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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 31, 1970] Seed stock (April 1970 Analog)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

It's the end of the month, and that means the latest Analog is on tap.  This one starts and even mids with the usual drudgery… but the latter third breeds a little hope.

April 1970 cover of 'analog SCIENCE FICTION SCIENCE FACT' featuring a blue man in a large visor helmet with a single eye decal pointing over the shoulder of a hooded wizard writing in a notebook, wearing a large medallion. The caption reads HERE, THERE BE WITCHES EVERETT B> COLE
by Kelly Freas

Here, There Be Witches, by Everett B. Cole

Frequently, some author will tailor a story to Analog editor John Campbell's particular idiosyncracies hoping to get some of that sweet, sweet four-cents-a-word payout.  In this case, Everett Cole has aimed at this kooky premise: the reason why humans didn't develop psionic powers (more than we have) is that true adepts were burned as witches.

And so, in this lead novella, we have a planet of exact humanoids going through their equivalent of the 17th Century.  The nobles are finding witches right and left because bumping off the psychics (who, naturally, are doing a bit better than the average population) is a lucrative business.  It's up to Hal Carlsen, agent of a galactic "Philosophical Corps", to alter the course of the planet's history.

Black and white image of aclose up man in a goggle-like mask and helmet with antennae. His hands are raised and clasped and smoke raises from one of his fingers on the righthand page the sillouette of a vulture sits in front of the moon in front of a body of water. The caption reads HHERE, THERE BE WITCHES
by Kelly Freas

Obviously, Cole succeeded at his mission—securing a check for several hundred dollars.  He does not accomplish much else, though.  The tale is by-the-numbers, and the premise is dumb on multiple levels.  Plus, I really didn't need several pages luridly describing the tortures that the accused had to endure.

Two stars.

Quiet Village, by David McDaniel

Black and white image of a man perched on one knee with a futuristic looking blaster in his hand. He carries a bow on his back. The caption reads QUIET VILLAGE Force- like any other tool- is itself neither Good nor Evil. The purpose- not the thing- determines value! DAVID MCDANIEL Illustrated by Vincent diFate
by Vincent DiFate

Three hundred years after The Plague eliminates most of the human population, pockets of America are slowly clawing their way back to civilization.  Their progress is hindered by rats—bandits clad in bullet-proof "street suits" and wielding blasters.  When a San Gabriel Valley community is threatened by a pack of rats, a contingent of Scouts is hired to flush them out.

Boy Scouts, that is.

This intriguing set-up quickly devolves into a competently told but otherwise uninteresting combat tale.  I suppose the "moral" is that, in times of trouble, a unified, God fearing organization like the Scouts will keep America going, like the Catholic church in the Dark Ages.  Or something.

A low three stars.

A Case of Overprotection, by Hazel Moseley

Ms. Moseley offers up a history of the Food and Drug Administration, notes its virtues, and decries its recent cautious slowness.  I appreciated the data, but I disagree with the sentiment.

Three stars.

Black and white caroon drawing of two surgeons in front of a large body on a table, organs clearly visible. Caption reads: DEPARTMENT OF DIVERSE DATA GASTRO- INTESTINUS DIAPANUS or GLASS GUT E.T. from Polaris IV, quite friendly as long as you keep him well fed. A favorite object of research among E.T. biologists, since no X ray is required to study his metabolism.
by David Pattee

The Siren Stars (Part 2 of 3), by Nancy and Richard Carrigan

Black and white image of scantily clad male and female figures crawling among the weeds in front of a wooden house. A man in dark clothing and a large brimmed hat holding a large rifle stands in front of the structure. In the foreground is an overturned wooden boat. The caption reads THE SIREN STARS
by Kelly Freas

Here we are again with the bland adventures of bland adventurer John Leigh.  This time around, after the failure of John's attempt to infiltrate his own base (as practice for a mission to investigate a Soviet facility which has received signals from an alien race), he meets up with Elizabeth Ashley.

She is a woman.

Oh!  You want to know more about her?  Well, in many ways, she is like every woman in the world: appreciates expensive clothes, startles easily, and has preternatural intuition.  In other ways, she's most unlike women.  For instance, she is very smart—despite being a very beautiful woman.

You think I'm being overly snide?  Read this installment, if you can.  Virtually every description and depiction of Dr. Ashley either emphasizes her femininity (explicitly) or contrasts this or that character trait with stereotypical femininity.  It's ridiculous.

Anyway, Ashley is an astronomer who came up with the hypothesis that maybe the ultimate evolution of intelligence is the creation of sapient machines.  And maybe said machines would conquer the universe by sending signals to other smart species that promise great technological increases.  And maybe those technologies are actually a Trojan horse, and if they are built, the hapless dupes will realize too late that they've actually created alien robots, who will take over.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Well, Ashley obviously struck a nerve with that one—foreign mooks first try to kill her, then succeed in abducting her.  Because nothing hides a cunning plan like offing the one person who has made casual surmises (without evidence, mind you) of the truth behind it.

The Carrigans also offer up some local color, showing off the places they have obviously seen personally.  There are some truly insipid love scenes, including a very brief peek inside Ashley's thoughts, just so the reader knows she is genuinely attracted to John and isn't just some kind of enemy agent.  We also get some Fleming-lite action sequences.

Things end with John now tasked to go to the USSR not to see which way their radio dish is pointed (it's a moot point—the Americans have also gotten the Lorelei signal; one astronomer has gone insane) but to destroy any technology derived from it.  Also, to extract a (presumably beautiful, and definitely female) defector.

Well, at least the Carrigans acknowledged (tardily) that satellite photography was an easier way to see which way the Russkie dish was pointed…

Two stars.

Come You Nigh: Kay Shuns, by Lawrence A. Perkins

Black and white image of a man clad in white looking angrily at a sheet of paper in front of a desk of machinery.
by Craig Robertson

A two-man fighter craft of the Tellurian International Space Force is disabled by a Zhobehr magnetic beam and left adrift in the solar system.  This turns out to be a blessing in disguise as the crippled craft winds up near the enemy aliens' secret local base.  But how to broadcast their findings to Earth without 1) giving away their position, and 2) letting the aliens know they've been found out?

The clue is in the title.  It's a cute story that, thankfully, goes no longer than it needs to.

Three stars.

The Life Preservers, by Hank Dempsey

Black and white image of a futuristic two-turret tank with a castle drawn in the background.
by Vincent DiFate

Here we've got another story about mechanical teleportation by "Hank Dempsey" (Harry Harrison in disguise).  This time, it's set much further in the future.  Teleporters have been situated on planets throughout the galaxy for so long that they've had time to be abandoned for centuries. 

Preservers is the story of Emergency Plague Control, a corps of doctors whose job is to ensure the health of humanity.  Alien planets have not spawned harmful diseases—the ecosystems aren't similar enough.  But isolated groups of humans evolve new spins on old epidemics, and its up to the EPC to keep them in check.

And so, a team is dispatched to a primitive world, regressed for a thousand years, to do a check-up.  Unwittingly, they bring death with them…

It's a pretty good tale, more nuanced than I had expected, and told in Harrison's taut style.  Not brilliant, but worthy.

Three stars.

Seed Stock, by Frank Herbert

Dark image of a hand reaching to sow seeds on the surface of an obfuscated planet. A ship or satelite glows in the foreground. The caption reads 'seed stock'.
by Vincent DiFate

A few months ago, I attempted a book by Rex Gordon called The Yellow Fraction.  The premise was that a colony world had divided into two factions: the Greens advocated terraforming the world to be a paradise for humans; the Blues said the settlers should adapt to the planet.  (There was also a minority group that said the planet was no good, and they should just up and leave—the yellows.)

Frank Herbert's newest story presents the Green vs. Blue debate in a much terser, much more compelling fashion.  It is told from the point of view of Kroudor, a laborer with an instinctive knack for the rhythms of their new world.  While the highfalutin scientists struggle in vain to make their imported crops and livestock survive in increasingly difficult conditions, Kroudor and his wife, the technician Honida, find and cultivate local resources.

The result presages survival for the colony… if not quite that which had been envisioned when the group left Earth several years prior.

This is probably the best thing I've read by Herbert.  I imagine he sold it to Campbell because it has a bit of the anti-egghead bias the editor enjoys so much, but it is a story that would have fit in any other mag.

Four stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Schuy sings the praises, this month, of Poul Anderson's future history as told in the tapestry of his dozens of published tales.  The occasion is the novel releases of Satan's World and The Rebel Worlds, both of which Miller liked, but we were less impressed with.  He likes the new collection Beyond the Beyond, too, whose contents include many stories we've covered on the Journey.

There's a neat bit about how SF veteran Alan E. Nourse is chartering a flight to Heidelberg's Worldcon this August—might be worth it for you folks who want to hop the Pond to West Germany.

Of Eight Fantasms and Magics, a Jack Vance collection of works that fit in the gap between SF and Fantasy, Schuy says, "If you don't like this kind of thing, stay away from it.  If you do, sample Vance: he is a master of the genre."

He also enjoys the 18th volume of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: "It's the best F&SF anthology in a long time."  This tallies with our assessment—that magazine finished at the top of the heap last year when we awarded the Galactic Stars

Finally, he lauds the A. Bertam Chandler collection, Catch the Star Winds, and contemplates making an encyclopedia for all of the Galactic Rim stories (whose main protagonist is Commodore John Grimes).

Signs of sprouting?

A dark haired woman is shown operating a large boxy computer, an IBM 2265 terminal.
a woman working at an IBM 2265 terminal

All told, this month's issue scores just 2.8 stars.  The concluding pages were such a comparatively pleasant experience that I'm left with a bit of optimism.  Sure, there's a Campbellian smugness that suffuses all that gets submitted; yet, the best authors seem to overcome that particular editorial tic.  Of course, this also suggests that Analog would get even better with a different man at the tiller.  That doesn't seem to be forthcoming any time soon…

As for the other sources of short fiction this month, we had a bumper crop.  From best to worst, there was:

Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.8), Fantastic (3.1), Galaxy (2.9), IF (2.8), Nova 1 (2.7), New Worlds (2.5), Orbit 6 (2.4), and Vision of Tomorrow (2.2)…and Andre Norton's collection of old and new stories: High Sorcery.

Individually, no outlet was outstanding (except for F&SF), but there was enough 4 and 5 star work to fill three full digests.  Also, women contributed 12% of the new fiction, which is on the higher side (again, thanks to Norton).

I suppose if you cast lots of seed, you're bound to get sprouts.  It just takes a lot of stock for this strategy to work.  And a lot of subscription fare!

Thank goodness books bought by the Journey are tax deductible.

Aren't they?

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Science / Space Race

[March 30, 1970] The Age of Explorer — the end of the Space Race

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

In February 1958, just months before Galactic Journey took to press, Vice President Nixon visited Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  He went personally congratulate the team that had built America's first artificial satellite, Explorer 1.

Vice President Richard Nixon holds a model of the cone-shaped top of the Explorer satellite with Dr. Lee DuBridge, left, president of Cal Tech, and Dr. William H. Pickering, right, director of the Cal Tech Jet Propulsion lab
Vice President Richard Nixon and a model of the Explorer satellite with Dr. Lee DuBridge, left, president of Cal Tech, and Dr. William H. Pickering, right, director of the Cal Tech Jet Propulsion lab, during a news conference in Pasadena, Calif., Feb. 17, 1958.

Now it is 1970.  President Nixon is presiding over a severe curtailing of our space program.  Next month, Apollo 13 will head to the Moon, marking the end of the first stage of lunar reconnaissance.  The original plan was for ten increasingly ambitious lunar landings, paving the way for long term exploration and exploitation.  But it's looking now like Apollo 11 was more of a conclusion than a beginning.  The Saturn V assembly line is shut down, Congress and the President are against any ambitious space endeavors, and even the three phases of Apollo flights are being cut down to two.

That said, our space endeavors are not entirely ended.  In addition to at least five more Apollo flights (the fates of Apollos 18 and 19 are in the balance; Apollo 20 has been canceled definitively), NASA plans to launch a space station into orbit built out of a dry Saturn upper stage.  The first 28-day mission will take place in 1972.  Three astronauts will conduct the first long-term experiments in space.  Two more missions of 56-day duration will follow.

A black and white ilustration of a space station in orbit, with Earth visible in the background.

But then "Skylab" will go into hibernation.  There won't be any more American spacecraft to visit or service the home in space—at least not until 1977.  That's the earliest that the proposed "space shuttle", all that's left of NASA Administrator Tom Paine's grandiose proposal for space development, which had included a trip to Mars on nuclear engines and several large space stations, can be brought online.

It is appropriate that it looks like tomorrow will be the day Explorer 1's orbit finally decays and sends the little satellite plunging into fiery reentry.  In its 13-year lifetime, it completed more than 58 thousand revolutions of the Earth, traveling 1.66 billion miles.  Explorer discovered the Van Allen Belts, fields of radioactive solar particles trapped in the Earth's magnetic field.  Its launch, on January 31, 1958, marked the true beginning of the Space Race.  Perhaps in decades to come, this comparatively brief moment of space pioneering will be known as "The Age of Explorer".

Ironically, one of the biggest poo-pooers of space exploration, at least of the manned variety, is the scientist who perhaps contributed the most to Explorer 1's design.  Dr. James A. Van Allen, Univ. of Iowa Director of Physics and Astronomy Departments, had this to say earlier this month:

Cover of TIME Magazine capttioned: SPACE and the RADIATION BELT PHYSICIST JAMES VAN ALLEN

"The Apollo missions, to me, are straightforward though immensely difficult tasks.  They do, however, yield relatively little in the way of fundamental understanding of nature. They are not scientific in that sense.  There is a longstanding controversy as to whether a manned spacecraft is a better way to conduct science in space than an automated, commandable spacecraft.  I’m sure there is no simple answer to that question.  As the general romance and entertainment value of manned flight tend to wear off a little, I think this question will be attacked in a thoroughly pragmatic way.

"[Apollo 11's lunar landing] might properly be compared to the explorations of Amundsen and Perry and Byrd in the Arctic and Antarctic, or perhaps Lindbergh flying the Atlantic. These are great achievements, heroic achievements, but the general potential of the Moon in its relationship to human life on a large scale is by no means obvious to me. I don’t think any competent person has found a significant, economic, human use for the Moon.

"[The Space shuttle and Skylab are feasible.] Whether or not it is sensible to pursue them, I have a great difficulty in judging."

President Nixon, Congress, and the majority of the American people seem to agree with the Professor.

What do you think?

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 20, 1970] Here comes the sun (April 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Out, damn spot!

A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Silverwolf offered us a tidbit on the latest solar eclipse.  I've since read a bit more about the scientific side of things and thought I'd share what I've learned with you.

It was the first total solar eclipse to be seen over heavily populated areas of U.S. since 1925, greeted by millions of viewers who crowded the beaches, towns, and islands where viewing was most favorable.  The eclipse cut a nearly 100 mile wide swath through Mexico, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Nantucket Island, Mass.  It was 96% total in New York City and 95% in the nation's capital.

A black and white collage of several photographs of a partial solar eclipse over a college building. Below the image, the headline reads Partial Eclipse as seen in North County.  The caption reads The partial eclipse seen by teh North County Saturday morning is superimposed over the Palomar College Dome Gym in this collage by staff photographer Dan Rios.  The maximum ecliplse in this area was roughly 30 per cent at 9am as shown in the fourth sun from the left.  Seven states were treated to a full eclipse.
a clipping from Escondido's Times-Advocate

But ground viewing was only the beginning.  NASA employed a flotilla of platforms to observe the eclipse from an unprecedented variety of vantages.  A barrage of sounding rockets (suborbital science probes) were launched during the eclipse to take measurements of the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere.

In space, radio signals from Mars probe Mariner 6, currently on the far side of Sun, were measured to determine how the eclipse affected communications and to study changes in charged particles in earth’s atmosphere.

Two Orbiting Solar Observatories, #5 and #6, pointed their instruments at the Sun to gather data on the solar atmosphere, while Advanced Test Satellite #3 took pictures of the Moon's shadow on the Earth from more than 20,000 miles above the surface.  Three American-Canadian satellites, Alouette 1, Alouette 2, and Isis 1, all examined the change the eclipse caused in the Earth's ionosphere.

Earthside telescopes got into the mix, too: Observers from three universities and four NASA centers at sites in Virginia and Mexico not only got great shots of the solar corona, but also of faint comets normally washed out in the glare of the Sun.

I can't imagine anyone in 1925 but maybe Hugo Gernsback could have foreseen how much attention, and from how many angles such attention would be applied, during the 1970 eclipse.  It's just one more example of how science fiction has become science.

Waiting for the dawn

The last two months of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction weren't too hot.  Does the latest issue mark a return of the light or continued darkness?  Let's find out…

The cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction April edition. At the center of the dark cover, a bright swirl suggesting a star or sun is surrounded by darker wisps emanating in spirals from it.  Below it is an alien landscape with craggy mountains in teh distance and black-streaked hills in the foreground, in muted shades of blue and brown.
cover by Chesley Bonestell

Ill Met in Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber

Because I didn't get into science fiction and fantasy in a big way until the early '50s, there are glaring gaps in my literacy.  One big hole is Leiber's Fahfrd and Gray Mouser stories, which were were hits in the '40s (I still need to crack into my complete set of Unknown) and were revived at Fantastic editor Cele Goldsmith's request in 1959.  I've read one or two, and I've enjoyed them, but mostly I know about the contents of the score or so stories set in Lankhmar only second-hand from the reviews of other Journeyers.

So I was quite delighted that the lead novelette in the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction not only features the hulking northman and his slate-swaddled companion, but details their first meeting!

On a dingy avenue in Lankhmar (is there any other kind), the two lay in wait, separately, to waylay a pair of thieves returning from a successful burglary.  They are handily successful and find that they are immediately compatible, both being fond of drink, both new to the city, both with comely and vivacious lady loves.  At a wine-fueled bash, we learn that Fahfrd's lady, Vlana, was roughly treated by Krovas, head of the local Thieves' Guild.  Ivrian, the Mouser's current flame, accuses Fahfrd of cowardice for not taking the robber lord's head, and with that, our newly united duo decide to sally forth tipsily and do just that.

Of course, taking on the entire Guild—and its rat-man sorcerer bodyguard—is not a task to be undertaken lightly…

There's a certain forced quality to this tale, as if Leiber is consciously trying to return to a pulpy histrionic style he has since grown out of.  I also take issue with having love interests introduced only to meet a gruesome fate so as to provide dramatic impetus for the heroes.

That said, boy can Leiber paint a lurid picture of a lived-in fantasy world, somewhere in sophistication between the rude settings of Conan and the rarefied towers of Tolkien.  His battle scenes are vivid and well drawn, his monsters fresh and intriguing.  There's no question but that I raced through the story without pause, eager to find how it resolved.

Four stars.

Books, by James Blish

Banner reading 'Books' with an illustration of a shelf of books bracketed on the one side by a miniature of a rocket staged for liftoff, and on the other with a diorama of an astronaut having landed on a book acting as a book-end

The books covered this time around include a book of SF poetry, Holding your eight hands, about which Blish says: "If you like poetry and know something about it, this volume will be a pleasant surprise…or perhaps even an unexpected doorway into the art."

Creatures of Light and Darkness, an SFnal rework of Egyptian myth by Roger Zelazny, gets a sour review.  "…the displacements from the world of experience involved in myth attempt to explain a world in terms of eternal forces which are changeless; the attempt is antithetical to the suppositions of science fiction, which center around the potentialities of continuous change."

George MacDonald's 1895 book, Lilith has gotten a Ballantine reprint, and Blish says it's worth reading for its influence on Lewis' "Narnia" and Carroll's Alice.

Dan Morgan's The New Minds is the latest in a series, which is essentially bad rehash of good Sturgeon.  Blish doesn't like this installment either.

Soulmate, by Charles W. Runyon

What could make Anne, an aging, but still lovely Black Widow, have such an emptiness at the center of her heart?  And when she consummates with marriage her seduction of a perfect, wealthy young man, fully intending to murder him for his money, just who is the hunter, and who the prey?

This is a beautifully dark story that, like The Graduate, manages to make an unpraiseworthy character somehow sympathetic.  I particularly liked the line: "Each disappointment is the end of an illusion.  I thank you, Anne, for a truly educational experience."

Four stars.

In Black of Many Colors, by Neil Shapiro

Cinnabar is Earth's only telepath, kept in cold sleep as a precious tool to be used only in case of emergency.  One has come up—the aliens of Beta Lyrae Three are implacably hostile and on the verge of developing spaceflight.  Only Cinnabar could possibly make contact and establish a peaceful rapport.

Cinnabar loathes the sharp-edged thoughts of humanity, and she thus has developed a strong death wish.  This is mitigated for the first time when she falls in love with the captain of the vessel taking her to Beta Lyrae.

What will win?  Her sense of duty (and desire for this to be her fatal swansong) or her desire for companionship?  And are the two mutually exclusive?

This really is a lovely tale.  In plot, it is not dissimilar to Silverberg's excellent novel, The Man in the Maze, but the execution, story, and cast are quite divergent.  The main room for improvement would be to get rid of the somewhat fairy-tale narration that accompanies the first half.  It's not necessary, and the story of a telepath should be internal, vivid and alien.  I think Shapiro had the skills to write that story (as evidenced by the latter half of the piece, which is better), but perhaps not the confidence.

Four stars.

The Brief, Swinging Career of Dan and Judy Smythe, by Carter Wilson

A handsome young California couple decides to answer an ad for swingers.  What seems to be a version of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice ends in supernatural horror.

It reads like something written for Playboy.  Perhaps Hugh rejected it.  After all, his magazine is meant to promote, not dissuade, this lifestyle.

Three stars.

The Wizard of Atala, by Richard A. Lupoff

The naval superpower of Atala is threatened by the invincible airships of Catayuna.  Only the might of Atala's wizard can stop them; only the pride of that nation's chief admiral, general, and strategist can thwart the sorcerer's mission.

I mostly know Dick Lupoff from his fanzine work (he and his wife won the Hugo in '63.  This story takes place either in the far past or the far future—it's one of those tales where the names of familiar places are distorted, but not so much as to be unrecognizable: Yorpa and Afric, for example.  Atala may be Atlantis or the Atlantic coast.

It's all kind of fantasy rote with traditional olde-type language, and it's a little tedious in the repetitious telling, but it's not bad.

Three stars.

Banner reading 'Science' with inset illustrations of an atom (in the style of Bohr), an optical microscope's view of microorganisms, an oscilloscope's view of a sawtooth wave, a satellite in orbit, and a spiral galaxy

The Nobel Prize That Wasn't, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor, after regaling us with a tale of the day he seduced a buxom 18-year-old co-ed (apparently sometime last year), finishes explaining how the Periodic Table of Elements was solidified.  A fellow named Mosely determined the last piece of the puzzle that was the atomic interior: atomic weight.  Using x-rays, he was able to find out exactly how many protons any element's nucleus had (though he didn't know anything about the particles, just that there was something with positive charge inside) and that this number was the unique identifying factor for each atom.

What I find so fascinating about all this is how recent it was.  When I was going to high school in the '30s, this fundament of chemistry was taken as read.  And yet, just thirty years prior, there was as yet no real proof for the order the elements should be in.  It is tremendous what a sea change subatomic theory and Einstein were at the beginning of this century.  Will the 21st see such radical changes in understanding of the universe?

Four stars.

They All Ran After the Farmer's Wife, by Raylyn Moore

A down-on-his luck preacher from Ohio ends up as a laborer on a Kansas farm.  His only social contacts are the Bible-thumping farmer, his fantastically ugly wife, Bep, and their other employee, a swarthy fellow named Aza who never takes off his socks.  When the preacher and the farmer's wife begin an illicit relationship, it turns out that more than a little Scripture is involved in the proceedings.

While Christian myth generally leaves me cold as the basis for a tale, I did appreciate that this story hews away from the horrific, actually concluding with gentleness and redemption.  Even the greatest of sinners can be saved with kindness by the honest, is the message.

Four stars.

Here comes the sun

As it turns out, the eclipse is over, and the stellar magazine that is F&SF has returned ablaze.  Glad tidings for all.  The question now is how long the sun will keep shining.

Is there a literary equivalent of Stonehenge to pray at?

A cartoon depicting a man leaning out of an upper window in his house, looking up at a poorly-made antenna on his roof which is listing to the right.  The moon is just above the antenna, and stars fill the rest of the dark sky.  Through the other window of the house the man's television is visible, showing a screen full of static.
by Gahan Wilson

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 14, 1970] To Venus and Hell's Gate… are we Out of Our Minds?

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

To Venus!  To Venus!, by David Grinnell

A book cover in color, showing three astronauts in spacesuits pushing a small, tanklike vehicle up a rocky incline against a orange, cloudy backdrop. One of the spacesuits is bright red. Beneath the title is the legend 'S.O.S. from an analogue of Hell!'
cover by John Schoenherr

Warning: the latest Ace Double contains Communist propaganda!

The premise to David Grinnell's (actually Ace editor and Futurian Donald Wolheim) newest book is as follows: it is the 1980s, and the latest Soviet Venera has confirmed the initial findings of Venera 4, not only reporting lower temperatures and pressures than our Mariner 5, but spotting a region of oxygen, vegetation, and Earth-tropical climate.

And they're launching an manned expedition there in less than two months.

Of course, NASA doesn't believe the obvious Russian lies, but since they were planning on sending a nuclear-powered unmanned Mariner to the Planet of Love at the same time (taking advantage of the favorable orbital relationship between Earth and Venus that occurs every 19 months), why not put a three-man crew onboard?  That way, the Stars and Stripes can beat the Sickle and Hammer to put first boots on the superheated ground.

But upon landing, the Mariner descent module stumbles and wrecks, stranding the three Venus-nauts "in an analogue of Hell".  Now their only hope is to make the 100 mile trek to the Soviet landing site and hope there are actually cosmonauts there to help.

To Venus is a highly technical book, closely related to, say, Martin Caidin's Marooned (recently turned into a big-budget but turgid picture).  The characters are so much cardboard, only developing the rudiments of a personality on the Big Hike.  Much of the setup beggars imagination.  Setting aside an even partially inhabitable Venus, the idea that a manned mission to the second planet could be trained for and launched in 43 days is absurd.  Recall that Pioneer 5, originally intended for Venus, was turned into a generic long-distance probe because it couldn't be built and launched in time.

For the most part, though, the technical descriptions seem pretty reasonable.  This is the first story set on "real" Venus I've read apart from the first of the subgenre, Niven's "Becalmed in Hell" (interestingly enough, included in Wollheim's anthology of 1965's best science fiction—coincidence?) The Have Spacesuit, Will Travel-esque journey portion, which comprises the latter half of the book, is genuinely thrilling.

I think three stars is appropriate, maybe another half star if any of the above elements are your bag.

The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb

A book cover in color, showing a man in a bubble-headed spacesuit clambering through waist-high mushrooms. Behind him is a giant, ethereal figure in a red cloak. The figure has yellow skin and red eyes, and is holding a pale green bottle. In contrast to the title and author's name in black letters, the subtitle is in white, and reads 'He sought the needle of eternal youth in the haystack of quick deaths'
cover by Kelly Freas

Blink and you miss it—just two and a half years ago, Britisher E. C. Tubb introduced the starfaring adventurer, Dumarest.  I quite enjoyed his first outing, The Winds of Gath, and Blue found the sequel, Derai to be passable.

Well, here we are, 18 months later, and I find we've missed books 3 and 4 of the Dumarest series, and I've already got #5 in my hands!  We're talking Moorcock/Silverberg levels of prolific here.

Once again, the setting is a hellish world plagued with poverty.  This time, it is Scar, orbiting closely around a red sun with a rotation period of 120 days.  Thus, each "season" is really a quarter of a day.  The reason people inhabit the planet, which alternates between savage heat, monsoon rains, and bitter cold, is the profusion of fungi on it.  All manner of molds and mushrooms cover the land, blooming in the brief summer.  They offer foodstuffs, medicines, hallucinogenics.  Above all, people seek "the golden spore", whose product is the most valuable.

The cast of characters come from the same castes as in the first novel (and presumably the other books, too).  We have native partners, driven by profit-motive.  We have representatives of the United Brotherhood, whose creed emphasizes paucity, but whose adherents sometimes chafe at that requirement.  We have a cyber, akin to the mentats of Dune, devoid of emotion but not ambition…and fierce loyalty to the computerized hive mind of his kind.  And we have fate-obsessed Jocelyn, heir to the throne of the poor planet Jest, along with his harsh and grasping new bride, Adrienne.

Dumarest's immediate goal is to raise sufficient funds to get off the world.  His ultimate mission, as it has been since Book #1, is to locate Earth among the hundreds of thousands of possible systems in the galaxy.  Suffice to say, he does not locate Terra in this volume—but he does get just the least bit closer to divining its location.

This really is a fun series.  While this installment is not as compelling as the first book, and it shows every sign of having been composed in haste (particularly the inelegant repetition of certain turns of phrase, and the reusing of stock characters), I have to say that I am rather hooked by the series, which is sort of a cross between Dune (politics and technology) and Earthblood (the run-down worlds and the quest for Earth).

Three and a half stars.

A picture of a young Black woman, wearing an outfit with planetary patterns, as well as a silver necklace.
by Amber Dubin

Hell's Gate, by Dean Koontz

A picture of a book cover, in color. The letters of the title are red and white striped. There is a strange, spiky machine in the foreground, suggesting an airhose. Behind it, a purple-red humanoid figure is stepping into a fleshy, red and green glob, somewhat shaped like a heart. In small black letters beneath the author's name, a legend reads 'Time-lines clash as Earth becomes a battleground for alien creatures and men of the future!'
Cover by Kelly Freas.

Although Dean R. Koontz' first full-length work was only recently published in 1968, Koontz has already built a reputation as a true science fiction suspense thriller novelist. Hell’s Gate keeps up a pulse-pounding pace throughout its pages, fraught with action, violence, mind-bendingly creative integration of complex subplots, beginning with a psychological thrilling secret agent assassin, tying in an alien invasion, and even taking the time to incorporate a tender romance. Throughout, what maintains the tension is the fact that this story is accurately named, as the hero spends the whole of it desperately trying to close the gate separating the world as we know it from a certain doom of a merger with a fireless inferno.

Our unlikely protagonist is Victor Salsbury, a creation of yet-to-be-known scientific technology who appears like a 30 year old man. The history that has been loaded into his memory is that of a successful artist, whose real body has yet to wash up in a small-town American river in the fall of 1970. After a rather jarring awakening in an apple orchard down the river running through said small town, Victor blindly follows his internal programming, which guides him to sneak into an old house and murder its lone occupant. After retreating to a nearby cave to hibernate and heal his wounds suffered in the struggle, Victor awakens again to receive further orders from a computer hidden in the cave with him.

Victor goes on to make use of the implanted memories, orders, supplies and only slightly super-human powers of healing, reflexes, and combat competency to further the objective of the computer, buying the house from a beautiful real estate agent whose uncle happened to be the man he killed. As he gradually acclimates himself to humanity and reality, our hero discovers that he has been placed in this house as a sentry to guard a portal in the basement to a morally bankrupt alien world, intent on sending a force through this gateway to establish a foothold of control on earth.

The developments that ensue are all very straightforward until about two thirds of the way through this ride, when the reader suddenly takes an incredible left turn into a “Land of the Giants” meets “Planet of the Apes”. It was an incredibly inventive and entertaining romp, but I found myself counting the remaining pages because I felt skeptical that the author could successfully explore the sudden digression and still have enough time to return to its original objective in a satisfactory manner.

My only true discomfort with this story was the way it resolved. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that the conclusion, while artful and delicately laid, doesn’t provide a comfortable wind down of the action. I didn’t exactly expect a neat and detailed epilogue, based on the tone set by the rest of the book, but I did find myself wanting at least a break in the rip-riotous pacing to take a step back and exhale. I understand that it probably would have been hard to make an ending that matched the energy and creativity of the rest of the story, but I did feel like more of an effort could have been made to satisfy the reader. That may be my personal bias, because all of my favorite books have the type of comforting, well-knit endings that make me feel like I just put down a comforting cup of hot chocolate and am now no longer thirsty or cold. I did feel a little of both when I closed and replaced this book on the shelf.

I would like to give this work 5 stars for the adrenaline rush, originality and consistently engaging plotline but I am particularly partial to stories with soft landings or at least ones that don’t end abruptly enough to give me whiplash from its final words.

4 stars

A young white man with short hair wearing a navy P-coat, blue polo collar, and green t-shirt.
by Brian Collins

Out of Their Minds, by Clifford D. Simak

A picture of a book cover, in color. The background is black, contrasting against a stylized orange shape wreathed in pink flames. The stylized orange shape may be interpreted as a skull, a face, a heart, or a mass of machinery. White letters in a faintly psychedelic font spell out the title.
Cover by Richard Powers.

Horton Smith writes for a living, but has been having trouble with his current book-in-progress; so he decides to return to his hometown of Pilot Knot, which he has not seen in a good while now. While there he hopes to pay a visit to an old friend of his, an eccentric academic (but then don't we all have that friend) named Philip Freeman. Freeman has some funny ideas about the evolution of homo sapiens, or rather had, because it turns out Philip Freeman is dead. The reason for Freeman's death is implied to be much stranger than a mere heart attack, or even foul play. A run-in with a large dinosaur while on the road tells both Smith and the reader that something very unusual is going on, and the dinosaur, which disappears about as quickly as it appeared, is only the beginning. Mythical figures and fictitious characters, from Don Quixote to Satan himself, start flooding into the real world, and these figures largely and inexplicably have it out for Smith. What an unlucky guy.

This is another science-fantasy novel from Simak, who over the past few years has been determined to use his novels as canvases for blurring the line between the genres. I call Out of Their Minds "science-fantasy," but it is really rationalized fantasy, of the sort that frequently appeared in the long gone but not forgotten magazine Unknown, which I don't think Simak ever got to appear in. I could be mistaken.

Freeman, from beyond the grave, provides a scientific explanation for why made-up characters and things from the distant past (at one point Smith finds himself in the middle of Gettysburg, as in the American Civil War battle) have been appearing in "our" world, but it's such a loose explanation that I don't think even Simak believes it. Maybe buying into the explanation is not the point. These figures are unbelievable because they're quite literally figments of the human imagination that have been given flesh, at least temporarily. The only thing more unbelievable than Smith having a casual conversation with Satan (one of the best scenes in the novel, by the way) is his fast-growing relationship with Kathy Adams, a local teacher at Pilot Knot who becomes his designated love interest.

I've been reading Simak for the past 15 years, pretty much ever since I started reading science fiction with enthusiasm, and with one or two exceptions his novels are not him at his best. Indeed, it seems like he uses the novel format as a pretext for indulging himself rather than writing his best work. If you want Simak at his best, you read his short stories (his masterpiece, City, is really a bunch of short stories and interludes rather than a proper novel); but with his longer works, you encounter almost a different writer. Out of Their Minds, had it appeared thirty years ago in Unknown, would have probably been condensed to novella-length, which would have suited it best. On a scene-by-scene basis, it's rather enjoyable, especially once we actually arrive in Pilot Knot (it takes surprisingly long to get there) and a goblin-like creature known as the Referee appears. But even at just 190 pages, it's constipated in its pacing. It could be that, as with most of Simak's other novels, Out of Their Minds is still structured like a short story—one that's been stretched almost to the breaking point.

Yet, for all its apparent flaws, there is something basically admirable about not only Simak's breaking down of what is and is not SF, but his cautious optimism about the human imagination. For the past few years, since I started writing seriously about genre fiction, I've called Simak the anti-Lovecraft (incidentally H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu himself get mentioned in this novel) in the sense that he seems to believe it's not the vast, barren, amoral universe we should be worried about, but rather human folly. Conflict in Simak's fiction, nine times out of ten, arises from human error, and so it makes sense that the menaces in Out of Their Minds spawn from the human mind. Even so, with the drawbacks that come with it in mind, both Simak and Freeman believe that human creativity is ultimately both good and necessary for the race's survival. I have to admit, there is something deeply affirming about that message, even if it comes packaged in an overlong novel such as this.

Three stars. I'm a Simak fan, so I'm biased. You may feel differently.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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[March 8, 1970] They say that it's the institution… (April 1970 Galaxy and the incomplete Court)

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[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

There ain't no Justice

It was only a few months that President Dicky tried to ram a conservative Supreme Court justice pick through the Senate to replace the seat left open by the retirement of the much laureled Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Clement Haynworth's candidacy went down to defeat in the Senate on November 21 of last year.

Now up is G. Harrold Carswell, until last year, the Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida.  He was elevated to the Fifth Circuit Appellate Court last June.  To all accounts, he is no less conservative than his predecessor, and he's a (former?) segregationist to boot.  His jurisprudence is also lacking: 40% of his rulings were overturned on appeal!  As Senator McGovern observed, "I find his record to be distinguished largely by two qualities: racism and mediocrity."  Nebraska's Senator Hruska damned with faint praise in his reply, to the effect saying, "Sure he's mediocre…but don't the mediocre warrant representation, too?"

Black-and-white photograph of a white man wearing a judge's robes.
G. Harrold Carswell

But as LIFE and other outlets are noting, Nixon's soothing rhetoric thinly veils a deeply conservative agenda, cutting social programs, withdrawing from world affairs, and trying to stack the Court with allies.  Carswell's nomination passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 16 of this year.  We'll see if the Senate as a whole can stomach him for the Court proper.

Plus ça change

Galaxy's editor Eljer Jakobsson is like Richard Nixon (well, perhaps this is a stretch, but indulge me—I need some sort of transition here!) He is trying all of the styles at his disposal in this new decade of the 1970s and seeing what sticks.  The result remains inconsistent, but not unworthy.

This month's issue trumpets Silverbob's newest serial (sure to be novelized, perhaps as we speak) The Tower of Glass.  Stephen Tall has the lead "breakthrough novelette", which I presumed meant this was his first work, but checking my index cards, I see it's not, since he first wrote a story for Worlds of Tomorrow four years ago.  And then there's Ray Bradbury, undeservedly getting a third of the cover's masthead, presumably because of his pop culture stature.

The editor starts out the issue with an interesting piece, noting that even if there something to genetic races, it's meaningless anyway because none of us stick exclusively to our own (something folks of my persuasion blame on how lovely those shiksas always end up…) It's short and sweet.  Then it's onto the "breakthrough novelette".

Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall, by Stephen Tall

Ink drawing of the faces of three men wearing astronaut helmets, shown against a background of black space. Text next to the drawing says: Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall. Space history echoes with their achievements. If you haven't yet read about them, start now! Text further below shows the name Stephen Tall.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

The three names in the title belong to a trio of compatible astronauts sent on the first expedition to the Jovian moon, Callisto.  A biologist, a mathematician, and a computer engineer, the three have just barely settled in for the several month trip when the first of them, Tattershall, makes an interesing hypothesis: space is a near vacuum but not a complete one—what if the interplanetary cosmos harbors life?  Incredibly diffuse, extremely voluminous life, to be sure.  Unrecognizable at a passing glance, certainly.  But there, nonetheless.

Seek, and ye shall find.  As the Albratross sails for Jupiter, the ship sails by and inside a number of planetoid-sized creatures, sensed only by their abnormal particle densities.  Unfortunately for the "Callistonauts", one of them take a fancy for their krypton-powered engine, and their fuel supply soon becomes dangerously depleted.

If this story appeared in Analog, it'd be a thrilling (or maybe just turgidly technical) SF action piece.  In F&SF, maybe fantastically whimsical or horrific.  Here, it's… pleasant.  More inches are devoted to the genial interactions of the tic-tac-toe playing Allison and Carmichael, the blissful absorption in ant farms of Tattershall, and the dietary proclivities of all three.  Plus, lots of discussion of biology.

Frankly, I suspect space life as posited by Tall is impossible.  Things don't scale like that (and someone tell Irwin Allen…) Still, it's a nice story.

Three stars.

Discover a Latent Moses, by Michael G. Coney

Two-page spread. On the left-hand page is the title: Discover a Latent Moses, then the name of the author, Michael G. Coney, and text further below says: Green Earth was a memory, and memories were not for builders. On the right-hand page is an ink drawing of the top portion of a tower in ruins, the rest of which is covered by the sands of a vast desert.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Here are the adventures of Jacko, Paladin, Switch, Cockade, and the Old Man, a band of humans surviving the Fifth Ice Age perhaps fifty years from now.  They live under a dozen feet of snow in an entombed town, surviving on canned food and bottled booze.  But they dream of land in the warmer West… if only they can outmaneuver the winged, snow skiing, Flesh Eaters.  It reminds me of a bit of Michael Moorcock's series involving the ice schooner.

It's never explained what causes the big freeze.  The general consensus of scientists is that industrial emissions will cause a global warming, but I've read at least one article lately that suggests smog particles will block the Sun and cause cooling.  Maybe that's it.  Or maybe, like in Robert Silverberg's Time of the Great Freeze, the next Ice Age will trump any artificial effects.

Anyway, the story is excitingly told and the characters vivid, if cardboard.  It's enjoyable reading, but it brings little new to the table.

Three stars.

The Tower of Glass (Part 1 of 3), by Robert Silverberg

Two-page spread with an ink drawing of amorphous gelatinous blobs that seem alive. At the bottom of the right-hand page is the title: The Tower of Glass, the name of the author, Robert Silverberg, and text further below says: Krug rivaled God Almighty as the creator of Heaven and Earth and Man. Now he just wanted to talk to all three of them!
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Robert Silverberg sure loves him some dark futures.

Over the next several decades, the world will undergo plague and war that mow down the Third World.  Birth control and ennui take care of the rest.  But the productivity of the race remains as high as ever, thanks to mechanization, computerization…and the development of androids.  These perfect physical specimens range from moronic (the gammas) to brilliant (the rarefied alphas—someone's been reading Huxley), and they fill the role of technician, nanny, nurse, and (but only secretly) lover.

The much-reduced human population lives effete, rich, and pampered, interplanetary and even nearby interstellar, knit globally by a network of "transmats" that eliminate commutes and homogenize culture.  This, then, is the world 250 years hence, contemporary with Star Trek, but oh so different.

For one thing, this is no utopia.  The androids seem quiescent, but there is indication that they might be on the verge of insurrection, or perhaps being manipulated to do so by human interests.  And then there are the women…

Silverberg seems to hate worlds in which women are anything but shallow playthings.  There is no narrative reason for women to get such short shrift in this story, and they do in all of Bob's stories, so I suspect it's more tic, less deliberate intent.

Anyway, that's the background.  The story involves billionaire Simeon Krug and the constellation of relatives, top staff, and associates who surround him.  Krug is building a 600 meter transmission tower in the tundras of Ontario to reply to a message recently received from the stars: "2-4, 2-5, 1-3" repeated ad nauseum.

So far, the story seems to be about thwarted expectations: Krug is disappointed that the alien senders seem to hail from a bright O-class star, precluding anything akin to humanity.  His son is dissatisfied with both his unexciting human wife and his vat-produced android paramour.  The android foreman Thor Watchman is dissatisfied with a nameless something, probably attached to his inferior position in human society, even as one of the most powerful beings on Earth.

It's all written with Silverberg's usual, if somewhat overdramatic, brilliance and not a little emphasis on sex.  There are some very nifty concepts here, from the eternal dawn or noon that teleportation affords, to the "jacking in" to vast computet networks (the ultimate evolution of ARPANET, perhaps).

So, bad taste in my mouth aside, I am interested to see where this goes.  It's in the same vein as his blue fire stories, which I liked.

Four stars.

Darwin, the Curious, by Ray Bradbury, Darwin, in the Fields, by Ray Bradbury, and Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn, by Ray Bradbury

A trio of pointless poems from the master of mawk: what if Chas sat in a field all day, and on the way home, passed a fox?

Two stars—the illustrations illuminating them are nice.

The Rub, by A. Bertram Chandler

Two-page spread. On the left-hand page is an ink drawing of a woman looking in horror at a humanoid figure crawling on the ceiling. On the right-hand page is the name of the author, A. Bertram Chandler, additional text that says: Can anything be more terrifying than realizing all your dreams? and the title: The Rub. The text of the story begins below the title.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

The adventures of John Grimes, intrepid if cantankerous officer of the Space Scout Service, have been going on for more than a decade.  Like Horatio Hornblower, we've now gotten most of his career, from Ensign through Commodore.  There's not a lot of room left to fill.  How then can Chandler keep this cash cow going?

Why, by returning to the mystical planet of Kinsolving, where dreams become reality.  In this case, Grimes ends up in a nightmare parallel universe where, instead of meeting his lovely wife, Sonya, and advancing to flag rank, he instead marries a shrew and ends up in a dead-end job as commander of a fourth-rate backwater base.

And yet, even schlub Grimes has got a touch of that seadog magic…

I quite enjoyed this story, although it ends just a touch too abruptly.  Four stars.

Sunpot (Part 3 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

Drawn illustration of an irregularly-shaped spaceship near a big round planet floating in black space. Above the illustration is text in cartoonish letters. First is the title: Sunpot, by Vaughn Bodé. Next to it is this text: Sunpot, the planet, moves across the quiet opulence of fat solar space like the great red phallic temple of Brother Mercury... White Venus awaits in the distance.
illustration by Vaughn Bodé

The adventures of the Sunpot continue to take turns for the worse—this time, the pages aren't even printed in the right order.

I said one star last time, but there's (a little) less sexism this time, and the pictures are pretty, even if the typeface is still illegible.

Two stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

An elegant piece of calligraphy with the words: Galaxy Bookshelf, Algis Budrys. Tiny stars decorate the space around the letters.

The magazine's book column is devoted solely to The Universal Baseball Association, Inc, by J. Henry Waugh.  It is about a fellow who creates his own private universe, centered around a baseball team, using a self-devised chart and dice to randomly determine what happens next.  It's a bit like how Philip K. Dick created The Man in the High Castle (he used bamboo sticks and the I Ching.

As Budrys puts it:

It does convey a convincing approximation of how a God might be infinitely creative and yet not in direct control of his creation, omnipotent and yet prey to events, omniscient and nevertheless blind to the future.

Though not technically SF or F, and thus perhaps not sold in the same outlets as our beloved regulars, Budrys recommends in no uncertain terms that we read it.

No Planet Like Home, by Robert Conquest

Undecipherable drawing composed of multiple circular shapes that resemble eyes.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

A race of humanoid aliens, prone to frequent mutation, wrings their collective hands over what to do about a comically tragic pinhead nephew of a Senator.  The aliens scour the galaxy until they find a race that constitutes a close physical match so they can deposit the hapless lad on their world.

Three guesses which world, and the first two don't count.

Two stars for being obvious.

Kindergarten, by James E. Gunn

Heavily darkened illustration, probably shaped like a coastline seen from above.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Speaking of, here's a (charmingly illustrated) tale about a precocious child who creates a planet for his amusement, but its inhabitants are too dangerous to be allowed to live.  The world's genesis takes, of course, six days.  The name of the planet is…

Well, you already know the answer.

Two stars.

Diverging courses

The Supreme Court's constitution has evolved since 1950, becoming for a time one of the most liberal Courts in the nation's history.  The building remains the same, but the members change…and only time will tell if we'll be happy with the new direction.

The magazine that Gold launched in 1950 also continues its slow, insensible slide toward whatever lies ahead in the '70s.  It still retains the same dimensions as when it started, the same tactile feel to its cover and pages.  But its cover art, its typeface, its stable of authors, the literary style, all have evolved.  Perhaps not always for the better, but generally still worthy.

Sure, I'll renew.

Page of a magazine. At the top is a drawing of a man standing next to a crashed car. Below it is this text: It doesn't take a genius to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of you favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us, and that's a double tragedy. But there's an answer. It doesn't take a genius to handle it either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon or write the information on a piece of plain paper and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. To the right of this text is a sample cover of Galaxy magazine, showing an illustration of a woman's face inside concentric curves. At the bottom of the page is a form to order a magazine subscription.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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[February 28, 1970] Revolutionaries… (March 1970 Analog)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Turbulent times

Unless you've been living under a rock the past two years, you know the shockwaves from The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are still reverberating.  The open fighting on the convention floor, the fascist polemic of Mayor Daley, the protests, the baby blue and olive drab helmets, and the crippled candidacy of the man tasked to thwart Dick Nixon from taking the White House.

Aside from the shambolic shuffle toward further embroilment in southeast Asia, two other phenomena have kept the convention in the public eye.  The first is last year's neck-clutch of a movie, Medium Cool.  Half drama, half documentary, Haskell Wexler's film follows a jaded Chicago news cameraman in the weeks leading up to the crisis point.  Indeed (and I didn't realize this at the time), the footage of Robert Forster and Verna Bloom in and around the convention hall during the clashes, hippie vs. fuzz, Dixiecrat vs. DFL, was all shot live. 

A brunette woman in a yellow dress walks in front of a line of police officers. There are hippies of various ages at the left side of the frame, including a young boy.
Verna Bloom, playing an emigrant from West Virginia, searches Grant Park for her lost son

If you haven't caught the film, check your local listings.  It may still be running in your local cinema.  Be warned: it will take you back.  If you're not ready for it, you will be overwhelmed.

A movie poster for <i>Medium Cool</i>. The tagline is
Robert Forster is the news man.  You'll recognize Marianna Hill (Forster's girlfriend) as a guest star in Star Trek's "Dagger of the Mind"

As for the other reminder, for the past two years, the papers have kept us apprised on the trials of the "Chicago Eight", charged by the United States Department of Justice with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.  They included Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale.

(in the midst of his trial, Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage at Woodstock during the performance of The Who to protest the incarceration of White Panther poet and musician, John Sinclair—it was a trippy scene)

Abbie Hoffman: "I think this is a pile of shit!  While John Sinclair rots in prison…"

Pete Townsend: "Fuck off!  Get off my fucking stage!"

A blurry black-and-white still of a floppy-haired white man in a white tunic. The image is timestamped 02:10:56:06
Pete Townsend, just after recovering the stage

The verdicts came down on February 18, a mixed bag of positive and negative news for the accused.  Apparently, four folks on the jury held out until the bitter end, but eventually went with guilty for some of the charges.  The verdicts were:

Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were charged with and convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.  All of the defendants were charged with and acquitted of conspiracy; Froines and Weiner were charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices and acquitted of those charges.  Bobby Seale had already skated when his case ended in mistrial.

Six men with long, wild hair stand smiling at the camera, arms wrapped around each other
Six of the "Seven": (l. to r.) Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden

So, it's jail time for five of the eight while their cases go to appeal.  You can bet that these results aren't going to lessen the flames of discontent in this country, at least for the vocal minority.

A news clipping, showing a crowd of people in front of a statue. Two people carry signs. One says 'COURTS OF INJUSTICE CANNOT PREVAIL!'. The other says 'FREE MARTIN SOSTRE'. The caption of the news clipping reads 'Protest rally in New York: Surrounded by demonstrators protesting the conspiracy trials of the Chicago 7 and the Panther 21, William M. Kunstler, defense attorney in the Chicago trial, addresses rally Monday in Madison Square Park in New York. One youth was injured in a clash with police, and windows were broken in several stores.'
From page 3 of my local paper on the 24th

Steady and staid

You wouldn't be aware of any of this turmoil if you lived under a rock and did nothing but read Analog Science Fiction.  It remains a relic and deliberate artifact of a halcyon past as envisioned by editor John Campbell.  The latest issue is a representative example.

The cover of the Analog issue. It shows a man with a gun looking over a desert cliff at a massive radio telescope facility.
by Kelly Freas

The Siren Stars (Part 1 of 3), by Richard Carrigan and Nancy Carrigan

First up, we introduce a new writing duo as well as a new James Bond-style hero.  John Leigh is a veteran, a fair hand with a souped up, armored Triumph sports car, and most importantly, a Physicist.  Shortly after serving his hitch in Korea, he is recruited by SPI—no, not the wargame company, but "Science Processing, Inc."

Leigh's latest mission is to infiltrate a Soviet radio telescope facility.  It seems that the Russkies have picked up signals from an alien civilization, and Leigh needs to take pictures of their dish to see which way it's pointing, and also to pick up the computer data tapes to see what the Reds have heard.

At the end of Part One, Leigh has infiltrated his own facility as a dry run for his attempt in the USSR, only to find that the Soviets are already trying to infiltrate the American base for some reason.

A two paneled image, white lines on a black background. There is a psychedelic image of a woman strumming a harp in a futuristic city.
by Kelly Freas

We get a lot of inches of Leigh driving his cool car, a lot of glimpses of incidental women through the eyes of men ("The blonde at the mail desk had been hired for her ornamental qualities as well as her fast hand with the correspondence…Like most men, [Leigh] approved highly of ornamental mail girls providing they didn't mangle the correspondence too badly."  "Emily Parkman was that rarity among women—the completely discreet human being.") and a lot of "thrilling" action, like a car chase in a parking garage.

I'm bored.  Two stars.

One Step from Earth, by Hank Dempsey

A single panel image, black ink on white background. Two figures are in insectoid spacesuits. One is standing on top of an jet engine, and the other is on the ground, holding a round ball. The legend at the top right reads 'ONE STEP FROM EARTH: The length of a step depends on how you measure distance -- and on who's trying to step on you!'
by Vincent DiFate

I hear tell Hank Dempsey is really Harry Harrison—I suspect he's nom d'pluming since this is going to be the first tale in a collection that deals with teleportation, coming out later this year.  Hey, if the apple will support multiple bites, why not chomp that baby?

Anyway, this is the story of our first manned trip to Mars.  A robot ship drops off a matter transmitter just big enough for a scientist to crawl through in a space suit.  The components of a base and a larger transmitter are teleported to the Red Planet.  Before their assembly can be finished, one of the two-man crew succumbs to a mysterious malady.  Our hero must decide between spending life in quarantine on Earth or becoming the first permanent resident of Barsoom.

It's fine for what it is, an episode involving grit, courage, and pioneering spirit.  Three stars.

Rover Does Tricks in Space, by Walter B. Hendrickson, Jr.

A grey image of a nuclear rocket on a black and white background. The background breaks the page in half vertically, and the grey rocket crosses it diagonally. On the white half, a legend in black leathers reads 'ROVER DOES TRICKS IN SPACE'

This is one of the best articles I've read on NERVA, the nuclear rocket stage being developed for use with the Saturn V.  Apparently, they've gotten the thing to work, which means that it could, if produced, perhaps triple the lifting capacity of our biggest rocket.  And once in space, NERVA engines could halve the trip time to our neighboring planets.

But here's why I suspect we'll never actually build the thing: the Saturn V assembly line is being shut down in the wake of the successful Moon landing.  NERVA is expensive, so its benefits only really manifest once a space program is mature, rockets are being made by the dozen, and orbital infrastructure has been established.  That doesn't like it'll happen any time soon.

Sure, NASA is working on its reusable, winged "space shuttle", which will reduce cost to orbit once it's operational, but that's a fair piece down the road, and I don't see a place for nuclear engines in that program.  Still, the option is there for someday.

In any event, four stars for this clear and interesting piece.

Protection, by Steven Shaw

A two panel image, black ink on white background. The left panel is of three muscled humanoid figures. They are all wearing helmets and armored vests, but only one is carrying a ray gun. The right panel shows some scientific equipment under shadowy trees.
by Vincent DiFate

This piece starts promisingly, alternating viewpoints between a native sentinel on an alien planet, squatting near the defensive line, and the security man providing protection for a scientific expedition.  When members of the team start crossing the line, they are slaughtered ignominiously by some unknown technology possessed by the aborigines.

I was enthralled until the story abruptly ended, the lead-up all in service of the "twist"—the aliens were using simple poison-tipped blowdarts.  What an allegory!  It's like our well-equipped troops getting aced by the "primitive" Viet Cong!  How the proud fall!

Except that it is repeatedly established that the security men are wearing body armor.  Last I heard, flak jackets repel bamboo reeds almost as well as bullets!  Moreover, were the humans really unable to recover the darts presumably still in the corpses, nor identify the poison coursing through their bloodstreams?

One star.

Ravenshaw of WBY, Inc., by W. Macfarlane

An two-paneled image, black ink on a white background. A floating platform hovers above the ground, with a fantastical astronomy lab atop it. There is a figure on the platform, facing away from the viewer. Two figures, a man and a woman, look up at the platform from the ground in the bottom left corner. The bottom right corner has the legend 'RAVENSHAW OF WBY, INC.: It takes a special sort of man to let logic go to hell -- and act on what he sees, even when he knows it's impossible!'
by Vincent DiFate

Here's a story that I found almost indistinguishable from the serial.  The hero is even named Leigh (in this case, Arleigh Ravenshaw).  He's a veteran with a knack for innovation—for instance, in Vietnam, he plied the local kids with ice cream to get them to turn in mines and weapons caches.  I'm sure it's that easy.

Ravenshaw is recruited to work for FBY (Flying Blue Yonder), a San Diego-based agency that entertains every crackpot in the region in the hopes that there might be wheat amongst the chaff (an endeavor Campbell surely thinks much of, but I can tell you, having worked with the publishing arm of the American Astronautical Society, which occasionally gets unsolicited papers, cranks are just that—cranks).  He is accompanied by a "palomino-haired" young woman with a "bitter-honey voice" and a penchant for dressing bright, clashing colors.

On their first mission, to the desert near Borrego Springs on the trail of the creators of a matter converter, they find a wall-less room that houses an iodine thief from a parallel universe…and what may be the younger version of Ravenshaw's female companion.

Apparently, this will be the first in a series of loosely connected (and rather tedious) tales.  Two stars.

An image, black lines on a white background, of a small alien going through grass. The alien resembles a hybrid of a stag beetle and a lawn sprinkler, and is about the same size. The title of the image is 'Department of Diverse Data', suggesting it is a comic series. The caption reads
by David Pattee

Wrong Rabbit, by Jack Wodhams

An image, black lines on white background, of two men in hazmat suits holding cattle prods, facing an alien stuck in a ring. The alien looks like an enormous sort of walrus-bear-cat thing, with blobby lobster claws.
by Vincent DiFate

Earth has a working matter transmitter setup, with each booth operated by a single technician linked psychically with her or his unit.  One day, wires get crossed, and the passenger of a similar, alien network ends up in a human booth…swapped with a human stuck in an extraterrestrial receptacle.  Chaos ensues.

Wodhams tells the tale in alternating viewpoints to illustrate that both races, despite being repulsively different from each other, have surprisingly convergent societies and thought processes.  Ultimately, the two reach a rapprochement and combine their networks.

I feel this tale would have been more effective had the two perspectives differed considerably.  I also felt the constant use of nonsense terms as shorthand for untranslateable concepts ("I cannot describe to you the feeling of kooig that permeated by slaktuc.") was silly given just how similar the two species turned out to be, at least in mindset.

Two stars.

Revolutionaries, by M. R. Anver

A two-paneled image, black on a white background. On the left panel, there is a bust of an old man looking outward, and two full-body drawings of women. One mostly-naked woman, or possibly alien, is looking down, holding a tool like a futuristic metal detector. The other woman is wearing a short dress, looking out at the viewer. The legend on the left-hand panel reads, 'REVOLUTIONARIES: Many things will be changed in an interstellar culture -- but some things haven't changed since Cheops was cheated by the Pyramid contractor!' On the right panel, another bust of an old man looks outward. There is a planet in the background, with two spaceships flying over its surface. Below the image of the planet are two futuristic-looking space cars.
by Vincent DiFate

Achates is a new Federation colony, a joint effort by humans and the blue-furred humanoids of Azure.  An important election is coming up, between Ronan, head of the bi-racial United Party, and the reactionary Manoc—who is willing to win at any price, including a coup d'etat after a potential UP victory.

In the middle of it all is John Cameron, a Federation observer, who appears to be playing both sides against the middle… but are his loyalties really in question?

Anver seems to have taken a page from Mack Reynolds' book, turning in a competent, but unexciting (and not at all SFnal), political action thriller.

Three stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Analog's veteran book reviewer covers Orbit 5, which he notes wanders further from the truly SFnal than ever before, but he finds it a worthy effort, nonetheless.  He damns with faint praise the books we also didn't sing huge praises of: The Palace of Eternity, Masque World, and Galactic Pot-Healer—which just goes to show how good Miller's taste is!  Which means you should perhaps avoid J. T. McIntosh's Six Gates from Limbo and seek out Edmond Hamilton's World of the Starwolves, which we never covered, but Miller does.

Tallying the results

A woman in a blue dress, sitting at a printer desk. In the background, a man in a dark suit is punching into a large computer.
IBM 360 Model 65 with a woman at the IBM 1052 printer in the foreground, a man at the Direct-Access Storage Devices (DASDs) in the back

Analog these days reminds me nothing so much as Hugh Heffner's Playboy.  Where the latter magazine is aimed squarely at the smug youngish libertarian with delusions of yacht-hood, Analog is for the smug youngish libertarian with aspirations in engineering.  Every story reinforces the notion that, if you're a scientifically educated man, you too can save Democracy, make the girls swoon, and show up those stuffy institutionalists.  Perhaps Campbell sees his mag as a kind of Fountain of Youth to recover never-gained glories.  Or maybe this kind of slop is just the secret to getting 200,000 subscribers.

Regardless, I'm getting pretty tired of it.  Maybe others are, too.  If they rate tales as I do, this issue scored just 2.4 stars—the lowest of any mag this month.  It is beaten by Amazing (2.8), IF (2.8), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8), The Year 2000 (3), New Worlds (3), Galaxy (3.2), and Vision of Tomorrow (3.5)

The overall average this month was 2.9, and the four and five star material in the eight mags that came out would fill two full-size mags.  If you're keeping count, women produced about 9% of new short fiction published this month. 

Luckily, as you can see, Analog just constituted one end of the bell-shaped distribution.  Somebody's gotta be tail-end Charlie, I suppose.  I'm just regretting that I drew the short straw and have to be the one to review it every month.

On the other hand, I could have gotten John Boston's gig and suffered through Amazing since Goldsmith left its helm.  And anyway, since things are finally starting to look up for him over there, maybe there's hope on the horizon for this hoary, once-honorable magazine…

An advertisement for Universe Book Club, which allows you 4 books per year, for 98 cents plus shipping and handling. Subjects include astrology (described as 'The Space Age Science'), ESP, reincarnation, the supernatural, yoga, hypnosis, and 'the black arts'.
Does astrology really count as a science?  Space Age, my Aunt Petunia!

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 20, 1970] Fun-nee enough… (OSCAR 5 and the March 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

A black-and-white photo portrait of Kaye Dee. She is a white woman with long, straight dark hair worn down, looking at the camera with a smile.

by Kaye Dee

Recently, The Traveller covered the launch of the TIROS-M weather satellite, noting that the rocket’s payload also included a small Australian-made ham radio satellite, OSCAR-5 (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio), also known as OSCAR-A.

Photograph of the cover of Goddard News depicting a rocket staged for launchCover of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre's in-house magazine, marking the launch of ITOS-1/TIROS-M and Australis-OSCAR-5

A New Star in the Southern Cross

It was exciting to be in “Mission Control” at the University of Melbourne when the satellite was launched in the evening (Australian time) on 23 January. You should have heard the cheers! After all, Australis-OSCAR-5 (AO-5), as we call it, is Australia’s second satellite. It’s also the first amateur radio satellite built outside the United States and the first OSCAR satellite constructed by university students – in this case, members of the Melbourne University Astronautical Society (MUAS).

Photograph of seven suited white men with exuberant expressions standing in an alley presenting the model satelliteThe MUAS student team with the engineering model of Australia's first amateur radio satellite

Radio Hams and Satellite Trackers

Commencing in 1961, the first OSCAR satellite was constructed by a group of American amateur radio enthusiasts. Cross-over membership between MUAS and the Melbourne University Radio Club (MURC) encouraged the students to begin tracking OSCAR satellites, moving quickly on to tracking and receiving signals from many other US and Soviet satellites.

Satellite photograph of cloud fronts moving over the continentNimbus satellite image of the western half of Australia received by MUAS for the weather bureau

One of MUAS’ achievements was the first regular reception in Australia of images from TIROS and Nimbus meteorological satellites. By 1964, they were supplying satellite weather images daily to the Bureau of Meteorology, before it established its own receiving facilities.

"How Do We Build a Satellite?"

After tracking OSCARs 3 and 4 in 1965, the MUAS students decided to try building their own satellite. “No one told us it couldn’t be done, and we were too naive to realise how complex it would be to get the satellite launched!”, an AO-5 team member told me at the launch party. MUAS decided to build a small ‘beacon’ satellite which would transmit telemetry data back to Earth on fixed frequencies.

Even before Australia’s first-launched satellite, WRESAT-1, was on the drawing board, the Australis satellite project commenced in March 1966. Volunteers from MUAS, MURC and university staff worked together to design and build the satellite, with technical and financial assistance from the Wireless Institute of Australia and a tiny budget of $600. The Australian NASA representative also gave the project invaluable support. The students acquired electronic and other components through donations from suppliers where possible: the springs used to push the satellite away from the launcher were generously made by a mattress manufacturer in Melbourne. Any other expenses came out of their own pockets!

Picture of AO-5 in launch configuration, somewhat resembling a metal-wrapped gift bound up twine holding the furled antennae down as 'the ribbon'Carpenter's steel tape was used to make AO-5's flexible antennae, seen here folded in launch configuration. Notice the inch markings on the tape!

AO-5 is a fantastic example of Aussie ‘make-do’ ingenuity. A flexible steel measuring tape from a hardware shop was cut up to make the antennae. The oven at the share house of one team member served to test the satellite’s heat tolerance, and a freezer in the university's glaciology lab was unofficially used for the cold soak. Copper circuit boards were etched with a technique using nail varnish, and a rifle-sight was used to help tune the antennae! Various components, including the transmitters and command system, were flight-tested on the university’s high altitude research balloon flights.

Colour photograph of the bare circuit-boards set up in a freezer
Colour photograph of a payload collection staged at the back of a truck in preparation for balloon flight
A university lab freezer and hitching a ride with university experiments on US HiBal high altitude balloon flights in Australia used to test the ruggedness of AO-5 components

A Long Wait for Launch

Australis was completed and delivered to Project OSCAR headquarters in June 1967, well before WRESAT’s launch in November that year. Unfortunately, AO-5 then had to wait a few years for a launch to be arranged by the Amateur Radio Satellite Corporation (AMSAT), which now operates the OSCAR project. However, it is surely appropriate that, as OSCAR-5, it finally made it into orbit with a weather satellite.

Colour photographs of the launch vehicle staged at Vandenberg Air Force Base, both before and during ignition

After launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, AO-5 was placed into a 115-minute orbit, varying in altitude between 880 – 910 miles. This means it will be in orbit for hundreds of years – unlike the short-lived WRESAT.

In Orbit at Last!

Battery-powered, Australis-OSCAR-5 weighs only 39 pounds and carries two transmitters, beaming out the same telemetry signal on the two-metre and 10-metre amateur radio bands. Its telemetry system is sophisticated but designed for simple decoding without expensive equipment. The start of a telemetry sequence is indicated by the letters HI in Morse code, followed by data on battery voltage, current, and the temperature of the satellite at two points as well as information on the satellite's orientation in space from three horizon sensors.

Colour photograph of the Australis OSCAR 5 (a rectangular box) with metal antennae extended

AO-5 includes the first use in an amateur satellite of innovations such as a passive magnetic attitude stabilisation system (which helps reduce signal fading), and a command system to switch it on and off to conserve power. Observations are recorded on special standardised reporting forms that are suitable for computer analysis.

Photograph of a telemetry coding form noting that the satellite is spinning at four rotations per minute

Just 66 minutes after launch, the first signal was detected in Madagascar and soon other hams reported receiving both the two and 10-metre signals on the satellite's first orbit. At “Mission Control” in Melbourne, we were thrilled when MURC members managed to pick up the satellite’s signals!  By the end of Australis’ first day of operation, AMSAT headquarters had already received more than 100 tracking, telemetry and reception reports.

Photograph of news clippings from The Australian (and other publications).  They provide a photograph of the satellite in pre-launch attitude (with furled metal antennae) and photographs (including a portrait of Richard Tonkin) of members of the Melbourne team who designed and built it.A selection of local newspaper cuttings following AO-5's launch. There was plenty of interest here in Australia.

The two-metre signal failed on 14 February, but the 10-metre transmission continues for now. How much longer AO-5’s batteries will last is anybody’s guess, but the satellite has proven itself to be a successful demonstration of the MUAS students’ technical capabilities, and the team is already contemplating a more advanced follow-on satellite project.

Picture of a post-card (posted Jan 23 1970, with an Apollo 8 stamp) with an illustration of a satellite over what appears to be a map of weather fronts. Above the illustration it reads 'ITOS-1 Day-Night Weather Eye', and to the side it reads 'Oscar 5' and 'Australis'
This philatelic cover for the ITOS-1/TIROS-M launch, includes mention of AO-5, but the satellite depicted is actually OSCAR-1

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Fantastic emanations on Earth

And now that you've had a chance to digest the latest space news, here's some less exciting (but no less necessary) coverage of the latest issue of F&SF.

Cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction's March issue-- the cover illustration is a square wrapped wrapped in digits with the top sequence running from 1-17, and the others presenting variations on the sequence.  The inside of the square appears to show four mirrored illustrations of men laying under blankets as though awaiting surgery.  Extending from the crowns of their heads to the center of the square are matching banded gradients from pale to dark blue.
by Ronald Walotsky

The Fatal Fulfillment, by Poul Anderson

Well, this is very interesting.  You remember that Ellison story that impressed me so much this month?  The Region Between, it was called. Well, it has an intriguing genesis.  I'll let editor Ed Ferman explain:

Five of science fiction's best storytellers were asked to write a novella beginning from a common prologue (written by Keith Laumer), to be combined in a book called Five Fates.  The Anderson story and one by Frank Herbert (coming up soon) will be published in F&SF.  We suggest that you look for the book (out in August from Doubleday) in order to catch up with the others: by Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson and Harlan Ellison.

The prologue, as you may recall, involves a fellow named Douglas Bailey being euthanized.  We don't know why he goes there, but he ends up very much dead.  In the Ellison story, he goes on to have his soul stuffed in a series of different bodies (five of them described in detail) until he rebels against his puppetmaster and becomes God.

Anderson's story is different.

Bailey in his tale is suffering from insanity brought on by the burgeoning population, stifling technology, and all the other bugaboos of modern society.  Each of his fates (five of them!  I see a motif developing) involves a different "cure" for his malady.  The first was obviously destruction.  The second involves radical therapy.  A third involves government subsidy.  Number four takes place in a post-pandemic world where the remaining 5% of humanity is enlightened to a degree that precludes craziness.

The fifth, well… that explains what's going on.  Anderson lays the crumbs such that, if you don't figure it out by the end, you'll at least find the conclusion well set up.

It's not a bad piece, though not nearly as gripping as Ellison's.  Moreover, it's one of those that makes you go "why bother" for too long before you realize Poul's actually got a point to his meanderings.

Three stars.

Books , by Gahan Wilson

Banner reading 'Books' with an illustration of a shelf of books bracketed on the one side by a miniature of a rocket staged for liftoff, and on the other with a diorama of an astronaut having landed on a book acting as a book-end

F&SF's (and Playboy's, and who knows how many other magazine's) illustrator returns to host the book review column.  All are collections/anthologies, and none are SFnal (being either horror or mystery in genre).  He does spent a good page expressing discomfort at how universally misogynistic the stories in Splinters: A New Anthology of Macabre Modern Fiction are, noting that virtually all the tales feature evil women who get their gruesome comeuppance.  He concludes the review by conceding that many of the stories are excellent, and that readers of the macabre will enjoy the volume, but suggests that the next such volume should be misandrist to compensate.

I bring this up because time and again (and again, and again) the Journey has been criticized for just this sort of column—daring to impugn the worth of a work simply because it treats women badly.  Indeed, we are often told that "no one cares" about such things.

We do, and obviously others do, too.

An inked cartoon labeled 'The Dark Corner' which depicts a shadowy blotch with two eyes and a smile in the corner of a room underneath a cobweb

The Night of the Eye, by Dennis Etchison

A fellow is driven off the road by Death in a Car.  He survives, but upon being driven home from the hospital by his harridan wife, Death reappears.

A nothing story.  Not even frightening.  One star.

Harvest, by Leo P. Kelley

If you read Joanna Russ' Initiation in last month's issue, then you already know the premise for this similar story: humans from Earth are making planetfall on a remote colony where the settlers' descendants have widely diverged from the original stock.

In this case, the colonists were involuntary emigrés from an overpopulated Earth, and the incoming ship holds the last vestiges of humanity fleeing from an exploded Sun.

I spent the whole time waiting for the author to drop the other shoe—the way humanity on this new world had changed such that they would be repugnant to the newcomers.

It wasn't worth the wait.  Two stars.

The Falls of Troy, by L. Sprague de Camp

A table where the column headers read 'Schliemann', 'Dorpfeld', and 'Blegen', with the rows indicating the different ways that they classified the various sites from newest (Classical/Roman/Roman & Hellenistic) to oldest (Trojan) and by which cultures they believed to be dominant.

Did the Troy of The Iliad exist?  The answer is a maddening mix of "yes", "no", and "not exactly"—for there were no fewer than nine Troys, all with their unique history and character.  F&SF writer and historian, De Camp, offers up a fascinating, if all-to-brief, summary of what we know about the history of the hill towns on Hissarlik.

Invaluable stuff to the amateur classicist.  Five stars.

Fun-Nee, by Miriam Allen deFord

Sort of a children's tale, it's all about the importance of tolerance, especially on an alien world where the two races are just different enough to elicit physical revulsion, but close enough to be good friends anyway.

A little simple, and perhaps mawkish, but then, I like happy endings.

Three stars.

The Chameleon, by Larry Eisenberg

A politician with a talent for exactly meeting expectations runs afoul of a focus group with too many conflicting desires.

Short, fun, and to the point.

Three stars.

Bridging the Gaps, by Isaac Asimov

Banner reading 'Science' with inset illustrations of an atom (in the style of Bohr), an optical microscope's view of microorganisms, an oscilloscope's view of a sawtooth wave, a satellite in orbit, and a spiral galaxy

The Good Doctor explains how elements fit in the Periodic Table… without really explaining why.  I just don't get chemistry, and he's not making it any easier.

Three stars.

Ink editorial cartoon with a werewolf wearing a spacesuit seated at a cockpit simulator with the moon filling the screen.  In the foreground, one lab-coated scientist relates to the other 'I'm afraid this simulator test indicates Commodore Brent would be a poor choice for the lunar expedition'
by Gahan Wilson

The Tangled Web of Neil Weaver, by Charles Miller

Pretty typical Satanism/voodoo tale about a college kid on the make who crosses a co-ed coven leader when he tries to bed a young witch.  There are no heroes in this admittedly well-told story.

Three stars.

Tuning in

All in all, this is one of those issues that sounds worse than it was.  It was diverting enough, just not stellar.  Given the low lows we've had, this is perfectly acceptable.  Let's just try to up the average next month!

Back cover of March 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine sharing readership demographics (they're overwhelming young with 84% under 45, and 62% have attended college) and advertising the availability of French, Spanish, and German language editions.

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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[February 14, 1970] Spock must Die!, Starbreed, Seed of the Dreamers, and The Blind Worm

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[For this first Galactoscope of the month, please enjoy this quartet of diverting reviews…which are probably more entertaining than the books in question!]

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

Star Trek is dead. Long live Star Trek!

No sooner had Trek left the air at the end of last year's rerun season than it reentered the airwaves in syndication. And not just at home, but abroad: the BBC are playing Trek weekly, exposing yet more potential fans to the first real science fiction show on TV.

While new episodes may not be airing on television, new stories are being created. I am subscribed to a number of fanzines devoted to Trek. There aren't quite so many these days as once there were, but there's also been something of a distillation of quality. For instance, I receive Spockanalia and T-Negative with almost montly regularity. These are quality pubs with some real heavy hitters involved. They are crammed with articles and fiction. As to the latter, a lot of it is proposed fourth season scripts turned into stories—by people who really know the show. The stories by such Big Name Fans as Ruth Berman, Dorothy Jones, and Astrid Anderson (of Karen/Poul Anderson lineage) are always excellent.

There have been few commercial Trek books to date. You had Gene Roddenberry/Stephen Whitfield's indispensible reference, The Making of Star Trek, released between the 2nd and 3rd seasons, and Bantam has published three collections of Trek episodes turned into short stories by James Blish (rather sketchily, and not overly faithfully). There was Mack Reynolds' juvenile Mission to Horatius, which wasn't very good.

Cover of an orange novel featuring two converging Spocks. The caption reads A STAR TREK NOVEL SPOCK MUST DIE! BY JAMES BLISH AN EXCITING NEW NOVEL OF ITERPLANETARY ADVENTURE INSPIRED BY THE CHARACTERS OF GENE RODDENBERRY CREATED FOR THE FAMOUS TELEVISION SERIES

Now Bantam has released the first "real" Trek novel, one aimed at adults. It is also by James Blish, who liberally sprinkles footnote references to prior episodes he has novelized. The basic premises are two-fold:

The Enterprise is on a farflung star-charting mission on the backside of the Klingon Empire, which is in a grudging armistice with the Federation enforced by the mind-being Organians (q.v. the excellent episode, Errand of Mercy) . Lieutenant Uhura reports to Captain Kirk that the Klingons have somehow managed to neutralize Organia and launch a surprise attack that knocks the Feds back on their heels.

Chief Engineer "Scotty" bungs together a long-range transporter that will allow Mr. Spock to reconnoiter Organia and report back his findings. However, the journey has an unexpected consequence: the first officer is duplicated—and the replica is irretrievably evil. Can Kirk and his crew resolve the Organia issue before the bad Spock destroys them all?

Put like that, the story seems awfully juvenile, but the slim novel (just 115 pages) is actually quite a good read.

Characterization is weak, relying on the reader's knowledge of the show, but it is rather truer to the cast than prior Trek novelizations. Everyone is a bit more technically savvy and erudite than normal: Star Trek as an Analog hard SF story. Scotty's accent is lovingly, if not quite accurately (to Doohan's variety) transliterated. Uhura and Sulu are given some good "screen time". Spock (both incarnations) are particularly well-rendered. Kirk is a bit of a cipher, and McCoy is more logical than usual. Also, the captain keeps calling him "Doc" rather than "Bones", which is a little jarring (though true to early 1st season Kirk). I did appreciate when Kirk mused, early on, "What was the source of the oddly overt response that women of all ages and degrees of experience seemed to feel toward Spock?" Blish certainly has kept up with the fandom!

As for the plot, well, it's a series of short chapters that read like episode scenes, the novel as a whole divided (informally) into a series of acts. It's a bit overlong for a TV show, but it would make a decent movie. Technical solutions are hatched out of nowhere, implemented, and moved past. One gets the impression that the Enterprise is responsible for half of the Federation's scientific innovations; it's a pity that most are forgotten about after they are developed.

The novel's climax is suitably exciting, and it's quite momentous. The Trek universe is substantially changed as a result…so much so that Blish has probably pinched off his own parallel continuum. Read it, and you'll see why.

I liked it. It's not literature for the ages, but it is at least as good as the best fanfiction (not a slur), and I think it sets a standard going forward.

3.5 stars.

[We were very excited to get this next review from someone who has worked behind the scenes at the Journey for a long time—please welcome Frida Singer to the team!]

photo of a fair-complected woman with long red hair in a plaid dress
by Frida Singer

Starbreed, by MARTHA deMEY CLOW

A book cover depicting an orb of humanoid faces of all colors shapes and sizes. The caption reads MARTHA deMEY CLOW HE WAS A HYBRID- STRONGER, CLEVERER, FASTER, THAN ANY HUMAN- AND FAR MORE DEADLY STARBREED .
cover by Steele Savage

Starbreed begins with a port-side interlude when a frustrated Centaurian merchantman (cross-fertile with other hominids, somehow) exercises his resentment by raping a pubescent prostitute. On discovering the consequent pregnancy, the never-named girl seeks refuge in a local convent. There, nuns present us an America where parentage is a licensed privilege (thanks to the problems postulated by that old dastard Malthus), where the 'defects' of crime mandate sterilisation, and where remote towns have euthanasia clinics.  The Soviet Union and China both remain, but the promise of communism has never truly flowered again, while American capital trips gaily forward, with bigotry her bold escort.  Eighteen years have passed since Centaurian traders first made contact, and thus far they have exploited their contracts, plying a colonial trade monopoly across the seas of space.

The child is raised in the shelter of the convent after his mother dies in childbirth. Thanks to his mixed parentage, by the age of 14 he's already a bizarre demigod of self-sufficiency, and so flees across the border of the American trade zone to Guayaquil.  Taking the alias ‘Roger’ after the slur ‘rojo’ which the border guards used, there he and a cohort of other half-Centaurian teens play at larceny, revolution and revenge. He conceives the idea that, through the time dilation of Centaurians superluminal transport (20 years in a few weeks subjective), he may evade the capital crime of being a child of miscegenation—by being older than would allow for his existence. With stolen money, he invests in a new identity and a working berth on a Centaurian trade vessel, burning to discover the secrets of their design.

Not a soul seems happy, and few afford one another grace. The story reads like something written by Ellison were he smidgen less misanthropic.  Imagine, if you will, Vogt's Slan, but the antagonist is our protagonist.  A Khan of the Eugenics Wars, but molded out of the pain of rejection rather than to the designs of some military-industrial complex.  Books, in the end, are Roger’s only solace, and he bitterly resents his social isolation, fixing on attaining power to secure for himself that which he feels he has been denied.  Women all seem to be playing to scripts which evoke John Norman: prizes to be conquered into obedient adoration, mothers to be outgrown, and artifacts of abjection.  Often it feels as though they’re only set-dressing for the quintet of rational, hale, golden-eyed men who scheme to seize the future as continental hegemons.

This is a bitterly comic, almost Wildean novel where every patronizing impulse seems bound to erupt with the pus of profound condescension, framed within a nesting-doll of layered imperialist exploitation, where the genocide of the Watusi is but a historical footnote. It strives to be a warning klaxon against the simmering of the dispossessed, and fails most profoundly where it relies on racial caricature, or lacks follow-through. I don't expect to re-read it, but I might refer it to others with a taste for maror, willing to subject themselves to stories about eugenics for reasons other than enjoyment.

3 out of 5

photo of a man with short dark hair and goatee
by Brian Collins

With the latest Ace Double (or at least the latest one to fall into my hands), we have two original short novels—although one of them is closer to a novella than a true novel. The shorter (and better) piece is by Emil Petaja, a veteran of the field, who seems to be as productive as ever. The other is (I believe) the second novel by a very young Englishman (he's only 21, so let's take it easy on him) named Brian Stableford. Stableford was apparently sending letters to New Worlds and the dearly missed SF Impulse years ago, when he was a snot-nosed teenager; more recently he's tried his hand at writing professionally.

Ace Double 06707

Double book covers, the first featuring the head of a man and a robot with the caption Emil Petaja Seed of the Dreamers The heroes of the Earth must live again! The second book cover depicts a long sharp green, blue and purple abstract figure with an eye atop, with small humanoids weilding swords below. the caption reads. Brian M. Stableford THE BLIND WORM Complete the Quadrilateral -and the universe is yours
Cover art by Gray Morrow and Jack Gaughan.

Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja

Brad Mantee is a tough and hard-nosed enforcer for Star Control, an intergalactic empire which Petaja, in his narration, explicitly calls fascist. Brad is here to take one Dr. Milton Lloyd to prison, for the doctor, while undoubtedly brilliant, is also responsible for an experiment gone wrong, killing over a dozen people. The journey goes wrong, however, when, upon landing, Brad meets a beautiful young woman who, unbeknownst to him, is Dr. Lloyd's daughter. Harriet Lloyd, the heroine of the novella, is bright like her old man, but what makes her different is twofold: that she works for TUFF, a league of what seem to be space-hippies, undermining Star Control's tyranny in subtle ways; and two, she has psi powers, these being more or less responsible for the rest of the plot. While Harriet is distracting Brad, Dr. Lloyd hijacks Brad's ship and takes off for what turns out to be a seemingly uninhabited planet, which Harriet christens as Virgo (she's interested in astrology).

The rest of the novella (it really is a lightning-quick hundred pages) is concerned with Brad and Harriet having to cooperate with each other once it becomes apparent Dr. Lloyd has crash-landed on Virgo, and may or may not be dead. This would all be a pretty derivative planetary adventure, and indeed during the opening stretch I was worried that Petaja had not put any effort into this one; but the good news is that Seed of the Dreamers has a neat little trick up its sleeve. It soon dawns on Brad and Harriet that they are not the only people on this planet—the only problem then being that said people have apparently spawned from the old adventure books Brad is fond of reading (secretly and illegally, since Star Control has long since outlawed fiction books). They meet and nearly get killed by some tribal folks out of the pages of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, and really it's off to the races from there.

Seed of the Dreamers reads as a sort of reversal of L. Ron Hubbard's Typewriter in the Sky, since whereas that novel involves a real person getting thrown into a world of fiction, in Petaja's novella the fictitious characters have decided to bring the party to the real world. Virgo is thus strangely populated with characters from different real-world books, including but not limited to King Solomon's Mines, The Time Machine, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and more. There's even a Tarzan lookalike named Zartan (I assume for legal reasons Petaja cannot use "Tarzan" as a name), who appears in one scene. These characters from books all live by what they call "the Word," which is clearly a joke about the Bible, but it's also in reference to each character's programming, or rather their characterization according to each's source material.

Petaja has a lot of fun with his premise, although Seed of the Dreamers is, if anything, too short. Brad and Harriet coming across one fictitious character after another makes the adventure feel almost like a theme park ride, and most of the supporting cast (excepting Tsung, a Chinese mythological figure) only get a chapter or two before Petaja quickly becomes bored of them, like a bratty child throwing away his toys. It's also mind-numbingly stupid, between the planetary adventure aspect, Brad and Harriet's fast-moving (and thoroughly unconvincing) romance, and Petaja's attempts at explaining scientifically a world that seems more aligned with fantasy. But most of it is good fun.

A hearty three stars.

The Blind Worm, by Brian Stableford

Stableford's novel is much longer than Petaja's, and unfortunately much worse. Indeed, this might be the first time I've reviewed a book for the Journey where I've loathed it simply due to how poorly it's written. The Blind Worm is a far-future science-fantasy action romp, in which humanity has all but died out, with only a tiny number of people living in Ylle, "the City of Sorrow," surrounded by the Wildland, a vast forest front that for humans is almost impossible to traverse. John Tamerlane is known as the black king, being black of both skin and clothing. He seeks to solve the Quadrilateral, a puzzle that seems to connect parallel universes, and which could provide a new beginning for mankind. Unfortunately, the black king and his cohorts must contend with Sum, an alien hive-mind with godlike powers, and a synthetic humanoid cyclops called the Blind Worm. Both the black king and Sum want to solve the Quadrilateral, but only the black king has the "key," in the form of Swallow, one of his aforementioned cohorts.

I would describe this novel, which mercifully clocks in at just under 150 pages, as like a more SFnal take on The Lord of the Rings, but only a fraction of that trilogy in both quantity and quality (I say this already not being terribly fond of Professor Tolkien's magnum opus). There is a big existential battle between good and evil, in a landscape that feels somehow both desolate and overgrown with vegetation; and then there's the Blind Worm, who acts as a third party and a sort of walking plot device. The Blind Worm is the invention of one Jose Dragon (yes, that is his name), a nigh-immortal human who had created the Blind Worm as a way to combat Sum and the Wildland. This is all conveyed in some of the clunkiest and most pseudo-philosophical dialogue I've ever had to read in an SF novel, which does make me wonder if Stableford had intended his characters to talk this way. It doesn't help that he mostly gives these characters, who are generally lacking in life and individual personality, some of the worst-sounding names you can imagine.

Given Stableford's age, I was inclined to grade The Blind Worm on a curve—but it took me four days to get through when it really should have only taken two. The dialogue and attempts at describing action scenes border on the embarrassing. Of the strangely large cast of characters, maybe the most conspicuously lacking is Zea, the single woman of the bunch. Clearly Stableford has certain ideas as to what to do with Zea, as a symbol with arms and legs, but as a character she does and says next to nothing. This is not active woman-hating like one would see in a Harlan Ellison or Robert Silverberg story, but rather it descends from a long literary tradition of contextualizing women as ways for the (presumably male) writer to work in some symbolism, as opposed to giving them Shakespearean humanity. The issues I have with Zea, more specifically with her emptiness as a character, feel like a microcosm for this novel's apparent deficiencies.

The shame of all this is that I would recommend Seed of the Dreamers, albeit tepidly, but it's conjoined to a much longer and much less entertaining piece of work.

One star.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Book, Conventions/Performances, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 8, 1970] Boldly going to the Region Between (March 1970 Galaxy)

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

A pleasant Escapade

Little fan conventions are popping up all over the place, perhaps thanks to the popularity of Star Trek.  The first adult science fiction show on the small screen, Trek not only thrilled existing fans (who have been putting on conclaves since the '30s), but has also galvanized millions of newfen who previously had lived outside the mainstream of fandom.

Last weekend, I went to a gathering of Los Angeles fans called "Escapade".  It differs from most fan conventions in that it focuses almost exclusively on science fiction and fantasy on the screen rather than in print.  Moreover, the emphasis is not on the SFnality of the works, but on the relationships and interactions of the characters.  This is the in-person culmination of the phenomenon we've seen in the Trekzines, where the stories and essays are about Spock or Kirk or Scotty—the people, not so much the adventures they go on.

Another distinction is that most of the attendees were women.  Most SF conventions, while not stag parties, are male-dominated.  The main difference I noted was that panels were less formal, more collaborative.  Instead of folks sitting behind a table and gabbing with each other, they were more like discussion groups…fannish teach-ins, if you will.  I really dug it.

If Escapade represents the future of fandom, then beam me up.  I'm sold!

And since the photos are back from the Fotomat, here's a sample of what I snapped:

Photo of a bearded man in glasses and a paisley shirt holding up a copy of a fanzine next to a tall woman in a Trek gold tunic flashing the Vulcan salute
That's David, holding up the latest issue of The Tricorder (#4) and Melody dressed as a Starfleet lieutenant

Photo of a dark-haired woman in a blue Star Trek uniform, smiling at the camera. She is carrying books in one arm, and behind her are tables of fannish items for sale.
And here's Melody again in sciences blue—who says you can't make a Vulcan smile?

A picture of a smiling brunette woman in a ribbed white sweater, sitting on the floor with an equally smiling baby about one year old.
If you can't recruit a fan…make one!  (this one isn't Lorelei's…but it's probably giving her ideas)

An image projected onto a wall, showing an image from the Star Trek episode 'The Enemy Within', where Kirk is drinking, faced by a Security woman in a beehive hairdo.
Lincoln Enterprises had a stall in the Huckster Hall—I got this clip from The Enemy Within!

The New Thing in America

It's been eight years since folks like Ballard and Aldiss started the New Wave in the UK.  It's leaked out across the Pond for a while, but this is the first time an issue of a Yank mag has so embraced the revolutionary ethos.  The latest issue of Galaxy was a surprise and delight that filled my spare moments (not many!) at the aforementioned convention.  Let's take a look.

Cover of Galaxy magazine featuring a ghostly male figure half-submerged in a multi-hued representation of the universe, dozens of planets swirling near him
cover by Jack Gaughan

The Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

A black-and-white ink image of the article's title in a bubble, surrounded by stars
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Budrys' focus is on fandom this month.  He notes that SF fandom differs from all others (that of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan, etc.) in that we are omnivorous.  We contain multitudes, digging all of the above and much, much more.

We also are directly responsible for the plaudits of our passion—whereas the Oscars, Edgars, and Silver Spurs (and Nebulas, for that matter) are given out by organizations, the Hugos are awarded by the fans themselves (well, those that have the $2-3 to shell out for a World Science Fiction Society membership).  Which means that all the nominations that Galactic Journey (hasn't) got are really worth something!

After a lengthy and entertaining discussion of what fandom means to Budrys, he goes on to review the indispensable The Index of Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1965, compiled by Norman Metcalf.  It's not only a useful reference, but it's fun to read what all your favorite authors have produced, and also to see the commonalities and differences of stories that end up next to each other when ordered alphabetically.

He also recommends Adventures in Discovery, an anthology of science fact articles by science fictioneers (including reliables like Asimov, Ley, and de Camp, but also unusuals like Silverberg and Poul Anderson).  It's put together by my dear friend, Tom Purdom, and you can bet we'll be reviewing it soon, too.

Now on to the fiction!

The Region Between, by Harlan Ellison

A three-panel image, showing a burst of white, raylike lines against a black background. The title is also in white letters, with the smaller legend 'Death came merely as a hyphen. For it was only when Bailey died that he began to live'. The third panel is black ink on a white background, showing a man in a circle, surrounded by astrological lines and symbols. The circle and man are upside down, set on top of framing black lines, emphasizing chaotic disruption.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

In Ellison's story, the universe is filled with warring factions: beings, societies, and races that play God with the lesser forces in an endless struggle for dominance.  The other truth of Region: the soul is immortal, and death merely a transition.  Your essence is also poachable, in death and in life—and a whole gaggle of Thieves has sprung up to take advantage of this.  When the soul that is snatched from a still-living being is too valuable to one of the squabbling tin pot deities, that's when it calls in the Succubus.  The Succubus deals in souls, too, thwarting the Thieves by replacing snitched spirits with ones from his collection.

One such is William Bailey, late of Earth, so tired of the pointlessness of it all that he picks euthanasia over enduring, but possessed of such anger at his lousy universe that he proves a true son-of-a-bitch.  A real Excedrin headache.  A turis.  A pain in the ass.  (Sound like any diminutive titans we know?)

Every body he inhabits, every pawn in every war, game, conquest, he subverts.  Through logic and sheer force of will, he convinces the shell personality of his host to allow him control, enough to stick it to the Man who pulls the strings of His minions.  And after each successful wrenching of the gears, the Succubus, too busy to note the peccadilloes of a single errant soul, tosses him off to his next assignment to wreak havoc.

It's the ultimate implementation of hubris and nemesis, an eye-stick against solipsism.  Not only are you not God, but watch out: your dicking around with creation may be just the thing that causes your uncreation.

The New Wave has all kinds of literary and typographical tricks—if you read New Worlds, you've seen them all.  This is the first time I've really seen them used fully in service of the story rather than being fripperous illumination.  They are special effects for the printed page, as impressive as any Kubrick rendered in his 2001 for the cinema.  I wouldn't want all of my stories to look like this, and Ghod help us if Ellison inspires a new New Wave of copycats who absorb the style and not the subtance.

But, my goodness, five stars.

The Propheteer, by Leo P. Kelley

A black-and-white sketch, briefly rendered, of a twisted robot sitting in a futuristic hammock, facing a wall of screens. The legend reads 'The Propheteer's people smiled for their lives -- or lost them!'
illustration by Jack Gaughan

"We can predict crime with absolute precision.  We can tell who will commit a crime and when.  We can even predict the exact nature of the crime."

Sounds like Dick's story, The Minority Report, though in Kelley's piece, what keeps crime from happening isn't a trio of precogs, but one man who monitors and controls the chemical balance of every human on Earth, ensuring tranquility and crimelessness throughout the planet.

Except, that man twiddles meaningless knobs and dummy switches.  Another man is in control of humanity, and he wields a stick, not an endocrine carrot…

It's a little too histrionic and pat, and less effective than the stories which preceded it (including an Analog story from 1962 by R. C. Fitzpatrick)

Two stars.

A Place of Strange, by George C. Willick

A pencil drawing of a knapped stone item, looking both like a knife and a deity. Above it reads the legend 'What would you call a place where men planned war?'

Humans teach primitive beings to hate, to fight.  The moral, like something from a less than effective Star Trek episode is stated: "There must be a way for simple survival to change into civilization without war.  There must be."

Indeed, there must be.

Two stars.

Downward to the Earth (Part 4 of 4), by Robert Silverberg

A pencil illustration showing the alien elephants, called the Nildoror, spattered in black goo.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Silverbob wraps up his latest serial, detailing the end of Gunderson's quest toward redemption on the colony he once administrated.  Of course, it ends with the unveiling of the mystery of Rebirth, which is revealed in the dreamy, avant-garde style that typifies the rest of the story.  We also learn the relationship between the two sapient races of Belzegor, the elephantine Nildoror and the apelike Sulidor.  It is both fascinating and also a little disappointing.  Without giving anything away, I suppose I was most interested in the concept of a world with two intelligent species sharing a planet; in Silverberg's story, it turns out they are less a pair of distinct beings and more two sides of the same coin.

There is a fascinating, hopeful note to the conclusion that elevates the story above a personal salvation story, even if the whole thing is more an exercise in building a setting than presenting an actual narrative.

I'd say four stars for this installment, three-and-a-half for the whole.  It may get consideration for the Hugo, but the year is young, and I imagine there is better to come—probably from Silverberg, himself.

Sunpot (Part 2 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

A cartoon panel, primarily showing a spaceship in orbit. The caption reads, 'The giant Sunpot complex hangs high above the Russian side of the Moon...it hangs like a bloated Siamese bowling pin in the afternoon motionlessness of space...'. The lettering, kerning, and bolding are all disastrous.
illustration by Vaughn Bodé

The adventures of the Sunpot continue, as does the illegible lettering.  I was dismayed to see Belind Bump, who had appeared to be an intrepid heroine, reduced to a host for boobies.  Fake boobies at that (as we are reminded multiple times throughout the strip).

A waste of space.  One star.

Reflections, by Robert F. Young

Last up is this sentimental tale of two humans of the far future teleporting to Earth for a tour of the cradle of their race.  Evolved far beyond our ability to ken, they are incorporeal beings of nostalgia and love.

Pleasant, but eminently forgettable.  It's that style (the type is interestingly arranged in reflecting columns and meandering rivers) over substance thing I just worried about above.

Three stars.

Summing up

That's that for this experiment in printing.  There were unfortunate casualties: the Silverberg was printed with compressed carriage returns between lines, which made it harder to read.  Also, with all the illustrations and text tricks (not to mention the comic), we probably got about 80% of the usual content—the Silverberg compression notwithstanding.

The stuff that isn't the Ellison or the Silverberg (or the Budrys) is also pretty disposable.  That said, the Ellison and the Silverberg comprise 80% of the issue, so who's complaining?

I definitely won't quit now… unlike Tony Curtis.

An advertisement showing a man in a doctor's uniform. The ad copy says, 'I got sick and tired of coughing and wheezing and hacking. So I quit. I quit smoking cigarettes. Which wasn't easy. I'd been a pack-a-day man for about 8 years. Still, I quit. And, after a while, I also quit coughing and wheezing and hacking. Now, the American Cancer Society offers every quitter an I.Q. button. To tell everyone you've got what it takes to say not quitting.' In smaller letters, there is an additional message: 'Get your I.Q. button from your local Unit of the American Cancer Society.'"/>
This campaign is everywhere—commercials, Laugh-In, the back inside cover of Galaxy…

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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[February 4, 1970] To Rome, with love (SPI's wargame, Anzio Beachhead)

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

When you talk about destruction…

Two months ago, Jim Dunnigan started a revolution.  He took over the wargame fanzine, Strategy and Tactics, and not only worked to revitalize it, he started the novel practice of releasing a new wargame in it every issue!  Avalon Hill, the previous, undisputed king of the wargame publishers, comes out with one or two new games a year, whereas S&T plans to put out six to twelve (there are two in the current issue) of these magazine inserts in the same time—plus a whole line of regular releases.  In fact, a number of them are already out as limited series test prototypes, which some of my friends are playing.  Once they get through this round of testing, we should see some or all of them in a more finished form on our hobby store shelves.

Wow!

The copyright page and table of contents for the magazine Strategy & Tactics.  The table of contents reads: In This Issue... The Luftwaffe Land Army, by Victor Madeja; Bastogne, by James F. Dunnigan; Anzio Beachhead, by Dave Williams; Outgoing Mail; If Looks Could Kill, by Redmond Simonsen; Games, by Sid Sackson; Pass in Review, by Albert Nofi; Diplomacy, by Rod Walker; Wargamers Notebook, by Ed Mohrmann; Incoming Mail.

Last issue's wargame was Crete, which I was well pleased with.  The two games in this issue are Bastogne, which looks very cumbersome, and a cutey called Anzio Beachhead, which we've had a lot of fun with.  Let's take a look.

Reconnaissance

If the name strikes a chord, it's because we've already played a game with "Anzio" in the title—namely Anzio, which billed itself as "A Realistic Strategy Game of Forces in Italy… 1944"!

Which is funny because the game actually covers from the Salerno landings in September 1943.  Anzio is a strategic game that covers the entire Italian campaign in WW2, with invasions treated very abstractly.  The invasion of Anzio in January 1944 was planned as a flank of the Germany "Gustav Line", against which the Allies had stalled.  The hope was that the Allies could pierce through at a weak point and destabilize the German front.  Instead, the Allies were bottled up for four long months.  The front didn't move again until the Allies bashed headlong into the Gustav Line, and General Mark Clark took the Anzio forces to Rome, claiming the Italian capital concurrently with the invasion of Normandy.

(This was the wrong move, strategically—by going for glory instead of providing an anvil for the Allied hammer, against which the retreating Germans would be smashed, it meant that the Italian campaign remained an agonizing meatgrinder until the end of the war.)

A black and white map of Italy. Parts of Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia, and Tunisia are also shown. Cities and regions relevant to the Italian Campaign of 1943-45 are marked.

But that's neither here nor there.  Anzio Beachhead depicts the landings and initial expansion at an operational level, covering the early part of the campaign.  In fact, it's by the same fellow who designed Anzio, Dave Williams.  Here's what Jim Dunnigan has to say about it:

"Anzio Beachhead was seen as another situation like the Bulge, where the attacker had a rapidly declining edge.  The original American commander was not bold, and lost.  So the idea with Anzio Beachhead was to explore the what if's.  At that time, I had been working on designing games for about eight years (since I first discovered the Avalon Hill games.) Before that, I was always interested in the details of history, and how they were connected.  Avalon Hill wargames were the first time I saw someone else thinking the same way, and doing it in a novel way. I was always building on that."

"I had been designing a similar game, called Italy, which incorporated the rest of the Italian theater, with a smaller scale map of the Anzio area (ie, two interrelated games, one strategic and the other operational).  But when Dave's game came in I thought it did a better job of the Anzio section.  We had come up with some of the same solutions, and his game was more compact and suitable for the magazine."

Vital Statistics

The title page of the Anzio Beachhead game. In the upper left corner it reads: Dave Williams designed Avalon Hill's latest effort, Anzio, and, you will soon discover, a great deal more.  The Anzio Beachhead game is but a part of the additional design effort that went into Anzio but never saw publication. In the center of the page is a black and white illustration of Anzio Beachhead.  A tank is on the left and a military ship labeled US 21 is docked to the right.  A small group of soldiers stands between them. The title of the game is written in white capitals across the bottom of the image.

Anzio Beachhead seats two players and is seven turns long.  A complete game takes about 6 hours.  The map is black and white (I made a color version tinted with pastels).

The whole game takes two pages of rules, almost half of which are "optional rules", which we always played with. 

Instead of the traditional "Player one moves, then fights; Player two moves, then fights" sequence, each turn is divided into six impulses.  Each side gets two moves, while the other side gets a half-move inbetween, during which they can't move into an enemy's "zone of control" (the six hexes surrounding a unit).  Zones of Control (ZOCs) are really sticky.  You can't move from one to another, and if you move out, you can only move one space.  Thus, it's easy to slow an enemy unit down just by parking next to it.

Combat is pretty typical, adding combat factors of attackers and dividing them by the combat factors of the defenders, determining a ratio, rolling a die, and finding the result on the Combar Results Table.  Unlike Crete, but like most wargames, good results don't really happen for the attacker until 3-1. 1-1 isn't generally worth it.

There are some fiddly rules which allow the Allies to use naval guns and fighters to add strength to their troop stacks during one impulse per turn.  This becomes a fun game of trying to outthink the other.  The Allies cannot defend all of their pieces, but the German player can never know which defender is augmented.  A miscalculation can result in losing a lot of attackers!

If the Germans engage units with 30 or more strength factors on turns 4 and 5, there is the chance that the Allies will break morale, allowing the Germans to swarm the lines.  You can bet that those two turns will see a lot of action—sometimes desperate action.

The Germans win if they slaughter lots of Allies or if they manage to park units next to Anzio. The Allies win if they avoid that.

How does it play?!

After the initial irruption onto the map, which may not see a single combat, it's all defense for the Allies, setting up a defensive perimeter using rivers and cities as barriers. The Germans are looking for weak points in the line. Both sides have reinforcements come in, the Allies get most of them earlier, the Germans getting more later.

Photo of the Anzio Beachhead map, hand-colored with pastels. It is the size of four regular 8.5 inch by 11 inch sheets of paper.

Allied play is fairly simple, if unforgiving.  Keep your lines strong and counterattack where appropriate.  German strategy is tougher.  A lot depends on understanding how to use the two movement turns, as there is no advance after combat rule.  The allies can break their lines to hit bad guys one hex away and then get back in line in phase 2, which is nice.  Indeed, as the Allies, many is the time I pounced south of the Asturia River to preemptively break up Germany attacks.

A good Allied player will not let the Germans have more than 2-1 odds at any point, to ensure that the Germans have to risk ugly exchanges.  Both the Germans and Allies have a few very powerful units, and those serve as anchors for defense, linchpins for assault.

Experience

I've played four games of Anzio Beachhead, and each was a different experience.  I lost as the Allies quickly in the first game because the rules say that the Germans can show up behind enemy lines at the Asturia River line unless you block it with your units' ZOCs.  I won as the Germans as quickly the second time, piercing the Allied line such that they never regained cohesion.

Gideon, wearing a Shakey's faux straw hat, points at the Anzio Beachhead map in this photo, taken in a diner.

The last two games went down to the wire.  I was the Allies both times, winning the first game (the Germans couldn't quite collapse me fast enough) and losing the second game (bad luck, mostly).

There are some games where you can be pretty free-wheeling with your strategy.  Crete for instance.  Sure, throw yourself at the enemy at 1:1 and see what happens!  You might open up a hole.

Not so, Anzio Beachhead.  With two skilled players, every unit, every hex feels like the most critical, and a single wrong move could lose the game.  I know I played almost perfectly as the Allies except for abandoning Corroceto Station too early; this was barely balanced out by a less than optimal German placement early in the game.  Otherwise, it was like a rigorous chess match.

Perfect John, a white man with a pensive expression, contemplates the Anzio Beachhead map in this photo. He is seated in the corner of a diner.

That kind of game can be exhausting, and it takes a long time.  There's no room for 85% thinking.  On the other hand… boy, it sure is rewarding when it all pays off!

Final thoughts

As Dunnigan said, wargames are all about "what if"s.  What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?  What if the Germans had won the Battle of the Bulge?  The interesting thing about Anzio Beachhead is that the what if is not "what if the Allies have broken through to Rome or crushed the Germany Wehrmacht in Italy?" because that was flatly impossible, no matter how well they'd done at Anzio.  As one person put it, "a corps was given an army's job."

I suppose the hypothetical is actually "what if the Germans had utterly crushed the Italian invasion?"  It would have given German forces more freedom of movement and been valuable for morale and propaganda purposes, but the long-term results would have been the same.  Either way, the ramifications are beyond the scope of the game.

But taken as a primer in operational invasions, it's a lot of fun, whether you're the Allies trying to make a bigger pimple in the Germany side, or the Germans trying to hurl the Allies back into the sea.  It's a taut game with a lot of interesting new mechanics, very evenly balanced.  Its only drawback is that it's a bit lengthy for what you get.

3.5 stars.

Photo of ships and men of the American Fifth Army landing at Anzio beach

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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