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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 20, 1964] Apocalypses and other trivia (Galactoscope)

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[Don't miss your chance to get your copy of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  If you like the Journey, you'll love this book (and you'll be helping us out, too!)]

[This month's Galactoscope features two global catastrophes, two collections, and four authors you've almost certainly heard of!]


by Jason Sacks

The Penultimate Truth, by Philip K. Dick

Like many fans, I first became really aware of Philip K. Dick after he won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel for his remarkable The Man in the High Castle. That book dazzled in its chronicle of an alternate history in which the Nazis and Japanese won World War II (which opened up many areas of thought and conversation for me and my friends) as well as in its brilliant world-building and the fascinating, multifaceted characters at the heart of Dick's award-winner.

High Castle was also an amazingly tight novel, packing a dense plot into its mere 240 pages. As many of us Dick fans have learned, not all of his works are quite so tightly plotted. I adored his Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney from last year, but those books tended to both delight and annoy in their meandering, nearly stream-of-consciousness styles.

The newest Philip K. Dick novel, The Penultimate Truth (just out in paperback from Belmont) fills a bit of the gap between his ’62 masterpiece and the challenging ’63 books. This thoroughly delightful book wanders a bit but always held me in its comforting grasp.

The Penultimate Truth is shambolic and episodic, but that approach serves the work well. Its main characters are living shambolic lives, which Dick depicts as full of odd episodes which occasionally have great and beautiful moments of transcendence, even in the post-apocalyptic wasteland in which the book is set.

Note that this review will reveal elements of the book, comments that "spoil", if you will, so skip down to the next review if you love surprises in your fiction.

In the future world of this book, much of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, nicknamed anthills, in which they build weapons and medical devices for the nuclear war they believe is ravaging the surface of the Earth. When Nick St. James, the president of one anthill, makes his way to the surface, St. James discovers his people have been lied to. The world on the surface has survived nuclear devastation and has emerged into a unique and odd civilization. Needless to say, the revelation of the relatively peaceful world surface changes nearly everything.

What makes this novel so special, though, is that those revelations don't change the way St. James views his world. He doesn’t become a noble crusader for truth or a vengeful destroyer of the new civilization. Instead our protagonist goes the opposite way of most heroic leads. Instead of rebelling, he goes out of his way to allow the world to stay in its current state. He will not let the truth of his world change life in the anthill. The penultimate truth of the story is the truth behind the nuclear war. But the ultimate truth is more powerful: it is the special bond society creates, the relationships created and enduring for decades, and the lies and half-truths that are necessary to perpetuate that society.

This description makes The Penultimate Truth sound heady and brainy, and it is filled with a intriguing level of intelligence and wisdom about human nature. But it is also has the several elements we have come to expect from Dick’s finest work.

First and foremost, this is an exciting story, with scenes of high adventure, escapes and shootouts which keep the reader turning the page. There are mysteries piled upon mysteries, characters who shift and change as the story proceeds only to have them revealed in ways for which the reader was foreshadowed but for which he likely could not have anticipated.

Secondly, this is a wise and fascinating study of human nature. The Penultimate Truth is about jealousy and lust for power balanced with trust and love for family and friends. It sets stability and chaos in opposite sides of the metaphorical coin in ways few other novels of any type have explored, and in doing so shows the power of novelistic science fiction in the hands of a master of the medium.

Thirdly, this book seems to explode with ideas, from the anthills (an idea Dick has explored in some of his short fiction such as “Second Variety”) to the vast demesnes in which the surface dwellers live, to the vast conspiracies used to keep ordinary people following their leaders. In fact, it is in that last set of ideas that Dick falls down a bit for me. I had trouble imagining a government systematically lying to its people in the way described here. In a world in which leaders are elected by the governed, there is no reason for leaders to lie to their people. [Oh, my sweet country mouse…(Ed.)]

And the last element I’ve come to love in Dick’s work comes from the very end of the book. In my mind there are two endings to this novel, and in fact I won’t reveal them here so you can experience them yourself. But I’m curious how many readers wish The Penultimate Truth had ended with the deeply ironic penultimate chapter as its conclusion as opposed to those who preferred the redemptive final chapter.

Throw in some gorgeously descriptive language and you have one of the finest science fiction novels of 1964. I hope Mr. Dick brings home another Hugo next year from London.

4.5 stars


by Gideon Marcus

Tongues of the Moon, by Philip J. Farmer

Three years ago, just before John Boston started reviewing Amazing for us, Philip Jose Farmer had a short story called Tongues of the Moon.  The tale began with a literal bang: the Axis of southern nations launched a preemptive strike on the Communist Northern Hemisphere (including a subjugated United States kept pacified with skull-mounted pain inducers!), and the entire world was destroyed.  At the same time, the "Axes" attacked their enemies throughout the solar system — from Mercury to the Mars, Copernicus to Callisto.  Our hero, a scientist named Broward, is caught in a crossfire at what was supposed to be a lunar peace conference.  Together with the monomaniacal American, Scone, he manages to escape the fight and deactivate the central pain induction center on the Moon.  Now free agents, Scone finds himself the leader of some of the very few human beings left alive.  Can he knit together a new human race from the four hundred survivors representing dozens of nations and ideologies?  Can a viable culture be created when men outnumber women 4:1?

These are all excellent questions, and I'm not surprised that Farmer decided to expand his novelette into a full novel.  Unfortunately, what could have been a fascinating sociological study is subverted in favor of a fairly pedestrian adventure story and a series of treasure hunts.

In the expanded portion of the book, Broward is dispatched to the ruined Earth to find a planet-destroying bomb.  The plan is to destroy the last significant Axis presence in the system, their colony on Mars, so that the Moon is safe.  But Broward recognizes paranoia when he sees it, and he is reluctant to carry out Scone's plan, which will cause yet more decimation of the human population.  He also, understandably so, has issues with Scone's plan to condemn the remaining women to forced multiple marriages.  And so begins a merry excursion — to the caves of Siberia, the undersea domes of the Mediterranean, the vastness of outerspace, the tunnels of Mars.  Tongues never stops to take a breath, and each sequence is more or less self-contained.  The most interesting bit involves the Siberian expedition, when Broward takes along as co-pilot the last Jew in the world (and probably the last person of Japanese extraction, too).  In this section are tantalizing hints of what the story might have been.  Alas, all development is tossed for more running and chasing.

It has been said of Farmer that he is "always almost good", which is not nearly as nice as "almost always good."  This latest book continues the trend.  Someday he'll make a masterpiece.  Until then, he's just a decent writer who can never quite deliver.

3.5 stars


by Rosemary Benton

Ace Double: "The Million Year Hunt" by Kenneth Bulmer and "Ships to the Stars" by Fritz Leiber

Ace Double novels are always a treat. Even though they are largely reprints of stories from the 1950s I always feel like I have rediscovered something special when I pick up one of these books at the bookstore. This month's release features titles by veteran authors Fritz Leiber and Kenneth Bulmer. Given the styles of each author I was intrigued to see how they would read back to back. Sadly to say, this was not one of the better lineups from Ace.

"The Million Year Hunt" by Kenneth Bulmer

Kenneth Bulmer's contribution to this month's Ace Double follows the adventures of a scrap yard worker turned savior of the human race. The story begins as we drop in on the aftermath of a prank pulled by protagonist Arthur Ross Carson, a mischievous young colonist on a back-water planet with few prospects. In short order he finds himself contending with the unjust killing of his fiancé Lucy, startling news of his parentage, and the piteous million-year mission of an alien conscious that enters his body. This is a lot to unwrap within less than 150 pages, and that's not even the full extent of the plot. Bulmer goes on to reveal a slew of converging political schemes to control the universe, including a program to selectively breed a successor to lead the intergalactic police force known as the Galactic Guard.

I felt like I was reading a much larger story that had been brutally and awkwardly chopped down to fit a page count limit. Up to the very last sentence the story is rife with major plot points that are not resolved, gawky transitions of emotion within the cast of characters, and plot twists that feel last minute and cheap. I can't overstate the issue that lies with the jerking sensation the reader gets as the story shifts from scene to scene. So awkward and halting was the pace that I just couldn't believe Bulmer was the one to give it a final proof read before sending it to publication. There was just no way a man as prolific as him could have been satisfied with this story, a public presentation by which he would be judged as a writer, going to press in the state it's in.

If "The Million Year Hunt" is indeed the butchered result of a much larger manuscript, then the most tragic victims of its murder were the emotional transitions of the characters and the quirky, adventurous and lighthearted atmosphere that was so desperately trying to take hold. The easy and funny dialogue between Arthur Ross Carson and the alien conscious that strapped itself to him nervous system is very entertaining to read. Their banter actually comprises some of the best scenes in this story. Instead of clunky exposition their conversations dynamically teased out information on their respective pasts, personalities, and surroundings.

If only Bulmer could have let the characters be themselves stumbling through space on adventures loosely tied to an end goal, specifically Carson's mission of revenge and his origin as the "savior" of the Galactic Guard, then this would have been a fantastic story. Unfortunately in its current state "The Million Year Hunt" is not a story that should have made it to print.

[Apparently, The Million Year Hunt is a fix-up of sorts, created from Scarlet Denial in Science Fiction Adventures No. 26, and Scarlet Dawn in Science Fiction Adventures No. 28. Both came out in 1962, published in the United Kingdom. The text is unchanged from the originals. (ed)]

"Ships to the Stars" by Fritz Leiber

On the other side of this Ace Double is a collection of six short stories by power house actor and novelist Fritz Leiber. In contrast to Bulmer's story, Leiber's "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", "The Big Trek", "The Enchanted Forest", "Deadly Moon", "The Snowbank Orbit", and "The Ship Sails at Midnight" are all well structured with tight plots and developed characters. Leiber's writing also demonstrates a more measured understanding of how to maintain the flow of a story. The tendency of his characters to repeatedly ponder the effects fear has on them makes them fragile, fallible, and very true to the duality of human nature. They want to know and see everything, but there are limits to what they can understand and what their eyes have access to. Leiber's inclusion of these relatable and basic human failings forms a tension in his stories that would be otherwise missing if he had held full faith in humanity's ability to rationalize everything with science.

The strongest short stories in this small selection were "The Big Trek" and "The Ship Sails at Midnight". In these two tales the reader can really see Leiber's deep connection with the gothic authors whom he draws inspiration from. In "The Big Trek" Leiber writes from the first-person perspective of a man joining a feverish march of bizarre beings from across the universe. The employment of fluctuating space and loose concepts of time's passage echoes William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland" (1908) and pretty much any piece by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator's awe and trepidation touched with excitement are also very similar to Arthur Machen's inner voice within "The White People" (1904).

Like H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, Leiber's strongest talent as a writer is keeping his characters grounded by the weighty truth that humans are far from the most powerful forces in the universe. All of Leiber's stories have humans sprinting to stay out of the way of some larger, stronger entity charging through with little interest in our species’ plight. "The Ship Sails at Midnight" best encapsulates this with its accompanying message that humans have such potential but are so readily self-sabotaging.

The joy of reading Fritz Leiber’s short stories greatly made up for my disappointment in Kenneth Bulmer’s novella. Fast paced, thoughtful and touching, they make this Ace Double a worthwhile purchase. I will absolutely be looking forward to reading more of his work in the future.

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




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 15, 1964] What are you thinking? (The Whole Man aka Telepathist by John Brunner; The Universe Against Her, by James H. Schmitz)

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[This month's Galactoscope features a pair of books with a common subject — but you already know what it is, if you possess the powers associated with that subject…]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Out of Many, One


Baby USA and the National Bird fighting over a ribbon.

It may seem highly eccentric to write a piece about a novel by a British writer with a title borrowed from a traditional motto of the United States. However, there is some method to my madness, as I have a few reasons for selecting the familiar phrase.

For one thing, the author prefaces his creation with a Latin quotation, and I thought I would return the favor. For another, the book is an example of the phenomenon, common in the science fiction world, known as the fix-up novel. That is to say, it incorporates previously published stories into a single work. Last but not least, the phrase fits not only the theme of telepathy, with multiple minds merging, but also the main character's transformation from a shattered personality into a complete human being.

I'll discuss each of these things at the proper time, but first let's take a look at mind-reading in science fiction, and at the career of the fellow who offers us the latest example.

Penny For Your Thoughts

Telepathy is a very common concept in SF; some might say, given John W. Campbell's promotion of ESP in his magazine, too common. There are far too many examples to discuss, so I'll just mention a couple of my favorites.


The first appearance of Bester's novel; cover art by Don Sibley.

Alfred Bester's novel The Demolished Man, the first book to win a Hugo, featured a man trying to get away with murder in a future full of telepathic police. This pyrotechnic work made use of typographic tricks to convey the sensation of reading another's thoughts.


The first appearance of Anderson's story; cover art by Emsh.

Poul Anderson's short story "Journeys End" dealt with the theme on a more intimate level, as two lonely telepaths find each other, only to have their meeting end in a bitterly ironic way.

These two works are, to my way of thinking, the finest examples of telepathy in fiction. Can anyone hope to match them? Meet a man who's willing to give it a try.

Precocious, Prolific, and Professional


From left to right, John Brunner and editor Ted Carnell at the 1957 Worldcon in London.

Born in the delightfully named English village of Preston Crowmarsh, John Kilian Houston Brunner began publishing science fiction at the tender age of seventeen. He hasn't stopped since, with nearly twenty books and well over fifty stories appearing under his name during the last dozen years. Many of his longer works appear in the famous Ace Double series. In general, he has a reputation as a producer of skillfully written, unambitious space operas.

Once in a while, he aims for something higher. The Traveler gave a glowing review to his novella Listen! The Stars! (Analog, July 1962) and I greatly enjoyed his novelette The Totally Rich (Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1963.) Will his latest novel reach the same level as these fine stories?

Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover


The American paperback.

Looking at the anonymous cover art, and the equally anonymous blurb that accompanies it, you might think this has something to do with a telepath and his beautiful companion, as they do something or other with some people in spacesuits. Nothing could be further from the truth.


The British hardcover.

My sources in the publishing industry gave me a peek at the version that will appear in the United Kingdom next year. The cover, which seems to combine photography with a simple drawing, is still anonymous, but less misleading. It's purely symbolic, of course, but at least it doesn't promise things it can't deliver.

When in Rome . . .

The novel begins with these lines from Virgil's Aeneid.

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.

My knowledge of Latin is limited to the Pig variety, so I did some research and found this translation.

The spirit within nourishes, and the mind that is diffused throughout the living parts of nature activates the whole mass and mingles with the vast body of the universe.

Apparently, the most important phrase in the quote is mens agitat molem (mind moves matter), because Brunner uses each of those three words as the title of a section of the novel. (By the way, mens agitat molem is also the motto of several institutes of higher learning, including the University of Oregon. Go Ducks!)

Born to Lose

First up is molem, or matter.

The plot begins with the birth of the protagonist, Gerald Howson, to an unmarried woman. The setting, judging by the names of the characters, is an English-speaking nation torn apart by a failed revolution. Armed United Nations peacekeepers restore order, with the help of telepaths. (In this future, the UN is much more powerful than it is today, and acts as a sort of world government.)

Gerald comes into the world with every disadvantage you can imagine. Not only is his mother without a husband, his father is a dead terrorist. He is also born severely disabled, with mismatched limbs and other deformities. Even as an adult, he is barely over four feet tall.

Gerald manages to survive a painful and impoverished childhood in a nation that is slowly returning to normalcy. By chance, he overhears a conversation between two criminals, and informs a rival crime boss. This earns him some money, but soon the police are after him. With nowhere else to go, he collapses in an empty lot.

A young woman, deaf and dumb since birth, cares for him. To his amazement, he can communicate with her telepathically. (It's implied that he actually read the minds of the criminals but thought he heard them speak.) His telepathy is so powerful, in fact, than even a telepath in a spaceship bound for Mars is able to detect his ability. UN forces soon arrive to take him to a place where he can make the best use of his powers.

Finding a Calling

The second section of the book carries the title agitat, or moves.

Gerald and the woman arrive in Ulan Bator. This city, the capital of Mongolia, is now an ultra-modern metropolis, and contains the headquarters of the World Health Organization. The woman's speech and hearing are restored, and she returns to her native land to lead a normal life. Unfortunately, the part of Gerald's brain that controls his body image prevents surgeons from correcting his deformities. He remains in Ulan Bator, under observation by UN officials.

Meanwhile, a crisis threatens the organization. It seems that some UN telepaths, under the strain of their responsibilities, suffer from a form of mental breakdown during which they escape into fantasy worlds. To make things much worse, they are able to take the minds of others into these imaginary realms as well. If not rescued, the people trapped in the illusion remain in a comatose state, to the point of death.

Gerald witnesses a formerly powerful mindreader, now weakened by a brain tumor, attempt to bring an important telepath out of a fantastic version of ancient Greece. When she fails, and cannot exit the dream world, he uses his own strength to save them both. This success inspires him to become a professional healer of damaged minds.

Physician, Heal Thyself

The third and last part of the novel, taking up half the book, is titled mens, or mind.

Unlike the first two sections, which are, as far as I can tell, completely new, this one makes use of two previously published novellas.

The first, City of the Tiger, appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy in 1958. It was reprinted in the American publication Fantastic Universe the next year.


Cover art by Brian Lewis, illustrating Brunner's story.


Anonymous cover art, not illustrating Brunner's story

The original version takes place almost entirely within an imaginary, magical version of the Orient. The reader doesn't find out that the whole thing is only a telepath's fantasy until the end. In the book, we know right away that Gerald enters the false reality in order to draw out a telepath who has deliberately entered it, and taken several people into it with him.

The second novella was published under the title The Whole Man in Science Fantasy in 1959. The same year, it appeared in Fantastic Universe as Curative Telepath.


Cover art by Brian Lewis, but not for Brunner's story.


More anonymous cover art, still not for Brunner's story.

As its original title suggests, this novella forms the heart of the novel. Gerald returns to his native land, in search of his roots. He meets the woman who used to be deaf and dumb, now married with children. The reunion is an awkward one. She envies his fame and glamorous life as an celebrated UN telepath. He envies her normal life and healthy body.

Gerald meets a group of university students at a tavern and goes to a party with them. They accept him as a peer, despite his deformity. While at the party, he meets an artist who is trying to combine music with visual media. He realizes that his abilities would be an enormous help to this project. He also saves a man's life in a particularly dramatic way, further convincing himself that he is a worthy member of society. At the end, Gerald is, at last, psychologically healthy. As the novel says, he is a whole man.

The Sum of its Parts

I believe this novel marks a turning point in Brunner's career. Although it contains melodramatic incidents, it is primarily concerned with the way in which the protagonist grows and changes. Some elements seem implausible, such as the notion that a certain part of the brain controls body image, and that this prevents surgical intervention. Overall, however, it is a realistic account of what telepathy might be like, a cautiously optimistic vision of a future world recovering from many challenges, and an acute psychological portrait of its main character. Expect it to be on the Hugo list next year.

Four stars.


A recent book on theology and psychology which nicely symbolizes Gerald's state of mind at the end of the novel. And the author's name is strikingly similar to the writer we've been discussing! Coincidence, or ESP?

[Continuing the skein of telepathy, we come to another "new" novel — unique in perspective, if lacking in execution…]

The virtues and vices of recycling


by Erica Frank

The Universe Against Her, by James H. Schmitz

James H. Schmitz writes, in two parts, the story of Telzey Amberdon, a 15-year-old genius in her second year of law school, with a Federation Councilwoman for a mother and a father who's an executive officer at an interplanetary bank. She also happens to be a powerful xenotelepath, able to communicate mentally with alien species as well as humans.

I was disappointed to discover this "novel" is very obviously two separate stories now just called "Part One" and "Part Two." In fact, you've seen them before: This "novel" has two parts that were previously published in Analog; "Novice" was from the June 1962 issue, and "Undercurrents" was in two parts, May and June 1964. No hint of the events from Part One spill into Part Two. Even the way Telzey thinks about her psionic powers changes between the two stories – in the first, she is trying to puzzle out "symbols" and how to interpret them; by the second, she's more familiar with her abilities.

In the first story, she discovers that her pet sabertooth tiger (not what it's called, but obviously what's intended) is part of a sentient species that's been hunted to near-extinction. In the second, the guardians of a friend from school are planning to murder the friend before she can inherit. The stories have several similarities: In both, her ability to read and persuade animals is a key part of the plot. In both, Telzey's parent gets involved and provides administrative and legal support. In both, Telzey shapes the emotions and mental focus of the people around her.

That last point is more interesting than most of the plot, especially of the second story, which rambled. It involved complex legal and government hassles that required several minor characters whose sole purpose was to expound on aspects of galactic law. (Does that sound needlessly elaborate and dull? It was!) That was boring; Telzey's discomfort with her mind- and personality-warping abilities was interesting. Unfortunately, after having brought up the topic, Telzey quickly rationalized that this was "the only way" to make her friend safe. Then she returned to trying to manipulate both the court and government agencies, because apparently in her galaxy, clear evidence that "This person is trying to kill someone" is not enough to lock them up.

I loved some of the ideas, but the execution was weak; the second story was especially convoluted. I agree with the Traveler's assessments of the stories, which you should see as I've no need to restate them here. As a whole for the book: Three stars if you love teen-focused stories; two stars otherwise.

[Thus ends our presentation of telepathic twins.  Next time… well, you already know what's coming, don't you?]

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




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Book

[July 18, 1964] Dog Day Crop (July's Galactoscope)

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by Gideon Marcus

Thank you for joining this month's edition of Galactoscope, where we plow through all the books that came out this most recent month of June/July 1964! Don't thank us; it's all part of the job…

(and if you found us at San Diego Comic-Con and can't figure out why we seem to be 55 years behind you, this should clear things up!)

Times Two

Time Travel has been a staple of the genre since before the genre had been formalized. H. G. Wells' The Time Machine is still a classic, and it was written last century. In the Journey's short tenure, we have encountered at least a dozen tales involving chronological trips, with notable books including John Brunner's Times without Number and Wallace West's River of Time, not to mention the stand-out tales, All you Zombies!, by Robert Heinlein (and his less stand-out tale, By His Bootstraps) and The Deaths of Ben Baxter, by Robert Sheckley.

This month, we have two variations on the theme, both invoking time in their title:

Time Tunnel, by Murray Leinster

As the specter of nuclear war threatens to manifest, a post-graduate student named Harrison is summering in Paris, waiting for school to resume. By chance, he runs across Pepe, a fiery Spaniard (are there any other kinds in books?) and fellow former student who reunites Harrison with Professor Carroll, late of the archaeology department of Harrison and Pepe's alma mater. It turns out that Carroll has made a tremendous discovery: he as learned how to bridge the gulf between eras. No special machine is required; one must simply find a sizeable hunk of cast metal that has been left alone since the time of its forger.

Carroll's private time tunnel goes back exactly 160 years to the France of Napoleon's time. Thus far, the professor has made little use of it, save to satisfy his wife's pecuniary avarice. She has enlisted her brother to start a little shop that sells perfectly preserved antiques pinched from 1804. But when the Harrison learns that someone from 1964 is undertaking to sell secrets of the future to the scientists of the past, he and his compatriots must stop the interference before history changes for good. In addition, they must complete their mission before rising international tensions instigate a nuclear war in the present, sealing off (and perhaps destroying) the time tunnel.

It's a great setup! We've seen fixed tunnels to the past, as recently as in River in Time, but they aren't common in the genre. I find them particularly compelling as they make points in the past more tangible destinations. One can't pick historical highlights at random; they have to soak in the local atmosphere one second at a time, just like the natives. I've even toyed with the idea of making a fanzine with that conceit, perhaps with a time shift of (to pick a length at random) 55 years. That would put me in 1909 with plenty of time to capture the pulp era as it happens.

Something to think about.

The problem with Tunnel is the same problem that has bedeviled most of his latest stuff — it's too long. Indeed, Tunnel is about three times longer than the story calls for, in large part because the author repeats everything he says several times throughout the book. Heck, Harrison's party doesn't even get to old France until halfway through the book, and then it mostly stays to the back roads and farms that have not significantly changed in "nearly two centuries" as Leinster insists on calling about a century-and-a-half.

It's too bad. There's an exciting novella here under all the chaff.

Three stars.

The Time Twisters, by J. Hunter Holly

The newest book by Ms. (the J. stands for Joan) Holly has the opposite problem: the writing is quite compelling, but the story doesn't work.

The time is present day, the protagonists the Garrison family — Rick, Lynn, and six year-old daughter Tina. We start with the family already ill at ease. A neighborhood boy has gone missing, and shortly before, a big brown patch appeared in his yard. Then, while touring an amusement park to distract themselves, a cluster of bright lights appear in the sky, eerie and menacing.

Over the course of the next few days, more children disappear. Tina longs to be allowed outside, affected by a sirensong the adults cannot hear. A monster appears on the block, terrifying the neighborhood. The Army appears and sets up camp around the small Great Lakes town. Throughout it all, Rick is suspicious of his new boarder, Marcus Jantz. That is, until Marcus helps defeat the monster, which turns out to be a tin-plated prop. Obviously, the alien invasion shtick is a ruse, a cover for something else. But what?

It turns out (as has been teased since the beginning, but it takes Rick a while to learn) that Marcus is actually an agent from the future. In this future, aliens have appeared, demanding millions of their children. But humanity of the future is near-sterile, thanks to an overabundance of nuclear energy. Their only source for children is the past, hence a series of raids throughout history. Indeed, the Pied Piper legend has roots in truth, a kidnapping strike from a century long distant. In the end, Rick follows the last child to be abducted, his own, into the future, where he makes a desperate plea to Marcus to let their children go.

The Time Twisters is a very quick read by a talented author (who, like Andre Norton, stays out of the genre magazines). The characters are nicely drawn, the situations nicely tense. Unfortunately, the plot is absurd. Any people with time travel have already won any war they might face. Moreover, surely the indiscriminate removal of ancestors must destroy countless future generations.

Still, I was entertained on my latest trip to Japan, and thus, I give this very flawed piece a full three stars.

And now, I turn things over to Mark Yon, who contributes the second half of this month's column…

Ace Double F-275: No Truce with Terra, by Philip E. High; and The Duplicators, by Murray Leinster


by Mark Yon

My latest read is one that I had delivered to me from my friends in the States. As it is an Ace Double, and being someone never to knowingly avoid a cliché, I must say that it is a book of two halves (although The Duplicators is a little longer than the other story): as befits a double book, they are quite different in tone and style.

No Truce with Terra

No Truce with Terra examines the premise of what might happen if Earth was invaded — not by the traditional all-guns-blazing War of the Worlds style invasion but instead by stealth. Written by Brit Philip E. High, it begins quite normally but soon becomes strange. Scientist Lipscombe goes home from work one evening to find that his fibroplastic home will not allow him entrance. All attempts to break-in are thwarted.

Furthermore, over the next few days the house changes shape and unusual objects appear to grow around the outside of the house. There’s some electric blue grass and a plant that gives those who touch it a near-lethal electric shock, for example. Impressions are that they are alien, a means of colonising the planet before taking overall control, a bridgehead before the full-blown invasion.

Michael Lipscombe and his colleague Peter Collard become part of the scientific observation group. Then the “house” is surrounded by the British Army and attacked, the house retaliates – “they have set the dog on us” is the summary from Lipscombe.

Lipscombe and Collard are evacuated to a research centre in the North of Scotland as the alien threat spreads. With their mentor Stanley Dyson, obviously “one of the greatest names in science”, they determine that the invading force is a form of “natural electronic life” which has evolved naturally on another planet.

The scientists create a contraption that warps the fabric of space time and allows the humans to be granted access to the alien world. They do so, believing that such an action would create an escape route for humans and also allow them to create a secret base that can organise retaliatory actions.

All of this is basically World War Two re-written, of course. It’s interesting, if a little predictable, beginning with lots of stoic scientists discussing things and then frantic battles between the military and the aliens.

What we also get is the alien perspective, that they are willing to discuss terms of future contact through Collard, who they select as an emissary between the two races. The aliens are odd but not the unholy terrors that other stories would have you believe, and it is this aspect that makes this fast-paced story readable.

Three stars.

The Duplicators, by Murray Leinster

The second story is longer (an expansion, in fact, of Lord of the Uffts), but I found it less enjoyable. This time around it is the humans doing the invading, in a faux- Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court kind of way. The Duplicators tells us of Link Denham, a non-too-scrupulous gadabout who, when he drunkenly signs himself up as an astrogator on the not-so-good ship Glamorgan under the equally drunk Captain Thistlethwaite, finds himself on the way to the mysterious planet Sord III. Thistlethwaite claims there are riches beyond compare there, which he is willing to share with Denham in return for his help.

On arriving at the planet, they meet two types of extraterrestrials. Firstly there are the rather sarcastic and oppressed pig-like aliens known as Uffts, who claim their ship on its landing, and secondly there are the humans, led by Harl, who live in Households and run the planet’s society using the Uffts as servants. Their response to Thistlethwaite’s arrival is to arrest him and agree to execute him for spreading sedition – for in offering to pay to send a message to his seller Old Man Addison he has caused great offense. Doing business, except with Uffts, is a major insult on Sord III.

Link’s attempt at rescuing Thistlethwaite – for how else is he going to escape the planet? – leads to Link also being arrested by Harl’s Household. Instead of being grateful, the non-too-stable Thistlethwaite seems annoyed, even betrayed, by Link for abandoning their spaceship.

By offering their spaceship and cargo as a guest-gift to Harl, Link manages to persuade the Householder to avoid hanging them, but the rather unpredictable Thistlethwaite, still determined to make a business deal and participate in the socially abhorrent activity of business, believes that Link has betrayed him.

To complicate things further, there’s a revolution brewing from the down-trodden Uffts. A deal is made by Thistlethwaite with the Uffts to arrange his escape and take advantage of the unrest felt by the enslaved group. Link is ‘fired’ by Thistlethwaite.

On a more positive note Link also meets Thana, Harl’s sister. She reveals the reason for Thistlethwaite’s interest in the planet, that the aliens of Sord III have the technology to duplicate objects with dupliers, something that Thistlethwaite believes would be worth a great deal. Harl disagrees, his reasoning being that such an invention would lead to the collapse of civilisation as societies become too lazy to bother working.

Thistlethwaite’s escape leads to a chase to try and recapture him before he makes a deal with Old Man Addison for dupliers. The dilemma of the novel then becomes how Link can manage to keep the dupliers a secret whilst not allowing Thistlethwaite to exploit the aliens on Sord III. It may not be a surprise that Link’s ingenuity saves the day, avoids an Ufftian Revolution, keep Thistlethwaite pleased and ends things happily ever after for Link and Thana.

The Duplicators is one of those heartily humorous tales, a story of manners and misunderstandings that is all about the behaviour of “strangers in a strange land”. It seems to be meant to be a lighter counterpoint tale to the Philip High story, a parody of politics and behaviour that is clearly meant to strike the reader as amusing but for me really wasn’t. In fact, at times there are places where it all becomes a bit silly. On the positive side, it’s well written, if predictable, but Animal Farm it isn’t.  2.5 stars.

Together these tales do what Ace Doubles tend to do – put on display deliberately different aspects of the genre. Whilst the two stories are undeniably entertaining, in the bigger scheme of things they are really minor league stuff. They are not the best Double I’ve ever read, but not the worst either and frankly neither story is the best work I’ve read from either author. File under “OK but not essential.”

Summing Up

I suppose one can't expect more from an average month than a bunch of average books. But, boy… it'd sure be nice!

We'll just have to wait for the next Galactoscope to see if our fortunes change (hopefully for the better…)

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[June 18, 1964] Bad Comic Book Style and Good Comic Book Style (Galactoscope)

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[This month's Galactoscope features a trio of books by two authors filled with riproar and comic-style adventure. We think you'll enjoy this foray into the past…and future!]

The Valley of Creation, by Edmond Hamilton


by Cora Buhlert

The Valley of Creation by Edmond Hamilton

Captain Future was the first science fiction I encountered, therefore I will always have a soft spot for Edmond Hamilton. And so I was happy to find a new Edmond Hamilton novel in the spinner rack of my local import bookshop, even if The Valley of Creation is quite different from Captain Future. The latter is space opera, the former is an earthbound adventure in the style of the "lost world" stories that were popular around the turn of the century.

The Valley of Creation follows the adventures of Eric Nelson, an American soldier of fortune (as he euphemistically calls himself) who got stuck in Asia after the Korean war. Together with a motley multinational crew of mercenaries – a Dutchman, an Englishman, a Chinaman and a fellow American (and a black man, at that) – Eric is fighting in the Chinese civil war, offering his guns and skills to whatever local warlord is willing to pay.

But Eric and his merry band of mercenaries are in a tight spot. Their latest employer is dead, the People's Liberation Army is encroaching and the mercenaries are about to find themselves on the wrong end of a firing squad. Luckily, a man called Shan Kar shows up and hires them to fight his private little war in a hidden valley in the Himalayas, far from the reach of the PLA. A hidden valley where platinum worth millions is just lying around for the taking.

If you're reminded of James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon at this point, you're not alone. Alas, L'Lan, the titular valley, is no peaceful Shangri-La. It is a troubled paradise, where the conflict between Shan Kar's faction, the Humanites, and their enemies, the so-called Brotherhood, is about the escalate.

You'd think that a group calling themselves the Humanites would be the good guys. But you'd be wrong, because the Humanites are bigoted supremacists. The Brotherhood, on the other hand, is committed to equality between humans and non-humans. Non-humans in this case meaning sentient and intelligent animals, who happen to be telepathic as well.

Shan Kar hopes that the mercenaries and their modern weapons will turn the tide in his favour. But their attempt to infiltrate the Brotherhood's stronghold quickly goes wrong. Eric is taken prisoner and finds himself at the mercy of the Brotherhood. As "punishment", he has his consciousness transferred into the body of a wolf via quasi-magic technology.

Forced to literally walk in the paws of his enemy, Eric realises that he is fighting on the wrong side and vows to aid the Brotherhood against his former comrades. And just in time, too, because – quelle surprise – Eric's surviving mercenary pals reveal themselves to be murderous thugs willing to do anything in order to get to the platinum.

Startling Stories July 1948The Valley of Creation is an action-packed science fantasy adventure that feels like a throwback to the pulp era, probably because it is. For The Valley of Creation is an expanded version of a story first published in the July 1948 issue of Startling Stories. This has caused some anachronisms, e.g. at one point Eric remarks that he has been in Asia for ten years, which would set the story in 1960. However, the Chinese Civil War and the annexation of Tibet and the East Turkestan Republic, which are the reason why Eric and his comrades are in the Himalayas in the first place, happened in 1949 and 1950, i.e. shortly after the story was originally published.

The chapters that Eric spends in the body of a wolf are the highlight of the novel, for Hamilton makes a serious attempt to describe what the world would look, smell and feel like through the senses of a wolf. The other animals are characters in their own right as well, though the Brotherhood's commitment to equality between man and beast is undermined by the fact that their hereditary leader is human. But then, making the leader anything other than human would have been problematic, considering the plot requires Eric to fall in love with his beautiful daughter.

One can view the novel as a plea for animal rights. Or one can view it as an analogy for racial equality – after all, Eric muses at one point that equality between humans and animals seems as natural in L'Lan as equality between different races is in the outer world. That's an optimistic statement to make even in 1964, let alone in 1948. Furthermore, the Chinese mercenary Li Kin is a wholly sympathetic character, in a genre that is still all too often suffused with yellow peril rhetoric. Another member of the mercenary band is a black man, but unfortunately he is the main villain.

An entertaining novel that's well worth reading, even if it belongs to an earlier era of science fiction. 3.5 stars.

Outside the Universe, by Edmond Hamilton


by Jason Sacks

As the Journey’s resident comic book fan, I try to broaden my understanding of the industry’s creators by checking out some of their text-only work. This month brought two novels by prominent comic book writers. The contrast between the two works is strong.

First up is Outside the Universe by Edmond Hamilton, an Ace reprint of Hamilton’s final Galactic Patrol book. First published in a quartet of 1929 Weird Tales pulps, alongside work by Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and — I kid you not — Lois Lane — Hamilton’s epic tale of titanic space battles, courageous heroes and intergalactic alliances is a breathless, often overwhelming weird tale.

Written in a long-winded style which reads like Hamilton was desperate to allow the words to tumble from his typewriter lest they find a stray period, Outside the Universe is a wild and wooly journey which involves a million-ship battle between a mighty galactic empire and evil space serpents. Battles are enormous and seemingly endless, and space seems filled with astonishing dangers which imperil every space ship which passes through them. Our heroes and villains fight their ways through bizarre radiation clouds and unexplained hot areas, stars arranged geometrically and people transformed into statues.

It’s a humdinger of a tale, a rousing yarn which throws the reader from cliffhanger to cliffhanger with scarcely a moment to catch their breath — unless they stop to diagram one of the hundreds (thousands?) of 50-word sentences in this book. Hamilton seems to have never internalized the idea of varying sentence length to keep his readers engaged. Perhaps this is an artifact of 1920s pulp writing, but I found I couldn’t keep focus on this book for too long without desperately getting impatient for a quick breather from all Hamilton’s verbosity.

Hamilton moved to comics, where he often wrote for his friend Mort Weisinger on the Superman family of comics. Notably, Hamilton's run on the "Legion of Super-Heroes" tales in Adventure Comics is well known for its breakneck pace — “a new planet every page”, as one critical wag labeled it — and complete paucity of characterization. Apparently Mr. Hamilton changed little as he aged, as this early work reflects those tendencies. Outside the Universe is a hoot but this story has no teeth.

Rating: 2.5

Escape Across the Cosmos, by Gardner Fox

Meanwhile, Gardner Fox has released his newest through the Paperback Library. Escape Across the Cosmos reads at times like a print version of Mr. Fox’s comic book work. In this volume, he delivers a novel about a kind of extradimensional space superhero.

That’s appropriate for the man who has written many classic tales for National Comics’ heroes line, including the memorable “Flash of Two Worlds”, in which the super speedster met his cross-dimensional counterpart. In fact, rumor has it that Fox will be assuming the reins on Batman later this year, taking over the moribund Batman and Detective Comics titles from a team which includes Edmond Hamilton.

Escape Across the Cosmos is the tale of Kael Carrack, a war-ravaged man whose body has been rebuilt to be nearly indestructible. His silicon skin, cybernetic strength and superhuman abilities are urgently needed to defeat the dreaded Ylth’yl, a Lovecraftian monster from another dimension who has killed nearly everybody of importance in his dimension and who hungers to transport his evil to our dimension. In fact, as the story unfolds, it seems Kael has a special connection to the evil creature, one which may save — or doom — our dimension.

In contrast with the Hamilton novel, Fox doesn’t squander characterization for adventure. He takes pains to show readers Kael’s confusion and allows us to become willing and excited participants in the hero’s journey to self-realization. As he and we do so, Kael finds true romance with a human woman, grows into a more perfected version of himself. It will betray any surprises to say that Kael begins to fulfill his destiny by the end of this short book.

This short novel is a clever, quick read. It shines in comparison with Hamilton’s overcrowded prose, as Fox takes pains to allow the reader to move ahead at his own pace. I would have loved to see more depth on the hero and his universe, but perhaps we’ll learn more about him at some point in the future when Fox delivers a sequel in one form or another.

Escape Across the Cosmos reads like an origin story for a new superhero, and for all I know Kael may appear in the pages of National’s Showcase try-out book in the next several months. Maybe Kael will be their next great sci-fi hero. I would certainly welcome him in my comics stack each month.

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[May 26, 1964] Stag Party (Silverberg's Regan's Planet and Time of the Great Freeze)

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by Gideon Marcus

Science fiction is a hard business to make it in.  Back in the early '50s, during the post-war revival, there were some 40+ monthly magazines authors could send stories to.  It was pretty easy to get published back then although the quality was often…shall we say…indifferent.  By the end of the decade, with the fall of the largest magazine distributor and the public getting, perhaps, more discerning, there were just six mags and sff book publication was pretty slow, too.

A lot of authors left the genre to try their luck in the mainstream world.  That's why we lost Bob Sheckley, Ted Sturgeon, and Philip K. Dick for a while.  But times are tough in the real world, too.  Plus, of late, sff seems to be picking up again: IF is going monthly, we've got a couple of new mags in Worlds of Tomorrow and Gamma, books are coming out at an increasing rate.  And so Dick is back in force, and others who have left the field are nosing their way back in.

Robert Silverberg is another one of the authors who wrote sff like the dickens back in the '50s and then disappeared.  He's still writing and writing and writing, but most of his stuff doesn't end up on our favorite shelves or in our favorite magazines.

But sometimes…

In fact, in just the last three months, two Silverberg science fiction books have hit my to-review pile.  And since Silverberg writes the "Spectroscope" book review column for Amazing, it is apt that this edition of the Journey's book review column, the "Galactoscope", be Silverberg-centered.

Regan's Planet

The New York World's Fair has captured the hearts and minds of America this spring, an exposition of modern technologies, wild speculations on the future, and cultural displays from all over the globe.  Silverberg's latest adult science fiction novel, Regan's Planet, is billed as "The wild and wacky novel of the next World's Fair."  As it turns out, this is a bit of false advertising.

It is the end of the 1980s, and corporations are virtually states unto themselves, and the CEO of a sprawling enterprise wields more power than even the President of the United States.  Our protagonist is Claude Regan, head of Global Factors, one of the world's great corporate conglomerates.  At the ripe old age of 35, Regan is bored with success.  Like Alexander, he weeps for a lack of worlds to conquer.

Thus, he conceives a brand new kind of World's Fair, one to take place on the quincentennial of Columbus' first landing in the New World, one that will establish a permanent foothold for humanity in the next frontier. 

Yes, he wants to hold the event in space.

Most of the slim book's 140 pages features the organization and funding of the event.  There's not much wild about it and certainly no wackiness.  In fact, the whole thing reads like an account of a fairly normal, if grandiose, business venture. 

And though Regan's Planet is putatively science fiction, it's really sheer fantasy.  Silverberg posits that we'll have colonies on Mars in just a couple of decades, and that a the cost of sending dozens of Saturn-class rockets into orbit to build an Expo satellite (not to mention the dozens more rockets required to stock it and send attendees) is a significant but not overly expensive endeavor.

The premise doesn't work in a lot of ways.  Firstly, I don't know if Bob reads Aviation Weekly, but I do, and I know what NASA's budget is.  There's no way spaceflight is going to be as cheap as he thinks it is, not in less than thirty years.  Moreover, if space is that cheap, then there should be lots of satellites already in space, whereas Regan's Planet suggests that the Expo is the first, and it is being built precisely as a vanguard space settlement.

On a personal note, I was turned off by the inclusion of precisely one (1) female character in the story (out of a dozen or so), Regan's conniver wife.  In this future, men still rule, and women are graspers and not even good marital partners.  Also, you may be unable to stomach the way that Regan ultimately gets the Fair to be an unqualified success (to be fair, Regan himself isn't able to, either).

All that said, I've seen flashes of brilliance when Bob applies himself, and even when he doesn't, he still puts out workmanlike stuff.  The book does move along pretty well, and I had no trouble finishing it.  Silverberg himself has described this book as "a minor work".  Perhaps he spent a week cranking the thing out; thanks very much for the paycheck, on to the next "under the counter" book.

Two and a half stars.

Time of the Great Freeze

In the late 20th Century, a mysterious galactic cloud obscured the sun.  Not entirely, but enough to send the Earth into another Ice Age.  The tropics became temperate, and the temperate zones became glaciated.  The population of the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, rushed southward only to be rebuffed by the emerging world, offering the industrialized nations a taste of their own anti-immigrant medicine.  And so the northerners either crowded into their barely inhabitable southern zones, or they established nuclear-powered underground cities, designed to be self-sufficient and protected by a mile of glacier ice.

Now, 300 years later, there are signs that the world's deep freeze is about to end, and a group of subterranean New Yorkers becomes curious about the half-forgotten world above.  After being cast out of the city by a paranoid oligarchy for making radio contact with underground London, nine men decide to undertake the trek to Europe.  Their goal: to see what civilization remains after three centuries of cold.

Time is a journey story, clearly written for a younger audience.  Along the way, we meet all manner of surface-dwellers, from illiterate hunters to half-savage bandits to civilized ice-dwellers.  There are exciting scenes of battle, of blizzard, of death.  In this book, we don't get a single woman, but I suppose no female characters is better than an unflattering single example. 

Again, I don't know if Silverberg put a great deal of energy into this book, but Bob writes like breathing, and there's a sort of a Time-Life The Poles feeling of realism about Time.  A kid (or kid-like adult, like me) will likely enjoy this combination of the Arctic expedition and post-apocalyptic genres.

Three and a half stars.

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[March 29, 1964] Five by Five (March Galactoscope)

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For your reading pleasure, Galactic Journey presents a quintet of the newest books in this month's Galactoscope…


by Victoria Silverwolf

The Prodigal Sun, by Philip E. High

I'm sitting here sipping some Earl Grey tea, nibbling a Bendicks Bittermint, listening to the Beatles on the radio; am I still in Tennessee?  I must be, because I'm holding Ace paperback F-255 in my hand, and that's an American publisher.  Then I take a closer look, and notice that the author is British.  I guess there's no way of getting around it; I'm a walking anglophile.

Philip E. High may not be very well known to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, but his stories have appeared in UK publications for about a decade.  I've had a chance to read a handful of them in New Worlds, thanks to fellow Traveler Mark Yon, who is very generous with lending copies of the magazine to Yanks. 

High also had the story Fallen Angel published in the June 1961 issue of Analog.  Our host was not impressed by it.  Overall, High seems to be a competent, if undistinguished, writer of science fiction.  Will his first novel confirm that opinion?  Is it worth forty cents?  Let's find out, starting with the front cover.

Was he there to teach Earth – or to rule it?

Well, that's a fairly interesting teaser.  The cover art is all right, I suppose, although it doesn't really grab me.  Let's take a look inside.

They wanted his secrets, but feared his presents

That should say presence, I think. 

Next we have a cast of characters.  That's a nice touch, as it allows me to flip back to the front when I forget who somebody is.  My only complaint is that it leaves out some important names.  Anyway, let's move on to the text.  Like most science fiction novels, it's well under two hundred pages long, so it's not a major investment in time.

The background is complex, requiring a lot of expository narration and dialogue.  Long before the novel begins, Earthlings settled a few extra-solar planets.  They ran into aliens, at about the same level of technology, who wanted one of these worlds for themselves, and a long and bloody interstellar war followed.  Eventually the humans won, but only at the cost of turning Earth into a brutal dictatorship.  Anyone suspected of disloyalty undergoes involuntary psychological conditioning, so that rebellious thoughts cause intense physical pain.

Into this dystopian world comes our hero, a young man named Peter Duncan.  As an infant, he was the only survivor of an accident in space, and was rescued by highly advanced aliens.  The rulers of Earth see him as a potential threat, but also as a possible source of technological secrets.  He has plans of his own, which I won't describe here, as they are not fully revealed until the end of the book.

The complicated, fast-moving plot also involves a bodyguard, a reporter, and a businessman who undergo important changes in their relationship with Duncan.  Thrown into the mix are enemy aliens, held as prisoners of war after hostilities end.  There is also a secret underground civilization, a love interest for the hero, and yet another set of aliens.  The novel shifts point of view often, sometimes several times within a single scene.

Near the end, developments come at a furious pace.  The revelation of Duncan's scheme, and the explanation of the novel's punning title, go beyond the limits of credulity. 

The book is full of interesting ideas; maybe too many.  Its basic theme can be expressed as Love Conquers All, which is not what you expect from a science fiction adventure story.  Many of the secondary characters are intriguing, although the protagonist is rather bland.  Often a villain turns out to be more complex than first thought, and earns the reader's sympathy.  The author's style is serviceable at best, with some clumsy phrasings.  Overall, it's a mixed bag, worth reading once, if you can spare a quarter, dime, and nickel, but not destined to become a timeless classic.

Three stars.

The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber


by Jason Sacks


Cover by Bob Abbett

The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber is an odd book, a combination of two disparate elements which never quite come together for me.

The core plot of the story is that a new planet, nicknamed the Wanderer, has appeared in our solar system — and in fact appears in almost exactly the same spot as our moon. At first nobody knows what to make of this new celestial body, but most people feel a combination of awe and confusion about what this new interstellar visitor might mean and what its impact might be on our world.

Quickly, though, a tragedy which once was unimaginable becomes inevitable. The moon begins to disintegrate under the gravity of The Wanderer, which unleashes a devastating level of natural destruction. Because The Wanderer has a higher gravity than the moon, ocean tides increase geometrically in power, terrible tidal waves hit all oceans, earthquakes strike in California, rising ocean currents open Lake Nicaragua to the ocean, and floods strike much of the United Kingdom.

In the midst of this utter destruction, Leiber shows us the hearty survivors who battle the effects of the devastation. We follow a band of travelers in Florida who encounter unexpected racism, a group of UFO enthusiasts in California who battle tsunamis, violence and some actual flying saucers, a lunar explorer who sees the crisis up front, and a panoply of other ordinary and extraordinary people, from South Africa to Vietnam to New York to a lone sailor piloting a ship across the Atlantic.

The scenes with these characters provide The Wanderer with much of its power and momentum, as readers are swept up in the terrifying and all-too-human adventures of these hearty and terrified people. In fact, if Leiber had focused exclusively on the people and left the reason for the destruction a mystery, this might have been an even more satisfying book.

Instead, Leiber shows us the reason for the Wanderer’s presence. In those sections, the book falters. The reason the Wanderer journeys to our solar system is that the Earth is one of the remaining backwaters in the universe that’s not yet settled by a group of extraterrestrial beings looking to civilize nearly all of known space. Those beings need to use our solar system as a kind of refueling station.

The Wanderer is actually an artificial planet, filled with hundreds of levels of civilizations inhabited by creatures and cultures nearly unimaginable to most humans. Piloting the ship is a super-brilliant catlike creature named Tigerishka who captures one of the lunar explorers and explains to him the background of the plot. A rebel against the civilizers, Tigerishka is soon captured and put on trial before she runs away from her fate — but not before she and the human have some extraterrestrial intercourse.

Leiber spins up an epic tale with some memorable characters and startling situations, but the work feels a bit undercooked to me. The two key elements of the plot never quite connect with each other and the space trial comes from out of nowhere. There is precious little foreshadowing of Tigerishka’s presence, and I found the idea and execution of her to be a bit pulpy. I kept imagining the cover being similar to a Gernsback pulp with an attractive human body attached to a mysterious feline face.

Still, this is the kind of epic novel which would make for a fine film and likely a nomination for the award named for Mr. Gernsback. While I won’t be voting for it in next year’s Hugos, it’s easy see Mr. Leiber’s entertaining though flawed creation taking home honors.

Rating: three stars

[you can purchase this book or check it out at the library]

Marooned, by Martin Caidin


by Gideon Marcus

Some science fiction propels us to the farthest futures and remotest settings.  The latest book by Martin Caidin, better known by his aeronautical and space nonfiction, takes place on the very edge of tomorrow.  When the Soviets stun the world early in 1964 with the launch and docking of a pair of multi-crew spacecraft, NASA is directed to fill the space between Gordo Cooper's last Mercury flight and the increasingly delayed Gemini program.  Major Richard Pruett, a (fictional) member of the second cadre of astronauts, is tapped for a 49 orbit Mercury endurance mission, launched in July.

For three days, all goes perfectly, but at the moment of deceleration, Pruett's retrorockets refuse to fire, stranding the fellow in space.  Now, with just enough oxygen to last two more days, the hapless astronaut must somehow find a way to last three days — until the drag of the upper atmosphere seizes Mercury 7 and sends it plunging toward the Earth.

There is no question but that Caidin did his homework for the book.  Undoubtedly, the author has enough material for a lengthy reference on the Mercury program and the astronaut training process in general.  But within the gears and hard science, Caidin manages to draw a compelling profile of Pruett, sort of an amalgam of the seven Mercury astronauts.  From his first flight in a propeller plane, through a bloody stint in Korea, and past the rigorous astronaut indoctrination, Pruett gives the reader a first-person view of the experiences that make up the humans beneath the silver sheen of the spacesuit.

Marooned shines most brightly in the first and last thirds of the book.  The solitude and hopelessness Pruett's plight is vividly portrayed, and the pages fly up through about page 100.  The journey through astronaut training is more clinical, with few dramatizations to liven it up.  It will be interesting to neophytes, but any of us who read the Time Life series on the Mercury 7 (or the compilation We Seven) will find it dry.  Things pick up again when we learn of the daring rescue attempts being assembled to save Pruett from being America's first casualty in space.

With Marooned, Caidin accomplishes two goals in one book, delivering an exciting read and providing perhaps the most detailed summary of the Mercury program for the layman yet put to paper.

Four stars.

ace double F-261

The Lunar Eye, by Robert Moore Williams


Cover by Ed Valigursky

It is the year 1973, and Art Harper owns a service station on the freeway to the launch pad where soon a giant rocket will take the first twelve men to the moon.  His life had hitherto been one of complete and deliberate normality.  But then, a woman appears claiming to be one of the Tuantha, a society of humans that had gone to the moon millennia before and established a secret, highly advanced civilization.  She insists that Art is Tuanthan, too, placed with a human family like a changeling, and that he must come home.  Further complicating the mix is Art's brother, Gecko, who, while human, managed to sneak into the Tuanthan moon city during one of the frequent inter-planet teleport trips.  Now he wants to live in their lovely settlement, too.

The fly in the ointment is the upcoming lunar shot.  The Tuanthans are convinced that, should the two societies ever meet, the Earthers will dominate and ultimately exterminate them, just as the Europeans slaughtered the American Indians.  And so, the Tuanthans plan to sabotage the American lunar effort before the moon city is discovered. 

This latest book by Robert Moore Williams stands in stark contrast to Caidin's hyer-realistic Marooned.  Moore has been producing adventure stories since the '30s, and it shows.  Eye reads like something written in 1948, lacking any comprehension of technological improvements since then.  But the real flaws of the book are in its execution.  It starts out excitingly enough, and the first half reads quite quickly.  But then Art, Gecko, and the Tuanthan, Lecia, end up on the moon, and the whole thing becomes a slog of speeches and redundant scenes as the three are put on trial for treason for wanting to stop the destruction of the American moon rocket.

In fact, Williams' fiction production consists almost exclusively of novellas.  It's pretty clear he has no heart or endurance for longer works, and the padding required to cross the novel-length finish line is tiresome and obvious.  Finally, Eye is riddled with plot holes and story threads that go nowhere. 

A promising but ultimately sloppy piece: Two and a half stars.

The Towers of Toron, by Samuel R. Delany


Cover by Ed Emshwiller

On the other hand, Chip Delany's new work, a sequel to last year's Captives of the Flame, reflects an upward trend.  In the first book of the series, he introduced us to Toromon, capital of an island empire situated on Earth long after an atomic cataclysm.  The cast of characters was bewilderingly large: the decadent and young King Uske, his cousin; Prince Let, who was smuggled into the custody of the smarter, psionically gifted forest people; the capable and canny Duchess Petra; the noble and former prisoner, Jon, who along with Petra had been rendered invisible in dim light by the radiations that girdle Toron's imperial boundaries; the paternal forest person, Arkor; Tel, a poor fisherman's son; Alter, a thief and acrobat; Clea, a brilliant mathematician…

It was all a bit much, but now that I see the author is planning on doing more with the world, I can understand why he introduced so many players.  Towers does a fine job of continuing their stories, and I feel like I have a good handle on them all now.

Towers is set three years after Flame.  The empire has rediscovered the technology of matter transfer and is busy exploring the devastated planet.  A war has already been fought and won against the mutant insectoid tranu, and another is in progress against the mysterious ketzis.  It is a strange war, fought in nearly impenetrable mists thousands of miles from home.  The enemy is never seen, and its combatants (who include Tel, the fisherman's son), seem almost in a daze, unable to dwell much upon their pasts or their futures.  Meanwhile, Toromon is in increasing turmoil.  Prime Minister Chargill is assassinated.  The evil seed of the fiery enemy from the first book is discovered hidden in the mind of King Uske.  And Clea, seeking refuge in arcane mathematics after the death of her fiancee (that occurred in Flame), discovers a secret that could tear the entire empire asunder.

Tower is a significant improvement on Flame: better paced, more skillfully written, exciting.  It is no mean feat to juggle all of these viewpoints and still maintain a coherent whole.  Moreover, I appreciate the sheer variety of characters, including the prominence of several women.

I did find both fascinating and a little disturbing Delany's depiction of the three races of people that inhabit future Earth, with greater divergence than the paltry skin tone differences humanity has today.  They are practically different species, with the baseline humans being seeming to be more imaginative (though not necessarily smarter) than the "neo-neanderthals," and the forest people occupying a mental rung above the humans.  The neo-neanderthals are referred to as 'apes', and though they don't ever object, I can only imagine that the author (who is Black) is making a point.

If there's a down-side to the book, it's that it is a clear bridge to the next novel in the series, which has not yet come out.  All the threads do come to a satisfying resolution at the book's end, but the aftermath, and the coming (final?) battle with the cosmic Lord of the Flames is left for later.

Three and a half stars, and kinder disposition toward the first book.

[(this book and the others in the series can be purchased here)]

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