There are few expressions as irritating to me as the oxymoronic "Modern Classic"…but I have to admit that the shoe sometimes fits.
Mario Puzo's third novel, The Godfather, came out last month, and I can't put it down. It's not a small book—some 446 pages—but those pages turn like no one's business. It's the story of Vito Corleone, a Sicilian who arrives in the country around the turn of the Century and slowly, but inexorably, becomes crime boss of Manhattan.
The Mafia has had a particular allure of late. LIFE just had a long bit on the recent death of Vito Genovese and the current scramble to replace him as head of the Genovese family. For those who want a (seemingly accurate) introduction to the underworld of organized crime, The Godfather makes a terrific primer.
Bloody, pornographic, blunt, but also detailed and even, in its own way, scholarly, The Godfather is a book you can't put down.
Which is a problem when you're supposed to get through a stack of science fiction magazines every month. Indeed, how is a somewhat long-in-the-tooth, middle-of-the-road mag like Galaxy, especially this latest issue, supposed to compete?
by Vaughn Bodé
Little Blue Hawk, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc
Imagine an America generations from now, after eugenics has gone awry. After some initial promising results, a significant number of humans became dramatically mutated, with profound physical and mental variations accompanied by even more pronounced neuroses. Over time, these mutants have mingled with baseline humans, spreading their traits.
This is the story of Kert Tahn, a wingless hawk of a man, who bears a weighty set of obsessions and compulsions, as well as a dandy case of synesthesia: to him, words are crystalline, shattering into dust and leaving a pall over everything. An urban "Special Person", plucked as an infant from one of the rural Special Person-only communities, he harbors a strong urge to fly, which is why he takes up a job as a hover-disc pilot, ferrying customers out into the hinterlands now reserved for the genetically modified. "Little Blue Hawk" is a series of encounters with a variety of more-or-less insane individuals, and how each helps him on his road to self-discovery.
by Reese
There are elements I really liked in this story. Though the causes of neuroses are genetic, it is clear Van Scyoc is making a statement—and an aspirational prediction—as to how mental illnesses might be accommodated rather than simply cured…or its sufferers tucked away. All Special Persons have the constitutional right to have their compulsions respected, and they are listed on a prominent medallion each of them wears. Of course, this leads to a mixture of both care by and disdain from the "normal" population.
I also thought that a set of neurotic compulsions actually makes for a dandy thumbnail sketch of an alien race—a set of traits that make no sense but are nevertheless consistent,
The problem with this story is simply that it's kind of dull and doesn't do much. I found myself taking breaks every five pages or so. With the Puzo constantly emanating its bullet-drenched sirensong, it was slow going, indeed.
Two stars.
The Open Secrets, by Larry Eisenberg
A fellow accidentally enters into his timeshare terminal the password for the FBI's internal files. Now that he has access to all the country's secrets, he becomes both extremely powerful…and extremely marked.
Frivolous, but not terrible. Two stars.
Star Dream, by Terry Carr and Alexei Panshin
On the eve of the flight of the first starship Gaea, its builder finds out why he was fired just before its completion. The answer takes some of the sting from being ejected from the vessel's crew.
This old-fashioned tale is rather mawkish and probably would have served better as the backbone of a juvenile novel, but it's not poorly written.
Three stars.
Coloured Element, by William Carlson and Alice Laurance
A new measles vaccine is dumped willy-nilly into the water supply, not for its salutory benefits, but for a side effect—it turns everyone primary colors based on their blood type! Ham-handed social commentary is delivered in this rather slight piece.
Two stars.
Killerbot!, by Dean R. Koontz
The mindless, cybernetic monsters from Euro are on the rampage in Nortamer, and it's up to the local law enforcement to dispatch the latest killer. The new model has got a twist—human cunning. But when the monster is taken down, the revelation is enough to rock society.
What seems like a rather pointless exercise in violent adventure turns out to be (I think) a commentary on the recent rash of gun violence—from the murder of JFK to the Austin tower shootings. It's not a terrific piece, but I appreciate what it's trying to do.
Three stars.
For Your Information: Max Valier and the Rocket-Propelled Airplane, by Willy Ley
I was just giving a lecture on rocketry pioneers at the local university the other day, and Max Valier was one of the notables I mentioned. Of course, I assumed from the name that he was French. He was not. That fact, and many others, can be found in this fascinating piece by Willy Ley on a man most associated with the rocket car that killed him.
The last man on Earth is Edwards James McHenry—better known by his DJ monicker, Jabber McAbber. Well, he's not actually on Earth; right before the calamity that ripped the planet asunder, a Howard Hughes look-alike ensconced him in an orbital trailer with a broadcaster, a thousand gallons of bourbon, and a record collection. Unbenownst to him, Ed also has a mechanical sidekick called Marty, a computer with colloquial intelligence.
Thus, while Ed more-or-less drunkenly transmits an unending, lonely monologue to the universe, Marty provides a broadcast counterpoint, explaining the subtext and background to Ed's plight and thoughts.
It all reads like something Harlan Ellison might have put together, a little less dirtily, perhaps. Hip and readable. Four stars.
At last, we reach the action-packed conclusion of this three-part serial. All the pieces are in motion: both Loki and 'Thor, immortal soldiers in an ages-long intergalactic war, who have been at each other's throats for 1200 years, are trudging through the rain for the runaway broadcast power facility on the Northeastern American seaboard.
As the Army tries and fails to bring the powerplant under control, the hurricane in the Atlantic intensifies. Meanwhile, we learn what the other unauthorized power-tapper is: none other than Loki's autonomous spaceship, Xix, which is charging its own batteries pending the unhatching of a terrible scheme. The climax of the novel is suitably climactic.
Laumer writes in two modes: satirical and deadly serious. And Now They Wake is firmly in the second camp, grim to the extreme. But it is also very human, very immediate, and, even with the graphic violence depicted, very engrossing. This is the closest I've seen Laumer come to Ted White's style, really engaging the senses such that you inhabit the bodies of the characters, but without an offputting degree of detail (even the gory bits are imaginative and non-repetitive.)
It's not a novel for the ages, and the tie-in to Norse mythology is a bit pat, but this is probably the best Laumer I've ever read, and the one piece that actually made me forget about The Godfather…for a few minutes, anyway.
Four stars.
Back to (un)reality
The first half of this month's Galaxy was certainly a slog, but at least the latter half kept my interest—if only I hadn't started from the end first! That's a bad habit I may have to overcome. I just like seeing the number of pages I have to read dwindle, and that gets easier to mark if you read in reverse order!
Anyway, the bottom line is that Pohl's mag will win no awards on the strength of this month's ish, but Puzo's book may very well. Pick up The Godfather right now…and maybe the Laumer when it's put into book form!
We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month. Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production. Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff! Enjoy:
From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.
The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.
Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.
The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.
In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.
Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.
All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.
I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.
Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.
Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.
Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.
The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.
At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.
Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel
Cover by Albert Nuetzell
Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.
Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.
The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.
With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.
By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.
Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.
Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.
Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.
The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.
Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.
Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela
Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.
Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.
On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.
In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.
Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.
Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.
Dean Koontz
Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.
First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.
Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.
This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement. Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.
Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.
Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).
Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:
Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.
As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.
Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:
He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.
Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.
Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:
That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?
This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.
Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:
While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.
Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.
There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.
However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.
The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:
Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.
The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.
I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?
Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.
Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.
Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.
Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.
The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.
Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.
Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.
An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.
Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.
In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.
Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.
Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.
They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.
Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?
We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.
(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)
The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.
Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.
Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.
The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.
The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.
Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.
(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)
Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.
Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.
This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.
The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.
As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.
About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.
The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.
There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.
Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.
Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.
(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)
Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.
What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.
Three stars.
There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.
It’s official. As if it weren’t already clear from the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia over the summer, the Soviet Union has now openly declared that no communist nation in the Soviet sphere of influence will be allowed to go its own way or engage in any sort of reforms not approved by Moscow. Addressing the Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party on November 13th, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated, “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” That’s the justification for military intervention wherever the U.S.S.R. feels like, especially within the Warsaw Pact. We all know who will get to decide if something is a move towards capitalism.
Leonid Brezhnev after addressing the Soviet Central Committee earlier this year.
The backlash has already begun. After years of strained relations, Albania formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Of course, they have Yugoslavia as a buffer state, and the close proximity of Greece and Italy probably also offer a deterrent. As we go to press, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu has publicly condemned this new doctrine as a violation of the Warsaw Treaty. Only time will tell how this shakes out.
Forget the past
Forgetfulness seems to be the theme of this month’s IF. The issue is book-ended with stories featuring protagonists with amnesia, while two of the remaining three stories offer a man who doesn’t know his name and an entire year blotted from everybody’s memory.
Just some random art not associated with any of the stories. Art by Chaffee
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
I mentioned a few months back that Tony Boucher, one of the original editors for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had passed away. Because of the vagaries of publication, it took this long for F&SF to solicit eulogies for Tony and get them in print. But a finer tribute, I can't imagine.
Some of SF's greatest luminaries pay their respects: Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Randall Garrett, Philip K. Dick, Avram Davidson…but what impressed me even more was how many prominent women authors appear, too–Judith Merril, Mildred Clingerman, Margaret St. Clair, Miriam Allen DeFord. It is fitting that so many of the fond rememberers are women; F&SF, particularly in the Boucher years, was by far the biggest SF publisher of woman-penned SFF.
Those were great days, the Boucher reign, when virtually every issue was a winner (sort of like the Gold days at Galaxy). And half the stories we picked for our anthology of SF by women from 1953-57, some of the very best science fiction of the time, came from the pages of F&SF.
It is a shame that the appearance of these names from yesteryear evoke a pang of loss perhaps greater than the passing of Mr. Boucher. Except for a few notable rallies, F&SF has been on a slow, inexorable downward trend since 1959, it's last superlative year. This issue is no exception. While it is not crammed with wholly unworthy material, nor is it anywhere near the standards it used to maintain.
Let me show you…
by Gahan Wilson
The House that Tony Built
The Devil and Jake O'Hara, by Brian Cleeve
I was less than enthusiastic about Brian's last story about Old Nick, in which Satan is cast out of hell along with a lowly sidekick when the souls of Hell unionize and go on strike. This one is a step downward.
All Lucifer needs to break the strike is one measly member of the damned who will cross the picket lines and turn the power back on in the underworld. He sets his eyes on an Irish lush who sells his soul for a bottle of quality whiskey. His daughter adds a few amendments to the deal, but it doesn't really matter. Ultimately, the sot goes to Hell, though the result is not what the Prince of Darkness wants.
There's just too much affected dialect, meandering, and oh-so-cleverisms. What could be a workable premise is, instead, tedious. And this is from someone who likes Deal-with-the-Devil stories.
Two stars.
Sos the Rope (Part 2 of 3), by Piers Anthony
[As with last time, Brian has graciously offered to stand in so I don't have to suffer through Anthony's latest "masterpiece"…]
by Brian Collins
To show once again that democracy is a flawed system, Piers Anthony is now a Hugo nominee! I can scarcely fathom some people’s enthusiasm for his debut novel Chthon getting nominated for Best Novel. His second novel, Sos the Rope, may redeem itself by the final installment, but the chances of it recovering are not high. There is one positive that can be said of this middle installment immediately: it’s short.
Not much happens here, and at only about 25 pages there isn’t much opportunity for Anthony to bless us with his worst habits, all involving women. To recap, it’s America a good century after a nuclear catastrophe, and two rogues, Sos and Sol, agree to a one-year partnership while the latter builds a tribe, one combatant at a time. The two are good friends and respect each other as warriors, but Sos is weaponless while Sol is unable to beget children of his own. Their friendship is complicated when Sol’s wife in name only, Sola, takes a strong liking to Sos and the two eventually have sex behind Sol’s back, leaving Sola pregnant with Sos’s child. This is unfortunate for everyone, including the reader. But by now the one-year contract has run out and Sos and Sol agree to part ways, with Sos returning to a crazy-run hospital where he grew up and where he learned to read.
Another positive thing I can say is that since Sola is virtually absent in this installment, and since Sol only appears at the beginning and end, we’re taken away from the plot to be given more of an explanation as to the workings of this post-apocalyptic world. It’s during his time away from Sol’s tribe that Sos finally decides to take on another weapon—this one the long heavy rope of the title. It’s about halfway through the novel that we finally get the weapon that would become part of the hero’s name. I still cannot properly describe how much I object to the naming system Anthony concocted here. It only gets more aggravating when Sos eventually returns to the tribe and finds that Sol now has a daughter named—wait for it—Soli. Sos and Sola still want each other but the latter refuses to give up Sol’s name and Sol himself refuses to give up his adoptive daughter. A fight in the battle circle, possibly to the death, ensues!
Anthony still cannot write compelling action scenes, and he still cannot write women above the level of depicting them as instigators of doom. A recurring implication here is that Sos and Sol would turn out fine, at worst going down different paths amicably, if not for Sola’s meddling. At the same time I was not offended so much this time.
If I turn my head on its side I might be able to stretch this installment to 3 stars, because it is a relatively painless experience and even mildly enjoyable in a few places, but that implies a tepid recommendation and I can’t lie to readers like that. Strong 2 out of 5 stars.
by Gideon Marcus
The Twelfth Bed, by Dean R. Koontz
by Gahan Wilson
This one takes place in a futuristic rest home, where the aged are confined in their last years under the beneficent but iron care of robot wards. One day, a young accountant is checked into the home by mistake. Try as he might, he can't get out…until he brews a revolt.
Koontz is a writer with a lot of promise, and he did manage a 4-star tale last month, but most of his stories have some kind of issue. For this one, it's that the setup is a bit too contrived to really engage sympathy. Maybe it's supposed to be satire, but again, it plays things to straight if that's the case. Moreover, I read a similar (and better) story in Fantastic three years ago (Terminal, by Ron Goulart).
Anyway, three stars, and keep trying Dean!
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Samuel R. Delany and Ed Emshwiller
Two of my more favorite people provide reviews of Kubrick/Clarke's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. They are interesting perspectives, one from a vivid fictioneer, and one from a gifted illustrator and artist.
Chip (Delany) actually favored the original three-hour version that was cut within a week of its premiere, asserting that the irony of the HAL segment is sharper, and the disorientation of the weightlessness scenes settle in more viscerally. I don't know if that kind of glacial pacing would have been an improvement, but on the other hand, the only time I felt even slightly restless when I watched the film was during the transit scene near the end, so maybe I missed out.
Emsh praises the effects and spends most of his time discussing them rather than the story, which he seems to find serviceable, if not stellar.
It's a better pair of reviews than, say, Robert Bloch's blistering affair (in which Bob calls the monolith a "cylinder" for some reason–sadly, I can't remember where I saw it. A fanzine, I think.)
This piece is book-ended by the protestations of a producer of a television program, disclaiming all responsibility for what ensued on his show, Investigations. It seems he hired a has-been actor to re-enact the recent assassination of a public figure (presumably, echoing the murder of JFK). The actor went meshuginnah and actually assured that he actually got killed in a sort of expiation of public sins. We know this from the interminable, raving diary the actor left behind explaining his motivations.
I really don't know what to make of this story. While I'm not the biggest fan of J.G. Ballard, I found his utlization of the Kennedy assassination (and other cultural touchstones) to be more effective. Certainly more readable, despite the outré nature of his composition. O'Donnell just seems like he's trying too hard.
It is the last night of a short-lived affair, for the male half is leaving. And not just away from his lover, but from Earth. You see, he is an alien, sort of, a member of an extraterrestrial race of humans, and Earth is doomed to soon be consumed in a natural nova. He was sent to our world to gather our finest art treasures, these to form a legacy of our lost race.
The tale is reasonably well executed, but its effectiveness is reduced both by the mawkishness of the scenario and that of its participants (the woman is hysterical, the man poor at communicating), as well as the fact that, again, this feels like a story I've read before, one that was done better. I just can't remember which one it was…
Maybe Taylor, who is a novice, will realize his potential with a more original story next time out. For now, three stars.
The Terrible Lizards, by Isaac Asimov
I was just thinking that I wanted a nice survey on what we know about dinosaurs in 1968, and the good Doctor has presented one. As a bonus, he tell us some horrible things about Sir Richard Owens, a preeminent dino-hunter in the last century.
I enjoyed learning the greek roots of the various dinosaur names as well as the relationship between dinosaurs, mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles.
Lanier is another newcomer, but this is his second story, and he seems to have found his footing very quickly. This is the tale of a British Brigadier, the sort with decades of experiences and a knack for storytelling. Apparently, Lanier has a whole treasure chest of stories that the Brigadier will tell, which we'll get to see as F&SF publishes them.
This particular piece involves the time the Brigadier went Caribbean island-hopping in a small boat with his friend, Joe, and two local seamen, Maxton and Oswald. They learn of Soldier Key, a little spit of land inhabited by the queerest of ex-Britishers, dedicated to an unholy church and with an unhealthy adoration for giant hermit crabs.
The plot is Lovecraftian, but without the undercurrent of racism (indeed, the story is quite anti-racist). I found it engaging, thrilling, and also satisfying. Not just horror for horror's sake, but threaded with light–the light provided by decent human beings remaining human in the face of inhumanity.
Four stars.
Urban blight
Well, that wasn't all bad, thankfully. Still, 2.4 is a pretty dismal aggregate. Compare that to the 3.3 average for 1959. Also, for all the female participation in the eulogizing, there are no fiction stories from women this issue. In fact, there have been only six stories by women this entire year.
We could stand to go back to the '50s in more ways than one…
It's been so very long since I could offer a travelogue from my favorite of countries, Japan. But now, after four years (and a stop at the Fotomat to develop pictures), I finally have a dual treat for you–vacation slides and a review of the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction!
But instead of dumping either of them on you all at once, how about we take a simultaneous trip, both to the Orient and to vistas even further off?
by Jack Gaughan
For this article, I have the invaluable assistance of Mr. Brian Collins, a fellow 'zine editor with a penchant for pain. To wit, after reading this month's issue, he offered to take a stab at the lead story. As I have no qualms with anyone stabbing Piers Anthony, here goes…
Sos the Rope (Part 1 of 3), by Piers Anthony
by Brian Collins
Piers Anthony has appeared here and there over the past few years without making much of a fuss, with his first SF novel, Chthon, being decidedly uncontroversial among the Journey people (read: everyone I know hates it). That was last year, and now we already have the beginning of his second SF novel, Sos the Rope, which Ed Ferman introduces as a “successful” contest novel “of superior quality.” I don’t wish to call Ferman a liar, but I shiver to think of what the standard must be for contest-winning SF novels for this to be deemed a success.
The premise is simple—too simple. It’s been a century since a nuclear holocaust apparently sent mankind back to its early hunter-gatherer ways, with “society” being reduced to mostly roaming tribes with little hotspots of civilization maintained by “the crazies,” people who somehow retain the ways from before the holocaust. We start with a duel between two warriors, both named Sol, who fight in a circle to see who gets to keep both the name and the right to use all the standard weapons of combat. The loser is thus named Sos, and he becomes not only weaponless but Sol’s (the winner’s) servant; but it’s not all bad, for Sol is not some wandering rogue but a man with a vision, as he wants to build an empire from scratch. A nameless woman who witnesses the duel joins the two and, in a rather haphazard ceremony, becomes Sol’s wife and takes the name of Sola, as is the custom. Apparently people here can change names the way one changes pairs of shoes.
Thus the story starts as something of a road trip narrative that at first sounds like it may be adventure fantasy a la Conan, but is actually science fiction—although Anthony puts in the minimum effort to justify the setting. We also have a lust triangle (I wouldn’t say love, for any reasonable person can’t suppose that Sos and Sola are in love) as Sos and Sola are clearly attracted to each other, but Sola wants Sol’s title while Sol has no affection for Sola. We find out at one point that indeed Sol can’t satisfy his wife as he’s all but said to be a eunuch. “Sol would never be a father. No wonder he sought success in his own lifetime. There would be no sons to follow him.” This does not stop Sos and Sola from eventually doing the dirty deed and the latter getting very pregnant. I continue to suffer.
My experience with Anthony up to this point was basically nil (though, of course, my friends at the Journey tell me stories), but I can already sense a profound distrust of women running through his writing. The way marriage works in the novel’s world is that women literally do not have names and presumably no property rights unless hitched to a man, whereupon they take their husband’s name with just a letter added to it. There is no signed contract, and marriage can be made and ended upon the exchanging of a bracelet. This notion of wife-as-property went out with the Dark Ages, but Anthony has revived it so as to a) generate conflict, and b) give us an excuse to view female characters through the lens of someone who might as well be picking out clothes in a store. There is much ogling at Sola’s physique, including a couple situations where she shamelessly tries to seduce Sos.
The battle circle scenes are not even strikingly written. By the time we get to the climax, where Sol, in recruiting men for his empire, is about to take on a massive brute named Bog (all the men seem to have monosyllables for names), I struggled not to put down my issue and do something better with my life. However, because I feel Anthony can do (and maybe has done) worse, I’m inclined to give this installment a generous 2 out of 5 stars.
by Gideon Marcus
The above was actually written before we went to Japan. On the 10th, we took off from Los Angeles, the Boeing 707 we flew in now a nostalgic experience rather than a new one (we're so spoiled!) Because of our speed, we were in daylight the entire time, and yet, when we landed at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, it was already the next day thanks to the international date line.
Just in time for me to read this story about a completely different kind of trip…
The Psychedelic Children, by Dean R. Koontz
The effects of LSD are still relatively unexplored. Some believe that the psychedelic effects of a "trip" suggest the unlocking of psionic potential. And what if that psionic potential was inheritable…
It is the near future, and Laurie, Frank's wife, is having an episode. Her psi powers come in waves; when they peak, they must be channeled outward in a fiery blaze lest they destroy her. So Frank drives her out to the countryside (furtively, for the psi-capable children of Acid-droppers are all sought by the authorities) so Lauren can vent her energies.
The next day, a patrolman and his robot assistant show up at their door…
Koontz paints a vivid world in a few deft strokes, creating a memorable story with a nice ending. Koontz is still a bit new, and it shows in some awkward turns of phrase and a less than expertly rendered final act. Nevertheless, it's a good story, both SFnal and fantastic.
Four stars.
We spent our first week in Tokyo, down by the harbor in the Hamamatsuchou area. Tokyo is different from other metropolises–from the air, it's an endless cityscape, and on the ground, it seethes with activity. Commuters rush by in endless streams, on foot and by train. It should be oppressive, but the fundamental politeness and regimentation of Japanese society, at least in the urban areas, somehow makes it all bearable. It's much different from, say, the noisy stink of New York City or the sprawling gray of Los Angeles.
Speaking of regimentation and programming…
Key Item, by Isaac Asimov
I was prepared not to like the Asimov story as his best fiction-writing days seem long behind him, and they now tend to be gimmick-ended vignettes. But this one, in which a scientist figures out why a sentient MULTIVAC computer has stopped answering requests, was pretty gratifying–and most surprising.
Four stars.
Tokyo also distinguishes itself from other cities in its random beauty. Personal space is at a premium, and so Japanese people decorate everything with thought and an aesthetic eye. Even storefronts and random streetscapes become scenic.
Ultimate Defense, by Larry Brody
If the last story dealt with a mechanical brain, Ultimate Defense features a bionic wonder, a genetically engineered super human. Jarvis Raal is under suspicion of murder, and it is up to a harried public defender to get him off. How he does so involves an interesting twist on the subject of race.
I love the way Brody hints at an integrated future (a necessary underpinning of the story), and the story's conclusion is a lovely jab at centuries of bigotry. My only complaint is stylistic: Brody ends every other paragraph with a punchy, one-line, standalone. It lacks effectiveness in the repetition.
Four stars.
After five lonely nights in Tokyo (all of our friends in the capital had moved away or drifted out of sight since our last visit), we made our way on the Shinkansen for the first time in four years. It's still as thrilling an experience as ever, zooming past the countryside as fast as a Cessna can fly. Our destination was Nagoya, a rather ugly, industrial city in the country's center. After Tokyo, it looked curiously American with its Western-style grid of streets designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was the least we could do after flattening the city during World War 2.
However, the urban sprawl of Nagoya was in some ways lovelier than Tokyo for the people who live in it. The Chubu/Osaka region is home to the greatest concentration of friends in Japan, both foreign and indigenous. After meeting up with Jen and Dan, two professors who work at Nagoya University (Dan is half-Japanese, Jen is full Minnesotan), we got a call from Nanami, whom you may remember from our previous Japan-based articles and her appearance on The Journey Show.
Well, not only had she recently gotten married, but her husband and she had formed a jazz duet. They invited us out to a coffee shop to watch them perform, and they were just terrif.
The ability to go all over Japan at great speed, manifesting almost at will, calls to mind the next story…
Remote Projection, by Guillaume Apollinaire
This ancient, translated piece starts off as one kind of thing and ends up very much another. A messiah, calling himself Aldavid has appeared simultaneously throughout the globe. Though he simply prays and gives sermons, his effect is electric. Jews start emigrating en masse to Palestine, Jewish bankers are incarcerated so that they cannot empty their coffers in the support of Zionist goals, and gentiles grudgingly concede that they might have backed the wrong horse 2000 years before.
So it's a religious fantasy, right? Then why does the messiah look suspiciously like a no-good-nik con artist, murderer, and crackpot inventor that our narrator character recalls from earlier life? The end of the tale is all science fiction (well, scientific romance; we didn't have "scientifiction" yet), and pretty prescient.
Three stars; four if the old style tickles your fancy.
It is said that being invited into the home of a Japanese family is quite the honor for a Westerner. Well, we were more than honored when Nanami and her husband, Tomoki, insisted we join them for a home-cooked meal of okonomiyaki at their lovely little house. Afterwards, we had an impromptu jam session. I sang Kyu Sakamoto's Ue wo muiteru arukou, which you know States-side as Sukiyaki (Nanami had ended their jazz concert with the song, too.) It was an absolutely sublime experience.
John Sladek offers up this pastiche of a certain New Wave pioneer (the story is ostensibly by a J. G. B??????) If you've read any Ballard, and especially if you've read a lot of Ballard, you will see that Sladek skewers him with absolutely convincing parody. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of mockery. Yet he also manages to tell his own tale and put his own spin on things. Brilliant stuff. I read it aloud to Janice immediately upon finishing it, and it was difficult to avoid breaking up.
Five stars.
Nanami's pad wasn't the only place we ate well. One morning in Nagoya, I found a little restaurant serving soba. And not just soba, but cold soba. And not just cold soba, but cold soba with fried onion on top. WITH a side of curry rice. I can tell you, I didn't eat lunch that day!
That was food for my stomach. Now, how about some food for the mind?
Little Lost Satellite, by Isaac Asimov
Dr. A's first fictional story was Marooned off Vesta, so it is appropriate that he finally do an article about the titular asteroid. He doesn't have too much to say because there isn't much to be learned from a point of light–the best we can resolve the tiny object with terrestrial telescopes. He does make some rather half-baked theories as to the origin of Vesta and other asteroids, suggesting they might be former moons of the big planets, their rotation rates indicative relics of the worlds they once orbited.
Mostly, we're left with questions. Three stars.
Beyond Words, by Hayden Howard
Last up, we have the fellow whose Esk tales in Galaxy started promisingly, meandered terribly, and ended…decently. The fellow can write, sometimes. And indeed, he does a decent job with this story, about a fellow who went into the desert to revert to language-less savagery.
But when you can't speak anymore, how can you defend yourself against a murder charge?
Three stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Heading for home
And so, 12 pleasant vacation days and 130 pages of F&SF go by. Aside from the disappointing beginning, which I thankfully didn't have to read, the magazine definitely compelled me to return to F&SF next month. Just as we fully intend to return to the lovely land of Japan next year, this time.
According to a story that may be apocryphal, somebody in the crowd shouted the phrase I'm using for the title of this article during one of Harry Truman's campaign speeches. True or not, we'll see how it relates to a major change in Fantastic magazine. Just to build up the suspense, however, let me digress and talk about another big change.
A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss
The British rock 'n' roll band known as the Rolling Stones, famous for gritty blues-driven music, went in a different direction recently. The new album Their Satanic Majesty's Request, released just a couple of days ago in both the UK and the USA, is full of the surrealism and dreamy psychedelic tunes to be found in the Beatles' groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Even the cover looks similar. Note that lack of words. If you don't know who these guys are, you must not be a fan.
I don't know if this album represents the future of the Stones, or if they did it just to gather some green (and I don't mean moss.) At least the groovy song She's a Rainbow is worth a listen while you stare at your lava lamp.
With a new editor at the helm of Fantastic, there are certain to be changes coming, although it may take a while. The mills of the publishing world grind slowly, to be sure, so the latest issue probably doesn't yet reflect the taste of the current boss. If nothing else, however, it's got two new stories instead of the usual one. Thank goodness for small favors.
Cover art by Frank R. Paul.
One change that hasn't yet happened is using new cover art. This issue recycles the back cover of the July 1945 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
Please excuse the faded, wrinkled, beat-up copy of the old magazine I had to use. Twenty-odd years haven't been kind to it. At least you can see the two big suns at the top and not just the two little ones to the side.
The fellow depicted above is none other than God. The God of the Bible, indeed, but also all the other deities. He hasn't checked on His creation for a while, and it seems to have been messed up by the Adversary, so he gets ready to take a look.
This version of the Almighty seems like a weary old man, wandering around His shabby surroundings, not sure what He should be doing. If you don't mind this kind of literary blasphemy, the main problem you'll have with this story is the fact that it comes to a dead stop when it becomes most interesting.
God never does take a look at things down below. It's almost like the first chapter of a much longer work.
Leiber is incapable of writing a bad sentence, of course, so it's not painful to read. I just wish there were more of it.
Three stars.
A Darkness in My Soul, by Dean R. Koontz
Also by Jones.
A fledgling writer — he's only had a couple of stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, both this year — offers this disturbing vision of the future.
After a quarter of a century and countless failures, a project to create superhuman beings has produced only two successes, if you can call them that. One is the main character, a outwardly normal man but with telepathic powers. The other is much more grotesque, a being that looks like a child with the face of a very old man. The latter is immensely intelligent, but his scientific discoveries are buried deep in his subconscious. The telepath dives into his mind in order to dig out vital information.
There's a lot more to the story than that. We've got the protagonist's Freudian sessions with a computer therapist, revealing the meaning of his dreams. The main character has a relationship with a woman who writes scandalous books. The author uses typographic tricks and symbolic fantasy sequences, adding more than a touch of New Wave writing. There's one heck of an ending.
The author displays great skill at creating an eerie mood. Maybe he should try writing out-and-out horror stories instead of creepy science fiction. In any case, this complex nightmare of neurosis shows great ambition for a newcomer.
From the May/June 1953 issue of the magazine comes this wry tale of the afterlife.
Cover art by W. T. Mars.
A teenage girl is dying. She's not at all upset about this, because she's absolutely certain she's going to enjoy the bliss of Heaven. For some reason, the ghost of a slightly older woman appears.
Illustration by Charles J. Berger.
The dead woman has taken a peek at the various paradises created by men, and she doesn't much care for them. This changes the dying girl's attitude.
This featherweight jape has a pleasing feminist aspect to it. (Despite the fact that the ghost is wearing only a brassiere and underpants.) Like the Leiber and the Koontz, it may raise the hackles of folks who take their religious faith very seriously.
As I mentioned last time, this serialized novel first appeared in three issues of Amazing Stories back in 1932. Dig through the archives if you want to see the covers of those old magazines.
Illustration by Leo Morey.
Last time we saw how civilization fell apart when all metals dissolved into dust. Some folks set up strongholds in the country, where they could defend themselves against packs of desperate criminals.
This half of the novel wanders around quite a bit. One sequence involves a group of female physicians and other professionals living on their own. As soon as one of the male characters meets them, you know we're going to have a love story. You may not predict the fact that it involves a tiger.
In the most bizarre plot development, a horde of Tartars shows up, and we get a big battle scene. There's an explanation, of sorts, for how these landlocked nomadic warriors wound up in New England. The way the good guys defeat the bad guys is implausible, to say the least.
Eventually, our heroes figure out how to turn the dust back into metal. You'd think somebody would have discovered the secret long before, but what do I know. Interestingly, the main motivation for producing small amounts of metal is to make surgical instruments so childbirth isn't so dangerous for mother and baby.
The author seems to believe that city life is inherently corrosive to the human spirit, and suggests that society was ready to fall apart even if metal things hadn't crumbled away. I'm not convinced.
Overall, I didn't find the development of the apocalyptic premise as interesting as its introduction.
This early work from a writer who is now something of a household name comes from the December 1944 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by James B. Settles.
A handful of the people killed when a German submarine destroyed their passenger ship turn into water-breathing ghosts or zombies, for lack of a better word. They spend their non-lives preventing Nazi subs from attacking Allied ships.
Illustration by Arnold Kohn.
This is something more than just wartime propaganda, although there's certainly some of that. The undead characters have their own motives and personalities. The most interesting are two women, one of whom is out for revenge, gleefully killing Germans, the other trying to protect the man she loves, who is sailing on a convoy.
We don't get much of the Bradbury touch, love it or hate it, with the exception of a few metaphors here and there. If I hadn't see the author's name, I never would have suspected it was his work.
Three stars.
They Fly So High, by Ross Rocklynne
This outer space yarn comes from the pages of the June 1952 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Walter Popp.
A spaceman holds a Mad Scientist prisoner aboard his vessel. The taunting genius has already rigged the ship to blow up, so the two of them go flying off towards Jupiter in their spacesuits.
Illustration by David Stone.
What follows is a strange odyssey on the surface (more or less) of the giant planet, and a change in the relationship between the two characters.
This is an odd story. It combines melodramatic space opera, vistas of a bizarre environment, and philosophical dialogues. I suppose the author is trying to say something about human thinking while telling a rattling good yarn, but much of its meaning escapes me.
This tale of love, death, and biology comes from the Fall 1952 issue of the magazine.
Cover art by Leo Summers.
The plot begins in gruesome fashion, as a couple are murdered by street thugs. A coroner (male) reveals the weird thing about the bodies to a reporter (female). (I mention their sexes because it's relevant to the story.)
The two victims are Siamese twins, bound together at the chest. (You may have already guessed that this isn't quite true.) When an eerie, inhuman scream draws the protagonists out of the building, somebody destroys the bodies in a blazing fire.
Also by David Stone.
The coroner meets a woman with whom he shares an intimate but nonsexual evening. The reporter has the same kind of encounter with a man, but we only get to hear about it second-hand. What does this have to do with the bodies? And why should the reader run to the dictionary and look up the various definitions of the word syzygy?
This is an intriguing work that always keeps the reader's interest. It's a mystery, a romance, and good science fiction to boot. Maybe you should stir in a touch of horror as well. In any case, it's a solid work from one of the masters.
The magazine finishes with this time travel story, reprinted from the August/September 1953 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Gaylord Welker.
A guy goes back in time to prevent a childhood friend from drowning. The weird thing is that there's no sign of his own younger self, and even his mother denies such a child exists. When he returns to his own time, the scientist he worked with claims he never saw him before. What the heck is going on?
Illustration by Ernie Barth.
The author makes up some pretty weird rules about time travel. I have to admit they're unique, even if they don't make a lot of sense to me. The ending is gruesome enough for any horror fan.
That's an overstatement, although I am hopeful that the new editor will bring some freshness to a magazine that has been dragging its feet for a while. This issue doesn't show any evidence of a major shift in policy yet. Time will tell. Meanwhile, just having double the usual amount of new fiction is enough to make me want to be kind to small animals.
I can't tell you anything about this drawing, which follows the Sturgeon story, except that it doesn't appear with the original publication of that work. It's probably a reprint from somewhere, but I have no evidence for that one way or another.
According to the very latest Science Fiction Weekly (formerly Degler), F&SF has failed to gain readership in the last several years. Contrast this to the steady gains (and 2x readership in general) that Analog has enjoyed.
Van Arnam ascribes this stagnation not to the inherent superiority of Campbell's mag, but the fact that F&SF just can't get the same kind of distribution that the other mags enjoy. The owners of Fantastic and Amazing benefit from having two mags to use as leverage. Fred Pohl has three, sort of. And Analog is put out by Condé Nast, which means newsstands get Analog as part of a larger package including big deal pubs like Vogue.
So the question becomes this: would F&SF score better with the fans if distribution was no longer a factor? In other words, is F&SF a better mag than the rest? Let's look at this month's issue and find out!
I always enjoy stories that mix magic with technology, and this piece by David Redd does so quite well. The setting is distant world with a steep axial tilt and a long orbit. Thus, for decades of its solar sojourn, whole swaths of the planet are in perpetual day or night.
Humans came to this world and drove away, enslaved, or slaughtered the natives of the northern polar continent when it was in sunlight. They built cities, exploited the land, and in general behaved like the expansionistic menace we so often are. Then the night came again…
As of the beginning of the tale, the dryads, gnomes, fur spirits, oreads, elves, and trolls, have lived in peace for some time, mining the abandoned human colony for metallic treasures under the endless starry night. But the serpent is returning to paradise: Josef Somes, a human from the southern lands, is trudging north in search of valuable "life-rock", and he doesn't care who he has to kill to get it.
The hero of our story is a the White Lady, a dryad. Her companions, a stolid, axe-wielding gnome, two fur spirits, and a cronish oread, form a squad whose mission is to dispatch the human before he can defile the fairy Homeground.
There is a lovely world here, and an unusual storytelling perspective. If the story has any fault, it is the rather prosaic language and somewhat shallow treatment. I feel Thomas Burnett Swann could have raised the material up to five stars.
It's still a fine piece, though, and an excellent opening to the issue. Four stars.
The Saga of DMM, by Larry Eisenberg
The synthetic drug, DMM, is not only the tastiest substance in existence, it is the richest food imaginable. And it's a powerful aphrodesiac. It soon proves more popular than pot, acid, reds, whites, and heroin comined. A wave of fornicative obesity sweeps the world, with catastrophic results.
Pretty frivolous satire. Not really worth your time. Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Brain Wave, by Jennifer Palmer and Stuart Palmer
A male college student is mentally contacted by a comely alien woman from from Alpha Centauri. A friendly correspondence ensues.
I find I have very little to say about this up-front story, which reads like some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy until the end, whereupon it has a rather silly twist conclusion (that I suppose is meant to be horrific, but it's really not).
"Mildly diverting fluff" covers it. It straddles the 2/3 star barrier, but I think it ends up on the poorer end of the spectrum.
Cerberus, by Algis Budrys
Marty McCay is an amiable ad man, legendary for his mildness. His method for coping with his wife's flagrant infidelities is to tell shaggy dog tales with a punning punchline. In the end, we see that the butt of his jokes was always himself.
There's no science fiction in this tale. What there is, however, is some excellent writing. Four stars.
Noise, by Ted Thomas
In this month's science fact vignette, I thought Thomas was going to propose a sonic weapon. Instead, he outlines the invention of selective ear-plugs that would blot out the bad noise, but admit desired sounds.
One of his better pieces, which is to say, it doesn't stink.
Three stars.
To Behold the Sun, by Dean R. Koontz
The first expedition to the sun is about to take off, crewed by three regular humans and a cybernetic ship-master. Unfortunately, said cyborg is still shellshocked from losing his beloved in a fire several years prior. And what is the sun if not a big ball of fire?
Behold feels as if Koontz read a bunch of Zelazny tales and thought, "I can do this too!" Well, he can't. His writing is hamfisted, the science is silly, and the situation is contrived.
Besides, if they wanted a safe trip to the sun, they should have waited until nighttime…
Wilson not only provides the cartoons for each issue of F&SF, he is also an author. Mandarin is the story of a pulp villain increasingly taking control of his creator's work, ultimately departing from the printed page into reality.
Reasonably well done, and arguably more successful than his drawings. Three stars.
The First Metal, by Isaac Asimov
I rate an Asimov article by its memorability and quotability. The good Doctor's discussion of the earliest knowledge of metals was pretty interesting, and I ended up summarizing the piece to my family on one of our morning walks. The only real fault with the piece is that it would have been well served by a couple more pages.
Four stars.
The Chelmlins, by Leonard Tushnet
A droll piece about how the Jewish version of the Leprechauns helps keep the schlemiels of the Polish city of Chelm from becoming schlimazels. It's the kind of story Avram Davidson might write, though had he done so, it may well have been funnier. Chelmlins isn't bad, but it doesn't quite hit the mark hard enough.
Finally, the latest story in the Vermillion Sands setting. These tales of the rather surreal artists colony tend to be my favorite by Ballard. This particular one involves a troupe of cloud-sculptors: glider pilots who use silver iodide and custom aircraft to create ephemeral images in the sky. They are hired by a bitter widow possessed of extreme vanity, with deadly results.
If you've read one story, you've read them all. They universally involve desolate landscapes, a dreamy sense of time, and have a sour undertone. This was dramatic stuff when Ballard first came on the scene early in the decade, but it's getting a bit played out.
Three stars.
Hung jury
This issue turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag. There are some stand-out pieces and some duds. Most interestingly, we have a several stories that would have been well served by being written by greater talents. On the other hand, rawer authors have to start somewhere, so I'd hate to deny them their chance to improve.
All in all, this issue would probably keep me subscribing, particularly at the discounted holiday rates. I don't know if the quality demonstrated in the December 1967 F&SF would be sufficient to displace other mags for the Best Magazine Hugo, however, even if distribution were not an issue.
It's all academic, in the end. As long as you order directly from the company, it doesn't really matter how many newsstands the magazine ends up on. So tell your friends and get a subscription today. You just might help F&SF outlast all of its competitiors!
I think it's safe to say that, for almost twenty years there have been three Big Science Fiction Magazines. Each aims at a specific branch of the scientification fandom. For instance, John Campbell's Analog (formerly Astounding) is at once the hardest of the Big Mags, focusing on near-future gizmo tech or sweeping galactic epics with a scientific core, and also one of the softest, given John's weakness for psi stories.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction covers the literary end of the STF spectrum, and it also veers into the outright fantastical (q.v. the masthead). Galaxy navigates a sort of middle path between the two.
But the most recent issue of FS&F had me wondering exactly which magazine I was reading again, for this month, Ed Ferman's publication feels a lot like Campbell's. Perhaps writers have finally answered FS&F's plea for harder works, or maybe Ferman finally had a sufficient number of such pieces to fill (most of) an issue. Either way, it's an interesting departure, especially with the increased art throughout. Does it work? Let's find out!
by Ronald Walotsky
Nuts, Bolts, and Dragons
Reduction in Arms, by Tom Purdom
My good friend Tom Purdom offers up this fascinating piece set in the early '80s. The superpowers have bound themselves by the Treaty of Peking to curtail the development and implementation of terrible weapons. But there is always the suspicion that one side or another is working on some version of a "ninety-five plus virus"–one that will wipe out most of a non-incoluated population.
Sure enough, American agents are tipped off when a Soviet biologist, supposed to be a patient in a specialized "role-play" treatment center, is found cavorting with ladies at a bar 30 miles away. A raid is authorized. Between hostile Soviets and rogue team members, the investigation quickly becomes fraught with peril.
Tom himself has this to say about the tale:
After I got out of the army in 1961 I became very interested in arms control and disarmament. I did a lot of reading on the subject and ended up writing two articles for the Kiwanis magazine (a good middle market for a new writer). An opportunity to write an article for Playboy didn't work out but I got to interview some of the people I'd been reading.
Fred Pohl suggested I write a story on the subject for Galaxy. I didn't think I could handle the technical stuff needed for a story about detecting nuclear weapons so I decided to write about biological weapons which seemed like they might be the next big threat. Microbiology labs, in addition, can be hidden in all sorts of small spaces. I decided to focus on a treaty banning secret research because I had come to the conclusion we tended to run the arms race against ourselves. Our people thought up a possibility and we had to work on it because the Russians might be working on it. If we could determine they weren't, both sides could avoid another cycle in the arms race.
I picked a mental health facility as the hiding place because it raised interesting human and moral issues. The story revolves around ethical and political issues instead of a duel between inspection technologies and evasion technologies. The programmed environment therapy seemed like a natural extension of Pavlovian conditioning.
Fred Pohl rejected the story. My agent, Scott Meredith, tried it on Redbook and Esquire with near misses at both places. The fiction editor at Esquire said he wanted to buy it but he was overruled by higher ups.
The story was a novelette, about ten thousand words. Playboy said they'd buy it if I could cut it in half. I did but they rejected it. Ed Ferman at F&SF liked the short version but felt it needed to be longer. So I expanded it to its original length. He bought it and now it's the August cover story. One of the peak moments in my writing career, so far.
The story grew out of intense, solid research and some deep thinking on the whole problem of arms control. When I finished it, I felt I had summarized and dramatized the key issues and dilemmas. Perhaps the sweeping treaty in the story isn't very plausible. We live in a time when the advance of technology makes serious arms control seem a necessity–so necessary even the politicians will have to see it. Science fiction explores What might happen if? The If may seem unlikely, but is still worth exploring.
I originally called the story "1980". Ed Ferman asked for a change and I thought Reduction in Arms had a nice military clatter. I also suggested War and Peace and A Farewell to Arms but he preferred Reduction in Arms.
There's no question that Tom has gotten a feather in his cap for the placement of this tale. I will say that, although I found the concept interesting, it suffers for being an action piece told in third-person by a largely uninvolved party. Visceral immediacy would have given the story more punch.
Still, it was interesting to see a Reynolds-esque thriller outside of Analog— and without the nardy slang Reynolds employs.
Three stars.
by Gahan Wilson
The Conflict, by Ilya Varshavsky
Here is an import from the Soviet Union, about the large and small scale strife between humans and their increasingly sapient "servants".
I think it loses something in translation. Two stars.
The Baron's Dog, by L. J. T. Biese
When an unemployed governess in Italy is offered 25,000 lira a month to walk a Transylvanian wolfhound, what's a girl to think? Especially when the employer is tall, dark, handsome…and strictly enjoins against photography of his pet?
I found this tale delightful, such a nice contrast from all the creeping horror that such a setup normally would have entailed. It's not quite Analogian, but it is good. And if L.J.T. Biese isn't a woman, I'll eat my hat.
Four stars.
Soft Come the Dragons, by Dean R. Koontz
Koontz is a brand new author, and he offers up the tale of a far-off world, the miners who live in fear upon it, and the gossamer dragons that turn beholders to stone. It's all rather metaphorical and lyrical and not quite sensical, rather as if Koontz spent the night reading Zelazny's works and then tried his hand at it.
I'd say it works more than it doesn't, but Koontz' rawness definitely shows through. Three stars.
Earthwoman, by Reginald Bretnor
Will Adamson, born on a distant world, is human in all qualities save one: he and his race are possessed of telepathy, knit into a consciousness collective. He is sent to Earth to discern how it is that we can love without the possibility of true connection. And if we truly be human, is there an innate telepathic skill just waiting to be awakened?
Bretnor usually write silly stories or bad puns, so this more serious piece is a welcome change. I found it a touch too affected, but otherwise enjoyable. And definitely something that could have appeared in Analog.
Three stars.
by Ed Emshwiller
Mosquito, by Theodore L. Thomas
F&SF's story seeder suggests mosquitos might be laden with vitamins and inoculants such that their bite becomes a beneficial distribution method. As usual, he misses some important aspects of his invention. To wit, mosquito bites are not controllable in distribution or quantity. And even if they provide needed drugs and nutrients, they still aren't pleasant to receive.
Two stars.
Bugs, by Charles L. Harness
Speaking of bugs, Charles L. Harness (who used to team up with Thomas under the pen name Leonard Lockhard) has authored this story of living bugs employed as espionage bugs.
There's a lot of "as you know" explanations, and the smugness with which the Americans subvert their KGB counterparts is pure Analog.
Mildly interesting, but just a bit too glib as well as prolix. Two stars.
The Bubble, by J. W. Schutz
The destruction of humanity's first and only space station has spooked the government, and now they've decided to pull the plug on space investment. Deane Aircraft, the largest space contractor, is faced with a pivotal decision: retool back to making conventional vehicles, or become the first private space presence. The linchpin to the success of the operation isn't Theodor Deane, President of the company, nor the thousands of engineers he employs. It's certainly not Theodor's greedy wife, Lillian, nor her paramour, Briggs, who is also Theodor's financial wiz.
It's Georgia Lighton, Theodor's secretary, who comes up with all the brilliant, cost-saving ideas.
The whole thing reads like a cross between Silverberg's Regan's Planet and a soap opera. Again, very Analog.
Not great, but Analog. Three stars.
Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism, by Thomas M. Disch
The first man on the Moon, Mikhail Andreivich Karkhov, is dying. Does he die for science? For love? For the state? Or something else entirely?
A beautiful, moving piece, made all the more poignant by the recent twin tragedies that claimed the lives of three astronauts and one cosmonaut.
Five stars.
by Ed Emshwiller
Argent Blood, by Joe L. Hensley
A man is being treated in a ward for the incurably insane. Between fits of "disturbance" he begins to mistrust the charitable nature of his doctor and nurse. But he has a plan…
A good, atmospheric piece. Three stars.
Kaleidoscope in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov
In a rare return to topics astronomical, Dr. A. submits a nonfiction piece on the moons of Mars, and how these extremely low flying rocks would appear to a surface observer. If, indeed, they are even suitably placed to see them, for unlike our Moon, Phobos and Deimos orbit so close to their planet that Martian pole-dweller could not see them.
Good stuff. Four stars.
Quick with His Hands, by Avram Davidson
Capping things off, this vignette of sibling rivalry on Mars, ably told and with a tearjerking finale.
Four stars.
Doing the math
So, did F&SF's experiment in apery succeed? Well, there were high points and low points, but the overall impression I was left with was favorable. We'll just have to compare it to the real thing in just over a week to see if Brand X beat the competition!
(Speaking of kooky stunts, it looks like F&SF is joining forces with several other organizations to hold a writing contest. I wish them the best of luck, although the last time a magazine (Galaxy in that case) did this, in the early '50s, they got bupkis, and Fred Pohl had to write as a novice under a pseudonym to give them anything worth publishing.)
![[April 8, 1969] Distractions (May 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690408cover-428x372.jpg)
![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers-672x372.jpg)
![[December 2, 1968] Forget It (January 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1969-01-IF-cover-560x372.jpg)
Leonid Brezhnev after addressing the Soviet Central Committee earlier this year.
Just some random art not associated with any of the stories. Art by Chaffee![[August 2, 1968] Dreams and Nightmares (September 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/IF-1968-09-Cover-672x372.jpg)
Red Guard rebels march in Shanghai last year.
Those are supposed to be radiators, not rocket thrusters. Art by McKenna![[July 22, 1968] Shades and Shadows (August 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/680722cover-664x372.jpg)
![[June 26, 1968] To far off lands (July 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/680620cover-451x372.jpg)
![[December 10, 1967] Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (January 1968 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/COVER-ART-3-672x372.jpg)
![[November 22, 1967] Being #3… (December 1967 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/671122cover-653x372.jpg)
![[July 20, 1967] An Analog of <i>Analog</i> (August 1967 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/670720cover-659x372.jpg)
