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[December 16, 1968] Adventure and eulogies (December Galactoscope)

December 16, 2023 Kris Vyas-Myall 7 Comments

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Arthur Sellings Double Feature

I was sad to read in last month’s Science Fiction Times of the death of Arthur Sellings at only 47. His is a name not well known enough outside of the UK.

Example covers of Authentic Galaxy Fantastic Universe If from 1953-1955 containing Sellings work — Just some of the markets from the early-mid 50s publishing Sellings

His story follows the standard pattern of many of the current crop of great SF writers. He began at the start of the 50s magazine boom, being published first in the British magazine Authentic in 1953. He then became a regular contributor to H. L. Gold’s Galaxy, going on to appear in many of the major US publications.

Example Covers of Science Fiction Adventures, New Worlds, Science Fantasy containing Sellings work along with his first novel, The Silent Speakers — He continued to be published in the 3 major UK magazines as well as starting on his own novels

As the magazine market contracted, he was concentrated largely in the British publications of Carnell and Moorcock, but also branched out into paperback novels.

In spite of getting well reviewed works coming out of Ballantine and occasional appearances in Pohl’s various periodicals, most SF fans across the pond would probably have no recollection of the fellow. His death marks a double shame as he was as prolific as ever and British writers, finally, seem to be getting more acceptance in America.

Yet it should not be thought he was a Moorcockian New Waver. Seven months before Ballard published his famous Which Way to Inner Space? in New Worlds, Sellings used the same editorial column to suggest his own vision to save SF, entitled Where Now?. Here is an extract:

The Next Revolution…is a return to roots…I am certainly not advocating a return to the rudimentary kind of s-f in which a professor holds up everything for two or three pages, while he explains it all to his idiot daughter…But a story should be intelligible – in itself – without reference to any other…Science fiction has become too glib. That sense of wonder is the prime thing which s-f can offer to the new-comer. If it doesn’t that is one more reason for him to turn away.
….Earth Abides, a ‘simple’ story on a theme as old as Noah. Yet it was new – and just as compelling for the fan as for the general reader…All the basic themes can similarly and profitably be investigated.

So, what has that meant in practice? Well, his best works have often dealt with familiar ideas but trying to consider *how* this might play out to an ordinary person. Silent Speakers looks at how having some limited telepathy could affect an individual, much in the manner of Wells’ Invisible Man, whilst The Last Time Around, uses the time dilation effect to look at how the traveller into the future would struggle to adjust to social changes and maintain relationships.

This year he released two of his best works, a short story collection and a novel. So, let's pour one out for Arthur and dive into his books:

The Power of X by Arthur Sellings

Cover of 1968 edition of The Power of X — Cover by Richard Weaver

In 2014 “Plying” was developed, the ability to duplicate an object exactly by taking it out of the fourth dimension. Although it could not be done infinitely, this created a large secondary market for Plied paintings, where someone may pay higher amounts for an original in order to make their money back via Plying twelve copies. Of course, the process is expensive and highly regulated.

Four years later, Max Afford, the new owner of Gallery O, discovers he has the unusual ability to detect whether or not a painting is Plied by touch. This would have turned out to be little more than a curiosity if it wasn’t for him being invited to meet the President of Europe…only to discover he is just a Plied copy of the original.

Everyone tells Max that it is not scientifically possible, yet he can sense it has been done. Who could do such a thing? And why?

Around 30 years ago Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Last year, Andy Warhol created 10 portraits of Marilyn Monroe through mechanical printing. So, whilst “Plying” may not be quite available today, the questions being grappled with are contemporary ones.

This work touches on the nature of reality, what is lost when something is duplicated and the aura that we have around certain objects. These are heady subjects, but Sellings displays his usual skill to make them understandable and fit them into a science fictional framework without it descending into a word salad of gobbledygook.

At the same time, it is a well-paced conspiracy thriller that does a wonderful job creating the world of a 21st century united European republic. As you are quickly going on with the plot, someone will give away they are from London by using the metric system in East Anglia, where the locals generally do not. The feel is closer to The Great Escape than 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It should also not go unnoticed that Sellings has a wonderful turn of phrase, and some parts are deliciously funny such as:

The ‘package’ must be something special, or she would have simply brought it in to me. What was it? A three-ton hunk of concrete by Harold Bleckstein? He was in the middle of a three-ton concrete period just then and had an artist’s fine disregard for such small details as phoning to let you know the latest was on the way.

‘Not a patch on that brewery, was it, Ada?’ I don’t know what they had expected. Free samples?

Add into this multiple fleshed-out women characters and some very progressive attitudes on display and I am more than happy to give this a full five stars.

The Long Eureka by Arthur Sellings

Cover of the 1968 Edition of The Long Eureka — Cover by Richard Weaver

His second short story collection covers from where the last one left off, in 1956, going up to 1964, along with a couple of originals.

Blank Form

Black and white illustration of a psychiatrist in his office talking to a shapeshifter in the form of a bear — Illustration by Martinez, from Galaxy

Originally published in July 1958 Galaxy, Sellings tells of Fletcher, a psychologist who believes he has run down a man with his car. It turns out that the victim is not only uninjured, but is actually an amnesiac shape-shifter. Being a psychologist, Fletcher does not wish to hurt or profit by this fellow, but to help him.

This is a perfect example of what Sellings does so well. Take a standard SFnal concept and bring it into a much more ordinary mode, looking at how different people might react in an uncliched manner. The ending feels a bit incomplete but still a strong tale.

Four Stars

The Scene Shifter

Cover of 1959 edition of Star Science Fiction #5 — Cover Artist Unknown

Possibly the high point of his American career. This story was published in Star Science Fiction #5, between Daniel F. Galouye & Rosel George Brown.

When actor Boyd Corry goes to see one of his films, he finds it has been changed from a drama to a broad comedy. Soon it happens again, where an ordinary romantic comedy is changed to pornography. These shots were not filmed and the reels themselves have not been tampered with. What could be causing this?

At first this seems like a slight tale about the movie industry, something of a piece with The Time-Machined Saga, but it evolves into something deeper. It looks at the relationship between the audience and the picture, asking who really has control of a story.

Four Stars

One Across

Black and White illustration of a newspaper boy yelling: "Extra! Gedge disappears behind Russia's lines!" Whilst behind him there is a man's face in agony and a hand points towards the words — Illustration by Cal, from Galaxy

Jumping back to earlier in Selling’s career, One Across was originally published in May 1956’s Galaxy.

Norman is addicted to crosswords, doing more and more challenging puzzles. In the most fiendish puzzle yet, he discovers it can only be solved by utilizing four dimensions. This realization causes him to be transported to another dimension, a desert plain inhabited by people who have solved complex problems. They are building a utopia and need him for one purpose, breeding.

This does feel like it is from a writer’s earlier career, more what you might see turn up in an If First. It has a good style and some interesting ideas but none of them are properly explored.

Two Stars

The Well-Trained Heroes

Black and White illustration of a man in a black outfit looking haggard — Illustration by Jack Gaughan, from Galaxy

Now for a more recent piece, covered by the Journey in the review of Galaxy June 1964. Our esteemed editor synopsized it well , so I am not going to be repetitious.

We are also in agreement in our thoughts on the story. The central concept, a kind of reverse The Space Merchants, is a good one, but the story is too long and rambling, with the decision to make it told predominantly through dialogue making it all far too expository.

A low Three Stars

Homecoming

In this previously unpublished work, Sellings once again makes use of an amnesiac. Sam Bishop wakes up after a car smash with only the vaguest memories of his life. Having lost his legs in the accident, Sam finds himself growing restless without a job. And, in spite of how nice everyone in Greenville seems, he can’t help but feel something is wrong.

Whilst using what would seem to be a Twilight Zone style of setup, we get a much deeper exploration of a host of ideas such as, how we treat the disabled, what the difference is between reality and illusion, what really is a home?

A high Four Stars

The Long Eureka

Cover of August 1959 Science Fantasy with a more abstract illustration — Cover Art by Brian Lewis

Back to reprints, where the titular piece comes from August 1959’s Science Fantasy.

In 1820, Issac Reeves believes he has discovered the Elixir of Life. Unfortunately, no one believes him, in spite of the fact that he doesn’t seem to age. Convincing anyone else is going to take a very, very, very long time.

I have a soft spot for longitudinal tales of immortals, so this fitted right into my wheelhouse. Also, it manages to be both funny and tragic as Isaac struggles in vain to get anyone to believe him, with each successive generation having a new explanation for his claims.

Four Stars

Verbal Agreement

Black and White illustration showing a Vernan woman talking to an Earthman as he pulls a book from his bag — Illustration by Dick Francis, from Galaxy

Returning to Galaxy once more, with this story from September 1956.

Humphrey Spink is a poet in the 22nd Century, struggling to come up with something new to say. Seeking to broaden his horizons, he accepts a very curious job offer from Cosmic Developments Inc.: to try to find out how to purchase from the Vernans, a telepathic species that only have disdain for Earth’s technological progress.

This one of the many tales of the time trying to demonstrate an alien race totally different from our own, but it is a good example of the theme. Not a classic but enjoyable.

Four Stars

Trade-In

The other original tale in this collection is Sellings taking on robotics. When a newer robot model comes along to replace them, each robot has twenty-one days to find a new owner. The problem is, who wants an outdated creation?

This is a very affecting story giving real humanity to our creations. These armies of unemployed robots remind me of the great depression, where so many people needed work but could never find any. It brings the metaphor right back to its earliest roots and gives us a fascinating solution for Davie by the end.

Four Stars

Birthright

Black and white illustration with a humanoid against a starfield which also contains a pair of eyes and a rocket. — Illustration by Eddie Jones, from New Worlds

And finally, one of his first stories for New Worlds, from November 1956.

Farr finds himself in a white room tended by gods of metal. At first, he is hostile towards them but, eventually, he agrees to learn from them. Following his educational journey, we learn of his people’s origin and the purpose the gods have for him.

This is definitely a more experimental and controversial piece, with lines such as:

I anger again. God is evil god I hate god. I smash god face again.

At the same time, it touches on a number of thorny issues and delicious concepts. By the end I am not sure where I stood on any of the character’s choices, and it is all the better for it.

Five Stars

Hic jacet Arthurus, auctor quondam et auctor futurus*

So, there you have it. I hope I have shown he was a brilliant writer who has yet to have the full appreciation he deserves. Hopefully, like his legendary namesake, his reputation will rise in SF’s hour of need.

*Apologies for the bad Latin.

by Gideon Marcus

Ace Double H-103

The Age of Ruin, by John M. Faucette

Awakened from his sleep by a nightmare, Jahalazar of the purple hair yet hears the cry of his kind:

Help us, Jahalazar, your people are dying.

So, Jahalazar, a warrior without peer, armed with Chernak, the Throwing Sword, and Lil Chernak, the Slitting Knife, he bids farewell to his adoptive home. The crude realm of Clan Chevy in the bowl of Bomb Valley is like a paradise compared to the the lands Jahalazar must travel—first to Sea City, where the fish-headed people fight off the rubber-suited Zharks and their fearsome weapons that project flesh-devouring Diss. Thence over mountains. Further over higher mountains on the back of friendly, giant spiders. Across the endless plains on which two mechanized armies are locked in eternal conflict.

And on and on, past volcanic and mutated horrors, into domains ruled by sadists, to others dominated by distorted but good souls, and always with the ever-evolving Diss, now sentient and bent on world conquest, nipping at his heels.

Ever in the background: what caused the Age of Ruin, and can humanity rebound from it?

Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? This is yet another "after the apocalypse" novels, of which Spawn of the Death machine and Omha Abides are fine examples from just this year. Unfortunately, The Age of Ruin is not up to their caliber.

Oh, the writing's not bad, in a sort of derivative, pulpy style. The monsters, scenery, and scenes are pretty interesting. The problem is there's nothing holding them all together. Each chapter is a self-contained story, and ultimately, Jahalazar is a sort of sight-seer. It's almost like Danté's Inferno.

The other issue is that Faucette, the author, throws out all of these monstrosities and weird human nations without any thought of logistics. Here we have the equivalent of Harry Harrison's Deathworld in terms of lethal environment, yet somehow humans are growing food and supporting realms. Given that Jahalazar rarely has the opportunity to sleep, I'm not sure how people manage to do the mundane things that running a civilization requires.

This is Faucette's second book, his first being another Ace Double half, Crown of Infinity, released earlier this year. I haven't read that one so I can't compare, but now I'm mildly tempted.

Three stars.

Code Duello, by Mack Reynolds

If you wanted to see more of Helen, the 26-year old acrobatic agent who goes undercover as an 8-year old (first seen in" Fiesta Brava"), then this is your chance. Code Duello is the latest in Mack Reynolds' saga of the United Planets, a future setting in which humanity has spread to the stars, and each planet has the freedom to pursue whichever socioeconomic path it chooses. Usually, it's something modeled on Earth history, and it's often pretty extreme. Mostly, it's a chance for Reynolds to show off his knowledge of history and politics and take real-life societies to absurd extremes.

It's also an opportunity for spy high jinks. There is a race of aliens who inhabit the "Dawnworlds". They don't communicate with humans, but they possess far more power than humanity, and they have been known to destroy perceived competitors if they get too threatening. This is why Earth has set up Section G, a supersecret spy organization whose job is to subtly ensure that all of the planets, despite ostensibly being free from interference, are never allowed to backslide technologically or productively. The idea is that, if we are to have a chance against the Dawnworlders, we must always be progressing rather than sitting on our laurels.

The planet of the week is Firenze, a world based on Florence (of course). Its salient features are that everyone likes to resolve conflicts by dueling (and everyone is quick to want to duel) and the supposedly democratic world is actually a rigidly controlled dictatorship. There is supposedly an "Engelist" underground, always on the verge of taking over, yet no one, not even the government officials, know who the Engelists are, what they stand for, or if any have even been seen in the wild.

The agents who have been sent to Firenze to investigate the situation (actually, explicitly to help the current government against the rebels…which seems like jumping the gun since obviously little was known about the Florentine government or its supposed insurgency) are as follows: Helen, as mentioned above; Dorn, a brilliant algae biologist who also happens to be the strongest man in the galaxy; Zorro, who is a demon with a whip; and Jerry, whose signature feature is his unbeatable luck. Once again, we have the setup for a Retief-style zany adventure, and it is mildly amusing…for a little while. Additional mystery is added when Zorro finds that the Florentines seem to have knowledge of the Dawnworlds, which was supposed to be a carefully controlled United Planets state secret.

But eventually, I got tired of Helen snorting/sneering/smirking through every line, the historical screeds that would flow incongruously from the mouths of various characters (always with relevance to, say, someone who had traveled the world circa 1960), and the slapstick nature of the book. I finished, because I wanted to know how the mysteries ended, but it was definitely a story written on autopilot.

Two and a half stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

Young and Old

Two new novels deal with the elderly and the young. Other than that, they could not be more different.

The Sword Swallower, by Ron Goulart

The first novel from this comic writer is a greatly expanded version of a story that appeared in the November 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Cover art by Gray Morrow.

The Noble Editor didn't care for the novelette when it first appeared. Will the long version be any better or worse?

Cover art by Seymour Chwast.

Ben Jolson is an interplanetary secret agent. As a member of the Chameleon Corps, he has the ability to change his appearance at will. He can look like anybody or anything. He's had a couple of other misadventures prior to this one.

Military officers have vanished. It seems that so-called pacifists are trying to prevent the Barnum system of planets from conquering Earth. Ben's job is to find out who's responsible and stop them.

(I guess this explains the otherwise obscure title. Making a sword disappear is kind of like making a soldier disappear, I suppose.)

At this point, I expected a satire of militarism, given the fact that the bad guys are pacifists and the good guys are attacking Earth with deadly force. It didn't quite work out that way.

Ben disguises himself as a very old man and sets out for a rejuvenation center on a planet that also serves as a gigantic cemetery. He gets mixed up with a female secret agent who is on his side, but who isn't part of the Chameleon Corps.

Following the clue he finds there, he changes into a young person and infiltrates a group of beatnik/hippie/folk singer types. From there, he goes to the huge cemetery to confront the guy behind the disappearances. Along the way he has to rescue the female agent.

That's the plot of the novelette, as well as the beginning and end of the novel. What's been added to increase the word length is Ben's involvement with a computer that acts as a crime boss. There's some other stuff, too.

The book didn't amuse me. If you think it's funny that Ben beats the computer at Monopoly, you may get a kick out of it.

It doesn't work as action/adventure/suspense, because Ben immediately gets out of trouble every time the bad guys get the upper hand, either by changing his shape or just by using his fists.

It fails as satire for a couple of reasons. The supposed pacifists turn out to be intent on arming Earth against the invaders. That undermines any Orwellian War is Peace theme. The portraits of the elderly and the young are just silly rather than biting.

The best I can say about the novel is that it's a very fast, easy read. The breakneck pace is similar to one of Keith Laumer's yarns.

Two stars.

They, by Marya Mannes

As far as I can tell, the only other work of fiction by this author is a novel that came out twenty years ago. (There may be some short stories of which I am not aware.) She's much better known for nonfiction, and has a reputation for being an acerbic social critic.

Cover art by Robert Hallock.

Her first novel was a ghost story, in which a dead woman looks back on her life. Maybe she'll publish another one in 1988. For now, we've got a dark vision of the near future.

Photograph of the author by Alex Gotfryd.

The fact that the cover depicts the author is our first hint that this isn't a typical science fiction novel. That seems more appropriate for a book of essays or some such. Her warm smile doesn't fit with the mood of the book either.

Not many years from now, people who are fifty years old are forced to retire and live in segregated communities, cut off from contact of any kind with younger folks. At the age of sixty, they have to pass a physical exam or else be forced to choose between suicide or execution by the government. At sixty-five, not even a clean bill of health can save them from mandatory death.

(Shades of Wild in the Streets, with its concentration camps for people over thirty-five years of age! Despite similar themes, that movie and this novel are quite different experiences.)

The narrator is one of five people living in a house by the sea. (As a special privilege, the government allows these creative types to dwell there instead of the usual ghetto for old folks. The house used to belong to the narrator and her husband, who killed himself when the youth movement seized power.)

Besides the narrator, who was a journalist, we have a painter, his model, a composer of classical music, and a writer of popular songs. The latter is also the narrator's current lover. The composer had a much younger wife who lived with the others for a while, but soon left to be with folks in her own age group.

I should also mention the narrator's dog, the composer's cat, and the bird that belongs to the painter and the model, because they are important characters as well.

Besides providing the reader with exposition, the narrator records the philosophical discussions and arguments among the five, often quoting them at length.

(The author does a fine job of making their voices distinct. The painter is angry and bitter, his speech full of profanity. The model speaks simply and emotionally. The composer is elegant and intellectual. The songwriter is witty and satiric.)

As you might be able to tell, much of the book consists of talk. The characters discuss what went wrong with society, and how it might be cured. Don't expect a lot of action.

An odd plot twist occurs late in the book. A beautiful, dark-skinned young man shows up, apparently washed up by the ocean. He doesn't speak, and his origin remains a mystery. The novel ends with a group decision by the five elders.

Besides dealing with the youth movement and attacking the way it disregards the past, the book also raises a lot of other issues. Art, music, politics, and education are discussed at length.

In addition to this rather dry material, there's some beautiful writing about the seashore, which the author obviously loves.

Not for all tastes, to be sure! I suspect a lot of readers will be bored to tears by all the talk, and find the unexplained arrival of the young man baffling.

Two stars.

by Cora Buhlert

A King on the Run: The Goblin Tower by L. Sprague De Camp

Do you remember thirteen-year-old Dutch singer Hein Simons a.k.a. Heintje, who is not only the breakout star of 1968 in West Germany, but whose sappy song "Mama" is the most successful single of the year?

Young Heintje followed up the success of "Mama" with a Christmas album entitled Weihnachten mit Heintje (Christmas with Heintje) where he sings traditional German Christmas carols. He also has a new single out called "Heidschi Bumbeidschi", which is even more painfully saccharine than "Mama", if that's possible. It is not a Christmas song, but a traditional Bohemian lullaby, which unfortunately does not stop West German radio stations from playing "Heidschi Bumbeidschi" in continuous rotation in the run-up to the holidays.

Hein Simons is clearly a very talented young man. I just hope that he eventually gets to sing songs that are more appropriate to a modern teenager.

Off With His Head

During the latest visit to my trusty import bookstore, I spotted a familiar name in the paperback spinner rack, namely L. Sprague De Camp, who has been editing and tinkering with the Conan reprints for Lancer Books. However, this time around, it wasn't another Conan book, but an original fantasy novel by L. Sprague De Camp called The Goblin Tower. The striking cover by J. Jones, probably the most talented new artist to emerge in recent times, drew me in and the blurb on the back sounded intriguing as well, so I picked the book up as a St. Nicholas Day present to myself. So let's see how L. Sprague De Camp does when he is not messing with Conan…

After a dedication to De Camp's fellow swashbuckler Lin Carter and a map of Novaria, the setting of the tale, The Goblin Tower certainly starts off with a bang or rather a chop, since Jorian, the current king of the city of Xylar, is about to be executed in front of the city gates. For in Xylar, it is custom to publicly behead the king every five years. Whoever catches the severed head shall become the new king, until it is his turn to mount the scaffold.

As methods of selecting a government go, this one is rather bloody and not particularly efficient, though it does prevent the establishment of tyranny, because every ruler comes with a built-in expiration date, as well as bloody wars of succession. Also kudos to L. Sprague De Camp for remembering that a monarchy is not necessarily hereditary; for example the Holy Roman Empire initially was not.

Jorian seems resigned to his fate and sanguine enough, even though he never desired to be king in the first place. Nor has he any intention to lose his head and so Jorian tricks the executioner and assembled populace of Xylar and escapes his own beheading with the aid of the wizard Karadur and his magical rope trick, which allows Jorian to climb away from the scaffold into what his people view as the afterlife.

This Never Happened to Conan

The "afterlife" in which Jorian briefly finds himself turns out to be our modern world. Worse, poor Jorian materialises in the grassy median strip of a highway and almost gets run over by a car – not that Jorian knows what a car is; he initially thinks it's a monster before realising that it is a vehicle. Jorian also meets a police officer in his brief sojourn in the modern world, though he mistakes the man for a carpenter, since Jorian has never seen a gun before, but finds that it looks like a carpenter's tool.

L. Sprague De Camp is a more humorous and satirical writer than Robert E. Howard was (though Howard could be very funny as well, e.g. in his Sailor Steve Costigan stories), which means that their styles don't always mesh well in the posthumous Conan collaborations. However, the brief interlude of our modern world seen through the eyes of a Barbarian king from a fantasy world plays to De Camp's strengths. The scene is hilarious, though De Camp can't resist adding some of his own opinions about the shortcomings of our world. It's also impossible to imagine anything like this ever happening to Conan.

A Quest and a Roadtrip

Alas, Jorian's sojourn in the modern world is short-lived, before he returns to his own world to meet up with Karadur. He also learns that the wizard didn't just save Jorian's life out of the goodness of his heart. No, there is a price. Karadur wants Jorian to help him retrieve a chest full of magical manuscripts called the Kist of Arvlen and bring it to a conclave of wizards at the titular Goblin Tower.

So Jorian and Karadur set off on their quest and now we learn the reason for the map at the beginning of the book, 'cause the pair will visit every single location marked thereon, have adventures and get entangled with beautiful women, vile wizards, and treacherous nobles, all the while pursued by Xylarian soldiers who want to recapture their errant king for his beheading. Along the way, Jorian rescues twelve slave girls from a brotherhood of retired executioners, once he realises that the executioners want to use them for practice to keep their skills sharp, and steals the Kist of Arvlen from the bedchamber of a shape-shifting serpent princess. He narrowly escapes being sacrificed to a jungle god and takes part in a heist to steal the statue of a frog god, replacing it with a real frog, much to the confusion of the worshippers.

Finally, Jorian and Karadur and the Kist of Arvlen make it to the conclave of wizards at the Goblin Tower, which turns out to be an edifice constructed from real goblins, who have been turned to stone by magic. What could possibly go wrong with holding a wizard symposium in such a place?

A Meandering Tale

Jorian and Karadur's adventures are a lot of fun, but they are also meandering and episodic to the point that every chapter seems more like a standalone short story than part of a greater whole. The fact that Jorian, who is more Sheherazade than Conan, frequently regales the people he meets by telling stories reinforces that episodic and picaresque feel of the novel.

However, this fault is not unique to The Goblin Tower, but appears to be a structural issue with the entire genre that Fritz Leiber dubbed "sword and sorcery". Born in the pages of Weird Tales almost forty years ago, sword and sorcery is a genre of short, fast adventures. Whether it's Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian or Kull of Atlantis, Fritz Leiber's stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or the dreamlike adventures of C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry, all of these characters initially appeared in short stories and novellas, and modern heroes in the same mode such as Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, Roger Zelazny's Dilvish the Damned or John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian follow suit.

However, the genre landscape has changed since the heyday of the pulps and the dominant form – particularly for fantasy – is now the novel. Of course, there are sword and sorcery novels, from Robert E. Howard's The Hour of the Dragon a.k.a. Conan the Conqueror via Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, Björn Nyberg's The Return of Conan a.k.a. Conan the Avenger, Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer and Lin Carter's A Wizard of Lemuria all the way to Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar, Joanna Russ' Picnic on Paradise and De Camp and Carter's Conan of the Isles. Having read and enjoyed several of these novels, it's notable that many of them tend to be very episodic and feel like fix-ups, even if they aren't. This makes sense in the case of The Hour of the Dragon, which was after all serialised in Weird Tales, or Swords of Lankhmar, the first part of which appeared as a standalone novella in Fantastic. But The Goblin Tower is a paperback original that was never serialised anywhere, so why is it structured like a serial?

Nonetheless, The Goblin Tower is a highly enjoyable novel, which allows De Camp to show off his humorous side, something he rarely has the opportunity to do with the Conan stories. Furthermore, the open ending is very much begging for a sequel and I for one will certainly pick it up.

Four stars

Rosenthal Christmas plate 1968 — This year's collectible Christmas plate by the china manufacturer Rosenthal depicts Bremen's market place in the snow – a rare sight indeed.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 12, 1968] The Further Adventures of the Cimmerian: Conan of the Isles by Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp and the Lancer Conan Series in General

November 12, 2023 Cora Buhlert 8 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Contempt of Court

Do you remember the would-be revolutionaries, who committed arson attacks on two department stores in Frankfurt on Main earlier this year?

Frankfurt arson trial — Ateempted arsonists Thorwald Proll, Hans Söhnlein, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in court.

The four arsonists – Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll and Hans Söhnlein – just had their day in court and decided to make a spectacle out of it. And so the four refused to stand up when the judge addressed them, they wore sunglasses and smoked cigarettes in court and answered even basic questions with nonsense. Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who are lovers even though they both have children with other people, even made out in court. As a result, Andreas Baader and Hans Söhnlein found themselves jailed for contempt of court on the first day of the trial.

Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in court — Lovers Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin make out in court.

Nor were the four in any way remorseful, but claimed that the attempted arson was a revolutionary act against capitalist consumption which is designed to destroy wealth by persuading people to buy things they don't need. Unsurprisingly, that defence did not stand up in court.

The trial ended as was to be expected, with the four young arsonists sentenced to three years in prison each, which prompted Thorwald Proll to threaten to burn down the courthouse, once again demonstrating his utter lack of remorse.

A Hail of Cobblestones

Only four days after the end of the arson trial, one of the lawyers involved, 32-year-old Horst Mahler, found himself on trial in West Berlin, about to have his licence revoked for taking part in the violent protests after the shooting of student activist Rudi Dutschke.

Horst Mahler, Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans — Lawyer Horst Mahler on his way to court with his clients, Kommune 1 members Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans.

Horst Mahler has represented many leftwing activists in court and so about one thousand young people gathered outside the courthouse in the Charlottenburg neighbourhood of West Berlin to protest Mahler's treatment by the legal system. Sadly, as has happened with so many protests in recent times, the situation quickly escalated into violence.

But while in most cases, the violence was instigated by the police, this time around the police were the victims. For a truck transporting cobblestones happened to end up directly in the middle of the protest – ironically after the police refused to let him take an alternate route according to truck driver Egon H. The protesters quickly availed themselves of the truck's cargo and began pelting the police officers with cobblestones. As a result, 130 police officers were injured, ten of them were hospitalised.

Aftermath of the battle of Tegeler Weg — Cobblestones litter the streets of the West Berlin neighbourhood of Charlottenburg in the aftermath of what has become known as the battle of the Tegeler Weg.

A Satisfying Slap

One of Horst Mahler's clients is Beate Klarsfeld, a 29-year-old French-German journalist and political activist. In 1960, Beate Klarsfeld spent a year as an au-pair in Paris, where she met Holocaust survivor Serge Klarsfeld, fell in love and eventually got married.

Horst Mahler and Beate Klarsfeld — Horst Mahler and his client Beate Klarsfeld.

Her marriage to a Holocaust survivor turned Beate Klarsfeld into an activist against former Nazis holding political offices in West Germany. Sadly, there are many of those, including the current chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger.

When Kiesinger visited Paris in January 1967, Beate Klarsfeld wrote several articles for the French magazine Combat, detailing Kiesinger's actions during the Third Reich. Those articles cost Beate Klarsfeld her job, so she started agitating even more against Kiesinger.

Beate Klarsfeld yells "Resign, Nazi" from the public gallery of the West German parliament building in Bonn and is restrained by a security guard.

Beate Klarsfeld is removed from parliament after yelling "Resign, Nazi" at Kiesinger.

In April, Beate Klarsfeld yelled "Resign, Nazi" at Kiesinger from the public gallery of the West German parliament and was promptly arrested. Then, five days ago, Beate Klarsfeld stormed the stage during a party convention in West Berlin, yelled "Nazi, Nazi" and slapped Kiesinger. Kurt Georg Kiesinger suffered a black eye, while Beate Klarsfeld was arrested and sentenced to one year in prison on the very same day. However, because Mrs. Klarsfeld is a French citizen ever since her marriage, she is currently free.

As someone who intensely dislikes Kurt Georg Kiesinger and considers him unfit for one of the highest offices in the land, because he is not just very stupid, but a former Nazi besides, I have to admit that I was inwardly cheering when I heard about the slap. Normally, I am not in favour political violence, but the many articles Beate Klarsfeld wrote about Kiesinger's Nazi past failed to have an impact, so she resorted to a more physical form of protest and I for one cannot fault her.

The Barbarian King

Besides, Kiesinger got off lightly with only a black eye, compared to Numidides, the tyrannical ruler of the prehistoric kingdom of Aquilonia, who was slain by his former general Conan the Cimmerian, whereupon Conan crowned himself king.

Lancer is truly doing Crom's work in reprinting Robert E. Howard's classic tales of Conan the Cimmerian, which were previously only available in the yellowing pages of more than thirty year old issues of Weird Tales or in the equally hard to find Gnome Press editions of the 1950s, in paperback form with striking covers by Frank Frazetta and John Duillo.

The Lancer Conan series also includes four complete stories that were never published in Howard's lifetime. Furthermore, series editor L. Sprague De Camp and the indefatigable Lin Carter have taken it upon themselves to complete several fragmentary Conan stories in a process they call "posthumous collaboration".

The results are a mixed bag. Even the weaker of the original Robert E. Howard tales from Weird Tales are highly entertaining, while the best are absolutely stellar. Of the Conan stories that were never published in Howard's lifetime, three are good – my favourite is "The God in the Bowl", a traditional locked room murder mystery featuring Conan as one of the suspects – but one story, "The Vale of Lost Women" is weak and shows that sometimes, stories remain unpublished for a reason. Similarly, the posthumous collaborations based on unfinished fragments once again includes some very good stories – "The Things in the Crypt", in which Conan hides in an ancient tomb and finds himself battling its mummified occupant, stands out – and some which remind us that sometimes, stories remain unfinished for a reason.

Last year, I reviewed the first two Conan volumes published by Lancer. Since then, seven more volumes have come out, assembling Howard's stories into chronological order, following Conan's life from teenaged thief to middle-aged King of Aquilonia. Howard himself wrote the stories out of order, as if recounting stories told in a bar by an old adventurer of dubious veracity. And so "The Phoenix of the Sword", the first Conan story to be published in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales, is actually set fairly late in Conan's career, when he has just become King of Aquilonia.

The correct chronological order of the Conan stories has been debated for more than thirty years now. Even Howard himself weighed in towards the end of his too short life, in response to a fan letter by P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark, which was reprinted in the first of Lancer's Conan collections. But while fans might debate the correct order of the stories, it is generally agreed that the only novel-length Conan tale, The Hour of the Dragon, republished as Conan the Conqueror, is chronologically the last of the original Howard stories. And what a story it is.

A Ravaged Land

The Hour of the Dragon opens with four conspirators resurrecting the ancient sorcerer Xaltotun to enlist his aid in overthrowing Conan, King of Aquilonia. Not long thereafter, the armies of Aquilonia and its eastern neighbour Nemedia meet on the battlefield. Conan is planning to lead the charge, but just before the battle, he is struck down by Xaltotun's sorcery and taken prisoner, while his forces are vanquished. If the opening feels a little familiar, maybe that's because it is, for something very similar happened to Conan in "The Scarlet Citadel", which was reprinted in the previous volume Conan the Usurper.

Conan is thrown into a monster-infested dungeon in Nemedia, but manages to escape with the help of a slave girl named Zenobia. He is forced to leave Zenobia behind, but promises to come back for her. It's a promise he will keep.

The Hour of the Dragon Weird Tales — Margaret Brundage's cover art for the December 1935 issue of Weird Tales depicts Zenobia freeing Conan from the dungeon.

But first Conan returns to Aquilonia, only to find that Nemedian soldiers are ransacking the land and that Valerius, a descendant of Numidides, has taken the throne and is abusing the populace.

The scenes of Conan racing through the ravaged Aquilonia to return to his capital and his people are some of the best in the novel. The visceral descriptions of burned fields and pillaged villages will feel eerily familiar to anybody who has seen the devastation of World War II in Europe, even though The Hour of the Dragon predates the beginning of the war by almost four years. The sense of doom and despair and also sheer anger Conan feels at seeing the people he considers 'his' hurt are palpable.

It would be wise for Conan to keep a low profile, but standing by as his people are abused is not Conan's style. And so he saves an elderly witch from being lynched by Nemedian soldiers and later rescues the Countess Albiona, an Aquilonian noblewoman about to be executed for her continued loyalty to Conan, from the headsman's block… while disguised as the executioner.

Conan the Conqueror Ace Double — Ed Emshwiller's cover for the Ace Double edition of Conan the Conqueror shows Conan rescuing the Countess Albiona from execution.

Conan the Anti-Imperialist

Conan and Albiona make it to Poitain, the one Aquilonian province that is still free and resisting the onslaught of Valerius and the Nemedian soldiers. Count Trocero, ruler of Poitain and Conan's friend, suggests that Conan forget about the rest of Aquilonia, proclaim himself King of Poitain and carve out a new kingdom for himself from the neighbouring lands. However, this is a moment where Conan says something remarkable.

"Let others dream imperial dreams. I but wish to hold what is mine. I have no desire to rule an empire welded together by blood and fire. It's one thing to seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It's another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear. I don't wish to be another Valerius. No, Trocero, I'll rule all Aquilonia and no more, or I'll rule nothing."

This clear repudiation of any imperialist ambitions also means that Conan the Conqueror, the title De Camp and Lancer bestowed on the novel, is a misnomer, because Conan is clearly not interested in conquering anything, he just wants his kingdom back.

Conan's Greatest Hits

However, in order to regain his kingdom, Conan first needs to find a magical gem called the Heart of Ahriman that was stolen by his enemies. So Conan sets off in pursuit and revisits the stations of his previous career as thief, mercenary soldier and pirate. While highly entertaining, these sections also feel very episodic, probably because The Hour of the Dragon was originally serialised over five issues of Weird Tales.

However, in the end Conan regains both the jewel and his throne. As for the slave girl Zenobia who helped him escape from the Nemedian dungeon, Conan has not forgotten about her, but vows to make her his queen.

All of Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories are good, but The Hour of the Dragon a.k.a. Conan the Conqueror stands a cut above the rest, probably because it revisits and combines elements and ideas from many of the previous stories.

Five stars.

The Further Adventures of Conan

Stirring as The Hour of the Dragon might be, fans have nonetheless wondered for more thirty years now what happened afterwards. Did Conan and his Queen Zenobia enjoy a long and peaceful reign, only to finally die of old age in bed? Cause that doesn't sound like the Cimmerian Barbarian we all know and love at all.

The first person who attempted to answer that question was a Swedish fan named Björn Nyberg who wrote a novel called The Return of Conan in 1957. It was republished as part of the Lancer line as Conan the Avenger.

The Return of Conan begins shortly after the events of The Hour of the Dragon. As promised, Conan returns the captured King Tarascus to Nemedia and fetches the slave girl Zenobia to make her his queen. The royal couple enjoy a few months of love and peace, until disaster strikes in the form of a winged demon who snatches Zenobia from the royal palace.

Of course, Conan sets off in pursuit which leads him to Khitai, the Hyborian age equivalent of China, whence the evil sorcerer Yah Chieng has abducted Zenobia. Along the way, Conan has many adventures, meets old and new friends and also reconnects (in the most physical sense of the word) with his old flame Yasmina, Queen of Vendya, from "People of the Black Circle". However, Conan is no longer a free Barbarian but a married man now. And so he travels onwards to Khitai and rescues Zenobia in the nick of time, just as she is about to be sacrificed to some Lovecraftian horror, a scene Frank Frazetta illustrates on the cover in his inimitable way.

The Return of Conan is a perfectly serviceable sword and sorcery adventure, but it is only a pale imitation of the real thing. Particularly grating is that the Cimmerian deity Crom, who has previously been portrayed as an absent god who does not respond to prayers, directly aids Conan in the finale via some divine intervention.

Three stars.

Conan Goes West

For eleven years, it seemed as if The Return of Conan would be the final adventure of the Cimmerian Barbarian. This year, however, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter decided to give Conan one last adventure in Conan of the Isles.

Conan of the Isles is set roughly twenty years after the events of The Hour of the Dragon and The Return of Conan. Conan is in his mid sixties by now and feeling his age. He is still King of Aquilonia, but these days there are not many challenges for a man like Conan, since he has long since dealt with any would-be usurper or aggressive neighbour. Peace reigns in Aquilonia, but while this is good for the realm, it's not good for one as restless as Conan.

What is more, Conan's Queen Zenobia died, while giving birth to his daughter. I understand why De Camp and Carter chose to write out Zenobia – death in childbirth was depressingly common even fifty years ago and Conan would never have abandoned his wife for further adventures – but killing her off-page nonetheless grates. Furthermore, there is Conan's daughter, who must still be quite young at this point. And I cannot imagine Conan abandoning his children either.

For this unnamed daughter (and couldn't Carter and De Camp at least come up with a name?) is not Conan's only child. He and Zenobia also had a son, Prince Conn, who is about twenty at the beginning of Conan of the Isles and clearly old enough to take over.

Things come to a head, when ghostly beings called the Red Shadows begin abducting Aquilonian citizens and even snatch Conan's old friend Count Trocero of Poitain directly from the royal palace in front of Conan's eyes.

Once again, it takes the abduction of one of Conan's close associates to propel him into action and leave Aquilonia. And so Conan abdicates the throne in favour of his son Conn, hires a pirate crew and sails westwards across the great uncharted ocean that we know as the Atlantic in pursuit of the red shadows and their master, the evil wizard Xotli, a descendant of the people of sunken Atlantis.

On the way, Conan has many adventures, fights off sharks and giant octopuses and goes scuba-diving in a suit made of seashells (yes, really). He finally lands on an island archipelago which might be the Azores or also the Caribbean islands and defeats Xotli, though he fails to find Trocero and the other missing Aquilonians.

In theory, Conan could now return to Aquilonia and spend the rest of his years with his children. Alas, the old adventurer's blood is still stirring and so Conan and his crew set out on their ship The Winged Serpent to the land of Mayapan even further to the west, where Conan and his ship will be known as "quetzalcoatl".

Yes, De Camp and Carter end the Conan saga by having Conan "discover" America. This would seem very preposterous, if Robert E. Howard himself hadn't mentioned in that letter to P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark that he envisioned Conan travelling to the American continent.

Though some scenes come close to defying my suspension of disbelief (scuba-diving, really?), Conan of the Isles is a thoroughly entertaining adventure. L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter are not as good as Howard, but then who is?

Three and a half stars.

Whither Conan?

Is Conan of the Isles truly the end of Conan's saga? According to L. Sprague De Camp, the answer is yes.

That said, there still are many blank spaces in the saga of Conan's adventures. For example, we have never seen the Battle of Venarium, where Conan first proved his mettle at the age of only fifteen. Nor have we seen how Conan actually took the throne of Aquilonia. And of course we have not seen much of Conan as a king and particularly as a husband and father either. As a matter of fact, my desire to see more of King Conan is what inspired my Kurval sword and sorcery series, while wondering what Conan would be like as a father inspired my short story "A Cry on the Battlefield".

All of these blank spaces are just begging to be filled, if not by De Camp and Carter, then by someone else. And I for one am looking forward to it.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 18, 1968] Dangerous Visions (Not Those Dangerous Visions!) (September 1968 Galactoscope)

September 18, 2023 Victoria Silverwolf 3 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Finlandia

Emil Petaja is an American writer of Finnish ancestry. His best known works are a series of novels based on the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. (Saga of Lost Earths, The Star Mill, The Stolen Sun, and Tramontane. These were all published from 1966 to 1967.)

Petaja's latest novel, although not part of this series, also deals with themes from Finnish mythology.

Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Doctor Stephen McCord is an anthropologist. Although he's the only major character who isn't of Finnish descent, he's studied the culture and knows something of the language.

Before the novel begins, his college buddy Art Mackey took off for a remote area of Montana, in search of his girlfriend Ilma, who mysteriously returned to her old homestead. Stephen gets a tape recording from his friend, giving him a few hints as to what's going on. (It also serves as exposition for the reader.)

It seems that the former logging town of Hellmouth, inhabited by Finnish immigrants, was completely destroyed in a huge forest fire in 1906. When Art arrived in search of Ilma's nearby farmhouse, he found the place looking exactly the way it did six decades ago, with some of the former citizens still alive and kicking.

Intrigued by this mystery (and wondering if his pal has gone nuts), Stephen makes his way to the supposedly vanished town. He discovers that Hellmouth is indeed still around. Furthermore, the inhabitants worship Ukko, the chief god of Finnish legend. (Roughly comparable to Zeus or Thor, I believe.)

Stephen finds Art, and they both search for Ilma. Things get weird when they actually run into what seems to be Ukko, a being whose presence is so overwhelming that it's almost impossible not to fall to one's knees in adoration. The apparent god promises to make Earth a utopia, in exchange for worship. Ukko also has plans for Stephen.

What happens involves Ilma's elderly father Izza, her hunchbacked brother Yalmar, the local schoolteacher/librarian, and the steel plate inside Stephen's head, a souvenir of his time as an ambulance driver during a conflict in Southeast Asia. (Maybe Vietnam, as the story takes place just a little bit in the future, some time in the 1970's.)

The author writes clearly and elegantly. I always knew what was going on and was able to keep track of the characters. There are many vivid descriptions of Petaja's home state of Montana. (He now lives in San Francisco, which is also depicted excellently in the early part of the book.)

Besides having a compelling plot that kept me reading in one sitting, the novel has some intriguing and controversial things to say about the nature of deity and its relationship with humanity. Even at the very end of the text, Stephen still isn't sure if opposing Ukko was the right thing to do.

Four stars.

Comedy and Tragedy

The latest Ace Double to fall into my hands (designated as H-85, for those of you keeping score) offers a pair of short novels with contrasting moods. One is lighthearted, the other is serious. Let's start with the humorous one.

Destination: Saturn, by David Grinnell and Lin Carter

Cover art by Kelly Freas.

David Grinnell is actually the well-known fan, writer, and editor Donald A. Wollheim. He also created the Ace Double series, so he must feel right at home.

This novel was published last year in hardcover.

Cover art by Michael M. Peters.

The protagonist is a filthy rich and rather egotistical fellow named Ajax Calkins. A little research reveals that Wollheim (without co-author Carter) has been writing about him since 1941, sometimes under the pen name Martin Pearson. Most recently, this old material was recycled into the novel Destiny's Orbit. The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review a while back, calling it a juvenile space opera.

In the current volume, Ajax is the king of an asteroid that is actually a gigantic spaceship built by the civilization that was destroyed when their home planet blew up long ago, creating the asteroid belt. He and his fiancée Emily Hackenschmidt are on Earth, leaving the asteroid in the hands (so to speak) of their loyal Martian friend, a spider-like being called Wuj.

Dastardly amoeba-like aliens, the inhabitants of Saturn, are the sworn enemies of Earth. (In a touch of satire, we find out that they were perfectly nice folks until they learned aggression from humans.) Two of the Saturnians disguise themselves as Ajax and Emily and convince Wuj they're the real thing. They set off for Saturn, eager to uncover the ancient spaceship's secrets and use its advanced technology to conquer the solar system.

What I've failed to convey is the fact that this is a comedy. Ajax manages to save the day, of course, but he's also something of a fool. The more levelheaded Emily is often exasperated at him, with good reason.

The novel is written in a dryly tongue-in-cheek style that is more amusing than the usual science fiction farce. There are quite a few witty lines. I'm not a big fan of comic SF, but this one is better than some.

Three stars.

Invader on My Back, by Philip E. High

Let's flip the book over and take a look at something without laughs.

Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

The cover proudly announces that this is the novel's first book publication. I assume that's true, but there's also a British hardcover edition that came out this year.

Cover art by Colin Andrews.

The story takes place a few hundred years after society fell apart, for reasons not apparent until later in the novel. Humanity has managed to build itself back up, but there's been a strange change in people. They're divided up into castes. Again, the explanation for this is unknown.

Roughly half of the population consists of Norms; ordinary folks. The other half are Delinks; murderers and other violent criminals. Some Norms and Delinks are also Scuttlers. These are people who have an intense phobia about the sky, and can't bear to look at it.

A small number of folks are Stinkers. Everybody else hates these people; so much so, that few of them survive. Those who do isolate themselves and protect their lives with various resources.

Michael Craig is a Stinker. (That looks like an example of nasty graffiti, doesn't it?) He gets a message from the police (by mail; if he came anywhere near them they would try to kill him) asking him to try an experiment. The cops want to know what would happen if two Stinkers met. Would they loathe each other on sight?

Michael agrees to meet Geo Hastings, a Stinker who lives in Africa. The oddly named Geo turns out to be an attractive woman. If you think the two are going to fall in love, give yourself an A in predicting familiar plot developments.

Besides not trying to kill each other, the two discover that they can communicate telepathically. Things would seem to be turning out nicely, if it were not for the Geeks.

A Geek is a type of human being that has just appeared recently. They are physically superior, tend to be cold-bloodedly calculating, and are intent on wiping out the rest of humanity. In particular, they are bent on destroying the Stinkers; not for the usual reason (pure, unexplained hatred) but as part of their plan to conquer the world.

Without giving anything away (although you may be able to predict the novel's plot twists), let's just say the reason for all these weird happenings is revealed. Can Norms, Delinks, and Stinkers work together against the Geeks and the secret menace behind them? Not to mention the Scuttlers, who have a vital role to play.

This isn't a bad novel. Not great, but not bad. The story held my interest. (I haven't mentioned Michael's three heavily armed robot birds, who are the most charming characters.) It's worth reading once.

Three stars.

by Cora Buhlert

The Long Con: God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake

Science fiction may be my first love, but I read other genres as well. And so my latest pick-up at the local import bookstore was a crime novel entitled God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake. The reason I bought the book is that it just won the prestigious Edgar Award, i.e. the mystery genre's equivalent to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, for the best crime novel of the year, beating out Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. Any novel that can beat a juggernaut like Rosemary's Baby is certainly worth checking out, so I picked it up. And reader, I was not disappointed.

The Most Gullible Man in New York City

The protagonist of God Save the Mark is one Fred Fitch, who must be the most gullible man in New York City. Fred is a magnet for con artists and there's not a scam in existence that Fred will not fall for.

The novel opens with Fred getting a phone call from a lawyer that his Uncle Matt has died and left Fred more than three hundred thousand US-dollars. This makes even the extremely gullible Fred suspicious, especially since he does not have an Uncle Matt.

So Fred alerts his friend his best and probably only friend, Detective Jack Reilly of the NYPD's "bunco squad", i.e. the police department dealing with fraud. Reilly tells Fred to go to the appointment with the fake lawyer, so Reilly can arrest him red-handed. Alas, Fred is late for the meeting because he got scammed… again and it turns out that the lawyer is not a fraud after all, but the real deal. As is the will of the late Uncle Matt. Fred really did inherit more than three hundred thousand US-dollars.

However, there's a catch or rather several. For starters, Uncle Matt was a con artist himself and the black sheep of the family, which is why Fred has never heard of him. What is more, Uncle Matt, though terminally ill, was murdered. Which makes Fred the prime suspect.

A City of Con Artists

The situation quickly escalates. To begin with, Fred's new found riches make him a target for even more would-be con artists, including a childhood sweetheart who intends to hold him to a marriage proposal made as a kid or sue him for breach of promise and a neighbour who wants to publish his alternate history novel Veni, Vidi, Vici with Air Power via a predatory vanity press. Worse, whoever murdered Uncle Matt is now taking potshots at Fred. Finally, Fred also finds himself entangled with two very different women, Gertie Divine, a former stripper who was the late Uncle Matt's nurse, and Karen Smith, Reilly's bit on the side who still hopes he'll marry her someday, once he gets over his Catholic guilt induced reluctance to divorce his wife.

The intense pressure under which Fred finds himself finally makes him wise up. He tells off several would-be con artists and also puts his skills as an independent researcher to use to investigate Uncle Matt's murder himself, since he no longer trusts the police.

However, there are still many twists and turns ahead, including a hilarious chase scene where Fred steals a child's bicycle to escape his pursuers and ends up tumbling headfirst into a pond in Central Park.

This was the first novel by Donald E. Westlake (who also writes as Richard Stark and under a number of other pen names and has even dabbled in science fiction on occasion) that I read, but it certainly won't be the last, because this book is laugh out loud funny and a complete and utter delight.

In many ways, God Save the Mark is a reminiscent of the screwball comedies of thirty years ago, yet it is also a solid mystery that plays fair with the reader and delivers plenty of red herrings as well as all the clues needed to solve it. The novel also offers an excellent overview of the various cons and scams going around, some I was aware of and others that were completely new to me. The ending is a perfect fit.

A Deserving Winner?

So is this novel better than Rosemary's Baby? Well, the two books are difficult to compare, because they are so very different. But all in all, I'd agree with the verdict of the Mystery Writers of America that God Save the Mark is a most deserving winner of the 1968 Edgar Award.

A fluffy, frothy caper that will leave you rolling on the floor laughing and guessing till the end.

Five stars.

by Jason Sacks

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Sometimes as a reviewer you just don’t quite trust yourself when you encounter something totally unexpected. When you read a work which feels sui generis for science fiction, a book which draws comparison to literary fiction like Dos Passos, Burges and Nabokov, it’s hard to assess that book in its own context.

John Brunner’s fascinating new novel Stand on Zanzibar is the spiritual successor to those modernist writers.

Brunner’s novel reads as part pulp fiction and part assault-the-senses bursts of information. Zanzibar is a prophecy and a critique, a satire and a work of deep seriousness. It has plot lines and complex emotions and an energy that won’t quit, and at 576 pages of very short chapters, it somehow felt exhausting and left me craving more. It’s also extremely hard to describe, so be aware I’m barely skimming the surface here, and I welcome anybody who’s willing to add their own comments in an LoC to this magazine.

Let’s start with the easy parts to describe. On its most basic level, Stand on Zanzibar is about the problem of overpopulation. When we all were in diapers, if stood side by side, all of humanity could take up a space roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. By the distant year of 2010, however, as Brunner writes, "If you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space of one foot by two, you could stand us all on the 640 square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar."

There’s so much information contained in one sentence. You get one of the key themes of the novel and also a feeling of Brunner’s approach to his writing. Like Burgess’s punks in Clockwork Orange, the characters in this book chatter and mumble in an invented slang which feels clever and becomes part of the larger reading experience of the book. (Brunner admits a strong influence on him from Burgess.) The language forces readers out of our comfort zones and therefore pay closer attention to the often fractured way Brunner chooses to tell his tale. (A codder is a certain type of man and a shiggy a certain type of woman and an appleofmyeye is a child, by the way.)

The other key piece of information in that sentence above how fears of world overpopulation has led to strong laws against procreation. Those restrictive rules in turn have created a vast black market in child-rearing, as citizens are shown considering traveling to the state of Puerto Rico to have kids, much as one might escape their home state for an abortion or divorce to defy difficult local laws. World society also angles towards eugenics, forced sterilizations and genetic modifications. Can suicide booths be far behind?

All of the above is mere background – though thoughtful, fascinating background – for the main thrust of this sprawling exercise. Much of the book tells the story of the small calm African country of Beninia, population 900,000, which has become the main staging point for refugees from wars in three neighboring countries. Those refugees despise each other, but the country has a kind of tenuous peace under the benevolent rule of President Zadkiel F. Obomi. However, President Obomi wants to retire. And when he retires, what will happen to the peace he worked so hard to broker?

Enter another key aspect of this book’s fascinating plot. Obomi is good friends with American Ambassador Elihu Masters, and as they discuss the problem, Masters comes up with an unexpected suggestion: what if American corporation General Technics (motto: "The difficult we did yesterday. The impossible we're doing right now") took over the country? What if the country exchanged its vast offshore mineral and oil reserves for education and infrastructure creation?

Parts of the book alternate between reveries by Obomi and the life in New York City shared by roommates Donald Hogan and Norman House. House is “Afram”, African-American, and has astutely used his race and his native intelligence to gain himself a powerful role inside GT. That means he will be on the ground while GT moves operations to Beninia – that is, of course, if Norman can shake his deep feelings of melancholia and dissatisfaction with his life and his career. Hogan, meanwhile, seems innocent since he spends most of his days at the New York Public Library. But in fact Hogan is a “Dilettanti”, a spy recruited by the government because of his preternatural skills at discovering patterns in seemingly normal experiences. Hogan is passive until “activated” by the government, and he worries about that aspect of his life.

Until he actually is activated and sent to Socialist Asian country of Yatakang, where the government has announced how eminent geneticist Dr. Sugaiguntung has invented a way for everybody around the world to give birth to perfect children. But is their assertion true, or it just a lie on top of all the other lies circulating in this complex world? Can Donald prove the Yatakang government’s announcement is a lie? Can he persuade the people of Yatakang to support the leader of a guerilla rebellion which is happening in the country’s mountains?

*Whew.* There’s so much there just in the plot. I’m sure you can see the pulpy outlines of a Le Carre style spy novel, as well as chances for Swiftian social satire in both storylines I’ve described, and yet all that description barely scratches the surface of this most profoundly wild novel. Because underpinning this entire book is a deeper critique of world society, a society full of selfishness and cheap thrills and tawdry media which creates false reality in its shows.

Most damningly, Brunner presents a world in which people seem constantly interconnected and yet somehow deeply distant from each other. Hogan and House, for instance, despite being roommates, scarcely know anything about each other. The media consumed by the people in this world prevents them from being social, and that gap has vast societal consequences. When people can literally project fictionalized versions of themselves on fantasy television shows, what attraction does the real world have? Drugs are all pervasive. Suburbs are collapsing. The planet is groaning from the weight of all the people living upon it. Yet the vast majority of men and women in this world care much more about the shows they consume than they do about the world they have created.

And there’s so much more here. There’s Shalmaneser, the super computer which makes critical decisions on Earth (wonder if Brunner heard about Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001 ideas?). There’s the muckers, a group of random people who go on killing sprees for no reason. There’s a drug which forces people to tell the truth which is given to a bishop who spends a Sunday mass telling everyone his real feelings about God. I could go on and on, and dear reader, I know I’m skipping one of your favorite elements of this book.

But I grow filled with a bit of despair that I could do an adequate job of explaining any element of this book; even more, I despair at the idea a mere plot summary would be useful to anybody who might be considering reading this astounding book.

So let me sum my feelings up this way. Like many of us here at the Journey, I’ve long been a fan of Mr. Brunner’s writing. But Stand on Zanzibar takes all of John Brunner’s writing abilities and takes them to a quantum level. He displayed massive potential in many of his earlier works, but here Brunner shows that potential paid off in spades.

No matter the context, on first read, Stand on Zanzibar Brunner has delivered the wildest, weirdest, most successful book of the year so far. Previously I called Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage the best book I had read in 1968 up to that point. Brunner’s achievement far exceeds Panshin's. I hope to be rereading this book in that far-flung future of 2010 and seeing how many of Brunner’s prophecies came true.

Five stars.

[And new to the Galactoscope, we are pleased to introduce poet and author Tonya R. Moore, who has dived into New Wave's deep end with her first brush with Chip Delany….]

by Tonya R. Moore

Nova, by Samuel R. Delany

Nova was my first encounter with the work of Samuel R. Delaney who has, thus far, proven himself exemplary of the originality and innovativeness one would expect from the current New Wave of Science Fiction writers. Set in a distant future where humans have migrated to other worlds, this book paints a chaotic but beautiful picture of human turmoil and adventurousness in an ever expanding universe.

Lorq Von Ray is a born upstart from a family of nouveau-riche propelled into high society by their ill-gotten gains. He makes friends and, eventually, enemies with Prince and Ruby, quintessential Earth-nobility driven by power, greed, and a keen sense of self-entitlement.

Von Ray grew up haunted by constant reminders of the social stratum wedging a vast chasm between himself and the siblings. Ever ambitious, Von Ray pits wills and wits against Prince and Ruby, aiming to upset the economic balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.

Further embittered by their twisted and broken friendship, he sets out, with dogged determination, to hit the motherlode of interstellar treasures in the form of illyrion, the ephemeral byproduct of a nova and the most valuable and potent energy source known to mankind.

Should Von Ray succeed in this second attempt to capture this precious material in abundance from the nova, his payload promises to transform the economy of the Pleiades system and upend Prince’s monopoly on interstellar travel technology which allows them to hoard most of the wealth and stratify the balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.

This book introduces a motley cast of characters who are destined to be enmeshed in the many dangers and high drama that comes along with being employed by Von Ray.

Mouse, for example, is a nomadic troubadour eking out a meager living while playing interplanetary hopscotch in the Draco system. He winds up on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, while seeking employment on one of the spaceships bound for other star systems and greater opportunities.

Here, Mouse encounters Lorq Von Ray, scion of the richest family in the Pleiades system and jumps at the opportunity to join the ragtag crew of cyborg studs on Von Ray’s spaceship bound for the heart of an exploding star.

Ruby Red and Prince don’t appreciate Von Ray’s intent to rise above a station they consider beneath them, not to mention shift humanity’s prosperity from Draco to the Pleiades system. A cargo hold filled with seven tons of illyrion would certainly help him achieve that.

Mouse and his syrynx, a musical instrument that conjures holographic imagery, bear witness to the changing times while the melodrama of a twisted love triangle unfolds among Von Ray, the selectively diffident Ruby Red, and the pridefully neurotic Prince.

The gypsy troubadour playing his syrynx is a recurring motif representing the backdrop humanity's culture and history against which the story unfolds. The syrynx, a stolen object, ironically foreshadows the climax of the story where it is once again stolen then turned into a weapon.

Delany’s command of astrophysics and the science behind supernovas is reasonably solid. He proves himself a master of using literary language to describe scientific concepts and the murky dynamics of human interpersonal entanglements but there are elements of Nova that make little sense.

Ruby Red’s complicity with Prince’s cruelty and neurotic behavior seems arbitrary, for instance. As a character, she seems to lack a will of her own. Despite her prominence in the story, we’re never given a real glimpse inside the mind of the woman. What does Ruby Red want? Why does she do the things that she does?

Ultimately, Nova is a beautifully chaotic and original tale rife with vivid, sometimes visceral prose, exuberant dialogue, and an intriguingly colorful cast of characters.

4.5 stars.

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[September 6, 1968] Adventures for a Dime: Science Fiction and Horror Dime Novels in West Germany

September 6, 2023 Cora Buhlert Leave a comment

by Cora Buhlert

Interesting Times

"May you live in interesting times" is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse, even though the proverb is completely unknown in China.

But be that as it may, we are certainly living in very interesting times, because it has been a long, hot summer of protests and violence here in Europe as well as abroad. Whether in Paris, Prague, Zurich, Rome, Warsaw, Bonn or West Berlin, whether on the western or eastern side of the iron curtain, it seems as if every single day there is another protest, another riot and the violent response of the authorities in the news.

The massive protests against West Germany's new emergency powers act did not just attract university students. Here we have a group of priests protesting the new law.

Former concentration camp prisoners donned their old prisoner uniforms to protest the West German emergency measures act. A similar law was abused in the 1930s and paved Hitler's way to power.

Soviet tanks crush protests in Prague, Czecheslovakia

Massive protests in Paris on May 1.

Student protesters clash with the police in Paris.

A burned out bus during students protests in Mexico City.

A sit-in in Zurich where protesters took over an empty department store.

Burning Streets and Sappy Songs

Maybe the fact that this has been such a violent year is the reason why the pop songs dominating the West German charts are so extremely saccharine. Songs by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones regularly hit the West German charts, but the breakout star of 1968 in West Germany is a young Dutch singer known as Heintje (real name Hein Simons) who just celebrated his thirteenth birthday last month.

Now young Heintje has a beautiful voice – at least for now, because puberty will eventually hit. However, the songs he is made to sing are painfully saccharine. His breakout hit was "Mama", a song that's already thirty years old and was originally written for Beniamino Gigli. His follow-up "Du sollst nicht weinen" (You shall not cry), a version of "La Golondrina", a Mexican song that is already more than a hundred years old, is currently topping the West German charts. And Heintje (or rather his manager) have even more plans. A new song called "Oma so lieb" (Grandma so kind) is coming out soon and Heintje will also appear in the movie Zum Teufel mit der Penne (To Hell With School).

Meanwhile, enjoy this performance of his breakout hit "Mama":

Escape at the Newsstand

While some are seeking escape from the violence on the news in sappy pop songs, others head for the spinner rack at their local newsstand to peruse the offerings and lose themselves in fantastic worlds.

A typical West German newsstand.

Another example of a typical West German newsstand.

I've written before about the so-called “Heftromane”, digest-sized 64-page fiction magazines sold at newsstands, gas stations, grocery stores and wherever magazines are sold. West German newsstands carry a bewildering array of "Heftromane" in variety of genres. Westerns, crime novels, war novels and romance novels with subgenres such as aristocratic romance, Alpine romance and medical romance are still the most popular, but there are also a number of science fiction series to be found.

The State of the United Galactic Empire

The eight hundred pound gorilla of West German science fiction is still Perry Rhodan. The series launched in September 1961 and is still going strong seven years later. In fact, I just picked up issue No. 366 today.

The latest issue of Perry Rhodan.

It has been almost four years, since I last checked in on Perry Rhodan's adventures in these pages, and a lot has happened since then.

Perry Rhodan's own Solar Empire and the Great Empire of Perry's Arkonian allies joined forces to form the United Galactic Empire. However, this new Empire continues to be beset by crises from within and without. And so Perry Rhodan and friends have been travelling to distant galaxies and also tangling with time cops.

A major internal crisis facing the United Galactic Empire was the revolt of the planet Plophos. Under the rule of the tyrannical Iratio Hondro, the Plophosians managed to shoot down Perry Rhodan's flagship Crest, imprisoned the crew and tried to poison them. However, Perry Rhodan managed to escape with the aid of Mory Abro, daughter of a Plophosian opposition leader.

Perry Rhodan's future wife Mory Abro is caught in the embrace of a bug-eyed monster on Jonny Bruck's cover for issue 186.

Initially, Mory and Perry disliked each other intensely, but during their perilous flight they fell in love. Eventually, Perry Rhodan and Mory Abro were married and had twins, a girl named Suzan Betty and a boy named Michael Reginald. So Perry Rhodan finally found some happiness after losing his first wife Thora all the way back in issue 78.

Since Perry Rhodan and most of his supporting cast are near immortal due to their cellular activators, time moves fast in the series and so the twins are already adults in the current issues. Suzan Betty studied mathematics, founded a chain of banks and eventually married the brilliant but scatterbrained scientist Geoffry Abel Waringer, initially against her parents' wishes.

Suzan Betty Rhodan poses with Gucky the telepathic Mousebeaver and Gucky's son Jumpy on the cover of issue 302.

Unlike his sister, Michael Reginald Rhodan chafed against finding himself in the shadow of his father. He ran away from home several times as a boy and finally left for good at age twenty-four. Fascinated by the French Revolution, he took the name Roi Danton, started dressing in eighteenth century garb for reasons best known to himself and joined the Free Traders, eventually rising to their king.

Michael Reginald Rhodan a.k.a. Roi Danton displays his rather unusual sense of style on the cover of issue 300.

Since the death of Thora, Perry Rhodan was sorely lacking in regular female characters, so Mory Abro and Suzan Betty Rhodan are welcome additions to the series. Even more welcome would be women authors, for the writing staff of Perry Rhodan is still all male. Which is a massive oversight, especially since West Germany does have female science fiction writers such as Lore Matthaey, prolific writer, translator and editor of the Utopia Zukunftsroman series, or the writer behind the pseudonym Garry McDunn, who I have on good authority is actually a woman.

Perry Rhodan's Rivals

Success breeds imitators and so other "Heftroman" publishers launched their own science fiction series, all inspired by Perry Rhodan and all inevitably starring square-jawed spacemen.

I already wrote about Ren Dhark, the Martin Kelter publishing company's foray into the science fiction genre. The brainchild of Perry Rhodan writer Kurt Brand, the saga about Terran colonists who crash-landed on the planet Hope is still going strong two years later. By now, the Terrans and their leader Ren Dhark have found not only traces of intelligent aliens they've named the Mysterious (because no one knows what they look like) but also a giant spaceship called Point of Interrogation. Ren Dhark and his crew repaired and launched the Point of Interrogation and are currently searching for both the Mysterious and Earth, which Ren Dhark, who was born in space aboard the colony ship Galaxis, has never seen.

Ren Dhark is enjoyable enough and has gradually also established its own identity as more than just a Perry Rhodan copy. The mystery behind the mysterious Mysterious is certainly compelling, though I hope the resolution, when it eventually comes, lives up to the mystery.

In November 1966, Bastei Verlag entered the science fiction arena with Rex Corda – Der Retter der Erde (Rex Corda – Saviour of the Earth). The brainchild of West German science fiction author H.G. Francis (real name Hans Gerhard Franciskowsky), the series finds Earth first near destroyed in a nuclear war and then caught in the middle of an intergalactic conflict between the Laktones and the Orathones, which has lasted for millennia. The titular characters Rex Corda is a US senator who tries to save the Earth from getting destroyed by the two warring factions.

The cover for the first issue of Rex Corda.

Rex Corda is a lot more political than either Perry Rhodan or Ren Dhark and the parallels to the war in Vietnam are more than obvious. Maybe this is why Rex Corda only lasted for thirty-eight issues, ending last year.

Don't worry, the attractive woman Rex Corda is protecting from an intergalactic petrodactyl is his sister.

The End of Utopia

After the cancellation of Rex Corda, H.G. Francis and his writing team launched a new science fiction series in the pages of the long-running science fiction anthology series Utopia Zukunfsroman.

Ad Astra – Chet Morrows Weg zu den Sternen (Ad Astra – Chet Morrow's Way to the Stars) started last year. The series is set in a solar system not unlike what could be found in the pages of pulp magazines like Planet Stories twenty years ago. Chet Morrow serves as an ensign aboard the interplanetary spaceship Dyna-Carrier, which is beset by saboteurs. After unmasking the saboteurs, Chet Morrow is promoted to Second Lieutenant and has many adventures around the solar system, while finding traces of alien visitors. Eventually, Chet Morrow becomes commander of the interstellar spaceship Sword of Terra and heads the first expedition to Alpha Centauri, which not only turns out to be inhabited, but also houses a human colony consisting of the descendants of ancient Romans who were abducted by aliens.

The cover for the first Ad Astra novel "Sabotage at the Dyna-Carrier" looks very much like a Perry Rhodan cover.

Ad Astra was certainly thrilling, and indeed the quality of the two H.G. Francis science fiction series Rex Corda and Ad Astra was higher than the average Perry Rhodan clone. Alas, Ad Astra was prematurely cut short, when Utopia Zukunftsroman was cancelled earlier this year after fifteen years. Worse, Ad Astra ended on a down note with the Earth and much of the solar system seemingly destroyed by a rogue comet.

Utopia Zukunftsroman may be history, but its competitor Terra Science Fiction is still being published, though the anthology series was rebranded as Terra Nova this year. The publisher Zauberkreis Verlag also entered the science fiction anthology market with Zauberkreis SF two years ago.

The final issue of Utopia Zukunftsroman featured a German translation of "Objectif Tamax" by French science fiction author Peter Randa.

But even if the West German "Heftroman" market does not look too promising for any science fiction series not named Perry Rhodan, a very interesting series in another genre just launched.

Things Get Spooky

Silber-Krimi (Silver Mystery) is a long-running crime fiction anthology series which started in 1952. Over the years, several recurring sleuths popped up in the pages of Silber-Krimi, the best known of them FBI Agent Jeff Conter and the crime-solving Butler Parker. But while the crimes in Silber-Krimi may occasionally seem far-fetched, they are still happening in our world.

This changed with issue 747 in July, when the regular Silber-Krimi bore the subtitle "Silber Grusel Krimi – Ein Roman für starke Nerven" (Silver Spooky Mystery – a novel for readers with strong nerves). Intrigued, I picked up the issue and was treated to "Das Grauen schleicht durch Bonnards Haus" (Horror creeps through Bonnard's house) by the appropriately named Dan Shocker.

After a spooky opening with a young man being pursued by beings unknown, the novel introduces us to Larry Brent, an FBI agent on holiday in France. FBI agents are popular protagonists in West German crime fiction, likely due to the enormous success of the "Heftroman" series G-Man Jerry Cotton.

However, it's very much a busman's holiday for Larry Brent, for no sooner has he arrived in France than he finds a body, completely drained of blood. Regular readers of spooky stories will find this quite ominous. And indeed, Larry Brent is attacked by a bona fide vampire soon thereafter. He vows to stop the bloodsucking fiend and finds that he is not the only one who is investigating the vampire killings. No, an agent of a mysterious organisation named PSA (short for Psychoanalytische Spezialabteilung, i.e. Psychoanalytic Special Unit) is also on the case. The story ends with the vampires vanquished and Larry Brent becoming on agent of the PSA himself.

"Das Grauen schleicht durch Bonnards Haus" is a satisfying horror novel, though the author clearly has no idea what psychoanalysis is and that it has nothing to do with investigating paranormal phenomena and everything with Sigmund Freud. Nonetheless, the novel proved popular enough that Larry Brent is getting a second outing this month.

But who is the author behind the outlandish pseudonym Dan Shocker? Well, it turns out that he is Jürgen Grasmück. Though only twenty-eight years old and using a wheelchair since his teens, Grasmück has already had a lengthy career. He started writing science fiction novels at sixteen and was a staff writer on both Ad Astra and Rex Corda. Grasmück tended to include horror elements into his science fiction novels and has clearly found his calling with the Larry Brent novels.

Quo Vadis, Heftroman?

Even though Perry Rhodan continues to be popular, other science fiction series have had a hard time in the West German "Heftroman" market. Will we eventually see another challenger to Perry Rhodan arise or was Ad Astra the last attempt to establish an ongoing science fiction series?

Meanwhile, occult investigator Larry Brent is an intriguing new character to arrive in the pages of the rather staid Silber-Krimi. Will his adventures continue, or will Larry Brent's second case also be his last?

We'll find out… at the newsstand.

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[April 14, 1968] In Unquiet Times: The Frankfurt Arson Attacks, the Shooting of Rudi Dutschke and Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB

April 14, 2023 Cora Buhlert 2 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Another Annus Horribilis

1967 was a terrible year of unrest and violence. So far, 1968 seems to follow suit, especially considering the horrible events in Memphis, Tennessee, last week.

Regular readers may remember my article about the devastating (and still unresolved) fire at the À l'innovation department store in Brussels last year. I expressed my disgust at the pamphlets distributed by the leftist activist group and alternative living experiment Kommune 1 in West Berlin. The Kommune 1 members not only expressed their glee that a department store full of people, whose sole crime was caring more about shopping than the war in Vietnam, burned down, but also hoped that more department stores would burn.

The West Berlin police viewed those pamphlets the same way I did, namely as a threat and incitement to arson. Therefore, two Kommune 1 members, Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans (who ironically are not even the people who claimed responsibility for the pamphlets) were arrested and tried for incitement to violence and arson. That trial concluded last month, when a judge acquitted Teufel and Langhans, accepting their explanation that the pamphlets were satire and never intended to be taken seriously.

Kommune 1 members Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans in court

It is possible that the Kommune 1 intended the pamphlets as satire, albeit in very bad taste. However, even if the pamphlets were intended as satire, there was always the risk that someone might take them seriously.

And then someone did…

Flames in Frankfurt

On the evening of April 2nd, the phone rang at the office of the press agency dpa in Frankfurt on Main. A woman's voice announced that fires would start in the Kaufhof and M. Schneider department stores as an act of political vengeance. Shortly thereafter, homemade incendiary devices ignited in the bedding and toy departments of Kaufhof and the women's wear and furniture departments of M. Schneider respectively.

Kaufhof in Frankfurt on Main — The Kaufhof department store in Frankfurt on Main.

The M. Schneider department store in Frankfurt on Main decked out with Christmas lights.

Thankfully, the human and financial toll of the Frankfurt fires was far lower than that of the À l'innovation fire in Brussels. The arsonists used timers to make sure that the incendiary devices ignited after hours, when the stores were closed and the only person inside the building was the night watchman (who escaped with minor injuries).

Furthermore, the Kaufhof and M. Schneider stores, built in 1948 and 1954 respectively, are far more modern and safer than the seventy-year-old À l'innovation building. Unlike À l'innovation, both stores were equipped with sprinkler systems – something the arsonists were not aware of – and the fires were quickly extinguished, though they still caused considerable damages of approx. 282000 Deutschmarks at Schneider and 390000 Deutschmarks at Kaufhof.

Burnt cupboard at M. Schneider — Aftermath of the arson attack at M. Schneider: Even if it is a very ugly cupboard, that's no reason to burn it down.

Aftermath of the arson attack at Kaufhof — Police officers survey the aftermath of the arson attack at Kaufhof.

But who were the arsonists? Witnesses remembered a suspicious young couple and two young men hurrying up the escalators shortly before closing time. The same young couple was later seen in a student bar, celebrating and bragging. And so four suspects were arrested only two days later: twenty-four-year-old Andreas Baader, charismatic, bisexual, a failed artist with a history of car theft, who used to hang out with the members of the Kommune 1, twenty-seven-year-old Gudrun Ensslin, a clergyman's daughter from Stuttgart, student of German literature at the Free University of (West) Berlin, Marxist, occasional actress and publisher of poetry chapbooks, mother of a one-year-old son and current lover of Andreas Baader (who is not the father of her son), twenty-six-year-old Thorwald Proll, also a student of German literature and friend of Baader's and the Kommune 1 members, and twenty-four-year-old Horst Söhnlein, who runs an alternative theatre in Munich, which he trashed shortly before he was arrested, because he feared that his rival Rainer Werner Fassbinder would take it over.

The common denominators that connect the four suspects are the Kommune 1 as well as Andreas Baader. People familiar with the West Berlin activist scene have told me that Baader is desperate to impress the Kommune 1 members, who don't particularly like him. So even if those disgusting pamphlets were intended to be satire, as Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans claimed in court, they did inspire four young people to commit a serious crime.

Public Enemy Number 1

Axel Springer headquarters in West Berlin — The ultra-modern headquarters of the Axel Springer Verlag in West Berlin, directly at the Wall.

However, the Kommune 1 are not the only ones who are using the written word to incite violence. Sadly, the West German tabloid press is no better. Of particular note are the various newspapers of the Axel Springer Verlag, including their flagship quality paper Welt and Bild, West Germany's biggest tabloid, sold at every newsstand, in every tobacco shop and every bakery in the country.

Bild editorial "Stoppt den Terror der Jung-Roten!" — One of the nastier Bild editorials demands: "Stop the Terror of the Young Reds".

Like all tabloids, Bild specialises in sensationalistic headlines that tap into the fears and desires of the West German population. Right now, a lot of older and conservative West Germans have decided that protesting students are to be feared. Bild as well as the other Springer papers feed those fears with lurid headlines, angry editorials with titles such as "Stop the terror of the young reds!" and political cartoons that frequently cross the line of good taste, all aimed at the supposed menace of left-wing student protesters.

Dispossession political cartoon — This political cartoon in Bild responds to the "Dispossess Springer" campaign by offering suggestions whom else to dispossess

Walter Ulbricht political cartoon — This political cartoon from Bild shows the spirit of East German socialist party chairman Walter Ulbricht marching with the student protesters.

Bild political cartoon 1968 — In this Bild editorial cartoon, two long-haired students wonder if they, too, will make it into the papers, if they riot enough.

Political cartoon 1968 — Officials of the far right party NPD praise student protesters as their best election campaigners.

Political cartoon 1938 and 1968 — In a remarkable feat of mental contortion, this Bild cartoonist equates left-wing student protesters with Nazis attacking Jewish businesses during Reichskristallnacht in 1938.

Bild and the other Springer papers have singled out one man in particular as the chief menace to society, namely twenty-eight-year-old Rudi Dutschke. Originally from East Germany, Dutschke's idealistic and pacifistic Christian Marxism quickly clashed with the real existing Socialism of the German Democratic Republic. Only three days before the building of the Berlin Wall, Dutschke fled to West Berlin. He found work as a sports reporter for the tabloid B.Z., ironically owned by the Axel Springer Verlag. He began studying sociology, philosophy and history at the Free University of (West) Berlin, where he quickly became involved in the activist scene and joined the left-wing student organisation Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund SDS.

Student activist Rudi Dutschke speaks at a protest march.

Rudi Dutschke political cartoon — This political cartoon in Bild shows Rudi Dutschke standing on his head and wondering why everybody else is wrong.

This editorial cartoon in Bild shows Rudi Dutschke in Hitler pose. Just in case there was any doubt about the cartoonist's intentions, the letters "SDS" on Dutschke's belt are styled like SS runes.

Rudi Dutschke scientists — In this Bild political cartoon, rendered even more tasteless by recent events, several doctors try to peer into Rudi Dutschke's head to find out what's wrong with him.

Rudi Dutschke is not the most violent or radical of the West Berlin student activists, but he is the most visible, taking part in every protest and relentlessly organising marches, meetings and discussions. He was invited to join the Kommune 1, hub of the West Berlin activist scene, but declined, preferring a more traditional family life with his American wife Gretchen and their infant son Hosea Che. Dutschke also knows the Frankfurt arsonists and is the godfather of Gudrun Ensslin's young son, though it is not known if he was aware of their plans. Finally, Dutschke is a charismatic speaker, which is how he ended up in the crosshairs of Bild and became public enemy number 1 to the conservative press.

Rudi Dutschke in Amsterdam — Rudi Dutschke earlier this year at a peace protest in Amsterdam

Rudi Duschke wedding — Happier times: Rudi Dutschke and his American wife Gretchen at their wedding in 1966.

According to the old saying, "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me." But, as the Frankfurt arson attacks show, words can incite people to do physical harm. And so the relentless attacks on Dutschke by the tabloid press led to threats and hateful slogans left in the stairwell of the apartment house where Dutschke lives with his young family.

Three days ago, they led to something far worse.

Shots in West Berlin

On April 11th, a young man – later identified as Josef Bachmann, a twenty-three-year-old unskilled labourer from Munich – rang the doorbell of an apartment on the quiet end of West Berlin's Kurfürstendamm boulevard that serves as the headquarters of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund. Bachmann asked if Rudi Dutschke was there. The student who answered the door nodded and asked if Bachmann wanted to come in. But Bachmann just shook his head and left.

He loitered on the sidewalk outside the apartment block and waited for Dutschke to emerge. Dutschke only wanted to buy nasal drops for his three-months-old son at a nearby pharmacy and got on his bicycle, when Bachmann approached him. "Are you Rudi Dutschke?"

Dutschke nodded, whereupon Bachmann screamed "Dirty Communist Pig", pulled a gun and shot Dutschke three times, in the head, the neck and the shoulder. Miraculously, Dutschke survived and even managed to walk a few more meters, before he collapsed in front of an undertaker's office. Passers-by quickly came to his aid and lifted Dutschke onto a bench, where he lay calling for his parents, declared that he had to go to the hairdresser and hallucinated something about soldiers. He was taken to hospital and underwent emergency surgery. As of this writing, Rudi Dutschke is still alive, though in critical condition. Even if he survives, he will retain lifelong disabilities.

Aftermath: Rudi Dutschke's bicycle lies on the sidewalk.

Rudi Dutschke shooting site — The police at the scene of the attack on Rudi Dutschke

Rudi Dutschke's shoes where he collapsed — Rudi Dutschke's shoes still lie where he collapsed in this crime scene photo

The spot where Rudi Dutschke collapsed — The place where Rudi Dutschke collapsed, right in front of an undertaker's office. Passers-by lifted him onto the bench, until the ambulance arrived.

Josef Bachmann fled and was eventually cornered by the police in a nearby backyard. Shot rang out and Bachmann was hit, though he, too, survived and is currently in hospital.

Police officers carry off the wounded assassin Josef Bachmann.

The Smoking Gun

But who or what persuaded Josef Bachmann to shoot down a complete stranger in the street? To the West Berlin students, the culprit was clear. The various tabloids of the Axel Springer Verlag had incited so much hatred towards Dutschke that they inspired Bachmann to travel from Munich to West Berlin to shoot a man he'd never met.

The truth is more complicated. Bachmann was carrying a newspaper, when he shot Dutschke. However, it was not a Springer paper, but the far right Deutsche National-Zeitung, which contained a Wanted poster style headshot with the headline "Stop Dutschke now!" In Bachmann's home, the police also found a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, the Springer papers are not a monolith. The tabloid B.Z. criticised the way its sister papers were turning Dutschke into public enemy number 1. And even Bild expressed their shock over the shooting in an article entitled "Millions fear for Dutschke's life".

The students, however, were too furious about the attempt on Dutschke's life only a week after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and not even a year after the murder of Benno Ohnesorg to care about nuance. To them, the Springer tabloids had at the very least incited violence, if not helped to fire the gun. And so, protests erupted, first in West Berlin and then all over West Germany.

Protest in Berlin following the shooting of Rudi Dutschke — Students protest in the streets of West Berlin after the shooting of Rudi Dutschke.

"Bild fired, too" protest — Protesters in West Berlin carry a placard declaring that "Bild fired, too".

Student protest in Stuttgart — At this protest in Stuttgart, protesters carry placards comparing the Springer papers Bild and Welt to the Nazi papers Stümer and Völkischer Beobachter, proving that Springer does not have a monopoly on tasteless Nazi comparisons.

In West Berlin, protesters attempted to storm the Springer headquarters, only to find themselves confronted by angry printshop workers, armed with heavy tools. Kommune 1 member Dieter Kunzelmann got stuck in the revolving door of the Springer building, where workers emptied a bucket of red paint over him. When they found that they could not storm the publishing house, the West Berlin protesters torched stacks of newspapers and delivery vehicles. Meanwhile in Munich, protesters trashed the local editorial office of Bild.

Torched Springer delivery trucks — A West Berlin firefighter extinguishes a torched Springer delivery truck.

Overturned Springer delivery vehicles — Overturned Springer delivery vans. Even a van delivering the latest issue of Bravo, an apolitical teen magazine focussed on pop and movie stars, suffered the wrath of the students.

Police officers wade through newspapers — It's raining newspapers. Police offers wade through Springer papers thrown onto the sidewalk by the protesters.

Students attack the Bild office in Munich — In Munich, protesters trashed the editorial offices of Bild.

So far, the protests have spread to twenty-seven West German cities and also abroad and show no sign of stopping. The protesters are no longer just university students either, but high school students, apprentices and workers. As we've seen with other protests in recent years, the police responded with violence, escalating an already volatile situation even further.

Protests in West Berlin 1968 — Protesters face off against the police in West Berlin, close to where Rudi Dutschke was shot.

Students protests Berlin 1968 — Protesters and police clash in West Berlin.

Political Bild cartoon — The political cartoonists of Bild responded to the attacks on their headquarters with this cartoon showing student protesters attacking the Easter Bunny.

Dad's Cinema Is Dead

With West Germany burning and all the terrible things happening here and elsewhere in the world, it's easy to forget that there are bright spots as well. One of those bright spots is the 14th West German Short Film Days in Oberhausen.

The West German Short Film Days were founded in Oberhausen, an otherwise unremarkable industrial town in the Ruhrgebiet area, in 1954 as the first film festival in the world focussed solely on short films. The new festival gained international attention for its willingness to show experimental movies by young filmmakers and also as a place where one could see East European movies that have no distribution elsewhere.

The West German Short Film Days also became a flashpoint for radical filmmakers. In 1962, a group of twenty-six young West German filmmakers published the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which they declared "Dad's cinema", i.e. the largely entertainment focussed West German cinema of the postwar era, dead. Unfortunately, this flaming manifesto did not lead to better movies – instead the results were no better than the films the signatories criticised, but infinitely duller. A new group of young filmmakers issued a second manifesto in 1965, in which they criticised the dull problem movies championed by the first manifesto and called for making good and entertaining movies in the style of Howard Hawks and Jean-Luc Goddard. Three years later, this second group has at least made a few decent would-be noir films.

Signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto — Some signatories of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto pose for a photo.

Talking Dicks

This year's festival was beset by controversy as well, when Besonders Wertvoll (Of Special Merit) was pulled at short notice, even though it had been previously approved. The eleven-minute film shows a close-up of a talking penis – portrayed by director Helllmuth Costard or rather his penis – reading out the new West German film grant law, which denies grants to movies deemed obscene. After reading out this very dry subject matter, the penis gets his deserved reward, while director Costard, this time fully clothed, attempts to confront the main sponsor of the bill Hans Toussaint.

Hilmar Hoffmann and Hellmuth Costard Oberhausen — Hilmar Hoffmann, head of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and Hellmuth Costard, director of "Besonders Wertvoll". The star of the film is hidden under the table and hopefully pants.

I have seen Besonders Wertvoll at an impromptu screening at the Ruhr University in nearby Bochum. It is clearly satirical and the true nature of the narrator isn't even immediately apparent. However, the festival refused to show the film, whereupon several West German filmmakers and a member of the jury withdrew in protest.

I Have Seen the Future…

But even with several films missing, the 14th West German Short Film Days still offered plenty of interesting and innovative filmmaking.

Oberhausen Short Film Festival 1968 — Hilmar Hoffmann, director of the West German Short Film Days, with the three young directors Werner Herzog, Heinz Badewitz and Rudolf Thome on stage.

One film that particularly impressed me is Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB, a dystopian science fiction film made by a young graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts named George Lucas.

Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB plunges us into the nightmarish future of the year 2187, a world where humans have numbers rather than names tattooed onto their foreheads. The titular THX 1138 4EB (Dan Natchsheim) has been found guilty of the crime of "sexacte". His mate YYO 7117 (Joy Carmichael) is interrogated and denies ever having loved him. The unique naming pattern is based on California licence plates, by the way. THX 1138 happens to be the number of director George Lucas' licence plate, while YYO 7117 is that of Lucas' fiancée.

Meanwhile, THX 1138 4EB is on the run through stark white corridors and what looks like an underground parking garage, tracked by countless cameras monitored by men in white jumpsuits in a white room filled with computers and screens. For most of the film, the only dialogue is the radio communication of the security personnel. They try to thwart THX 1138 4EB's escape, first by subjecting him to a high-pitched noise and then by having a guard attack him. However, THX 1138 4EB forces open a door and runs off into the sunset and hopefully freedom. Meanwhile, a voice informs YYO 7117 that they regret that THX 1138 has destroyed himself and that she may apply for a new mate – of either gender – at any time.

George Lucas THX 1138 4EB — Director George Lucas on the set of Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB.

Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB is a neat work of dystopian science fiction that manages to tell a complete and coherent story in only fifteen minutes. The film also shows that it is possible to make a science fiction movie on literally a shoestring budget.

Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB has already won the National Student Film Award and was also honoured at the West German Short Film Days. As for the talented twenty-three-year-old director George Lucas, he is planning to turn Electronic LabyrinthTHX 1138 4EB into a full-length feature film. I for one will certainly be watching. I'm am also looking forward to whatever Mr. Lucas does next.

Bild & Funk Easter 1968 — The world may be terrible, but it's still Easter, so enjoy the cover of the TV magazine "Bild & Funk"

Bild und Funk Raumpatrouille Orion cover — The cover of last week's issue of "Bild und Funk" features some familiar faces, advertising a rerun of "Raumpatrouille Orion". Now where is season 2?

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 16, 1968] In Distant Lands (March Galactoscope)

March 16, 2023 Cora Buhlert Leave a comment

by Cora Buhlert

Protests in Poland

Student protests have been erupting all over Europe and even the otherwise nigh impenetrable iron curtain cannot stop them.

The latest country to be rocked by student protests is Poland. The protests were triggered when a production of the play Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's most celebrated poet, was pulled from the Warsaw National Theatre because of alleged anti-Soviet tendencies. In response, students protested against the cancellation of the play and censorship in general. More than thirty students were arrested during the initial protests in Warsaw and two of them were expelled from the University of Warsaw. The fact that both expelled students happened to be Jewish suggests that Anti-Semitism, which has been rearing its ugly head in Poland again in recent years under the guise of Anti-Zionism, may have played a role.

The Polish students, however, were not willing to give up and announced another protest for March 8. The authorities responded with violence and pre-emptively arrested several student leaders. Nonetheless, the protests spread to other Polish cities.

Buddha is a Spaceman: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny, of Polish origin himself, is one of the most exciting young authors in our genre and has already won two Nebulas and one Hugo Award, which is remarkable, considering he has only been writing professionally for not quite six years.

My own response to Zelazny's works has been mixed. I enjoyed some of them very much (the Dilvish the Damned stories from Fantastic or last year's novella "Damnation Alley" from Galaxy) and could not connect to others at all (the highly lauded "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"). So I opened Zelazny's latest novel Lord of Light with trepidation, for what would I find within, the Zelazny who wrote the Dilvish the Damned stories or the one who wrote "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"?

The answer is "a little bit of both" and "neither". Lord of Light is not so much a novel, but a series of interconnected stories, two of which, "Dawn" and "Death and the Executioner", appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction last year. To make things even more disjointed, the stories are not arranged in chronological order either.

The novel starts with the resurrection of Mahasamatman, Sam to his friends, who may or may not be a god. Sam is not happy about his resurrection, because he was pulled back into bodily existence from a blissful, Nirvana-like bodyless existence that was supposed to be a punishment, the only way of executing one who is functionally immortal. We gradually learn what brought Sam to this place, namely his rebellion against the gods of his world who keep the population downtrodden and oppressed .

Initially, Lord of Light appears to be a fantasy novel, but we eventually realise that the novel is set on a distant planet in the far future and that the gods and demigods we meet are the crew of the Earth spaceship Star of India, which landed here eons ago, while the demons are the original inhabitants of the planet. The human crew mutated themselves to better survive and reincarnate themselves in new bodies via mind transfer to become immortal. They rule over their descendants with an iron hand as self-styled gods. Sam, however, will have none of this and launches a rebellion.

Fantasy and science fiction have been drawing from European religion, mythology and history for decades. In Lord of Light, however, Zelazny draws on Hindu and Buddhist religion and mythology. The spaceship crew turned gods are based on Hindu deities, while Sam is based on Siddhartha Gautama a.k.a. Buddha.

Indian culture is popular right now and Indian influences can be seen in fashion, interior design, music (the Beatles have just embarked on a meditation sojourn in India) as well as in the yoga studios springing up in the big cities. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before Indian influences would appear in science fiction. Especially since it would be silly to assume that only white Christian westerners get to travel to the stars. There is a Christian character in Lord of Light, by the way; the ship's former chaplain Renfrew embarks on a crusade against the self-styled Hindu gods and their worshippers.

The Beatles in India — The Beatles arrived in India for a meditation retreat last month.

It is a refreshing change to read a science fiction novel where eastern rather than western culture and religion dominate the far future. Nonetheless, something about Lord of Light bothered me. As a child, I spent time in South East Asia, mainly in Singapore, but also in Bangkok, because my Dad was stationed there as an agent for the Norddeutscher Lloyd and DDG Hansa shipping companies. And while I cannot claim to know a lot about Hinduism and Buddhism (though two war-battered Buddha statues guard my home), I know enough to realise that Zelazny gets a lot of things wrong.

Fullerton Building in Singapore — Singapore as it looked when I lived there: The General Post Office a.k.a. the Fullerton Building, which was brand-new at the time. I understand Singapore has been modernising rapidly since gaining independence.

C.K. Tang Ltd. in Singapore — The C.K. Tang Ltd. department store in Singapore, where my mother and I enjoyed shopping back in the day.

Of course, Zelazny isn't the only person to rather liberally adapt mythology into fiction. For example, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, Marvel's The Mighty Thor comics or The Ring of the Nibelungs by Richard Wagner are all liberal adaptions of Norse mythology and yet I am not bothered by them. However, hardly anybody worships the Norse or the Greek gods anymore, whereas Hinduism and Buddhism are living religions with some 255 and 150 million worshipers respectively. And borrowing from a living religion as someone who is not an adherent feels disrespectful in a way that turning Norse gods into superheroes does not.

I for one would love to see more science fiction and fantasy that draws on non-western culture and mythology. However, I would prefer to read works written by authors who actually come from the culture in question rather than by a Polish-Irish Catholic from Ohio. India is a country of 533 million people. Surely, some of them write science fiction and I hope to eventually see their take on Indian mythology and history rather than Zelazny's.

Interesting and well written but disjointed and somewhat disrespectful to half a billion Hindus and Buddhists.

Three and a half stars

Looting the Pharaohs: Easy Go by John Lange

I don't just read science fiction and fantasy, but am also fond of mysteries and thrillers. This is how I came across John Lange, who burst onto the scene two years ago with the heist novel Odds On and followed up with the spy thriller Scratch One last year. Both novels are notable for their tight writing and clever plots, as well as their evocative – and as far as I can tell accurate – description of locations deemed exotic by the average American reader. There even is the occasional science fiction element, e.g. the heist in Odds On is planned using a computer program.

Lange's latest novel Easy Go contains all the elements that made his previous works so enjoyable. This time, Lange takes us to Egypt, where an American archaeologist named Harold Barnaby has made an exciting discovery, a seemingly innocuous papyrus which contains an coded message revealing the location of a heretofore undiscovered royal tomb. This discovery could gain Barnaby academic accolades – or a whole lot of money. Barnaby chooses the latter and decides to rob the tomb. However, the timid academic needs help and finds it in Richard Pierce, a journalist and old war buddy of Barnaby's who has the connections and the plan to pull off the heist of the century.

Cairo 1968 — These days, Cairo is a bustling modern city, which does not remotely look like the set of a Hollywood sword and sandal epic, contrary to popular belief.

The novel follows the usual beats of a heist story. A team of specialists is assembled and a carefully plotted plan is executed, while fate keeps throwing wrenches at our protagonists, especially since the Egyptian authorities turn out to be not nearly as stupid as Pierce and Barnaby assumed. We have seen this sort of story before in movies like Ocean's Eleven, Topkapi or the TV-show Mission Impossible and yet Lange brings a unique flair to the well-worn plot via his knowledge of Egyptology and his vivid descriptions of bustling modern day Egypt (which contrary to popular belief does not look like the set of a Hollywood sword and sandal epic). The building of the Aswan Dam and the moving of the Temple of Abu Simbel play a notable role.

Moving Abu Simbel — The marvelous of moving the Abu Simbel temple to save it from sinking into the rising waters of the Aswan Dam.

But who is John Lange? Rumour has it that he is a medical student at Harvard who is writing under a pseudonym in order to finance his tuition. Rumour also has it that Lange is working on a bona fide science fiction novel about a deadly plague from outer space, which is expected to come out next year. I can't wait.

An fun caper thriller which will make you want to book a trip to Egypt.

Four and a half stars

by Victoria Silverwolf

Tuning Up the Orchestra

I recently read a quartet of new works of speculative fiction. They range from so-called Hard SF, dealing with science and technology, to New Wave experimentation. Like the movements of a symphony, they offer varying contents, moods, and tempos. Let's grab copies of the program notes and find some good seats before the music begins.

First Movement: Andante

Anonymous cover art.

Out of the Sun, by Ben Bova

An American fighter plane traveling at three times the speed of sound over the Arctic Ocean suddenly breaks apart. The same thing happens to two other aircraft of the same kind. The military calls in the fellow who designed the special metal alloy from which the planes were constructed. He has to figure out what's wrong before more lives are lost.

This is a very short book with plenty of white space. I suspect it was intended for younger readers. (Unlike most so-called juveniles, however, all the characters are adults.) There are some violent deaths, but never described in any detail. The closest thing to sex in its pages is the hero taking a woman out to dinner.

This problem-solving story wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Analog. (Fortunately, it lacks John W. Campbell's quirky obsessions.) It moves at a moderate pace, but is never very exciting. You might be able to predict the main plot gimmick before it's revealed, if you've been keeping up with recent developments in technology.

The writing is very plain and simple. You could easily finish the book in an hour. A longer version, with more fully developed characters, would be welcome.

Two stars.

Second Movement: Adagio

Cover art by Robert Korn.

The God Machine, by Martin Caidin

This one starts with a bang. The narrator, having survived multiple attempts on his life, allows a woman with whom he's been having an affair to enter his room. She immediately offers her body to him, thrusting herself at him wantonly. Instead of reacting the way you'd expect, he knocks her unconscious with the butt of his pistol.

No juvenile novel here!

A long flashback tells us how he got into this situation. The narrator is a mathematical genius. The government contacts him while he's in high school, offering to pay for the best possible college education. In return, they want him to work on a hush-hush project.

It seems that millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been spent constructing a facility deep inside a mountain in Colorado. In terms of secrecy and security, it's the equivalent of the Manhattan Project. The goal? To build a super-powerful computer, one that can come up with its own ideas of how best to prevent a nuclear war.

The computer can also directly communicate with human beings through the use of alpha waves in their brains. Add in the fact that, along with the rest of its vast knowledge, it understands a lot about hypnosis, and you can see where this is going.

When the machine decides that the narrator has to be eliminated, things seem hopeless. He can't trust anybody. The computer itself is protected by lasers, electricity, and radiation. It's got its own secure atomic power generators, so you can't just turn it off. What's a fellow to do?

Other than the opening and closing scenes, most of the book moves at a leisurely pace. In sharp contrast to Bova's slim volume, this tome is well over three hundred pages. It could benefit from some judicious editing; I learned more than I really needed to know about the narrator's life before he becomes the computer's target.

Two stars.

Third Movement: Scherzo

Cover art by Richard Powers.

The Reefs of Earth, by R. A. Lafferty

As soon as you take a look at the table of contents for the author's first novel, you know you're in for something different.

Not only are the chapter titles weird, they form a poem. There are lots of other little bits of verse throughout the book as well. Usually, these are poems that the six children (or seven, if you count Bad John) use to work magic, particularly to kill people.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I'm confusing you. Let me start over.

Some time ago, two married couples came to Earth from another planet. They're doomed to succumb to Earth sickness. They had a total of six children (or seven, if you count Bad John) among them. Because these offspring were born on Earth, they won't get the sickness.

What's this Bad John nonsense? I hear you cry.

Well, he died at birth, but he's still around. Only certain Earth folks, such as an American Indian and a drunken Frenchman, can perceive him. He's insubstantial and can pass through walls and such, but the other children are emphatic that he is not a ghost.

I have no idea why he's called Bad John. Another of the kids is just named John.

This gives you a tiny hint of how eccentric this book is. I would be hard pressed to provide a coherent plot summary. It has something to do with the children plotting to kill everybody on the planet. Meanwhile, one of the adults is blamed for a murder he didn't commit.

The narrative style is that of a tall tale or a shaggy dog story. The mood might be described as serious whimsy. There's a lot of violence — the basic plot, if there is one, involves an ax murder — but only the Earth people seem to care very much about it. It's not exactly a black comedy, but it treats death in an offhand fashion.

Although they're from another planet, the characters are more supernatural than alien. (They're called the Puka, and the allusion to the Pooka from Celtic myth seems intentional.)

It may be labeled as science fiction, but this is a fantasy novel, and a very strange one at that. How much you get out of it will depend on whether or not you're willing to let the author take you on a dizzying journey with no particular destination in kind.

Four stars.

Fourth Movement: Allegro

Cover art by Harry Douthwaite.

The Final Programme, by Michael Moorcock

As editor of a remarkably transformed version of the venerable science fiction magazine New Worlds, the author proves himself to be the guiding light of the British New Wave. This book shows he can write the stuff, too.

It first appeared as three separate stories in New Worlds. I'm not sure how much has been added to it, if anything, or how substantially it's been revised, if at all. It's more coherent as a whole rather than in bits and pieces, but it's still somewhat episodic.

Jerry Cornelius is a rock star, a brilliant scientist/philosopher, and as quick with a gun as James Bond. He's also a snappy dresser. We'll get a lot of detailed descriptions of his mod outfits throughout the book.

Jerry gets involved with some folks who want to get their hands on microfilm kept secure in the fortress home of his late father. Complicating matters is the presence inside the house of Jerry's sinister brother Frank and his beloved sister Catherine.

(The relationship between Jerry and Catherine may remind you of a certain controversial story that recently appeared in a groundbreaking anthology.)

Things get pretty wild at this point, from a bloody assault on the fortress to a secret underground base built by the Nazis to the novel's truly apocalyptic climax.

I should mention another character who plays a vital part in the story. Miss Brunner (no first name ever given) is an enigma. At first, she seems to be nothing more than one of the conspirators who work with Jerry. She soon turns out to be a most peculiar sort of person indeed.

I'd say Miss Brunner is actually the heart of the novel, more so than Jerry himself. She's always several steps ahead of everyone else, and has an agenda of her own that doesn't become clear until the end of the book.

The author's style is usually surprisingly traditional, no matter how bizarre the plot. The mood combines frenzy with the feeling that things are falling apart all over, and that maybe this is a good thing. At times, I felt that Moorcock was amusing himself at the expense of the reader. It's worth a look, but you may wonder what it's all supposed to mean.

Three stars.

by Gideon Marcus

Ace Double H-48

The Youth Monopoly, by Ellen Wobig

Rod Dorashi is a vagabond, a member of the wretched working class of Metropolis, staying out of trouble so as not to be squashed by the draconian dictator Korm. Yet he risks all to take in an old man, hit by a car, in his last hours of life. The dying man presses a packet of seeds upon Rod, promising that they are the secret to eternal life.

Enter Bey Ormand, a slick powerful man who is the founder and ruler of Trysis–a paradisical resort and the sole purveyor of the distilled essence of the forever seeds. For a lordly sum, they turn back the clock for their customers by five years. Seemingly without motive, Ormand picks up Rod and adds him to his select coterie of multi-centenarians. The troupe then acts as little dictators, forcing all invitees, whether petty princes of a Balkanized America, or faded stars and starlets, to grovel at their feet.

Despite an instinct for rebellion, Dorashi never quite revolts. Instead, he sticks with the sadistic Ormand and his band for centuries. When they leave (almost without notice), the wrap-up is many pages of explanation: turns out Ormand et. al. were not very old humans but actually very old aliens, and the goal of the project was to siphon off the wealth of the Earth–something they've done time and again.

The whole thing reads like a long, unpleasant cocktail party, and the framing of the ending is not at all condemnatory. It merely is.

I applaud new author Wobig for their first publication, but I found The Youth Monopoly a difficult, and ultimately unrewarding, read.

Two stars.

Pictures of Pavanne, by Lan Wright

On the dead planet of Pavanne, light years from Earth, reside 'The Pictures'. This tremendous tapestry, carved from native rock by unknown aliens countless eons ago, are the most beautiful sight in the galaxy. And, of course, capitalism being what it is, the Harkrider corporation has secured the license to the their viewing. Now, Pavanne is a pleasure planet that specializes in relieving every wealthy guest of their money, pouring it into the coffers of the half-robotic, entirely wizened Jason Harkrider.

Enter Max Farway, one of humanity's leading artists. Driven by the need to prove himself, exacerbated by the twisted, diminutive and sterile body he was born with, Farway resolves to tackle the hardest subject of art: The Pictures themselves. And so, he travels to Pavanne with his beautiful, recently widowed step-mother, and his much put-upon agent, in time for the conjunction of the alien planet and the brighter of its two suns–when the artifact achieves its highest, and most ineffable level of beauty. But once he steps foot on Pavanne, Farway finds himself in a power struggle with the planet's venal warlord, with Harkrider's assistant, Rudolph Heininger, a wild card in the conflict. At the heart of it all are the unknown predictions of the murdered mathematician Damon Wisehart, whose calculations suggest something terrible is soon to occur involving Pavanne and its extraterrestrial art.

For a good portion of the reading, I admired author Wright's juxtaposition of the petty and irritable Farway, along with the thoroughly disgusting Wisehart (and his twisted twin daughters), with the unearthly beauty of The Pictures. As Farway slowly grows up under the ministrations of his gentle step-mother, I looked forward to a piece that was largely philosophical, eschewing the fetters of the typical Ace Double. This is largely discarded at the end, as things wrap up suddenly and with much action, but without much heart.

Perhaps a more satisfying book remains to be published by a different press. As is, I give it three stars.

Need more science fiction? The next episode of Star Trek is on TONIGHT! You won't want to miss it:

Here's the invitation!

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 20, 1968] Alyx and Company (January 1968 Galactoscope)

January 20, 2023 Kris Vyas-Myall 6 Comments

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

Cover by Leo and Diane Dillon

As people who read my review of last year’s Orbit will recall, I loved Joanna Russ’ new fantasy hero Alyx the Adventuress. These stories combined a modern sensibility, great characterization and the kind of fun you would get from Howard or Leiber.

Needless to say then, I was extremely excited to learn we would be getting a new novel of Alyx’s adventures so soon afterwards. Trying to go into the book with as little foreknowledge as possible, I found it was definitely not the story I was expecting.

When we last left Alyx she was escaping Orudh and planning her next move. In the opening paragraph of Picnic on Paradise we are reintroduced to her:

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot believe you are a proper Trans-Temporal agent; I think-” and he finished the thought on the floor his head under one of his ankles… “I am the Agent, and My name is Alyx.

To understand what a sharp diversion this is, imagine picking up Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror and finding it opens in 1917 with Conan at the Battle of the Somme. A fascinating choice but also one that requires a lot of readjustment of expectations as well as explanations.

Eventually what we piece together is that while she was escaping by sea after robbing the Prince of Tyre, she was somehow brought to the future and has come to work for the transtemporal agency. Although she has learnt some elements and language of this future millennia and these weird new worlds, she is still largely a stranger.

What is continued from the previous installments is Alyx’s impatience for impractical people. Here it is the tourists she must shepherd across Paradise. They are all different representatives of this future, showing different facets of the time, but for Alyx they are all fools in one way or another, coddled by society and unable to survive without it.

In some ways this could be seen as a version of Montaigne’s Des Cannibales but it significantly improves upon it. Whilst the original uses cultural relativism as a means to critique contemporary society, Russ sets up two opposing societies as alien to us as each other: the ancient Mediterranean of Alyx and the highly complex future of the tourists, and compares them to make more complex points as well as building fascinating worlds.

It should not be thought as an old-fashioned kind of text at all, as it does not pull any punches. Instead, we have explorations of drugs, sex, religion, complex psychology, violence, humanity and much more. It is like all of society attempting to be distilled into one perilous journey.

I know it is only January but if this isn’t to be my favourite novel of 1968, something really special will have to come along in the next 11 months.

A very high Five Stars

by Victoria Silverwolf

Short and Not So Sweet

I recently came across a trio of new works of speculative fiction that don't require a lot of time to read. In fact, I was able to finish all three books in one day. Each features a fair amount of disturbing material, even though one is a comedy, one is intended for younger readers, and one is a action-packed thriller. Let's take a look at these brief, dark-tinged novels.

The Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov

I use the word new loosely for this satiric Russian novella from an author who died in 1940. It was actually written in 1925, but has never been officially published in the Soviet Union. (I understand that copies of it have been circulated in the underground form known as samizdat.) Michael Glenny's translation is its first appearance in English, I believe.

Cover design by Applebaum & Curtis, Inc., according to the back cover, but the artist remains anonymous.

In classic horror movie fashion, a Mad Scientist adopts a homeless pooch for the bizarre purpose of transplanting a dead man's testicles and pineal gland into the animal's body. (The detailed descriptions of surgery are the gruesome parts of the book. Dog lovers beware.)

The mutt changes into a man, of a particularly vulgar sort. The canine fellow claims to be a loyal Communist, turning against the aristocratic scientist and siding with the bureaucrats who want the doctor to give up several rooms in his apartment.

It's obvious that the author is attacking the Bolshevik revolution in his portrait of the dog-man and the other collectivists. He also satirizes quack medicine of the time.

The narrative alternates from first person, in the dog's point of view, to third person, sometimes in a single paragraph. Some readers may find these sudden transitions jarring, although otherwise the book is quite readable. (Kudos to the translator.)

Despite the blood-soaked scenes of surgery and the savage satire of Communism, much of the novel is pure slapstick. There's an extended sequence in which the newly created man chases a cat, leading to the flooding of the apartment. Overall, the book is both amusing and thought-provoking.

Four stars.

The Weathermonger, by Peter Dickinson

Next we have an unusual fantasy for young people. I think this is the author's first book.

My sources suggest that this art is by John Holder.

We jump right into a scene of nail-biting suspense. A sixteen year old boy and his kid sister are trapped on a small rock in the sea off the coast of England. Folks with spears are ready to kill them if they make it back to shore. The tide is rising, ready to drown them.

The boy got hit on the head by one of the mob and has amnesia. This gives the girl a good excuse to tell her brother (and the reader) what's been going on for the last five years.

A mysterious something made the inhabitants of Britain hate machines. They've gone back to a medieval way of life. The boy was caught messing around with a motorboat, and his sister was seen drawing pictures of machines. The fanatical locals are ready to execute them for witchcraft. (Apparently the anti-technology effect has worn off on them.)

The boy is a weathermonger; that is, he can control the weather with his mind. (Every village in England has one, it seems. I suppose it's a side effect of the machine-hating phenomenon.)

He uses this power to create a fog. The siblings escape, make their way to the forbidden motorboat, and reach France. (The anti-technology effect is limited to Britain.)

That's just the start of their adventures. The French authorities, seeing that they are immune to the phenomenon, send them back to track down its source. Thus begins a wild odyssey to Wales, making use of a snazzy 1909 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost stolen from a museum. (I get the feeling the author is in love with that classic car.)

It's an exciting book, with one heck of a climax. The explanation for what's going on strains credibility, even for fantasy. The story is too intense for very young readers, I think, but it should be fine for teenagers. Adults who don't mind reading so-called juveniles should enjoy it as well.

Four stars.

City of the Chasch, by Jack Vance

The cover makes it clear that this is the start of a series. The name of the series, and the illustration, suggest that we're in for the kind of SFnal sword and sorcery yarn you might find in an old copy of Planet Stories. That's pretty accurate, but there's a bit more to it.

Cover art by Jeff Jones, who also provides a couple of interior illustrations.

The author doesn't waste any time. In just a couple of pages, a starship is destroyed by a weapon launched from the planet it's orbiting. A scout ship carrying two guys crashes on the planet. A few pages later, one of them is dead.

Let's catch our breath and see where we are. See the tiny black dot in the middle of the left side of the map? That's where the scout ship landed. The sole remaining hero won't get very far from that spot by the time the book ends. He just travels a bit to the northwest, not even reaching the coast. There are a few references to other places on the map, but the vast majority of the rest of the planet is going to have to wait for other volumes in the series.

The map art is not credited, but might be by Jeff Jones as well.

If you think the geography is complicated, wait until you hear about the population. There are humans of many different cultures present, for reasons explained later. There are at least four species of aliens, broken up into subgroups. The aliens who give the book its title, for example, are divided into the Old Chasch, the Blue Chasch, and the Green Chasch.

Complicating matters is the fact that some humans are (pick one) servants/slaves/worshippers/devotees/imitators of the various aliens. One such person is the book's most amusing character.

With all this going on, we still have a nonstop action-packed plot, as our hero sets out on a seemingly hopeless quest to get back to Earth. Along the way, he meets the traditional beautiful princess, whom he has to rescue from captivity no less than three times.

(At this point, I had to wonder if the author was poking subtle fun at the kind of work produced by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard.)

The story is full of violence and, frankly, kind of puerile. What distinguishes it from a typical thud-and-blunder yarn is the extraordinarily intricate setting. The author is a master of creating exotic cultures, and that's a lot more interesting than the endless killing and corny plot.

If the male characters are two-dimensional, the females are one-dimensional. The princess exists only to be stunningly beautiful, get kidnapped, and fall in love with the hero. There's a cult of priestesses who hate men and loathe attractive women. There are no other female characters of any importance, just servants and the like.

Three stars.

by Gideon Marcus

Operation: Time Search, by Andre Norton

Taking a break from her various long-running series, Andre Norton, one of the most prolific science fiction novelists, has produced a new one-off. It's a simple, dare I say, old-fashioned tale wherein ex-GI Ray Osborne gets inadvertently whipped into the distant past when he stumbles across an experimental time travel beam. Emerging into the primeval forests of "The Barren Lands" that will one day be North America, he is quickly captured by a party of Atlanteans (as in from the lost continent of Atlantis) and turned into a galley slave. Fortunately, he is able to make his escape, with the help of a fellow prisoner named Cho. The two, now sword-brothers, secure passage on a warship commissioned by Atlantis' rival, the Pacific continent-nation of Mu. On said ship, Ray and Cho make their way to the land of the Sun, where Ray is elevated to the aristocratic rank of Sun-born and welcomed.

But Ray is in for more than he bargained, as he is imbued with a subconscious geas to infiltrate the perfidious former colony of Atlantis and stop their nefarious plan to bring in other-worldly demons, their doomsday weapon in a cold war about to turn hot…

Operation: Time Search is all very Burroughsian in its setup and execution, up to and including the pseudo-scientific, modern era bookends (that do not add much to the book save padding). It's essentially riproaring action from beginning to end, and Norton delivers it competently. There are also agreeable relationships between the sword-brethren Ray and Cho, as well as, later in the book, Ray and a buccaneer captain named Taut.

This is a peculiarly shallow book, however. The Murians are portrayed as universally good and just (even when they commit actions that are not so nice, as in making Ray an unwitting weapon). The Atlanteans are foul in every respect. This could be fine–after all, when has Conan been subtle? But the writing is peculiarly sparse, almost oblique, when describing the many visceral horrors and foes of this bloody world, almost as if Norton were censoring herself (or perhaps she was censored after the fact). An encounter between Roy and "The Loving One", a gruesome Lovecraftian menace, in particular suffers for this.

Plus, I was sad that the potentially interesting Lady Ayna, captain of a Murian warship, essentially disappears shortly after her introduction. The saintly Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, is not nearly so compelling; in any wise, she is gone halfway through the book, too. Really, there just isn't a lot to become attached to in this book: Ray isn't a good enough character, and the setting is too one dimensional.

All in all, it felt like Norton was just going through the motions on this one. Three stars.

by Cora Buhlert

70 Pfennig – they'd rather walk

The cause of the trouble, a modern Bremen tram.

1967 was no quiet year, but full of unrest, protests and violence, at least here in Europe. And so far, 1968 seems to follow suit.

Until now, the protests and unrest have been confined to the bigger cities, particularly West Berlin. My hometown of Bremen did have its share of protests, but those were mostly just a few dozen people standing around on the market square, holding up placards. Though protests are getting bigger even here. On the day before Christmas, there was a protest against the war in Vietnam of several thousand overwhelmingly young people outside the US general consulate.

Right now, however, Bremen is seeing the biggest protests since the Bremen Soviet Republic fifty years ago. And for once, those protests are not against the war in Vietnam or the West German emergency laws or a visit of the Shah of Persia or former Nazis in positions of power, but about something far more mundane, namely an increase in bus and tram fares from 60 to 70 Pfennig for single tickets and 33 to 40 Pfennig for group tickets popular with students and apprentices. On the surface, this increase seems modest. However, for students, apprentices and young people in general who neither have cars nor a lot of money and rely on public transport to get around the city, even a small fare increase is a big problem.

The tram protests started small on January 15 with approximately fifty students of several Bremen high schools protesting the fare increase on the Domsheide square, one of the main tram traffic hubs in the city center. When the protest was ignored, the students decided to stage a sit-in on the tram tracks. The police removed the students, whereupon the protest continued outside Bremen central station – another major traffic hub – where other young people joined in.

Bremen tram protests — Protesting youngsters on the Domsheide square

In the following days, the protests continued to grow. On January 16, there were roughly 1500 young people staging a sit-in on the tram tracks, holding placards with slogans like "70 Pfennig – Lieber renn' ich" (70 Pfennig – I'd rather walk). The initial protesters had been high school students, but by now they were joined by students of the technical and pedagogical colleges and apprentices of various local companies. The protest managed to bring tram traffic in Bremen's city center to a complete halt with a backlog of trams stretching all across town.

And the protest was still growing. The next day, there were 5000 young people protesting and blocking the tram tracks to the point that the public transport company BSAG suspended all tram traffic across the entire city.

Bremen's chief of police Erich von Bock und Polach, who was a Colonel in the Waffen-SS before he reinvented himself as a member of the Social Democratic Party, proved that he had learned nothing whatsoever from the tragic events in West Berlin last June and ordered the Bremen police to attack the protesting students with truncheons, batons and water cannons. Hereby, the police not only managed to beat up several innocent bystanders, but the resulting unrest also caused damage to twenty-one tram cars and fourteen busses.

Chaos on the streets of Bremen

And still the protests grew. The workers of the AG Weser shipyard and the Klöckner steelwork, the two biggest companies in Bremen, employing thousands of people, many of whom rely on public transport, declared their solidarity with the protesting students and apprentices. By January 18, twenty thousand people were protesting in the city center.

The city was in utter chaos by now and the Bremen senate held an emergency meeting. Thankfully, cooler heads than the noxious chief of police von Bock und Polach prevailed and so Bremen's new mayor Hans Koschnik, who has only been in office since November, met with representatives of the protesters in the townhall, while the protests were still going on outside and threatened to boil over into violence again.

Bremen's new mayor Hans Koschnik has only been in office since November and really deserves better.

An unlikely heroine emerged in 54-year-old Annemarie Mevissen, deputy mayor and senator for youth, sports and education. Mrs. Mevissen left the relative safety of the townhall and went out to talk to the protesters directly. On the Domsheide, where the protests had begun four days earlier, Mrs. Mevissen climbed onto a crate of road de-icing salt, grabbed a megaphone and spoke to the protesters, explaining why the fare increases were sadly necessary, but also expressing sympathy for the protesters. Annemarie Mevissen's speech as well as the meeting with Mayor Koschnik did the trick and the protests gradually ceased. As of today, trams and busses are mostly running again.

Bremen tram protester — Senator for Youth, Sports and Education and deputy mayor Annemarie Mevissen speaks to the protesters to express sympathy and call for calm.

By chance, I was shopping in the city center on the second day of the protests. I could still get into the city by tram, but by the time I wanted to go home I had to walk several kilometres to where I had parked my car. However, I still found the time to stop at my favourite import bookstore to peruse their spinner rack of English language paperbacks.

The Return of the Dynamic Duo: The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber's delightful pair of rogues, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, have had a troubled publication history. They debuted in the pages of Unknown, Astounding/Analog's fantasy-focussed sister magazine, almost thirty years ago. After Unknown's demise in 1943, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser were left adrift, until they finally found a new home in Fantastic under the editorship of Cele Goldsmith Lalli. However, with the sale of the Ziff-Davis magazines to Sol Cohen, the appearances of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in the pages of Fantastic became scarce. It seemed the dynamic duo was homeless once again, unless they shacked up with Cele Goldsmith Lalli over at Modern Bride magazine, that is.

So imagine my joy when I spotted the brand-new Fafhrd and Gray Mouser adventure The Swords of Lankhmar in the spinner rack of my trusty import bookstore. Nor was this adventure short fiction, like the duos' previous outings, but a full length novel. So of course I had to pick it up, even if I had to carry it five kilometres through the city, dodging protesters and aggressive police officers.

The story

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser return to Lankhmar, only to find themselves first attacked and then hired by Lankhmar's overlord Glipkerio Kistomerces to escort a fleet of grain ships to a neighbouring city. The fleet's cargo is a gift to Movarl of the Eight Cities in exchange for some help with a pesky pirate plague. Also aboard the grain ships – and another gift to Movarl – are the Demoiselle Hisvet, daughter of Lankhmar's wealthiest grain merchant, her maid Frix and Hisvet's twelve trained white rats. The ship's captain isn't happy about the presence of the rats, because rats and grain don't mix. Meanwhile, both Fafhrd and Mouser are fascinated by the Hisvet and her maid.

It does not take long for trouble to find Fafhrd and Mouser, who soon find themselves fighting off monsters, pirates and rat attacks. The two rogues also have their hands full with Hisvet and Frix. Luckily, they get some help from Karl Treuherz, a German-speaking time-travelling hunter capturing monsters for Hagenbeck's Zeitgarten. Karl Treuherz (his last name means "true heart") is a delightful character, particularly if you're German and can understand not only his dialogue in flawless German (kudos to Mr. Leiber), but also understand that Hagenbeck's Zeitgarten is a riff on Hagenbecks Tierpark, the famous Hamburg zoo, which apparently will open a time- and dimension-travelling dependency in the future. Cover artist J. Jones clearly likes Karl Treuherz, too, and put him on the cover.

Hagenbeck's Tierpark — The distinctive main entrance of Hagenbecks Tierpark in Hamburg. So far, they don't yet display alien monsters, but it's only a matter of time.

Something smells of rat here

If the story feels a little familiar, that's probably because it is. For the first half of The Swords of Lankhmar appeared under the title "Scylla's Daughter" in the May 1961 issue of Fantastic. That novella ended on a cliffhanger with the treacherous Hisvet and Frix escaping aboard one of the ships, leaving Fafhrd and Mouser marooned.

Fantastic May 1961 — Fantastic's cover artist clearly liked Karl Treuherz as well.

The novel follows the two ladies as well as Fafhrd and Mouser back to Lankhmar, where even more intrigues await. For sinking a fleet of grain ships was just the start for Hisvet and her twelve trained rats. It turns out that Hisvet and her father are members of a race of intelligent rats, who live in Lankhmar Below and want to take over the entire city. Mouser shrinks himself down to rat size to spy on them, only for the mad overlord Glipkerio to ignore his warnings in favour of building a contraption that may or may not send him to a parallel universe. The way of defeating the rat invasion is as obvious as it is ingenious by using the rats' hereditary enemy against them.

The Lankhmar Below scenes were my favourite parts, probably because as a kid, I envisioned thumb-sized beings, both humans and animals, who inhabit a parallel city in the sewers, basements and walls of our world. In order to cross between the two worlds you needed a magical shrinking potion. Reading Leiber's descriptions of Lankhmar Below felt as if he had reached into my mind to bring my own fantasy world to the page. Or maybe there really is a parallel world of intelligent rodents and both Fritz Leiber and I somehow stumbled upon them in early childhood.

Cookie tin with Cologne cathedral — My imaginary parallel world of little people and animals sprang from the collection of small figures kept in this cookie tin featuring a picture of the Cologne Cathedral, hence I called them "church box people".

An ode to interracial and interspecies romance

Because this is a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, there also are plenty of romantic entanglements. Mouser falls for Hisvet and finds himself wondering if she's human or rat underneath her floor-length gown and if it even matters to him. Fafhrd prefers Frix, but Hisvet likes Frix, too. Furthermore, Mouser is fascinated by Reetha, a maid at the overlord's palace who is completely hairless, while Fafhrd starts a relationship with Kreeshkra, a ghoul with transparent skin and flesh who is basically a walking skeleton.

Over the past few years, the amount of sex in science fiction and fantasy has been creeping upwards, as the sexual revolution makes it possible to write about previously taboo subjects. This is not necessarily a good thing, since some writers feel the need to foist sexual fantasies that had better remained private upon the unsuspecting reader – see Piers Anthony's Chthon or John Norman's Gor books. Thankfully, Leiber does not go this route, even though there is quite a bit of sexual content, including sexual content of the more unusual sort, in The Swords of Lankhmar. However, nothing here is even remotely as prurient as Chthon or the Gor books. Instead, Leiber's message – even spelled out at one point – is that love is love, no matter the gender, race or species of the participants. And indeed, none of the women Fafhrd and Mouser become involved with in this story are in any way standard love interests. Frix is a black woman, Reetha's hairlessness does not match any classic beauty standards, Hisvet may or may not be part rat and Kreeshkra is essentially a walking skeleton. Furthermore, there are several not so subtle hints that Hisvet and Frix are in a romantic relationship as well.

All in all, The Swords of Lankhmar is a thoroughly enjoyable fantasy adventure and a welcome return to the world of Nehwon and its most famous rogues. However, the plot meanders a bit, particularly in the second half. The genre that Robert E. Howard pioneered in the pages of Weird Tales almost forty years ago and that Fritz Leiber named sword and sorcery works best in the short form. Almost all of Howard's tales about Conan the Cimmerian or Kull of Atlantis, C.L. Moore's adventures of the medieval swordswoman Jirel of Joiry, which I hope will be reprinted eventually, as well as Michael Moorcock's stories about Elric of Melniboné and all previous Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories have been novellas and novelettes. A genre that focusses on action and adventures thrives best in the short form and tends to meander at novel length, a problem that's also apparent in Robert E. Howard's sole Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon, recently reprinted as Conan the Conqueror.

A fun, if meandering adventure tale.

Five stars.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 16, 1967] Long Distance Travel (December 1967 Galactoscope)

December 16, 2022 Kris Vyas-Myall 6 Comments

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Whilst reading the Times a couple of months I was surprised to see a mention of my favourite SF periodical turn up.

Is New Worlds doomed? 3rd Paragraph: "He part-finances the magazine himself by taking three days off on occasions to write hack adventure novels with titles like The Jade Man, The Jewel in the Skull and Twilight Man. He has written 21. 'They're Tokienesque things I sneak out and hope nobody here notices. They're an embarassment to me.'" — Source: The Times 28th September 1967

As regular readers of the publication will know they have managed to get a new publisher (Stonehart) and are continuing on with only a single month’s break to reorganize. What interested me most was the third paragraph, that there were some more adventure stories he was writing specifically for the US market. I have not come across The Jade Man yet but The Twilight Man actually is the book form of his The Shores of Death already released.

And I was able to discover that The Jewel in the Skull was coming out in America in December.

Now Moorcock’s adventure stories are a mixed bag. For every Elric there is a Michael Kane. But with such an anti-endorsement from the writer himself, how could I not want to read it?

The Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock

In one of my favourite kind of settings, post-apocalyptic fantasy, the world has returned to a state of medieval kingdoms fighting each other, with modern technology treated as ancient sorceries people struggle to understand.

This book is primarily set in the Europe of this future, where the dark empire of the Granbretans is attempting to conquer the continent in the name of its King-Emperor. The powerful kingdom of Kamarg remains independent with Count Brass and his fortress of Castle Brass. Baron Meliadus of Kroiden attempts to gain their support for the empire but is thrown out when he attempts to rape the Count’s daughter Yisselda. Swearing an oath by the Runestaff to control the count and seize his daughter for himself he concocts a plan to do so.

In the dungeons of Londra is the rebellious Duke of Köln, Dorian Hawkmoon. He gives Hawkmoon an offer he can’t refuse, granting him his lands back and his freedom if he goes to Castle Brass, kidnaps Yisselda and brings her back to London. As additional motivation, a black jewel is implanted in his skull. This will allow the Granbretans to monitor him at all times and they can also use it to destroy his mind whenever they choose. And so Hawkmoon rides to Castle Brass on this fraught mission.

When I first opened this book I was worried this was going to be another Barbarians of Mars, with some incredibly overwritten descriptions and cod-Shakesperean dialogue. Thankfully, the style soon settles down and we get something much thicker than the Sub-Tolkien fantasy at first suggested. In fact there are some wonderful choices of imagery, a kind of combination of the gothic and the psychedelic.

As you can probably see from the description, this is not a setup where there are any easy heroes. It is also fascinating to see a tale where the British are explicitly setup as “The Dark Empire”, with people regularly suggesting the entire nation has gone insane and our representative of them a manipulative rapist. Instead, our lead character is a German, the inverse of what you will see whenever you go to the cinema.

This is only the first story in a series, so there is a lot left to be told, but, overall, this is an interesting and entertaining fantasy.

Four stars

by Victoria Silverwolf

Synchronicity

As fate would have it, I recently read two new science fiction novels featuring psychiatrists named Paul. In addition to that, both protagonists are involved with women who have a hard time pronouncing that name. Other than this odd coincidence, the books have little in common, except that they both involve people who have traveled a long distance.

A Far Sunset, by Edmund Cooper

Uncredited photographic cover art.

Split Personalities

The first mental health professional we'll meet is Paul Marlowe. He's a psychiatrist aboard the starship Gloria Mundi. (Given the familiar Latin phrase containing those words, that seems like asking for trouble.)

When the novel opens, he's in prison on an alien world. Two other members of the crew, captured at the same time, are dead. Before all this happened, the nine remaining folks aboard the ill-fated vessel disappeared while exploring the planet. For some reason, the locals have supplied him with a concubine, even in prison. That's the woman who can't pronounce Paul correctly. Her name, by the way, is Mylai Tui.

Meanwhile, Gloria Mundi destroys itself, as it's programmed to do when all the crew is gone for a certain amount of time. Sounds like a design flaw to me, but the idea is to keep it from falling into the hands of hostile aliens.

With no way to return to Earth, Paul Marlowe decides to fit into his new world. He does this by creating a second self, in a way. When acting like one of the locals, he calls himself Poul Mer Lo. This mental exercise allows him to control his emotions when witnessing things like child sacrifice.

(I couldn't help wondering if this was a sly allusion to Poul Anderson, whose first name is famously difficult to pronounce unless you're Scandinavian.)

Paul pretty much accepts Mylai Tui as his wife, although he was already married to one of the missing crew members. The marriage was one of convenience, mostly, although the two were fond of each other. Paul left his true love back on Earth, because he wanted to travel to the stars so badly. Be careful what you wish for!

A parallel to Paul's double identity is found in the local god-king, a young man who often takes on a second persona as a peasant, in order to speak freely with Paul in a way he can't as a divine ruler. Their relationship, in which the god-king is eager to learn Earth ways from Paul, may be the most intriguing part of the book. It also creates some suspense, as the god-king is only allowed to rule for a year, after which he is ritually killed.

The plot really begins when Paul and some local companions make a dangerous journey through enemy territory and deadly jungles to an ice-covered mountain. He makes an extraordinary discovery, learns what happened to the missing crew members, and even finds out why the inhabitants of the planet are very similar to Earthlings but have only four fingers on each hand.

The alien culture is interesting and vividly portrayed. Paul is not a very sympathetic protagonist. He beats Mylai Tui when she struggles to pronounce his name correctly, for one thing. The latter half of the book turns into a quest adventure, which is fine if you like that sort of thing. The revelation at the end of the trek to the mountain strains credibility. Overall, a mixed bag.

Three stars.

Quicksand, by John Brunner

Cover art by Emanuel Schongut.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Our next psychiatrist is Paul Fidler. He works at a mental hospital. You'll get to know him well, because much of the book consists of his interior monologues. They're set off from the rest of the text in the manner I'll demonstrate in the next paragraph.

–I hope the editor likes this article.

Paul has doubts about his career and his marriage. He also has a habit of imagining the way that things might have gone badly in the past. It's kind of the opposite of the wistful thinking we probably all do. You know, something like If only such-and-such had happened. Besides all this, he hides the fact that he had a nervous breakdown some time ago from everyone, even his wife.

After spending some time with this sad fellow, the plot gets going when a badly injured man staggers into a pub. He claims a naked woman attacked him. Could it be one of the inmates at the hospital?

Nope. Paul soon runs into the woman, a tiny little thing, sort of like the diminutive Sister Bertrille. Don't worry, she doesn't fly.

As I've indicated, she has trouble saying Paul correctly. She speaks an unknown language, but manages to indicate that her name is Arrzheen. That gets distorted into Urchin by the folks at the hospital, which fits her pretty well.

Much of the book deals with Paul's attempt to solve the mystery of Urchin. What was she doing naked in the woods on a cold, rainy night? How did such a small woman, who hardly seems out of her teens, severely injure a much bigger man? (We'll find out later it was self defense.) Why can't expert linguists identify her speech or her written language? Why does she seem baffled by ordinary objects?

A strange form of mental illness, or something else? (Hint: this is a science fiction novel.)

Urchin proves to be extraordinarily intelligent, and she picks up English quickly. Paul's marriage falls apart completely. Through the use of hypnosis, he learns more about Urchin. He tries to help her adjust to the outside world.

Let's just say that things go a little too far. After some misleading hints about Urchin, we find out the truth at the very end. Don't expect a happy ending.

As with the Cooper's novel, the protagonist is not always very likable. What he does at the end may disturb you. The book seems almost like introspective mainstream fiction, with a science fiction premise forced into it. It's more to be admired than loved, I think.

Three stars.

by Gideon Marcus

The fourth book for this Galactoscope turns out to be another kind of fourth book: Emil Petaja has written the fourth (and final?) book in his science fiction translation of the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. It's an unusual novel in that it stars a villain, of sorts. Let's learn more about the…

Tramontane

Kullervo Kasi is a most unlovely man. Born of the chance interaction between a rent in the universe and a random act of sex, he is half human/half evil energy. Physically, he is a gnome-like character, though not without a strong back. Humans instinctively recoil from him. When we first meet him, he is on one of the thousands of colonies of humanity, the race exiled to the stars after their home world had been exhausted. Kullervo is bullied near to death, from which he escapes by a jump into a chasm to (he believes) his doom.

But Louhi the star witch has other plans. She takes Kullervo under her wing, unlocks the intelligence lying dormant in his genes as the reincarnation of the ancient Kalevalan anti-hero, Kullervo, and sends him to the wasted Earth. His mission: to destroy any remnants of humanity–the Vanhat race–that may yet survive on the ruined world.

This is for whom we should be rooting?

Well, yes. It's hard not to feel sorry for Kullervo. He was born with a handicap; his human tormentors have no such excuse. Once he arrives on Earth, and through cunning, endurance, and not a little (if grudging) selflessness, surmounts obstacle after obstacle, one can't help admiring the guy. In the end, if he is not exactly the hero of the story, he certainly is the catalyst for a great good.

Such an unusual protagonist is refreshing, indeed. Plus, Petaja really can spin a quill, offering a neo-pulp adventure with a mythical base. His depictions of the rusting supercities, the floating junk islands, and the recovering crags of Scandinavia have a rich, Burroughsian flavor. I particularly enjoyed Kullervo's adventures with Billyjo, a renegade coast-dweller. Their run-in with the pirates of the roving islands, and Kullervo's short-term subjugation to Queen Fiammante, reminded me somewhat of my favorite Baum book, John Dough and the Cherub. I also found interesting the implication that Kullervo, hideous as he was, had a strange appeal to women–both Fiammante and Louhi make him their lover, and the people who treat Kullervo poorly are invariably men.

Tramontane is not a great book: for one thing, it's not science fiction, but space opera. It's also not consistently written: the middle third is excellent, but the last third lags a touch and is quite literally a deus ex machina situation. Still, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book, and it stands well enough alone (I haven't read any of the other books in the series: Saga of Lost Earths, The Star Mill, or The Stolen Sun.)

Three and a half stars.

(Note: Tramontane comprises one half of Ace Double H-36; the other half is Moorcock's The Wrecks of Time, previously reviewed by Mark Yon. The Ace version has apparently been butchered to fit the format, the greatest casualties being the naughty bits.)

by Cora Buhlert

Sex in the Real World

The most shocking film of the year is currently playing in West German cinemas. It's called Helga – Vom Werden des menschlichen Lebens (Helga – About the Development of Human Life) and has caused scores of cinema goers to faint.

But what exactly is so shocking about Helga? Well, Helga is a movie about – gasp – sex. The plot is simple. An interviewer asks pedestrians in the street about sex education and birth control. Next we meet the protagonist: Helga (newcomer Ruth Gassmann), a naïve young woman pregnant with her first child. Like many women, Helga knows very little about her body and what is happening inside her womb. Luckily, a kindly gynecologist explains the mechanics of conception and pregnancy to Helga and the viewer. The movie then follows Helga through her pregnancy and also documents the birth of her child. It's this birth scene – shot in full, gory detail – that makes particularly male viewers faint in the cinema… and hopefully think twice before impregnating a woman.

In spite of the frank scenes, Helga is not pornography, but an educational film intended to teach West Germans about human sexuality. Shot in a pseudo-documentary style and interspersed with animations showing the human reproductive system, Helga does what parents and schools all too often fail to do, namely teach young and not so young people about their bodies. The film was produced by West German Secretary of Health Käte Strobe, a sixty-year-old lady from Bavaria and unlikely champion of sex education.

West German Secretary of Health and champion of sex education Käte Strobel

But don't take my word for it. Because American International has purchased the distribution rights for Helga, so you can soon see it in a theatre near you.

Sex on an Alien World: Outlaw of Gor by John Norman

I wasn't enamoured with John Norman's debut novel Tarnsman of Gor and didn't plan on reading the sequel. However, December 6 is St. Nicholas Day and since St. Nick was kindly enough to put a copy of Outlaw of Gor into my stocking, I of course felt obliged to read and review it.

When I reviewed Tarnsman of Gor earlier this year, I noted that John Norman was obviously inspired by the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. This influence is even more marked in Outlaw of Gor, for while Tarnsman opened with protagonist and first person narrator Tarl Cabot, Outlaw uses a Burroughs type framing device and opens with the statement of an attorney named Harrison Smith, who describes at great length his relationship with Cabot, Cabot's physical appearance, his mysterious disappearance and reappearance.

Years later, Cabot and Smith rekindle their acquaintance. Eventually Cabot hands Smith the manuscript for Tarnsman of Gor and vanishes again. Smith publishes the manuscript, as the law of framing devices demands, as well as the sequel, which he finds waiting for him on his coffee table.

It is helpful to briefly recapitulate the previous book in an ongoing series for the reader, but the statement of Harrison Smith goes on for pages upon pages. Nor does the novel need a framing device, because this is 1967, not 1912, and readers are accustomed to fantastic adventures in alien worlds by now.

A Gorean Travelogue

The story proper finally starts with Tarl Cabot giving us an extended description of the Gorean scenery, customs, flora and fauna. One of my complaints about Tarnsman was that the opening third of the novel was a dull and interminable lump of information, because Norman was an inexperienced writer uncertain how to present information about his world to the reader. I had hoped that Norman's writing skills would have improved by his second book. Sadly, they have not.

After a trek through the wilderness, Tarl Cabot finds his hometown Ko-Ro-Ba destroyed by the Priest-Kings and its people, including Cabot's father and his mate Talena, scattered to the four winds. Cabot himself is now an outlaw and decides to avenge himself on the Priest-Kings. Again, the parallels to Burroughs are notable, because John Carter also found himself separated from his hometown and wife upon his return to Barsoom and forced to deal with overbearing godlike beings in The Gods of Mars back in 1913. Indeed, many things in Tarnsman and Outlaw of Gor only happen to Tarl Cabot because they happened to John Carter first.

Before meeting the Priest-Kings, Cabot pays a visit to the city of Tharna, which is remarkable for two reasons. One, all Goreans, regardless of their origin, are welcome in Tharna. Two, Tharna is ruled by a woman and – unlike the rest of Gor – women are revered in Tharna and not treated as slaves or possessions.

It's a Women's City… or is it?

The position of women and the institution of slavery on Gor played an important role in Tarnsman and crops up again in Outlaw. And indeed, the descriptions of Gorean slave girls seem to be what attracts many readers to these books. As a modern man of the Sixties, Tarl Cabot abhors slavery and the oppression of women in general, though it is not clear, if the author shares these views, since the narrative repeatedly notes that the slave girls are happy with their lot after initial resistance and that the free women of Gor, who are kept locked up and only venture outdoors in heavy veils, comparable to practices in many Muslim countries, which are thankfully modernising, secretly envy the slave girls their relative freedom. These aspects make the Gor books more disturbing than a simple Burroughs pastiche should be.

Compared to other Gorean cities, Tharna is described as a grey and depressing place full of grey and depressed men. Apparently, treating women like human beings tends to make cities grey and men depressed. In general, Cabot seems inordinately concerned with cities and their appearance, at one point comparing the run-down New York City unfavourably to Gorean cities. I wonder if Cabot (and his creator) blames women for the sorry state of New York City, too.

Revenge of the Masked Lesbians

Cabot has only been in Tharna for a few hours, when he is approached with an offer to kidnap the Tatrix Lara, the city's ruler. He refuses, finds himself framed for a crime and condemned to die in the arena for the amusement of the Tatrix and the haughty masked women of Tharna. Cabot also learns the reason why Tharna is uncommonly hospitable towards strangers – because they are enslaved to labour in the fields or mines. What is more, men are viewed as little more than animals in Tharna and the women are forbidden from loving men, though encouraged to love each other.

Cabot manages to escape with the help of his tarn, the giant bird creatures warriors of Gor ride into battle. However, rather than continuing his journey to see the Priest-Kings, Cabot instead decides to liberate Tharna from the haughty masked lesbians. Needless to say he succeeds and decrees that what the masked lesbians of Tharna need is a man and some good old fashioned Gorean slavery to teach them how to love. Reader, I puked.

Honestly, just read Burroughs

Tarnsman of Gor was mildly spicy Burroughs pastiche. But while John Norman's fascination with slavery, whips, hoods and shackles was already evident, I did not sense anything prurient or anti-feminist in Tarnsman.

Outlaw, however, is another matter. Particularly the second half of the novel and its anti-feminist conclusion gave me the same creepy crawly feeling that Piers Anthony's Chthon did. Worse, since Cabot has neither found the Priest-Kings nor his true love Talena by the end, I fear there will be at least one more Gor book. However, I will not read it.

If you like swashbuckling adventures on alien worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs' entire catalogue is back in print and the excellent planetary adventures of Leigh Brackett are easy enough to find as well. If you like the spicier aspects, there is plenty of sleaze to be found in the paperback spinner racks, some of it – so I am reliably informed – written by genre stalwarts such as Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison under pseudonyms.

However, don't bother with Outlaw of Gor or its predecessor.

One star.

St.Nicholas and his helper Knecht Ruprecht deliver treats and presents to kids in Bremen's historical Schnnor neighbourhood

by Jason Sacks

Secret of the Marauder Satellite, by Ted White

There's a new novel out by Ted White, the longtime assistant editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Despite its goofy title, the new Secret of the Marauder Satellite is a wonderful quick read with some clever turns of phrase and interesting insights into its lead character.

Our lead is a young man named Paul Williams, recently graduated from "space cadet" school (as he half-dismissedly calls it) and ready for his first major assignment, aboard a satellite orbiting the Earth which also works as a staging site for mankind's further trips through the Solar System.

As you might imagine from a book like this, Paul is a bit of a prodigy in a space suit. He receives a plum assignment, as a roving salvage man assigned to pick up space junk and haul it back to the station for recycling. With resources short on the station, such a job is extremely useful and important. But during his second mission in that role, Paul makes a fateful and surprising discovery which indicates mankind might not have been the first race to orbit Earth's moon.

White separates his prose from his peers with its vividness of description and clever ways he brings common events to life. For instance, he explains why rocket launches require countdowns in the kind of matter-of-fact detail that had me nodding my head, and his explanation of gravitational inertia is as elegant as it is concise.

But the element that really elevates this book is the way White explains Paul's inner life. We learn early on that Paul is an introvert and has trouble talking with people. But White takes pains to show readers Paul's vast intelligence and his completely broken childhood, with Paul's arrogant unfeeling parents seldom giving their small child more than a smidge of attention as they slept and drank their ways through their hedonistic lives. With this background, it becomes clear why Paul was motivated to be a high achieving astronaut, but it also explains why he had trouble with peers and with members of the opposite sex.

Secret of the Marauder Satellite packs a lot into its short length, and every word was necessary. This book teases at the potential for Ted White to deliver a masterpiece, but its brief length does work against the story. The story moves at a breakneck speed but that rapid pace doesn't quite give the reader enough time to consider all the impacts of its events. Ignore the goofy title and spend an enjoyable couple of hours with Paul White.

3½ stars

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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 18, 1967] We Are The Martians: Quatermass and the Pit, Bonnie and Clyde, The Day the Fish Came Out and The Snake Pit and the Pendulum

October 18, 2022 Fiona Moore 2 Comments

by Fiona Moore

This month sees the release of a film I’ve been anticipating for a long time: Quatermass and the Pit, the final instalment in Hammer Film Productions’ adaptations of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy. With a whole new cast of actors and a very different look and feel to Hammer’s earlier movies starring Brian Donlevy, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957), this represents a concerted effort to bring Quatermass into the 1960s.

While reportedly this film was considered as another outing for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir as Quatermass and Julian Glover as Breen provide great interpretations. Keir is the most likeable of the Quatermass actors, while still managing a bitter world-weariness in keeping with the character. Rising star Glover is a bold choice as Breen, being considerably younger than Anthony Bushell in the TV serial, but this casting shifts the interpretation from an old officer too set in his ways to acknowledge the impossible, to an immature, overpromoted man falling back on rigid denials to cover the fact that he is out of his depth. Barbara Shelley as Barbara Judd is more sexy than the usual Quatermass women, wearing outfits that one would think not very sensible for an archaeologist.

Likeable: Andrew Keir as Quatermass and Barbara Shelley as Miss Judd

The basic narrative has had only a few updates. For instance, rather than a new building, the construction work which revives the ancient horrors is the digging of a new Underground extension, something which many Londoners are having to put up with right now. The story has been compressed from six half-hour episodes to a lean 97 minutes, meaning that the plot cracks along at a ripping pace without every feeling overpadded, and we lose most of Kneale’s excruciating working-class stereotype characters. On the more negative side, the film lacks the slow buildup of tension that the TV serial had. Crucially, the themes of the original are all present. Perhaps because Kneale is here adapting his own screenplay, we do not lose the sense of anger at military proliferation, colonialism, and humanity’s self-destructive tendencies.

Colonel Breen, representing humanity's negative side.

One aspect which remains unchanged, however, leads to a rather specialised criticism I have of this movie, speaking as an anthropologist. While in 1959 the dominant theory about human evolution was, indeed, that large brains would precede upright walking, more recent discoveries by Louis and Mary Leakey in East Africa are starting to move the consensus more towards the idea that the opposite was true.

The colour film and production values give the film a much more lavish feel than the austere Donlevy movies, but are a mixed blessing. The alien spacecraft is a thing of beauty compared to the crude cylinder of the serial, but this makes the idea that it could be initially thought to be a German V-weapon less credible. The simple ground-shaking effect in the TV serial when Sladden (played here by Duncan Lamont) accesses his primitive side was somehow more terrifying than the wild poltergeist activity seen here. However, the climax of the film uses its production values to build on the sense of terror as humanity succumbs to the Wild Hunt: we have a chilling scene where a group of people surround a man and beat him to death telekinetically with stones and masonry. Rather than concluding with an explanatory speech by Quatermass, the film simply lingers on the image of Quatermass and Barbara sitting among the ruins, shattered by what they’ve experienced.

Hammer's take on the Martians.

Quatermass and the Pit provides evidence both that the themes of the original Quatermass stories remain fresh and relevant almost a decade later, and that Hammer are still capable of producing a decent horror film without relying on gore and nudity to bring in the shocks. It’s a shame there’s unlikely to be a Quatermass 4.

Four out of five stars.

by Jason Sacks

Bonnie and Clyde

And while Fiona praises Quatermass and the Pit for its lack of gore, I have to praise Bonnie and Clyde for its copious use of gore.

You're probably aware of this newest film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. In the two months since its New York premiere, perhaps you've seen the numerous newspaper articles focusing on the highly violent nature of Bonnie and Clyde, or articles which have condemned the idea that the film makes heroes of its bankrobbing protagonists.

Or perhaps you've read the rhapsodic review of Bonnie and Clyde in the latest issue of The New Yorker by their new critic Pauline Kael and possibly dismissed it because of your annoyance with Kael's now legendary condemnation of The Sound of Music three years ago in McCall's.

I've had the most amazing experience since I saw Bonnie and Clyde last weekend after it premiered at the Northgate Cinema: I've been raving nonstop to my friends about this film.

Like Kael, I was thrilled to see a film which is so bold, so intense and somehow so contemporary feeling. Despite–or perhaps because of–its setting in during the Great Depression, this film feels like a deconstruction of the myths we have told ourselves about the past. Bonnie and Clyde makes villains out of the brave federal men who chase our heroic criminals. This isn't an episode of The FBI. This is an inversion of what it means to be a hero. And in that inversion I saw myself in the faces of people who lived and died 35 years ago.

Because the world in which Bonnie and Clyde live feels like a real world. It's dusty and ugly and people wear worn clothes. Some banks have collapsed and others are near collapse and peoples' lives are miserable. In that misery, ordinary people are desperate for someone, anyone, who is able to triumph against all odds, even if the fate of those heroes seems horribly preordained.

Like all of us, the characters in Bonnie and Clyde are deeply flawed. I was especially swept up in Clyde's foibles. We're all used to seeing Warren Beatty as the smooth handsome lover in movies like Promise Her Anything and Splendor in the Grass, but here Beatty plays a man who's just not interested in love, or maybe more truthfully Clyde is a man who gets his thrills from robbery and not from women. Faye Dunaway is thus not quite Beatty's girlfriend on screen as much as she is his accomplice, fascinatingly contrary to what we expect.

With its echoes of the French New Wave and its shattering of cliche and audience expectations, Bonnie and Clyde feels like a revolution–a harbinger of the types of films I hope to see as the new decade dawns.

4½ out of 5 stars

by Victoria Silverwolf

Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts

Filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis had an international hit with Zorba the Greek a few years ago, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three. With that success behind him, I guess he figured he could do just about anything he wanted. He decided to do something different.

The Day the Fish Came Out

The film starts with an unseen narrator telling us about the tragic incident last year when a B-52 bomber collided with a tanker during mid-air refueling, killing most of the crew. Four nuclear bombs fell out of the doomed aircraft, three of them landing near the Spanish village of Palomares and one falling into the sea. Since this movie is a black comedy, this frightening story is accompanied by three flamenco dancers.

They also have the ability to sing with subtitles, giving away the plot.

In the future year 1972, a plane carrying a pilot, a navigator, two atomic bombs, and a mysterious metal box crashes near a tiny Greek island. The unfortunate pair of flyboys lose their clothing, and spend most of the film in their underpants.

Colin Blakely (left) and Tom Courtenay (right) offer a little beefcake.

A bunch of military types, pretending to be folks interested in building a hotel on the island, search for the bombs and box. They get the bombs back, but it seems a local fellow found the box and thinks it has a treasure inside. Unfortunately for him, it's sealed tight and can't be opened except by a laser or a special chemical. (Keep that latter possibility in mind.)

Meanwhile, a bunch of tourists, attracted by the rumor of an upcoming hotel, flock to the island. Like almost everybody else in this movie (not including the locals or the barely dressed airmen), they wear clothes that would be rejected by Carnaby Street as too extreme. They also dance a lot.

In fact, if you get a chance to watch the trailer for this movie, you'll think it's a beach movie.

After more than an hour of this stuff, the plot gets going with the arrival of Electra Brown, played by Candice Bergen, the beautiful daughter of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. She's supposed to be an archeologist, but the way she behaves with one of the military guys makes me think she's more interested in human biology. Bergen made her film debut as a lesbian in the classy soap opera movie The Group, but here she is very heterosexual indeed.

Electra Brown in one of her more conservative outfits.

Electra has this weird device that uses a special chemical (sound familiar?) to cut through metal in order to make replicas of ancient objects. (No, that didn't make much sense to me either.) Long story short, the guy who found the box steals the gizmo, opens the box, and . . .

Well, without giving away too much, let's just say that the depressing ending finally explains the title. This movie badly wants to be Dr. Strangelove and it fails miserably. The comedy isn't funny, the satire falls flat, and there are long stretches where nothing much is happening.

Two stars, mostly for the wacky costumes.

Stay away from this one unless you want to laugh at it. Read a book instead.

Maybe not this one.

by Cora Buhlert

Horror in the Real World

1967 is certainly turning out to be a year of disasters.

Belgium has barely recovered from the devastating fire at the À l'Innovation department store in May and now two express trains and a local passenger train collided near the village of Fexhe-le-Haut-Clocher in the French-speaking part of Belgium on October 5, leaving twelve people dead and 76 injured.

FEXHE LE HAUT CLOCHE traincrash — Aftermath of the train crash of Fexhe-Le-Haut-Clocher in Belgium.

The photos of the wrecked trains bring back memories of another terrible railroad disaster that happened only three months ago in East Germany. A barrier at a railroad crossing near the village of Langenweddingen malfunctioned. As a result, a passenger train crashed into a tanker truck, setting the train on fire. 94 people died, 44 of them school children en route to a holiday camp. The Langenweddingen train crash is the worst railroad accident not just in East Germany, but in all of German history.

Langenweddingen train crash — Aftermath of the devastating railroad crash in Langenweddingen, East Germany. Note the burned out train cars.

Horror on the Silver Screen: Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (The Snake Pit and the Pendulum)

Compared to the many horrors of the real world, watching a spooky movie in the theatre feels almost cathartic. And so I decided to get away from the real world by watching the new West German horror movie Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (The Snake Pit and the Pendulum) at my local cinema.

As the title indicates, the film is a (loose) adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum". Of course, we already had a very good (loose) adaptation of that story by Roger Corman only six years ago. And indeed, The Snake Pit and the Pendulum intends to be West Germany's answer to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the UK's Hammer horror films and the lurid horror films from Italy, all of which are popular, if not necessarily critical successes in West German cinemas. So how does The Snake Pit and the Pendulum hold up?

Snake Pit and the Pendulum 1967 — Judge Richard von Marienberg (Lex Barker in a wig) setnences Count Regula (Christopher Lee) to death.

Pretty well, it turns out. The movie starts with a bang, as a bewigged judge and a scarlet-masked executioner visit Count Regula (Christopher Lee) in his cell. The judge informs Count Regula that he is sentenced to death for murdering twelve virgins in his quest for immortality. However, the immortality elixir requires the blood of thirteen virgins and the final virgin managed to escape the Count's clutches and alerted the authorities.

Snake Pit and the Pendulum — The bodies of the twelve murdered virgins are arranged in a censor-friendly way, covering up any stray breasts.

The death sentence is to be executed immediately and a most bloody sentence it is, too. First, a bronze mask lined with spikes is nailed onto Count Regula's face – reminiscent of Mario Bava's 1960 horror movie La Maschera del Demonio a.k.a. Black Sunday. Then Count Regula is led onto the market square of the fictional town of Sandertal – portrayed by the Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which is famous for its medieval architecture – where his body is torn apart by four horses. Of course, we have seen similar scenes in Italian and French historical and horror movies many times, but by the rather tame standards of West German cinema, this is a remarkably bloody opening.

Snake Pit and Pendulum — The executioner is ready for action.

The movie continues in the same vein. For true to form, Count Regula has vowed bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, not only on the judge who sentenced him to death and that pesky virgin who escaped his clutches, but also on their descendants.

Vengeance from Beyond the Grave

The story now jumps forward by thirty years, from the early nineteenth century into the 1830s. A mail coach is traveling to Sandertal. The passengers are the lawyer Roger Mont Elise (Lex Barker), Baroness Lilian of Brabant (Karin Dor), her maid Babette (Christiane Rücker) and Fabian (Yugoslav actor Vladimir Medar), a highwayman masquerading as a priest. Roger and Lilian have both been summoned to Castle Andomai via mysterious letters. Roger, who is an orphan, is supposed to learn more about his parentage, while Lilian is supposed to receive the inheritance of her late mother. Both letters are signed by Count Regula, the very same Count Regula whose bloody execution we just witnessed.

Schalngengrube und das Pendel — The woods around Sandertal are certainly spooky.

En route to the castle, the coach and its passengers must not only travel through a spooky forest where the bodies of hanged men are dangling from every tree, but are also assailed by bandits intent on kidnapping the two women. Roger and Fabian manage to fight off the bandits. But even more trouble awaits them at the castle, where the undead Count Regula and his equally undead servant Anatol (played by the delightfully creepy Carl Lange) are about to make good on the Count's dying threats.

For unbeknownst to them, Roger and Lilian are the descendants of the judge who sentenced Count Regula to death and the virgin who escaped the Count's clutches (and clearly did not remain a virgin). A gruesome fate awaits them at the castle, a fate that involves a pit full of snakes and a razor-sharp pendulum.

The Snake Pit and the Pendulum is not quite up to the high standards set by Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations on the one hand and the Hammer movies from the UK on the other. However, it is an enjoyably spooky film that will send a shudder or two down your spine.

Harald Reinl is a veteran of the Edgar Wallace, Dr. Mabuse and Winnetou movie series and probably the best director working in West Germany right now. His skills are on full display in this movie and he uses existing locations such as the medieval town of Rotenburg ob der Tauber or the Extern Stones in the Teutoburg Forest to great effect.

The cast is excellent. Christopher Lee has graced many a Hammer movie and now brings his horror skills to West German screens. Carl Lange has specialised in playing dubious characters and outright villains for a long time now and his performance as a hangman forced to execute his own son in Face of the Frog is unforgettable. I'm always stunned that Lex Barker never got to be the A-list star in Hollywood that he is in Europe, but their loss was our gain. That said, at 48 Barker may be getting a little too hold for hero roles. Finally, I'm very happy to see the always reliable Karin Dor back in a West German production and with her natural brunette hair after the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice wasted her talents on a cliched femme fatale role and foisted a terrible red wig on her, too.

Almost fifty years ago, the horror film genre was born in Germany. But like so many other things, horror film making in Germany died with the Weimar Republic. Let's hope that The Snake Pit and the Pendulum heralds a revival of a film genre that was pioneered here.

Four stars

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Science / Space Race

[August 16, 1967] Boxes, Big Steel Boxes: The Rise of the Shipping Container

August 16, 2022 Cora Buhlert 6 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

A Strangely Familiar Monk

A few days ago, Der Mönch mit der Peitsche (The Monk with the Whip), the latest movie in the Edgar Wallace series, premiered in West German cinemas. Director Alfred Vohrer delivers the best colour film in the Wallace series to date (the series switched to colour last year) and creates striking visuals as a scarlet robed monk stalks the fog-shrouded grounds of an exclusive girls' school. The organ-heavy score by Martin Böttcher contributes to the eerie atmosphere

However, the plot seems strangely familiar, probably because we've already seen this very same film one and a half years ago under the title Der unheimliche Mönch (The Sinister Monk). Star Uschi Glas even played a supporting role in the earlier movie.

Monk with the Whip: Uschi Glass — Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) comfort Ann Portland (Uschi Glas) after a run-in with the monk.

So has it finally happened? Has the Edgar Wallace series run out of ideas after a stunning twenty-nine movies in the past eight years? On the other hand, Edgar Wallace was a very prolific writer and much of his work remains unadapted. So maybe there is life in the old warhorse yet?

However, not just the Edgar Wallace movies have switched to colour. West German television will begin broadcasting in colour later this month to coincide with the Internationale Funkausstellung (International Radio Exhibition) in Berlin.

Magic Boxes

Meanwhile, a revolution just as significant as the switch from black and white to colour is quietly happening in a completely different sector. At the centre of this revolution is an unassuming 20 x 8 x 8.5 foot box of aluminium or corrugated steel: the shipping container.

Cargo ships may not be as glamorous as the big ocean liners and cruise ships or as impressive as a Navy destroyer or aircraft carrier, but they are the backbone of international trade. Pretty much every product from overseas, whether it's cars from Japan, import paperbacks and comic books from the US, coffee from Brazil, tea from India, canned pineapples from Hawaii or even that fanzine mailed from America, comes to you by cargo ship, because air freight is much too expensive and only reserved for the most urgent of cargos.

However, shipping cargo from one port to another takes time. Now unless there is a revolution in engine technology, which is currently not in sight, the speed of a modern ship has reached a maximum. The SS United States set The Blue Riband record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic fifteen years ago, and this achievement is not likely to be broken anytime soon.

But the actual sea voyage is only a part of cargo transport. Freighters spend a large chunk of time in ports, because loading and unloading the cargo takes a lot of time and manpower (roughly twenty longshoremen are needed to load or unload a single freighter). Hereby, a large part of the problem is that cargo comes in all shapes and sizes. Cars are different from sacks of coffee, which are different from cans of pineapples, which are different from bales of cotton, which are different from boxes of books, which are different from bags of mail. All of these differently sized cargos must be individually unloaded, with the help of cranes, where necessary.

Loading the MV Rothenstein in Port of Sudan — Longshoremen are loading bags aboard the MV Rothenstein in Port of Sudan in 1960.

Bags being unloaded in the port of Bremen — Bagged cargo is being unloaded in the port of Bremen.

Cotton bales being unloaded in the port of Bremen — Bales of cotton are being unloaded in the port of Bremen.

Damaged coffee bag — Another drawback of breakbulk cargo is that the cargo can get damaged, such as these coffee beans spilling out of a bag in the cargo hold of a freighter.

Father of the Modern Shipping Container

The slow loading and unloading process is a constant source of frustration for shipping companies. Among the frustrated was a man named Malcom McLean, co-owner of a trucking company from North Carolina. Some thirty years ago, McLean had the brilliant idea that instead of the current time-consuming process, it would be much quicker to just load a trailer with the cargo onto a ship and then unload trailer and cargo at the destination and connect it to a tractor unit.

Eventually McLean refined his idea to load not entire truck trailers onto a ship, but simply transport the cargo in boxes of the same size that are easy to load, unload and stack, whether they contain books or shoes or sacks of coffee or bales of cotton or canned pineapples or bags of mail. And thus, the shipping container was born.

Malcom McLean overlooks his empire in Newark in 1957.

Initially, the shipping industry was sceptical about McLean's idea – after all, a box would add extra weight and reduce the available payload – and he had problems finding backers. So in 1955, he sold his share in his trucking company, bought a steamship company he named Sea-Land Corporation Ltd. and two decommissioned US Navy tankers, which he had converted for transporting containers. The first of these two ships, the SS Ideal X, disembarked on its first voyage from Newark to Houston on April 26, 1956.

Container aboard the Ideal X — Containers being loaded aboard the Ideal X for its first voyage in 1956.

The breakthrough for the shipping container and a lucrative contract for Sea-Land finally came with the Vietnam War, because McLean's containers turned out to be ideal for transporting supplies to the US troops in Vietnam.

The Container Comes to Bremen

But while McLean and Sea-Land were slowly revolutionising cargo shipping in the US, European and particularly West German shipping companies remained sceptical of this new-fangled container idea. And so it took until May of last year for Sea-Land to start a regular transatlantic cargo service and for the first container vessel, the MV Fairland, to come to Europe.

The Fairland's first port of call was Rotterdam. Her second port of call was my hometown of Bremen and this is why I was lucky enough to see the Fairland and her cargo of miracle boxes in person. A friend of mine works as an engineer at the AG Weser shipyard and was asked to stand by with a team of technicians and electricians in case there were any problems while unloading the Fairland's cargo of containers. He invited me along to serve as an interpreter in case of language issues.

Fairland in Bremen port — The MV Fairland moored in the port of Bremen last year.

And there definitely were problems unloading the Fairland, because the port of Bremen is not set up for the handling of containers and German trucks turned out to be not all that well equipped for transporting containers with American dimensions. And because containers are still very new in Europe, things like corner castings and twist-locks, which keep the container in place aboard a ship or on a truck bed, are unknown here.

Another look at the MV Fairland in the port of Bremen last year. Note the containers on deck.

The first of the 226 containers on board was unloaded without a hitch. However, disaster struck when the second container, a refrigerated unit called a "reefer container", carrying frozen chicken legs from Virginia, slipped from the hook of the on-board cargo crane of the Fairland and crashed down onto the driver's cab of a brand-new truck waiting below. Thankfully, the driver was not seriously injured. The container survived the fall as well, as did the chicken legs, though the truck did not.

While the Fairland was being unloaded, several Bremen merchants and representatives of West German shipping companies were watching the proceedings with great interest. Initially, the merchants and shipping companies were highly sceptical and the accident during the unloading of the second container did not help matters. However, when the Fairland was fully unloaded after only sixteen hours and two shifts rather than the customary several days or even weeks, depending on the size of the ship and the type of cargo, the gentlemen were intrigued.

The Container Revolution

The Fairland would not remain the only container freighter to moor at the port of Bremen. But while there was still a lot of scepticism towards the metal box, Bremen senator of harbours Georg Bortscheller (nicknamed "Container Schorse" for his championing of container shipping) and Gerhard Beier, head of the Bremer Lagerhaus Gesellschaft, the company which manages the loading, unloading and storage of cargo in the harbours of Bremen and Bremerhaven, were both convinced by Malcom McLean's idea and also saw great potential for Bremen's harbours in the introduction of the shipping container. Because if Bremen's harbour was better set up to handle containers than competing harbours like Hamburg, Rotterdam or Antwerp, container ships and the resulting business would go here. And indeed, the United States Line and the Container Marines Lines now have a regular container service to Bremen in addition to Sea-Land.

Senator Bortscheller — George Bortscheller a.k.a. "Container Schorse", Bremen's senator of harbours.

As a result, the first specialised container bridge was installed in Bremen harbour in October 1966, only five months after the arrival of the Fairland. Now container vessels could be unloaded even faster than before. Last months, the 100,000th container was unloaded in Bremen harbour, a remarkable number considering that the first 100 containers were unloaded from the Fairland only a little more than a year ago.

First container bridge in the harbour of Bremen — The first container bridge in the port of Bremen began operations in October of last year.

But West German shipping companies were also taking note. The first container vessel built in West Germany, the Bell Vanguard, was launched in March 1966 in Hamburg, two months before the Fairland arrived in Bremen. But though the Bell Vanguard was commissioned by the West German shipping company Jürgen Heinrich Breuer of Hamburg, it was chartered out to the Irish shipping company Bell Lines and it currently in service between Ireland and continental Europe.

Meanwhile, two of the biggest West German shipping companies, the Hamburg-Amerika-Linie a.k.a. Hapag of Hamburg and the Norddeutscher Lloyd of Bremen are also getting into the container business. Initially, Hapag had some of its fast freighters of the Westfalia und Nürnberg classes converted to be able to transport containers in addition to regular breakbulk cargos, while the Norddeutscher Lloyd is doing the same with Burgenstein class vessels and the brand-new fast freighters of Friesenstein class. My friend, who works at the AG Weser shipyard, is in charge of these conversions and is currently overseeing the freighters being outfitted with twist locks, plugs for reefer containers and rails to allow for moving and storing containers on deck.

HAPAG's MV Alemannia, retrofitted for container transport.

The Norddeutscher Lloyd's MV Bayernstein, retrofitted for container transport.

MV Birkenstein — The Norddeutscher Lolyd's MV Buntenstein, retrofitted for container transport.

But both companies have even bigger plans and the long-time rivals are cooperating to make them a reality. For Hapag and the Norddeutscher Lloyd are planning to order four dedicated container vessels of their own and will jointly operate them under the name Hapag-Lloyd. The first two of these ships, the MV Weser Express and MV Elbe Express, are expected to go into service next year. This is good news, particularly for the troubled Hapag, since one of their ships, the freighter MV Münsterland, is currently stuck in the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal due to the Six Day War. It is unknown when the Münsterland will be able to return to Hamburg.

Freighters trapped in the Suez Canal due to the Six Days War — Hapag's MV Münsterland and several other freighters stuck in the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal due to the Six Days War.

Will the container revolution continue or will it fizzle out? So far, the future is still up in the air. However, the rapid growth of container turnover in the harbour of Bremen, the fact that Senator Bortscheller has announced that a brand-new container terminal will be built in the harbour of Bremerhaven as well as the fact that big shipping companies such as Hapag and the Norddeutscher Lloyd are jumping into the container business indicate that the shipping container is not a passing fad, but here to stay.

The container does have its drawbacks. For example it endangers the jobs of many longshoremen, but overall the world will profit from the rise of the container and the faster turnover times it makes possible, because it means that goods from overseas, whether coffee, tobacco, cotton, canned pineapples, Japanese cars and radios, frozen chicken legs from Virginia, books and magazines, and yes, even the postage for that fanzine mailed from the US, will become more plentiful and cheaper. And this is something that will benefit us all.

Freighters may be the backbone of the shipping industry, but the glamour still plays a role as well, as exemplified by the Norddeutscher Lloyd's flagship, the beautiful MV Europa, which is offering both liner service between Bremerhaven and New York as well as cruises.

MV Europa in the foggy outer Weser — The MV Europa on the foggy outer Weser. However, she'll soon reach sunnier climes.

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[September 6, 1968] Adventures for a Dime: Science Fiction and Horror Dime Novels in West Germany

[April 14, 1968] In Unquiet Times: The Frankfurt Arson Attacks, the Shooting of Rudi Dutschke and Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB

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[January 20, 1968] Alyx and Company (January 1968 Galactoscope)

[December 16, 1967] Long Distance Travel (December 1967 Galactoscope)

[October 18, 1967] We Are The Martians: Quatermass and the Pit, Bonnie and Clyde, The Day the Fish Came Out and The Snake Pit and the Pendulum

[August 16, 1967] Boxes, Big Steel Boxes: The Rise of the Shipping Container

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction