by Gideon Marcus
It's likely you missed the other big news in space given how much the flight of Apollo 13 dominated the air waves. But while we were busy ensuring that Lovell, Swigert, and Haise made it back home, the ChiComs and the Russkies were accomplishing some space spectaculars of their own:
If you look up in the sky, you'll see nine new stars, all of them Red!
Continue reading [April 26, 1970] Red stars in space (Communist China and the USSR make leaps)
by Gideon Marcus
Tunnel light
There have been a lot of happy endings recently. The postal strike is over, thanks to the government agreeing to an 8% raise for federal employees. Ditto the air traffic control strike. Nixon's third nominee to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Harry Blackmun, isn't somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan. The Apollo 13 astronauts made it back home by the skin of their teeth.
But of course, the old stories go on. The Vietnam war has grown to include Cambodia—if Domino Theory is to be believed, we'll soon be fighting in the streets of Canberra. Teachers are on strike in California; Governor Reagan says they're "against the children". And actor Michael Strong says you can't walk the streets of the nation's capital without a good chance of getting mugged.
And so, it is appropriate that the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a mixed bag. Some of it will thrill you, some of it will leave you cold. On the other hand, none of it will mug you.
The Issue at Hand
by Mel Hunter
Continue reading [April 20, 1970] Not the final quarry (May 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)
[Be sure to tune in tonight at 7PM PDT for Science Fiction Theater! It's Nimoytacular—plus Apollo 13 pre-launch coverage!]
by Gideon Marcus
Backlash in D.C.
50,000 people marched on Washington last week protesting the course of the Vietnam War. Sure, you think, another day ending in "y", right?
Except these kooks were protesting for the war!
Organized by a fundamentalist coalition, religious fervor dominated the gathering. That said, there were plenty of Birchers and Nazis in attendance, too, making this a truly ecumenical demonstration.
There were even counter-counter protestors.
Which poses the question: can Nixon still call them a "silent" majority?
Calm after the storm
There's really nothing to protest in the latest issue of Galaxy, which offers, in the main, a pleasant reading experience.
by Jack Gaughan for A Style in Treason
Continue reading [April 10, 1970] A Style in Treason (May 1970 Galaxy)
by Gideon Marcus
A little over half a century ago, the actions of two ships changed the entire course of human events.
SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau bombarding Phillipeville on the French-Algerian coast (W. Malchin, 1915)
In 1912, two warships of the German Kriegsmarine were stationed in the Mediterranean. The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, in the event of war, were to raid French shipping between Africa and Europa. When war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia on July 28, 1914, the vessels were in the Adriatic port of Pola. Admiral Souchon, commander of the German duo, decided he didn't want to be bottled up, so he took his ships to the central Mediterranean and waited for orders.
They arrived: head east for the Aegean Sea and ultimately the Dardanelles, the strait on which Turkish Istanbul was situated. There, Souchon was to offer the two modern vessels to the aging and inefficient Ottomans. In return, the Sultan would bring Turkey into The Great War on the side of the Central Powers.
Thus ensued a grand chase, which the British lost. The rest is history.
But what if Souchon had been given different orders? What if the British had had different priorities? Such are the What Ifs that compelling parallel universes are made of—and the subject of the newest game to arrive in the magazine Strategy & Tactics.
The Game
Continue reading [April 4, 1970] Twixt Scylla and Charybdis (S&T's The Flight of the Goeben)
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.
by Kelly Freas
Continue reading [March 31, 1970] Seed stock (April 1970 Analog)
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 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.
Continue reading [March 30, 1970] The Age of Explorer — the end of the Space Race
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 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…
cover by Chesley Bonestell
Continue reading [March 20, 1970] Here comes the sun (April 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)
by Gideon Marcus
To Venus! To Venus!, by David Grinnell
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.
Continue reading [March 14, 1970] To Venus and Hell's Gate… are we Out of Our Minds?
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
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?"
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.
cover by Jack Gaughan
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.
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.
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!"
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 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.
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.
by Kelly Freas
Continue reading [February 28, 1970] Revolutionaries… (March 1970 Analog)
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