in 1967, so what better year to review it?

If you've seen the movie, then you know the plot of the book: mechanical malfunction causes a flight of bombers, responding to a false threat, to head irretrievably on an atomic raid of Moscow.  Indeed, the movie is in many ways a shot-for-shot rendition of the print version.  The differences pertain to the medium: we get several mini-biographies of the main characters, including the translator, the war-monger, the self-loathing SAC General, the commander of the Omaha base.  There are also occasional, Marooned-style depictions of the technology involved, in lurid detail.

But the events are the same, the dialogue is largely the same, the agony is the same.  Fail-Safe is the story of breakdown–of huge computerized networks failing for the disruption of tiny components, of people failing when confronted with clashing instructions.  Despite the fundamental tragedy of the story, it is ultimately a hopeful book.  It says that people made this death trap we live in, and only people can get us out of it.  And thankfully, there are still good people left in the positions that matter.

Indeed, the main divergence between the book and movie is that the two national leaders involved are not generic statesmen but real people: Kennedy and Khruschev.  This is a little jarring given that neither outlasted the book's publication by very long.  However, it's also fundamental to the plot.  Burdick and Wheeler ascribe a basic competence and goodness to these particular national leaders, qualities that keep the world from exploding when all factors say it should.

Were the two "K"s given too much credit?  Are LBJ and Kosygin men we can trust to steer us clear from the edge of disaster?  Those are questions that can only be answered by biographers in the first instance, and in the moment for the second.  May summits like the recent one in Glassboro ensure the latter never needs answering.

Four stars.

The Invaders, by Keith Laumer

Have you seen The Invaders?  It's a dopey riff on The Fugitive, instead of Richard Kimball running from the law for a murder he didn't commit, at the same time tracking down the real killer, it's about an architect running from alien invaders, while he also plans a counterattack.

The Fugitive was, itself, a riff on Route 66, about two hunks Kerouac-ing across the country doing odd jobs trying to find themselves.  The Fugitive works because Kimball has a reason to keep moving, but, as a doctor, a moral obligation to help people wherever he goes.  There's a reason the show lasted four years.

The Invaders doesn't work for lots of reasons — being an architect doesn't fundamendally involve protagonist David Vincent in anything.  The aliens are laughably inept, betraying themselves with crooked pinky fingers, and yet Vincent can never really get anyone to believe him.

It's a dumb show.

So, of course it has a tie-in novel.  Keith Laumer probably wrote this one in his sleep and happily pocketed the $2000 royalty to pay for his next trip to London.  It is cliché-ridden and tired, a typical potboiler with a B-movie plot and science decades out of date.

It's still better than the show.

It's better because Laumer's Vincent discovers the aliens through canny investigation rather than stumbling on them at an old diner (tracking several seemingly unrelated factory production orders; once the widgets are assembled, they make a ray gun).  It's better because Laumer is a competent action writer.  It's better because the book is highly divergent from the show, only retaining the name of the hero, the plot of invasion (even the aliens are quite different — their high temperature gives them away), and the William Conrad-esque narration that precedes and succeeds the three vignettes included in this first volume.

Three stars.  Why not?

Belmont Double B50-779

The second Belmont Double, poor imitation of the Ace Double follows a similar format to the first: one old novella combined with a newly commissioned one.

Doomsman, by Harlan Ellison

These days, Harlan's name is associated with avante garde stuff, the cutting edge of the New Wave laden with emotion and impact.

Back in the late '50s, when he was cranking out material for the profusion of SF digests, Harlan's work was of more variable quality.  Doomsman originally came out in the last issue (October 1958) of Imagination as The Assassin, and it is lesser Ellison.

A hundred years from now, the Western Hemisphere is dominated by the AmeriState, a totalitarian regime that ascended in the ashes of an atomic war.  Power is maintained by an assassin's corps, of which one Juanito Montoya, abducted from the Pampas of Argentine in his early manhood, is a typical example.  He can kill in a thousand different ways, endure most any climate, and he lacks even the rudiments of empathy or civilization.

But in one way, he is different from his peers, for he comes to learn that he is the son of Don Eskalyo, a princeling who would topple the AmeriState.  Once in possession of this knowledge, he resolves to stop at nothing to meet Eskalyo and join his forces.  Except, of course, that's just what the AmeriState wants him to do…

Doomsman is a brutal, unpleasant story, rife with torture and grossness.  In particular, I could have done without the introduction of the lone female character, the nude and violated (but still desirable, of course!) imprisoned young woman who proves the linchpin to finding Eskalyo.  Not only did I find her character a sop to the more lewd readers, but though Ellison makes it clear that she endured three months of the worst tortures without cracking, she succumbs to Montoya's techniques immediately.  And we never learn what these techniques are.  Obviously, it's an author's trick to imply how effective and monstrous these methods are, but it just comes off as implausible and a cheat.

The one thing Doomsman's favor is it is never dull.  That's not enough.  2.5 stars.

Telepower, by Lee Hoffman

Lee Hoffman is a name I've heard a lot in the fanzines, but I've never met her because she lives in Chicago.  It's always a delight to see a fan turn into a (filthy) pro, and the main reason I picked up this Double is because of her byline.

Her book takes place in and around the post-atomic ruins of Cleveland, which have settled into a sort of medieval complacency, its inhabitants placid and staid.  The defense of the city is left to the soldiers, an almost robotic breed of human, who live outside the city walls.  The main threat to Cleveland isn't other men–it's waves upon waves of rats.  The story opens up with such an attack, and we are introduced to Beldone, one of the many anonymous drones in the ranks.

Beldone, unlike his companions, develops a spark of curiosity, of individuality.  This terrifies him since such is a sign of illness, and the remedy for illness is execution.  We quickly learn that this spark is externally created: inside the city dwells the beautiful, and bored, Illyna.  In a fit of ennui, she developed the embers of a psychic power, initially telepathic in nature but ultimately controlling.  Beldone was her first contact, and through him, she seeks to learn more about the world she inhabits–and to find a way to control it.

There's a lot of disturbing stuff in this novel.  Folks who are turned off by depictions of violence, depictions of rats, and/or depictions of telepathic mind control may wish to give this piece a miss.  It's also not a happy story, even when it is triumphant.  But it is an interesting, well-written one, and I look forward to more of Hoffman's work.

3.5 stars.



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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 18, 1967] Highs and Lows (July Galactoscope #2)

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by Gideon Marcus

We've had a bit of a backlog of books here at the editorial desk, and the only remedy was to have two back-to-back Galactoscopes. Luckily, summer is slow season for TV, and thus the schedule opens up a bit. Sometimes, our book review column comprises a clutch of mediocrities. This time around, the disparity in quality was abnormally high–mostly thanks (no thanks!) to the debut novel by one Piers Anthony…

Chthon, by Piers Anthony

Imagine a world where genetic modification has created a monstrous race of humans. The women are near-immortal semi-telepaths, but they suffer from an emotional inversion: they only feel love and joy when men express hate and pain. You can imagine how warped the ensuing society must be, the females doomed to solicit violence from their partners, the men compelled to express their every animalistic whim on them. One woman of this race escapes this planet, but, a slave to her make-up, cannot escape her wretched fate. Thus, she marries a man wracked with guilt from the death of his first wife in childbirth. When his love for the alien woman becomes unalloyed, she must leave, but not before she bears a child.

But the alien woman still requires love, twisted, painful love, to live. So she seduces her own son, thus ensuring his passion for his mother will always be the appropriate mix of pleasure and pain, and they can live happily ever after.

In-between these episodes, the story takes place on Chthon, the hellish underground garnet mine whence the son is sentenced for murder. Naked and toolless, he must devise an escape, resorting to treachery, violence, rapine, and cannibalism. Of course, we know he will escape because author Piers Anthony elected to tell the story in a ping-pong flashback/flashforward style, starting and ending with scenes on Chthon.

This is a terrible book.

The premise, fundamentally implausible, seems tailored to indulge a male id-fantasy. We already have a problem in our current society whereby women are "othered" into a different species: vain, frivolous, subservient, sinister, yet desirable. With Chthon, Anthony comes up with a scientificititious explanation for why his starring woman must be that kind of creature. Not that the other women in the novel fare much better, consisting of a slave and vicious fellow Chthonian prisoners.

I'm sure Anthony would say that the book is unpleasant because it bares the human (i.e. male) soul, revealing the sordid mess underneath we'd rather not acknowledge. That all men desire to possess our mothers, rape our partners. That hate is really the purest kind of love.

Mr. Anthony needs professional help. Chthon is an odious turd, and I suspect its author is, too. One star, and winner of this year's "Queen Bee" award.


by Cora Buhlert

Like our esteemed host, I also had the misfortune of reading Chthon. I spotted the paperback in my friendly local import store and was intrigued enough by the unusual title to pull it out of the spinner rack. And while I have not read much by Piers Anthony – and am now unlikely to ever read more – he is one of Cele Goldsmith Lalli's discoveries and she normally has a good eye for authors. The blurb on the back of the slim paperback – promising a tale of an inescapable space prison and a man sent there for pursuing a forbidden love affair – sealed the deal, because I am a sucker for space prison stories.

The scenes set on Chthon, the hellish prison planet cum garnet mine, are indeed the one redeeming grace of this novel. Genuinely atmospheric and visceral, they immediately drew me in. However, even these scenes are marred by what will become a recurrent problem, namely the fact that every single woman protagonist Aton Five meets wants to have sex with him, while Aton manfully refuses, because there can only be one woman for him: Malice the forbidden minionette (i.e. his mother, though he doesn't know that yet).

Scenes of Aton's life leading up to his incarceration are interspersed with the scenes on Chthon. Again, there are some interesting ideas here, such as hvee flowers which Aton's family cultivates and which can detect true love. And once again, the good ideas are marred by off-putting sex scenes, such as fourteen-year-old Aton trying to have sex with a thirteen-year-old neighbour girl and failing because human girls have anatomy and fluids, unlike his idealized vision of minionettes.

When Aton rapes a woman on Chthon, the book came close to hitting the wall and I only prevailed because I had promised to review it for the Journey. The book did actually hit the wall – and considering how expensive import paperbacks are, that's saying something – once we got to the planet of the minionettes, genetically engineered to be masochists and enjoy pain, and of course the final twist of just why Aton has been so obsessed with Malice since he was seven years old and that their "love" is forbidden for a very good reason.

Honestly, this is a terrible book. The sexual revolution and the New Wave have made it easier for science fiction to address formerly taboo subjects like sexuality. But just because authors can write about sex now, doesn't necessarily mean that they should foist their sexual fantasies upon unsuspecting readers, particularly the kind Piers Anthony appears to harbor.

Zero stars. Stay away!

Belmont Double 5F0-759

Belmont Publishing has decided to take on the Ace Double is a flaccid sort of way by combining two novellas (calling them "two complete novels") in one thin volume. This is the first result.

Peril of the Starmen, by Kris Neville

First up Kris Neville's 1954 story, Peril of the Starmen, which first appeared in the magazine Imagination. You're welcome to give it a read if you like.

The Flame of Iridar, by Lin Carter

Considering how harsh I was on The Star Magicians, I was surprised to find that Lin Carter's The Flame of Iridar, published as an Ace Double knock-off by Belmont together with Peril of the Starmen by Kris Neville, reprinted from the January 1954 issue of Imagination, was the better of the two books I read this month. Not that this is a high bar to clear, considering how utterly terrible Chthon was.

That said, Lin Carter's writing has improved since last year's The Star Magicians. True, his prose is still overly purple – thews are inevitably iron and mighty, blood and pain are inevitably scarlet, and female breasts are inevitably described by inappropriate adjectives – and Carter is still oddly preoccupied with lovingly describing his protagonist's manly physique. However, at least Carter remembers who his protagonist is this time around.

The protagonist is one Chandar of Orm, a deposed prince turned pirate on ancient Mars, when it still had oceans. If this setting seems familiar, that's because it is, borrowed wholesale form Leigh Brackett's much superior 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars, better known as The Sword of Rhiannon, the title under which it was published as the very first STF Ace Double back in 1953 together with another excellent fantasy adventure, Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard. And indeed, Carter acknowledges this influence and dedicates The Flame of Iridar to Leigh Brackett and her husband Edmond Hamilton.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, July 1946

Ace Double Conan the Conqueror and Sword of Rhiannon

The opening of the novel finds Chandar of Orm in deep trouble. After a successful career as a pirate, he has been captured by the evil warlord Niamnon (occasionally spelled Niamnor in what I hope is not indicative of the quality of Belmont's copy-editing), the man who slaughtered Chandar's entire family in front the then twelve-year-old boy's eyes, and has been sentenced to die in Niamnon's arena, a fate Chandar himself imagines as follows:

A few more hours of darkness, and then the blinding morning sun on the arena sands… a few moments of scarlet pain… and he would rest… forever.

However, before it can come to that, Chandar and his comrade-in-arms Bram are freed by the enchanter Sarkond of K'thom, advisor to none other than King Niamnon himself. Sarkond also helpfully reveals Niamnon's plans of conquest and promises to take Chandar back to his pirate comrades. And in return, he only asks for a little favour. Use the Axe of Orm, a magical weapon that can only be wielded by a member of Chandar's family, to pierce the enchanted Wall of Ice that surrounds the magical realm of Iophar. What can possibly go wrong?

To no one's surprise, Sarkond double-crosses Chandar as soon as Chandar has fulfilled his purpose and hacked through the Wall of Ice. However, Chandar is saved by Meliander, exiled brother of the villainous King Niamnon.

What follows is an epic clash of the forces of good and evil. Chandar also gets revenge on Niamnon and his throne back. Furthermore, he gets entangled with two women, the witch Mnadis, whose breasts are "high and proud", and Llys, Queen of Iophar, whose breasts are "sweet and virginal". Three guesses with which of the two ladies Chandar ends up.

In many ways, The Flame of Iridar feels like the sort of swashbuckling planetary adventure that might have been found in the pages of Planet Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories twenty years ago. It's not as good as Leigh Brackett or Edmond Hamilton at their best, but then who is?

An entertaining adventure that feels like a throwback to the pulp era. Three stars.


by Gideon Marcus

And to continue our positive mood (because after Chthon, a double dose is necessary), let's all dig on Ted White's latest novel:

The Jewels of Elsewhen, by Ted White

Arthur Ficarra, an exhausted ex-beat cop-cum-desk-sergeant, just wants his subway ride to end so he can go to sleep after an overlong shift. But when he responds to the death rattle of a fellow passenger, he discovers to his horror that the stricken man, and everyone on the train but one, is just a mannequin, the train a cardboard model. Only Arthur and a young woman named Kim remain human. Indeed, it turns out they are now the only living things in all of New York City.

But this is not the Big Apple they remember. It is subtly changed, freshly painted, with hollow buildings. Almost a model of itself. And it is disintegrating…

Escape takes them on a whirlwind tour of alternate timelines, the common element of which is that the people speak some variety of Italian. There also is the sense of deliberate manufacture, as well as a shepherding of world events by a secret society of cloaked individuals. Arthur and Kim must solve the riddle of these artificial universes before they are captured and dispatched by these caretakers.

I came in without knowing what to expect. Sure, Rose Benton gave White's last book, Android Avenger, a whopping five stars, but I'd never gotten a chance to read it. All I really knew about the author was that he doesn't like Star Trek (per his column in the latest issue of the Yandro fanzine), he helps edit Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he's chair of the NyCon 3 committee.

I really dug this book. It's written in a punchy but understated style well-suited to mainstream fiction; indeed, I have to wonder if White makes most of his money out of the genre. He's certainly good enough. Arthur and Kim are compelling, strong characters, and the divergent timetracks are nicely detailed. I was in recent correspondence with Ted, and I mentioned that the book reminded me a bit of Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium books. He replied that the resemblance was intentional, and that Laumer had a strong influence on him.

If anything, I like White's even better! Four stars.



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