As we are now into Summer here, the warmer weather leads to reflection, if not introspection, although I am quite excited about the next few months. Not only do we have the impending Apollo mission to land men on the Moon – and how exciting does that sound! – but as I mentioned last month we also have Star Trek starting on the BBC in July. Such news even reached the national newspapers here.
The only annoying part of that last event is that I understand that the Beeb will not show all of them but a selection, chosen from all three seasons. I hope I’m wrong, but as the series is filling in time between July and new Doctor Who in the Autumn, it sounds likely.
More positively, though, and partly based on the comments from my colleagues here at Galactic Journey, I feel that seeing any Star Trek at all has to be good. I’m just pleased that we will have chance to see them here, albeit in black and white – no colour telly luxury for me, I’m afraid. Most British viewers do not have colour televisions.
Another great cover by Mal Dean – that’s two in a row. This one is illustrating Norman Spinrad’s story, The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde.
Lead-In by The Publishers
It's not just me that's in a reflective mood this month – this Lead In points out that the magazine has been five years in its current format and brings us up to date with what’s been happening to the magazine over that time: financial worries, subscription issues, publisher issues and the refusal of certain shops to sell the magazine in public.
It’s a sobering read and yet in the end a positive one, celebrating that the magazine has lasted five years in its current format and with its new agenda.
Coincidentally, this introduction also tells us that Norman Spinrad is now a resident here in Britain, which may or may not be in part due to the publication of Bug Jack Barron in this magazine.
This may be one of the best Langdon Jones stories I’ve read. It’s not for the easily shocked – as is de rigueur for New Worlds. It’s sexually graphic and basically deals with the story of an incestuous relationship between a boy and his mother. I liked the time travel aspect of the story, although it’s not a new science-fiction thing. 4 out of 5.
Wherein Spinrad is the latest author to write about Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius. (The last was Brian W. Aldiss in last month’s issue.) The Beatles, Russians, Mongolians, a facsimile of Las Vegas in China. Chaotic and satirical (what would you expect from the author of Bug Jack Barron? Not a bad effort, frankly. 4 out of 5.
Erogenous Zone by Graham Charnock
Drawing by Mal Dean
The fourth story based in Graham’s world, CRIM – the first was in New Worlds in November 1965, the third last month. It’s a strange world, where advertising is an essential part of society. It’s a two-act story, one where Craven Image (great name! – but also not-coincidentally ‘CR…IM’) is in a car accident and taken to the hospital afterwards, and another where a dying man is being watched by his daughter and her spouse. Not a story to make sense, but lots of vivid imagery and sex. The world is both odd and depressing, with talk of the Dresden bombings, amongst other things. I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 a little, although not quite as ‘out there’ as that. 3 out of 5.
A non-fiction article from Mr. Aldiss, with the promise of more to follow at a later date. It is written more as a monologue, combining Aldiss’s own life with ruminations of life, technology and H. G. Wells. Odd, but engaging. 4 out of 5.
Surface If You Can by T. Champagne
Drawing by Mal Dean
According to the Lead In, Terry Champagne is a sculptor and an author. Her first story here in Britain is about a young couple who rent a fallout shelter as a home, only to find themselves sealed in when what appears to be nuclear bombs fall outside. A surprisingly straightforward story, with a twist at the end, given the New Worlds treatment by including lots of sex and even necrophilia. There’s also cockroaches. 4 out of 5.
Circularisation by Michael Butterworth
And here’s this issue’s attempt to break down traditional prose format by creating a number of ‘radial-planographic condensed word image structures’, rotated around a point. As these things go, I quite liked the concept of these, although I disliked the fact that the author felt he had to explain them for pages at the end. The actual content is symbolic nonsense, of course. 3 out of 5.
An Experiment in Genocide by Leo Zorin
Artist drawings are unlabelled, but possibly by Mal Dean
Leo Zorin’s odd snippets of prose seem to be well-liked by New Worlds readers (or is that editors?) I’m less impressed by most, although this one was more accessible. This one’s about a pervert (actually described as such in the text!) wandering a world of Ballardian car accidents and grotesque characters that feel like they’ve mutated from Moorcock’s world of Elric. More visual, mixed-up imagery as a result. 3 out of 5.
Perjoriative by Robert E. Toomey Jr.
A story that begins with a one-armed man and a dwarf on a bus and ends with a mushroom cloud. A typical New Worlds story of oddness, reminiscent of the rant-y elements of Bug Jack Barron. 3 out of 5.
Book Reviews: Terrible Biological Haste by Kenneth Coutts-Smith Where Kenneth Coutts-Smith looks at the work of artist Aubrey Beardsley.
Book Reviews: Fourteen Shillings Worth of Grass by R. G. Meadley
R. G. Meadley reviews Gunter Grass’s Dog Years as well as a book of his poetry.
Book Reviews: Paperbag by Joyce Churchill
Joyce Churchill (also known as M. John Harrison) reviews some science fiction books, including Edmund Cooper’s “dated” Deadly Image, Anne McCaffrey’s Decision at Doona (from “the Enid Blyton of science fiction”), Michael Frayn’s satire The Tin Men, John Jakes’s The Planet Wizard, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and (unsurprisingly) saves the plaudits for Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, lastly taking a pop at the editor of Ace Books, Donald A. Wollheim, with a quote from his review of Bug Jack Barron;
Book Reviews: The Sexual Gothic Private Eye Caper by Charles Platt
Charles Platt reviews The Image of the Beast by Philip Jose Farmer very positively.
Book Reviews: The Quality of Justice by David Conway
Back to the non-genre stuff. David Conway reviews a philosophical book on the quality and justice of our social practices.
Summing up New Worlds
I was surprised and pleased to find that on balance I enjoyed this more than the last issue. Spinrad makes a decent stab of a Jerry Cornelius story, the Langdon Jones is acceptable (a fairly standard science fiction idea given the New Worlds treatment of sex and incest) and some good work from new writers as well. I even found the poetry less annoying than usual, although I readily accept that I was more interested in the process of creating rather than the content of the poetry.
What was most memorable however was the fighting talk given by the editors at end of the Lead In at the beginning of the issue. As shown here, New Worlds has not been without its difficulties over the past five years, but based on this it looks like it is determined to fight for its place in a literary market.
As far as I know, there aren't a lot of science fiction mystery novels out there. The most famous, of course, are Isaac Asimov's tales of police detective Elijah Bailey and his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw. The Caves of Steel (1953) and The Naked Sun (1956) are classics in this specific combination of genres.
A new book continues the tradition of a detective investigating a murder case in the far future. Will it be up to the level of the Good Doctor's predecessors? Let's find out.
The novel takes place aboard a luxury starship on its way from Earth to Altair. On board is police lieutenant/doctor of psychology Claudine St. Cyr. Her job is to make sure that the king of a planet orbiting Altair gets home safely. This seems like an easy assignment, as the king claims that everybody on his world loves him. It turns out this isn't quite true.
After foiling an assassination attempt on the king, things start to go very badly indeed. Somebody has sabotaged the gizmo that allows the starship to travel faster than light. This threatens to make the whole darn thing blow up, killing hundreds of passengers and crew.
As if that weren't enough, both the captain and the second in command die in mysterious ways. Can St. Cyr solve the crime and save the ship?
Suspects? We've got plenty of 'em. Just about everybody we meet has some kind of secret, from the king to a shopkeeper who sells St. Cyr a wristwatch with a second hand that runs backwards.
Notable among the possible killers are a wild-eyed religious fanatic and a guy with telekinetic powers. It takes a while for the plot to get going, but towards the end the author throws in a ton of twists and turns.
As a murder mystery, it generally plays fair with the reader. There are lots of clues scattered here and there, from a mysterious message left near the sabotaged gizmo to the aroma of a certain brand of cigar. My one quibble with the whodunit plot is that some of the twists depend on people concealing information from St. Cyr (and the reader) for pretty weak reasons.
As science fiction, well, that's a different matter. There's a long discussion of the way the starship gizmo works that is pure doubletalk. We also learn a lot about the way telekinetic powers work; more than I wanted to know, really. Despite the far future setting, it feels more like we're aboard the Queen Mary during the golden age of cruise ships.
A word about St. Cyr as a character. She's highly skilled as a detective and as a psychologist. She is also very beautiful, and just about every male character in the novel falls madly in love with her. She isn't afraid to use her feminine wiles to get information out of these besotted fellows, and this gets to be a bit much at times.
Overall, a light piece of entertainment that passes the time pleasantly, but will fade from memory as soon as you reach the last page.
Three stars.
by Gideon Marcus
The Nets of Space, by Emil Petaja
I've only recently discovered Petaja, a Finnish-extraction author with a fantastical sense imbued in his writing and a penchant for incorporating themes from various mythologies. He's sort of a rip-roaring version of Thomas Burnett Swann, and I always enjoy (though not necessarily love) his work. His latest is no exception.
Cover art by Paul Lehr
The opening is a grabber: Don Quick is a technician bounced from the Alpha Centauri expedition at the last minute. The first scene of the book is a dream sequence in which he is in an enormous cocktail glass with dozens of other naked humans, glazed in brine, and they are one-by-one pulled out and dipped in sauce before being eaten by giant alien crabs.
When he awakens, Don finds himself back on Earth and recalls that he has been a mental patient for months. Is his dream a kind of clairvoyance? Or merely a kind of shell shock from the time he inhaled hyperspatial gas during a pre-launch accident involving the Centaur III? And why, when he falls asleep, does the dream continue sequentially and seem to portend an extraterrestrial invasion of the Earth?
Cervantes' classic Don Quixote figures strongly in this book; it is the external influence Petaja has chosen for his latest adventure. The whole thing is lighthearted enough that you're never too worried about Earth's possible impending disaster. Indeed, The Nets of Space is essentially a comic book in literary form—never mind the science or consistency. But it reads quickly: I finished it on a single flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka.
The Day of the Dolphin is a work of fiction of great contradictions: it’s lighthearted and downbeat, escapist and embedded in the world; engaged in technological innovation and driven by characters; and written in manners both straightforward and elliptical.
If there ever was a book to drive a reader crazy, it’s this one.
At the heart of Robert Merle’s new novel is a fascinating concept. We all know that dolphins are smart animals. As this book reminds us, the brain size and complexity of the average dolphin is roughly analogous to those of a human brain. So what if a wise researcher was able to talk to dolphins in their language and teach dolphins to talk to us in ours? How would those dolphins navigate their learning, how would their approaches to the world be different from those of humans, and what would make those majestic creatures truly happy?
When Merle explores those ideas, The Day of the Dolphin leaps ecstatically like a dolphin leaping out of the water to shoot a basketball through a hoop. There’s a thrilling element of discovery as a secret government laboratory of scientists patiently work with a young dolphin to teach him a few words of English. When he starts to learn English, the scientists provide that dolphin a mate. And the courtship and love affair between the dolphin couple is fascinating and sweet and surprisingly moving. My favorite parts of the novel were the sections in which Merle shows the creatures change each other, drive their relationships and truly build a bond between themselves and the scientists who care for them.
But if a scientific agency is driving this research, you know there has to be some geopolitics involved, and of course there is. In fact, one character notes in a clever bit of metafictional dialogue the moment when the plot takes on Bond or Flint elements. There are human romances inside the research group. But there is also espionage, and secret taping, and a “dolphin gap” argument with the Soviets, and it is to sigh.
Mr. Merle
Because to me, all those moments of connection to the real world take away the most intriguing aspects of the book. The book pivots at its midpoint. At that point. The book swiftly changes from an intellectually absorbing exploration of science into an often dull, often by-the-numbers tale of espionage and intrigue. I predicted around page 20 that the dolphins would be sent on the mission they go on towards the end of this novel, and the impact of those actions were equally as obvious.
Merle writes much of this book in a kaleidoscopical style, full of long paragraphs with stream-of-consciousness approaches which kind of wander and meander from first person to third person, from grounded reality to revelations of emotion and often to outright gibberish. At first this style is thrilling or at least intriguing, but when Merle breaks up that approach with excerpts from letters or interviews conducted by government agencies, that break often feels like a necessary breath of fresh air. I kept finding my mind drifting as the characters’ minds drifted, ungrounded in reality or in this story but instead of my own thoughts about dolphins or work or the Miami Dolphins of the NFL.
It sounds like I hated this book but in truth I enjoyed The Day of the Dolphin for its brazen oddness and for Merle’s obvious passion for both the way he presents his story and the story itself. The more I read about them in this book, the more I wanted to read about our aquatic friends. I now have a nice stack of library books on my desk about Cetaceans because I find that species so interesting. I just wish The Day of the Dolphin had a bit more dolphin and a bit less human in its pages.
The continuing voyage of the new-new-new New Worlds continues apace. (Apologies – I’m still recovering from being told that it looks like the BBC are finally – finally! – going to show Star Trek over here starting in the Summer!)
Well, that’s better!! After the succession of frankly dull covers with faces on, this is a breath of fresh air – scarily dark, vivid, startling – never has Jerry Cornelius looked more frightening. Should get casual readers interested!
Lead-In by The Publishers
The fact that we have two stories of Jerry Cornelius this month is heralded by the Lead-In, as it should.
As we reach the end of the story things begin to make some sense, although to some extent the point of the story is to be confusing, I think!
It is still non-linear, almost dadaist in its narrative structure. This is a story less about plot and more about the little vignettes, scattered across different times and different universes. At times the contradictory nature of these elements add to the confusion.
Keeping it simple, Jerry manages to retrieve the gizmo he has been chasing over the last three parts and we now know that it is important because it allows the user to control multiple universes and see all the alternatives at once. As a result, characters we thought had gone now reappear – Bishop Beesley, Jerry’s brother Frank, Mitzi, and most important to Jerry, his sister Catherine.
The Cure for Cancer is perhaps most important for being an indicator of the times. It is the sort of story I think you need to read with Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, or the Beatles’ White Album playing in the background – both artists have been mentioned in the narrative. Its thoughts on race, war (deliberately satirising Vietnam) and sexual freedom are indicative of being made for an angry, disillusioned and, perhaps most of all, young readership. 4 out of 5.
Three Events of the Same View by John G. Chapman
Another one of those anti-religious stories New Worlds likes. In the first part, Pope Honorius is imprisoned in a castle by the cardinals after declaring there is no God. In the second, a domestic scene involving a garden shed and a request to store cadavers there before an Undertakers Convention. In the third, the view is from a Commandant in a concentration camp. Nice prose, but if there’s a connection, I couldn’t see it. 3 out of 5.
Playback by Granville Hawkins
An un-named narrator uses illegal equipment to play back a recording of sex. It unfolds that the recording is of his wife, who with their children has been killed in a destroyed London by the moralistic "Calvs". As a final act of defiance, our narrator shows the unlawful recording to the public by projecting it onto a chapel wall. It doesn’t end well. An odd yet memorable story, well written, graphically depicting a dystopian future – rather like Orwell’s 1984 meets the Night of the Long Knives, with racist hangings, castrations and sex. 3 out of 5.
Babel by Alan Burns
Drawing by Mal Dean
An author on his debut here. This is a story that has paragraphs, each a different story. In other words, this is Ballard-type pastiche, which could be good, but this is filled with such stream of consciousness nonsense that it feels like a bad hallucinogenic drug trip. For example: “Men are opening the Moon. Streams of wheels have springs of space.” 2 out of 5.
Between the Tracks by Ron Pagett and Tom Veich
A story with the same events repeated over and over, but slightly different each time. Most begin with a ‘boy’ travelling along ‘the tracks’ but things are not what they seem. Allegorical tale, with nods to Bradbury’s Martian stories, I noticed. Nicely done, but I’m not sure I ‘got it’. 3 out of 5.
Spoor by Alan Passes
Photograph by Gabi Nasemann
A story about a man searching for Jayne in a Royal Park. Along the way a number of people around him are suddenly eaten by dangerous animals – a lion, an alligator. At the end he finds Jayne fornicating with a gorilla. I get the impression that all this is meant to be funny (“Me Tarzan, you Jane”, perhaps?), but I just found it unpleasant and meaningless. Another dream-state tale. 2 out of 5.
Flower Gathering by Langdon Jones
Langdon Jones’s latest piece, text written out in pretty patterns (which is rapidly becoming a prose-thing that I hate) to say THE GARLANDS OF LOVE WEAVE FOR US – or is that WEAVE FOR US THE GARLANDS OF LOVE? I guess this is an attempt to give prose a new form, but for me pretty meaningless. 1 out of 5.
Sub-Entropic Evening by Graham Charnock
Photograph by Gabi Nasemann
We’re back in Graham’s CRIM-world for this one. (The first was in New Worlds in November 1968, the last in the March issue three months ago.) This is a story where nothing is what it seems, another set of descriptions written as if the people are in a drug-induced, dream-like state. Jones, Dragon, Velma, and Cat live near an Arena where people seen as enemies of the state are routinely incinerated, and there’s a music concert played by musicians which can cause blindness and death in some sort of suicide pact. It’s all vivid but odd and rather unpleasant. Not a place I’d want to live in, but I guess that is the point. 3 out of 5.
The Fermament Theorem by Brian W Aldiss
Drawing by Mal Dean
In which Brian Aldiss takes up the mantle to write a Jerry Cornelius story. Earlier in the year Mike Moorcock did say that the sharing of the Jerry Cornelius character was about to happen. Is it any good? It is such a confused mess of satire, social commentary and sex that readers will either think of it as a work of genius or be horrified by the unstructured elements claiming to be a story.
Drawing by Mal Dean
I enjoyed it, even if I’m not sure I understood it all. There’s a story in there about the origin of the solar system being allied to the Moon and sex, comments on popularism and culture, not to mention lots of obscure references to people such as astronomer and science fiction writer Fred Hoyle, the Archbishop of Canterbury and author Robert Graves. In summary, Aldiss manages to take the key characteristics of a JC story – fluid sexuality, references to culture, fashion and society – and turn them into a satirical commentary – I think. What I found most interesting was that although Cornelius barely appears in the story, Aldiss has managed to write a Jerry Cornelius story in Moorcock’s style. It doesn’t feel out of place in the Jerry Cornelius series, although lighter in tone than A Cure for Cancer. I’ll give it 4 out of 5, although I accept that it could score anywhere between 2 (unstructured mess) – and 5 (work of genius!) depending on the person reading it.
Book Reviews: Use Your Vagina by J. G. Ballard
Advertisement from the back cover for the reviewed book.
In which J. G. Ballard reviews in detail a “sexual handbook.” Wouldn’t happen in Analog!
Book Reviews: The Boy from Vietnam by M. John Harrison
More relevant, perhaps, Harrison reviews a collection of two stories, one by Aldiss and one by Ballard in a book entitled The Inner Landscape, with varying degrees of success. Harrison then claims that Aldiss is “on better form” with his collection of five novellas in Intangibles, Inc. Eric Burdick’s Old Rag Bone is a non-genre book seemingly dealing with Catholic guilt.
Lastly and in keeping with contemporary themes, Harrison reviews Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? reminding me that the magazine is sold in the US as well as England. The book was reviewed in more detail by Douglas Hill in the March 1968 issue of New Worlds.
Book Reviews: The Comrade from Ploor by James Cawthorn
James Cawthorn generously reviews E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Subspace Explorers as a book that “offers the kind of entertainment that made the good old days of sf what they were” (ie: not the sort of story found in New Worlds today!), Brother Assassin by Fred Saberhagen which “stretches credibility just a little” and John Brunner’s Double! Double! which has “no credibility whatsoever”. There’s also an Ace Double with Code Duello by Mack Reynolds and The Age of Ruin by John M. Faucett, a review of a new biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Richard A. Lupoff, World of the Starwolves—a space opera by Edmond Hamilton, and positive reviews of James H. Schmitz’s This Demon Breed and Hal Clement’s story collection, Small Changes. I was pleased to see some more traditional sf get some positive comments.
Book Reviews: The Machiavellian Method by R. Glynn Jones
R. Glynn Jones reviews a book on tyranny, which is most disconcerting for having photographs of Hitler’s teeth.
Book Reviews: Woman’s Realm by D. R. Boardman
Lastly, D. R. Boardman reviews The Tunnel by Maureen Lawrence, a “competent first novel”. Was mildly pleased to see that it has been written by an ex-academic who is local to me, but not really my sort of thing, being the story of “a bored lonely woman living a boring life”.
Summing up New Worlds
Good news: although the scores may not reflect it, this is a better issue than the last. Although not perfect, the magazine scores with the conclusion of the Moorcock serial and Brian Aldiss’s take on the character. They are recognisably similar yet different, both confusing and subversive. New readers will not have a clue, regular readers will appreciate the word play and anti-establishment satire.
On the other side of the coin, there is also lots of material by relative unknowns, the new lifeblood of the magazine. Most of it is acceptable, though rarely outstanding. For example, the Hawkins was OK, but like Obtuowicz’s story last month really was another unpleasant story without anything really new to offer, Alan Passes’ Spoor was just dreadful.
[We've got another wonderful haul of books for you this month, many of which are well worth you're time. Be sure to read on 'til the end—you'll definitely catch the reading bug!]
By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall
The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith by Josephine Saxton
Josephine Saxton is British author so, of course, her first book is about apocalypses and sexual awakening. However, it's a particularly skilled one.
The story: an unnamed teenage boy is wandering across the desolated British landscape alone, after an unexplained event has killed off all the other people. He comes across a baby girl and decides to bring her up. Together they try to understand the world that was left behind and what it means to be an adult.
You might assume this is either the usual “New Adam and Eve” story, or some kind of shock piece. However, Saxton manages to negotiate between these two paths skillfully. She describes the sexual emergences of both of them in matter-of-fact terms, which grounds the story within the dream-like atmosphere they inhabit.
As we go through, their comprehension of the world changes from child-like to a clear understanding of the facts of life. Even though their eventual relations could come across as disturbing given the age difference between the two, and the fact The Boy brought her up like a little sister, Saxton manages to largely negate this. She is able to show the passage of time well and, more importantly, give us the thought processes of both our leads to show they have free-will and are fully in control of their choices. For example:
She studied this for some time, and came to the conclusion that this was a drawing of a penis, and at what she had read and seen, she became hot all over, and in an excitable state.
There is also a clear sense throughout the text about the importance of symbolism. The Boy is constantly dismissing the importance of words and symbols but The Girl slowly shows him that deeper meaning is important.
For me, the key message that is brought out here is that they need to wipe away the sins of the past. The things that brought this world into being. When The Girl is bathing she sings about washing away her troubles in the River Jordan. And, when she gives birth, she insists on doing it in a place of death “to eradicate the source of evil here”. There is a central concept that simply them growing up and continuing the human race is not enough. Things have to change.
I picked up this novel as I knew it was related to The Consciousness Machine, one of my favourite novellas of last year. The connection raises significant questions. However, to discuss this requires mentions of later revelations of both works. As such, if you want to avoid knowing these facts, please feel free to skip to the next review.
As the name suggests, the novella is about a machine, WAWWAR, that can take the images of the unconscious mind and display them on a screen. The technician Zona is trying to decipher the meaning of The Boy and The Girl’s journey. There is also another piece of material relating to the hunt for a wild animal. These secondary and tertiary narratives are completely absent from the novel, which only contains The Boy and Girl’s tale in its totality.
As such, the conclusion of the book version is not about Zona learning the nature of the Animus, but The Boy, The Girl and The Baby deciding it is time to go home. So, they get on a bus, pay the conductor and go back to a fully furnished suburban house. The Girl then decides to get an early night as there is nothing on television on Tuesdays and puts the baby to sleep.
Now, a simple explanation for this could be we are literally seeing the film that was recorded by the WAWWAR. However, no hint of that is given and I think that is too large a leap to expect the average reader to make.
But to read it purely as a science fiction tale causes just as many problems. This sharp turn is nowhere hinted at in the text and in fact contradicts several core points created. Even if you could somehow accept the idea that The Boy went to live in a town that has been uninhabited, how does he have a house? How has he never seen a fully grown adult woman before? How does The Girl know about contemporary television schedules? How is the home not only still available to them after decades away, but with the utilities on?
So, what are we to make of this strange choice? There is no reason I could imagine that would force Saxton to expunge this frame from the longer book form. And the novel is indeed a good bit more explicit than the novella. So, a choice we must assume it is.
I like to believe it is opening us up to the freedom to understand the text in our own way. Zona’s meta-commentary on the events is merely one way of understanding a dream. You could also just as easily contend that the explosion in the chemist, shortly before they leave the town of Thingy, actually killed them all, suburbia representing the afterlife and Zona being like the angels in 40s cinema, discussing their existence.
Or, perhaps, the Town of Thingy really does exist and is a time displaced retreat. Something akin to Hawksbill Station. Where couples facing marital difficulties can be de-aged, grow-up together, and learn how to become one unit again, before being brought back at the same moment they left. And then The Consciousness Machine is actually just a dream The Girl has after she goes to bed.
I don’t know what Saxton intended, but I also do not think it matters. The journey and feel of the novel is excellent and how you choose to view it is just as valid as those watching the WAWWAR.
Humanity has made its first steps into interstellar space, settling the worlds of the Pleiades. In so doing, they have brushed across the domain of the mysterious Moldaug—a frustratingly humanoid but not quite human alien race with a fleet strength comparably to Terra's. After decades of peaceful coexistence, the Moldaug suddenly make claim to all the Pleiades. The Old Worlds of Earth, Mars, and Venus, reeling from a kind of space phobia, offer to relinquish their own claims to the Frontier. This only makes things worse for two reasons: 1) the Moldaug inexplicably find the offer offensive, and 2) the Frontier is not Earth's to give, for they had fought and won independence a dozen years prior! (For more on this story, see the novelette Hilifter.)
by Jack Gaughan (and cribbed from the novelization of Three Worlds to Conquer, as I learned from my friend, Joachim Boaz—the art makes much more sense for the original title)
Enter Cully O'Rourke When, the man most responsible for the Frontier's independence. When the veteran spacejacker returns to Earth to treat with the Old World's government, he is thrown into a floating prison with hundreds of other Frontiersmen, rendered impotent to cause more mischief. But in that very prison, he learns from an imprisoned anthropologist the explosive secret that foretells Armageddon between humans and the Moldaug…unless someone can bring the two races into true understanding.
Thus begins a tale that involves Cully's jailbreak, piracy on high space, and political turmoil in three realms.
This is a frustrating book because it has such potential, and there are many things to like in it. The gripping beginning, the well-realized triune nature of the Moldaug (each being-unit comprises three tri-bonded individuals), the subtle difference in morality between the two species (Right/not-Right vs. Respectable/not-Respectable—though one could argue that this is a thinly guised variation of the Japanese concept of "Face"), the rich setting, the final confrontation between Cully and the Moldaug Admiral Ruhn…these are all compelling.
But Dickson falls into the issues he had with his Dorsai series: one mastermind (our hero) knows every move and countermove, and everything breaks his way. As a result, the only drama comes in seeing the master plan unfold, not how said hero responds to adversity. In stories like this, one can see the author laying out the stepping stones, guiding a path so that the protagonist never makes a misstep.
The other issue is the virtual absence of women. I know people have given me grief for harping on this issue since I started this 'zine in 1958, but come on, people—it's 1969. We have women leading Israel and India. On Star Trek, a third of the crew of the Enterprise is female. A few years back, Rydra Wong led a crew of misfits to save the galaxy. So when the only human female character in all of the Frontier and the Old Worlds serves just to be a romantic foil (and to be ignored at the one juncture that she has critical information!), and she is the sole woman amongst a cast of dozens of men, the world Dickson builds starts to feel a little hollow.
Edmund Cooper is a British writer who has been active since the '50s, and up until recently I've not had the pleasure to read any of his work. He put out a novel just a month or two ago, and now here he is again, with a short collection called News from Elsewhere, featuring eight stories, only one of which is original to the collection. It was published in Britain last year but only just now got an American edition, courtesy of Berkley Medallion. Overall it's a mixed bag, since it looks like Cooper likes to repeat himself (there are three or four stories here about space expeditions), but the strongest material does make me curious for more. Let's take a look.
This is the only story to be first published in News from Elsewhere, and it’s… fine. It’s basically a fable, set in an icy and desolate world, about a young woman and her infant son as they travel with “the People of the Spur,” on a religious pilgrimage. The problem is that the woman’s son is a half-breed, a child-by-rape whose father is a “Changeling,” of a fellow humanoid race that whose members have hairy and thorny ridges on their backs. The woman tries to keep her son’s racial status a secret, but in trying to evade her people she literally falls into a chasm—and certain death. Cooper’s style here is almost childlike; there is barely any dialogue, and by the end it becomes clear what message we’re supposed to take from what is admittedly a harrowing adventure narrative. Cooper also saves the answer to the question “Is this science fiction or fantasy?” for the end, although I’m not sure why he treats it like a twist.
We jump from the newest story to one of the oldest, first published as “The End of the Journey” in the February 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe. “M 81: Ursa Major” is a space opera that asks a rather troubling question: “How do we know when we’re dead?” Or, to phrase it less threateningly: “How can we tell the difference, subjectively speaking, between being dead and being unconscious?” An experimental ship uses scientific mumbo jumbo to skirt the fact that it’s impossible to travel at the speed of light. The results are tragic, but also very strange—not least for the deeply jaded captain, who has a hunch that things will go wrong indeed. This is a story with a loose plot and only one genuine character to speak of, but it’s anchored by a strong idea. It’s the kind of story that was commonplace a decade and a half ago, but which now strikes me as a bit refreshing. I almost feel nostalgic about this sort of thing.
Four stars, but I understand if someone reads it and is not as impressed.
The Enlightened Ones
This one originally appeared in Cooper’s first collection, Tomorrow’s Gift. It’s the longest in the collection, and frankly, I’m not sure the length was justified. Long story short, a team of space explorers makes first contact with a race of hominids, who at first seem like primitive humans but who turn out to have a major advantage over the humans—only the humans are too concerned with what to do with the hominids at first to notice anything amiss. It’s a trite premise, even by the standards of a decade ago, that’s elevated by Cooper’s acute pessimism with regards to the notion of human supremacy. In this distant future it’s said that the Eskimos, Polynesians, and some other indigenous groups on Earth have been driven to extinction. Certainly the Campbellian protagonists do not come off well for the most part, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that “The Enlightened Ones” (such an immediately ironic title) was printed in Fantastic Universe and not Astounding/Analog.
First published in the 1963 collection Tomorrow Came, which may sound unfamiliar because it never got an American printing. “Judgment Day” is the most British-sounding of the lot so far, to the point where it reads like the late John Wyndham at a hefty discount. At first it doesn’t even register as SF. The narrator and his wife are in the park one day when people around them start having violent seizures—too many in one place for this to be a random occurrence. Soon the narrator’s wife falls victim as well, and for much of the story we may be wondering about not just the cause, but the context for all this. What does any of this mean? The narrator meets a soldier who promptly feeds him enough information to stun an elephant, the result being that we’re told about something important that basically happens outside the confines of the page and which has already come to an end by the time the narrator hears about it. It’s rather inelegant, never mind that the SFnal element already feels outdated somehow.
Two stars.
The Intruders
Cover art by Virgil Finlay.
This one first appeared as “Intruders on the Moon” in the April 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. Yes, this surely does read like an SF adventure story from a dozen years ago. A team of explorers land on our moon to investigate the massive crater that is Tycho, for mining as well as the slim possibility of discovering intelligent life. (Something I wish to make clear at this point is that Cooper’s characters are not usually “characters” in the Shakespearian sense; they do not tend to have distinguishable personalities.) Miraculously, however, one of the crew discovers footprints in the sand near Tycho—rather large footprints with very long strides, indeed too much to be a human’s. The explorers go looking for this “Man Friday” of theirs, but they soon learn to regret it. “The Intruders” is pretty straightforward for how long it is, and while its quaint vision of man’s landing on the moon would have been acceptable last decade, I can’t imagine there being much interest in a story of its sort now.
One of Cooper’s earliest stories, and a hand-me-down from Tomorrow’s Gift. A team of space explorers (oh God, not again) lands on “Planet Five,” where there doesn’t seem to be any organic life—save for a species of butterfly. The butterflies have a power over the human explorers they remain unaware of until it’s too late. But it’s not all bad: the explorers also have with them a smartass robot named Whizbang, who emerges as the story’s single genuine character. The autonomous robot comes off more human than the actual humans, although this may be Cooper’s intention, as he uses this disparity at the end of the story to somewhat chilling effect. I’m sensing repetition in the story selection, but I do tepidly recommend this one. If nothing else it comes close to “M 81: Ursa Major” in conveying Cooper’s thesis on the strenuous nature between human rationality and things in our universe which may be beyond human understanding.
A strong three stars.
The Lizard of Woz
Cover art by Virgil Finlay.
This one first appeared in the August 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe, and it’s the crown jewel of the collection. “The Lizard of Woz,” aside from having an incredible title, is different from the others in that it is an outright comedy (albeit of a morbid hue), but it also is told from an alien’s perspective. Ynky is a member of a highly advanced race of alien lizards, who has been sent to Earth so as to determine if it is fit for “fumigation,” i.e., genocide on a planetary scale. The people Ynky comes into contact with (an American, then a Russian, then a third I would prefer to keep a secret) are caricatures, which is all well and good. Cooper pokes fun at both sides of the Iron Curtain, but overall this is a story about the absurdity of the notion of racial supremacy. We’re told constantly that the lizards of Woz are a superior race, yet they also have slave labor and are casually murderous with other sentient races, not to mention Ynky himself is rather slow-witted. Since this is a comedy, and a pretty silly one to boot, some people will be irritated by the antics, but I laughed several times over the span of its mere ten pages.
Finally we have “Welcome Home,” which first appeared in Tomorrow Came and so this marks its first American appearance. Looking back at that time, it seems now like the early ‘60s were simply an extension (or the semi-stale leftovers) of the ‘50s, at least with regards to SF, because this story reads as a few years older than it is. A team of explorers (for the last time, we swear it) land on Mars, which is suspected of possibly hosting life, but if so life on Mars would be far down on the evolutionary ladder. As it turns out, a mysterious pyramid, a sophisticated structure, has drawn the explorers’ attention. This is a first-contact story—of a sort. The twist, which I won’t say here (although you can safely guess it), seemed oddly familiar to me. As with a few other stories in the collection, “Welcome Home” is about the conflict between the West and the Soviets, although it’s not of a ham-fisted sort. It’s fine, but nothing special or surprising.
Three stars.
by Jason Sacks
The Sky is Filled with Ships by Richard C. Meredith
It's the year 979 of the Federation, or the year 3493 in the old calendar. Captain Robert T. Janas of the Solar Trading Company, Terran by birth and starman by occupation, is journeying back to his home planet at a time Terra is in great peril.
The Federation, long bloated and often brutal, is facing a massive rebellion among its vast and angry colonies. A truly titanic armada of thousands of warships from hundreds of solar systems is streaming to Earth via subspace wormholes to gain freedom for the colonies. Janas knows the defense of his home planet will be a futile gesture. There is no possible way even the enormous Terran space fleet can overcome the overwhelming odds and passions of the furious rebels and their massively armed fleet.
Janas knows, too, that a victory by the rebels will spiral mankind down to a new dark ages, just as brutal and destructive as that of Europe after the fall of Rome. Only Janas has the insight and plan to preserve a smidgen of the wisdom — not by saving Terra but by making the Solar Trading Company one of the few institutions to survive and preserve galactic knowledge.
I'm not familiar with the fiction of Richard C. Meredith, but I'm curious to read more by him based on this book. I was pretty intrigued by lead character Janas, who has a nice kind of fish-out-of-water feel to him as he wanders around Earth. That alienation presents a clever, illuminating aspect of the character. I enjoyed having a protagonist who is both a highly self-assured man and who also feels uncomfortable at times due to certain aspects of Earth's culture.
For instance, there's a slightly poignant feel to his annoyance at Earth fashions- like a colonial returned to his home only to find it dramatically different from the place he left. Janas is a stiff military man on a planet where the men dress like harlequins and the women wear fashions which leave them bare-breasted and proud.
But all that discomfort contrasts with the depiction of Janas as a man of action. Like a classic sci-fi hero, Janas brings his own plans and friends to the office of Al Franken, leader of the STC but too blinded by his own hubris to understand he is the problem. Captain Janas literally drags Franken into a plot which will ensure the fall of the ruling Franken family and the survival of Janas's beloved STC.
Meredith adroitly alternates chapters of this palace intrigue with scenes of the armada flying through subspace and showing the massive devastation which the rebel fleet creates on its journey. Those invasion scenes have a breathless, telegraphical quality to them which convey a massive sense of urgency.
As the book winds up, Meredith also does a clever thing: in late chapters he shows brief snippets of events all around the planet Earth as the reality of the Terran apocalypse become clear. In East Asia an angry mob kills their governor and his whole family; in Australia, a cult climb a mountain and await their ends; a rural farmer stands at his barn door, shotgun in hand, waiting to do his small part.
Mr Meredith in his younger days
Mr. Meredith, just over the age of 30, has created a clever and fun novel. There are points in which The Sky is Filled with Ships reads like a pretty standard potboiler sci-fi actioner, with square-chinned heroes fighting for noble causes. In that way it feels a bit of a throwback to the golden John W. Campbell days.
But I appreciated how the actions of our hero were focused on preserving society, which gave him a nobility which stood out on the page. As well, the scenes of oncoming invasion are exciting and had me quickly turning the pages.
I finished this relatively slim novel in one night. And though Meredith is no John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, or Harlan Ellison, he makes no effort to create literary science fiction with this novel. The Sky is Filled with Ships achieves what Meredith set out to create: an intriguing, exciting novel which will make me seek out some of his shorter fiction while I wait for the next thrilling novel by him.
This is the fifth in a series of novels under the collective title of Children of Violence. The others are Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965). I haven't read the others.
A little research reveals that they all deal with Martha, the child of British parents working on a farm in colonial Africa. She's born in about 1920. The four novels all take place in southern Africa. As a teenager, Martha leaves home to work in a city. As the years go by, she is married and divorced and married again. She has a daughter whom she leaves in the care of others. She becomes involved in leftwing politics.
None of the earlier books have speculative elements. The newest one is different. At well over six hundred pages, it's also roughly twice as long as any of the previous volumes.
The sheer length and the very large number of characters and incidents make it difficult to offer a brief summary. I'll do what I can. Keep in mind that I'm leaving out the vast majority of the content of this massive novel.
Martha is now in London in about 1950. She gets a job as a secretary/housekeeper for a man who is married to a woman who is in and out of mental hospitals. She winds up living in the same household for many years, becoming involved with many other members of his family and their acquaintances.
Just to pick one example out of dozens, the man's brother is a scientist who defects to the Soviet Union. He leaves behind his wife and young son. The woman is a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. When her husband leaves, she kills herself.
That's enough of a dramatic plot for a complete novel, but it only takes up a small portion of the book. Rather than attempt to relate any other events of equal importance, let me try to give you some idea of what the novel is like as a whole. Taking my inspiration from its title, I'll consider it as four different kinds of book in one.
Psychological Novel
Much of the text consists of Martha's interior monologues. She often looks at herself as if she were an outsider. At times, she withdraws from the rest of the world and spends time in a meditative, introspective state.
Novel of Character
Although Martha is the most important character, we also spend a great deal of time with lots of other people. In one section, the point of view shifts to Martha's elderly mother, who leaves Africa in order to visit her daughter. All the secondary characters are described in detail. There are so many of them that I sometimes lost track of who was related to whom. A dramatis personae for this book would take up several pages.
Social Novel
A large number of social and political issues come up in the novel. Just off the top of my head, these include Communism and anti-Communism, psychiatry, post-war austerity evolving into 1960's hedonism, the youth movement, the relationship between the sexes, the media, the environment, the military, espionage, homosexuality, colonialism and anti-colonialism, and economics. At times the novel resembles a series of debates.
Science Fiction Novel
You were wondering when I'd get to that! They take a while to show up, but speculative themes eventually make an appearance. The novel suggests that people diagnosed as schizophrenic are actually clairvoyant and telepathic. They are treated as mentally ill because they have visions and hear voices.
More to the point, the book's lengthy appendix consists of documents, mostly letters from Martha and other characters, describing how the United Kingdom and other parts of the world are devastated by what seems to be a combination of pollution, accidental release of nerve gas, plague, and radiation from nuclear weapons. Martha ends up with a small number of survivors on a tiny island. In true science fiction fashion, children born there have highly developed psychic powers.
Giving this book a rating is very difficult. Some people are going to hate it, and find slogging through very long sentences and paragraphs that go on for a page or more not worth the effort. Others will consider it to be a major literary achievement of great ambition.
I have very mixed feelings. At times I found it highly insightful; at other times I found it tedious.
Three stars, for lack of a better way to rate it.
by Cora Buhlert
A Five and Dime James Bond: Zero Cool by John Lange
This weekend, I attended a convention in the city of Neuss in the Rhineland. Luckily, West Germany has an excellent network of highways, the famous Autobahnen, so the three and a half hour trip was quite pleasant.
I left at dawn and took the opportunity to have breakfast at the brand-new service station Dammer Berge. Service stations are not exactly uncommon – you can find them roughly every fifty to sixty kilometers along the Germany's Autobahnen. There's always a parking lot, a gas station, a small shop, a restaurant and sometimes a motel, housed in fairly unremarkable buildings on either side of the highway.
Dammer Berge, however, is different. Billed as the service station of the future, the restaurant is a concrete bridge which spans the highway, held up by two steel pylons. The structure is spectacular, a beacon of modernism, though sadly the food itself was rather lacklustre: a cup of coffee that tasted of the soap used to clean the machine and a slice of stale apple cake.
But I'm not here to talk about architecture or food, but about books. Now the trusty paperback spinner rack at my local import bookstore does not hold solely science fiction and fantasy. There is also a motley mix of gothic romances, murder mysteries and thrillers available. And whenever the science fiction and fantasy selection on offer does not seem promising, I reach for one of those other genres. This is how I discovered John Lange, a thriller author whose novel Easy Go I read last year and enjoyed very much. So when I spotted a new John Lange novel named Zero Cool in that spinner rack, I of course picked it up.
Zero Cool starts with Peter Ross, an American radiologist who's supposed to present a paper at a medical conference in Barcelona. And since he's already in Spain, Ross plans to take the opportunity for a holiday on the nearby Costa Brava in the seaside resort of Tossa de Mar.
One of John Lange's greatest strengths is his atmospheric descriptions. His skills are on full display in Zero Cool in the descriptions of the rugged Costa Brava with its picturesque fishing villages turned holiday destination for package tourists from all over Europe. It's obvious that Lange has visited Spain in general and the Costa Brava in particular.
That doesn't mean that Lange doesn't take poetic licence. And so his protagonist Peter Ross notes that the beaches of the Costa Brava are full of beautiful women in bikinis with nary a man in sight. As someone who has actually visited said beaches, I can assure you that this isn't true. Like anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, the beaches of Tossa de Mar contain a motley mix of old and young, of men, women and children, of attractive and not so attractive bodies. And yes, there are women in bikinis, too. Ross has holiday fling with one of them, a British stewardess named Angela.
But in spite of what the cover may imply, Zero Cool is not a romance set in an exotic location, but a thriller. And so Ross finds himself accosted on the beach by a man who begs him not to do the autopsy or he will surely die. Ross is bemused—what autopsy? In any event, he is on vacation and besides, he's a radiologist, not a pathologist, dammit.
Not long after this encounter, Ross is approached by four men in black suits who could not seem more like gangsters if they wore signs saying "The Mob" 'round their necks. The men want Ross to perform – you guessed it – an autopsy on their deceased brother, so his body can be repatriated to the US. Ross protests that he is a radiologist, not a pathologist, but the men are very insistent. They offer Ross a lot of money and also threaten to kill him if he refuses.
In the end, Ross does perform the autopsy – not that he has any choice, because he is abducted at gunpoint. To no one's surprise, the four gangsters from central casting are not all that interested in how their alleged brother died, but want Ross to hide a package inside the body. Once again, Ross complies, since finding himself on the wrong end of a gun is very persuasive.
Up to now, Zero Cool seems to be a fairly routine thriller about an everyman who gets entangled in a criminal enterprise. But the novel takes a turn for the weird, when the body vanishes and people start dying horribly, mutilated beyond recognition. Ross not only finds himself a murder suspect – in a country which still garrottes convicted criminals – but other parties also show an interest in the missing body and the mysterious package inside. These other parties include Tex, a cartoonish Texan in a ten gallon hat, the Professor, a bald man who uses mathematics to predict the future and is basically Hari Seldon, if Hari had applied his skills to crime rather than to trying to save humanity from the dark ages, and – last but not least – the Count, a Spanish nobleman with dwarfism, who collects perfume bottles and lives in a castle with a mute butler, a flock of murderous falcons and a Doberman named Franco.
With its exotic locales (well, for Americans at least, since for West Germans the Costa Brava no longer feels all that exotic, when you can book a flight there via the Neckermann mail order catalogue), beautiful but duplicitous women and colourful villains, Zero Cool feels more like a James Bond adventure than a serious thriller. As for the mystery package, it doesn't contain anything as mundane as drugs (which was my initial suspicion), but a priceless emerald stolen by the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico. It all culminates in a showdown at the Alhambra palace in Granada, where Ross finds himself dodging bullets, poison gas and the razor-sharp talons of the Count's murder falcons.
It's all a lot of fun, though it still pales in comparison to the James Bond novels and films, which Zero Cool is clearly trying to emulate. Because unlike the suave agent on her majesty's secret service, Peter Ross just isn't very interesting. He literally is an everyman, an American doctor – and note that John Lange is the pen name used by a student at Harvard medical school who is financing his studies by writing thrillers – bouncing around Spain and France. In fact, Ross is probably the least interesting character in the whole novel. Furthermore, the fact that Ross is a radiologist, though constantly brought up, contributes nothing to the resolution. He might just as well have been a paediatrician or a gynaecologist or any other type of doctor for all it matters.
But even a lesser effort by John Lange is still better than most other thrillers in the paperback spinner rack. If John Lange becomes as good a doctor as he's a writer, his patients will be very lucky indeed.
An outrageous adventure. Three and a half stars.
(As mentioned above, John Lange is a pen name. However, I have it on good authority that his real name is "Michael Crichton" and that he has just published a science fiction novel under that byline. I haven't yet read it, but my colleague Joe has, so check out his review.)
The story begins in the town of Piedmont, Arizona, in the United States. It’s a pretty unremarkable town, with one small exception: just about everyone in the town is lying dead in the street, all except for two men who traveled to Piedmont to recover some lost government property and an odd figure in the town of corpses who happens to be walking their way. Upon the apparent death of the two men, an investigation gets underway, ultimately led by a clandestine government group called Project Wildfire.
Project Wildfire is the brainchild of Dr. Jeremy Stone, a bacteriologist possessing so many awards and degrees that the story paints him as a modern-day Da Vinci, a man above men. His team includes Dr. Charles Burton, a pathologist; Dr. Mark Hall, a surgeon, and the only unmarried man on the team—the odd man as the story puts it; and lastly, Dr. Peter Leavitt, a microbiologist. The four men quickly fall into their roles as they uncover the cause of whatever killed an entire town full of people in one night and try to prevent it from spreading.
They do this working out of a secure, state-of-the-art research facility with a list of protocols to prevent the escape of diseases, viruses, and other deadly pathogens, longer than a football field. Part of the appeal of the story is the detailed descriptions of all the computers, machines, and medical facilities that the four doctors use in their quest. Crichton’s depiction of even the smallest details of the workings of every inch of the Wildfire facility give a grounded feel not only to the base but to the descriptions he provides of the microorganism at the heart of this story: the Andromeda Strain itself. Crichton beautifully has his characters follow the scientific method we all learned in grade school, as Stone and the others start with observation, then move to hypothesis, then experimentation. Every solution in the book is arrived at through the efforts of brilliant men under tremendous pressure. It is truly exciting to witness them work as each discovery and dead end leads to new discoveries and new dangers.
The pacing of The Andromeda Strain felt fitting to me. I never felt as if I was waiting for something to happen. Each scene in every chapter was packed with purpose and direction, each page wasted no space. Every character had a job to do, and each was one of the best in the world at that job. Regarding the characterizations, although the story is set in modern times, these men often felt as if they were the stoic men of bronze from 1950’s serials. The characters felt dated, but the problems they tackled were quite modern.
By the end of the book, the characters and the circumstances reached a good stopping point. The object of worry, the Andromeda Strain itself, proved a challenge that had taxed the heroes of the story to their very limits. Some issues are addressed, and others are left unresolved. In my own zeal for the story, I’ve taken great pains to avoid revealing too much of the plot. It is best experienced in real time. All I can say is that the journey this book takes you on is worth the time investment. It’s a stellar read.
But not a perfect one. This is a story that begins with the end in mind. With all the truly amazing events that unfold in the book, what stands out most are the constant reminders from the narrator that the story was already over. This was my first time reading a book written by Mr. Crichton. I don’t know if he employs this technique in his other works, but I would have preferred that he kept his internal monologuing to himself. In one instance, a character forgets to replicate an action that he had performed on some lab rats. Narrator: “Later we learned that was a mistake.” In another, a character makes assumptions about a biological process. Narrator: “That action wasted days of our time.” The narrator frequently shares tidbits of the future, a narrative tool I would call “Poor Man's Foreshadowing.” The Andromeda Strain is such an engaging and suspenseful tale that I wished to remain in the present throughout my reading without Crichton yanking me out of it, offering glimpses of a future I wanted to reach without shortcuts.
That minor gripe aside, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton is a thrilling mystery with high stakes. It is the kind of fact-based science fiction that I enjoy the most.
With this issue of New Worlds, number 190, we now seem to be getting back to a regular monthly schedule and the new style seems to be bedding itself down into a regular format – although this being New Worlds I suspect that they would hate any hint of things becoming routine.
Quick recap, then. Recently Charles Platt and Michael Moorcock stepped away from full-time editorial duties, leaving the magazine in the capable hands of Langdon-Jones. His first issue last month was a corker, with the first publication of a Harlan Ellison story in Britain (although to be fair I had read some of his other work published in the American magazines beforehand.) As a result, the new mantra seems to be that New Worlds even though under new management will continue to publish cutting edge, controversial material that defies borders and descriptions.
Each issue seems to continue a confounding mixture of good, bad and weird prose, not to mention poetry. Its appeal to me seems to be that I never quite know what I’m going to get next, although with the poetry I have a fairly good (or is that bad?) idea.
We’re back to the odd pictures of people’s faces on the cover this month.
Lead-In by The Publishers
As is usual, information is given on the contributors. This month, Harvey Jacobs, Brian Aldiss, poet Libby Houston, science editor Dr. Christopher Evans, his secretary Jackie Wilson and a photo of author Marek Obtuowicz without any further detail.
The Moment of Eclipse by Brian W Aldiss
Photo by Gabi Nasemann
The Lead In tells us that Brian’s latest offering was inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Poem Inspired by a Lunar Eclipse written in 1902.
This however is a more contemporary work, about a modern film maker and his pursuit of Christiania, a woman he has met, despite the fact that she is married and with a son. So, a story of lust, combined with Aldiss’s quirky humour and his love of global places that we have read before – not to mention a parasitical worm that will frighten any devotees of Frank Herbert’s Dune!
I liked this generally – mainly because it shows Aldiss’s precise and illustrative prose without so much of the oddness exhibited in his recent Charteris stories. 3 out of 5.
This story is set in Vietnam as a dialogue between two negotiators hoping to cease the conflict there. Whilst the two characters grow closer, the war continues. A story that through vivid imagery and prose, at times sexual, basically suggests that war is bad, but that love may bring peace, or at least agreement. 4 out of 5.
Article: The Responsive Environment by Charles Platt
Platt interviews Keith Albarn, an architectural artist who makes furniture and buildings that adapt and can be rebuilt to individual needs. These range from a funfair in Margate to theatre design, educational toys, and a fun palace in Girvan, Scotland.
More fractured escapades with Jerry Cornelius. Much of this part has Jerry travelling the world in search of the missing techno-wotsit. Really though this gives Moorcock a chance to show us the world, from his own street of Ladbroke Grove, London, to trendy Soho and the King’s Road, Chelsea before going on to other places such as Las Vegas and Sumatra.
Cornelius meets his brother Frank again (last seen in the March 1966 issue of New Worlds as part of The Final Programme novel) and sister Catherine, in suspended animation, but really the story appears to mainly be a minor point whilst we examine the setting of a free world in decline. Most of these places have been bombed, London has an air-strike whilst Jerry is in it, Americans are filling the world with ‘advisors’ whilst dealing with civil riots of its own on home territory.
Things begin to make more sense and there’s a feeling that we might be drawing things to a close, as Jerry and the missing machine that he is in search of may be either the cause of the world chaos or the person most effective in having to deal with it. 4 out of 5.
Poems by Libby Houston
Image by Mal Dean
First thought: What must a young woman do to get published in New Worlds magazine? Write poetry, it seems, or be married to the magazine illustrator. (That is unfair, I know. New Worlds has championed women’s writing for years now, when they can get it.)
Six short poems here, and as such – they fill up space unremarkably. (Do bear in mind that I still find most poetry uninteresting, though.) At least they’re not written by the seemingly ubiquitous D. M. Thomas this month. 2 out of 5.
the hurt by Marek Obtuowicz
Photo by Gabi Nasemann
A new author. Sadly, this is one of those stories designed to try and shock without any real involvement on the part of the reader and filled with symbolism that seems meaningless.
Mostly dialogue based, it is a number of conversations between Peter and his sister, Pauline. Unsurprisingly, they discuss their lives in a depressingly bleak future, a world where sex seems meaningless and crying is forbidden. Perhaps even more unsurprisingly, Pauline is a brothel-owner and Peter and Pauline have an incestuous sexual relationship.
There’s something in there about emotional hurt being caused by events in the past, but I was too bored to look at it in detail. 2 out of 5.
The Dreams of the Computer by Dr. Christopher Evans and Jackie Wilson
Written as if a computer programme, filled with lots of “Answer Yes or No” and “Go to” statements, Dr. Evans, with the help of his secretary, responds in kind to J. G. Ballard’s prose story, How Dr. Christopher Evans Landed on the Moon in issue 187 (February 1969) of New Worlds. I liked it. There’s a nice sense of absurd humour in it, but it loses some of its impact by being not as original as the Ballard version. I am also not sure it makes sense if you’ve not seen Ballard’s original piece. 3 out of 5.
A bumper crop of reviews this month, though most are not science fiction-related.
Book Reviews: Back in the U.S.S.R. by R. Glynn Jones
R. Glynn Jones reviews Art and Revolution, a book about the work of Russian sculptor Neivestny, whose opposition to Kruschev has made him a heroic and revolutionary symbol.
Book Reviews: Twilight Crucifixion of the Beastly Black Sheep by M. John Harrison
Harrison reviews The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a polemic book about a Black CIA officer which is “an incitement to riot”, Behold the Man by Michal Moorcock (which we reviewed here when it was a serial story), The Twilight of the Vilp by Paul Ableman, which is “weary, contrived and too long”, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, a novel which is “beautifully constructed yet disappointing”, and the wonderfully titled The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, which is “moderately enjoyable”.
Book Reviews: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity by Bob Marsden
Marsden reviews a book on the theory of game-play, a book on psychological theories and stratagems and a book on the discrepancy between what people think a person should be and what they really are. Nothing really of interest to me there. Moving on…
Book Reviews: From Alice with Malice by James Cawthorn
At last: Cawthorn reviews what we would broadly describe as fantasy and science fiction! Black Alice will be of interest here as it is written by two New Worlds regulars, Thomas M. Disch and John T. Sladek. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is well-received. So too a number of books by Michael Moorcock, including The Jewel in the Skull, The Ice Schooner and The Mad God’s Amulet. He then reviews a “disappointing” SF novel for younger readers, Undersea City by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, and the “fairly entertaining” Twin Planets by Philip E. High. Lastly, and then rather oddly, Cawthorn reviews a book on rural uprisings in pre-Victorian England – who says New Worlds lacks diversity?
Book Reviews: Against the Juggernaut by John Clute
John Clute is a new reviewer here, although he has had fiction published in New Worlds before (A Man Must Die, November 1966.) Here he reviews a “simply godawful” book of poetry, Juggernaut by Barry McSweeney, a book by a new African writer who Clute describes as “an intelligent and urbane civil servant and diplomat, but a lame writer”, a novel about a group of Americans who translate the Oberammergau Passion Play into English and put it on in Texas as making the reviewer feel as if they had “just been forced to eat yesterday’s newspaper” and a detailed review on a book about the philosophy of Jean Paul Satre. They may not be books I would ever want to read myself, but at least the reviewer is entertaining.
Book Reviews: The Nondescript Heroes by Charles Platt
Platt reviews the autobiographical Gemini! by the recently-departed Apollo astronaut Virgil Grissom. He is disappointed by the book’s blandness and superficiality, eventually concluding that such an exciting and technological advancement is not served well by such pilots of limited expression.
Summing up New Worlds
Well, if New Worlds is all about ‘cutting edge, controversial material that defies borders and descriptions’, then this issue isn’t it. In fact, it is a solid yet rather conventional issue – admittedly conventional for New Worlds. There’s no photos of naked ladies, relatively little sex (although there is some – this is New Worlds, after all!) and stories that now seem rather typical of the new style of New Worlds.
In short, it is pretty much what to expect from the magazine, which is not a bad thing, but rather unmemorable, as it is not as determined to startle as some previous editions have been.
The most memorable thing about the issue is the new reviewer John Clute, who seems to be here to stir things up a little, although I do find it amusing to see both recently-retired editors Platt and Moorcock appearing in issues writing fiction and articles. Still around and not forgotten.
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!
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 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 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.
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!
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
As I mentioned last month, this issue begins yet another new era for New Worlds. With the retirement of Mike Moorcock and Charles Platt from full-time editorialship in the last issue, it is Langdon Jones that steps up to the mark as editor this time.
For that reason alone, it should be an interesting one, but last month’s issue also pointed out that the April issue was going to have an apocalyptic theme:
The named list from last month.
With Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius saving the world from destruction, the advert proudly declared, “Is The Apocalypse Already Upon us??” Gone is the optimistic, forward-looking shiny and new future as suggested by the SF of the 1950’s, and in its place we have post-apocalyptic gloom, doom, decay and squalor. It has been an ongoing theme in the magazine for the last few years.
To be fair, the white cover with a minimalist approach to titling and imagery, this month by the recently deceased Mervyn Peake, does not give an impression of 'gloom and doom'. Far from it. I found it more interesting than the recent generic covers. A good start.
Lead In by The Publishers
Much is made of the fact that this issue has the UK debut of the US’s enfant terrible Harlan Ellison.
In a post-apocalyptic US we are told of teenager Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. Vic is a teenage boy who spends his time scavenging the world for basic needs—food, companionship, and sex—as well as generally avoiding other groups, known as roverpaks, doing the same thing. They meet Quilla June – unusual because most women live where it is safer, underground. Vic rapes Quilla June before they are attacked by another roverpak. Blood is hurt in the scuffle. Quilla June escapes and returns to her underground home of Topeka.
Determined to get food and find Quilla June, Vic leaves Blood on the surface and follows Quilla June underground, to discover that bringing Vic underground was the original plan by the subterranean city elders. New blood (see what Ellison did there?) is needed to replenish the depleted stock of men! Vic sees this as a great opportunity for sex with lots of different women, but soon tires of being basically a sex slave. He escapes back to the surface with Quilla June, only to find Blood hurt and in need of food to survive. The open ending leaves Vic with a quandary – does he leave Blood or feed Blood?
This one should activate all the seismic shockmeters: there’s sex, masturbation, rape, gore, violence, cannibalism, radioactive mutations and a distinct lack of morals and ethics as Vic and Blood try to survive. (It's a little concerning when I'm told that Ellison used his own dealings with gang culture in the US as inspiration for this story.)
As good as it is, that’s not to say that there aren't worrying elements – Quilla June’s change from rape victim to willing participant is a little jarring to me, but to some extent this reflects the brutal society Vic and Blood live in and the amoral stance that Vic has towards life. Unsurprisingly, when presented with a version of what pre-War domesticity is like, he rebels and runs away back to his previous life.
Undoubtedly memorable and a million miles away from the classic hero template of older SF work, A Boy and his Dog reinvents the apocalyptic adventure story and generally holds up. I found it bold, interesting, lively and yes, controversial. As good as Delany’s Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stonesback in the December issue. 5 out of 5.
The Ash Circus by M. John Harrison
And here’s M. John Harrison’s take on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius (more of which later.) They do say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and here Harrison copies the beginning of Ian Fleming’s James Bond movie You Only Live Twice before having Jerry return to a decaying London, then travel to Scotland and Manchester to become inspired by Byron and then get involved in a putsch in London, before meeting the authoritarian Miss Brunner again.
It’s actually not bad as a mixture of James Bond and The Avengers television series, with the dark humour of Cornelius coming to the fore, but it is less out-there than Moorcock’s own Cornelius material (again – more of which later.) This may, of course, make the story more readable than some of Jerry’s other esoteric stories. 4 out of 5.
How the Sponsors Helped Out by Anthony Haden-Guest
Poetry – or rather a list of different things sent by companies to ‘The Front’ – Hamleys sent toys, IBM sent a brain, and so on. This being New Worlds the poem doesn’t miss throwing out a few choice expletives in the mixture – guess what Playboy sent? I dare not repeat the word here. Mildly amusing. 3 out of 5.
Labyrinth by D. M. Thomas
More poetry. Described as ‘a poem for light and movement’, Thomas manages to produce strange typewritten boxes that are at times undecipherable. A typical ‘form over content’ type piece. 2 out of 5.
Another one of Ballard’s stories where novels are compressed into paragraphs. The clever part is that each paragraph begins with the letters of the alphabet. Described as ‘An Entertainment for George MacBeth’, this one reads like the description of an exotic holiday beach party and also feels, rather oddly at times, like a James Bond plot – not the first time I’ve thought that for this issue. One of the more enjoyable of Ballard’s recent stories for me, perhaps because it feels a little more like the material Ballard was writing when I first noticed him. 4 out of 5.
Inside by J. J. Mundis
The inevitable 'naked lady of the month' picture.
Another strange story from J J Mundis after the rather odd ‘Luger’ story last month. This time, a depressing stream of consciousness story that’s all sex, drugs and allegory about being empty inside. Nothing really worth remembering. 2 out of 5.
For Czechoslovakia by George MacBeth
Yet more poetry, this time from the poet J. G. Ballard wrote for earlier. As expected, it is dark, gloomy and depressing, combining prose passages from The Diary of a German Soldier, written in 1939 interspersed with verses written by MacBeth using the process of automatic writing. I’m intrigued by the process, if less impressed by the poetry. 3 out of 5.
After Harrison’s version, we now return to the originator of the Jerry Cornelius stories.
More artwork by Mal Dean.
This month Jerry continues his meandering travels across time with Karen von Krupp to try and find Bishop Beezley. Lots of prose in small sections (with even an homage of J. G. Ballard in Ballard style lists of text), whose connections are rather obtuse, lots of sex and Miss Brunner – again! (see also M. John Harrison’s story.)
The plot’s undecipherable, but I feel that this is one you appreciate for the enthusiastic energy rather than the plot. Who knows what’s going on, but the writer clearly had fun writing it. 4 out of 5.
Book Reviews
A Turning World by Brian W. Aldiss
Where Aldiss muses on how perspectives change through time, throwing in a couple of reviews along the way – basically, a discussion on how others might see us in the future.
The Cannon Kings by Joyce Churchill
Referring to recent publications, Joyce Churchill (also known as M. John Harrison) writes about the importance of Germany’s armaments manufacturers in the first half of the 20th century.
A Slight Case of Tolkien by James Cawthorn
It is left to James Cawthorn to review the genre books. This month he looks at Jack Vance’s Catch A Falling Star, Robert Burnet (sic) Swann’s Moondust, Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, Clifford Simak’s So Bright the Vision coupled with Jeff Sutton’s The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s A Torrent of Faces, Ron Goulart’s ‘light-hearted’ The Sword Swallower and a well-deserved reprint of William Hope Hodgson’s horror classic, The House on the Borderland.
Summing Up
This one’s heavy on the espionage Bond-type vibes this month, what with not one but two Jerry Cornelius stories and a Ballard that reads like a Bond story in a Ballard style. As a first issue of the new regime with Langdon Jones as editor, it is not bad – although it may have been better had the Cornelius stories been spread out across different issues. Personally I like the stories, but they're not for everyone, and there's a lot of it here.
But then there’s the Harlan Ellison story that surpassed even my high expectations of his work. If the 'impending apocalypse' is represented by this story, then it's a memorable one to be sure, if decidedly downbeat. According to Ellison, the future is dark and tough.
I can’t see this one being published in the US in the usual science fiction magazines, but even allowing for its deliberate shock tactics, it really impressed – much more than say Bug Jack Barron, which tried to shock readers in a similar way, I think.
If I needed anything to show how much the British genre scene has changed in the last few years, this would be my example, albeit written by an American. Shocking and controversial, yes – but perhaps the best story I’ve read in New Worlds to date. A real coup for the new editorship.
As I am a Brit, you may have realised that it is essential that from time to time we talk about the weather – after all, it is usually so changeable here.
And post-Christmas I haven’t really mentioned it – the grey, sometimes snowy, dreariness of Winter is not something to write home about, unless it is extreme as it was in the winter of ’63. None of that recently, thank goodness!
Anyway, I was guided to write something about atmospheric conditions because as we approach March, things seem to be improving. It is lighter with longer hours of daylight and noticeably warmer. Spring is clearly on the way.
Daffodils and blossom in spring, Hampton, Greater London
But does this upturn in the weather mean that I continue to look at New Worlds with a sunnier disposition? Let’s see..
Cover by Gabi Nasemann. Is this Moorcock horrified by his announcement?
Lead In by The Publishers
Well, I was expecting to be annoyed here by the second part of James Sallis’s diatribe on the modernist novel, as told to expect last month, but no. Instead, we have the return of the Lead In and a shock revelation.
The Lead In tells us that Mike Moorcock and Charles Platt have resigned as editors of New Worlds magazine from the next issue. “It is with regret that we announce the resignation of Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt…”
After my initial astonishment, I read it again. It’s not quite what I thought I read – it actually says that Moorcock and Platt are resigning “from full time editorial involvement”.
Whilst this is clearly a change – and one I didn’t expect – it does not mean that they are banished from the magazine forever; more that they have other things to do, like write stuff and ensure the regular production of the magazine as publishers. An advisory role, in fact. Talking of writing:
Our lead story is a Jerry Cornelius story by the originator himself. In case you didn’t know, three months ago, the magazine declared that Mike Moorcock’s character Jerry Cornelius would continue in future issues by stories written by others, starting with James Sallis’s Jeremiad, which was in last month’s issue. So this is a bit of a surprise, but a welcome one.
This time Moorcock gives us what is really a James Bond-ian espionage romp, with guns, sex, cars, helicopters and airplanes, more sex, drugs – things that Fleming or the movies could never get away with – but in a sectioned, fractured, Ballardian style that currently seems de rigueur at New Worlds.
The plot, not that it really matters, is deliberately random but concerns Jerry travelling all over the world and meeting various odd characters, many of whom he seems to bed. There are villains in the form of Doktor Krupp and Bishop Beesley, a sort of corpulent Sidney Greenstreet.
Although the story may be initially set in 1970, there’s an interesting juxtaposition of old and new as Jerry seems to combine elements as diverse as George Formby songs from the 1940’s and Beatles lyrics with futuristic weapons like the vibragun. It’s an engaging mix, even if it’s not always clear what’s going on. Hopefully the second part will make things clearer, but this is another one where you must not consider the story’s logic and just enjoy the ride. 4 out of 5.
White Dove by Carol Emshwiller
Artwork by Pamela Zoline.
The return of Emshwiller to New Worlds. I have found that her previous prose has often been unsettlingly sexual and odd, something I’ve not really liked personally. But it can’t be denied that she has an impact on readers and so it is here. This is a story of a statue of an older man that the narrator is obsessed by. 3 out of 5.
The Death Layout by Graham Charnock
Graham was last seen with Crim in November, a story I’m tempted to call ‘grim’, though it wasn’t really that bad. This time it is about life and death – more cheerful stuff. Darkly satirical as an advertising campaign looks at how they can profit from a recent upsurge in pain and suicide. Could give ‘Chuckles’ Ballard a run for the monopoly on negative topics. 3 out of 5.
Mr. Black’s Poems of Innocence by D. M. Thomas
The magazine’s obsession with D.M. Thomas continues, with something given under the premise that it is a transcript of speech from Mr. Black, a schizophrenic, as he is treated. As the story progresses, in Flowers for Algernon fashion, Black becomes increasingly more literate and emotional. Despite my usual moans I found this more readable than some of D. M.’s previous efforts. 3 out of 5.
The Luger is a 9mm Handgun with a Parabellum Action by J. J. Mundis
Here’s an American writer we’ve not seen since November 1966. One of those allegorical stories where the narrator talks to his dog, who is an atavism, for most of the story, but at the end the owner shoots the dog with the titular Luger, presumably signalling the death of God, religion or both. Minor tale that sadly underperforms for me. 2 out of 5.
Plekhanov Screams by Leo Zorin
Bizarre artwork by Mal Dean, seemingly stuck in at random in the middle of this story.
It may help you to know that Georgi Plekhanov was a Russian philosopher and revolutionary widely regarded as the first Marxist, but if you didn’t know that the story becomes even more meaningless than it actually is. Here Georgi Plekhanov is a surgeon on a secret operation. Lots of randomness, meaningless sex and obtuse actions ensue, including the odd artwork above, which I couldn't decide whether it was part of the story or not . Literary pretention at its highest. 2 out of 5.
I D by Charles Platt
The latest dystopian post-apocalyptic story, filled with death and decay. The narrator follows a mysterious woman before drifting into a dream-state which imagines birth and death. When he awakes the woman isn’t there, of course. Ballard-like bleakness. 3 out of 5.
And talking of Ballard, here’s ‘Chuckles’ himself. Unusually though, this one is startlingly direct, an anti-war story where the British Army is tasked with the difficult task of maintaining order in a world in decay. Includes a not-so-subtle nod to the US war in Viet Nam. Unusual in its directness, although as a result many will see it as lower-league Ballard. Nevertheless, I liked it. 4 out of 5.
The Hiroshima Dream by George MacBeth
Continuing the war theme, now with poetry, this time from writer and reviewer MacBeth. His last prose piece was in July 1967. The Hiroshima Dream touches on themes that seem very Ballardian, so it seems a logical piece to follow Ballard. Death, destruction, dystopia….fifty tankas* all based around apocalypse and the nuclear bomb dropping at Hiroshima. Although it is shockingly dark, I prefer MacBeth to D. M. Thomas. 4 out of 5.
*I had to look it up in my dictionary – tankas are prose poems made up of five lines, similar to haiku.
Book Reviews
The Future of Art by Kenneth Coutts-Smith
Coutts-Smith reviews a book with an ambitious title – Heaven and Hell in Western Art by Robert Hughes, and then Art, Affluence and Alienation by Roy McMullen.
Mr. Throd and the Wise Old Crocodile by M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison reviews books of genre interest – the latest Mervyn Peake reprinted novel, Gormenghast, which shows what a talent the late Mr. Peake was, a spy novel by Anthony Burgess, and a story collection by Fritz Leiber, described as “one of the most underrated and misunderstood writers in the field”.
No News is Good News by William Barclay
Barclay reviews in detail Andrew Wilson’s The Bomb and the Computer, which reduces warfare to computer-simulated wargames.
The scary thing is that these simulations are real. Look at the diagram above, which could be easily used in, say, Viet Nam. I guess that this is science fiction made real.
Those Erotic Green Men in Their Flying Machines by James Cawthorn
Eye-catching title aside, James Cawthorn reviews Frank Herbert’s ‘far more presentable than it deserves’ The Heaven Makers, the ‘dated but fast-moving novel’ Doomsday Morning by Catherine L. Moore, and A. E. van Vogt’s first story collection for fifteen years (‘not a collection designed for new readers’)
More positively are the reviews of books from now-departing editors. Michael Moorcock’s latest ‘original and remarkable’ Elric fantasy, Stormbringer and Charles Platt’s The Garbage World, which we reviewed when it was a serial here in the magazine There are also brief reviews of Alan Garner’s fantasy novels, as well as Poul Anderson’s ‘ponderous and irritating’ The Star Fox, Robert Silverberg’s The Time Hoppers, The Ring by Piers Anthony and Robert E. Margroff. There's also a brief re-review of The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny, which was reviewed a while back.
Also quickly mentioned and reviewed by D.R.B. are a number of books also received about poetry, theatre and imagery.
Pictures: M. C. Escher
A page of pictures by this unusual artist, who you may remember was also examined in the July 1967 issue of New Worlds. Seems to be here to highlight the publishing of a new book, The Graphic Work of M. C. Escher.
Summing Up
With a cheery wave goodbye, the leaving of Moorcock and Platt as full-time editors leaves something of a hole at New Worlds, but I am sure that they are leaving feeling that the magazine is in safe hands under the auspices of Langdon Jones and James Sallis.
My own view on Sallis’s work is much less positive. He is far too fond of the poetic allegory and the ‘dissertation as lecture’ article for my liking, as recent issues have shown, although he can surprise me and also produce work I liked. I'm not sure where this means New Worlds will go.
Despite the weather making things seem better, Moorcock's final issue is a rather dark one, with most of the material being about life and death, war and things that are generally unpleasant.* The only thing to lighten the mood is Moorcock's own A Cure for Cancer, which doesn't seem to take itself seriously at all.
*This gloom also looks to continue in the next issue, looking at the 'Next Month' banner (below.)
So, as Moorcock and Platt move on to pastures new – well, more book writing and editing, anyway – is it possible we have another dawning of a new age – not just for them but for New Worlds as well?
Um. Even under new management I’m not expecting things to change much. I think that this issue is what we should expect more of in the future, continuing the trend of combining the well-known writers such as J. G. Ballard with newish writers who are becoming regulars – Leo Zorin, Graham Charnock and yes, my own favourite (sarcasm) D. M. Thomas.
However, with allegory piled onto allegory, the overall feel is that the issue is rather intense. As is always the case with such experimental work, there are times when it worked for me, whilst others less so. It should make the future interesting.
Ah well – just when I thought things were settling down! Life’s never boring here at the British front, eh?
Is ten books a record for the Galactoscope? Lucky we have so many folks reading furiously for the Journey. And it's a good thing, because amidst the dross and mediocrity, there's a couple of gems…
Kate Wilhelm is perhaps better known for her debut short story, "The Mile-Long Spaceship" (1963) and Clone (1965), the Hugo Award nominated novel written in collaboration with Theodore L. Thomas. Perhaps you've read her work in Orbit, edited by her husband, Damon Knight.
The ominous title of this book, Let the Fire Fall, promises fire, brimstone, and a violent alien invasion—but the bad guys in this story aren't the extraterrestrials. The plot: A spaceship inhabited by pregnant alien women lands in small town America. The aliens are friendly, and clearly hope to be welcome on this new planet they’ve discovered. One vile and opportunistic man named Obie Cox– under normal circumstances, a small-town philanderer of no account, blessed with uncommon charisma–manages to worm his way to the pulpit. One there, he takes advantage of humanity’s rampant xenophobia and the ineffectuality of Earth’s bureaucracy through flat-out lies, hate, and fear mongering. What he wants is control and he achieves that by weaponizing humanity’s worst traits and using them to brainwash the populace and plunging the world into dystopian chaos.
At first, Wilhelm’s strangely familiar-feeling and deliberately matter-of-fact writing style, peppered with many clever twists of phrase, seems to capture the spirit of Ray Bradbury or an episode of the Twilight Zone. What we get, instead, is a riveting and decidedly tragic tale of First Contact gone awry in a world populated by an almost irredeemable cast of humans.
Wilhelm’s courage and ambitiousness in attempting to capture the vile side of human nature is admirable. Still, even a forward thinking and imaginative author such as herself cannot seem to escape the discriminatory views of our time. Let the Fire Fall perpetuates the sexist view that women must be submissive to men and even the women important to the plot are given no initiative to steer their own destinies. While Wilhelm is progressive enough to acknowledge the existence of homosexuals, the way she characterizes homosexuality as one of the “vices” permitted by the villainous Obie Cox’s vaunted religion suggests a personal disapproval of such individuals. (To be fair, what her characters feel, even the "good" ones, doesn't necessarily reflect Wilhelm's feelings on a subject.)
In any wise, Let the Fire Fall is an excellently written novel. The author’s insight and ability to imagine a dark future, all too possible, are incredible. I love this book but I hated reading it. The way it mirrors our current reality where opportunistic charlatans have risen to political power by preying on the gullibility of the American populace fills me with trepidation. Let the Fire Fall is an insidiously horrifying and damning condemnation of the human race. This book will make you squirm and fret about the world as we know it, and the future of our species. You will not feel comfortable reading this book. You should not.
Daphne du Maurier has been a favourite of mine for a long while. I read Rebecca in my teens and have slowly been building up a collection of her writings. However, she has only had one truly SFnal release to date, the marvellous collection The Apple Tree, most notable for containing the original short story of The Birds.
That was until this year, when she followed in the footsteps of fellow literary darlings Naomi Mitchison and Virginia Woolf and put out a book on a mainstay of science fiction, time travel.
Dick Young goes down to visit his old university friend Professor Magnus Lane in Cornwall. Dick agrees to be the test subject of the Professor’s new alchemical invention and finds himself transported back in time to the era of Edward III’s infancy. The story follows Dick and Magnus’ trips back and forth between the 14th and 20th centuries.
What Du Maurier always does well is give a real sense of atmosphere to her tales. As is usual in her books Cornwall takes on the mysterious atmosphere of Bronte’s Yorkshire and Doyle’s Dartmoor: a strange wild place where anything can happen. She also illustrates well the sense of dislocation Dick feels moving between the periods, making him feel like an outsider in both.
Cover by Susan Einzig
And yet, I don’t feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting here. The children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden explores similar themes better for me. Also, in spite of the period being underserved in historical narratives, I didn’t feel like I gained much more insight or understanding of it than I would have done from an encyclopedia summary.
This almost reads like one of those historical stories that had a touch of added SFnal content to get into the magazines. Of course, that is not the case here (DuMaurier could release her shopping list and it would be a best seller) and this is still a good read, but I did not feel like it is doing anything exceptional nor is it destined to be one of my favourites.
As John Carnell has now edited as many editions of New Writings as Ian Flemming wrote James Bond novels, he is entitled to enjoy himself. As such, he says this volume is entirely composed of stories he personally loved, rather than mixing in some he knew were good but not to his taste. But how much do my feelings ally with his?
Blood Brother by James White
We start with the always reliable James White with another tale of Sector General.
Following on from Vertigo, a team is returning with Surreshun to “Meatball” to assess the species' medical needs and to locate the manufacturers of their responsive organic tools. Unfortunately, the native entities of the planet believe that Surreshun was kidnapped by the crew of the Descartes and are not keen to let this happen again.
This once again is a fascinating exercise from White, trying to imagine a wholly alien species from our understanding and the problems it could cause. The natives of “Meatball” have an inbuilt dislike of anything similar to themselves and have no central form of government but exist in a deep layer of animal life. How to communicate ideas like friendship to a species like that is a true challenge.
What White is always great at is giving us a sense of how diverse the species in the Galactic Federation are, whilst still making it seem like an everyday occurrence at the hospital. For example:
Despite the fact that one species was covered in thick silver fur and crawled like a giant caterpillar and the other resembled a six-legged elephant, they were fairly easy to deal with because they had the same atmosphere and gravity requirements as Conway. But he was also responsible for a small ward of Hudlars, beings with hide like flexible armour plate whose artificial gravity system was set at five Gs and whose atmosphere was a dense high-pressure fog – and the odd-ball TLTU classification entity hailing from he knew not where who breathed superheated steam. It took more than a few hours to tidy up such a collection of loose ends…
He continues to know what he does well and produces the most consistently strong series currently ongoing in Science Fiction.
Four Stars
If You're So Smart by Paul Corey
Ibby has a mental disability and suffers from regular seizures, so lives permanently at a mental hospital. He also helps out in the animal testing lab. However, he may be able to understand the animals better than the scientists.
A pedestrian tale, poorly told. Whilst I have heard that Corey is an American writer and journalist of some renown, I am only familiar with him from his awful appearance in New Worlds earlier in the decade. Apparently he has an SF novel out from Robert Hale but this isn’t inspiring me to pick it up.
A low Two Stars
The Ballad of Luna Lil by Sydney J. Bounds
Gerard The Rhymer wrote The Ballad of Luna Lil many centuries ago. This work analyses the historical accuracy of the tale to the real life of Captain Bartholomew “Black Bart” Sparrow, a space free trader, and Lily La Lune, singing star of the videos.
I am a great lover of analyses of fictional works and this one doesn’t disappoint. It turns what could be a standard pulpy adventure into an exploration of a fictional universe, containing fascinating ideas and raising questions about the power of art.
A high Four Stars
The Eternity Game by Vincent King
In a tale told from four perspectives (A, G, P & Z), two different species find themselves in the Place, attempting to survive in their collapsing galaxy.
We learn from the introduction that Vincent King is also a visual artist and Carnell describes this work as being like an abstract painting. I am not sure I agree with that, it is certainly not as obscure as some of the writings of Ballard, Burroughs, or Farmer. Rather, you have a puzzle that fits together by the end.
I don’t think it is quite as effective as his usual Medieval Futurism, but still a worthy piece.
Four Stars
Tilt Angle by R. W. Mackelworth
The Earth has entered a new Ice Age, and Tomas and Donna are sent on a mission from the City to find food stores. But is this parasitic existence right or sustainable?
Another one of these Frozen Earth tales that have been popping up a lot recently in the UK (we do like to moan about the weather). Whilst evocatively told, it feels abrupt and incomplete. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw further stories in this world.
Three Stars
The Song of Infinity by Domingo Santos
Once again we have a work in translation, this time from a Spanish author. He is apparently well known in his own country but I am not aware of any prior translations into English. This one was selected and translated by the late great Arthur Sellings.
We get the internal monologue of an astronaut who finds himself accidentally floating through space without any hope of rescue.
This is a well told and melancholic tale but one that nevertheless didn’t really affect me as much as I felt it was trying to.
Three Stars
Green Five Renegade by M. John Harrison
Astronaut of the Green 5, Chad Redeem, encounters alien life forms. Discovering them to be naïve and peaceful compared to the human race, he goes on the run rather than risk his knowledge of them becoming known to the authorities.
Oh dear, I am not sure what happened here. Even putting aside some weird printing errors, it is overwritten, cliché driven and full of creepy descriptions of women. I know Harrison can do a lot better so I am surprised to see this come from his pen.
One Star
So, the good ship New Writings continues steadily on its course. Some good works, some poorer, still generally very much in Carnell’s usual mode. Much the same crew manning the rigging with nary a woman in sight*. Whilst it may not always be the most exciting voyage, it shows little signs of leakage. Onward!
*I believe it has now been over 5 years since Carnell published a story by a woman, the last being Dial SCH 1828 by Gweneth Penn-Bull in December ‘63’s Science Fantasy.
by Gideon Marcus
Ace Double 72400
The High Hex, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Here is the sequel to Target: Terra that nobody asked for. In this one, the African space station has begun broadcasting a menacing message, all chants and tribal drums, that seems to presage a heating up of the White/Black cold war. The crew of Space Station 1 are recalled to duty and tasked with infiltrating the second station. The plot is thickened with robots and destructive aliens, and the Africans aren't the bad guys after all.
If you enjoyed the gaggish and frivolous tone of the first book, you'll like this one. Otherwise…you won't.
If you read and enjoyed the four stories of John Grimes, a space captain running the rim of galactic space, then this is an opportunity to get all of them in one convenient package. In this fix-up, they are unchanged, with only short concluding scenes added to each piece to link them together.
They all appeared in IF, where David gave them three stars apiece. I see no reason to change his assessment.
by Victoria Silverwolf
War And No Peace
Two new novels deal with armed conflict, international or domestic. One takes place in the very recent past, but not the one with which we're familiar. The other is set in the near future, one we'd like to avoid. Let's start with something that didn't happen less than two years ago.
If Israel Lost the War, by Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littell
Uncredited cover art.
In the tradition of Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore (the Confederacy wins the American Civil War) and The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick (the Axis wins the Second World War), this book reverses the result of a war.
The title makes that obvious, of course. We're talking about the so-called Six Day War (June 5 through 10, 1967), in which Israel triumphed over a coalition of Arab nations.
I know less about military stuff than almost anybody, so I won't try to analyze the war. However, there seems to be general agreement that Israel's preemptive strike, devastating the Egyptian Air Force and giving Israel complete control over the skies, was a key factor in the victory.
What if Israel didn't attack first? What if Arab forces destroyed most of Israel's air power instead?
That's the premise of the novel. The result is overwhelming victory for the Arab nations, with Israel's territory soon being divided up among them.
The book's map, showing the progress of the imagined conflict.
The occupying forces initiate a reign of terror. As in many wars, looting, rape, and murder follow the victory. The big winner is Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who dominates his allies and intends to create a new, bigger United Arab Republic.
(The UAR was the name given to the union of Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961. The United Arab Republic is still the official name of the nation better known as Egypt.)
As I said, I'm no expert on war, so I don't know how plausible this scenario might be. It assumes closely coordinated action among the Arab states, which is questionable. It also presumes that Arab aircraft would be able to bypass Israel's early warning defense system. (There are even some lines in the book that indicate that this is unlikely.)
So how is the book as a work of fiction? Well, given the fact that the three authors are journalists (all working for Newsweek), it's no surprise that it reads like nonfiction. There are a few minor fictional characters, but all the major ones are real people. We follow politicians and military leaders from Israel, the Arab nations, the USA, and the USSR.
The work is obviously very pro-Israel. (Richard Z. Chesnoff is married to an Israeli woman, and used to live on a kibbutz.) Whether one sees the book as reasoned justification for Israel's preemptive strike, or as anti-Arab propaganda, it is sure to stir up controversy. Judged strictly on its literary merits, I'd have to say that it's readable enough. The authors are definitely more interested in getting their message across than in creating a work of art.
Three stars.
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Let's turn from an imaginary past to a speculative future.
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillion.
The race problem in the United States is much worse in the year 2014 than it was in our own time. Some cities (Detroit, Washington, etc.) are under the control of kneeblanks, while others are still firmly dominated by blanks.
Oh, you're not familiar with those terms? Maybe it'll help if I point out that blank is derived from the Afrikaans word blanc (white) and that kneeblank (often just knee) comes from nieblanc (not white.)
This is a sample of the book's futuristic terminology, which takes some time to get used to. It's not as difficult as the slang in A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, but it requires a little effort.
Anyway, ordinary citizens are forced to defend themselves with serious weapons, supplied by arms dealers. The dominant supplier of deadly devices is a family-run corporation that resembles the Mafia.
That's the background. What about the story? Well, it's complicated. There are a lot of important characters and a lot of plot threads. Let me try to come up with a greatly oversimplified synopsis.
There's a psychiatric institute under the direction of a megalomaniac who treats his patients with extreme isolation from society. One of the inmates is a kneeblank soldier who suffered a breakdown in war, but who now seems perfectly sane. In fact, he's an electronics genius.
A woman who produces enigmatic prophecies while under the influence of drugs (as in ancient times, she's called a pythoness) performs at the institute. A fellow who exposes scandals on television (the book calls him a spoolpigeon) records her act. He also happens to be married to one of the patients.
Meanwhile, a kneeblank spoolpigeon gets kicked out of Detroit by the city's kneeblank mayor, at the instigation of a blank South African. (The tragic situation of apartheid is still going strong in 2014.)
In addition to that, a kneeblank revolutionary who put kneeblanks in control of much of the United Kingdom is on his way to the United States. Even though US officials are terrified of him, he easily gets through customs.
What does this all have to do with a secret project of the arms dealers? Suffice to say that the kneeblank soldier I mentioned above isn't what he seems to be.
I've only given you a vague hint of what the novel is like. In addition to the convoluted plot, there's the narrative style. The first two chapters, for example, consist of a single word split into two parts. Many of the chapter titles are very long and often satiric. In the middle of the book, Brunner provides quotes from real newspaper articles about the American race problem.
The climax involves science fiction themes that are more speculative than those found earlier in the book. These may strain the reader's suspension of disbelief.
This novel isn't as groundbreaking as the author's stunning masterwork Stand on Zanzibar, but it's pretty close in quality.
Four stars.
by David Levinson
A Familiar Refrain
In music, it’s common for artists to cover an old standard or just something someone else has already done. Usually, they have a different approach that may be about the same, worse, or better. Once in a while, they’ll take an old song and make entirely their own (Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra have a singular talent for this).
There’s a similar phenomenon in science fiction. Someone comes up with an interesting idea—time travel, alien invasion, what have you—and eventually almost everybody tries to see what they can do with the concept. Harry Harrison’s latest novel is just such a work. How well did he do?
Two Aztec villages lie on either side of a river in a valley long isolated from the outside world. We soon learn that things are not as they seem. The serpent-headed goddess Coatlicue is a physical presence that stalks the river bank at night, and typical Aztec features include blonde hair and blue eyes.
Into this world is born Chimal, a young man with a penchant for asking uncomfortable questions. When he inadvertently causes the death of the high priest (and the sun fails to rise, because there is no one to say the necessary prayer), Chimal must flee the valley. The society he finds outside the valley is no less hidebound and no fonder of questions with uncomfortable answers.
Although I’ve talked around it for the benefit of those who would like to experience the surprise on their own, I suspect many of you have figured out what’s going on. Although Harrison adds one or two interesting flourishes, the novel follows the expected course to one of the standard endings. Indeed, the story follows such a predictable course, I found myself more interested in what happened centuries earlier to create the situation or what is going to happen a few decades after the end.
Is it worth your time? Maybe. Is it worth your money? Definitely not, especially not at hardback prices.
Dickson has been busy as of late, with his serial Wolfling currently running in Analog, and with a new paperback original alongside it. Spacepaw is a less serious novel and seems to be aimed at a younger readership, which is fine by me. It takes place on Dilbia, the same planet featured in Dickson's 1961 novel Special Delivery. Like that earlier novel it features the Dilbians, a race of nine-foot-tall bear-like aliens who are not exactly hostile but who certainly have a curious way of going about things.
Bill Waltham is an agriculture scientist sent to Dilbia, supposedly to meet up with Lafe Greentree, his on-site superior, and Anita Lyme, a "trainee assistant" working under Greentree. The problem (actually two problems) is that Greentree is not here: he had sustained an injury whose severity the off-planet hospital is strangely vague about disclosing, and Anita has been taken captive by a pack of Dilbian outlaws. The only possible help Waltham can get are the mischievous Dilbian the Hill Bluffer (that's his name, the Hill Bluffer) and a Hemnoid named Mula-ay (italics not mine). The Hill Bluffer is not terribly useful and Mula-ay seems to be working for a third party—in Waltham's favor or not remains to be seen.
This novel is basically a comedy of manners. To rescue Lyme and convince the Dilbians to pick up agricultural skills (the race is a rural lot that lives off the fat o' the land), Waltham will have to adapt to Dilbian customs. The black-furred giants are a comical lot, with silly names like More Jam, Perfectly Delightful, and Grandpa Squeaky; they even give Waltham a Dilbian name, "Pick-and-Shovel," which the serious-minded human does not appreciate. The leader of the outlaws, Bone Breaker, is pretty affable despite his name and occupation. The stakes are kept somewhat low, even when Waltham is duped into accepting a duel to the death, which is fitting for a comedy, even if doesn't leave the reader with much to think about.
Dickson's brand of humor is unlikely to spark laughter, but it's effective at often invoking a smirk. Waltham himself is a bit of a wet blanket, but the comedy mostly stems from this straight-laced hero type being forced to deal with some deeply unserious aliens. Lyme is a bit of a shrew, but Dickson does write her as competent and independent-minded, even if I suspect he does not think very highly of her.
A solid three out of five stars, possibly four for young readers.
A good deal less enjoyable is a new Gothic horror novel I picked up, by an author I've never heard of before. Despite having been published this year, The Tormented reads like a fossilized dinosaur, but not one of the interesting ones. It's a pastiche of late-19th century supernatural horror. I'm sure Daniels likes Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle, but unfortunately she is not remotely as good a wordsmith as James or even Doyle.
Sharon Aldrich lived on a New Orleans plantation called The Pillars until both her parents died, and it turns out all the money had dried up. After a stint or two abroad she returns to The Pillars as governess for a new family that's moved in, the Beaumonts. Craig Beaumont and his wife Emily are stuck in a loveless marriage while Emily's sister, Sarah, tags along as a third wheel. Cassie, Craig's daughter, is a reasonably well-adjusted child despite the fact that she had witnessed a horrific death in the family not long ago. And there seems to be a ghost problem on the plantation. The place is most certainly haunted (it takes all of about five minutes upon Sharon's arriving for a ghost to start whispering in her ear), and worse yet, Sharon must now deal with a dysfunctional upper-class family.
You would think that at only 160 pages this would be a densely packed narrative, but it's not. There's quite a bit of padding. Most of the wordage is dialogue, with characters often getting into arguments with each other and then almost immediately apologizing for causing a fuss. Emily and Sarah are major shrews, and Sharon is not much better. It soon becomes clear Sharon and Craig like each other but are hesitant to take action, what with the whole marriage thing. Even the ghost does not pose much of a threat. No wonder the Confederacy lost. The Tormented is probably a few thousand words longer than James's The Turn of the Screw, but feels shorter because it spins its wheels so often. Not much actually happens, and despite the New Orleans setting Daniels injects practically no atmosphere into her writing.
The most damning part is that this is 1969, not 1889. I kept thinking, "Why play such an old and tired genre straight? What point is Daniels trying to make by doing this?" After having read the whole thing, I still don't know.
![[June 26, 1969] <i>Five Years… New Worlds</i>, July 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/new-worlds-july-1969.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Cover by Mal Dean
Photo by Gabi Nasemann 
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Unknown source. 
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Artist drawings are unlabelled, but possibly by Mal Dean 
Where Kenneth Coutts-Smith looks at the work of artist Aubrey Beardsley.
![[June 16, 1969] The Voyage to Net a Dolphin (June 1969 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/690616covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[May 26, 1969] Cornelius Overload! <i>New Worlds</i>, June 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/New-Worlds-mag-June-1969.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Photograph by Gabi Nasemann 
Photograph by Gabi Nasemann 
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Drawing by Mal Dean 
Advertisement from the back cover for the reviewed book. ![[May 16, 1969] Strange Dreams (May Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/690516covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[April 24, 1969] The Strange New Normal <i>New Worlds</i>, May 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/New-Worlds-May-1969.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Cover by Gabi Nasemann 
Photo by Gabi Nasemann 
Image by Mal Dean 
A map of the Girvan Fun Palace, Image by Unknown 
Image by Mal Dean 
Photo by Gabi Nasemann 
![[April 18, 1969] A new look at dragons… (Anne McCaffrey's <i>Dragonflight</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690418coverdragonflight.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690416covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 24, 1969] Apocalypse Impending? <i>New Worlds</i>, April 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/New-Worlds-April-1969.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
The named list from last month.
Cover by Mervyn Peake.
In a post-apocalyptic US we are told of teenager Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. Vic is a teenage boy who spends his time scavenging the world for basic needs—food, companionship, and sex—as well as generally avoiding other groups, known as roverpaks, doing the same thing. They meet Quilla June – unusual because most women live where it is safer, underground. Vic rapes Quilla June before they are attacked by another roverpak. Blood is hurt in the scuffle. Quilla June escapes and returns to her underground home of Topeka.
More poetry. Described as ‘a poem for light and movement’, Thomas manages to produce strange typewritten boxes that are at times undecipherable. A typical ‘form over content’ type piece. 2 out of 5.
The inevitable 'naked lady of the month' picture.
Artwork by Mal Dean.
More artwork by Mal Dean.
![February 26, 1969] Springtime for Moorcock? <i>New Worlds</i>, March 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/NW-March-1969.png?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Cover by Gabi Nasemann. Is this Moorcock horrified by his announcement? 
Artwork by Mal Dean.
The magazine’s obsession with D.M. Thomas continues, with something given under the premise that it is a transcript of speech from Mr. Black, a schizophrenic, as he is treated. As the story progresses, in 
Bizarre artwork by Mal Dean, seemingly stuck in at random in the middle of this story.
Artwork by Mal Dean.
Continuing the war theme, now with poetry, this time from writer and reviewer MacBeth. His last prose piece was in July 1967. The Hiroshima Dream touches on themes that seem very Ballardian, so it seems a logical piece to follow Ballard. Death, destruction, dystopia….fifty tankas* all based around apocalypse and the nuclear bomb dropping at Hiroshima. Although it is shockingly dark, I prefer MacBeth to D. M. Thomas. 4 out of 5.
![[February 18, 1969] (February Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690218covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Art by Paul Lehr
