[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
Up in the sky!
There are some intrepid women whose names are household words: Willa Brown, Jerrie Mock, Amelia Earhart. Others are not so familiar. The other day, I read the obituary for a pioneering soul I'd not known of before.
Blanche Stewart Scott was born in 1885. A native of Rochester, she was 25 when she drove a 25-horsepower Overland stock car from New York to San Francisco, her 69 hour journey marking the second time a woman had made a transcontinental drive.
This attracted the interest of aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss, who took her under his wing (so to speak) and trained her to fly. Apparently, Mrs. Scott had never seen an airplane before her coast-to-coast jaunt; she was caught in a traffic jam outside Dayton, Ohio, caused by a flying exhibition out of Wright Field.
After just three days of instruction, she made her first solo flight on September 5, 1910 from an airfield in Hammondsport—what may well be the first time an American woman piloted an aircraft.
Over the next four years, until she gave up flying, she suffered 41 broken bones in a number of crashes. She was one of the lucky ones: "Most of the early women fliers got killed," she once observed.
Scott's later career included working as a scriptwriter, film producer, and radio broadcaster in Hollywood. In 1948, she became the first woman to ever ride in a jet aircraft. During the '50s, she combed the country for vintage planes to stock the U.S. Air Force Museum near Dayton.
She died on January 12 at Genesee Hospital in her native town of Rochester, New York.
Who says you can't still publish Adam and Eve stories? This time, our parabolic (is that the adjective form of parable?) two are "Dorn" and "Lara", respectively the Master and Mistress of Fortress Desire and Fortress Hope. They are young clones, the last two humans alive, residing in twin, invulnerable bastions on the Moon.
Three centuries after atomic apocalypse destroyed their planet, the two beings are still conducting weekly mutual bombardments, begun ages before by their predecessors. Then the "Ezkeel", alien guardians of Earth, return to unite them so that they can repopulate their home planet. I leave it to you to decipher the thinly disguised biblical reference in their race name.
Anyway, Shapiro manages to write both in a peurile fashion and for the Playboy set (perhaps the two aren't that divergent, after all).
Illustrator Wilson (he gets around; I see him drawing for Playboy too) takes a stab at short story writing. In this vignette, mysterious forces have erected a thousand-foot statue of Mickey Mouse in the Nevada desert. The point of the story, aside from the feeble joke ending, is to see how long it takes the reader to realize what has happened, as the figure is obliquely described as characters ascend it like a cliff face.
I got the joke halfway through page 2. The rest seemed superfluous.
Two stars.
Books (F&SF, February 1970), by James Blish
Blish tags in for Russ this month, reviewing five classic fantasies and one new novel:
James Branch Cabell: FIGURES OF EARTH,
James Branch Cabell: THE SILVER STALLION.
Lord Dunsany: THE KING OF ELFLAND's DAUGHTER.
William Morris: THE WOOD BEYOND THE WORLD.
Fletcher Pratt: THE BLUE STAR.
All from Ballantine Books, New York, paper, 95¢: 1969.
He likes and recommends all of them. I've read none of them…
He is less effusive about Josephin Saxton's THE HIERos GAMOS OF SAM AND AN SMITH. He appreciates the surrealism of it, but he would have preferred that this odd Adam-an-Eve story had remained in its own world rather than transitioning into ours.
by Gahan Wilson
His Only Safari, by Sterling E. Lanier
Brigadier Ffelowes relates of the time he went to the Kenyan highlands and came face to face with the man-eating monster that inspired the Egyptian god Anubis.
Lanier does a good job of reviving the pulp era for modern audiences. A brisk, taut read.
Four stars.
Watching Apollo, by Barry N. Malzberg
Our astronauts may be the stalwart vanguard of humanity, but they also have to shit, sometimes.
A precious homosexual and a straight-laced starship captain escape a spacewreck, landing on an odd human colony. In contrast to their overcrowded, overconfining Earth, the new world's people are free, untechnological, and possessed of profound psionic powers. The skipper is unable to adapt or understand. The Terran civilian, unpleasant and mistrustful, eventually loses his inhibitions (and, apparently, his proclivity for men), becoming one with the outworlders.
Told in a dreamlike fashion to suggest the odd psychic phenomena and the constant wordless communication, I found this story's affected style off-putting. Sex was described obliquely, less to avoid offense, it seemed; more as if Russ was embarrassed of describing the act.
I also didn't like anyone in the story, nor did I care much what happened to them. The alienness of the colonists would have had more impact had things started with a more familiar, constrasting viewpoint.
I understand this story is also actually a detached piece of a larger novel due out later this year. Perhaps it would make more sense in context.
Two stars.
The Tracy Business, by Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson
Fans of the fanzine Yandro know who Robert "Buck" Coulson is (Juanita Coulson's husband). He and DeWeese write Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels under the name "Thomas Stratton".
This story follows a private dick hired by a shrewish woman to find out why her husband disappears every four weeks for three days, spending a boodle of money in the process. Hint: it's not another woman, and it's not blackmail.
It's a rather obvious tale, and unpleasant to boot. Two stars.
The Multiplying Elements, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor explains those "rare earths" that have their own separate spot on the periodic table, and also how they were first isolated from their containing ores. However, we have yet to learn why they occupy their own sub-table.
Chemistry is not my strong suit, and this article is necessarily incomplete, but I'll give it four stars for now.
Dream Patrol, by Charles W. Runyon
Way back in 1952, J.T.McIntosh (when he still was calling himself M'Intosh) wrote a neat story called Hallucination Orbit. The premise was that there were these solitary garrison stations at the edge of the solar system, manned for months at a time. Eventually, the folks stationed there started having hallucinations, which was the sign they needed to be relieved. The sentry of that story dreamed a succession of increasingly convincing female companions. The tension of that tale lay in our hero's increasingly challenging attempts to distinguish fantasy from reality.
It was a warm and ultimately sweet story, and it is one of my favorites. There's a reason it got republished in the Second Galaxy Reader (1953).
Dream Patrol has the same premise, except the illusions are caused by hostile aliens, and there is no cure. There's also a streak of misogyny to the whole thing. Hell, almost 20 years ago, McIntosh had women in his space navy; that's unfathomable to Runyon.
Two stars.
Autopsy report
Given how good last month's issue was, this abyssmal 2.3-star mag is quite the surprise. Let's hope this constitutes an outlier. One prominent obituary this month is quite sufficient!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
It's been a while since we've heard from Wilson Tucker, fan-turned-pro-but-still-very-much-a-fan. Hence, I was delighted to see that he had a new book out last month. Except, of course, it's not new at all, as I soon found out.
The story: Corporal Russell Gary, Fifth Army, veteran of "Viet Nam" and now Stateside on a recruiting stint, has gone on a bender for his 30th birthday. When he wakes up in a seedy motel room in a small town outside of Chicago, he finds that everyone in town is dead. Several days dead.
Turns out that some unnamed enemy has ravaged the American northeast with atomic fire and plague. Within 48 hours, almost everyone east of the Mississippi has died. West of the river, what's left of the country has set up a nationwide blockade, ensuring that the pestilence remains contained. No attempt is made to give succor to the thousands of Americans who have proven immune to the diseases.
Silence follows Gary as he braves the increasing barbarism until he can make his way back to civilization. Not a particularly bright nor sympathetic character, but with the instinct and training for survival, he partners up when convenient, kills without compunction when advantageous. He never becomes a brave hero or a romantic figure. Aside from a brief reference to New Orleans' straggling along, there are no enclaves of east-bank recovery. This is a holocaust from which no one is trying to rebuild. Just bands of increasingly hungry and desperate marauders, of which Gary is simply the one Tucker chooses to make his viewpoint.
There is no happy ending—indeed, there can't be. Gary is a disease carrier. The western United States has abandoned the east, and the east is a rotting corpse. And so, we have a story that starts like Andromeda Strain, continues like Alas, Babylon, and ends like a sour version of Spawn of the Death Machine.
Per the copyrights page, The Long Loud Silence originally came out in 1952, and was "specially revised and updated" for this release. That sparked my curiosity—how adroitly would Tucker handle the modernization? 17 years is a fair stretch, so it didn't seem like a slap of paint would be sufficient.
It wasn't. The story feels very much of its time (right around the time I got into science fiction, actually). There are no hippies, no reference to television. Lots of talk about radio and movies. The attack on the country is localized, believed to have been launched from Greenland…because ICBMs hadn't been invented yet. I'm pretty sure the Soviets now have missiles that can hit any part of the country. Certainly the new Russian bombers could hit Los Angeles as easily as New York. There's also a point in the book where a misprinted dogtag is an issue, and the implication is that it dates to the early 40s, which would match if Gary had been a WW2 war vet, which (having gotten a copy of the '52 release) it looks like he originally was. In fact, comparing the two versions, it looks like Gary's war background is the only change.
Setting that aside, and just reading "Europe" for "Viet Nam", how is the book? Well, it reads extremely well up through page 81. Gary teams up with interesting characters, including a fellow soldier/school-teacher, a jewel-mad girl named Irma, and a starving refugee named Sally. Seeing the ravaged geography and following the details of survival are compelling. The abortive probes of the Mississippi are exciting and tragic.
But after that, not only does Gary become more and more unlikable, but the author keeps repeating himself, copying whole passages from earlier in the book. The story just isn't long enough to need reminders like that.
I do appreciate that Tucker was willing to write an anti-hero, gritty and realistic. On the other hand, it means the narrative and the message of Silence is necessarily limited. The journey is interesting, but it doesn't say much other than that everyone is something of a bastard, civilized or otherwise.
Still, I actually finished the book, and quickly, which is more than I can say for the other two books I received last month.*
3.5 stars.
*The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon, is about a planet settled by a generation ship. There are three factions: the greens, espousing the terraforming of the world; the blues, espousing adaptation of humans to the world; the yellows, asserting that landing was a mistake. The yellows were right, but the totalitarian government doesn't want to hear about it. I lost interest around page 40.
*Star Giant, by Dorothy E. Skinkle, is about a seven foot humanoid alien genius who is exiled to Earth. It was too juvenile and silly for me.
I used to know a follower of Aleister Crowley, back in California. A little flighty and blustering, like most of his sect, but he told me something that’s stuck with me ever since:
“If you can't be good, be bad.”
That is a phrase that was in my mind throughout reading Sex and the High Command, the new novel by John Boyd. His last novel, The Rakehells of Heaven, was reviewed last year by Victoria Silverwolf. She described it as "an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke." This novel is much the same, although it has far more dirty jokes than blasphemy. Dedicated “For Aristophanes and Lenny Bruce”.
Ugh. We haven’t even started the book and I’m already rolling my eyes.
by Paul Lehr
Our story follows Navy Captain Benjamin Hansen, captain of the UNS Chattahoochee, bringing his crew to Norfolk, VA, after eighteen months in Antarctica. But the docks are strangely peaceful…
It transpires that a peculiar new drug from California called Vita-Lerp is allowing women to orgasm without the involvement of a man. I have it on good authority that this is possible without drugs, but Vita-Lerp also allows for “self-childbirth” — women are able to reproduce independently, although it seems to result in no boy children being born to those women. Dr. "Mother" Carey, who developed Vita-Lerp, is also president of a movement called the FEMs, which has created cells through women’s meetings and book clubs. These cells have also taught the women “New Logic” and “New Grammar”, which puts a feminine ending on all masculine nouns, and has only female and “neuter” genders.
To help defend against the obsolescence of men, Captain Hansen is brought into the confidence of the highest offices of US power, as well as a crewman of his, Chief Water Tender McCormick. The latter has been chosen for President against Dr. Carey, as he is “Lothario X”, the ideal lover. In return, he asks for a wife of his own, one guaranteed to be “uncorrupted” by the FEMs movement. According to him, ”’I’m not particular, sir. I just want me some pretty little mountain doozy, not over eighteen, with a good shape, who can cook crackling bread.’”
(I’ve never understood that, the belief that women are most desirable when they’re teenagers. Everyone is so awkward and gangly, and pimply besides.)
A man named John Pope is sent to find the woman in question. He is a man’s man, and is the most likeable character in the book by a fair margin. However, not long after he completes his mission, Pope is killed by a prostitute and framed to look as if he died while having sex with another man. Is that the worst fate in the world? Is that the only context in which homosexual love can be imagined by this author?
It is discovered that Vita-Lerp may be used as a rectal suppository, and allows men to become women. The remaining men immediately accept the transformed person as "she” and a woman, an enlightened attitude which is surprising, given how stupid everything has been up to now. Speaking of which, Hansen is eventually taxidermied as an example of the now-extinct male species.
I have had real trouble writing this review, because I couldn’t decide how to go about it. Do I address it as science fiction? As a comedy? If the latter, what humor is there? If I am unable to understand the humor, what conclusions can I draw from the book itself?
”After the ceremony, Dr. Carey’s all-girl crew got the yacht away from the dock at Newport News with a minimum of scraped paint and the loss of only one bollard off the dock.”
Is this funny? I know that there is a stereotype of women not being able to drive well, but I think that is a matter of the limited practice time often afforded them. Beyond the plot’s suggestion of Lysistrata (a play by Aristophanes about women denying their warring husbands sex until they negotiate peace), there doesn’t seem to be much to suggest Aristophanes' wit, either.
The best thing I can say about this book is that it’s never boring. I always was interested in learning what happened next, no matter how stupid or silly.
If you can’t be good, be bad.
Two stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
Let's see; this sure looks like it's a sword-and-sorcery yarn, with a mighty-thewed hero and a dragon. Too bad that has nothing at all to do with what's between the covers. More false advertising, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, let's take a look inside and see what we've got.
We begin at an abandoned gold mine and ghost town that have been changed into a tourist attraction. A guy wearing nothing but a pair of torn shorts runs out of the mine. A ten-foot-tall monster with two heads blasts him with something that causes him to explode from the inside out. There's also a helicopter full of tourists, so old Two Heads blasts them, too.
That gets the reader's attention, anyway. We next meet our hero, a brilliant scientist who has a vast organization working for him. Among his employees are a guy who tells fortunes with a deck of cards and a woman who uses a crystal ball.
Why all this mystical stuff? It seems this guy also uses psychic methods to figure things out. He and his colleagues have a way of looking into their minds, kind of like mediation, and getting glimpses of the future.
Anyway, a military officer shows up and asks our hero to check things out at the site of the helicopter disaster. Heading for the same place, but separately, are two of his associates, a statuesque woman and a ape-like fellow.
(At this point, I was reminded of the old Doc Savage yarns that Bantam Books has been reprinting as slim paperbacks for the past few years. In a lot of ways, this new novel harks back to the pulp magazines of the 1930's.)
From this point on, the chapters alternate between the hero and his two pals. Suffice to say that they all get captured and wind up underground. Besides the two-headed monsters, we've got small robot miners and a bunch of kidnapped humans brainwashed by invisible aliens intent on taking over the world. Did I mention that there's also a Mad Scientist and his Beautiful Daughter?
At times, I thought the author was pulling my leg. There's a fair amount of teasing banter between the hero's two friends, and constant arguments between the monster's two heads. Then there's the scene in which the hero and the Beautiful Daughter keep their conversation secret from the aliens by speaking in Pig Latin . . .
This is a very silly book. Despite what I've said above, I can't really call it a satire or a comedy, because there's also some pretty gruesome violence. It's a quick read, and too goofy to be boring, but hardly worth slapping down four bits at your local drug store.
When writing reviews, it’s generally a good habit to separate the writer from the work. We reviewers have a responsibility to consider a book or story based on the quality of its writing, characterization and themes. We feel obligated not to fixate on a writer’s personal life nor on their political beliefs. Whether that creator supports Reagan or Brown, McCarthy or Nixon, is less important than their ability to write a compelling piece of fiction.
That’s true unless their personal life or political philosophy fuels their fiction – and most especially if that fiction is propaganda for that writer's philosophy.
Taurus Four by Rena Vale is a work of propaganda which shows the true colors of its author. This novel is sexist, pro-colonial, anti-Women’s Lib, anti-hippie, anti-Communist propaganda. Its author is one of the more repulsive creatures to be part of California’s political scene since World War II.
Those are strong words, I know, but please hear why I say them.
Rena Vale has been associated for many years with the work of the California Un-American Activities Committee (CUAC), even into the last decade. She has actively worked against the efforts of anti-War protesters, framed the questions the CUAC used to interrogate their witnesses, and painted the Free Speech Movement a communist plot.
Rena Vale's 1952 treatise on the evils of Communism
Vale has the feeling of a zealot, because she was a convert away from Communism. During the 1930s, she briefly joined the Communist Party, attending meetings alongside luminaries as John Steinbeck, but she felt pushed out by sexist Party members. Vale believed Steinbeck’s research into The Grapes of Wrath demonstrated that the acclaimed author was looking to advocate communism. Vale even claimed that in 1936, while still dabbling with Communist Party membership, she attended a Party meeting at the home of Lucille Ball. Yes, Rena Vale believes Lucille Ball is a Communist.
Vale, in short, is a conspiracy theorist who sees an evil Communist around every corner and a traitorous subversive behind every anti-War protester. She tracked civil rights activists as early as 1963, cataloging the daily lives of members of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination, the Berkeley Peace Center, the Free Speech Movement and other Northern California organizations into a massive compilation of detailed information which might have rivaled that of the national HUAC.
Thus Vale has a significant and long-lasting role in the anti-Communist crusade. That crusade led to loyalty oaths, repression of free speech, and to groups like the Hollywood Ten, skilled screenwriters whom studios denied employment (in fact, I'm reviewing the 'comeback' film for one of those blacklisted writers later this month. Ring Lardner Jr. is credited as the screenwriter of the new film M*A*S*H).
Vale is an avowed anti-Communist. She's a woman who makes her living through the organized and brutal oppression of those who disagree with her.
Vale believes science fiction can be used as propaganda to further her repugnant beliefs. And though science fiction has been used for propaganda since at least the days of H.G. Wells (see The Shape of Things to Come, among other works by him), authors must demonstrate some real grace to make that propaganda compelling.
Cover by Robert Foster. It has has absolutely nothing to do with the book.
There is little grace in Taurus Four. The propaganda is not compelling. I think this brief excerpt will give you a bit of an idea of why I was repulsed rather than compelled by the ideas in this novel.
To communicate, to permit one’s self to become involved emotionally with alien creatures, brought doubt of the total rightness of Earth and Mankind. Did the strong and virile men of the American old West (sic) ever doubt the rightness of white Yankees in pushing westward to the Pacific Ocean? Were there any among them who had the bad judgment to listen to the redman’s tale of woe? If so, history obliterated them. History recorded the words of the strong, not those of the weaklings who fell by the wayside.
Taurus Four is peppered with ideas and phrases like that fragment. At its base in her novel is the pessimistic thought – pessimistic to Vale anyway – that at the end of the Cold War, the Soviets “dictated fashion as well as many other social, political and scientific customs,” that Soviet supremacy “was accepted and [it] became a matter of historical record that the ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ countries were decadent, the people degenerating into pulpy softness.”
From that world we meet our protagonist, Dorian Frank XIV, a pudgy and henpecked 32-year-old “space sociologist” from that soft society who can’t even pilot his landing vessel correctly. Frank crash-lands his ship on Taurus Four, and rather than obey orders and stay close to his ship, Frank decides to wander off in search of food.
More concerned with protecting his tender feet and avoiding sunburns than with prudence, Dorian eventually finds himself in a strange village settled by descendants of 1960s San Francisco war protesters. Those people have gone wild in the 300 years since their ship landed on this distant world: living naked, not cutting their hair or nails, descending into a kind of pidgin English, and eating only fruit from the sacred “manna” tree. They are ruled by a cruel and despotic leader who orders sacrifices to a native god.
While most of the members of the tribe resemble American Indians, the chief’s daughter looks more European-descended: her “skin was almost white instead of the reddish tan of the others; her hair was fine and pale, muscles firm, stomach flat and breasts perfect.”
The girl, Teeda, is racially superior to her peers from a colonial standpoint, which helps cause Dorian to fall for her – despite the fact she’s just 14 years old. Yes, this girl has a man twice her age admiring her breasts (I feel a little sick just quoting that line). But that sexualization is all fine in the context of the novel because, well, the couple barely even kiss before Dorian is rescued. And even beyond that, Teela is hard-wired for the traditional work of women. Despite the fact she’s lived naked all her life, when asked to wash clothes she embraces the work: “I wash now. I think I do more better than you.’ He laughed. ‘It's instinctive I guess—something carried in the genes that makes women want to wash clothes!”
An example of the cards Vale maintained as part of CUAC, this shows how John Steinbeck's activities were tracked.
Frank adopts a paternalistic approach to Teeda – perhaps logical since she is practically young enough to be his daughter. But he also takes a paternalistic approach to the colonists, embracing a James T. Kirk-style approach to upending their peaceful life and introducing chaos and worry into a long-stable existence. Of course, this peaceful society embraced communal property, lack of individual rights, and a feverish devotion to their absolute monarch. All those attributes could be found in the Soviet Union, so by definition they are evil philosophies which must be destroyed.
Therefore Frank, quickly coming into his own as an aggressive man who has even lost his baby fat, is the logical man to redeem these primitive people. He grows into a true Colonial whose mission becomes the need to modernize the natives’ civilization. Frank won't listen to "the redman's tale of woe."
I’ve already written 1000 words on this essay, and I hope my points here are cogent. But I’d like to note one more thing: this book is just not well written.
Oh, sure, Vale is literate. Her sentences aren’t too long, and her settings are vivid enough. But she struggles badly with characterization, she writes a pathetically clichéd villain, and the details of this world are sketchy at best. Over and over, I found myself slightly compelled by a hint of gracefulness in Taurus Four, only to become overwhelmed by bland events of political grandstanding or a disgusting glimpse into her politics.
The book feels amateurish, like the work of someone who understands the mechanics of writing but has no idea of its skills. Since she is 72 years old, I don’t expect Rena Vale to improve.
This is not a good book, and I can’t recommend it. Furthermore, I don’t want Vale to receive another penny of anybody’s money.
1 star.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
A little off the top
And so it begins. For eight years, NASA enjoyed an open budget spigot and, through persistence and endless shoveling of money (though a fraction of what's spent on defense, mind you), got us to the Moon. Now the tap has been cut to a trickle, and the first casualties are being announced.
Apollo manager George Low at a press conference on the 4th
Of the 190,000 people employed at the space agency, a whopping 50,000 are going to get the axe before the end of the year. Saturn V production is being halted. Lunar missions are going down to a twice-per-year cadence (as opposed to the six in thirteen months we had recently).
Apollo 20, originally scheduled to land in Tycho crater in December 1972, has been canceled. Astronauts Don Lind, Jack Lousma, and Stuart Roosa now get to cool their heels indefinitely. Apollos 13-16 will go up over the next two years followed by "Skylab", a small orbital space station built from Saturn parts. Then we'll get the last three Apollo missions.
After that… who knows? If only the Soviets had given us more competition…
Oh, and in the silly season department:
On the 6th, Columbia University's Dr. Gary V. Latham, seismologist and principal seismic investigator for Apollo program, withdrew his proposal that an atomic bomb be detonated on the Moon. You'll recall Apollo 12 sent the top half of Intrepid into the lunar surface so the seismometers Conrad and Bean had emplaced could listen to the echoes and learn about the Moon's interior.
Latham got some pretty harsh criticism of his idea, so he dialed things back, suggesting NASA should find way to hit the Moon hard enough to create strong internal reverberations. Let's hope they don't use Apollo 13…
A sampling from the upper percentiles
The news may be dour on the space front, but the latest issue of Galaxy is, in contrast, most encouraging!
In the early 1990s, America has become a hollow shell, spiritually. All of the worst elements of our modern day have amplified: the hippies have sold out to become consumers, Black Americans are confined to walled Ghettoes, kids are dropping out in growing multitudes.
Into this era, a movement is born—the New Shakers. They live the Four Noes: No hate. No war. No money. No sex.
a riff on American Gothic by Jack Gaughan
This hero of this tale, such as there is one, is a journalist who is doing a series of interviews on the movement. As time goes on, we learn that he is also tracking down his missing son, whom he believes has been inducted by the growing cult.
It's fascinating stuff, but there's no end, nor is the piece indicated as "Part One of [N]". On the other hand, it is concluded with "MORE TO COME", which is less dispositive than it might be since that phrase gets used often in the story proper.
I'm going to give it four stars on the assumption that we're going to see more stories in this world a la Silverberg's Blue Fire series. If this turns out to be a literary cul de sac, then we can drop the score retroactively.
There are some stories your read, and you just know it's going to be superlative. I've felt guilty these last few months, handing out five-star reviews so sparingly, wondering if my standards had gotten too high. And then I read something that is truly superior, and I realize that, for five stars to mean anything, it's got to be saved for the very best.
I shan't spoil things for you. It's about a man and a woman, the former an engineer, the latter a cipher, both troubled. It involves electricity and bonsai and an understated romance (no one writes romance like Ted Sturgeon), and it is the best thing I've read in a dog's age.
Another bi-month, another sequel, this one involving Lieutenant Grimes in command of the Adder courier ship. As a result of his last adventure, Grimes is (supposed to be) no longer in the passenger business. Instead, he is sent to a nearby star to meet with an insectoid Shari queen. Unfortunately, the cargo they ask him to transport is…a pupate Shari princess.
This is all fine and good, so long as the nascent queen remains in cold stasis. A power outage causes her to hatch, however, and she soon has the crew in her thrall. Worse, she has increasing interracial designs on the young Lieutenant!
Yet another pleasant but unremarkable adventure. We're definitely going to see a fix-up Ace Double half, I'm sure.
Three stars.
The Last Night of the Festival, by Dannie Plachta
by Jack Gaughan
Two archetypes, Dawn and Dusk, walk through a macabre parade filled with hedonistic and gory spectacles. Each scene is punctuated by an italicized interstitial with some oblique reference to Nazi Germany. The story is illustrated like a picture book such that the text only fills perhaps a third of the page.
Like much of Plachta's work, it's an abstract and abstruse piece. Are the two on their way to Hell? Do they represent actual people? I'd appreciate it more if I knew what he was trying to say.
Continues the journey of Edmund Gunderson toward the mist country of the planet he once administered as a mining colony. The key beats include a reunion with his lover, Seema, who stayed behind when he left. She has become enamored with the planet, surrounding her station with a garden of native life. She is also caring for her husband, Kurtz, who was horribly distorted by his attempt to participate in the Rebirth ceremonies of the elephantine indigenous Nildoror.
Another key beat is his entry into the misty cold of the temperate zone. It is implied that Rebirth involves the swapping of consciousnesses between the Nildoror and the simian Sulidoror, the other intelligent race on the planet. We learn that Gunderson plans to emulate Kurtz—to offer himself as a Rebirth candidate as a sort of expiation for his sins against the indigenes.
This section is more episodic and Heart of Darkness than the prior ones, and it left me a bit cold. I do appreciate how much time Silverberg has spent developing a truly alien world, however, and the anti-colonialist sentiment is welcome. I just have trouble relating to or even buying the characters, and that deliberate abstraction, distancing, gives the whole affair a shambling sleep-walk feel to it.
If that's your bag, you'll love it. For me, we're at three stars for this installment.
After They Took the Panama Canal, by Zane Kotker
America is conquered by the Soviets. Rape, re-education, and reduction ensue.
All this is told compellingly from the point of view of Myra, a not particularly bright (by design) woman, who is selected to be a consort to several conquerors, and to bear several of their children. In the end, she helps lead a revolt of sorts.
I cannot tell the sex of the author from the name, but the style is unlike those employed by any male authors I know. In any event, the narrative is reminiscent of 1954's A Woman in Berlin, a harrowing autobiographical account of a journalist in Germany's capital when the Russians came.
Four stars.
Sunpot (Part 1 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé
Here we've got a tongue-in-cheek space adventure starting Captain Belinda Bump, who for some reason is topless throughout the strip. Actually, it seems quite natural to go nude in space—after all, Niven's Belters are nudists. However, prurience seems intended: Bump is referred to as "Nectar Nipples" and "Wobble Boobs", and the overall style feels something like a black and white version of what fills the final pages of Playboy each month.
In this short installment, Captain Bump runs across the next Apollo mission. High jinks ensue.
The art is fun, and I want to like the characters, but Bodé needs a new letterer. Maybe he can borrow Sol Rosen from Marvel.
Three stars.
Doing the math
While nothing in this magazine quite hits the highs of Sturgeon, and Plachta keeps swinging and missing (no one I've talked to has managed to decipher Ronnie's intent), it's still a pleasant read from front to back. I have a suspicion Galaxy will outlive Apollo.
That's something, at least!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
Pan Am makes the going great!
Thousands turned out in Everett, Washington, for the roll-out of the first jumbo jet ever built. The "wide-bodied" Boeing 747 can carry a whopping 362 passengers; compare that to the 189 carried by the 707 that inaugurated the "Jet Age" a decade ago. Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) took delivery of the aircraft, which flew to Nassau, Bahamas, thenceforth to New York.
Originally scheduled for regular service on Dec. 15, things have been pushed back to January 18. That's because 28 of the world's airlines have placed orders for 186 of these monsters, including American Airlines, which has ordered 16. Since their shipment won't arrive until June, and as air travel is strictly regulated in this country by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which ensures fairness of rates, routes, and other aspects of competition, the CAB ordered a delay until Pan Am leases American one of its fleet.
As impressive as the 747 is, it constitutes something of a bridge, aeronautically speaking. Very soon, we will have supersonic transports plying the airlanes. Eventually, we may even have hypersonic derivatives of the reusable "space shuttle", currently under development at NASA. The jumbo jet will allow for economical, subsonic flights until passenger travel goes faster than sound, at which point, the 747 will make an excellent freighter.
These are exciting times for the skies! And with that, let's see if we've also got exciting times in space…
John Campbell makes the going… hard
What Supports Apollo?, by Ben Bova and J. Russell Seitz
Apropos of the aeronautically pioneering theme, the first piece in this issue is a science article on what supports the Apollo, literally: the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building, where the three stages of the Saturn V are put together; the crawler that the rocket rides to the launch pad, and the 30-story gantry at the launch pad.
The mobile launcher (left) and the Saturn on the crawler (right)
It's a lot of numbers told in a wide-eyed fashion, but I enjoyed it. The pictures are nice, too.
Four stars.
The Wild Blue Yonder, by Robert Chilson
by Vincent diFate(right)
Engineer Ted Halsman had bought an old mine in rural Ohio and stuffed it with all kinds of advanced equipment. When the mine explodes with the force of an atomic blast, Halsman goes on the run, asserting that his discovery will warp the future of humanity if it escapes his clutches.
Told in documentary fashion, this story goes on waaaaay too long. Along the way, much speculation is made about the nature of the blast, and how it might require rewriting the laws of physics. That the speculations are patently absurd does a bit to foreshadow the joke ending. On the other hand, that ending is also rather implausible.
Beyond that, we're meant to sympathize with Halsman, who idly dreams of returning to civilization, decades after successfully escaping from it. That he murdered half a dozen people in cold blood while fleeing is glossed over.
Two stars.
The Proper Gander, by A. Bertram Chandler
by Leo Summers
A thoroughly humanoid flying-saucer pilot is reprimanded for being too showy about his jaunts to Earth. His bosses decide the best defense against discovery is hiding in plain sight: a saucer is ordered to land in front of a commuter, and out strolls a vivacious, thoroughly humanoid "Officer's Comfort Second Class" who claims she is from Venus. Since modern humans know Venus is uninhabitable, the saucer people figure that future sightings will be written off as gags or delusions.
This story is both stupid and sexist, both in spades. One star.
Curfew, by Bruce Daniels
A young Martian by the name of Matheson comes to Earth for the reading of his uncle's will. Said uncle was an inventor and a corporate spy, and his legacy includes some rather valuable patents that could be explosive in the wrong hands. Others are already after the secret, and in addition to dodging them, Matheson must meet with a shady unknown at night, outside the safety of his hotel.
Therein lines the inspiration for the story's title: as a solution to the crime problem, there is a night-long curfew enforced by mechanical beasts and aircraft. Can Matheson brave the rigors of his homeworld long enough to claim his prize?
This piece is somewhat juvenile in tone, but not bad. Three stars.
This story appears to take place in the same universe as "His Master's Vice", because that's the other place we've seen Prox(y)Ad(miral)s. In this tale, we've got a prison escapee named Olivine who has made a break with four other convicts. He heads out to a planet that he knows (as a former ProxAd) has been restricted and bears a resource of great value. Of course, the suspicious ease of Olivine's escape suggests that the authorities have a reason for letting him and his band scout out this world for them…
It's cute, in a Chris Anvil sort of way, though the space patrol must have been close to prescient to anticipate all of the twists and turns the story takes. Three stars, barely.
And now, Part 2 of the serial started last month, in which an Israeli scientists flees to Denmark to develop anti-gravity.
In this installment, Denmark builds a proper anti-grav spaceship, adapted from a giant hovercraft. We learn that its pilot likes to sleep around, and his wife is being leaned on by the CIA to steal secrets from the project. In all of this issue's 50 pages, the only scene that really matters is when the discoverer of the effect, Leif Holm, newly minted Minister for Space, gives a speech from the Moon. The rest is superfluous building scenes or bits with the pilot's wife, who exists solely to be weak, vulnerable, and jealous, so she can be traitorous.
"Did you read about our Mars visit?" is a line that is actually in the book, and I thought at that point, "No! But I'd have liked to!"
Also, can a diesel tractor really work on the Moon even with oxygen cylinders? And are the Danestronauts doing anything to sterilize their equipment, or are they just blithely contaminating the Moon?
I'm really not enjoying this one very much. Harrison is sleepwalking. Two stars.
The Reference Library: To Buy a Book (Analog, January 1970), by P. Schuyler Miller
Miller prefaces his book column with a fascinating piece on how books are distributed. In short, they aren't…not for very long, anyway. The titles sit on shelves for a vanishingly brief time, and unless the booksellers know they can sell a bunch, chances are they won't bother ordering any. The profit margin's just not there. This is a phenomenon I know very well as an author, and I don't imagine the paradigm will change for the next half century or so (until we all switch over to digital books, computer-delivered, as Mack Reynolds predicts).
There's also a nice plug for Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance, a comprehensive encyclopedia of all topics from the show. Then Miller gushes over a trio of reprint Judith Merril novellas, Daughters of Earth, the recently novelized Leiber serial, A Specter is Haunting Texas, and the very recently novelized Silverberg serial, Up the Line. His praise is slightly muted for Alexander Key's juvenile, The Golden Enemy.
It is appropriate that, on the eve of the dawn of a new era of air travel, Analog is continuing a serial about a new era of space travel. But despite that subject matter, this issue is straight out of Dullsville, continuing a flight into mediocrity that has been going on for many years now.
With a score of 2.5, this month's issue is only beaten to the bottom by the perennial stinker, Amazing (2.4). It is roughly tied with New Worlds (2.5), and exceed by IF (2.7), Vision of Tomorrow (3.2), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.5).
Aside from that superlative last magazine, it's been something of a drab month: you could take all the 4-5 star stuff and you'd have less than two full magazine's worth. And women wrote just 4% of the pieces.
Is this any way to run a genre?
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
We at the Journey have a special treat for you this holiday season. Look beneath all the discarded paper and shed pine needles and gelt wrappers—why, it's a complete list of The Best Science Fiction (and Fantasy) of 1969! With SFnal output on the rise, there's a good chance you haven't been able to keep up.
Don't worry; we've got you covered. Anything on this list is worth reading/watching. Just peruse the Journey library, settle into your coziest chair, and enjoy the week before New Year's!
—— Best Poetry
——
Joanna Russ at last year's Baycon, Harlan Ellison trying to steal her thunder in the background
It used to be that poetry abounded in professional science fiction. You can still find it in the fanzines (particularly a lot of cloying, 'I love Spock' stuff in the trekzines), but it's largely died out in the mags for sale. Luckily, this year we had a compendium of pro-poetry in the form of Frontier of Going: An Anthology of Space Poetry, which provided the last three entries above.
The standout was Joanna Russ' poem, and when you read it, you'll see why.
A doctor decides the world is too sick to survive… and he makes sure of it by personally spreading disease across the globe.
ㅤ Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes, by Harlan Ellison
Love knows no allegiance to race…human or otherwise.
We've got more entries this year, in part because the venues are so disparate, catering to different tastes. Not all of us loved all of the stories here, but at least one person did, which means a chunk of our readers will too!
As with the short story section, there were only two stories a lot of people truly enjoyed, but all of these are good reads. It is notable that this is the first category that we see women (at least, women writing under female names—one never knows!) coming to the fore. This is a contrast to prior years when women would often be stronger in shorter lengths, largely because F&SF was the one mag that consistently published women.
A case of mistaken intention pits incomprehensible aliens vs. the medical corps of Sector General. If you like this series, you'll love this installment.
The world is drowning, and only a handful can be saved by fleeing to the Moon. As Brian put it:
"Would mankind be able to survive without our possessions, and even our waste? Would we be able to bury Shakespeare, or even personal items which possess only sentimental value, for the sake of the race’s survival? Blish supposes we wouldn’t."
Novellas are an odd duck, length-wise, so we are often starved for choice. This year, however, though the options were fewer, the quality was pretty darned high.
The story of an American POW during World War 2, culminating in the Dresden firebombing. Vaguely SFnal, such trappings are really there so the author could approach the traumatic material at a distance. Big for a reason.
One of Dick's less comprehensible and yet somehow more compelling works, combining a grab-bag of innovations, commentaries on commercialism, and questionings of reality.
We've got it all: fantasy, science fiction, satire, psychedelia. And more sex than ever. There's nothing really "conventional" or "traditional" here. Even the Anderson is more outré than usual.
Dr. Isaac Asimov: feminist. This is a fascinating piece on the second-class history of women in society. How does a fellow with a troublesome "handsy" problem produce such a brilliant piece on sexism? I guess we all contain multitudes.
It is a sad, yet fitting epitaph for science writer Willy Ley that there are three pieces concerning him this year—two by him, and one about him. Rest in peace, my friend.
—— Best Magazine/Collection
——
New Writings 14-15: 3.7 stars, 3 Star nominees, (two anthologies)
F&SF: 3.1 stars, 11 Star nominees (12 issues)
IF: 3.1 stars, 5 Star nominees (11 issues)
New Worlds: 3 stars, 5 Star nominees (11 issues)
Galaxy: 3 stars, 12 Star nominees (11 issues)
Vision of Tomorrow: 2.9 stars, 2 Star nominees (3 issues)
Venture: 2.8 stars, 0 Star nominees (3 issues)
Analog: 2.7 stars, 1 Star nominee (12 issues)
Fantastic: 2.6 stars, 1 Star nominee (six issues)
Amazing: 2.6 stars, 0 Star nominees (six issues)
Orbit 5: 2.6 stars, 1 Star nominee, (one anthology)
Famous Science Fiction 1.9 stars, 0 Star nominees (one issue)
Frontier of Going: An Anthology of Space Poetry 3 star nominees (one anthology)
—
The main conclusions we draw from this line-up are:
New Writings really pushes Kris' buttons! (I generally rate the stories therein about one star less than Kris does, but Kris is more enamored of the new style than me).
F&SF is living up to its reputation (it won the Hugo this year).
Analog really needs a new editor.
—— Best Publisher
——
Ace: 3 Star nominees
Hodder & Stoughton 2 Star nominees
Knopf: 2 Star nominees
Doubleday: 1 Star nominee
Delacorte 1 Star nominee
MacMillan 1 Star nominee
F&SF 1 Star nominee
Ballantine 1 Star nominee
Pyramid 1 Star nominee
Avon 1 Star nominee
—
My friend, Tom Purdom, said this of Ace a few years ago:
"Ace is an attractive beginner’s market because you just have to satisfy two requirements. You have to create a good action-adventure plot and you have to set it in a colorful, interesting future. The editor of Ace Books, Donald A. Wollheim, has been a science fiction fan since was a teenager in the 1930s. He grew up reading the science fiction pulps and sometimes argues that science fiction is a branch of children’s literature—a genre whose core audience consisted of bright teenage boys. He doesn’t object if your novel includes things like good prose, interesting characters, and an original view of the future. But anybody who understands science fiction and its history can look at the covers of a rack full of Ace Doubles and know what the basic requirements are."
And so, Ace combines action, adventure and (often) solid writing—and a lot of ouput. A recipe for sweeping this category every year!
This list keeps growing every year. The recent paperback boom is partly responsible, but also, we're seeing each magazine develop its own stable of promising artists. Interestingly, perennial Schoennherr didn't make the list. Jack Gaughan, a favorite of everyone else, never seems to make much impression on the Journey staff.
Is it science fiction? Well, it's something—and as a swan song for The Monkees, it can't be beat. I guess if it's SFnal, its closest analog would be New Worlds magazine.
We didn't get a lot of good choices this year. As Kris observed, it's easier to crank out million-dollar kitchen-sink films and hope for a 100x return rather than produce a $10 million film and hope for a 10x return, even if the profits are roughly the same, all told.
—— Best Comic Book
——
Trigan Empire (Look & Learn)
X-Men (Marvel)
Honorable Mention
Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel) Captain America (Marvel) Doctor Strange (Marvel) Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD (Marvel) Night Master (Showcase) Tiny Tania In Space (Sally) Valerian & Laureline (Dargaud)
–
A nice mix of Marvel titles and stuff from overseas. National (D.C.) is conspicuously absent. They're pretty bad this year.
I have some reservations about giving SFT the crown since it stopped publication in April, but it got the most votes. Trumpet is noteworthy for including Niven's "Down in Flames", which reveals The Truth behind his Known Space stories. The last two 'zines are both put out by Ruth Berman, the former of which is a particularly literate trekfiction mag.
And that's that for this year! Season's Greetings to all, and here's to another year of terrific science fiction!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
Being #2… stinks
On the scene at the launch of Apollo 12, President Nixon assured the NASA technicians that America was #1 in space, and that it wasn't just jingoism—it was true!
Well, even a stopped clock, etc. In fact, all accounts suggest the Soviet space program had some serious setbacks last year, the results of which will be felt through at least to 1971. Schedules got shifted as large rockets were earmarked for purely military service in response to the escalating (now calmed) Sino-Soviet crisis. But the biggest issue was reported in Aviation Weekly last month: apparently, the Soviets lost a Saturn-class booster on the launch pad before liftoff last summer. I hadn't even heard that such a thing was in development! The rocket's loss has set back the USSR's manned space program by at least a year, resulting in tepid non-achievements like their recent triple Soyuz mission rather than the construction of a space station or a trip to the Moon.
This is actually the rocket from the Soviet film The Sky Calls (American title: Battle Beyond the Sun)
It didn't help that the Soyuz pads were occupied during the summer as the Soviets tried to match our lunar efforts. It may well be that their Saturn was rushed to service too soon, and similar gun-jumping may have caused the loss of the Luna 15 sample-return mission.
Speaking of which, in September, the Soviets launched Kosmos 300 and 305. Both of them were heavy satellites that went into the orbit usually used for lunar Zond missions. And then they reentered shortly thereafter…in pieces. It's not certain if these were to be circumlunar flights or retries of Luna 15. Either way, they didn't work out, either.
Meanwhile, the Apollo mission moves blithely along. Apollo 13 will go to the Moon next March to Fra Mauro, a landing site photographically scouted out by the Apollo 12 folks. This chapter of the Space Race is well and truly over, won by the forces of democracy championed by such luminaries as Spiro Agnew.
That's a good rock
Speaking of Apollo 12, you may recall earlier this month I talked about analysis of the Moon rocks brought back by Apollo 11. A similar report has come out about the rocks brought back by Conrad and Bean. Dr. Oliver A. Schaeffer of New York State Univ. at Stony Brook says they are only 2.2 to 2.5 billion years old—1-2 billion years younger than the Armstrong and Aldrin's samples. This means some kind of surface activity was ongoing on the comparatively quiet Moon—meteorite strikes and/or vulcanism, we don't know yet.
NASA astronaut Charles "Pete" Conrad, commander of the Apollo 12 mission, holds two moon rocks he and Alan Bean brought back to Earth. Taken last month at Manned Spacecraft Center's Lunar Receiving Laboratory.
Also, Dr. S. Ross Taylor of Australian National Univ. says the Apollo 12 samples contain about half the titanium as the Apollo 11 rocks and also more nickel, though otherwise, their chemistry is similar. Thus, the Moon is far from homogeneous, and we have just scratched the surface (so to speak) of the mystery that is the Moon. As we get more samples from more sites, a better picture will come together, but it will undoubtedly take time; imagine trying to contemplate all of Earth's geologic diversity from just two short digs?
Ben Dane is a widower with a bad heart, stranded by a blizzard at his friend Harp's house. When the home is beset by a furry, anthropoid monster, the two give chase. Is it a crazed lunatic? An alien? The Abominable Snowman?
Pangborn really lets you live inside his characters, vividly depicting the Maine land and farmscape as well as the personalities that populate his stories. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the tale's telling, which takes its time, satisfied with the redolence of its scenery. The real problem is the uninspired ending; what we have here, aside from the liberal sprinkling of four-letter words, is a piece that could have come out in Weird Tales thirty years ago.
Three stars.
Books (F&SF, January 1970), by Joanna Russ
Ms. Russ has come into her own as a columnist—her review of Day of the Dolphin was so funny that I was compelled to read it aloud to my wife. She goes on to damn Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron with faint praise, agreeing only with the simple premise that all men have their price. Russ gives highest marks to Jack Vance's Emphyrio, which our Victoria Silverwolf enjoyed.
Indeed, Russ' opinions mirror those of our own staff, though Jason liked Dophin more than Joanna did.
Russ ends her piece with a tepid review of a tepid anthology: Best SF: 1968, edited by Harry Harrison.
A Matter of Time and Place, by Larry Eisenberg
The name "Emmett Duckworth" inevitably elicits a weary sigh, for this series following the offbeat adventures of an inventor are invariably stupid.
Such is the case here where Duckworth is pressed into service by the Pentagon to make a host of ambitious but unworkable weapons. In the end, he discovers that there is a conservation of local entropy: the more domestic disorder in America, the more peaceful the world becomes.
Every scientific assertion in the story is ludicrous. It doesn't even work as farce. One star.
by Gahan Wilson
E Pluribus Solo, by Bruce McAllister
The last bald eagle, locked inside the Smithsonian for its protection, is under attack. A mercenary with a vicious falcon sidekick has been hired to dispatch this American icon. All that stands between them is one overmatched security guard…
This is a gruesome story, and I wasn't sure if I was going to like it, but the end is redeeming.
On the edge of three and four stars. I guess I'll flip it to the latter.
This is a genuinely funny piece. A fellow takes his Rambler American to the seedy shop in his village to be serviced. What he doesn't know until too late is that his car has been stud serviced by another vehicle…and his car is now pregnant.
The only failing to this story is that it doesn't end. It just sort of trails off, either too soon or too long after the punchline is delivered. The implied biology of cars is fascinating, though. They seem to be like Gethenians from Left Hand of Darkness: all are capable of giving birth, but they can take on either sexual role.
Four stars.
A Third Hand, by Dean R. Koontz
A genetic freak dubbed Timothy is cooked up in a DoD lab. Armless and legless, and with only one eye, he is nevertheless one of humanity's most gifted members. That's because he has an IQ of 250+ and Gil Hamilton's ability to psionically manipulate small items at close range. Eventually, he is given prosthetic arms and legs to give him a "normal" life—sort of a flip side to McCaffrey's The Ship Who… series (where deformed brains are turned into spaceship control centers).
But that's just setting up the character. The story starts when Timothy witnesses the death of his guitarist buddy over the visiphone at the hands of a notorious crime boss. The handicapped genius applies all of his resources toward bringing the fiend to justice.
Koontz throws a lot of interesting future tech into his story: home printers that reproduce daily photostatted newspapers; androids that uncannily imitate their owners; floating death machines called Hounds. What he doesn't do is anything with his protagonist. Timothy is unique in all ways except mindset, which is not only conventional, but not even particularly brilliant. In the event, his main distinction is his limited telekinesis, and if you've read Niven's "The Organleggers", then you certainly won't get much out of this.
Highway 150 is haunted, and all the cargo-haulers know it. And it's because of a mean young cuss called Joe Indian, who runs an old Mack with a load of turkeys, transported in the most inhumane way possible. What's his story, and how is the spectral visitation ended? You'll have to read to the end to find out.
A fine ghost story, by a trucker for truckers, originally published in Overdrive, a trucker mag, in 1967. Four stars.
Bughouse, by Doris Pitkin Buck
Two couples at a personal soirée. One of the husbands suggests that they might all be a little mad, and he proposes to prove it by having them all eat an Oriental bug poison (which should have no effect on humans—unless they're "buggy").
A slight, but interestingly written, piece. Three stars.
The Lunar Honor-Roll, by Isaac Asimov
This month's science article has a touching book-end: Ike's dad apparently lived long enough to experience not only the flight of the first aircraft but also the first lunar mission, passing away a couple of weeks after the flight of Apollo 11. A fan of science fiction, he instilled a love of learning and educating that has served The Good Doctor well. The meat inside the reminiscence is a nice piece on the naming of the Moon's prominent features. Why are so many 16th Century, medieval, and Greek astronomers honored? Why do we have Alps and Apennines on the Moon as well as lakes, seas, and an ocean?
Worth reading. Five stars.
A Delicate Operation, by Robin Scott
Getting a brilliant doctor out of East Germany to freedom in the West is tough at the best of times. A "white" operation, where a double is sent in so the target can escape, is considered unworkable because no suitable man can be found for the job. A "black" op (smuggling out as hidden cargo) is planned, but when the latter fails, it seems all hope is lost. That is, until Dr. Celia Adams, a supremely talented British biologist, takes matters into her own hands. Can she succeed where the cynical, oversexed CIA veteran (the ostensible hero of our story) cannot?
This is a tight, fun story whose ending you'd likely only guess because you know it has to be SFnal given where it was published. Much is made of the East German doctor being gay, which turns out to be fundamental to the plot.
Four stars.
Seasons Greetings!
Well that was a fine repast (even if the two cover authors turned in the lesser works). And we're now up to a two-magazine streak. Will 1970 be the year F&SF truly deserves the Hugo it won in August? That would be something to celebrate, indeed!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
A generation or two from now, the Earth is recovering from a devastating war between the Western World and the Chinasian alliance. At first, the latter was winning, surging into Australia and with a plan to cross the Bering Strait. Then things bogged down. Eschewing the use of nuclear weapons (for an unexplained reason), the death rate became fantastic.
One day, the war just stopped. Or, more specifically, someone stopped them. Sounds like a positive development, but whoever did it is now exerting dictatorial control over the globe, futzing with governments, economies, even population growth rates and somehow slowing the age of human maturity!
Now, a decade after the war, Michael Standard, a battered veteran of the Australian front, is the one man who can stop the war-stopper. He is equipped with a prosthetic arm which is set to fire its hand like a cannon when face to face with the entity who styles himself "The Rim".
In many ways, Earthrim is a conventional action yarn, not too different from the series hero paperbacks like the new "Executioner" series. Standard is an irascible brute who lurches from fight to fight, surviving by animal cunning and will to live. The world Nick Kamin (a new author) creates is not particularly visionary. There is one lady character, and she is a prostitute, existing for the sole purpose of 1) being Standard's lover, and 2) getting Standard to Rim.
But Kamin does some interesting stuff. He begins the story with a compelling hook: Standard is put under to have his prosthetic arm's shoulder put back into its socket, which brings a hapless doctor into the plot. Then we get scenes from Standard's past, woven in quite deftly, making his character more interesting and his personality a bit more palatable (though how he acts like a moron most of the time, but can whip out an erudite observation on topology is a bit strange).
The other characters are actually well drawn, from Jeannine the prostitute to Dr. Graystone. Even the cops on the trail of Standard get decently fleshed out, though their role is somewhat incidental. Kamin is also a compelling author. He's got the modern style down pat, and the lurid mode works well for Ace Doubles.
The biggest problem with the book is the revelation at the end that no character has exercised free will. Everything that happens is ultimately the will of Rim or Condliffe, the fellow who equipped Standard with the arm-gun. The journey is interesting. The writing is good. But the story is a steel lattice that the characters can only inhabit, not change.
Three and a half stars.
Phoenix Ship, by Leigh and Walt Richmond
by Jack Gaughan
The Richmond husband-and-wife team (supposedly, the wife does the typing, with the husband sending telepathic instructions from his living room easy chair) has another Ace Double for us. Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald (S.T.A.R.) Dustin is an Earther, nephew to an asteroid belt-dwelling rabble-rouser named Trevor Dustin. Stan's dad wants his son to be nothing like his uncle, so he enrolls him in an arctic university for a proper indoctrination…er…education. Said education is most unusual. Stan gets weekly "inoculations" and then is given a series of exams. The questions are highly technical—impossible to answer without years of classes. Yes somehow, unconsciously, Stan seems to have the answers floating in the back of his mind.
Not content to let his hindbrain do the work, Stan spends all of his waking hours studying so that he could pass the tests even without the mysterious, subconscious aid. As a result, after four years, Stan has one of the most remarkable minds in the solar system. He finishes his schooling just in time for his uncle to lead a rebellion against Earth, winning independence for the Belt through a series of brilliant space naval maneuvers.
This makes Stan persona non grata on Earth, whereupon the school's headmaster sneeringly informs Stan that he has been drafted into the Marines, and he will have to report for duty in two weeks as one of Earth's finest. Well, Stan won't stand for that—he skips town, heads to orbit, and then off to the Belt…where he has a date with destiny and a second war with Earth.
Written in a much (much!) more juvenile vein than the Kamin, this is an odd duck of a book. With its cardboard characters, mustache-twirling villains, perfunctory inclusion of a single female (to be the love interest, natch), and its basic plot, it feels like something out of the 30s. On the other hand, the loving detail lavished on things like weightless maneuvers, dealing with explosive decompression, and space station construction are pulled from the current pages of Popular Science. There are tantalizing details on living in the Belt. Most interesting was that virtually all of its denizens are scarred or deformed, testament to the hostile environment, but no less human for it. Anderson and Niven have written about Belters, but the Richmonds have taken the first, if clumsy, steps to flesh out living in the Belt, I think.
The problem is neither Anderson nor Niven wrote this book, and the Richmonds really weren't up to it. The subject matter required twice its length. At the hands of a Heinlein, it could have been a second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As is, it's an occasionally entertaining, but largely turgid and by-the-numbers throwaway.
Speaking of husband and wife writing teams… Lord of the Stars is a new juvenile sf adventure co-created by the husband-and-wife team of Jean and Jeff Sutton. Stars is readable and fun, but lacks the fire and flash of the best juveniles.
Like many juveniles, Stars is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of how a young boy discovers a world around him much more complex and interesting than he ever could have expected. As in many of these types of books, Danny has a destiny to fulfill, and as he learns of his destiny, the boy also learns the creature who had mentored him is evil, and he meets his true friends along the way.
Hmm, it occurs to me there is a lot of familiar archetyping in that description. That archetyping is a big part of the strength and weakness of this book. Because sophisticated readers know basically how a story like this will proceed, we're looking for signposts that indicate a different viewpoint or more complexity – as in the recent Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. But the Suttons aren't after the same level of complexity as Panshin was, and that leaves this book as merely an average juvenile sf yarn.
Cover by Albert Orbaan
The Suttons center Lord of the Stars around Danny June. As we meet Danny, he's all alone on a mysterious planet. He's been lost on the planet since his parents' colonist ship blew up, wandering the planet with the help of an amazing telepathic octopus-creature named Zandro. Zandro has incredible abilities and is extremely intelligent, guiding our boy in his means to survive the planet, and seeming to groom Danny for a greater fate.
But others want Danny as well. The great Galactic Empire, spanning thousands of stars, is after Danny. In chapter two we are introduced to the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire, led by Sol Houston, who see Danny as the kind of creature who can destroy their empire.
That aspect of the book is dully familiar, but at least the Suttons bring in a bit of playfulness with the names of the Galactic leaders. For reasons lost in the fog of time, the names Sol and Houston are legendary, so the leader of the empire is named Sol Houston. And so on, names explained in fun and clever asides which added to my pleasure with this book.
Similarly, there's an amusing tangent in which a set of Empire bureaucrats try to figure out what they can do to affect the lives of Danny and his friends. The bureaucrats fall into an almost talmudic debate about which regs to follow, which rules can be broken. It's in those moments one can see real-life arguments with governments and school boards made manifest. (Jean Sutton works as a high school teacher while Jeff Sutton works as an aerospace consultant, so both know plenty about bureaucracy).
But the core of the book centers around Danny, his great psychic powers, and the attempts by his friends and allies to break Danny away from Zandro's influence. Along the way, Danny battles the plans of Gultur, Lord of the Stars; communicates psychically in subspace with a group of androids; and makes friends.
All of this is quite fun, since the Suttons bring just the right amount of seriousness to bear with Lord of the Stars. This is also a well-written, crisp little novel — no surprise since Jeff Sutton has written fiction and nonfiction since he left the Marines after the War. Still, Danny comes across as bit of a cipher and the plot machinations are a bit creaky.
Overall, a pleasant novel that's a bit of a throwback but still is worth the read.
Three stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
The Best Laid Schemes o' Mice an' (Space)Men
Two novels in which interstellar voyages gang agley (with a tip o' the Tam o' Shanter to Bobby Burns) fell into my hands recently. One is by a Yank, the other by a Brit. Let's take a look at 'em.
The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd
Wraparound cover art by Paul Lehr
Atlanta-born Boyd Bradfield Upchurch writes under the penname listed above. He's whipped out a couple of previous novels quickly. The Last Starship from Earth came out last year, and The Pollinators of Eden just a few months ago.
This latest work starts with a psychiatrist interviewing a spaceman who came back from his voyage too early. More concerning is the fact that it was supposed to be a two-man effort, and his partner isn't with him.
The text quickly shifts to first person narration by the astronaut himself. His name is John Adams, better known as Jack. (I'm not sure if his name is supposed to be an allusion to the second President of the United States or not.) He's a Southern boy, just like the author.
His missing buddy is Keven "Red" O'Hara, a stereotypical Irishman who has a toy leprechaun as a good luck charm and wears underwear with green polka dots. (The latter is actually part of the plot.)
We get quite a bit of background about their days before the spaceflight. Suffice to say that, after an encounter with an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher and his nubile daughter, Jack gets religion and Red gets the girl. (He actually marries her but, as we'll see, that hardly ties him down.)
Their mission takes them to a planet in another galaxy. (There's no real reason the place has to be so far away. In other ways, this isn't the most realistic space voyage ever to appear in fiction.) The inhabitants are very human in appearance, the main difference being very long, strong legs that are used in about the same way as arms.
The aliens live in a logical, technologically advanced society with no apparent form of government. Society is made up of what are pretty much universities. The two Earthmen are welcomed, and even allowed to teach classes.
It should be noted that the locals wear extremely short tunics and nothing else, not even underwear. This very casual almost-nudity (which really conceals nothing) goes along with the fact that they consider sex to be no big deal, just something they do when they feel like it. Children often result, of course, and never know who their fathers are.
For Red, this is an opportunity to have relations with as many of the beautiful young women surrounding him as possible. Jack, on the other hand, wants to convert the natives to Christianity. That includes dressing modestly, courting the opposite sex chastely, etc.
Can you guess that this is going to backfire?
Complicating matters is the fact that Jack falls in love with one of the aliens. It seems that Earth doesn't consider extraterrestrials to be human unless they meet a long list of very specific conditions. That includes being able to defend their planet from invaders. (Obviously this is a cynical ploy on the part of Earthlings to be able to enslave any aliens who are weaker than they are.) In essence, Jack is marrying an animal, legally, unless he can prove they meet all the conditions.
Things reach a climax during the performance of an Eastertime Passion Play, meant to convey the story of Christ's sacrifice to the aliens, who are entirely without religion. (Red, nominally a Catholic, goes along with Jack's evangelism, mostly because he enjoys putting on shows.)
Yep, that's not going to go at all well either.
This is a satiric novel, not quite openly comic although it's got some farcical elements. There's also quite a bit of sex. This may be the only science fiction book I've read with a detailed description of a woman's genitalia.
The last part of the novel, which goes back to the psychiatrist, has a twist ending that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe the best way to describe this odd little book is to compare it to an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke.
Three stars.
The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon
Prolific author and controversial editor Moorcock needs no introduction to Galactic Journeyers.
A fellow named Ryan is aboard a starship heading for a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Barnard's Star. The trip will take five years, and three have already gone by. He's the only person awake on the ship. In hibernation are his wife, their two sons, and other relatives and friends.
(We'll find out, by the way, that a couple of the men have two wives each. This drastic change in Western European society [everybody is British] is taken for granted, with no discussion.)
Flashbacks take us to a future Earth that is rapidly disintegrating into chaos. Tribalism rears its ugly head. Ryan, the manager of a toy company, fires a kindly employee just because the fellow is Welsh. Things get much, much worse as the book continues. Ryan and the others hijack the starship in order to escape Earth, which they feel is doomed.
Aboard the ship, Ryan suffers nightmares. These are often surrealistic. At times, the text turns into words in all capitals that are placed on the page to form other words. These typographical tricks contrast strongly with the main parts of the narrative, which use simple language to convey truly horrific happenings.
It's hard for me to say much more about what happens, because Ryan is quite obviously experiencing a mental breakdown. You can't trust that what you're told is real.
This is a very dark and disturbing book. The New Wave narrative technique associated with the nightmares is a little gimmicky, but otherwise the novel is compelling in its portrait of both individuals and society in general falling apart.
(It should be noted that, according to scuttlebutt, many of the scenes set on Earth were written by Hilary Bailey, who is married to Moorcock. He rewrote that material, and added everything set in space. The resulting work is credited solely to Moorcock, apparently with Bailey's consent.)
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Only one book from me this month, and unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's also, for better or worse, a familiar face. John Jakes has been writing at a mile a minute this year, with The Asylum World being what must be his fourth or fifth novel of 1969. Unlike some previous Jakes novels (a couple of which I reviewed), which lean more towards fantasy, this one is very much science fiction. If anything, the changing of genres is for the worse.
The year is 2031, and while mankind still lives on Earth, to an extent, a widespread race war between blacks and whites (I am not kidding) has resulted in not only Earth being split into Westbloc and Eastbloc (obviously a futuristic equivalent of our current cold war with the Soviets), but, I suppose on the bright side, a Noah's Ark of humanity has been established on Mars, where people live in domes, more or less in racial harmony. Sean Cloud is young, brash, and a "subadministrator" of this Martian colony. He's also hopelessly in love Lydia Vebren, who likes Sean but is hesitant due to his mixed racial heritage. Sean is half-black and half-white, is apparently unable to pass as the latter, and Lydia has a prejudice against black men.
There's also another, larger problem: a fleet of alien ships is making its way through the solar system, to Mars, possibly for peace, but also possibly to make war. The Martian colony does not have the armaments to defend itself, so Sean and Lydia are sent to Earth to bargain with the leadership in Westbloc, which itself is on the verge of turning to shambles.
The back cover says The Asylum World is satire, which strikes me as a bit odd, because in my experience satire is supposed to a) be humorous, and b) provide a topic on which the author may try to prove a point. No doubt this novel is Jakes's attempt at providing commentary on the current political climate in the U.S., especially racial strife over the past decade, not to mention that yes, tensions between the Americans and Soviets have resulted in us nearly blowing ourselves to bits at least once already. The problem is that I'm not sure what the hell he is trying to say, other than to make some center-of-the-road statements such as, for example, bemoaning the irrelevance of the family unit in this not-too-far future. There's a general sentiment of "Why can't we just get along and learn to speak honestly with each other?" which is all well and good, but men around my age and younger are dying. Sean's mixed racial heritage, which seems like it should be fodder for symbolic meaning (he is, after all, the offspring of two races, and now he must join Westbloc with Mars), but Jakes does very little with this.
I could continue to berate Jakes's political naivete, and I could also delve into how even at 170 pages this novel spins its wheels a fair bit (it really could have been a novella); but instead I'll focus some on how, despite taking place several decades into our future, The Asylum World strikes me as having been written only in the past year, maybe in the span of a month or two (why not? Michael Moorcock has written novels in a matter of days), and that I do not see how it could remain relevant in say, another ten years. When Sean comes to Earth he spends most of the novel at the "Nixon-Hilton." Sure. There's also the "Statue of the Three Kennedys." The bubbling conflict between Westbloc and Eastbloc is more or less what we are now dealing with, despite the very real possibility that the Soviet Union may not exist in 2031. Or indeed the United States. This seems like a novel written specifically to be published in 1969, so that readers may "get it" while it still gives the impression of being timely—at which point, having finished the novel in a day or two, said readers will toss it aside. At least Jakes is now slightly less at risk of having to beg for money on a street corner.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
With the Apollo missions taking so much of our attention (there were four flights this year), it is understandable that unmanned missions and science have gotten short shrift. I'm going to try to address this oversight now.
Far out!
Do you remember Pioneer 6 (launched Dec. 16, 1965) and Pioneer 7 (launched Aug. 17, 1966)? They are deep space probes designed to observe the Sun from widely different vantage points. In fact, we've been a bit remiss: since '66, two more identical Pioneers have gone up: Pioneer 8 (December 13, 1967) and Pioneer 9 (November 8, 1968). A fifth and final Pioneer was launched August 27, 1969, but its carrier rocket exploded. The loss of that one is pretty bad; whereas the others are all spread out fairly equidistantly around the Sun, more or less as far away from it as the Earth, Pioneer "E" was going to be put in an orbit that kept it close to Earth, where it would be used to give as much as a two-week warning of dangerous flare activity.
Nevertheless, NASA is blazing along with four satellites. Indeed, thanks to the longevity and spread-out positions of Pioneers 6 and 7, they were able to perform an unique experiment. On Nov. 6, the two satellites were 175 million miles apart on a common line with the Sun, and scientists observed the difference in behavior of solar wind particles due to their passage through space in opposite directions. In a similar vein, on Dec. 2, when the spacecraft reached points on a common spiral line leading out from the Sun (the star rotates, so it flings out particles in a spiral rather than linear fashion), scientists measured different kinds of solar particles coming from the same events on the Sun.
We'll have to wait for the journals to publish any papers, but this is the kind of large-scale, long-term science made possible by the Pioneer probes!
Another cool example of Pioneer science
Far in!
While the Pioneers study the Sun far from Earth, there are a host of spacecraft monitoring our home star from Earth orbit. For instance, we haven't talked about the Orbiting Solar Observatories (OSOs) for a while, but there have been six so far. They were the first heavy satellite series to be launched by NASA, providing nearly continuous coverage of the Sun since 1962, in wavelengths we can't observe from Earth because they are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere: ultraviolet, X-Ray, and gamma ray.
Why was the Sun such an early focus? Three major reasons: 1) understanding the dangers posed by flares and their relation to the high energy particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field is critical to ensuring astronaut safety, 2) surveying the Sun and comparing changes on the solar surface with fluctuations of space weather near Earth tell us both about the interactions of the two as well as the nature of both, and 3) the Sun is the closest star at hand, and what we learn about the Sun as a star can be applied to the millions of other stars we can observe.
The revelations OSO have given us are not easily conveyed. It's not like Explorer 1, which discovered the Van Allen Belts—a hitherto unexpected phenomenon—or the TIROS weather satellite, which discovered storms we hadn't even known about. Rather, they give us a huge body of data with which we can refine our understanding of how the Sun works, and also so that we can better predict space weather. What's called "basic research."
OSO 1 operated continuously from March-May 1962, and intermittently on to August 1963, returning data on 75 solar flares—most importantly, what events preceded, succeeded, and coincided with them in many different wavelengths, a fingerprint of an eruption, so to speak.
(ground-taken picture of the Sun flaring)
OSO 2 expanded its coverage to the corona, that bright bit of the Sun you can only see during a lunar eclipse. Its launch was delayed until February 3, 1965 because the original OSO B was damaged in a launch explosion, April 14, 1964, that killed three technicians! Though OSO 2 returned data for nine months, I can't find a single article on the Sun that stemmed from it. There's one on about 20 other stars observed by the satellite, though, and the difficulties of seeing through the Sun's glare to them.
OSO 3, the one that launched March 8, 1967, and not the one that failed to orbit in August 1965, was more successful. It returned interesting solar data, for instance finding solar X-ray sources that weren't flares, determining that the chromosophere (visible surface) didn't necessarily heat up before a flare, and monitoring the change in the solar spectrum over the course of its 28-day rotation.
And the onboard gamma ray experiments told us a lot about the universe. For instance, the torrent of gamma rays streaming in from the universe is highly confined to the galactic plane, and particularly toward the Milky Way's core, which means it must be galactic in origin. OSO 3 also observed X-ray bursts from a star (maybe stars) that isn't the Sun: Scorpius X-1, later determined to be a neutron star, and Lupus XR-1 (which may or may not be the same source—the literature is unclear). The satellite stopped working just last month.
OSO 4 went up October 18, 1967, and was the first OSO to carry an international experiment—a University of Paris device that measures the Sun in the ultraviolet frequency that best shows solar activity ("Lyman-alpha"). Indeed, it was the first OSO to scan the Sun in ultraviolet at all. Also really cool is that its X-ray resolution is such that it could watch flares in X-ray wavelengths as sharply as we could see it on the ground in the visual spectrum, so scientists could make one to one comparisons.
You'll note the use of past tense—the satellite is still in orbit, but its tape storage failed in May 1968, and last month, OSO 4 was ordered into standby mode.
That brings us to the OSOs we haven't covered yet. OSO 5 went up on January 22, 1969, and has the ability to scan the Sun in the X-ray range more quickly and thoroughly. OSO 6 went up August 9. I don't have too much to say about them because it's too early for papers. NASA reports both did their jobs fine, and they're still operating. Like OSO 3 did, they not only study the Sun but also galactic X-ray sources…so stay tuned.
Small satellites are doing their part, too. For instance, Explorer 41, the latest in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform series, launched June 21 into a high orbit that goes almost halfway to the Moon. The Sun this satellite examined has been unusually quiet, an expected trait of the "solar maximum"—the time in the Sun's 11-year cycle of highest output. On the other hand, low-energy galactic cosmic rays rates fluctuated more than usual, and interplanetary conditions appeared to be more disturbed. The satellite is still operating.
Finally, and only tangentially related to the Sun, there are the missions of Aurorae and Boreas, launched October 3, 1968 and October 10, 1969, respectively under the auspices of the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). They report on the brightness of Earth's aurorae, the composition and temperature of the ionosphere, and the charged particle environment in orbit. The first satellite is still working just fine, but Boreas went into a lower than expected orbit, and it reentered on November 23rd. Still, the mission was deemed successful.
Rocks to dig
Veering back into the manned space program, there was some exciting coverage during the Apollo 12 flight that I didn't have a chance to relate. As Conrad, Bean, and Gordon finish their three weeks in quarantine (joined on Dec. 2 by 11 scientists and technicians who had accidentally been exposed to lunar samples), this is a good time to talk about what we've learned from Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
Walter Cronkite had, as a guest on his programming, Dr. John O' Keefe—a geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Center. The visibly excited O'Keefe stated that the most extraordinary aspect of the Moon rocks is that they are deficient in nickel and cobalt as compared to the Sun, that latter body presumably being representative of the nebula that originally coalesced and formed our solar system.
Why is that significant? Well, the Earth's crust is similarly lacking in nickel and cobalt (and other "precious metals" that dissolve easily in iron, collectively called "siderophiles"). We know Earth has a dense iron core because nothing else would account for the planet's mass with respect to its volume, and also, it explains why the planet has a magnetic field. While our planet was first cooling, it makes sense that the siderophiles melted and mostly sank to the center of the planet.
The Moon has no core—we know this because its density (volume divided by mass) is too low, and it has no appreciable magnetic field. That the Moon's surface rocks correlate to Earth's surface rocks, and because its density appears to be constant from crust to center, that suggests that the Moon was somehow formed from Earth's crust. It is, in fact, a piece of our planet's outer surface that somehow spun off into orbit and formed its own little, low-density world.
What causes this is still unknown. Perhaps the Earth was spinning so fast when it was formed that its middle flew off. Or maybe a rogue planet smashed into the Earth. What we do know is that the composition of the Moon rocks puts paid the hypothesis that the Moon formed separately from and at the same time as Earth, since we'd then expect its crust's composition to either be more like that of the Sun, or for our moon to have a dense core.
We also know that whatever created the Moon happened quite early in Earth's history. The lunar rocks have been dated as 4.6 billion years old. That's very close to the estimated age of the Earth. What I found particularly exciting is that the Moon rocks must be the very oldest rocks we've ever encountered, except maybe for meteorites. That's because erosion and vulcanism are constantly erasing the Earth's surface, and the oldest rocks I know of down here are somewhere around 3 billion years old.
As we continue to explore the cosmos, we shall find more data points with which to create an holistic view of the universe, something that would be impossible were we to stay Earthbound. I am happy that I live in the Space Age, when our scientific knowledge is expanding exponentially. Who knows what new discoveries 1970 will bring!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
The news has been brewing for a while, and now it's on the front page: 1st Lieutenant William J. Calley Jr., a 26-year-old platoon leader stationed in Vietnam, has been "life or death" court martialed for the murder of 109 South Vietnamese civilians "of various ages and sexes."
This so-called "My Lai incident" took place northeast of Quang Ngai city on March 16, 1968 in a village called Song My—code-named "Pinkville". Calley, enraged at the death of his chief sergeant, appears to have ordered his unit to eliminate everyone in the hamlet. Several of his men went on a bloody spree; others did what they could to avoid involvement. One even shot himself in the foot so he could be medivaced out. A number came forward with the story, which was investigated and then dismissed by the 11th Infrantry Brigade. Letters to Congress have prompted the reopening of the case and investigation into the original investigation.
If Calley is convicted, he faces no less than life imprisonment, and death by firing squad is on the table.
The court martial comes on the heels of the July 21, 1969 charge of Green Beret commander, Col. Robert Rheault, and six of his officers with murder and conspiracy for the secret execution of a Vietnamese spy suspect. Those charges were dropped two months later when the CIA, whose operatives were key witnesses, refused to cooperate. Whether the government's tacit support of brutality increases or decreases the odds of Calley facing the music remains to be seen.
Mediocrities in Print
by Kelly Freas
December's final magazine is Analog. Let's hope this makes for pleasanter reading that the newspapers.
Turning first to the book review column, and skipping the editorial (for those who want recapitulations of Campbell's latest blatherings, go buy the collected volumes that have recently come out), P. Schuyler Miller offers up some nice coverage of translated Perry Rhodan books from West Germany. He goes on to cover a Silverberg collection of antediluvian tales called The Calibrated Alligator. They were written back when Silverbob was writing 50,000 words a week and rapidly killing himself. The quality of his work was moderate; he devoted most of his energies to the kinds of books once sold below the counter, but which are now on brazen display in New York newstands.
Miller liked Timescoop, though he thought it lesser Brunner (but not least Brunner). Pretty much what Jason said when he wrote about it. He also thought much of Isle of the Dead, by Roger Zelazny, as did Victoria Silverwolf early this year. Finally, before dispatching a bunch of reprints, he gives middlin' praise to Mack Raynolds' Time Gladiator, which is really just the serial Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes, a People's Capitalism story so old, it still has Joe Mauser in it! I liked the story, but I find Reynolds' near-future predictions fascinating, even if his writing is often just workmanlike.
This, by the way, is why I like Schuyler so much—he agrees with us! (And he doesn't play favorites; coming out first in Analog doesn't automatically increase the score).
That dopey looking sub-ship on the cover and as the headline illustration is, in fact, a submarine turned into a spaceship. How did it happen?
Arnie Klein is an Israeli researcher who develops…something. So explosive is this secret (literally—the story begins with his invention blowing up his laboratory) that he flees to Denmark, seeks asylum, and enlists the aid of his friend, Nobel Prize winner Ove Rasmussen. The two work together to build a woking model of the contraption, and then install it in a submarine.
Pretty early on, it's obvious what the thing will do: generate antigravity.
All of this takes us to about Page 40 of the serial, and none of those pages are necessary. The information conveyed in those dry ~10,000 words of text could easily have been woven into an in media res beginning—and Harrison is fully up to the task. That he padded things out so much, with uninteresting characters and inconsequential events, suggests he's in it for the per-word rates.
Anyway, after the Blæksprutten is commissioned, a trio of Soviet cosmonauts find themselves marooned on the Moon with a limited oxygen supply. Klein and Co. take their ship up to Luna and rescue them. Meanwhile, down on Earth, there's some Cold War spy machinations of limited interest.
Harrison can do much better. This is like cut-rate Mack Reynolds, really. Anyway, 3 stars, I guess, but if it's all like this, we're going to end up in the 2.5 zone.
Is Biological Aging Inevitable?, by Capt. John E. Wrobel, Jr.
This is an interesting piece on what we think causes mortality (lots of options), what's being done about it (not that much, surprisingly), the effects of immortality on society (only positive ones listed), and the mythological underpinnings of mortality acceptance (quite interesting).
I found the article quite graspable, and the use of chapter divisions greatly improved readability. Let's hope this becomes a feature for future nonfiction pieces.
Four stars.
Mindwipe, by Tak Hallus
by Vincent DiFate
"Tak Hallus" returns for his sophomore tale (his first, also appeared in Analog.) In this one, space-hand Ernest Schwab is on trial for a heinous crime: blanking the mind of the Terran governor of the planet Paria. It turns out Schwab is one of the very few telepaths known to humanity—even he didn't know he had this power. Now it is up to Public Defender Benson to prove that he was manipulated into action by another telepath rather than acting of his own volition. Doing so will take Benson on an adventure, from the courtrooms of Earth to the tunnels of the burrowing indigenes of Paria…and place a bullseye on his own head for meddling!
This is a pretty neat piece. It suffers for being rather workmanlike in execution, as if it were a little rushed, and I found the society of the future a bit too similar to that of the present (particularly the role of women). Nevertheless, it captures interest and offers up a decent mystery as well as, in the process, presenting an interesting alien race.
Three stars.
Testing … One, Two, Three, Four, by Steve Chapman
by Leo Summers
A bird colonel, stuck in service to an electronic brain, is given the task of overseeing a trio of servicemen who are undergoing computerized tests qualifying them for extraterrestrial deployment. What he doesn't realize (but what is obvious fairly early on) is that this assignment is, in fact, a test of his capabilities.
Not bad. The sort of thing Chris Anvil might have come up with.
Three stars.
Superiority Complex, by Thomas N. Scortia
by Leo Summers
Things fall off a cliff for these last two vignettes, probably accepted more for their useful length than quality. This one takes us to a time several generations after The Bomb wiped out half of humanity. Researchers are trying to revitalize the race through eugenics, specifically tracking down the descendants of "Phil Jason", an exceptional man who wrote screenplays in old Hollywood until he blew his own brains out. If society could manufacture more of his type, then perhaps it could be rejuvenated.
Turns out that "Phil" was really "Phyllis", and the spirit of her genius lives on throughout the human race…explaining why women always seem to rule from the shadows, preferring the power behind the throne rather than the throne itself (this is the story's contention, not mine).
A dumb, sexist piece. One star.
Any Number Can Play, by Richard Lippa
by Vincent DiFate
A meteorologist man-and-wife team investigate anomolaus weather off the coast of Florida and find the wreck of an enemy warship that had been creating the storm. Portentous intonations of "could this be happening globally?"
Weather control is all the rage these days, in fiction and nonfiction. Personally I can't buy that all the silver iodide crystals and laser beams will have half the effect that, say, a century of industrial society is having on the Earth. But I also take issue with attibuting harmful weather to malevolent foreign entities. That road leads to Silly Science. We had enough of that with folks like Lysenko. What's next? Railing against vaccinations?
Now that all the magazines are done, I can give you a sneak preview of what the Galactic Stars will look like. Here are all of the mags/anthologies in order of average:
New Writings 3.679824561
Fantasy and Science Fiction 3.102574451
IF 3.070572755
New Worlds 3.030241097
Galaxy 3.005917367
Vision of Tomorrow 2.921091331
Venture 2.824404762
Analog 2.688902006
Fantastic 2.645528083
Amazing 2.622086594
Orbit 2.571428571
Famous 1.897435897
As you can see, Analog finished pretty close to the bottom, barely acing out the Ted White mags (which are on their way up). Campbell's going to have to do better than this if he wants to keep his ~170,000 readers, I imagine.
In other statistics, women wrote just 3% of the new fiction this month, and the four and five star pieces would fill three small digests (out of the eight published). Not an auspicious way to end the decade, but perhaps the '70s will offer up a New New Wave.
See you on the other side!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
Just four months ago, men first set foot on the Moon, fulfilling a millennia-long dream of humanity as well as culminating a decade-long Space Race between the superpowers. And the question on everyone's lips: how do you top that?
It's important to remember that the flight of Apollo 11 was not the end, but only a beginning—just as John Glenn's orbital flight, Gus Grissom's mission in Gemini 3, Wally Schirra's in Apollo 7 were all beginnings. The Moon Port is open, and it is time to start the exploration of the cosmos in earnest.
Appropriately, the flight of Apollo 12 was planned to mark an incremental expansion upon the prior mission's success. Scheduled for a November 14 launch at 11:22AM Eastern time months in advance, the second lunar mission would include the following improvements:
Time spent on the Moon would be 32 hours, half again more than the 21 hours spent by Apollo 11.
There would be two Extravehicular Activities (EVAs) rather than one.
The astronauts would set up a series of experiments designed to operate for one year from the lunar surface.
The Lunar Module (LM) would execute a pinpoint landing at Site 7 in the Sea of Storms, as opposed to the less precise touchdown made by Eagle in July
As a result, the astronauts would be able to recover the TV camera from Surveyor 3, which had soft-landed on the Moon two years prior.
The Moonwalks would be televised in color this time.
After lunar exploration, Apollo 12 would spend an extra day in lunar orbit photographing future landing sites.
In all, Apollo 12 promised to be only slightly more ambitious than its predecessor, but how much more ambitious than a flight to the Moon do you need?
Crew and Capsule
The astronauts selected for this mission included two veterans and a rookie, the first time since Apollo 9 that an Apollo crew has included a newcomer. The mission commander was Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr., an irrepressibly cheerful and talented fellow who almost made the Mercury 7. He was pilot on the Gemini 5 endurance mission and commander on Gemini 11, which conducted docking and microgravity experiments. Richard "Dick" Gordon served as Command Module Pilot, and since he had been Conrad's pilot on Gemini 11, it must have seemed like old times. The newcomer was Alan Bean, who, like Gordon, had been part of the third group of NASA astronauts. His job was to pilot the Lunar Module down to the Moon's surface.
Left to right: Conrad, Gordon, and Bean
The timing for this crew's mission was determined by quirks of fate, only becoming set in stone in December. NASA has a protocol of assigning back-up crews (stand-ins who will replace mission crews in an emergency) to live missions three flights later. Originally, Conrad and Gordon had been the back-up crew for Apollo 8, along with third group astronaut Clifton Williams. Apollo 8 was supposed to test the LM in Earth orbit. But after the successful flight of Apollo 7, which tested the Command and Service Modules, and with the threat of an impending Soviet circumlunar flight, Apollo 8 was bumped to the 9th slot, and the December 1968 flight was reprogrammed for a mission around the Moon.
Conrad and Gordon backed up the delayed Apollo 9 flight, along with Alan Bean, who replaced Clifton Williams, who had died in a test flight October 5, 1967. Nine plus three is twelve, and so those three were put on the second lunar lander mission. But if Williams had not died, and had Apollo's missions gone as schedule, then it would have been Conrad and Bean to set the first steps on the Moon.
As with the prior Columbia and Eagle, NASA wanted proud names for the Apollo 12 vessels. Thousands of NASA employees and contractors sent in their suggestions, and the all-Navy crew decided on Yankee Clipper for the Command Module and Intrepid for the Lunar Module. This marks the first time that a NASA ship has shared a name with one that appeared on Star Trek—namely, the Vulcan-crewed starship in "The Immunity Syndrome". Of course, Intrepid has also been used for American naval vessels since the country's founding, but one has to wonder if Trek's outsize impact on popular culture wasn't a factor. I guess we'll see if we ever get a spaceship called Enterprise…
The crew were intimately involved in the creation of the Apollo 12 patch. The blue and gold motif was chosen to honor the U.S. Navy. The Eagle was featured on the last patch; this time, Yankee Clipper got to star. Al Bean went to the library to round up suitable ship references for the clipper and worked closely with the artist to ensure it had a truly "American" look, nixing the first draft as looking too much like the Argo from Greek myth.
Stormy weather
In 1949, President Truman chose Cape Canaveral in Florida to be the nation's spaceport as it allowed launches over the Atlantic rather than over populated regions; it is also as close to the equator as you can get in the continental United States, which means space launches get the most boost from the Earth's rotation.
But it also rains a lot in Florida, and an approaching storm front threatened to delay the Nov. 14th launch date. There was a four and a half hour window that day; if rain grounded the launch beyond that point, the back-up date was Nov. 16th, with a different landing site.
An internal problem reared its head, too: one of the fuel cells (a kind of refillable battery) on Yankee Clipper was leaking hydrogen and had to be replaced.
Nevetherless, at 22 minutes past the 8:00 (Pacific time) hour, Apollo 12's Saturn V spurted flame and began its ascent, President Nixon in attendance with his family. The rocket was almost immediately lost in the clouds. Moments later, ABC anchor Frank Reynold's voice went tremulous. He reported that an electrical shock, perhaps caused by a lightning strike, had shot through Apollo 12, taking the fuel cells off-line. Worse, the inertial navigation platform "eight-ball", common to air and spacecraft alike, went haywire. Without these, the mission would probably have to be scrubbed.
Flight Director Attitude Indicator: the "platform" or "Eight-ball"
Apollo Commander Conrad, to his credit, retained his cool. "I always like to start out behind the eight-ball and get ahead," he joked as the spacecraft slid into its first orbit around the Earth.
Moonward, Ho!
Once in orbit, a reset brought most of the affected systems back on line, and bright stars were used to realign the platform once Yankee Clipper had passed into night time. Conrad and Bean thoroughly checked their lunar module, entering it ahead of schedule, to ensure there was no lightning damage. That survey complete, they blasted out of orbit into a "free-return" trajectory that would take them around the Moon. On the way, they snapped this picture of the Earth:
They also conducted two color broadcasts, Dick Gordon donning shades to deal with the solar glare. Although we've seen it before, I always marvel at the spaciousness of the Apollo/LM complex compared to prior spacecraft. That one can travel fifteen feet now without hitting anything seems like incomparable luxury compared to the cramped Gemini and Mercury capsules.
After three days, Yankee Clipper decelerated, entering lunar orbit. Apollo 12 was now at that scary juncture, out of radio contact for 45 minutes every hour and a half as the spacecraft ducked behind the Moon. And, as CBS anchor Walter Cronkite never failed to remind us, if the Service Module's engine did not fire, the astronauts would be stranded a quarter million miles from home.
While looping the Moon, the Apollo 12 crew returned live TV shots, gawking at the stark beauty of the horizon, whose peaks looked like distant clouds to them, and at the pebbled landscape, which Conrad described as cotton candy someone had shot BBs at.
The big crater, Copernicus, ejecta of which ridged the Apollo 12 landing site
Fra Mauro, potential future landing site of Apollo 13
Stormy approach
As Intrepid undocked from its mother ship and began its hour-long descent to the lunar surface, two concerns sprung up: firstly, a solar flare had erupted, threatening radio communications, if not the lives of the astronauts; secondly, Alan Bean got a congested nose—but a decongestant pill kept trouble at bay.
Then the LM was on its way, the two Navy aviators, Conrad and Bean, as jovial as any two spacefarers have ever been. Cronkite noted to former astronaut Wally Schirra that the spacemen seemed particularly jocular this flight, to which the Navy Captain replied that that's the way it should be; astronauts shouldn't have to be stuffy.
At first, the spaceship flew almost perpendicular to the lunar surface, not so much landing as orbiting. In fact, until a final burn at about 50,000 feet, Intrepid was in an orbit just nine miles high, such a feat being possible because the Moon has no atmospheric drag.
See how the ship is sideways for most of it?
Once the landing burn commenced, the Intrepid began slowly arcing toward vertical, its engine spewing close to its maximum thrust: some 9000 pounds of force. As the lunar horizon came into view, the astronauts burst into excited exclamations. The target crater was right where it was supposed to be, and they were bang on course. Pete Conrad maneuvered the LM closer and closer to the lunar surface, Bean calling out altitude checks and attaboys in a constant stream. As the module descended, a huge cloud of black dust billowed up—a feature of that site, as Surveyor 3 had found previously. At last, Intrepid landed in "Pete's Parking Lot" just 600 feet from Surveyor 3 with 7% of its fuel left in the tanks, a healthy margin. The pinpoint landing had worked out perfectly.
Going for a walk
Unlike Apollo 11, no post-landing rest period was planned for the astronauts. Who could restrain them anyway, at this point? Just four hours after touchdown, Pete Conrad was out the hatch and making his descent down the ladder. This happened around 3:30 in the morning for me. I have to wonder what viewership was like for this flight given that coverage started at 10 PM. Luckily, Amber works third shift, so we kept each other company on the phone, and when I fell asleep around 11:30 PM, she kindly gave me a wake-up call when the Moonwalk began.
True to style, Pete's first words as he lit on the lunar surface were, "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" I watched the astronaut toodle around, in color and at 30 frames per second, for a while, but then fell back into unconsciousness around 4 AM. No worries, I thought. The exciting stuff wouldn't happen until the second EVA…
Hard to tell, but that's Conrad jumping down to the surface
Except when I woke up and watched the news, it turned out Alan Bean had accidentally set up the camera on a tripod pointed directly at the Sun. In short order, the picture tube had burned out. So much for color TV from the Moon.
I'd actually missed the deployment of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), which included a seismometer, a magnetometer, and a spectrometer for measuring the solar wind. The last instrument, in particular, would return data that would be compared with that being returned from Explorer 35, which has been in lunar orbit since 1967. This will tell us if the Moon, itself, generates or conducts any electric fields that can't be detected from space. All are powered by a SNAP-27 nuclear reactor that creates electricity from radioactive decay. The solar wind experiment was, in part, built by Marcia Neugebauer, whom you may recall was responsible for similar devices on the Venus probe, Mariner 2.
Diagram of ALSEP components laid out on the Moon
I did not miss, however, the astronauts walking into Surveyor 3's crater. As they bounced around, Bean noted that they looked like they were in one of those overcranked silent films of the '20s. They collected samples, uttering profound statements like, "That's a good rock!" The landing site is particularly good for selenology (the lunar equivalent of geology, natch), because the terrain is rather varied; ejecta from Copernicus crater when it was formed fell over the site, creating a mixed set of soil.
Then they found Surveyor and, as planned, began taking a hacksaw to it to bring some pieces home with them. Interestingly, they noted that it was no longer white, but a kind of tan. A trick of the light or erosion? We don't know yet. The metal also seemed to have crystallized, becoming more brittle than it had been on Earth.
The astronauts blasted off from the Moon and, with almost blasé affect, docked with Yankee Clipper. Bean and Conrad rejoined the more laconic Gordon, and they jettisoned Intrepid's top half. Shortly thereafter, they activated the half-LM's engines and plowed the vehicle into the Moon in a test of the ALSEP's seismometer. So much for that ten million bucks. The result was a Moonquake that lasted a good hour, so long that NASA scientists believe the impact may have triggered a landslide. Either that, or the material of the Moon is unique such that, instead of dampening shock waves, as on Earth, it actually amplifies them.
Intrepid as seen from Yankee Clipper; sorry for the monochrome—I snapped this shot off my black and white TV
After a day of photographing the Moon from orbit, Yankee Clipper fired its main engine, broke lunar orbit, and began the three day trip to Earth. On the way, the space trio gave us one final broadcast and also snapped a shot of the Earth as it eclipsed the Sun. All the while, the astronauts suffered from runny noses and wheezy breath, the consequence of lunar dust ending up in the capsule.
On the morning of the 24th, Yankee Clipper sailed into the Earth's atmosphere and the typical radio blackout. Three minutes before splashdown at 12:58 Pacific time, cameras from the U.S.S. Hornet recovery carrier, 1200 miles south of Hawaii, spotted the three orange and white parachutes, just two and a half miles away. This ties Apollo 8 for the closest recovery. The command module touched the roughest waves ever encountered on an Apollo recovery, immediately inverting. Recovery was swift and efficient, the Hornet's helicopter #66 making its fourth Apollo astronaut pick-up (previous ones included 8, 10, and 11).
Once the spacemen were on the carrier, we got to see that they were not wrapped up in suits, but merely wearing respirators. They jauntily waved to the cameras as they entered their quarantine trailer, where they will stay for five days, before transferring to a larger facility for thirteen more days. Missing were the folks in protective suits immediately washing away their bootprints. One has to wonder if they'll even bother with quarantine after this mission. They don't seem to be taking it very seriously this time.
President Nixon called the astronauts to congratulate them. He capped the conference with an on-the-spot promotion. This is customary for spacemen after each flight, but I think this is the first time the President has done it. Conrad, Bean, and Gordon are all now Navy Captains.
There was some concern that Apollo 12's systems might have been permanently damaged by the lightning that struck on take-off. Nothing seems to have been hurt at all, but there is still a clamor to launch the next missions in clearer weather to avoid another strike.
The lightning strike was caught on camera after launch but not discovered by NASA until later
It is an amazing and saddening thing that the public seems already somewhat tired of the Apollo missions. NBC's David Brinkley and CBS' Harry Reasoner could barely keep the disdain out of their voices as they described the astronauts gallivanting on the Moon, as if they were personally wasting taxpayer money. Conrad and Bean's casual mien, rather than charming the public, seems to have belittled the enterprise in the public's esteem.
Beyond that, NASA itself is in turmoil. They are demoralized at what they see as the end of an era, rather than the beginning of a new one. Vice President Agnew may be gung ho on going to Mars, but President Nixon refuses to make any commitments. To quote Music Scene's David Steinberg, who said this about Nixon's Vietnamization speech, "We would like to go out of our way to salute President Nixon, who in his speech exactly one week ago had the courage and the confidence to believe that he actually said something."
After that comment, an FBI agent stepped up and snapped his picture. This became a running gag.
NASA scientists feel that they have not been listened to, and that the Apollo missions stress engineering and political issues over the acquisition of knowledge. Indeed, many prominent researchers have quit, and others have been laid off.
Nevertheless, the money has been paid and the Saturns have been built. Apollo 13 is scheduled to launch next March to some spot scouted by Apollo 12, and we'll have at least four more missions after that (Apollo 20 has been cancelled; Apollos 18 and 19 may be on the block). I, personally, am excited that travel to the Moon has become routine. We are very much at a similar juncture as when Schirra flew his textbook Sigma 7 flight, and he didn't even make the front page. You know what? I am okay with taking the spectacle out of things. Let's get down to the real business: exploration and utilization of space. It's not about the missiles anymore, but humanity.
The kind of humanity down-to-Earth heroes like Conrad, Bean, and Gordon represent. Hear, hear, folks.
The astronauts enter their quarantine trailer, one of them miming a pistol shot at the crew
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