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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 8, 1968] Probing the future (November 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Professional opinion

Fred Pohl opens up this month's issue of Galaxy with a summary of the letters he's received from readers on how they would, in 100 words or fewer, successfully resolve the war in Vietnam.  He has great faith in the power of harnessing a bunch of smart folks to spit out solutions to problems.  I honestly don't know how useful someone's cursory stab at peace in Southeast Asia can be, even if it's from the pen of a clearly clever person like Judith Merril or Larry Niven.

He did, however, talk about a different kind of brain-tapping, one that has me very excited.  There's something called Sigma, which is a scientific way of presenting scenarios to people and assessing their likelihood, feasability, and desirability.  A consensus can then be reached and a mass-mind prediction derived. 

And as it turns out, I recently was sent a copy of Probe a 14-volume compilation of technological predictions made by the folks at TRW's Space Technology Laboratories—the folks who gave us Pioneers 0, 1 and 2, Explorer 6, Atlas Able, Pioneer 5, the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, and parts of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module.  I've only just started perusing it, but it makes for fascinating reading.  Of course, only time will tell if their predictions are accurate, or if they're even asking the right questions.

Of course, science fictioneers have been predicting the future in their own way for half a century.  And while the stories in this issue may not depict situations that ever come to pass, I have to say that are, at least, quite entertaining!


by Sol Dember, illustrating Building on the Line

Perris Way, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

I had not expected a continuation of the story, "Nightwing," but "Perris Way" is a direct sequel.  The tale picks up with our nameless Watcher, whose profession of scanning the skies for alien invasion, is no longer relevant as the invasion has come and succeeded, heading toward Perris (Paris) with his companion, the former Prince of Roum.  That latter, a member of the Dominator caste, was blinded during the invasion by the alien-in-disguise Gormon for forcing himself upon the Flier, Avluela, whom Gormon loved.  The two arrived at France's former capital to become members of the guild of Rememberers.

The erstwhile Watcher becomes an apprentice, and during his training discovers the true history of Earth and the hubristic crime that warranted the alien invasion.  His halcyon half-year with the Rememberers is abruptly terminated when the Prince shames the guild with a tactless act.  The Watcher, caught on the horns of a dilemma comprising the remedy to a Rememberer's anger versus (perhaps misplaced) loyalty to the Prince, comes up with a solution that ultimately pleases no one.  It also leaves room for a Part 3, which, if a novelization be forthcoming, is probably necessary to reach the appropriate length.

Silverbob's language is exquisite.  His poetic SFnal prose is probably even better than Zelazny's, and more approachable than Delany's.  His history of Earth is as fascinating as any that has been drawn.  On the other hand, he never treats his women well, and they are always sex objects, one way or another.  Contrast that with James Schmitz's Dr. Nile Etland, showcased just last month in Analog, lest someone want to lecture me on how "this is just the way things are."  Women do not exist just to be scenery, as much as those who hum "I'm a Girl Watcher" and hound the bosomy New Yorker Francine Gottfried on the way to work might like to think so.

It's still terrific stuff, but I can't give it more than four stars.

Keep Moving, by Miriam Allen deFord

Science fiction stories often play with the premise, "If this goes on…"  DeFord, one of the genre's most venerable authors, offers up a 22nd Century in which freeways pave virtually every square inch of the planet, and commuter culture has become the norm.  People don't even have homes anymore—they simply live in their cars, driving constantly to obtain food, entertainment, and presumably working while moving.

One man decides he's had enough and founds the "Live-In" movement, boldly staying put in one place over night.  This crazy idea wins the casual endorsement of dozens and the fervent support of one particular woman, a rather famous poet.  The ensuing partnership proves unstoppable.

Absolutely silly, but also quite charming.  Three stars.

Building on the Line, by Gordon R. Dickson


by Gray Morrow

Clancy and Plotchin are mismatched, feuding workers on the Line, a galaxy-spanning set of teleporter stations.  The two are building a set of Starlinks on the hostile world of XN-4010 when its incorporeal, gibbering race of "hobgoblins" unleashes a meteorite storm upon them.  Plotchin is incapacitated, maybe dead, but there is hope that an experimental cryogenic unit in the man's suit might be sustaining him.

Clancy decides that staying put and waiting for rescue is less desirable than making the 36-mile trek back to the main exploration ship.  And so, with Plotchin in his arms, he begins the brutal trek through the ice and near-vacuum of XN-4010, the hobgoblins nibbling at his psyche the entire way.  This bit is truly thrilling, reminiscent of the middle section of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel when our heroes are making a similar journey across the frozen wastes of Pluto.

The denouement, however, is a rather windy extolling of the virtues of heroic men expanding the horizons of mankind.  It all felt a little hollow, especially as it is intimated that the hobgoblins may not be malicious but simply trying to defend their world from an onslaught of human tourists.  That, to me, was the more important point, and it was tossed aside.  Framed differently, Line's premise could have made an excellent novel, with themes similar to those explored brilliantly in Silverberg's The Man in the Maze.  Alas.

Still, it's beautifully written, and the first two thirds are a wild ride.

Four stars.

For Your Information: My Friend, the Nautilus, by Willy Ley

This is quite a neat piece, definitely a throwback to Willy's better days.  It's really the evolutionary history of mollusks, with an eventual focus on nautiloids and their relatives, the ammonites.  No, this is not a Pennsylvania religious sect but a prolific family of shelled mollusks that thrived during the Age of Dinosaurs.

Given that octopuses (Ley calls the plural 'octopi', tsk tsk) are shockingly intelligent, and ammonites were advanced nautiloids, I think stories about sapient Mesozoic shellfish would be fascinating.  Be sure to credit me with the idea if you use it.

Four stars.

The Market in Aliens, by K. M. O'Donnell

An unscrupulous fellow runs a brisk trade in sapient aliens.  He has occasional twinges of guilt, but he perseveres, nevertheless.

This is a dark, ugly story.  Looking back on it, I think I have to give it four stars.  It says a lot with a little.

Locust Years, by Douglas R. Mason


by Brock

In the not too far future, universities literally recreate the past, casting lines through time to reel in prehistorical happenings for student viewing.  But when a construction accident summons a wounded mastodon and opens up a time vortex, no one is safe—up to and including humans from other time frames!

This is an interesting story, if initially difficult to apprehend.  Probably the best thing the author has written to date.  Three stars.

The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine, by Brian W. Aldiss

This one's about bitter, middle-aged man, reeling from the recent loss of his wife and his ejection from the board of the company that made his fortune.  Said company has discovered the secret of synthetic life, starting with the recreation of dinosaurs, and with the aim of creating complete humans.  Ostensibly, the man hates his father-in-law, erstwhile partner in the endeavor, for his lack of morality, and for the coldness he has hitherto shown his family.  In fact, there is something deeper going on, and a rift that may not be mendable, even as the father-in-law attempts to attone.

I found myself moved by this one.  Definitely one of Aldiss' better efforts of late.

Four stars.

Eeeetz Ch, by H. H. Hollis


by Dan Adkins

I had gone into this one expecting from the title some sort of joke story.  It's not.

Dolphins are hot news this decade.  From Flipper to People of the Sea to World of Ptavvs, the idea of porpoises being partner sapients is catching on in a big way.  Hollis' story details the visit of the junior Senator from Hawaii, Ramon Coatl (presumably of Filipino ancestry), to a Caribbean research center.  There, the dolphin called Andy but really named Eeeetz Ch is being fitted with artificial hands and tested on advanced machinery.  But the tests go both ways—the two scientists working with him (a man and a woman, the woman being the senior engineer; Silverbob, take notes) are fitted with artificial gills that plug into a plate surgically embedded in their sternums.

There's doesn't exactly seem to be a plot to the whole thing, until it's done, and you understand the stakes of Coatl's visit.  Hollis says a lot about intelligence and handicaps, about technology and ethics, without spelling it out too heavy-handedly.  Most impressively, all of the characters are extremely well realized.  Andy the dolphin, in particular, is an alien.  A likeable, sympathetic one, but not human.

This is my favorite story of the issue.  It's both conventional and new, prosaic and profound.  It made me laugh a couple of times.  It kept me riveted.

Five stars.

Like, wow!

What a contrast, huh?  Last month, Galaxy finished at a dismal 2.4.  This month, we're at 3.9, probaby the best mag of the year.  It reminds me of the old Gold days of the early '50s.  Of course with a spread like that, it's hard to make any solid predictions, but at least there's always a chance every month that Galaxy will knock it out of the park like it did this month.

That's something to look forward to!

(oh, and dig the cool offer on the back of the mag—Trek is everywhere!)




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 6, 1968] Snail on the Slope? (November 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Suspicions confirmed—this November Amazing names as Editor Barry N. Malzberg, who was listed last issue as Associate Editor.  Sol Cohen is now merely the Publisher.  Oddly, though, the editorial is by Harry Harrison, now listed as Associate Editor (though most likely gone).  Go figure, or just say it’s more Sol Cohen chaos.

Johnny Bruck is back as the cover artist; this one (from Perry Rhodan #109, published in 1963) looks even more cliched and perfunctory than his earlier covers, making me wonder if they are really getting worse, or if I am just getting more tired of them.


by Johnny Bruck

“New” is sprinkled across the cover wherever possible to distract from the fact that once again, reprints dominate.  Four new short stories take up 36 pages, just under 25% of the magazine. And the prize: “plus stories by: RAY BRADBURY (Winner of the Aviation Space Writers Association’s Top Award). . . .” Does Bradbury need that kind of boosting? 

One of the new stories, interestingly, is a collaboration between Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany.  When Delany appeared with a novel excerpt in the issue before last, his name was misspelled about half the time; this issue, it’s misspelled “Delaney” everywhere—on the cover, on the contents page (twice), on the first page of the story, in the book review column.  Well, small mercy, it’s spelled right in the blurb for the story. 

There are worse production botches, discussed when I get to them.

Harrison’s editorial, Science Fiction and the Establishment, is superficial and banal: the Establishment doesn’t like SF, it’s a problem all over, but it’s starting to get better, someday it will be gone.  The book review column continues interestingly but incestuously, with James Blish as William Atheling reviewing Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany reviewing Blish.  Leon E. Stover contributes another in his “Science of Man” series, discussed below.

Despite all the above kvetching about the magazine’s presentation, the good news is that the new short stories are as interesting a batch as we’ve seen in Amazing for a while, and the reprints are all readable or better, unlike many of their predecessors. 

Power of the Nail, by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany

Ellison and Delany’s Power of the Nail reads like what Ellison was publishing in the SF magazines around 1957, polished up by a smoother writer.  Robert Zagaramendo and his wife Margret are Ecological Observers on the planet Saquetta, and boy howdy is Margret pissed: “You promised me better than this, somewhere.” Robert’s not too thrilled either, especially with Margret.  Bickering is constant.

Saquetta features the Saquettes, mole-like aliens who are not at all cute, but have the interesting trait of being reincarnated when they die naturally, which is most of the time.  But the vibrations of the “phase-antenna of the automatic ecology equipment” that the humans are burying in various locations draw the Saquettes away from their usual hideouts to places where they are vulnerable to attack by giant predatory birds, called molloks because that’s what the Saquettes scream when they’re being hunted.


by Dan Adkins

After further conflict with his wife, including a near-rape, Robert sets up “ecology equipment” near an especially large Saquette colony, complete with lurking molloks, and goes back later to find, as expected, hundreds of dead Saquettes.  He builds little round coffins for them and nails them together, then goes back and tells Margret that they’re going home—and shortly, suffers a terrible and fatal punishment that is not clearly explained, though one may surmise it is related to the operation of the "automatic ecology equipment."  (Compare David H. Keller's The Doorbell if you've ever read it.) In the moral universe of the story, it’s obviously because he decided to sacrifice hundreds of Saquettes in order to escape an emotionally intolerable situation.

It's a very vivid and readable story, which goes some way towards compensating for its ultimate obscurity.  Three stars.

The Monsters, by David R. Bunch

The formerly prolific David R. Bunch, who has not appeared in Amazing since Sol Cohen took over, is back with The Monsters.  It’s short as usual for Bunch, and on a familiar theme: the need to harden one’s small children against the brutalities of life by brutalizing them pre-emptively.  (See Bunch’s earlier story A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins, Fantastic June 1961, and thence to Judith Merril’s annual “year’s best” volume.) Here, the threat the children are to be prepared for is a bit trite, but the writing is brisk and economical.  Three stars.

Try Again, by Jack Wodhams

Jack Wodhams is new to me, though the Journeyer-in-Chief has not thought highly of his work in Analog.  His Try Again is surprisingly good.  Pyler, a psychiatrist, is having a session with the precocious five-year-old Tommy, who says he has lived before and remembers it.  But this isn’t quite the same life as before, since with adult memories he acts differently the second time around.  Tommy is much burdened by his knowledge of future events and the question whether he could do anything about them (it’s 1935, Mussolini has just invaded Ethiopia; and Tommy knows what comes later).  Shortly he is kidnapped to Germany.  An alternative history, even worse than the real one, is telegraphically unfolded.  Tommy, who has disappeared from the plot after his interrogation, reappears at the terrible end.  Four stars—maybe a bit crude, but powerful.


by Jeff Jones

The reading experience is undermined at the end by Amazing’s production values, or lack of them.  The story stops on page 29 in the midst of a sentence with no “continued on” notice, and the reader is left to rummage through the magazine to find the rest of the text on page 138.

This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty

R.A. Lafferty’s This Grand Carcass is, typically, told in high Tall Tale mode, and it is also clearly a moral tale, though the precise moral may be a bit obscure.  Mord comes to Juniper Tell offering to sell a device cheap that will allow Tell to “own the worlds.” So why is he selling it?  He’s dying. Tell bites and is the new owner of Gahn, for Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus, which soon enough is outdoing and dominating all the other “general purpose machines.” Shortly, it is a full partner with Tell (in Tell and Gahn—get it?). 

Before long, Tell, like Mord, is almost, er, gone, and Gahn (whose power inputs have been revealed as dummies) candidly admits: “I use you.  I use human fuel.  I establish symbiosis with you.  I suck you out.  I eat you up.” So Tell sells Gahn on to the next high-rolling sucker.  Moral, did I say?  Machines are the Devil?  Anything that makes humans’ work too easy is damnation?  Something along those lines, I’m sure.  This is not one of Lafferty’s best; it is simultaneously obvious and vague and less deliciously absurd than Lafferty at his best.  But it’s amusing enough, good for three stars.

The Dwarf, by Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf (Fantastic, January/February 1954), Mr. Bigelow, a dwarf, visits the carnival daily, forks over his dime at the Mirror Maze, and heads straight for the mirror that makes him look large.  Aimee, a carnival worker, hangs out in the booth with ticket-seller Ralph when her business is slow.  She is sympathetic to Mr. Bigelow’s plight.  Ralph isn’t, and makes fun of him, and of her.  Aimee discovers that Mr. Bigelow makes a living writing detective stories, which reveal his inner torments.  Ralph plays a nasty trick on him, proving that Ralph is nasty, which we already knew.


by Sanford Kossln

Rather abruptly, end of story.  Or is it?  There’s no “Continued on . . .” at the end.  As with Try Again, I rummaged through the magazine, but found no loose piece of the story.  So I checked the original 1954 Fantastic . . . and there’s an entire page of text at the end that is omitted from this reprinted version.

No rating, since the full text doesn’t actually appear in the magazine.  It’s not one of Bradbury’s better stories to my taste, but it’s a whole lot better complete than truncated.  Sheesh.

The Traveling Crag, by Theodore Sturgeon

The Traveling Crag, from the July 1951 Fantastic Adventures, is a silly confection by Theodore Sturgeon—a non-trivial category of his ouevre.  On the other hand, silliness by Sturgeon is more palatable than that from less accomplished hands.

Cris is a literary agent with an assistant, Naome, who is obviously in love with him, though he is oblivious.  Cris has received a story, The Traveling Crag, from an unknown, Sig Weiss, which “grabs you by the throat, shakes your bones, puts a heartbeat into your lymph ducts and finally slams you down, gasping, weak, and oh so happy,” and incidentally makes a lot of money fast.  But Weiss sends no more stories.  Cris visits to find out why, and the local storekeeper warns him, “Meanest bastard ever lived,” a judgment Weiss lives up to in the flesh.


by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)

When Weiss finally submits another story at Cris’s urging, it begins: “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light-years from Sol.” This is the beginning of a notorious subscription ad that ran in Galaxy, headlined YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY!, designed to distinguish Galaxy’s policy from that of lowbrow pulp magazines like . . . Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories.  So to perpetrate this in-joke, Sturgeon must have convinced not only Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, but also Fantastic Adventures editor Howard Browne, to allow it.

But I digress.  The point is that Weiss has turned in a bunch of crap, continuing his mean-bastard performance.  Meanwhile, Cris meets Miss Tillie Moroney, who is offering a reward for an “authentic case of devil into saint,” and eventually tells him a story—“a science fiction plot”—about a humanoid race that has developed the ultimate weapon, one of which has apparently been lost on Earth for thousands of years.  And she wants Cris to get Weiss to write another blockbuster story and then find out how and where he wrote it.

So Weiss produces another story that makes everyone cry, and Cris and Tillie head out to see him, but Naome the assistant contrives to get there first, and the ultimate weapon, a small object found after a rockslide, proves to have been the key to Weiss’s transformation, but it gets triggered, and one of Tillie’s blouse buttons emits communications from the humanoids, who explain to them all telepathically that the ultimate weapon was one that stops useless conflict, and now a reaction is propagating through the atmosphere to bring the weapon’s benefits to all the world (it’s science!), and by the way Naome has paired off with Weiss, and Nick with Tillie.  “Outside, it was a greener world, and all over it the birds sang.”

It's all just Too Much, but rendered so smoothly as to disarm even the house misanthrope’s ire.  Three stars for this feat of making fatuity charming.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

“Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed, for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind.  Universe?  Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit.  Universe?  The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of whose who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak.  The word is a mockery.  Yet how glibly men utter it!  How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!”

Yes!  Rave on!  Here is a fine specimen of the peak of cosmos-spanning rhetoric occasionally reached by early (pre-Campbell) SF, and what follows lives up to it in naïve grandeur.  It is the first paragraph of He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, a novella from the August 1936 Amazing.

The plot is essentially that of The Man from the Atom run backwards.  Atoms are solar systems and galaxies are molecules, and the Professor has devised a substance (called Shrinx!) that will reduce humans to subatomic dimensions so they can explore the sub-universes.  When his unnamed assistant is unenthusiastic about making this one-way trip, the Prof stabs hin with the needle.  As he shrinks, the Prof drops him onto a block of Rehyllium-X (sic!), where he descends into a microscopic scratch on its surface and is chased around by a germ, fearsomely portrayed by illustrator Morey.


by Leo Morey

Soon enough, our hero finds himself surrounded by luminous masses—nebulae!—and then, as he shrinks further, stars and planets.  He alights on one occupied by gaseous intelligences, shrinks further to a planet of cave-dwellers, and then (in a powerful passage) to a planet of machines gone out of control.  Their birdlike creators have fled to the world’s moon, as their mechanical heirs maniacally tear down the remains of their civilization and remake the world closer to their circuits’ desire. 

Our hero continues downward, or smallward, through universes he cannot bring himself to recount except in the most summary form (“Suns dying . . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more years of sustenance . . . [etc.]”) But then . . . he is mysteriously attracted to a tiny, distant spark of yellow, which on approach proves to be circled by planets including a tiny blue one that twinkles invitingly, so he approaches, descends, and finds himself in . . . Cleveland!

Well, actually, he lands in Lake Erie, flooding much of Cleveland as well as nearby Toledo.  Upon attaining dry land, he is accosted by aircraft shooting at him, which he finds annoying.  He is bundled into a vehicle and taken to Cleveland, to a building where scientists assemble to interrogate him, but are unable to understand his thoughts, though he can read theirs.  He is not impressed by them, or humanity.  He escapes and flees into the countryside, where he is drawn to an isolated house occupied by a writer, of science fiction of course, who is sufficiently enlightened to be capable of receiving his thought, and to whom the shrinking man tells his tale before continuing his apparently endless and by now wearisome voyage.

In one sense this is an odd story for Amazing to reprint, since it appeared in the 1946 anthology Adventures and Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—one of the oldest stories in the book, and the only one from Amazing.  That book is so well known that stories included in it are much more likely to be familiar to current Amazing readers than most of Sol Cohen’s other reprints.  I read that anthology when I was a kid and wondered what this old-fashioned story based on scientific nonsense was doing in the company of Heinlein, Asimov, et al.  But I’m younger than that now and can better appreciate its hokey majesty.  Four stars, allowing for its age.

Henry Hasse (b. 1913) began publishing SF in 1933; this is his third published story.  Aside from it, he is best known for collaborating with Ray Bradbury on a few minor early stories.  None of his other work, which has appeared sporadically over the decades, has garnered the recognition that this story has. 

One side note: This story presents a very early occurrence of what later was named Tuckerization, after its heavy use by Wilson Tucker: giving fictional characters the names of real members of the SF community.  The Cleveland writer to whom the shrinking man tells his story is named Stanton Cobb Lentz, obviously a reference to Stanton A. Coblentz, a prolific SF writer mainly of the late ‘20s and ‘30s, whose work is nowadays most charitably described as quaint. 

The Last Day, by Richard Matheson


by Robert Kay

In Richard Matheson’s The Last Day (Amazing, April/May 1953), the Sun is about to destroy Earth (it’s swollen and red and much too hot).  Protagonist wakes up after the last night, which he and friends have spent in drunken, lustful, and/or senselessly destructive pursuits.  He decides this approach to the end is unsatisfactory, and after wrestling with his conscience reluctantly heads to his parents’ house (shooting an attacker en route).  He has avoided this visit for years because of his mother’s excessive piety.  But on this final hot day, she’s cool, and they hang out waiting for the end.  The editor blurbs: “Waxing philosophical is like waxing a floor; it is powerful easy to fall on your face while trying it.” Matheson does not.  Four stars, mainly for keeping just on the right side of bathos as he renders the conventional sentiments.

Science of Man: War Is Peace, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover is back with another of his “Science of Man” articles, War Is Peace, written in his usual dogmatic style.  He takes on the likes of Konrad Lorenz (of On Aggression), arguing that aggression is not a mode of behavior that we must sublimate or otherwise redirect, but a goal-directed extension of human social organization.  He says: “The ethologists have nothing to offer that can improve on what Karl von Clauswitz said of war in the 19th century: that it is an extension of politics carried on by different means.” And he concludes: “There is no magic solution to be found in animal behavior studies, psychology, or biology.  Do not be misled.  The only solution is better politics.  But we have to know that to want it.” Well, maybe—he has no suggestions for how we get there in practice.  But Stover recounts much entertaining anthropological lore along the way.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Well, that wasn’t bad at all.  The new material is lively and interesting, and even the reprints are all readable or better, with nothing grossly stupid or incompetent.  Admittedly, that shouldn’t be the standard, but in Sol Cohen-world it does make a difference.  This issue is a magazine that one might actually purchase for enjoyment and not as a duty, a change not to be sneezed at.  Can it continue?

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 16, 1968] Siriusly? (October 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Summertime, and the living ain't easy

Our longest, hottest summer began early with the shooting of Bobby Kennedy.  It heated up to the sound of Soviet bullets and tank treads in Czechoslovakia and reached a crescendo with the fiasco of a Democratic Convention in Chicago, shuddering in synchronicity with the quake in eastern Iran that killed 10,000.  Meanwhile, radioactive rain from the French H-bomb test soaks Japan, Pete Seeger's daughter, Mika, has been in a Mexico City jail for two months (for participating in anti-police protests), and the 82 crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo are still locked up in North Korea (for participating in unauthorized offshore fishing exercises).

But, hey, thanks to the war in Vietnam, unemployment is at its lowest rate since Korea.  And America has a new Queen, Miss Judith Ford, formerly Queen of Illinois.

Her "subjects" demonstrated a properly American sentiment toward the coronation.  Spurred by a collective called the New York Radical Women, several hundred protesters tossed "beauty" accoutrements into the "freedom trash can": bras, girdles, high-heeled shoes, fake eyelashes, etc.  So there was a bright spot, of sorts.

I wouldn't sent a knight out on a dog like this…

I apologize for coming off sour.  It's not just the season.  I've got a humdinger of a virus, and the latest issue of Galaxy is only making me feel worse.


by Douglas Chaffee

The Villains from Vega IV, by E. J. Gold and H. L. Gold


by Jack Gaughan

Fred Pohl, editor for Galaxy, likes to talk about how Gold, the founding editor for the magazine, was legendarily zealous with his red pen.  Not a single story made it through the slush pile (or any other) without looking like it had been through a Prussian duel.  Now, one could argue that there was merit to this approach: much of vintage Galaxy is superlative.

However, when Gold first submitted a story for an anthology Pohl was putting together, Fred could not help taking delight in a bit of revenge.  He contrived to mark everything, even innocuous conjunctions and prepositions.  When it was done, there was more red than black and white.  The dedication this must have taken!

Reportedly, Gold called Pohl up, and said something to the effect of, "Fred, you're the editor, and I'll defer to your judgment, of course, but…Jesus!"

In any event, it couldn't be this story to which Fred was referring since Villains was co-written by both Gold and his son, Eugene (but not, as I initially thought from the initials, his wife, Evelyn).  It's the silly story of Robert E. Li, President of Vega IV, who comes to Earth to find his young bride, who has run off to be in pictures.  Andytec, a diffident young android, is dispatched to accompany him as bodyguard and detective.

There are some interesting concepts, like the Vegan tradition of 36 year olds marrying 18 year olds, who themselves find new partners upon reaching 36.  At 54, one is then free to marry whomever one likes.  And there's the Bird of Perdition, a chimerical creature biologically rooted into the heads of former criminals (including, surprisingly, the Vegan President).  Semi-intelligent, they spout Poe-derivative prose when alarmed.

But all in all, the story is not funny enough, nor does it break enough ground (indeed, it feels vaguely like a washed out A Specter is Haunting Texas) to sustain its novelet length.  One good bit, however:

"Turn that bloody thing off!" he shouted at me.

"Off, sir?" I said vacantly.  "You can change channels and make it louder, but you can't turn it off.  With the 3V off, what would there be to do?  And it would be so lonely."

Two stars.

All the Myriad Ways, by Larry Niven


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

Things look up a bit, as they always do, with Niven's latest.  An L.A. cop is trying to decode the recent rash of murders and suicides, all spontaneous, few logically motivated.  The timing suggests a connection with Crosstime, the company that just began producing vehicles that can transit parallel time tracks.  In addition to bringing back marvels from other histories—worlds where the Confederacy won the Civil War, or where the planet has been bombed into searing radioactivity—it has also discovered a philosophical crisis.  If everything that could ever be does exist somewhen, does anything you do really matter?

And would you kill/die to find out?

As usual, the value of the tale is in Niven's crisp telling.  I particularly liked the revelation that the world our detective inhabits is not our Earth.  There's not quite enough to the story to make it truly memorable.  It's more of an idea-piece (or, per the author, an anti-idea piece; he doesn't buy the idea of parallel universes, nor does he appreciate their implications.  This is the ad absurdum extension of the concept.)

Of course, I think there is a middle ground: probabilities do exist.  Just because there are two options doesn't mean their chance of occurring is 50/50.  Or as I tell folks, if I flip a coin, it's 50% likely it comes up heads or tails.  But it's 100% likely the coin falls down rather than up.

So while there may be an infinity of universes, it would seem they would all remain confined to the possible, and the preponderance tend toward the probable.  I could also see timelines sort of merging back together if they were close enough.

Anyway, a good story, and thought-provoking.  Four stars.

Thyre Planet, by Kris Neville


by Dan Adkins

One day, an alien race called the Thyres all, suddenly, disappeared.  They left behind an inhabitable world and a working, planetary teleportation booth grid.  Of course, humans jumped at the chance to settle the planet.

The hitch: each use of the booth has an infinitesimal but non-zero chance of killing the traveler.  Hundreds die each year.  A Terran scientist is dispatched to solve the problem.  Convinced it is tied to some abstruse physical law, he secures billions in funding to crash-start a Manhattan Project to rewrite cosmic law.  The endeavor takes on a life of its own, ultimately eclipsing the original problem.  Said problem remains unresolved until the end, and it turns out to be caused by something completely different.

I found this a deeply frustrating story.  Is it a satire of scientific institutions?  A cautionary tale advising us to look for simple explanations before complex ones?  A screed against hasty colonization?  it all muddles together without a satisfactory payoff.  Maybe I read it wrong.

Two stars.

Homespinner, by Jack Wodhams


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

Boy, this was a hard one to rate.  It's about a fellow who lives in a future where houses can be done up in a day, rooms completely redecorated as quickly as one might, today, swap out a picture on the wall.  Said fellow is annoyed that his wife keeps changing his home on a weekly basis.  All he wants is some consistency in his life.  Indeed, you can't help wondering why the couple are together at all, so incompatible they seem.  The husband also seems awfully sexist, expecting his wife to stay at home and do virtually nothing but greet him cheerfully after work.

Of course, you'll figure out what's up with their relationship before it's revealed, and that bit is reasonably clever.  The problem is, the getting there is repetitive and unpleasant.  I get why, but I feel a more skilled author could have put it together better.

For some reason, however, I appreciate it enough to give it three stars.

Criminal in Utopia, by Mack Reynolds


by Brand

In yet another story exploring "People's Capitalism", the American welfare state of the 1980s, a citizen embarks on a crime spree to improve his lot.  After all, in a system where everyone is supposed to be equal, the only way to get ahead is to cheat.

The question is: in an economy where income is strictly tied to each person, and all transactions are electronicized and trackable, can a person get more than he deserves?

As usual for Reynolds, a mildly diverting story and some very interesting technologies.  Three stars.

For Your Information: The Orbit of Explorer-1, by Willy Ley

Despite the sexy subject matter (I dig space stuff), this piece on…well…the orbit of Explorer-1…is pretty dull stuff.  I think Ley's heart just isn't in these articles very often anymore.

Three stars.

I Bring You Hands, by Colin Kapp


by Virgil Finlay

A rather amoral fellow is a Hands merchant.  These are tape-programmable, robotic hands that can do a physical task an infinite number of times.  Perfect for replacing assembly line workers, tailors, cooks, you name it.  Along the way, the salesman has an affair with one of the workers whose job he causes to be roboticized.  The end is not a pleasant one for the Hands dealer.

I had a lot of hopes for this story.  I thought it was going to make some sort of statement about mechanization, the ensuing unemployment, and how society adapts to change.  Instead, it was all thrown away for a cheap, obvious, macabre finish.

Two stars.

A Visit to Cleveland General, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc


by Jack Gaughan

Two brothers were in an air-car accident.  Just one emerged.  So why does Albin have trouble distinguishing himself from the deceased Deon?  Why does he need to take a pill every morning "for memory"?  And what are those aerosols Miss Kling, the nurse at Cleveland General, keeps spraying to affect everyone's mood and recollection?  Particularly in surgery, where body parts are shuffled into various people, muddling the identifies of donor and recipient?

Visit is a decent enough piece, thematically and literally, though you'll guess what's going on very quickly.  Scientifically, it makes no lick of sense.

Three stars.

The Warbots, by Larry S. Todd


by Todd

You'd think I would be quite keen on a fictional history of legged assault vehicles.  This one, however, is both too goofy and far too long to scratch that itch.

Two stars.

Behind the Sandrat Hoax, by Christopher Anvil


by Safrani

My first thought upon reaching this final piece was, "Oh, great—a Chris Anvil epistolary story."

And that thought was justified.

It's about how a prospector on New Venus discovers that eating the raw stomach of a desert rat allows the consumer to digest water from grass, but the proud scientific community doesn't like the way the research is done and impedes progress.  All of the scientists are made of straw, you see.

I was surprised not to find this in Analog—I guess sometimes things are too lousy even for Campbell.  On the other hand, Campbell gets the credit for tainting Anvil so that he's now worthless wherever he publishes.

One star.

Dimmer than a thousand squibs

2.4 stars.  Not only is that dismal, but recall that an issue of Galaxy is half-again as long as a normal mag.

There's a reason I paused for breath halfway to tear through The Weathermonger (and that is a good read!) Anyway, all things pass, and summer's only got five days left to it.  Surely next season will see an improvement, yes?




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[September 2, 1968] What might have been (October 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

From spring straight into the fall

Back in April, I reported on the early days of the “Prague Spring,” First Secretary Alexander Dubček’s effort to reform Czechoslovakian communism and create “socialism with a human face.” Dubček managed to keep his plans afloat through the spring and much of the summer, but—as anyone who has been following the news is aware—the Soviet bear has flexed its claws and put an end to ideas of openness and freedom of speech. But not without creating a few cracks in the Warsaw Pact.


A Soviet armored vehicle comes to a fiery end.

The first sign of trouble came in June. Military maneuvers by Warsaw Pact forces took place in Czechoslovakia as scheduled, but Soviet troops were slow to leave the country after the conclusion. A number of communist leaders visited Prague over the course of a week in early August; some, like East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht and Hungary’s János Kádár, probably trying to bring Dubček to heel, while Yugoslavia’s Tito and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu were no doubt more encouraging. Ceaușescu certainly was, since he signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Czechoslovakia and has loudly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the last few days.

It’s not clear what straw broke the camel’s back, though the announcement that Czechoslovakia was considering loans from the World Bank might have accelerated things. In any case, at 11:00 PM on August 20th Warsaw Pact forces rolled across the border in numbers not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. Dubček and other reformist leaders were arrested, and the Soviets tried to install a puppet government, but the people of Czechoslovakia weren’t having it. On the 22nd, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia met hastily and elected a new central committee and presidium, which then unanimously re-elected Dubček as First Secretary.


Somewhat more peaceful resistance.

The invasion triggered protests around the world, even by some Communist parties in western and neutral countries. In Czechoslovakia, although the military was never ordered to oppose Warsaw Pact forces, the invaders have been met with protests and violence. Alas, it was not enough. The arrested leaders signed an agreement to roll back their reforms on the 26th, and after returning to Prague on the 27th, Dubček gave a tearful radio address, asking Czechoslovakians to end their resistance as well as for their forgiveness for his surrender. As I write, that is where things stand, and like Hungary a dozen years ago, Czechoslovakia has been brought back into the fold.

Lost in the fog

A couple of the protagonists in this month’s IF spend their stories wandering in a daze. Unfortunately, the far less successful of the tales takes up nearly a third of the magazine and feels like a lot more, overwhelming an otherwise decent issue.

Scientists on Mars make an unexpected find. Art by Chaffee

High Weir, by Samuel R. Delany

A group of scientists investigate an ancient Martian temple and discover that the jeweled eyes of the sculptures contain moving holographic images. Meanwhile one of their number, linguist Rimkin, suffers a severe mental breakdown.

Art by Gaughan

Normally, I’d complain about the idea of an ancient Martian temple, but Delany’s writing is just so gorgeous I don’t care. He also has the skill to keep the viewpoint entirely with a man slowly losing his mind, keep the story coherent and include a discussion of information storage that ties the whole thing together. Not his best work, but still excellent.

Four stars.

Report on Japanese Science Fiction, by Takumi Shibano

Top Japanese fan Takumi Shibano (for more on him see last month’s article by my colleague Alison Scott) tells us about the state of science fiction in Japan. The first half of the article offers a brief history of the genre in Japan, from the inter-war years to today; the second half is a run-down of the authors in the field today and the sort of things they write. The history is very good, while the second half is a bit dry. But maybe something in there will catch a publisher’s eye and prompt a translation or two.

A high three stars.

Deathchild, by Sterling Lanier

A baby named Joseph is the ultimate weapon; anyone who comes into unprotected contact with him dies horribly. Is he enough to keep a surging communist China from conquering all of Asia and bring them to the negotiation table?

Feeding time. Art by Virgil Finlay

After a slow start under John Campbell’s tutelage, Lanier seems to have come into his own as an author. There’s certainly some good writing here, however it’s too long. Worse, the concept behind Project Inside Straight is utterly absurd. The quality of the line-by-line writing is just enough to keep the story’s head above water.

Three propped-up stars.

Paddlewheel on the Styx, by Lohr Miller

From the title, I was expecting something in the mode of John Kendrick Bangs or Riverworld. Instead, we have the tale of an attempt to rescue a crashed spaceship on the shore of a river of molten metal on Mercury. It’s beautifully poetic, but it falters a bit right at the end. I will forgive the lapse, though, because this month’s new author is very new indeed: he won’t be 14 until sometime in November. This is very well done for someone so young, and I hope we see more from master Miller in the future.

A solid three stars.

The Proxy Intelligence, by A.E. van Vogt

Space vampires and some nonsense about intelligence. ‘Nuff said.

The head vampire meets the scientist and his beautiful daughter. Art by Gaughan

This unasked-for sequel to Asylum (Astounding, May 1942) is a confused mess. The protagonist wanders through the story in a daze due to his exposure a vastly superior intelligence, but unlike with Delany’s story the reader comes away knowing even less than the “hero.” In desperation, I tracked down the original story. While it did clarify who all the characters are, I can’t say it helped otherwise.

Barely two stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, del Rey looks at what is coming to be known as materials science, the study of improving the materials we use to make things and developing entirely new ones. He covers a wide variety of topics, such as building materials that can be eaten in a pinch, metals that dampen impacts, materials that can be induced to return to a given shape, and many more ideas. This was all inspired by The New Materials by David Fishlock, which he makes sound very interesting indeed. But then, this is a field I’ve long had something of an interest in.

Four stars for me, maybe slightly less if your interests are different.

Or Battle’s Sound, by Harry Harrison

Dom Priego is a university student doing a hitch in the military. His unit is tasked with boarding an enemy spaceship carrying a matter transmitter and keeping them from sending through a huge mass of men and equipment.

Dom fights his way through the enemy ship. Art by Adkins

On the surface, Harrison has given us an entertaining space opera, but underneath it is the philosophical question of why we fight. Overall, this is very well done, but I think it’s the wrong length. Either the combat scenes need to be tightened up, reducing the story by a couple of pages, or it needs to be a lot longer, so we can get to know Dom better, say some stuff from before he signed up and why he did so.

A high three stars.

Pupa Knows Best, by James Tiptree, Jr.

In this sequel to The Mother Ship, more aliens come to Earth. First some blue lizards who leave behind some mysterious missile-like objects, followed by the Siggies, who everybody likes. Earth people start picking up aspects of the alien culture, and then things start to go wrong.

Siggie religion features quaint rituals. Art by Brand

I liked this one a bit more than the first story. Maybe that’s because I have an easier time accepting the underlying premise. In any case, it’s a pithy tale dealing with both religion and the effects of colonization.

Three stars.

Summing up

This could have been a pretty good issue. All but one story are average to very good. Even the low score for “Deathchild” is mostly due to the highly unbelievable premise; up until that is revealed, it’s a good read. But then there’s van Vogt. A “complete novel condensation in a special section” it says on the cover. As I said, if it’s condensed, they took out too much. As for the special section, the magazine is the same length it always is; the story just squats right in the middle like some sort of unpleasant toad. Can we please go back to serials?

Three out of the four have potential, but I’d rather have the whole Zelazny.




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[August 12, 1968] Galaxy's the One?  (the September 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Live from Miami Beach!

If you, like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (and me), soldiered through the four days and nights of GOP convention coverage, you saw the drama unfold in Miami Beach as it happened.  Dick Nixon came into the event a "half-inch" shy of having the nomination sewed up, his chief competition coming from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.  California governor Ronald Reagan, best known for his Chesterfield cigarette ads, coyly denied that he was a candidate…until he suddenly was, in a desperate bid to court "the New South".

The suspense was all a bit forced.  By Day Two, it was understood that the New Jersey delegation, which had been putatively firm in supporting native son Senator Clifford Case through the first ballot so as to be able to play kingmaker later on, was now breaking for Nixon.  On Day Three, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had expressed that his first and second choices were Ronald Reagan, suddenly declared his support for Nixon.

And so, after endless seconding speeches for candidates who had no intention of being President, like Governor Hatfield of Oregon and "dead duck" Governor Romney of Michigan, Nixon won on the first ballot.

After that, the only unknown was who would be his running mate.  The South made loud objections to any GOP liberals being tapped, like New York mayor John Lindsay and Illinois Senator Charles Percy.  The smart money was on a Southerner like John Tower of Texas or Howard Baker of Tennessee.  So everyone was surprised when Maryland governor Spiro Agnew got the nod at a press conference the morning of Day 4, overwhelmingly winning the ballot that night (though not without loud protest from Romney's Michigan contingent).

Why Agnew?  Here were a couple of comments from the NBC reporter pool after the convention:

"It's not that Agnew adds anything to the ticket; it's that he doesn't take anything away."

"Everybody loves Agnew–no one's ever heard of him!"

Agnew, who is kind of a Southerner, and kind of a liberal, but who has recently come out in favor of strong "law and order" (which means urging cops to shoot Baltimoreans if they steal shoes), will enable Nixon to retain his chameleon qualities while Agnew acts as attack dog.  And since being the actual Vice Presidency is worth exactly one half-full bucket of warm piss, it doesn't really matter that Agnew is brand new to large scale politics.

Long story short, Nixon is the One, which we've known since February.  God help us all.

Live from New York!

When Galaxy first appeared in 1950, it was also "the One", breathing fresh new air into the science fiction genre.  18 years later, it is still a regular on the ballot for the Hugo Award.  Last month's was a superlative issue; does this month's mag maintain that level of quality?


cover by Jack Gaughan

Nightwings, by Robert Silverberg

Silverbob presents a richly drawn future world, one in which humanity has soared to great heights only to stumble back to savagery twice.  Now, thousands of years later, Earth is in its Third Cycle.  The planet is an intergalactic backwater, and its people are rigidly divided into castes.

Our heroes are a Watcher, a Flier, and a Changeling.  The first, whose viewpoint we share, is an aged itinerant, hauling in a wagon his arcane tools with which he clairvoys the heavens three times a day (or is it four?  The author says both.) for any signs of an alien invasion.  The Flier Avluela, the only woman in the story, is a spare youth who is able to soar on dragonfly wings when the cosmic wind is not too strong.  And finally, there is Gorman, who has no caste, yet has such a broad knowledge of history that he could pose as a Rememberer.


art by Jack Gaughan

All roads lead to Rome, so it is said, and indeed the three end up in history-drenched Roum, where the Watcher finds the city overcrowded with his caste.  The cruel Prince of Roum, a Dominator, takes a shine to Avluela, compelling her to share his bed.  This incenses Gormon, the crudely handsome mutant, who vows his revenge.

Gormon has the advantage of knowing that justice will not be long delayed–the alien invasion is coming, and he is an advance scout…

There's something hollow about this tale, rather in the vein of lesser Zelazny.  Oh, it's prettily and deliberately constructed, but the story's characters are merely observers rather than actors.  The stage is set and the inevitable happens.  When the alien conquest occurs, it is our Watcher who sounds the alarm, but it is implied others were about to do so (why they did not cry out the night before when the invasion first became apparent is left an inadequately explained mystery).  It's a story that doesn't really say or do anything.

Beyond that, I object to the lone female existing to be loved and/or raped, depending on the man involved.  She is there to be a pretty companion, a object of pity, a tormented vessel.  I suppose the small mercy is she is not also a harpy, as Silverberg is occasionally wont to present his women.

Anyway, I give it just three stars, but I imagine it'll be a Hugo contender next year…

When I Was Very Jung, by Brian W. Aldiss


art by Brock

A weird mix of sex, cannibalism, and archetypes.  I found it distasteful and out of place.

One star.

Find the Face, by Ross Rocklynne

One of science fiction's eldest veterans offers up this romantic piece.  It has the old-fashioned narrative framework, with an aged tramp freighter captain describing the day he was contracted by a wealthy widow, and what ensued afterwards.  The widow's husband and family had been lost in a space accident, but somehow, his face remained, etched across the sky in cosmic clouds and star clusters.  The widow saw this phenomenon once, and she was determined to find from what vantage in the universe it could be reliably observed again.

The captain, meanwhile, was looking for Cuspid, the planet whence the green horses that sired his favorite racer came.  Together, they went off on their separate quests, and in the process, found the one thing neither had been looking for: new love.

It's something of a mawkish story and nothing particularly memorable.  That said, it is sweet, almost like a romantic A. B. Chandler piece, and I appreciated the two characters being oldsters rather than spring chickens.  Moreover, these were not ageless immortals, but silver-haired and wrinkle-faced septuagenarians.

More of that, please.  Three stars.

The Listeners, by James E. Gunn


art by Dan Adkins

In the early 21st Century, Project Ozma continues, despite fifty years of drawing a blank; even with the efforts of dozens of astronomers, hundreds of staff, and the entire survey calendar of the great Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, not a single extraterrestrial signal has been encountered.  Low morale and lack of purpose are the rule amongst these dispirited sentinels.

This is an odd story, with much discussion and development, but no resolution.  At times, the author hints that a message is forthcoming, or maybe even already being received, if only the listeners could crack the code to understand it.  But the climax to the tale has little to do with the story's backbone, and, as with Nightwings, the characters drift rather than do.

It feels like the beginning of a novel, not a complete story.  Larry Niven could probably have done a lot more with the piece in about half the space.

Three stars.

For Your Information: Mission to a Comet, by Willy Ley

Now this piece, I dug.  Willy Ley talks about why comets are important to understanding the early history of the solar system, and which ones could feasibly be approached with our current rocket and probe technology.  The little chart with all the astronomical details of the Earth-approaching comets was worth the piece all by itself.  I particularly liked the idea of Saturn for a "swing-around" mission to catch up with Halley's Coment from behind!

We truly live in an SFnal reality.  Five stars.

The Wonders We Owe DeGaulle, by Lise Braun


art by Brock

Newcomer Lise Braun offers up a droll travel guide to a mauled Earth.  It seems a French bomb that exploded in Algeria sundered our planet's crust, sinking half the Americas and turning the Sahara into a stained glass plain.

It's mildly diverting but Braun's clumsy writing shows her clearly a novice.  I think the setting would have served better as background than a nonfact piece.

Two stars.

A Specter is Haunting Texas (Part 3 of 3), by Fritz Leiber


art by Jack Gaughan

Lastly, the conclusion to Leiber's latest serial, a sort of fairytale version of a hard science epic.  The "Specter" is really a spaceman named de la Cruz, a gaunt, eight-foot figure kept erect by an electric exoskeleton, denizen of a circumlunar colony.  He has been the centerpiece of a Mexican revolution, which is trying to throw off the literal yokes (cybernetic and hypnotic) forced upon the Mesoamerican race by post-Apocalyptic Texans.  The spaceman's comrades include two quite capable and comely freedom fighters, Raquel Vaquel, daughter of the governor of Texas province, and Rosa ("La Cucaracha"), a high-spirited Chicana; then there's Guchu, a Black Buddhist, reluctantly working with the ofays; Dr. Fanninowicz, a Teutonic technician with fascist sympathies; Father Francisco; and El Toro, a charismatic leader in the revolution.

In this installment, de la Cruz finally makes it to Yellow Knife, where he wishes to lay claim to a valuable pitchblende (uranium) deposit.  Unfortunately, the Texans have gotten there first–and what they have established on the site finally reveals just what all those purple-illumined towers they've been planting across the North American continent are for.  'T'ain't nothin' good, I can assure you!

Last month, I read a fanzine where someone complained that this was a perfectly good story ruined by being turned into a tongue-in-cheek fable.  Certainly, I felt the same way for a while.  By Part II, however, I was fully onboard.  While this last bit didn't thrill me quite as much as the middle installment, it's still a worthy novel overall.  When it comes out in paperback, pick it up.

Four stars for this section and for the serial as a whole.


art by Jack Gaughan

Roll Call

Like the Republican convention, the outcome seemed certain, but a few twists and turns along the way did create a bit of doubt.  But in the end, if this month's Galaxy is perhaps not all the magazine we hoped it would be, nevertheless, it's one we can live with.

For the time being, Galaxy remains The One.  May it continue to be so for four more years.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 6, 1968] Treading Water (September 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The beat goes on at Amazing, after the brief syncopation that pushed its schedule back a month.  This September issue, as usual these days, boasts on the cover of all the new (non-reprint) stories inside—four short stories, 35 pages in all, less than a fourth of the magazine.  The rest of the fiction, three novelets, is reprints.  So is the cover—Frank R. Paul’s Great Nebula in Andromeda (“Andromida,” as this barely-proofread magazine has it).  It’s from the back cover of the October 1945 Fantastic Adventures, significantly cropped, and generally pretty cheesy-looking.  By then, Paul’s future was behind him, in more senses than one.


by Frank R. Paul

There is the usual collection of features, ranging from a startlingly inane editorial by editor Harrison, through another “Science of Man” article by Leon E. Stover (see below) and a Sao Paulo Letter by Walter Martins about SFnal doings around Brazil, to what has become the usual lively book review column.  Though this month it’s a little incestuous.  William Atheling, Jr., who is James Blish, reviews Brian Aldiss’s new novel, while Blish’s own byline appears on a review of Harrison and Aldiss’s Best SF 1967.  Alexei Panshin reviews John Wyndham’s new novel, while Leroy Tanner, who is Harrison, reviews Panshin’s book on Heinlein, and Harrison under his own name reviews William Tenn’s new novel Of Men and Monsters.  What is this?  The New York Review of Books?

And—speaking of “What is this?”—there’s a telltale development in the fine print at the bottom of the contents page.  Right under “Sol Cohen, Publisher” and “Harry Harrison, Editor,” is a new line: “Barry N. Malzberg, Associate Editor.” Based on past history (Harrison first sneaked into Amazing as a book reviewer before being named as editor), maybe there’s another change in the works.  That might account for the rather detached and phoned-in quality of Harrison’s editorial this month.  Mr. Malzberg is a recent arrival on the SF scene, having published several stories under the name “K.M. O’Donnell,” which might be said to be notable for their vehemence.  That could be just what this frequently uninspired magazine needs.

Where's Horatius?, by Mack Reynolds


by Jeff Jones

The issue begins with Mack Reynolds’s Where’s Horatius?, on the now-familiar premise of making movies of the past.  Our time-traveling rogues’ gallery of heroes is trying to film the action in 509 B.C., when the Etruscan king Lars Posena marched with his army on Rome.  Reynolds makes the most of his research into the events and the military technology and technique of the age, and generally seems to be having a better time than usual, in a slightly cartoonish way, without the often leaden style and dense didactics of some of his Analog work.  The ending is gimmicky and reads like a chunk of text got dropped somewhere in the last few paragraphs, but it’s readable and amusing nonetheless.  Three stars.

Manhattan Dome, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s Manhattan Dome is a perplexing story, sort of an idiot plot writ large.  (For those unfamiliar with the jargon, an idiot plot is one in which there is a story only because the characters act like idiots.) A dome has been constructed over Manhattan to keep out the air pollution wafting over from New Jersey.  However, the part of the proposal that would ban cars and cigarettes from Manhattan was blocked by the City Council after the auto, oil, tobacco, and advertising lobbyists got to work, so the air under the dome is worse than the outside air. 

To top it off, when Ed, the Chief Dome Engineer, encounters his girlfriend’s cranky old father, he is ranting about how the lack of rain under the Dome has ruined his garden.  It’s a disaster, and “Washington” (specified only as the “Public Health people”) has just announced that it’s tearing the Dome down.  All is lost!  But suddenly the light bulb goes on over Ed’s head, and back in the office, he starts turning on the fire sprinklers that are part of the Dome’s construction.  “Rains scrub the air, wash away the aerosols and float them down the sewers.  Air always feels clean after a rain, doesn’t it?” All is saved!


by Dan Adkins

What's wrong with this picture?  Let us count the ways.  Even an entity like the New York City Council (which has been described publicly as having the I.Q. of a cucumber) would probably not be so stupid as to allow the Dome while blocking the measures to keep the air clean under it.  And it’s equally hard to imagine that nobody would have thought about making rain with the sprinklers until long after the Dome was in operation, and about to be torn down.  (Ed says there’s plenty of water available.  I’d like to see the calculations.) And it’s also hard to credit that artificial rain alone would cure the air pollution problem in a giant city, since there are a lot of cities around the world that have terrible air pollution despite being exposed to the rain—notably New York.

Maybe there will be a sequel in which Bova will sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.  But there is one more thing in this story which bears mention.  In the lobby of Dome HQ, the chairman of the Greater New York Evolutionary Society and someone from the American Longevity Society get into it, the former supporting the Dome, the latter opposing it.  The Evolutionary guy is described as “a massive specimen, with an insistent voice and a craggy face topped by a bristling shock of straight white hair.  He had a Roosevelt-type cigaret [sic] holder clamped in his teeth. . . .” They argue, and Mr. Evolutionary declares at his peak:

“I know it’s rough on some individuals.  But evolution isn’t worried about the individual.  This Dome will foster the development of a superior race, able to breathe pure carbon monoxide, impervious to germs!  Magnificent!”

This is an obvious lampoon of Analog editor John W. Campbell and of his views in general, and in particular his opinion that smoking cigarettes is not a serious health hazard, but a boon.  (See his editorial in the September 1964 Analog.) This is interesting, since Bova has made a number of appearances in Analog in recent years.  We’ll see if that continues.  But back to the story: mildly amusing, depending on how high you can suspend your disbelief.  Two stars.

Idiot’s Mate, by Robert Taylor

Bova is followed by Robert Taylor (who, you ask?  He had a story in last month’s F&SF), with Idiot’s Mate, on the familiar theme of staged violence as mass entertainment.  This one features the Chess Tournament, held on the Moon, in which people in spacesuits are assigned to teams and given the names of chess pieces, and apparently given powers to match, though that idea is not well developed.  Mostly everyone just plays hide-and-seek and shoots explosive bullets.  Protagonist Rodgers, imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges, volunteers for the Tournament and is made king of a team.  Needless to say, matters end badly, though the story is not bad; it is a bit overwritten, but capably so, and moves fast.  Three stars.

Time Bomb, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell’s Time Bomb is a time-travel joke, deftly rendered, worth about the two pages it takes up.  Three stars, allowing for its limited ambition.

The Patty-Cake Mutiny, by Winston Marks

The reprints begin with The Patty-Cake Mutiny (Fantastic, February 1955), by Winston Marks, that monstrously prolific contributor to the mid-‘50s SF magazines, to remind us that they sure published a lot of crap in between the undying classics we all remember. 

The Patty-Cake Mutiny is a story of space exploration featuring crew members Slappy Kansas, Conkie Morton, Butch Bagley, Pokey Gannet, Sniffer Smith, and Balls Murphy.  Slappy is unofficial foreman because of his skill in slapping people around.  Sniffer is greatly talented olfactorily.  Conkie conks out under anything more than a gee and a half of acceleration.  Balls—calm down now—is so named because of the “pendulous little knobs of flesh” on his face, each of which contains “a submicroscopic parasite that had baffled Earth doctors” (but it’s OK, they’re not contagious).  Et cetera.  Their mission is to find and mine the incredibly valuable radioactive kegnite.  There is tension among the crew because Balls has won at craps their shares of any profit from the voyage.


by Tom Beecham

This motley crew lands on a planet with a resilient surface and tall grass-like stalks as far as they can see.  Balls goes out exploring and gets into trouble, and is retrieved in a state of “infantile regression”—literally—so they have to put him in a diaper and take turns keeping the baby occupied (hence patty-cake; the mutiny is separate despite the title).  But back to work: they cut into the surface and a red fluid—guess what?—gushes out.  Before the end, they are hacking steaks out of the giant organism they have landed on—Hairy Joe, as they call it.  And it goes on, ending with a fist fight (Slapper lives up to his name) and the explanation of Balls’s regression, which is as silly as the rest of the story.  It’s all too ridiculous and tiresome to be borne.  I’m demanding a raise.  One star.

"Labyrinth", by Neil R. Jones

Neil R. Jones’s Labyrinth (from Amazing, April 1936) is another in his seemingly endless series (22 of them!) about Professor Jameson, revived from his orbiting tomb by the Zoromes (from Zor, of course), and installed like them in a metal body.  Now they all go roaming around the universe looking for entertainment, though of course the author doesn’t put it that way.  The few of these I’ve read were mostly benignly tedious, but this one is a little more dynamic. 

The Prof and the Z’s land on a planet and investigate a city, which at first seems abandoned, but proves to be inhabited by strange beings with four legs and a dozen arms, who flee when our heroes approach.

“ ‘We must seize one of them!’ Professor Jameson exclaimed.  ‘They seem intelligent enough for questioning.’ ” Of course!  (So much for the respectful fellowship of sentient beings.) Once they’ve got a couple in hand, they conclude that their intelligence is “somewhat below the level of an Australian bushboy, an earthly type which lay in the professor’s memory, yet well above the mentality of the beasts he had known.” (So much for . . . oh, never mind.)

The Queegs, as they call themselves, are quite affable once reassured that they won’t be harmed.  They didn’t build the city but say they’ve “always” lived there.  They survive by hunting creatures called ohbs, using wooden weapons, even though they can work metal.  Why?  Metal doesn’t last very long, they say—which seems odd.

So the metal folks tag along on a hunting expedition to a seemingly barren area.  The ohbs prove to be giant gray slug-like creatures who apparently subsist on something in the ground.  A Zorome comes into contact with an ohb, which starts to radiate light and grabs the Zorome.  Another ohb joins in.  What’s going on?

“ ‘It is eating me!’ cried 47B-97.  ‘It is eating my metal body!’”


by Leo Morey

And now—“coming from every direction a vast legion of hurrying ohbs, their antennae quivering, slight radiations of anticipation suffusing their leaping-crawling bodies.  They were being called to the feast, a feast of virgin metal which the gluttonous appetites of their two companions had involuntarily revealed.” The author continues, waxing rhapsodic:

“With as much disregard for self-preservation as they had shown when hunted by the Queegs, the ohbs, fully half as large as the cubed body of a Zorome, seemed possessed of but one unquenchable desire, and that was to glut themselves on pure, refined metal, free of all impurities and unmixed with rock and other foreign material, such as they found regularly in their daily diet.  Nothing less than death stopped their mad charge.”

And a little later, a Zorome cries: “22MM392!  744U-21!  We are helpless!  They are all around us!  Wet, clammy juices they exude from their bodies are turning our metal parts to a fluid which they absorb!  If our metal heads are eaten through, we are doomed!’”

Electrifying!  But the rest of the story is a little anticlimactic, with the Zoromes fleeing into a tunnel mouth, which leads to the labyrinth of the title.  Soon enough they are lost, wandering aimlessly between dangerous encounters with ohbs, until they follow an underground river and are rescued, to resume their peregrinations around the galaxy.  Three corroded stars.

Paradox, by Charles Cloukey

The precocious Charles Cloukey (1912-1931) is back, or re-resurrected (see Sub-Satellite), with Paradox (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1929), another assuredly executed story, published when he was 17.  It’s a frame story in which the author is a guest at a club where a couple of members are arguing about the possibility of time travel, and the mysterious Raymond Cannes introduces himself as a time traveler and tells his tale. 


by Wally Wallit

Hawkinson, a scientist and old college chum, has received plans for a strange machine, done in Cannes’s handwriting, but Cannes didn’t write them and wouldn’t have been capable of it.  Later, Hawkinson builds the machine—a time machine—and invites Cannes over, and of course (in the usual manner of ‘20s and ‘30s SF), Cannes goes for it and travels a thousand years into the future.  After various adventures he flees home at a cliff-hanging moment to find that Hawkinson is dead and his laboratory burned.  Cannes throws his time-traveling gear into the river, destroying all corroborating evidence (also as usual for this period’s SF). 

The story runs facilely through several now-familiar time paradox themes that were new to the genre when this was written.  Unfortunately some of the plot developments I have passed over are fairly hackneyed, and Cloukey’s stilted style, though well turned, gets a bit wearing over the length of the story, keeping it to three stars.

Science of Man: Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover’s article, Naked Ape or Hairless Monkey, invoking at least the title of Desmond Morris’s best-selling book, takes on the question whether, evolutionarily speaking, humans are naked apes or hairless monkeys.  Stover follows human ancestry backwards to conclude . . . nobody knows.  A key sentence: “The game seems to be, how much can we learn from the least evidence.” But he thinks he’s got a good guess: an apparently hypothetical animal that he calls Propriopithecus.  Conclusion: “So man is neither a naked ape nor a hairless monkey.  His line of ancestry evolved apart from the monkeys and apes.  He is not simply a depilitated version of either one of them.  Man is what he is—a nudist who made it on his own.”

I am reminded of the form letter that H.L. Mencken reputedly kept handy to respond to some of his more imaginative correspondents: “Dear sir or madam: You may be right!” And so may Stover.  In any case, it’s reasonably interesting and informative if inconclusive, but also pretty dense reading.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Amazing continues to tread water, capably enough this month.  Almost everything here is perfectly readable, with one shameful exception.  The new stories are pretty lively within their limitations.  But we wait in vain for something outstanding, and we’re not likely to get it when only 25% of the magazine is open to new fiction.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 2, 1968] Dreams and Nightmares (September 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

Is the nightmare ending?

I’ve written a few times about the turmoil in communist China brought on by Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s efforts to reassert his power after being sidelined. The most dangerous of Mao’s tools has been the explosive, violent fanaticism of the country’s young people. Calling themselves Red Guards, they came boiling out of the universities and high schools, enforcing a strict adherence to “Mao Tse-tung thought” with humiliation, beatings, and even death.

That was the situation when I last covered the “Cultural Revolution” in February of last year. Since then, the Red Guards have split into factions almost everywhere, generally with one side being more fanatical and the other more willing to work within the system. There are rumors of massacres in Canton Province last year and Kwangshi Province this spring. Clashes in Peking over the last three months have involved not only batons and stones, but landmines, improvised armored vehicles and Molotov cocktails.

Red Guard rebels march in Shanghai last year.

Enough is enough. On July 3rd, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a public notice aimed at the violence in Kwangshi. China watchers say this is a sign Mao and the other leaders have decided it’s time to rein in the Red Guards. Results so far have been minimal, so on the 27th Mao dispatched thousands of “worker-peasant thought propaganda teams” to Tsinghua University, the birthplace of the Red Guard movement. The next day, he summoned five of the most influential Red Guard leaders to a meeting. Word is that he strongly reprimanded them, but any news out of China is uncertain. Time will tell if the violence will finally ebb.

Dream a little dream

This month’s IF features several stories that involve dreams and hallucinations. It’s also missing something, but we’ll talk about that later.

Those are supposed to be radiators, not rocket thrusters. Art by McKenna

More Bubbles for Your Bier, by Frederik Pohl

Fred Pohl gives us an editorial that makes a frightening companion piece to the guest editorial by Poul Anderson in the May issue. Poul warned us that power generation creates waste heat, and increased power demands mean increased heat. He warned that we’re at risk of warming the planet to a life-threatening degree.

Fred, meanwhile, warns that we’re ignoring a key pollutant: carbon dioxide. Burning coal and oil produces CO2, but that’s what makes our drinks fizzy, so what’s the worry? For one, high levels of CO2 make it harder to breathe; big cities already have measurably lower oxygen levels than the natural atmosphere. Worse, CO2 is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, trapping heat that would normally radiate into space. The best way to slow the increase in carbon dioxide would be to stop burning fossil fuels. And that’s not very likely to happen.

Bulge, by Hal Clement

Four men hijack an orbiting platform that uses fusion power to transmute elements. The only thing standing between them and large amounts of the most dangerous nuclear fuels is the sole, elderly caretaker.

Moving in zero gravity is difficult for the uninitiated. Art by Gaughan

This is a Hal Clement story, so you know the resolution is going to come from some scientific principle (with an assist from Shakespeare this time). What’s unusual is that the human antagonists are truly bad people. The only bad guys in Clement that I can think of who are really bad are the alien drug smugglers in Iceworld and the Hunter from Needle. Humans usually just have a difference of opinion that can be worked out. In any case, this is otherwise typical for Clement; if you like his stuff, you’ll like this.

Three stars.

Dream Street, by C.C. MacApp

Henry Traum is desperate for a repeat of the experience he had with a dream-sloth the previous day. Unfortunately for him, the creature has different plans.

The first four pages of this story were readable, but forgettable. The final page, though, turns things on their head in ways that MacApp hasn’t tried in several years. The twist elevates the story beyond what it was shaping up to be, though not quite to four-star levels.

A high three stars.

The Elf in the Starship Enterprise, by Dorothy Jones

A (thankfully) brief poem about Mr. Spock discovering emotions. Has Miss Jones actually seen Star Trek? Spock deals with his emotions all the time. The rhyme scheme is insipid and filled with slant rhymes that would make Emily Dickinson scowl.

Two stars at best.

I’m sure Fred could have come up with a better excuse to run this portrait. Art by Virgil Finlay

Flesh and the Iron, by Larry S. Todd

Humans hunt robots and call them Iron; robots hunt humans and call them Flesh. By a quirk of fate, robot Marigold and human Bannock manage to capture each other. They must travel together while they figure out a way to let each other go without giving the other an advantage.

Marigold has a problem with ledges. Art by Todd (presumably the author)

While the situation is rather contrived, the story is not as silly or light as my summary or the author’s art might suggest. Todd has improved a great deal in the two years since his last story, but let’s be honest: this is basically The Defiant Ones. That’s a decent template to work from, and Todd doesn’t stick too closely to it, but Marigold and Bannock are no Poitier and Curtis.

Three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, del Rey discusses the uses of fluorocarbons in the human body. It is possible that they can be used as a temporary replacement for blood. This has implications in the treatment of strokes, blood clots, and removing fatty deposits from arterial walls. Another possibility is that they can be used to flood the lungs, replacing air as a means of getting oxygen into the bloodstream. That would allow divers to resist the pressure of the deep ocean. Not a new idea; we’ve seen it in a couple of Hal Clement stories (Raindrop and Ocean on Top). But Lester suggests it might also help resist low pressure; a torn spacesuit might not be a death sentence.

Three stars.

Star Itch, by Thomas J. Bassler, M.D.

This month’s first-time author is a doctor who recently completed a stint as an army pathologist. He brings us a tale of an attempt to plant an interstellar colony, but first the computer intelligence running the effort and a shipboard doctor must figure out why the first colony and the scouts sent down by the ship are dying despite the abundance around them. We also follow one of the “expendables.”

Things aren’t going well for Ralph. Art by Adkins

This is a very good story, but there are a lot of caveats. First and foremost, this is not for the squeamish. Even if you aren’t squeamish, I strongly recommend not reading while you’re eating. We get an exhaustive description of what happens to someone starving to death in medical detail. The author shows off his specialist vocabulary, too. I’m not unfamiliar with biological and medical terminology, but I had to grab my dictionary more than once. It’s also a bit longer than it really needed to be. All this is enough to knock off a star, but if Dr. Bassler can overcome some of the tendencies he shows here, he could be very good.

A high, but queasy, three stars.

Love Conquers All, by Mack Reynolds

A crackpot scientist has come up with a foolproof way to end a global depression. A presidential aide ain’t buying it.

Watch out for the cop at 34th and Vine. Art by Wehrle

This is another of those Mack Reynolds stories where you wonder why it isn’t in Analog. This time, it’s probably because the protagonist is a bureaucrat. Or maybe because it’s too much like Chris Anvil’s "Is Everybody Happy?" which ran back in the April issue, just with the effects ratcheted up several notches. Too bad Mack doesn’t really have a hand for humor.

A low three stars.

Dreambird, by Dean R. Koontz

A vicious, wealthy old man wants to steal the Pheasant of Dreams, the last of its kind, to make his final years tolerably pleasant. Only a puritanical undercover policeman with a troubled past can stop him.

Sloane has a bad encounter with a nightmare rat. Art by Brand

Newish writer Koontz continues to show a lot of potential, but sooner or later he’s going to have to live up to it. His biggest problem is creating contrived situations. Here it’s that the training of the secret agents has so clearly created people who can barely function in society. And that’s key to the ending. Still, it’s very well written, and the ending is very, very good, even if the motivations behind it are hard to swallow.

A very high three stars.

Like Banquo’s Ghost, by Larry Niven

After a 30 year wait, the signals from the first interstellar probe are due to arrive. For some reason, nobody seems to care.

It’s hard to say much about this without giving the whole thing away. Some of it’s obvious, but you need to let Niven peel the onion one layer at a time for the full effect. I want to like this story more than I do. I love what he’s trying to do, but I’m not sure he fully achieved it. More of a ground rule double than a home run. (Also, he kept writing "perihelion", when he clearly meant "perigee".)

On the plus side, he gets the setting perfectly. He’s obviously traveled up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on more than one occasion to attend a "first data" presentation like the one depicted in the story. This is some of the best scene setting he’s ever done.

A very high three stars, but it might rate four for others.

Summing up

Back at the beginning of the year, editor Fred Pohl promised us some new features. The first to appear was the SF Calendar, which lists upcoming conventions and other science fiction events. Apparently, attendance at Boskone doubled this year, and other cons have shown similar growth. We also got the new column from Lester del Rey, “If… and When.” So far, that’s been quite good.

But we’ve also lost a lot. Lin Carter’s “Our Man in Fandom” has vanished without a trace. Admittedly, it felt like Lin had run out of things to say, but some acknowledgment would have been nice. Much bigger, IF has been a source of serials, good and bad, for many years. Ever since the October 1965 issue, when Skylark DuQuesne came to a close and Retief’s War began, the end of a serial has shared the issue with the start of a new one. That came to an end in May, when The Man in the Maze ended without a successor. And now, Rogue Star ended last month without a new serial beginning in this issue.

Look at this month’s cover. “All stories complete in this issue.” The plug for next month promises “A brand-new novel condensation in a special bound-in supplement!” In the letter col, Fred just says it’s a complete short novel. It sounds to me like the serials are gone, and I count that as a loss.

Well, at least a new Delany story is bound to be good.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 10, 1968] Back in the Saddle Again (August 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Not F-UN

Bjo Trimble, a superfan from the wayback, put together a fan shindig in Los Angeles last weekend.  Called F-UN Con, it is not only an SF convention, but it's also the first Star Trek convention, with a whole day of programming dedicated to the show.

This article is not about F-UN Con.

Why did we fly to the Bay Area this past weekend rather than trundling up to L.A., which is closer?  Well, we know the gang in 'Frisco, and they've been putting together informal conclaves every year.  We couldn't very well shuck tradition just for a new event, even if it's nominally in our back yard.

It was a good decision.  For one thing, they had a bit of Star Trek up there–this lovely reproduction of the captain's chair.

And now that The Prisoner is showing in the States, we're getting some lovely costumage, too!

Speaking of traditions that are worth upholding, the latest issue of Galaxy feels like a return to the quality of yore.  Usually, magazines pack their summer issues with their least impressive offerings, but such was not the case this time around.  Take a trip with me!


by Vaughn Bodé

Among the Bad Baboons, by Mack Reynolds


by Vaughn Bodé

Mack Reynolds continues his stories of life under "People's Capitalism" in the '80s, this time focusing on the last of the Bohemians, living in the decaying ruins of Greenwich Village.  With most of the country now on the dole, and white flight having been taken to its logical extreme, the cities are now all but abandoned, save for the "babboons"–lawless squatters–and the "hunters", who go downtown to shoot for thrills.

This story is more a vehicle for philosophical discussion than plot, and I found the end a bit distasteful.  That said, there are some fascinating suppositions in this tale.  One is that the current regime, in which prospective authors send their manuscripts to editors, who then publish them through traditional channels, will be supplanted by a revolutionary new process.  In the '80s, any author can take their novel (or story, or artwork) to a computer and have it stored for infinite reproduction.  These reproductions can then be read on a tv-phone (or in the case of art, facsimile duplicated).

This means that anyone can be a writer or an artist, and anyone can appreciate any work, any time.  And since everyone is on the dole anyway, why not be an artist or a writer?  Well, it does mean there's a lot more competition, and it's harder to become a phenomenon, but on the other hand, there's no barrier to entry.

Now, Reynolds assumes most people won't want to be artists, and they will be content to watch 24 hours of television a day while tranked up on cheap drugs.  Maybe he's right.  But as someone who already publishes nontraditionally (what is Galactic Journey and The Fantasy Amateur Press Association if not decentralized publishing), it's an exciting prospect.

Three stars, for the ideas, if anything.

Going Down Smooth, by Robert Silverberg


by Brock

Silverbob puts on his best Ellison impression with this tale of a therapist computer gone nuts listening to neurotic patients all day.

It's not bad, but it doesn't go anywhere.  I'd stick with the original.

Three stars.

A Specter is Haunting Texas (Part 2 of 3), by Fritz Leiber


by Jack Gaughan

I really had not been looking forward to this second installment of Leiber's tale.  Last time, as you recall, a spaceman-actor had landed in post-apocalyptic Texas (now ruler of all North America save the two Black republics in the southwest and southeast) to 1) perform in a short tour and 2) make good on a pitchblende claim in the Yukon.  The eight-foot tall, cadaverous, cybernetic thespian was recruited in a hit on the current President of Texas, whereupon he escaped to join causes with the revolutionary Mexican underclass.

It was all a bit silly, and while I appreciated what Leiber was doing, it didn't quite resonate with me.  This time, however, the needle fell into the groove.  As Chris Crockett La Cruz assumed the role of La Muerta, spurring the downtrodden Mexicans with promises of Vengeance and Death, Leiber's writing took on sublime proportions. The way he navigates the line between satire and seriousness so deftly, with such beautiful language and characterization, even as the characters are all caricatures, is an accomplishment for the ages.

Five stars for ths installment.

For Your Information: In Australia, the Rain …, by Willy Ley

The topic for this month's non-fiction piece is an interesting one: the artificial lakes, rivers, and resulting hydropower systems of Australia.  The presentation, however, leaves much to be desired.  I want to know the impact of these developments, both on settlement and on the environment, not be given pages of details of their precise geographical location.

Three stars.

The Time Trawlers, by Burt K. Filer


by Dan Adkins

A thousand years from now, humans will fish the future just as they now fish the seas.  As the solar system's population grows to number into the quadrillions, our race must pluck planets from 30 billion A.D. to plunder them for their resources.  An 18-year old fisherman with "the knack" for finding rich worlds, decides he doesn't want to do it anymore after seeing what the process does to already-inhabited planets.  He embarks on a one-man crusade against the practice, hatching a novel scheme to bring it to an end.

Never mind the silliness of the premise, or the fact that culture looks pretty much like 20th Century Earth in the tale.  It's a good story, well-told.  Sure, it feels a bit like early vintage Galaxy, but I like that era!

Four stars.

The Star Below, by Damon Knight


by Jack Gaughan

Thorinn, that diminutive traveler introduced in The World and Thorinn and later in The Garden of Ease, has returned.  This time, he has stumbled across an enormous warehouse filled with all manner of wondrous items.  From rich garments to strange engines to a talking box, all are marvels to the medieval-minded explorer.

Of course, it's at this point that our suspicions are confirmed that the myriad of worlds Thorinn passes through are all parts of a giant generation ship, this being the cargo hold.  What makes this segment so compelling is the description of these (to us) more-or-less familiar items to a man with no conception of technology.  The interactions between Thorinn and the little computer, particularly the way the box learns English, feel very natural.  I only wish Thorinn could have taken the box with him; it'd make an interesting companion.

Four stars.

HEMEAC, by E. G. Von Wald


by Joe Wehrle

Long ago, the robots took over the human power plants, and they also claimed a number of human hostages, who they began to educate in their own, logical images.  But the robots are breaking down, and the "renegade" humans are pounding at the gates.

What is HEMEAC, a teenaged robot-trained youth supposed to think when his teachers all start behaving erratically and the wild people defile the sacred halls of cybernia?

This is another tale with a classic (i.e. '50s) sense to it.  I particularly enjoyed the rendering of the robots, and HEMEAC's not-entirely-successful attempts to make rigid his thought processes.

Four stars.

Missed it by THAT much

Put it all together, and you get an issue that soars almost to four stars in quality–surely to contend for the best magazine of the month.  It's reads like this that keep me going, and also cause me to commend editor Pohl for keeping the proud publication on an even keel.  I know some disagree with his lambasting of the New Wave (and, indeed, Pohl is not averse to printing examples of it), but I think there is value to the continued production of novel, interesting, but also conventional SF prose.

I can't wait for next month!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial, Uncategorized

[July 2, 1968] What’s the Point? (August 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

The appearance of doing something

One of the German Empire’s colonies before the First World War was German South West Africa, nestled between what are today South Africa, Angola, and Botswana. After the war, South Africa was granted a mandate over the colony by the League of Nations, similar to Britain’s control over Palestine or France’s over Lebanon and Syria. The League was dissolved in 1946 and replaced by the United Nations. In general, mandates were intended to be replaced by United Nations Trusteeship, and the General Assembly recommended that South West Africa be one of those, however South Africa refused. In 1949, South Africa declared that it was no longer subject to U.N. oversight where South West Africa was concerned, as they began to extend their apartheid system into the former colony. The following year, the International Court ruled that the U.N. should exercise supervision in the administration of the territory in place of the League, but South Africa rejected the Court’s opinion and has refused any involvement by the U.N.

A political cartoon from after the First World War.

Independence movements have swept through Africa over the last decade, and as I noted in January of last year, South West Africa is not immune. The predominant organization is the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and they have been lobbying the U.N. for several years. In 1966, the General Assembly terminated the mandate, giving the U.N. direct supervision of the territory. Last year, they established the United Nations Council for South West Africa to administer the territory until independence. South Africa remains recalcitrant. And so, on June 12th, the Assembly approved Resolution 2372, which, in accordance with the wishes of the people as represented by SWAPO, changed the name to Namibia. Well, that, some finger-wagging at South Africa and the nations supporting the illegal occupation of Namibia, and a request that the Security Council do something to get South Africa out. Don’t hold your breath.

Sam Nujoma (r.), President of SWAPO, shakes hands with Mostafa Rateb Abdel-Wahab, President of the Council for Namibia

Noir, nonsense, and the blatantly obvious

The stories in this month’s IF range from the patently obvious to those that leave the reader wondering why the author bothered. There are a couple of mildly entertaining stops along the way, and the high point may surprise you (even if it is more molehill than mountain).

Supposedly for Rogue Star, which doesn’t have a starship crash. Or this many characters. Art by Chaffee

Whaddya Read?, by H.L. Gold

The founding editor of both IF and Galaxy offers a defense of modern science fiction. Maybe the new stuff isn’t as different as most people seem to think. It’s just better written.

Three stars.

Getting Through University, by Piers Anthony

A few stories ago, dentist Dr. Dillingham was kidnapped by aliens and has since bumbled around the galaxy, from one emergency patient to the next. Now, he’s been given the opportunity to attend dental school and gain proper accreditation. All he needs to do is pass the entrance exam.

The doctor deals with a difficult case instead of prepping for his exam. Art by Vaughn Bodé

Surprisingly, given the previous stories and the author’s general output, I rather liked this one. A lot of what happens is ridiculously obvious, but it doesn’t lead to quite where you might suspect. This is almost the quality that Cele Lalli used to get out of Anthony. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.

A somewhat above average three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, del Rey looks at Project Orion, the idea of using nuclear bombs to propel a starship. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, but he’s not shy about discussing some of the problems connected with a successful launch of the project (including the hundred billion dollar price tag). This is a clear-headed look at an interesting idea full of possibilities for science fiction authors.

Three stars.

In Another Land, by Mary Urhausen

Seeking to escape a regimented society and a failed love affair, the narrator attempts suicide only to find himself in a utopia. That utopia feels like the sort often imagined 50 or 60 years ago, but this month’s first time author does what she can with it. The shift from first person perspective to third person is slightly jarring, but gives the story what little bite it has. New author Urhausen shows definite skill. Here’s hoping she can hone it into something a little meatier.

Three stars.

Last Dreamer, by A. Bertram Chandler

Commodore John Grimes just wants to go home, but the strangeness at the Rim of the galaxy keeps throwing adventures in his way. This time, it’s a habitable planet with no sun, where everything is out of a bad fairy tale, and everyone speaks in rhymed couplets.

It comes as no surprise that Dan Adkins can’t draw a fire-breathing dragon. Art by Adkins

I generally enjoy the Grimes stories, but this is just silly – and that in a series that has had intelligent rats and an appearance by the Olympian gods. Of course, Chandler knows it’s silly and does get some humor out of the Commodore’s grumpiness about the situation. (He really should have ended a sentence with the word “orange,” though. Let’s see them rhyme that.) Overall, a disappointment; the more so because Chandler teased us with a story from the very beginning of Grimes’s career, but has since stuck with the older man near the end of his service. Let’s see some more of the younger man, whether wet behind the ears or just coming into his prime.

A low three stars.

Merlin Planet, by E.G. Von Wald

Sticking with fantasy pretending it’s science fiction, we have the story of the new man on a Terran trading team on a world where the locals can do magic (thanks to some psychic handwaving; what hath Campbell wrought?). Fortunately, the wizards can be stopped for a time by doing complicated math in your head. Unfortunately, instead of the requested mathematician, headquarters has sent a business law expert.

That’s not how you use a magic staff. Art by Wehrle

If you can get past the magic, the story isn’t terrible. However, it is twice as long as it needs to be. I saw the solution as soon as the new guy revealed he couldn’t do high order math. The rest was just an interminable wait until he figured it out. Right on the line between two and three stars, but the length drags it down for me.

A high two stars.

Song of the Blue Baboon, by Roger Zelazny

Zelazny takes us into the mind of a man who either betrayed Earth to alien invaders or carried out a clever stratagem to defeat them. The problem is that he never engages with his theme. The ambiguity of the ending could be read a couple of ways. Pretty, but shallow.

A low three stars.

What the Old Aliens Left, by D.M. Melton

Here’s our first tale with strong noir elements: an honest cop, a corrupt system, a dangerous dame. The lure of great wealth? The technology left behind by a dead alien civilization.

Most of the action takes place in a bar, too. Art by Brand

Melton continues to improve. He’s never going to get to the point where I’m excited to see his name on the cover, but at least it’s a sign of a probably-entertaining read. He might be getting a handle on writing women, but he’s working from a strong template here, one that’s not necessarily great, but at least gives them their own motives. On the whole, the story probably could have been tightened up here and there. Less going back and forth from the bar, for instance. Still an entertaining read.

Three stars.

West Is West, by Larry Tritten

The inhabitants of the planet West wallow in the cliches of old-school westerns and have names like Randolph Scott Cartwheel, even if many of them are duck-billed saurians. Sheriff Matt Cooper has to bring in Cartwheel for the unprovoked killing of another saurian. Then things go a bit noir, with a femme fatale and the Maltese Longhorn Steer.

A shootout is about the only thing missing from this story. Art by Wehrle

Tritten appears to be another newcomer, though he’s not acknowledged as an IF First. The parody here is laid on with a dumptruck and feels dated. The cliches are familiar, but the western genre has largely moved on from them. There’s no room for Clint Eastwood’s man with no name (though Rowdy Yates would likely feel at home). Ron Goulart could have pulled this off.

A low three stars.

Rogue Star (Part 3 of 3), by Fredrik Pohl and Jack Williamson

This thing doesn’t deserve a recap. I’ll merely note that the climax features actual stars battling each other. The flaws are many, but I’ll limit myself to just two. For starters, “protagonist” Andy Quam should have just stayed home. Everything would have turned out exactly the same, and he wouldn’t have had to deal with all the stress. There are also a number of unresolved subplots, most notably the strange behavior of Earth’s sun. We’re told why it’s happening, but nothing is done about it.

Two stars for this installment and barely two stars for the novel as a whole.

Edmond Hamilton just smashed planets together. What a piker. Art by Gaughan

Summing up

If you told me that, in an issue with stories by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jack Williamson, the one I would like best was by Piers Anthony, I’d have laughed at you. Look, it’s not a great story; it’s just the one that annoyed me the least. Maybe the summer heat is making me cranky.

That’s a promising lineup.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 6, 1968] Trend-setter (April 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Back in the saddle again

It's been a long time since the halcyon days of the early '50s, when Galaxy was setting the standard to beat, ushering in the Silver Age of Science Fiction (along with the more avante garde F&SF).  But now that editor Fred Pohl has collapsed his empire to just two mags, it seems he can afford to be more picky.  Indeed, IF is unusually good this month, and the April 1968 issue of Galaxy is by far the best I've read in a long time, and a strong contender for best magazine of March.


by Gray Morrow

Brave new worlds

Goblin Reservation (Part 1 of 2), by Clifford D. Simak

Simak is back with a odd brew of a story, perhaps in the same universe as Here Gather the Stars, as reference is made to a Wisconsin transit station.  Eschewing (for the most part) his usual pastoral motif, instead we get the first installment of the book-length adventure of Peter Maxwell, professor at the Time University in North America.  At least he was.  It seems that, while on the way to do fieldwork on the planet of Coonskin, Maxwell was duplicated.  One of him went on to his intended task.  The other ended up on a crystalline, roofed-over planet.  This world is some 50 billion years old, its inhabitants little more than ghosts, and they possess the knowledge of two universes since they lived through the last cosmological crunch and survived the most recent "Big Bang".

This latter Maxwell is the one we follow, since the other one died in a traffic accident upon arriving home.  Now, Maxwell is officially dead, out of work, and at loose ends.  Add to that there seems to be conspiracies, both human and alien, to get the secrets of the crystal planet from him, and things get very hot indeed.

That would be a twisty enough tale in and of itself.  Throw in the existence of fairies and ghosts (they've been around all along, but now they're acknowledged creatures who live on reservations) as well as working time travel (one of the main characters is Alley Oop, a brilliant Neanderthal), and things are complicated to the extreme!


by Gray Morrow

And yet, somehow Simak makes it all work.  It's an unusually humorous story, though the Morrow illustrations are perhaps too comic, and I tore through the half novel in short order.

I am looking forward to seeing where this all goes.  Four stars.

The Riches of Embarrassment, by H. L. Gold

Why does Miss McGiveney always seem to happen upon her neighbors at the most embarrassing moments?  It may just be her superpower.

This slight tale in particular feels like vintage Galaxy, perhaps because it's written by the magazine's first editor.  I hope Fred Pohl edited the story savagely…what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Three stars.

Brain Drain, by Joseph P. Martino


by Dan Adkins

Tom Harrison, a field agent of Intelligence Imports Incorporated, is in Thailand searching for a particular kind of student, and he thinks he has his target in high school graduate Manob Suravit.  It turns out that Triple-I is on the hunt for brilliant PhD candidates, and apparently there aren't enough in America (and/or perhaps there is value in recruiting from beyond our shores).

At first, I thought it would turn out Harrison was looking for folks with psi powers–I was glad to find the object of his search was more mundane.  Most of the story is excellent, redolent with such authentic color that I have to think Martino has spent time in Thailand.

The problem is the ending, where Harrison convinces the local schoolmaster to be happy about the loss of promising students.  Not so much the reasoning, but the near-polemic way the reasoning is delivered.  What could be a thoughtful piece, with shades of gray woven in (as the story appeared to promise earlier on) becomes something more suited for Analog.  Along the lines of "Hey, sure we take your smart kids, but you weren't using them, and you've still got plenty."

A missed opportunity.  Three stars.

Sword Game, by H. H. Hollis

A bored middle-aged topologist and a grubby would-be Gypsy team up with their tessaract-based circus show.  Said mathematician shoves his partner into a cylinder of fuzzy time and space and stabs her vividly, but harmlessly, with a sword while the audience marvels.

But said topologist bores of this, too, and the result is truly macabre (though ultimately happy).

Three stars, but I could see someone going to four.

For Your Information: The Devil's Apples, by Willy Ley

Willy Ley offers up a short, but interesting piece on potatoes.  Not much to say, really.  Three stars.

Touch of the Moon, by Ross Rocklynne


by Dan Adkins

What an odd piece this is, about a romance broken when one of the partners goes to the moon.  Gravity has an irrevocable effect not only on the body, but also the psyche.  But happily, loosing one's ties to Earth is ultimately good for the species if it ever wants to claim the stars.

This could have been a good story, but it's written far too amateurishly and with too implausible a premise.  The former is surprising given that Rocklynne dates back to the Golden Age.  On the other hand, I haven't seen hide nor hair of him since I began reading SF regularly (1954), so perhaps he's out of practice.

Two stars.

The Deceivers, by Larry Niven


by Jack Gaughan

Our old pal Lucas Garner is back, this time with a shaggy dog story about the first fully automated restaurant that opened in 2025.

Niven has a real knack for creating whole worlds with a few strokes.  He also joins multiple time periods with ease: Lucas Garner was born in 1939, so he is our contemporary.  He lives in the 2100s, and he reminisces about the 2000s.  Thus, his stories have touches of the futuristic as well as the familiar.

Four stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

I don't often comment on Algis Budrys' column, but this time, he has some important things to say…and a friend named Brian Collins (who has his own commendable 'zine) did an excellent job of summing it up while adding his own observations:

Algis Budrys dedicates the whole review column to Dangerous Visions, giving us a review I'd say is about 1,500 to 2,000 words long. Budrys has shown us before that he's one of the more "literate" people in the field, but he has a unique challenge with Dangerous Visions, a book he both highly recommends but is highly mixed on as far as its content goes.

He argues pretty well as to why this is a major work in the field and why you should get yourself a copy, despite a lot of the stories therein not holding up to scrutiny. It helps that he and I mostly agree on what works and what doesn't (I'm admittedly one of the few people who liked the Farmer), and it pleases me in a morbid way to find that I'm not the only one who was incredibly disappointed by the Sturgeon. But Budrys notes that while the bloated pseudo-lecture from Sturgeon is a failure, and far under Sturgeon's caliber, it works as a sort of counter-piece to the Emshwiller, which, as Budrys says, feels more like a classic Sturgeon story than the Sturgeon we got. Taken together, these two contribute immensely to a narrative that Harlan Ellison is trying to put forth with the book.

Will Dangerous Visions kick off a new movement in SF? No. We had already seen stuff published in F&SF and New Worlds that would have made fine contributions to Dangerous Visions. This book does not present a brave new world like Ellison claims, but rather as Budrys argues it serves as an essential reminder that change is inevitable and that the field has been changing and will continue to change. No doubt 50 years from now Dangerous Visions will be remembered for the best stories between its covers, but also as a historical artifact—a portrait of a genre in the midst of change, and change is often violent and unpretty.

The World and Thorinn, by Damon Knight


by Jack Gaughan

Finally, Damon Knight begins what looks like the first part of serial in all but name.  Thorinn is a human raised by trolls in a primitive, Scandinavianesque, not-quite-fantasy world.  When calamity befalls his family, they throw him down a well to appease the god Snorri.  Thus begins the first of Thorinn's subterranean adventures.

The first few pages are a bit slow, particularly when scenes are repeated from two different viewpoints (I really dislike that style), but the rest makes for an excellent puzzle story, written in a fine, almost Vancean style.

Four stars, and the anticipated book may rate higher.

The Other Show

Between the Simak and the Knight (both fantasy-tinged pieces), we have a couple of open promises.  We also have something of a new style: there's a lot more sex in this issue than I've seen recently in Galaxy.  Is Pohl taking a page from F&SF's book?  Or has the New Wave simply caught up to the Guinn publishing enterprise?

Either way, I like it.  More, please!

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