There must be a growing demand for original anthologies of science fiction, because they keep coming—both standalone titles and series. Infinity One is, going by its title, the first in yet another series of these, although notably there is one reprint between its covers (really two reprints, as you'll see), a story that many readers will already be familiar with. Robert Hoskins is an occasional author-turned-agent-turned-editor, whose high position at Lancer Books has apparently resulted in Infinity One. Will there be future installments? Does it really matter? We shall see.
The tagline for Infinity One is “a magazine of speculative fiction in book form,” which strikes me as a sequence of words only fit to come from the mouth of a clinically insane person. This is a paperback anthology and nothing more nor less. I mentioned in my review of Nova 1 last month that Harry Harrison claimed that he simply wanted to put together an anthology of “good” SF, although I’m not sure if Hoskins had even such a basic goal in mind.
This is a rambling introduction from someone who really loves the sound of his own voice, even when it’s in writing. Asimov talks about mankind’s future in possibly inhabiting the most inhospitable corners of the globe, and even in the depths of space. He goes on a rather mind-numbing tangent about baseball on the Moon, or “moon-ball” as he calls it. Looking at the copyright page reveals that “much of the material” in Asimov’s introduction first appeared in some mainstream publication I have never heard of a few years ago; it’s only in the last section, which feels stapled on after the fact, that he mentions Infinity One at all. Asimov is a lot of things, but he is not a lazy writer, which makes me think Hoskins is the one who was being lazy in not being able to procure an original piece from the Good Doctor.
No rating.
A Word from the Editor, by Robert Hoskins
Thankfully, Hoskins’s own introduction is much shorter than Asimov’s, although it somehow has even less to do with the book he has gosh-darn put together. We get a rather alloyed ode to the late Hugo Gernsback, not so much as an editor of magazines but as a gadgeteer who speculated on the potential real-world technology such as TV. Hoskins posits that, given how quickly TV has become ubiquitous as a commercial item, the likelihood of technology being nigh-unrecognizable in just a few decades is considerable.
No rating.
The Pleasure of Our Company, by Robert Silverberg
Yet again I am writing about Robert Silverberg, because I am unable to get rid of him. While Silverberg’s recent output has been mixed, his outing here is quite decent. Thomas Voigtland is the former president of a colony known as Bradley’s Planet, having been overtaken by a military junta and forced to flee in a spaceship—by himself. He has taken with him several “cubes,” which are really personality tapes replicating real-life people, including his wife and son, along with historical figures such as Ovid and the late Ernest Hemingway. Silverberg’s thesis is obvious, the story being about Voightland’s guilt and his decision to flee from the junta instead of staying and probably dying alongside his family and supporters. Most of Silverberg’s bad habits are absent here, which helps.
A high three stars.
The Absolute Ultimate Invention, by Stephen Barr
This is one of three “fables” in Infinity One. A scientist has made an age-reversing machine, which through some Looney Tunes logic is able to literally reverse the digits in a person’s age, so that a 41-year-old man would become 14. However, the machine does not quite work like how the scientist intended. Hilarity ensues.
Whatever, man. Two stars.
The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke Cover art by Robert Engle.
I remember seeing this one in print some 15 years ago, in the November 1955 issue of a now-forgotten magazine called Infinity Science Fiction. “The Star” is pretty famous and even won Clarke a Hugo. I like this one more the older I get. An unnamed Jesuit has been accompanying a spacefaring team as its chief astrophysicist, but the discovery of a planet that only narrowly avoided being engulfed by an exploding sun has shaken his faith. It’s a mood piece; not much happens and there’s really only one character. Yet Clarke’s style, which normally is not much to write home about, is splendid here, and I have to say there’s something moving about it, regardless of one’s own religious standing. You probably already know the ending, but I dare not give it away.
Four stars.
Echo, by Katherine MacLean
A spaceship crash lands on a planet filled with vegetation, and said vegetation is apparently sentient. The plants and trees are not happy about the lone astronaut, whose existence they can barely comprehend. MacLean has played with perspective before, but “Echo” sees her most strongly resembling the A. E. van Vogt of yore; in fact “Echo” reminds me of a van Vogt story from about 20 years ago, called “Process.” This is by no means a point against MacLean. It mostly reads as prose poetry, but while it only has the bones of a story, you could find much worse examples of poetic style in SF—just open the latest Orbit.
A high three or low four stars.
The Great Canine Chorus, by Anne McCaffrey
Peter is a cop on the beat with Wizard, his K-9 unit, when they find a lonely and malnourished girl in a condemned building by herself named Maria. The girl turns out to be a telepath, albeit very young and weak, with her mother dead and her father on the run from the law. There’s a plot involving a gang leader and Maria’s almost supernatural ability to communicate with dogs. It’s too cute by half. Incidentally, this is the first story in Infinity One to not involve space travel or futuristic technology. McCaffrey has her audience, but I’m not part of that audience. Her style here is especially grating in its childishness.
Two stars.
Pacem Est, by Kris Neville and K. M. O’Donnell
Neville and “O’Donnell” (actually Barry Malzberg) come in with a short and moody story, about a war happening on an alien planet and a nun who got killed in the line of duty. Hawkins, the company commander, is trying to understand why this order of nuns would journey out to this hostile alien world in the first place. Putting aside for the moment the fact that “Pacem Est” is only SF insofar as it involves a war that could just as easily be the one in Vietnam, it’s a perfectly evocative piece that sees Neville and Malzberg in a less vicious and more introspective mood than is either author’s normal routine.
Three stars.
Keeping an Eye on Janey, by Rob Goulart
Goulart has been around for a while, and his experience shows with this story, which similarly to the McCaffrey story has to do with urban crime. The editor of a publisher that specializes in cheap gothic trash gets involved with a dimestore hood who’s due to be assassinated, as well as a robot private detective named Carnahan. The robot is at least endearing, despite talking mostly in detective cliches. Raymond Chandler must be rolling in his grave. There’s a bit of detective fiction, a bit of gangster action, a bit of satire on book publishing, but it’s simply not enough of any one element. The message ultimately seems to be that computers can’t be relied on for everything. No shit.
Two, almost three stars, for what it’s worth.
The Packerhaus Method, by Gene Wolfe
I’ve seen Wolfe’s writing evolve over the past few years, and he seems like he is on the cusp of making something truly special. He’s almost there. The premise of his latest story is that the dead have been brought back to life—although not quite. These are robotic replicas of the originals, with mechanical and rather circular minds that, while replicating the wants, fears, and verbal tics of the dead, are unable to process new information. The results are disturbing, although the story’s potential for horror is held back somewhat by almost nonstop expositional dialogue that can overburden the reader.
A light four stars.
The Water Sculptor of Station 233, by George Zebrowski
Zebrowski is one of the new generation of writers, and this here is a fine mood piece, if not much more than that. Two astronauts are stuck in space, each in his own station, due to some disgraceful prior incident. Life on Earth has gone to shit, but things are not much better in space when you have minimal contact with other humans and only so many things to occupy your time with. One of these astronauts has developed a unique method of sculpting, whereby he uses water, plastic, and the vacuum of space to make his art. The climax comes pretty suddenly, but maybe that’s the point.
A solid three stars.
Operation P-Button, by Gordon R. Dickson
Here’s the second of the three “fables,” and I really don’t understand the point of these things other than to pad out the book. Dickson recreates the story of Chicken Little with military higher-ups, complete with a report about the sky falling. That’s really all there is to it.
Only avoids being one star because it goes down quickly.
The Tiger, by Miriam Allen deFord
Bart Holland is a 20-year-old young man who craves adventure—only nothing too dangerous. He finds it when he meets a strange girl who seems to be a “foreigner,” along with her traveling sideshow, featuring the most docile Bengal tiger in existence. Even before reading this one, I suspected deFord would do a twist on the lady-and-the-tiger routine, and she sort of does. Unfortunately the two main characters, especially Holland, read as flat, and the SFnal element doesn’t really make any sense when one stops to think about it. As with a few other stories in Infinity One, including Asimov’s “introduction,” this feels hastily written.
A high two or low three stars.
Hands of the Man, by R. A. Lafferty
As with the Neville-Malzberg story, this one is only nominally SFnal. Hodl Oskanian, a “skyman” who consults the lines of his hands, is challenged to a game of cards, with a precious stone being the reward. I have to say I resent Hoskins basically giving away the story’s ending in his introduction, even if said ending is far from unpredictable. I also wish Lafferty had inserted more of what has become his trademark strangeness, leaving aside the obligatory nod to Catholic theology. “Hands of the Man” is a rather humorless tale that does not play to Lafferty’s strengths.
Two stars.
Nightmare Gang, by Dean R. Koontz
Koontz is very young, but he already has a few novels to his credit, plus quite a few short stories. “Nightmare Gang” is Koontz’s attempt at hopping on the biker gang bandwagon, and it’s honestly too dark for its own good. Louis, the leader of a biker gang, is a telepath who is able to coordinate with his gang members via mind control, but he also has a few other abilities that the narrator finds hard to explain. It’s gory and bleak, but also I don’t really understand what the point of it is, which is not helped by Koontz being such an inelegant stylist.
Whatever. Two stars.
These Our Actors, by Edward Wellen
I’m not familiar with Wellen, possibly because he hasn’t written much in the past decade. “These Our Actors” is really two vignettes, the first about an unnamed man on a hostile alien world and the second about an anxiety-ridden TV actor. Neither of these vignettes is substantive enough on its own, especially the first one, but how they’re connected is rather interesting. Unfortunately, given that he wrote something of a prose poem, Wellen is not fine enough a stylist to make it a consistently engrossing experience. The ending is pretty good, though.
Three stars.
Inside Mother, by Pat de Graw
A first story by a new author, one whom not even Hoskins knows anything about. Making good on the Freudian implications of its title, “Inside Mother” has to do with sex and adolescence, about a group of kids (teenagers?) who are evidently the survivors of a crashed satellite. The adults who ran the satellite did not give the kids names, so they go by numbers; and they also neglected to have the satellite’s computer teach the kids basic things like sex or how to build a fire in the wilderness. How these kids have survived up to this point is thus a mystery, bordering on nonsensical. I think I understand what de Graw is doing, but what he or she has written is too abstract and lacking in consistency for my liking.
Barely three stars.
The Communicators, by Poul Anderson
Hoskins, in his introduction for this story, gloats that he was able to get pieces from Asimov, Clarke, and Anderson, whom he considers the three most popular SF writers at the moment. Given that Asimov’s introduction apparently was not written for Infinity One, and that “The Star” is a reprint, that leaves only one original piece Hoskins was able to procure. He also calls “The Communicators” a “short novel,” which is being overly generous since I’m not even sure it’s long enough to qualify as a novella. Finally, and I do not mean this as an insult towards Anderson, since his work ethic is tremendous, but the man will basically write for anybody, so long as the paycheck is serviceable enough. For better or worse, he has been one of the most reliable workhorses in the field for the past couple decades.
As for “The Communicators” itself, it’s the kind of far-future speculative fiction that Anderson writes in his sleep, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Two members of the Communicators, a pseudo-religious order that forsakes race and national borders in the service of preserving human knowledge, meets with a colonel from the Domination of Baikal (an “Oriental” power whose real-life equivalent is probably supposed to be Maoist China) to discuss what seem to be alien signals coming from Kappa Ceti. Roban, the junior member of the Communicators, still holds a grudge over his homeland (clearly the United States) losing its status as a world superpower, a conflict with his position as a Communicator that adds spice to the debate. This might be Anderson’s response to Asimov’s famous Foundation trilogy, in which the protectors of human knowledge are beholden to a near-perfect series of predictions, whereas the Communicators, while being intelligent, are still prone to human foibles.
It’s quite readable. A high three stars.
The Man on the Hill, by Michael Fayette
This is the last story and also the last of the “fables.” It’s also easily the best, given that it does not insult my intelligence. The last human survivor of some hostile environment, having grown tired of living in solitude, decides to take off his helmet and breathe some fresh air for the first time in decades. It’s a perfectly fine little mood piece that does not demean the reader with bad jokes, and incidentally its sense of weariness captures my own feelings after having read all of Infinity One.
Three stars.
Conclusion
The increasing ubiquity of paperbacks has been a double-edged sword. Paperbacks are both more affordable and easier to handle than hardcovers, but that also means they tend to come cheap. I get the impression that Hoskins, seeing the success of Damon Knight’s Orbit books, as well as the growing paperback market generally, saw an opportunity to make a bit of extra money with relatively little effort. The best story here is unquestionably Clarke’s “The Star,” a Hugo winner from 15 years ago that you probably already have in a couple anthologies and/or collections. And maybe SF was better 15 years ago; certainly there were more authors active and more SF at short lengths being written back then. My point is that if the original anthology craze is to survive then we need to do better than Harrison’s Nova 1 from last month, which was middling, or Infinity One, which is even worse.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
It seems that between Harlan Ellison’s massive (that is, quite bloated) Dangerous Visions and Damon Knight’s Orbit series, original anthologies are here to stay; not only that, but we’re starting to see more of them, albeit thankfully not on the same scale as Ellison’s book. Harry Harrison is nothing if not knowledgeable of the field we share, and he’s also been involved in nearly every aspect of SF publishing that I can think of. It helps, too, that he’s already released an original anthology, just last month actually, titled The Year 2000. I have to admit that calling this new anthology Nova 1 is a bit presumptuous, since it implies a guarantee of future entries in this new series; but time will tell if the number is unfortunate or not.
Nova 1, edited by Harry Harrison
Cover art by Johannes Regn.
Introduction, by Harry Harrison
Harrison quickly goes over what he sees as the history of SF, something I think each of us has heard a hundred times before at this point; but he just as quickly goes into justifying the existence of Nova 1. This is not a themed anthology, but simply what Harrison considers good fiction, which with a couple exceptions he had commissioned specifically for book publication. He puts aside fears held by me and others who have become jaded with New Wave excesses, saying, “Not that the stories [in this book] are overly nasty or overly sexy—or overly anything. They are just—if just is the word—excellent stories by the best science fiction writers around.” We’ll see about that.
No rating.
The Big Connection, by Robin Scott Wilson
On 42nd Street, in New York, two guys, only known as the Hairy One and the Maha, have been toying with and selling “modern” art. The Hairy One is an artist, you know. One day the Hairy One tries to make art out of some odd scrap machinery, “some experimental failure from the Naval Underwater Sound Observatory.” The results are SFnal, really “outasight,” and I guess they’re supposed to be funny. The dialogue is so filled with ridiculous hippy lingo that I have to think Wilson meant it as parody, but if so, it’s a little too much for my taste. There is also some light commentary on the relationship between the artist (the Hairy One) and the capitalist (the Maha), but it’s too slight and deliberately goofy. This whole thing will age like milk in a few years.
Did not make me laugh or even chuckle, but it didn’t offend me. Two stars.
Overpopulation has been a popular subject as of late, and Silverberg gives us a take on it here. Charles Matterns is a “sociocomputator” who gives a visiting (from Venus) colleague a tour of Shanghai—not the city we now know, but a series of floors in a thousand-story building. The “sanctity of life” that conservatives whine so much about has apparently been taken to its logical (or maybe illogical) conclusion, with Earth’s population now estimating 75 billion. Abortion and even birth control are strictly taboo. But, of course, Mattern insists the people who live in these city-buildings are very happy—except for a few “flippos,” those who do not conform. The dialogue is mostly expositional, and the plot is almost nonexistent. There are a few, I guess you could say Silverberg trademarks present, such as his concerning interest in teenagers having sex with full-grown adults, but these are not to the story’s benefit.
Call it a hunch, but I think Malzberg is unenthusiastic about NASA. “Terminus Est” takes place after a semi-aborted colonization effort, “the Moon boondoggle,” with only about a hundred so-called bohemians staying. The narrator is an astronaut who travels between Earth and the Moon, and all too happy to be retiring in a few months. A certain incident, involving murder, darkened his view of the whole affair. Malzberg actually appears twice in this book, the other being under his not-so-secret pen name K. M. O’Donnell. Reading his first story here, I got the sense that somehow I had read this sort of thing before, but also it’s such a little (only half a dozen pages) fireball of hatred that I have to say I was almost impressed with it. Almost.
Three stars.
Hexamnium, by Chan Davis
Davis has not been around for about a decade, but those who are old enough or have good memories may remember the occasional Davis story in the ‘40s and ‘50s. “Hexamnium” starts as if it’s about to give us something hard-boiled, like Malzberg’s (first) story, but it ends up being much more bittersweet, about a teen boy from Earth being introduced to a team of fellow teens who have been raised from infancy to live in zero gravity. The mode of narration here, in which Emilio, one of the zero-gravity kids, narrates directly to the reader, takes some getting used to, but I think I understand the rationale behind it. This is a reasonably effective coming-of-age story, about a bunch of kids crossing the shadow-line into maturity, with some precious things being gained and other things, no less precious, being forever lost.
Four stars, and I hope this signals Davis’s return to writing SF.
And This Did Dante Do, by Ray Bradbury
This is a poem that was originally published in some magazine a few years ago, making it a reprint. Harrison, in his introduction, makes excuses for why Bradbury has barely written any fiction in the past several years, although he neglects to mention that he couldn’t even procure an original piece from the much overpraised writer. It strikes me as painfully obvious that the Bradbury who wrote The Martian Chronicles and The October Country has long since skipped town. Anyway, this poem, taken strictly as poetry, is bad, in that when read aloud it often grates on the ear. At least the punchline is cute and almost got a chuckle from me.
Two stars.
The Higher Things, J. R. Pierce
Stanley G. Weinbaum would be celebrating his 68th birthday next month, had cancer not taken him back in 1935. A recurring character of Weinbaum’s, the mad scientist Professor Manderpootz, emerges from hibernation thanks to Pierce’s story, which functions on the one hand as an exercise in mimicry, but also as an ode to the late Weinbaum. It’s effective—honestly, it works a lot better than it should. Manderpootz relates a story of how he traveled into the far future and encountered a humanity that had given up physical reality in favor of highly advanced psi powers, and I have to admit the whole thing sparked my own imagination. Pierce’s style here is “pulpy” and a bit stilted, but that is indeed the point.
Four stars.
Swastika!, by Brian W. Aldiss
Hitler is not only alive but enjoying “retirement” in Belgium, his suicide in 1945 having been faked. The narrator is a fellow named Brian (this detail took me out of the story for a bit), who is apparently a Nazi sympathizer and someone with connections. This is less a story and more of a Socratic dialogue, in which Aldiss uses Hitler to take pot shots at politicians and regimes he deems to have at least a touch of the Nazi in them. “President Nixon also has his better side,” says Hitler. Very funny, Aldiss. We also get shots at Reagan and Wallace, and the Soviets, the Cubans under Castro, and even the Israelis. The idea is that the Nazis may have lost World War II, but fascist militarism is alive and well. I’m sure Aldiss wrote “Swastika!” in an afternoon and hardly bothered to revise it, but it gets the job done.
Harrison says in his introduction that Wolfe is a Korean War veteran, which I certainly find both believable and relevant to this story. Androids, or robots that both look like and think like (although not exactly like) humans, have mostly replaced soldiers in the future. There’s even a robot tank called Pinocchio. Despite the pun of the title (it’s military jargon or something) and the fairy tale connections, this is a rather serious and philosophical story, about the blurry dividing line between “us” and “the Enemy,” along with the line between humans and robots. While the last few pages, in which Wolfe finally lays all his cards on the table, are splendid, I do wish it was overall a more engrossing reading experience. Wolfe has the right ideas, but he needs to work on narrative pacing and really building up his characters. This is one of those stories that becomes fonder in one’s memory than when one is in the midst of reading it.
I would say three stars, but the premise and ending are strong enough that I feel compelled to bump it up. So, barely four stars.
You may recall that Gerrold wrote arguably the funniest episode in the dearly departed Star Trek, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” He certainly has an ear for humor, but “Love Story in Three Acts” also sees him turn more to romantic sentiment. A middle-aged man’s wife orders a newfangled piece of computer machinery that would, get this, guide them in their sex life, because apparently the wife has been sorely disappointed with her man’s performance as of late. It’s not nearly as funny as the aforementioned Trek episode, and it also becomes a little too saccharine for my taste; but it certainly has its charm, and it’s that rare “modern” SF story that posits that maybe technology really can do good for the human spirit in some way.
Three stars, you could say one for each “act.”
Jean Duprès, by Gordon R. Dickson
French-Canadian settlers have become farmers and soldiers on the planet Utword, which has its own dominant sentient race, with their own customs and concerns about the intruders. The titular character is a human boy who was born on Utword, alongside the aliens, and thus is most understanding of their ways. Ah, but tragedy and battle ensue! I can’t think of titles off the top of my head, but I feel like Dickson has written just this sort of story before elsewhere—probably more than once. Colonizers bumping heads with alien (read: indigenous) populations is clearly a topic that strikes a chord with him, and while his assumptions about colonizers (that they’re basically good people who are simply tragically misguided, rather than people working within a framework that by its nature damages both mankind and the natural world) strike me as overly generous, even romantic, I understand the appeal. Still, it doesn’t help that this is the longest story in the book, and Dickson doesn’t really venture outside his wheelhouse.
Three stars.
In the Pocket, by K. M. O’Donnell
This is Barry Malzberg’s other story, under the not-so-secret pen name of K. M. O’Donnell. Anyway, as with “Terminus Est,” this one is brief but bleak. The narrator is a “messenger” who works to excise cancer from patients he’s been assigned to, so that he functions as a kind of orderly. He tells the story of when he cared for one elderly man, named Yancey, whom the narrator came to despise. In part this strikes me as a retelling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but it does ask a few tough questions regarding a future in which cancer really can be removed via the touch of human hands. It’s a mood piece, one so dark and on-edge with so little really to latch onto that I could not bring myself to care about what was happening in-story, even as I was considering its philosophical weight.
Barely three stars.
Mary and Joe, by Naomi Mitchison
This is the other reprint to be included, except it’s even older than the Bradbury poem. The idea is that the titular characters are a married couple working to save their daughter’s life via an unlikely solution, which somehow works; how it worked out is thus saved for the final reveal, as opposed to whether the daughter lives or not. One positive thing I can say is that the science is believable, to the point where I’m convinced we’ll see something like Mitchison’s “solution” here in, say, the next 25 years or so. The problem is that “Mary and Joe” barely functions as a short story, and by the end I got the feeling that it’s incomplete somehow, as if ripped violently from a larger narrative. It’s a shame, because Mitchison is the only woman included here.
Frankly I don’t see much of a point to it. Two stars.
Faces & Hands, by James Sallis
As with the Wolfe story, this is about a war in the future, although this time it’s an interplanetary war, between Earth and Venus. There’s even an alien race of feathered humanoids, and that, combined with the melancholy tone of the whole thing, make me wonder if Sallis had already read the Margaret St. Clair 1951 story “Brightness Falls from the Air.” Sallis’s story unfortunately lacks the conciseness and grace of St. Clair’s, despite working with similar material. “Faces & Hands” is split into sections, taking place both before and after the war, and despite not being the longest story in Nova 1, it certainly feels the longest. Sallis is a very young writer, I think only 25, and he does show ambition, the problem thus being that his reach, at least for now, far exceeds his grasp.
A strong two stars, for what that's worth.
The Winner, by Donald E. Westlake
Revell is an anti-social man being held in a futuristic prison, a place that is supposed to be inescapable. We then follow his battle of wills with his overseer, Wordman, who’s set up traps so that Revell will have to give in and become a good obedient prisoner. This sounds a bit like that show The Prisoner, right? Granted, Westlake’s story is a lot less surreal and much smaller in scope than that series, but both are allegories about the institution versus the individual. In both cases, the author (or creator, in Patrick McGoohan’s case) very much sides with the individual. Only nominally SFnal, but it’s fine for what it is.
Three stars.
The Whole Truth, by Piers Anthony
Just last year, Anthony came in with Macroscope, which I still think is one of the best and most fascinating SF novels in recent memory. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re back to business as usual, because “The Whole Truth” is quite bad. Leo MacHenry is a space ranger who picks up a woman named Nevada, who may or may not be a spy working for a hostile alien race. Harrison’s introduction mentions the lady-and-the-tiger routine, but I was also thinking of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.” Leo is a pervert whose dilemma with how to handle Nevada mostly comes from whether he wants to kill her, take her prisoner, or have sex with her. I really could not stand either of these characters or their situation.
I loathed it, especially the ending. One star.
Conclusion
Harrison's idea was to start a new series of original anthologies, not based on a theme but simply to publish what he feels are some of the best short SF money can buy. Of course, all anthology editors want to collect only what they think is the best, unless they happen to be lazy; or you might have Damon Knight with the Orbit books, where he seems to think experimentation matters more than literary value. Harrison seems to have sympathies for both the New Wave and the "old guard," but if this Nova series is to be successful I think he should narrow his criteria for "good" SF a fair amount. Both of the reprints here being weak doesn't help either. If original anthologies are to have their own seat at the table that is the market, I think those in charge (and Harrison and Knight are very bright, talented fellows) should try to be more discerning.
Back in April, I wrote about a border skirmish between the Soviet Union and China. That wasn’t the end of the matter. The Soviets went on a minor diplomatic offensive, trying to get India to join an alliance against China and to pull North Korea back into the Soviet orbit. Violence flared up again in August on the Terekty River on the border between the Sinkiang region of China and the Kazakh SSR. As in April, both sides accused the other of crossing the border.
Rumor has it that Soviet Foreign Minister Alexei Kosygin attempted to contact the Chinese government in an effort to calm tensions and reopen negotiations on the border. His efforts were reportedly rudely rebuffed by Chairman Mao. At the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in early September, the Soviet and Chinese delegations went out of their way to avoid being in the same room with each other, even attending the funeral at different times.
When Kosygin left Hanoi on September 11th, his plane was denied entry into Chinese airspace, forcing a long detour. But while the plane was refueling in India, Kosygin was informed that the Chinese were ready to talk. He promptly flew to Peking, where he and Chinese Foreign Minister Chou Enlai met at the airport. They agreed to reinstate diplomatic relations and reopen talks on the border.
l. Soviet Foreign Minister Alexei Kosygin, r. Chinese Foreign Minister Chou Enlai
Despite that, Mao continued to ramp up his hostile rhetoric towards the Soviets. China also began moving large numbers of troops north to the border regions. That was followed by two unannounced nuclear tests at the end of September, most notably China’s largest detonation to date (3 megatons) on the 29th. The very next day, Chinese Defense Minister Lin Biao put the armed forces on the highest level of alert.
And then on October 9th, Mao blinked. China announced that they would no longer claim territory annexed by Tsarist Russia over the last 300 years through “unequal treaties.” The only concession demanded is that the Soviet Union acknowledge that the treaties were unfair. The status quo has been restored, and the only result of six months of high tension is several ulcers and a huge sigh of relief around the world.
Love among the ruins
Love runs through most of the stories in this month’s IF. Not as a romantic theme, but rather as an examination of the ways in which it affects the events of the stories and is in turn affected by events.
Vaguely suggested by Ancient, My Enemy. Art by Gaughan
Ancient, My Enemy, by Gordon R. Dickson
Udbahr is a hell world. Daytime temperatures are so high it is impossible for humans to survive outside of special shelters. On top of that, protein is so scarce, the only source for the natives are each other or the humans who have come to prospect and explore the ruins of an ancient civilization.
One such person is Kiev Archad, currently acting as a guide for female graduate student Willy Fairchild. Unfortunately, she is full of ideas that don’t mesh well with the ways in which humans and Udbahrs interact. Despite that, a relationship develops between the two. The final obstacle to their romance is a native named Hehog, who has decided that he and Kiev are ancient enemies, reborn every generation to take turns killing each other.
Hehog taunts Kiev. Art probably by Gaughan
This is not the Dickson story I was expecting. From the title, I thought this would be one of his military pieces, maybe a new Dorsai tale. This is personal in a way those stories aren’t, and it’s very, very good. But Dickson didn’t quite hit the mark for me. He never really sells the relationship between Kiev and Willy; worse, even though Kiev is the viewpoint character, we never really get into his head, which makes the ending a bit inscrutable. And for all that, and because I know Dickson is capable of doing better, I have to lower my rating. Don’t be surprised to see this one nominated for a lot of awards, though.
A very, very high three stars.
Now No One Waits, by Neil Shapiro
Wrecked on a dead world, a man and a woman have little hope of rescue. They spend their time in meaningless sex and exploring the ruins of a lost civilization.
The doomed couple study the map room. Art by Gaughan
Shapiro seems to be a new writer, though he isn’t this month’s IF first; maybe he has a sale or two outside science fiction. In any case, the writing is solid for the most part. The ending, though, didn’t seem to grow naturally from what came before and also felt rather obscure. A writer with potential.
A slightly below average three stars.
What Time Was That?, by Barry Malzberg
Malzberg offers us a New Wave tale of the invention of a time machine, told in first, second, and third person. It mostly works.
Three stars.
A crackpot’s time machine. Art probably by Gaughan
A newlywed couple are exploring the galaxy, hoping to find a habitable world and make their fortune. They find one, but they also find aliens who decide to stress test their relationship.
I don’t know if this is a printing error or a deliberate choice, but it’s awfully hard to read. Art by Gaughan
A reasonable effort by Spinrad, with more than a touch of Ellisonian cynicism. It’s not a pleasant read, but then it’s not trying to say pleasant things.
Three stars.
The New Thing, by John Brunner
From the title and author, I was expecting a piece satirizing the New Wave. Instead, it’s an examination of what happens to societies in the extremely far future when a sort of interstellar Guinness Book of Records makes it clear that there truly is nothing new under the sun (or any other star).
Waiting rooms will never change. Art probably by Gaughan
It’s a bit long-winded and consists almost entirely of people sitting around and talking. Nevertheless, it mostly works.
Three stars.
In the Beginning, by Glenn Chang
This month’s official new author asks if love can endure beyond the end of all things. The theme is jejune, and the ending rather trite, but the author is only 18. He shows promise, and more experience with the real world could result in some good stories.
Three stars.
The Story of Our Earth (Part 4), by Willy Ley
Ley’s history of the planet has reached the Carboniferous period. He talks about the origins of coal (no matter what Sinclair Oil may say, it wasn’t dinosaurs) and how our understanding of the period has changed. From there he moves to the Earth’s first ice age and the Permian period. He focuses on the primitive reptiles of the time and the importance of teeth to paleontologists.
It’s hard to say anything about this without giving the whole thing away. In essence, it’s a conversation about the end of an experiment. Beyond that, I’ll only say that it is both downbeat and hopeful.
Honestly, I just don’t feel motivated to summarize the end of this serial. Aliens, a guy with memories he can’t quite explain, blah, blah, blah. The hero triumphs in the end. Sort of. Everybody on Earth is dead except for a few hundred people in south-eastern Nebraska. If you’re familiar with Laumer, he does this better in other books; if you aren’t, this is not a good place to start.
A low three stars for this part (some of the action is OK) and barely three stars for the whole thing.
The hero and an ally fight an invader. Art by Gaughan
Summing up
I’m starting to feel like I know what IF is going to be like under the new management. Just looking at the scores, it doesn’t seem all that different from the Pohl days. That’s true for the peaks and averages, but the lows don’t seem to be as low. Plus, the overall tone is fresher. My only real complaint is the art being all Gaughan all the time, and uncredited. We’re not getting his best work. Otherwise, I’d say IF is looking good as we move into a new decade.
Sounds like the big story would have fit right in this month.
It's hard to believe it was just six years ago that the Renaissance Pleasure Faire started in the suburbs of Los Angeles:
"Counterculture" didn't even have a name yet (I think we were calling it "contraculture"), but already, there were folks weary of the modern age, casting their eyes back to a simpler time. You know, when there were far more things that could kill you, and much fewer opportunities to escape drudgery…
Anyway, I reported on our last foray into the past a couple of years ago. These days, the back-to-then movement is stronger than ever, with the Society for Creative Anachronism exploding (do they have a thousand members now?) and Renaissance Faires catching on. They are a good fit for the Pagans and hippies and folks looking for an escape.
We're not immune to the lure. Here are some scenes from this month's event:
You may recognize the fellow in blue
What really makes the Faire such a delight is the attention to detail. Everywhere you go, there are actors and actress really playing a part, making the whole thing an exercise in living history. Of course, as my "character" styles himself a member of the Habsburg clan, you can bet I razzed the Queen when she paraded by with her foppish retinue.
Nevertheless, I hope the Faire retains its purity, prioritizing the spirit of the event rather than descending into a kind of cynical capitalism. Though, I suppose, that's what the original faires were all about…
Alas!
Speaking of cynical capitalism, I feel that Analog editor stays on the job these days just for a paycheck (and a podium for his irrascible editorials—which he then compiles and sells in book form!) While the latest issue isn't terrible, it certainly doesn't scrape the heights it achieved "back in the day."
by Leo Summers
Artifact, by J. B. Clarke
The name of J. B. Clarke is unknown to me. Perhaps he's Arthur Clarke's little brother (sister?) His writing isn't bad, nor even is the premise, but the execution of this first tale of his…
by Leo Summers
A beach ball-sized orb appears in interplanetary space. When an Earth spaceship tries to pick it up, it zips away at faster-than-light speeds a couple of times, as if to demonstrate that it can, and then becomes docile. After it is picked up, the humans assessing the artifact determine that it was deliberately sent to jump-start our technology. But was the rationale benevolent or otherwise?
This would have been a great story had not Clarke explained from the very beginning that the scheme was a plot by the evil Imperium to instigate a diplomatic incident a la the Nazis asserting a Polish attack against the Germans on September 1, 1939. This would give the rapacious aliens legal precedent to annex our planet. Moreover, we learn that an agent of the "Web", the galactic federation of which the Imperium constitutes a small portion, is already on Earth, guiding our assessment of the artifact.
As a result, there's no tension. We know everything will turn out fine. Indeed, it's a strangely un-Campbellian story in that humans aren't the smart ones in the end. But because there are no decisions to be made, no suspense to the outcome, the story falls flat.
Two stars.
Zozzl, by Jackson Burrows
by Leo Summers
This one gets closer to the mark. It stars a big game hunter whose quarry is a telepathic beast. The creature's natural defense is to access your fears and throw pursuers into a nightmare world, repelling them. It's a neat concept, and Burrows (another name with which I am unacquainted), renders the dream sequences quite effectively.
While we learn a bit about our hero's past and motivations, he never really has to solve any puzzles to win his prize. He just wins in the end. There needs to be more.
Still, I really dug the idea, and there's definitely potential for Jackson. Three stars.
Dramatic Mission, by Anne McCaffrey
by Leo Summers
Here's the latest installment of the The Ship Who. This series stars Helva, a profoundly disabled woman who, at a young age, was turned into a cybernetic brain for a starship. Together with a series of "brawns", the human component of the ship's crew, she has been on all kinds of adventures.
In this story, we learn that brain-ships can earn their independence (paying off the debt of their construction) and fly without brawns, and that many vessels strive for this status. But Helva prefers to ride with company—indeed, she insists on it.
Well, her wish is granted. Short-listed for a priority mission to Beta Corvi, Helva is tasked to transport a troupe of actors to a gas giant in that system, where they will perform Romeo and Juliet for a bunch of alien jellyfish in exchange for an important chemical process.
The problem is the drama that unfolds before the drama: Solar Prane, the star, is dying from chronic use of a memory-enhancing drug. His nurse is deeply in love with him. His co-star and ex-lover is jealous and stubbornly insists on sabotaging the production. It is up to Helva to be the grown-up in the room and save the day.
There is so much to like about this story, so many neat, unique things about the setting and characters, that it's a shame McCaffrey can't help getting in her own way. She loves writing waspish, unlikeable characters, and her penchant for including casual, off-putting violence reminds me of what I don't like about Marion Zimmer Bradley.
This is one of those pieces I'd like to see redone by someone more talented and sensitive. Zenna Henderson, maybe, if I wanted to see the soft tones enhanced, or Rosel George Brown (RIP) if I wanted something a little lighter and funnier.
The planet of Terex has turned into a death trap for the terran Space Force. Invited in to deal with an insurgency problem, a combination of religious proscriptions against advanced technology and a flourishing black market that loots what munitions are allowed in, the human troops are not only made into sitting ducks but laughing stocks.
Enter a canny colonel of the Interstellar Corps, whose bright idea is to suffuse all incoming logistics with explosives so that, when they are stolen, they explode. Deterrent and humiliation, all in one.
It may seem that I've given away the plot…and I have. It's given away fairly early on, and the rest of the story is simply an explication of the plan's success.
I should have liked the story less than I did, but it reads pretty well. Three stars.
The Ghoul Squad, by Harry Harrison
by Leo Summers
A rural sheriff digs in his heels at the notion of government agencies harvesting the organs of newly dead victims of traffic accidents in his jurisdiction. He sticks to his principles even at the cost of his own life, decades later.
The human sphere of stars has begun to brush against the part of the galaxy claimed by the loosely knit Morah, aliens with a talent for profound modification of bodies, internally and externally. In the middle of sensitive negotiations between the two empires over a contested bit of space, a bipedal creature runs amok at the space dock. It is impossible to determine if the being is a Morah made to look like a human or a human made to look like a Morah. Ultimately, the fate of the two empires rests on this hapless person.
Easily the best story in the issue, both interesting and well written, though it still rates no more than four stars.
Give me the past
Short story SF appears to be on the decline in general, with only four magazines out this month. Of them, Fantasy and Science Fiction was by far the best, garnering 3.4 stars, but Fantastic and New Worlds both barely made three stars, and Mark, who covers the last mag, has been grumbling about all the newfangled, outré stuff.
As a result, you could fill just one digest-sized magazine with all the good stuff that came out this month. In other statistical news, women produced just 8% of all the new fiction this month.
It's enough to make you long for the (romanticized) good ol' days…but who knows what the future holds?
[We've got another wonderful haul of books for you this month, many of which are well worth you're time. Be sure to read on 'til the end—you'll definitely catch the reading bug!]
By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall
The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith by Josephine Saxton
Josephine Saxton is British author so, of course, her first book is about apocalypses and sexual awakening. However, it's a particularly skilled one.
The story: an unnamed teenage boy is wandering across the desolated British landscape alone, after an unexplained event has killed off all the other people. He comes across a baby girl and decides to bring her up. Together they try to understand the world that was left behind and what it means to be an adult.
You might assume this is either the usual “New Adam and Eve” story, or some kind of shock piece. However, Saxton manages to negotiate between these two paths skillfully. She describes the sexual emergences of both of them in matter-of-fact terms, which grounds the story within the dream-like atmosphere they inhabit.
As we go through, their comprehension of the world changes from child-like to a clear understanding of the facts of life. Even though their eventual relations could come across as disturbing given the age difference between the two, and the fact The Boy brought her up like a little sister, Saxton manages to largely negate this. She is able to show the passage of time well and, more importantly, give us the thought processes of both our leads to show they have free-will and are fully in control of their choices. For example:
She studied this for some time, and came to the conclusion that this was a drawing of a penis, and at what she had read and seen, she became hot all over, and in an excitable state.
There is also a clear sense throughout the text about the importance of symbolism. The Boy is constantly dismissing the importance of words and symbols but The Girl slowly shows him that deeper meaning is important.
For me, the key message that is brought out here is that they need to wipe away the sins of the past. The things that brought this world into being. When The Girl is bathing she sings about washing away her troubles in the River Jordan. And, when she gives birth, she insists on doing it in a place of death “to eradicate the source of evil here”. There is a central concept that simply them growing up and continuing the human race is not enough. Things have to change.
I picked up this novel as I knew it was related to The Consciousness Machine, one of my favourite novellas of last year. The connection raises significant questions. However, to discuss this requires mentions of later revelations of both works. As such, if you want to avoid knowing these facts, please feel free to skip to the next review.
As the name suggests, the novella is about a machine, WAWWAR, that can take the images of the unconscious mind and display them on a screen. The technician Zona is trying to decipher the meaning of The Boy and The Girl’s journey. There is also another piece of material relating to the hunt for a wild animal. These secondary and tertiary narratives are completely absent from the novel, which only contains The Boy and Girl’s tale in its totality.
As such, the conclusion of the book version is not about Zona learning the nature of the Animus, but The Boy, The Girl and The Baby deciding it is time to go home. So, they get on a bus, pay the conductor and go back to a fully furnished suburban house. The Girl then decides to get an early night as there is nothing on television on Tuesdays and puts the baby to sleep.
Now, a simple explanation for this could be we are literally seeing the film that was recorded by the WAWWAR. However, no hint of that is given and I think that is too large a leap to expect the average reader to make.
But to read it purely as a science fiction tale causes just as many problems. This sharp turn is nowhere hinted at in the text and in fact contradicts several core points created. Even if you could somehow accept the idea that The Boy went to live in a town that has been uninhabited, how does he have a house? How has he never seen a fully grown adult woman before? How does The Girl know about contemporary television schedules? How is the home not only still available to them after decades away, but with the utilities on?
So, what are we to make of this strange choice? There is no reason I could imagine that would force Saxton to expunge this frame from the longer book form. And the novel is indeed a good bit more explicit than the novella. So, a choice we must assume it is.
I like to believe it is opening us up to the freedom to understand the text in our own way. Zona’s meta-commentary on the events is merely one way of understanding a dream. You could also just as easily contend that the explosion in the chemist, shortly before they leave the town of Thingy, actually killed them all, suburbia representing the afterlife and Zona being like the angels in 40s cinema, discussing their existence.
Or, perhaps, the Town of Thingy really does exist and is a time displaced retreat. Something akin to Hawksbill Station. Where couples facing marital difficulties can be de-aged, grow-up together, and learn how to become one unit again, before being brought back at the same moment they left. And then The Consciousness Machine is actually just a dream The Girl has after she goes to bed.
I don’t know what Saxton intended, but I also do not think it matters. The journey and feel of the novel is excellent and how you choose to view it is just as valid as those watching the WAWWAR.
Humanity has made its first steps into interstellar space, settling the worlds of the Pleiades. In so doing, they have brushed across the domain of the mysterious Moldaug—a frustratingly humanoid but not quite human alien race with a fleet strength comparably to Terra's. After decades of peaceful coexistence, the Moldaug suddenly make claim to all the Pleiades. The Old Worlds of Earth, Mars, and Venus, reeling from a kind of space phobia, offer to relinquish their own claims to the Frontier. This only makes things worse for two reasons: 1) the Moldaug inexplicably find the offer offensive, and 2) the Frontier is not Earth's to give, for they had fought and won independence a dozen years prior! (For more on this story, see the novelette Hilifter.)
by Jack Gaughan (and cribbed from the novelization of Three Worlds to Conquer, as I learned from my friend, Joachim Boaz—the art makes much more sense for the original title)
Enter Cully O'Rourke When, the man most responsible for the Frontier's independence. When the veteran spacejacker returns to Earth to treat with the Old World's government, he is thrown into a floating prison with hundreds of other Frontiersmen, rendered impotent to cause more mischief. But in that very prison, he learns from an imprisoned anthropologist the explosive secret that foretells Armageddon between humans and the Moldaug…unless someone can bring the two races into true understanding.
Thus begins a tale that involves Cully's jailbreak, piracy on high space, and political turmoil in three realms.
This is a frustrating book because it has such potential, and there are many things to like in it. The gripping beginning, the well-realized triune nature of the Moldaug (each being-unit comprises three tri-bonded individuals), the subtle difference in morality between the two species (Right/not-Right vs. Respectable/not-Respectable—though one could argue that this is a thinly guised variation of the Japanese concept of "Face"), the rich setting, the final confrontation between Cully and the Moldaug Admiral Ruhn…these are all compelling.
But Dickson falls into the issues he had with his Dorsai series: one mastermind (our hero) knows every move and countermove, and everything breaks his way. As a result, the only drama comes in seeing the master plan unfold, not how said hero responds to adversity. In stories like this, one can see the author laying out the stepping stones, guiding a path so that the protagonist never makes a misstep.
The other issue is the virtual absence of women. I know people have given me grief for harping on this issue since I started this 'zine in 1958, but come on, people—it's 1969. We have women leading Israel and India. On Star Trek, a third of the crew of the Enterprise is female. A few years back, Rydra Wong led a crew of misfits to save the galaxy. So when the only human female character in all of the Frontier and the Old Worlds serves just to be a romantic foil (and to be ignored at the one juncture that she has critical information!), and she is the sole woman amongst a cast of dozens of men, the world Dickson builds starts to feel a little hollow.
Edmund Cooper is a British writer who has been active since the '50s, and up until recently I've not had the pleasure to read any of his work. He put out a novel just a month or two ago, and now here he is again, with a short collection called News from Elsewhere, featuring eight stories, only one of which is original to the collection. It was published in Britain last year but only just now got an American edition, courtesy of Berkley Medallion. Overall it's a mixed bag, since it looks like Cooper likes to repeat himself (there are three or four stories here about space expeditions), but the strongest material does make me curious for more. Let's take a look.
This is the only story to be first published in News from Elsewhere, and it’s… fine. It’s basically a fable, set in an icy and desolate world, about a young woman and her infant son as they travel with “the People of the Spur,” on a religious pilgrimage. The problem is that the woman’s son is a half-breed, a child-by-rape whose father is a “Changeling,” of a fellow humanoid race that whose members have hairy and thorny ridges on their backs. The woman tries to keep her son’s racial status a secret, but in trying to evade her people she literally falls into a chasm—and certain death. Cooper’s style here is almost childlike; there is barely any dialogue, and by the end it becomes clear what message we’re supposed to take from what is admittedly a harrowing adventure narrative. Cooper also saves the answer to the question “Is this science fiction or fantasy?” for the end, although I’m not sure why he treats it like a twist.
We jump from the newest story to one of the oldest, first published as “The End of the Journey” in the February 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe. “M 81: Ursa Major” is a space opera that asks a rather troubling question: “How do we know when we’re dead?” Or, to phrase it less threateningly: “How can we tell the difference, subjectively speaking, between being dead and being unconscious?” An experimental ship uses scientific mumbo jumbo to skirt the fact that it’s impossible to travel at the speed of light. The results are tragic, but also very strange—not least for the deeply jaded captain, who has a hunch that things will go wrong indeed. This is a story with a loose plot and only one genuine character to speak of, but it’s anchored by a strong idea. It’s the kind of story that was commonplace a decade and a half ago, but which now strikes me as a bit refreshing. I almost feel nostalgic about this sort of thing.
Four stars, but I understand if someone reads it and is not as impressed.
The Enlightened Ones
This one originally appeared in Cooper’s first collection, Tomorrow’s Gift. It’s the longest in the collection, and frankly, I’m not sure the length was justified. Long story short, a team of space explorers makes first contact with a race of hominids, who at first seem like primitive humans but who turn out to have a major advantage over the humans—only the humans are too concerned with what to do with the hominids at first to notice anything amiss. It’s a trite premise, even by the standards of a decade ago, that’s elevated by Cooper’s acute pessimism with regards to the notion of human supremacy. In this distant future it’s said that the Eskimos, Polynesians, and some other indigenous groups on Earth have been driven to extinction. Certainly the Campbellian protagonists do not come off well for the most part, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that “The Enlightened Ones” (such an immediately ironic title) was printed in Fantastic Universe and not Astounding/Analog.
First published in the 1963 collection Tomorrow Came, which may sound unfamiliar because it never got an American printing. “Judgment Day” is the most British-sounding of the lot so far, to the point where it reads like the late John Wyndham at a hefty discount. At first it doesn’t even register as SF. The narrator and his wife are in the park one day when people around them start having violent seizures—too many in one place for this to be a random occurrence. Soon the narrator’s wife falls victim as well, and for much of the story we may be wondering about not just the cause, but the context for all this. What does any of this mean? The narrator meets a soldier who promptly feeds him enough information to stun an elephant, the result being that we’re told about something important that basically happens outside the confines of the page and which has already come to an end by the time the narrator hears about it. It’s rather inelegant, never mind that the SFnal element already feels outdated somehow.
Two stars.
The Intruders
Cover art by Virgil Finlay.
This one first appeared as “Intruders on the Moon” in the April 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. Yes, this surely does read like an SF adventure story from a dozen years ago. A team of explorers land on our moon to investigate the massive crater that is Tycho, for mining as well as the slim possibility of discovering intelligent life. (Something I wish to make clear at this point is that Cooper’s characters are not usually “characters” in the Shakespearian sense; they do not tend to have distinguishable personalities.) Miraculously, however, one of the crew discovers footprints in the sand near Tycho—rather large footprints with very long strides, indeed too much to be a human’s. The explorers go looking for this “Man Friday” of theirs, but they soon learn to regret it. “The Intruders” is pretty straightforward for how long it is, and while its quaint vision of man’s landing on the moon would have been acceptable last decade, I can’t imagine there being much interest in a story of its sort now.
One of Cooper’s earliest stories, and a hand-me-down from Tomorrow’s Gift. A team of space explorers (oh God, not again) lands on “Planet Five,” where there doesn’t seem to be any organic life—save for a species of butterfly. The butterflies have a power over the human explorers they remain unaware of until it’s too late. But it’s not all bad: the explorers also have with them a smartass robot named Whizbang, who emerges as the story’s single genuine character. The autonomous robot comes off more human than the actual humans, although this may be Cooper’s intention, as he uses this disparity at the end of the story to somewhat chilling effect. I’m sensing repetition in the story selection, but I do tepidly recommend this one. If nothing else it comes close to “M 81: Ursa Major” in conveying Cooper’s thesis on the strenuous nature between human rationality and things in our universe which may be beyond human understanding.
A strong three stars.
The Lizard of Woz
Cover art by Virgil Finlay.
This one first appeared in the August 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe, and it’s the crown jewel of the collection. “The Lizard of Woz,” aside from having an incredible title, is different from the others in that it is an outright comedy (albeit of a morbid hue), but it also is told from an alien’s perspective. Ynky is a member of a highly advanced race of alien lizards, who has been sent to Earth so as to determine if it is fit for “fumigation,” i.e., genocide on a planetary scale. The people Ynky comes into contact with (an American, then a Russian, then a third I would prefer to keep a secret) are caricatures, which is all well and good. Cooper pokes fun at both sides of the Iron Curtain, but overall this is a story about the absurdity of the notion of racial supremacy. We’re told constantly that the lizards of Woz are a superior race, yet they also have slave labor and are casually murderous with other sentient races, not to mention Ynky himself is rather slow-witted. Since this is a comedy, and a pretty silly one to boot, some people will be irritated by the antics, but I laughed several times over the span of its mere ten pages.
Finally we have “Welcome Home,” which first appeared in Tomorrow Came and so this marks its first American appearance. Looking back at that time, it seems now like the early ‘60s were simply an extension (or the semi-stale leftovers) of the ‘50s, at least with regards to SF, because this story reads as a few years older than it is. A team of explorers (for the last time, we swear it) land on Mars, which is suspected of possibly hosting life, but if so life on Mars would be far down on the evolutionary ladder. As it turns out, a mysterious pyramid, a sophisticated structure, has drawn the explorers’ attention. This is a first-contact story—of a sort. The twist, which I won’t say here (although you can safely guess it), seemed oddly familiar to me. As with a few other stories in the collection, “Welcome Home” is about the conflict between the West and the Soviets, although it’s not of a ham-fisted sort. It’s fine, but nothing special or surprising.
Three stars.
by Jason Sacks
The Sky is Filled with Ships by Richard C. Meredith
It's the year 979 of the Federation, or the year 3493 in the old calendar. Captain Robert T. Janas of the Solar Trading Company, Terran by birth and starman by occupation, is journeying back to his home planet at a time Terra is in great peril.
The Federation, long bloated and often brutal, is facing a massive rebellion among its vast and angry colonies. A truly titanic armada of thousands of warships from hundreds of solar systems is streaming to Earth via subspace wormholes to gain freedom for the colonies. Janas knows the defense of his home planet will be a futile gesture. There is no possible way even the enormous Terran space fleet can overcome the overwhelming odds and passions of the furious rebels and their massively armed fleet.
Janas knows, too, that a victory by the rebels will spiral mankind down to a new dark ages, just as brutal and destructive as that of Europe after the fall of Rome. Only Janas has the insight and plan to preserve a smidgen of the wisdom — not by saving Terra but by making the Solar Trading Company one of the few institutions to survive and preserve galactic knowledge.
I'm not familiar with the fiction of Richard C. Meredith, but I'm curious to read more by him based on this book. I was pretty intrigued by lead character Janas, who has a nice kind of fish-out-of-water feel to him as he wanders around Earth. That alienation presents a clever, illuminating aspect of the character. I enjoyed having a protagonist who is both a highly self-assured man and who also feels uncomfortable at times due to certain aspects of Earth's culture.
For instance, there's a slightly poignant feel to his annoyance at Earth fashions- like a colonial returned to his home only to find it dramatically different from the place he left. Janas is a stiff military man on a planet where the men dress like harlequins and the women wear fashions which leave them bare-breasted and proud.
But all that discomfort contrasts with the depiction of Janas as a man of action. Like a classic sci-fi hero, Janas brings his own plans and friends to the office of Al Franken, leader of the STC but too blinded by his own hubris to understand he is the problem. Captain Janas literally drags Franken into a plot which will ensure the fall of the ruling Franken family and the survival of Janas's beloved STC.
Meredith adroitly alternates chapters of this palace intrigue with scenes of the armada flying through subspace and showing the massive devastation which the rebel fleet creates on its journey. Those invasion scenes have a breathless, telegraphical quality to them which convey a massive sense of urgency.
As the book winds up, Meredith also does a clever thing: in late chapters he shows brief snippets of events all around the planet Earth as the reality of the Terran apocalypse become clear. In East Asia an angry mob kills their governor and his whole family; in Australia, a cult climb a mountain and await their ends; a rural farmer stands at his barn door, shotgun in hand, waiting to do his small part.
Mr Meredith in his younger days
Mr. Meredith, just over the age of 30, has created a clever and fun novel. There are points in which The Sky is Filled with Ships reads like a pretty standard potboiler sci-fi actioner, with square-chinned heroes fighting for noble causes. In that way it feels a bit of a throwback to the golden John W. Campbell days.
But I appreciated how the actions of our hero were focused on preserving society, which gave him a nobility which stood out on the page. As well, the scenes of oncoming invasion are exciting and had me quickly turning the pages.
I finished this relatively slim novel in one night. And though Meredith is no John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, or Harlan Ellison, he makes no effort to create literary science fiction with this novel. The Sky is Filled with Ships achieves what Meredith set out to create: an intriguing, exciting novel which will make me seek out some of his shorter fiction while I wait for the next thrilling novel by him.
This is the fifth in a series of novels under the collective title of Children of Violence. The others are Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), and Landlocked (1965). I haven't read the others.
A little research reveals that they all deal with Martha, the child of British parents working on a farm in colonial Africa. She's born in about 1920. The four novels all take place in southern Africa. As a teenager, Martha leaves home to work in a city. As the years go by, she is married and divorced and married again. She has a daughter whom she leaves in the care of others. She becomes involved in leftwing politics.
None of the earlier books have speculative elements. The newest one is different. At well over six hundred pages, it's also roughly twice as long as any of the previous volumes.
The sheer length and the very large number of characters and incidents make it difficult to offer a brief summary. I'll do what I can. Keep in mind that I'm leaving out the vast majority of the content of this massive novel.
Martha is now in London in about 1950. She gets a job as a secretary/housekeeper for a man who is married to a woman who is in and out of mental hospitals. She winds up living in the same household for many years, becoming involved with many other members of his family and their acquaintances.
Just to pick one example out of dozens, the man's brother is a scientist who defects to the Soviet Union. He leaves behind his wife and young son. The woman is a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. When her husband leaves, she kills herself.
That's enough of a dramatic plot for a complete novel, but it only takes up a small portion of the book. Rather than attempt to relate any other events of equal importance, let me try to give you some idea of what the novel is like as a whole. Taking my inspiration from its title, I'll consider it as four different kinds of book in one.
Psychological Novel
Much of the text consists of Martha's interior monologues. She often looks at herself as if she were an outsider. At times, she withdraws from the rest of the world and spends time in a meditative, introspective state.
Novel of Character
Although Martha is the most important character, we also spend a great deal of time with lots of other people. In one section, the point of view shifts to Martha's elderly mother, who leaves Africa in order to visit her daughter. All the secondary characters are described in detail. There are so many of them that I sometimes lost track of who was related to whom. A dramatis personae for this book would take up several pages.
Social Novel
A large number of social and political issues come up in the novel. Just off the top of my head, these include Communism and anti-Communism, psychiatry, post-war austerity evolving into 1960's hedonism, the youth movement, the relationship between the sexes, the media, the environment, the military, espionage, homosexuality, colonialism and anti-colonialism, and economics. At times the novel resembles a series of debates.
Science Fiction Novel
You were wondering when I'd get to that! They take a while to show up, but speculative themes eventually make an appearance. The novel suggests that people diagnosed as schizophrenic are actually clairvoyant and telepathic. They are treated as mentally ill because they have visions and hear voices.
More to the point, the book's lengthy appendix consists of documents, mostly letters from Martha and other characters, describing how the United Kingdom and other parts of the world are devastated by what seems to be a combination of pollution, accidental release of nerve gas, plague, and radiation from nuclear weapons. Martha ends up with a small number of survivors on a tiny island. In true science fiction fashion, children born there have highly developed psychic powers.
Giving this book a rating is very difficult. Some people are going to hate it, and find slogging through very long sentences and paragraphs that go on for a page or more not worth the effort. Others will consider it to be a major literary achievement of great ambition.
I have very mixed feelings. At times I found it highly insightful; at other times I found it tedious.
Three stars, for lack of a better way to rate it.
by Cora Buhlert
A Five and Dime James Bond: Zero Cool by John Lange
This weekend, I attended a convention in the city of Neuss in the Rhineland. Luckily, West Germany has an excellent network of highways, the famous Autobahnen, so the three and a half hour trip was quite pleasant.
I left at dawn and took the opportunity to have breakfast at the brand-new service station Dammer Berge. Service stations are not exactly uncommon – you can find them roughly every fifty to sixty kilometers along the Germany's Autobahnen. There's always a parking lot, a gas station, a small shop, a restaurant and sometimes a motel, housed in fairly unremarkable buildings on either side of the highway.
Dammer Berge, however, is different. Billed as the service station of the future, the restaurant is a concrete bridge which spans the highway, held up by two steel pylons. The structure is spectacular, a beacon of modernism, though sadly the food itself was rather lacklustre: a cup of coffee that tasted of the soap used to clean the machine and a slice of stale apple cake.
But I'm not here to talk about architecture or food, but about books. Now the trusty paperback spinner rack at my local import bookstore does not hold solely science fiction and fantasy. There is also a motley mix of gothic romances, murder mysteries and thrillers available. And whenever the science fiction and fantasy selection on offer does not seem promising, I reach for one of those other genres. This is how I discovered John Lange, a thriller author whose novel Easy Go I read last year and enjoyed very much. So when I spotted a new John Lange novel named Zero Cool in that spinner rack, I of course picked it up.
Zero Cool starts with Peter Ross, an American radiologist who's supposed to present a paper at a medical conference in Barcelona. And since he's already in Spain, Ross plans to take the opportunity for a holiday on the nearby Costa Brava in the seaside resort of Tossa de Mar.
One of John Lange's greatest strengths is his atmospheric descriptions. His skills are on full display in Zero Cool in the descriptions of the rugged Costa Brava with its picturesque fishing villages turned holiday destination for package tourists from all over Europe. It's obvious that Lange has visited Spain in general and the Costa Brava in particular.
That doesn't mean that Lange doesn't take poetic licence. And so his protagonist Peter Ross notes that the beaches of the Costa Brava are full of beautiful women in bikinis with nary a man in sight. As someone who has actually visited said beaches, I can assure you that this isn't true. Like anywhere on the Mediterranean coast, the beaches of Tossa de Mar contain a motley mix of old and young, of men, women and children, of attractive and not so attractive bodies. And yes, there are women in bikinis, too. Ross has holiday fling with one of them, a British stewardess named Angela.
But in spite of what the cover may imply, Zero Cool is not a romance set in an exotic location, but a thriller. And so Ross finds himself accosted on the beach by a man who begs him not to do the autopsy or he will surely die. Ross is bemused—what autopsy? In any event, he is on vacation and besides, he's a radiologist, not a pathologist, dammit.
Not long after this encounter, Ross is approached by four men in black suits who could not seem more like gangsters if they wore signs saying "The Mob" 'round their necks. The men want Ross to perform – you guessed it – an autopsy on their deceased brother, so his body can be repatriated to the US. Ross protests that he is a radiologist, not a pathologist, but the men are very insistent. They offer Ross a lot of money and also threaten to kill him if he refuses.
In the end, Ross does perform the autopsy – not that he has any choice, because he is abducted at gunpoint. To no one's surprise, the four gangsters from central casting are not all that interested in how their alleged brother died, but want Ross to hide a package inside the body. Once again, Ross complies, since finding himself on the wrong end of a gun is very persuasive.
Up to now, Zero Cool seems to be a fairly routine thriller about an everyman who gets entangled in a criminal enterprise. But the novel takes a turn for the weird, when the body vanishes and people start dying horribly, mutilated beyond recognition. Ross not only finds himself a murder suspect – in a country which still garrottes convicted criminals – but other parties also show an interest in the missing body and the mysterious package inside. These other parties include Tex, a cartoonish Texan in a ten gallon hat, the Professor, a bald man who uses mathematics to predict the future and is basically Hari Seldon, if Hari had applied his skills to crime rather than to trying to save humanity from the dark ages, and – last but not least – the Count, a Spanish nobleman with dwarfism, who collects perfume bottles and lives in a castle with a mute butler, a flock of murderous falcons and a Doberman named Franco.
With its exotic locales (well, for Americans at least, since for West Germans the Costa Brava no longer feels all that exotic, when you can book a flight there via the Neckermann mail order catalogue), beautiful but duplicitous women and colourful villains, Zero Cool feels more like a James Bond adventure than a serious thriller. As for the mystery package, it doesn't contain anything as mundane as drugs (which was my initial suspicion), but a priceless emerald stolen by the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico. It all culminates in a showdown at the Alhambra palace in Granada, where Ross finds himself dodging bullets, poison gas and the razor-sharp talons of the Count's murder falcons.
It's all a lot of fun, though it still pales in comparison to the James Bond novels and films, which Zero Cool is clearly trying to emulate. Because unlike the suave agent on her majesty's secret service, Peter Ross just isn't very interesting. He literally is an everyman, an American doctor – and note that John Lange is the pen name used by a student at Harvard medical school who is financing his studies by writing thrillers – bouncing around Spain and France. In fact, Ross is probably the least interesting character in the whole novel. Furthermore, the fact that Ross is a radiologist, though constantly brought up, contributes nothing to the resolution. He might just as well have been a paediatrician or a gynaecologist or any other type of doctor for all it matters.
But even a lesser effort by John Lange is still better than most other thrillers in the paperback spinner rack. If John Lange becomes as good a doctor as he's a writer, his patients will be very lucky indeed.
An outrageous adventure. Three and a half stars.
(As mentioned above, John Lange is a pen name. However, I have it on good authority that his real name is "Michael Crichton" and that he has just published a science fiction novel under that byline. I haven't yet read it, but my colleague Joe has, so check out his review.)
The story begins in the town of Piedmont, Arizona, in the United States. It’s a pretty unremarkable town, with one small exception: just about everyone in the town is lying dead in the street, all except for two men who traveled to Piedmont to recover some lost government property and an odd figure in the town of corpses who happens to be walking their way. Upon the apparent death of the two men, an investigation gets underway, ultimately led by a clandestine government group called Project Wildfire.
Project Wildfire is the brainchild of Dr. Jeremy Stone, a bacteriologist possessing so many awards and degrees that the story paints him as a modern-day Da Vinci, a man above men. His team includes Dr. Charles Burton, a pathologist; Dr. Mark Hall, a surgeon, and the only unmarried man on the team—the odd man as the story puts it; and lastly, Dr. Peter Leavitt, a microbiologist. The four men quickly fall into their roles as they uncover the cause of whatever killed an entire town full of people in one night and try to prevent it from spreading.
They do this working out of a secure, state-of-the-art research facility with a list of protocols to prevent the escape of diseases, viruses, and other deadly pathogens, longer than a football field. Part of the appeal of the story is the detailed descriptions of all the computers, machines, and medical facilities that the four doctors use in their quest. Crichton’s depiction of even the smallest details of the workings of every inch of the Wildfire facility give a grounded feel not only to the base but to the descriptions he provides of the microorganism at the heart of this story: the Andromeda Strain itself. Crichton beautifully has his characters follow the scientific method we all learned in grade school, as Stone and the others start with observation, then move to hypothesis, then experimentation. Every solution in the book is arrived at through the efforts of brilliant men under tremendous pressure. It is truly exciting to witness them work as each discovery and dead end leads to new discoveries and new dangers.
The pacing of The Andromeda Strain felt fitting to me. I never felt as if I was waiting for something to happen. Each scene in every chapter was packed with purpose and direction, each page wasted no space. Every character had a job to do, and each was one of the best in the world at that job. Regarding the characterizations, although the story is set in modern times, these men often felt as if they were the stoic men of bronze from 1950’s serials. The characters felt dated, but the problems they tackled were quite modern.
By the end of the book, the characters and the circumstances reached a good stopping point. The object of worry, the Andromeda Strain itself, proved a challenge that had taxed the heroes of the story to their very limits. Some issues are addressed, and others are left unresolved. In my own zeal for the story, I’ve taken great pains to avoid revealing too much of the plot. It is best experienced in real time. All I can say is that the journey this book takes you on is worth the time investment. It’s a stellar read.
But not a perfect one. This is a story that begins with the end in mind. With all the truly amazing events that unfold in the book, what stands out most are the constant reminders from the narrator that the story was already over. This was my first time reading a book written by Mr. Crichton. I don’t know if he employs this technique in his other works, but I would have preferred that he kept his internal monologuing to himself. In one instance, a character forgets to replicate an action that he had performed on some lab rats. Narrator: “Later we learned that was a mistake.” In another, a character makes assumptions about a biological process. Narrator: “That action wasted days of our time.” The narrator frequently shares tidbits of the future, a narrative tool I would call “Poor Man's Foreshadowing.” The Andromeda Strain is such an engaging and suspenseful tale that I wished to remain in the present throughout my reading without Crichton yanking me out of it, offering glimpses of a future I wanted to reach without shortcuts.
That minor gripe aside, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton is a thrilling mystery with high stakes. It is the kind of fact-based science fiction that I enjoy the most.
Way back in 1956, Joseph Ferman was the owner of Mercury Publishing, which produced several magazines, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He believed there was a place in the crowded SF market for a new magazine. The genre was changing; space opera was out, problem stories and stories with a narrower focus were in. The closure of Planet Stories the previous year meant no one was running SF with a hint of adventure and excitement. Joe decided to fill that gap, and a new magazine was born.
The first issue of Venture Science Fiction was dated January 1957 (which means it hit the stands in November or December of 1956). The editor was Robert P. Mills, who was the managing editor over at F&SF under Tony Boucher, with Boucher listed as the advisory editor. The cover by Ed Emshwiller went to a Poul Anderson Psychotechnic League story, Virgin Planet, later expanded to a novel of the same name. Other stories included a science fiction mystery by Isaac Asimov (The Dust of Death) and a controversial Ted Sturgeon tale (The Girl Had Guts), which allegedly made some readers physically ill.
The issue also had a note from the publisher, explaining what he hoped the magazine would be. Every story would have to be well told, and every story had to have “pace, power, and excitement.” But those things also wouldn’t take the place of character and sense.
Venture came out regularly every other month for 10 issues, but it never stood out in a crowded market. There were plenty of big-name authors, and you might recognize a story or two, but none were big stories that will be remembered as classics. This is where Asimov’s science essays ran before moving to F&SF. The magazine may be best remembered as the place that Sturgeon’s Law was first proposed in full: “Ninety percent of everything is crud,” along with its two corollaries.
The first and last covers for the first run of Venture. Art in both by Ed Emshwiller
What happened? It’s hard to say, but it has been suggested some of the content was too much for the times. There was more gore and sex than was considered acceptable, but which would fit right in today. As a result, new readers may have been put off, and old readers may have decided to go elsewhere. The chaos in the magazine market following the collapse of American News Distribution, which held a near monopoly on magazine distribution, in mid-1957 can’t have helped matters. In any case, the final issue was dated July 1958.
“Wait,” I hear our British and Australian readers say, “wasn’t there a magazine by that name in the early ’60s?” There was! The British version of Venture ran from September 1963 to December 1965. It carried reprints from the American edition of F&SF, even though that magazine also had a British version. The Australian edition was identical, just dated two months later, folding in February 1966.
Another try at the brass ring
The Fermans père et fils have decided to give Venture another try. Maybe they should have told someone. Galaxy Publishing has launched a few new magazines in the last few years, and they always made a big deal of it in their other mags several months in advance. Beyond a very small notice in last month’s F&SF, I haven’t heard a thing about it. Seems like a questionable marketing strategy.
Ed Ferman will be editing Venture as well as F&SF, but since it’s going to be quarterly, it shouldn’t be too much extra work. Along with stories, there’s a book review column by Ron Goulart. A particularly biting review column; Ron doesn’t seem to like much. Presumably, this will be a regular feature.
Another apparent recurring feature (it is, at least, listed as a “department” along with the book reviews) is the return of Ferdinand Feghoot. Feghoots, for the uninitiated, are very short – usually around half a page – stories ending in a pun. They ran in F&SF for a time, up until a few years ago, and the Traveler generally left them out of his reviews. Since puns may be the most subjective form of humor and it will be nearly impossible to cover them without giving away the joke, I will maintain this policy. Should they disappear, I will mention it. At the very least, they tend to be considerably better than the atrocious Benedict Breadfruit stories that appeared in Amazing several years ago.
This singularly unattractive cover is by Bert Tanner.
Before we get to the stories, we need to talk about this cover. At first glance, I thought this was a coffin and a bat, so I assumed it was a horror mag and moved on. It was only when I went back a second time that I realized it was what I was looking for. Cover art should grab the eye and make you want to pick it up. That’s especially true for a new magazine that’s had essentially no advertising. This does none of that. I do like the logo, though.
One day, the sun turns red, and a spaceship the size of Rhode Island appears in orbit around the Earth. Two apparently human beings appear, claiming to be from the center of the galaxy. They bear warning of the approach of a threat which will wipe the galaxy almost clean of life. Earth will be allowed to provide one person to aid in the defense against the threat. The person they choose is graduate art student Miles Vander.
Vander is searching for the creative equivalent of “hysterical strength,” the sort of thing that allows a small woman to lift a car to rescue her trapped child. He is changed by the aliens so that he can draw on the rest of humanity for a poorly explained resource and perhaps pass it on to the Center Aliens. What he finds when he reaches the Battle Line is less than encouraging.
I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s almost the only art in the issue. Art by Bert Tanner
If I’d been handed this without a byline, I’d have said it was by Dickson once I got to the military stuff, so if you’re familiar with his work, you should have some idea what you’ll think of this. Much as in the recent Wolfling, the story goes on too long after the climax in order for Dickson to wax philosophic for a while. Otherwise, it was pretty good.
According to my sources, this “complete novel” has actually been condensed. It hasn’t suffered too much from the Reader’s Digest treatment. A few things might make a bit more sense, but they’re not really necessary to enjoy the story.
Three stars.
July 24, 1970, by K.M. O’Donnell
It’s no secret that K.M. O’Donnell is Barry Malzberg, who was briefly the editor of Amazing and Fantastic. This story was probably inspired by his time there. It’s in the form of a letter from an editor to a writer, gently trying to dissuade the author from submitting the story without rejecting it outright. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, which the story actually calls attention to, and doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s told pretty well.
Three stars.
The New Science, by Don Thompson
Four grad students attempt to use the university computer to tease out the valid aspects of witchcraft, in the same way that alchemy led to chemistry. There are unintended consequences. Like the previous story, there’s nothing new here, but it’s told reasonably well.
Three stars.
Troubling of a Star, by Bryce Walton
After searching 10,000 worlds without finding a trace of life, an expedition plans to go home. The captain is reluctant, but has little choice. With the rest of the crew already in suspended animation, he makes a discovery.
This story is far too long and is overwrought. I have no idea what the author wanted to say, and much of it doesn’t make sense.
Two stars.
The Topic for the Evening, by Daphne Castell
A married couple discuss local events and some of the women in town. The husband oversteps his bounds.
Yet another tale covering well-trod ground, but told well enough. I liked this better, though, when it was Gladys’s Gregory or Conjure Wife.
A low three stars.
Nine P.M., Pacific Daylight Time, by Ronald S. Bonn
Maybe the reason no time traveler has ever appeared is that no one has built a receiver. A “Mad Scientist” has now done so and invites a prominent science writer to be there when he powers it up. He may not have thought this through all the way.
Old ground again, but quite well told.
A high three stars.
Hold Your Fire!, by Larry Eisenberg
Eisenberg came up with brilliant and obnoxious chemist Emmett Duckworth back in 1967 and probably should have left him there. But with a story both here and in Galaxy this month, it looks like we’re in for more not very funny stories. In this one, Duckworth is annoyed by the sounds of a rifle competition on campus.
Two stars.
Summing up
Is there room for another SF magazine in the current market? Maybe, though the failure of Worlds of Tomorrow and the intermittent at best appearances of International Science Fiction and Worlds of Fantasy argue against it. If Venture is going to be successful in its second incarnation, it’s going to need a couple of things.
The first is promotion. An easily missed, three line announcement in F&SF isn’t going to cut it. The three magazines I mentioned in the previous paragraph were all heavily promoted in IF and Galaxy in both editorials and half-page ads for several months before they hit the newsstands. Another aspect of promotion is an eye-catching cover. The art on this issue is terrible. As I said, I was looking for this magazine and almost missed it. F&SF doesn’t have interior illustrations, but the covers are usually quite good.
The other important aspect is standing out. Especially for a quarterly, you need people talking about your magazine. Running a (condensed) novel might work if it’s really good. Hour of the Horde is decent, but it’s not going to generate word of mouth. A really outstanding story (or a really controversial one) would also work. The retreads in this issue, no matter how well-told, don’t cut the mustard.
We’ll see how things look this summer when the next issue is due.
Four years ago (has it been that long?) Mariner 4 became the first space probe to sail by Mars. This event instantly destroyed a thousand dreams. The 21 grainy, black and white pictures returned by the spacecraft's TV cameras showed a cratered, lunar-type surface. The Martian atmosphere was found to be less than 1% as dense at the surface as that of Earth. Gone was the romantic Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett.
These findings should not have come as such a surprise—the abundance of craters and the thin atmosphere had already been suspected before Mariner 4 ever got there. But the photographic evidence was the final nail in the coffin. Mars is dead.
Or is it?
Mariner 4 was a rather limited spacecraft. We only got 21 pictures, after all. And while 7 millibars may not seem like much, that's a veritable atmospheric blanket compared to the Moon or Mercury. We need more data.
This is why a second generation of spacecraft, Mariners 6 and 7, are being sent to Mars. These are heavier spacecraft with more sophisticated equipment: infrared and ultraviolet radiometers (measuring Martian energy output in those wavelengths), a better TV camera, and the ability to reprogram the spacecraft in flight, as needed.
Mariner 6 took off last week on the 24th, and Mariner 7 will blast off March 21st. We've yet to have both members of a Mariner pair make it to its destination (Mariner 1 and Mariner 3 both had mishaps), but hope springs eternal. Come this summer, perhaps around the same time a man sets foot on the Moon, we will unveil more mysteries of the fourth planet.
I have a private joke that every Chris Anvil story for Analog begins (Mad Lib style):
[Military Rank] [WASPy male name] of [military organization] [verbed] down the [corridor/hall/base] lightly touching his [weapon] clipped to his [clippable article of clothing].
"Trap" did nothing but reinforce this cliché, and I hunkered down for a slog of a novella.
Instead, I got a reasonably interesting, technical tale about peaceably dealing with implacable aliens, who possess an unbeatable weapon. In this case, the planet is a swampy wasteland, the aliens have the ability to teleport anywhere they've been before, and the humans and Centrans (in an alliance since the 1956 story, "Paradise Planet") must find a way to make peace before the aliens find a way to teleport onto every ship and planet in both empires.
It starts a bit slow, but I found myself compelled. Certainly better than the fare Anvil usually offers us in Analog. Three stars.
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, by R. E. Allen
How does Mannie supply all the movies and music producers with the top talent? Why, by dowsing over each of the actor's/musician's headshots with a divining rod, of course!
Not much of a story. Not much science fiction. Two stars.
They're Trying to Tell Us Something (part 1 of 2), by Thomas R. McDonough
This month's science article is on those enigmatic, recently discovered interstellar radio beacons known as pulsars. Beeping on the radio dial on the average of once a second (some are faster, some are slower), they are significant for their unwaveringly precise timing and for their enormous power output—some one billion times the power output of all of Earth's civilizations!
There is a lot of interesting information in this article, but what annoys me is that McDonough seems convinced that pulsars are the work of "Little Green Men" (LGM), and presents his article accordingly. Nowhere in the piece is the general accepted wisdom that the regularity of the signals and the fact that they seem to carry no information (not to mention their tremendous power) indicates that pulsars are rapidly rotating stars, and likely rapidly rotating, collapsed dead stars called "neutron stars".
This isn't esoteric knowledge I gleaned from The Astrophysical Journal—it's from the Sunday Supplement of Escondido's rag of a paper, The Times-Advocate. So, its exclusion from McDonough's piece must be conscious, and that makes his arguments suspect. Perhaps he'll discuss neutron stars in the next piece, but they really should have been front and center.
Three stars.
Minitalent, by Tak Hallus
by Leo Summers
Alice Culligan, third mate and computer officer on the space ship Iphigenia, witnessed a crime: gun runners had smuggled cruel "nervers" to a race of aborigines. They were caught, but the company they're working for looks to get away scott free. They will do anything to ensure that verdict—including silencing Miss Culligan forever.
But Alice has an ace up her sleeve: a minor talent for telekinetics. And in a computerized world, sometimes a little push is all that's needed…
Similarly premised as Larry Niven's sublime "The Organleggers", this tale (Tak Hallus' first) is not as deftly told. That said, it is pretty good, and I liked the heroine very much. It's clearly in the vein of, say, James H. Schmitz, so if you like him, you'll like this.
By the way, Tak Hallus is simply Arabic for "pseudonym", so who knows? Maybe it really is Schmitz!
An assassin named Jagen performs a job and, with the help of a teleportation system, escapes The Great Despot's justice. But is there any ultimate evasion the efficient robot machines of the Despot's police force?
The well-written piece is really a setup for the philosophical question posed at the end. The answer is surprising for such a libertarian mag as editor Campbell's.
And now, the conclusion of Wolfling. By Gordy Dickson.
Jim Weil, archaeologist and Ace of All Trades (the term "bannou" (万能) is even more appropriate), had infiltrated the High-Born empire he was sent to detachedly examine, becoming a general in its armies. Having discovered a plot to destroy the imperial warrior race of Starkiens, Jim quickly returned to the throne world to thwart a plot on the Emperor, himself. He is successful in defeating the pretender, the Emperor's cousin, but now he must return to Earth and face treason charges for possibly incurring the imperial wrath on humanity.
In a dramatic courtroom scene, Jim explains his actions, how they saved the Earth, and the true origin of humanity vis. a vis. the High-Born. Did we come from them, or did they come from us?
The answer is rather disappointing, more along the lines of something I'd expect written in the pulp era than modern times. In addition, all of the energy-saber dueling seemed unnecessary; when everyone can teleport at whim, how do you keep your foe in the same room long enough to dispatch him? Or keep your foe from materializing behind you?
But most of all, I had expected a statement against eugenics, but instead got something of a defense of it. If not for the skilled writing, I might rate it more poorly.
Three stars for the serial as a whole.
On to the numbers!
You know, it's been quite a month! With Analog clocking in at 3.4 stars, it's near the top of the heap rather than taking its usual place in the middle. Ahead of it were Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.4) and IF (3.5). The good news is, the spread was pretty narrow: Galaxy scored 3.3, New Worlds 3.2, New Writings 14 3. Only Amazing scored below the three-line (2.7), and it was still better than usual.
In other vital statistics, women produced 11% of the new fictional content. The superior stuff this month would fill three full-sized magazines. Given that there were seven published this month, that's a good ratio.
Stay tuned for the end of next month when we find out how April's magazines do…and how Mariner 7 flies!
Is ten books a record for the Galactoscope? Lucky we have so many folks reading furiously for the Journey. And it's a good thing, because amidst the dross and mediocrity, there's a couple of gems…
Kate Wilhelm is perhaps better known for her debut short story, "The Mile-Long Spaceship" (1963) and Clone (1965), the Hugo Award nominated novel written in collaboration with Theodore L. Thomas. Perhaps you've read her work in Orbit, edited by her husband, Damon Knight.
The ominous title of this book, Let the Fire Fall, promises fire, brimstone, and a violent alien invasion—but the bad guys in this story aren't the extraterrestrials. The plot: A spaceship inhabited by pregnant alien women lands in small town America. The aliens are friendly, and clearly hope to be welcome on this new planet they’ve discovered. One vile and opportunistic man named Obie Cox– under normal circumstances, a small-town philanderer of no account, blessed with uncommon charisma–manages to worm his way to the pulpit. One there, he takes advantage of humanity’s rampant xenophobia and the ineffectuality of Earth’s bureaucracy through flat-out lies, hate, and fear mongering. What he wants is control and he achieves that by weaponizing humanity’s worst traits and using them to brainwash the populace and plunging the world into dystopian chaos.
At first, Wilhelm’s strangely familiar-feeling and deliberately matter-of-fact writing style, peppered with many clever twists of phrase, seems to capture the spirit of Ray Bradbury or an episode of the Twilight Zone. What we get, instead, is a riveting and decidedly tragic tale of First Contact gone awry in a world populated by an almost irredeemable cast of humans.
Wilhelm’s courage and ambitiousness in attempting to capture the vile side of human nature is admirable. Still, even a forward thinking and imaginative author such as herself cannot seem to escape the discriminatory views of our time. Let the Fire Fall perpetuates the sexist view that women must be submissive to men and even the women important to the plot are given no initiative to steer their own destinies. While Wilhelm is progressive enough to acknowledge the existence of homosexuals, the way she characterizes homosexuality as one of the “vices” permitted by the villainous Obie Cox’s vaunted religion suggests a personal disapproval of such individuals. (To be fair, what her characters feel, even the "good" ones, doesn't necessarily reflect Wilhelm's feelings on a subject.)
In any wise, Let the Fire Fall is an excellently written novel. The author’s insight and ability to imagine a dark future, all too possible, are incredible. I love this book but I hated reading it. The way it mirrors our current reality where opportunistic charlatans have risen to political power by preying on the gullibility of the American populace fills me with trepidation. Let the Fire Fall is an insidiously horrifying and damning condemnation of the human race. This book will make you squirm and fret about the world as we know it, and the future of our species. You will not feel comfortable reading this book. You should not.
Daphne du Maurier has been a favourite of mine for a long while. I read Rebecca in my teens and have slowly been building up a collection of her writings. However, she has only had one truly SFnal release to date, the marvellous collection The Apple Tree, most notable for containing the original short story of The Birds.
That was until this year, when she followed in the footsteps of fellow literary darlings Naomi Mitchison and Virginia Woolf and put out a book on a mainstay of science fiction, time travel.
Dick Young goes down to visit his old university friend Professor Magnus Lane in Cornwall. Dick agrees to be the test subject of the Professor’s new alchemical invention and finds himself transported back in time to the era of Edward III’s infancy. The story follows Dick and Magnus’ trips back and forth between the 14th and 20th centuries.
What Du Maurier always does well is give a real sense of atmosphere to her tales. As is usual in her books Cornwall takes on the mysterious atmosphere of Bronte’s Yorkshire and Doyle’s Dartmoor: a strange wild place where anything can happen. She also illustrates well the sense of dislocation Dick feels moving between the periods, making him feel like an outsider in both.
Cover by Susan Einzig
And yet, I don’t feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting here. The children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden explores similar themes better for me. Also, in spite of the period being underserved in historical narratives, I didn’t feel like I gained much more insight or understanding of it than I would have done from an encyclopedia summary.
This almost reads like one of those historical stories that had a touch of added SFnal content to get into the magazines. Of course, that is not the case here (DuMaurier could release her shopping list and it would be a best seller) and this is still a good read, but I did not feel like it is doing anything exceptional nor is it destined to be one of my favourites.
As John Carnell has now edited as many editions of New Writings as Ian Flemming wrote James Bond novels, he is entitled to enjoy himself. As such, he says this volume is entirely composed of stories he personally loved, rather than mixing in some he knew were good but not to his taste. But how much do my feelings ally with his?
Blood Brother by James White
We start with the always reliable James White with another tale of Sector General.
Following on from Vertigo, a team is returning with Surreshun to “Meatball” to assess the species' medical needs and to locate the manufacturers of their responsive organic tools. Unfortunately, the native entities of the planet believe that Surreshun was kidnapped by the crew of the Descartes and are not keen to let this happen again.
This once again is a fascinating exercise from White, trying to imagine a wholly alien species from our understanding and the problems it could cause. The natives of “Meatball” have an inbuilt dislike of anything similar to themselves and have no central form of government but exist in a deep layer of animal life. How to communicate ideas like friendship to a species like that is a true challenge.
What White is always great at is giving us a sense of how diverse the species in the Galactic Federation are, whilst still making it seem like an everyday occurrence at the hospital. For example:
Despite the fact that one species was covered in thick silver fur and crawled like a giant caterpillar and the other resembled a six-legged elephant, they were fairly easy to deal with because they had the same atmosphere and gravity requirements as Conway. But he was also responsible for a small ward of Hudlars, beings with hide like flexible armour plate whose artificial gravity system was set at five Gs and whose atmosphere was a dense high-pressure fog – and the odd-ball TLTU classification entity hailing from he knew not where who breathed superheated steam. It took more than a few hours to tidy up such a collection of loose ends…
He continues to know what he does well and produces the most consistently strong series currently ongoing in Science Fiction.
Four Stars
If You're So Smart by Paul Corey
Ibby has a mental disability and suffers from regular seizures, so lives permanently at a mental hospital. He also helps out in the animal testing lab. However, he may be able to understand the animals better than the scientists.
A pedestrian tale, poorly told. Whilst I have heard that Corey is an American writer and journalist of some renown, I am only familiar with him from his awful appearance in New Worlds earlier in the decade. Apparently he has an SF novel out from Robert Hale but this isn’t inspiring me to pick it up.
A low Two Stars
The Ballad of Luna Lil by Sydney J. Bounds
Gerard The Rhymer wrote The Ballad of Luna Lil many centuries ago. This work analyses the historical accuracy of the tale to the real life of Captain Bartholomew “Black Bart” Sparrow, a space free trader, and Lily La Lune, singing star of the videos.
I am a great lover of analyses of fictional works and this one doesn’t disappoint. It turns what could be a standard pulpy adventure into an exploration of a fictional universe, containing fascinating ideas and raising questions about the power of art.
A high Four Stars
The Eternity Game by Vincent King
In a tale told from four perspectives (A, G, P & Z), two different species find themselves in the Place, attempting to survive in their collapsing galaxy.
We learn from the introduction that Vincent King is also a visual artist and Carnell describes this work as being like an abstract painting. I am not sure I agree with that, it is certainly not as obscure as some of the writings of Ballard, Burroughs, or Farmer. Rather, you have a puzzle that fits together by the end.
I don’t think it is quite as effective as his usual Medieval Futurism, but still a worthy piece.
Four Stars
Tilt Angle by R. W. Mackelworth
The Earth has entered a new Ice Age, and Tomas and Donna are sent on a mission from the City to find food stores. But is this parasitic existence right or sustainable?
Another one of these Frozen Earth tales that have been popping up a lot recently in the UK (we do like to moan about the weather). Whilst evocatively told, it feels abrupt and incomplete. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw further stories in this world.
Three Stars
The Song of Infinity by Domingo Santos
Once again we have a work in translation, this time from a Spanish author. He is apparently well known in his own country but I am not aware of any prior translations into English. This one was selected and translated by the late great Arthur Sellings.
We get the internal monologue of an astronaut who finds himself accidentally floating through space without any hope of rescue.
This is a well told and melancholic tale but one that nevertheless didn’t really affect me as much as I felt it was trying to.
Three Stars
Green Five Renegade by M. John Harrison
Astronaut of the Green 5, Chad Redeem, encounters alien life forms. Discovering them to be naïve and peaceful compared to the human race, he goes on the run rather than risk his knowledge of them becoming known to the authorities.
Oh dear, I am not sure what happened here. Even putting aside some weird printing errors, it is overwritten, cliché driven and full of creepy descriptions of women. I know Harrison can do a lot better so I am surprised to see this come from his pen.
One Star
So, the good ship New Writings continues steadily on its course. Some good works, some poorer, still generally very much in Carnell’s usual mode. Much the same crew manning the rigging with nary a woman in sight*. Whilst it may not always be the most exciting voyage, it shows little signs of leakage. Onward!
*I believe it has now been over 5 years since Carnell published a story by a woman, the last being Dial SCH 1828 by Gweneth Penn-Bull in December ‘63’s Science Fantasy.
by Gideon Marcus
Ace Double 72400
The High Hex, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Here is the sequel to Target: Terra that nobody asked for. In this one, the African space station has begun broadcasting a menacing message, all chants and tribal drums, that seems to presage a heating up of the White/Black cold war. The crew of Space Station 1 are recalled to duty and tasked with infiltrating the second station. The plot is thickened with robots and destructive aliens, and the Africans aren't the bad guys after all.
If you enjoyed the gaggish and frivolous tone of the first book, you'll like this one. Otherwise…you won't.
If you read and enjoyed the four stories of John Grimes, a space captain running the rim of galactic space, then this is an opportunity to get all of them in one convenient package. In this fix-up, they are unchanged, with only short concluding scenes added to each piece to link them together.
They all appeared in IF, where David gave them three stars apiece. I see no reason to change his assessment.
by Victoria Silverwolf
War And No Peace
Two new novels deal with armed conflict, international or domestic. One takes place in the very recent past, but not the one with which we're familiar. The other is set in the near future, one we'd like to avoid. Let's start with something that didn't happen less than two years ago.
If Israel Lost the War, by Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littell
Uncredited cover art.
In the tradition of Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore (the Confederacy wins the American Civil War) and The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick (the Axis wins the Second World War), this book reverses the result of a war.
The title makes that obvious, of course. We're talking about the so-called Six Day War (June 5 through 10, 1967), in which Israel triumphed over a coalition of Arab nations.
I know less about military stuff than almost anybody, so I won't try to analyze the war. However, there seems to be general agreement that Israel's preemptive strike, devastating the Egyptian Air Force and giving Israel complete control over the skies, was a key factor in the victory.
What if Israel didn't attack first? What if Arab forces destroyed most of Israel's air power instead?
That's the premise of the novel. The result is overwhelming victory for the Arab nations, with Israel's territory soon being divided up among them.
The book's map, showing the progress of the imagined conflict.
The occupying forces initiate a reign of terror. As in many wars, looting, rape, and murder follow the victory. The big winner is Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who dominates his allies and intends to create a new, bigger United Arab Republic.
(The UAR was the name given to the union of Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961. The United Arab Republic is still the official name of the nation better known as Egypt.)
As I said, I'm no expert on war, so I don't know how plausible this scenario might be. It assumes closely coordinated action among the Arab states, which is questionable. It also presumes that Arab aircraft would be able to bypass Israel's early warning defense system. (There are even some lines in the book that indicate that this is unlikely.)
So how is the book as a work of fiction? Well, given the fact that the three authors are journalists (all working for Newsweek), it's no surprise that it reads like nonfiction. There are a few minor fictional characters, but all the major ones are real people. We follow politicians and military leaders from Israel, the Arab nations, the USA, and the USSR.
The work is obviously very pro-Israel. (Richard Z. Chesnoff is married to an Israeli woman, and used to live on a kibbutz.) Whether one sees the book as reasoned justification for Israel's preemptive strike, or as anti-Arab propaganda, it is sure to stir up controversy. Judged strictly on its literary merits, I'd have to say that it's readable enough. The authors are definitely more interested in getting their message across than in creating a work of art.
Three stars.
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Let's turn from an imaginary past to a speculative future.
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillion.
The race problem in the United States is much worse in the year 2014 than it was in our own time. Some cities (Detroit, Washington, etc.) are under the control of kneeblanks, while others are still firmly dominated by blanks.
Oh, you're not familiar with those terms? Maybe it'll help if I point out that blank is derived from the Afrikaans word blanc (white) and that kneeblank (often just knee) comes from nieblanc (not white.)
This is a sample of the book's futuristic terminology, which takes some time to get used to. It's not as difficult as the slang in A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, but it requires a little effort.
Anyway, ordinary citizens are forced to defend themselves with serious weapons, supplied by arms dealers. The dominant supplier of deadly devices is a family-run corporation that resembles the Mafia.
That's the background. What about the story? Well, it's complicated. There are a lot of important characters and a lot of plot threads. Let me try to come up with a greatly oversimplified synopsis.
There's a psychiatric institute under the direction of a megalomaniac who treats his patients with extreme isolation from society. One of the inmates is a kneeblank soldier who suffered a breakdown in war, but who now seems perfectly sane. In fact, he's an electronics genius.
A woman who produces enigmatic prophecies while under the influence of drugs (as in ancient times, she's called a pythoness) performs at the institute. A fellow who exposes scandals on television (the book calls him a spoolpigeon) records her act. He also happens to be married to one of the patients.
Meanwhile, a kneeblank spoolpigeon gets kicked out of Detroit by the city's kneeblank mayor, at the instigation of a blank South African. (The tragic situation of apartheid is still going strong in 2014.)
In addition to that, a kneeblank revolutionary who put kneeblanks in control of much of the United Kingdom is on his way to the United States. Even though US officials are terrified of him, he easily gets through customs.
What does this all have to do with a secret project of the arms dealers? Suffice to say that the kneeblank soldier I mentioned above isn't what he seems to be.
I've only given you a vague hint of what the novel is like. In addition to the convoluted plot, there's the narrative style. The first two chapters, for example, consist of a single word split into two parts. Many of the chapter titles are very long and often satiric. In the middle of the book, Brunner provides quotes from real newspaper articles about the American race problem.
The climax involves science fiction themes that are more speculative than those found earlier in the book. These may strain the reader's suspension of disbelief.
This novel isn't as groundbreaking as the author's stunning masterwork Stand on Zanzibar, but it's pretty close in quality.
Four stars.
by David Levinson
A Familiar Refrain
In music, it’s common for artists to cover an old standard or just something someone else has already done. Usually, they have a different approach that may be about the same, worse, or better. Once in a while, they’ll take an old song and make entirely their own (Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra have a singular talent for this).
There’s a similar phenomenon in science fiction. Someone comes up with an interesting idea—time travel, alien invasion, what have you—and eventually almost everybody tries to see what they can do with the concept. Harry Harrison’s latest novel is just such a work. How well did he do?
Two Aztec villages lie on either side of a river in a valley long isolated from the outside world. We soon learn that things are not as they seem. The serpent-headed goddess Coatlicue is a physical presence that stalks the river bank at night, and typical Aztec features include blonde hair and blue eyes.
Into this world is born Chimal, a young man with a penchant for asking uncomfortable questions. When he inadvertently causes the death of the high priest (and the sun fails to rise, because there is no one to say the necessary prayer), Chimal must flee the valley. The society he finds outside the valley is no less hidebound and no fonder of questions with uncomfortable answers.
Although I’ve talked around it for the benefit of those who would like to experience the surprise on their own, I suspect many of you have figured out what’s going on. Although Harrison adds one or two interesting flourishes, the novel follows the expected course to one of the standard endings. Indeed, the story follows such a predictable course, I found myself more interested in what happened centuries earlier to create the situation or what is going to happen a few decades after the end.
Is it worth your time? Maybe. Is it worth your money? Definitely not, especially not at hardback prices.
Dickson has been busy as of late, with his serial Wolfling currently running in Analog, and with a new paperback original alongside it. Spacepaw is a less serious novel and seems to be aimed at a younger readership, which is fine by me. It takes place on Dilbia, the same planet featured in Dickson's 1961 novel Special Delivery. Like that earlier novel it features the Dilbians, a race of nine-foot-tall bear-like aliens who are not exactly hostile but who certainly have a curious way of going about things.
Bill Waltham is an agriculture scientist sent to Dilbia, supposedly to meet up with Lafe Greentree, his on-site superior, and Anita Lyme, a "trainee assistant" working under Greentree. The problem (actually two problems) is that Greentree is not here: he had sustained an injury whose severity the off-planet hospital is strangely vague about disclosing, and Anita has been taken captive by a pack of Dilbian outlaws. The only possible help Waltham can get are the mischievous Dilbian the Hill Bluffer (that's his name, the Hill Bluffer) and a Hemnoid named Mula-ay (italics not mine). The Hill Bluffer is not terribly useful and Mula-ay seems to be working for a third party—in Waltham's favor or not remains to be seen.
This novel is basically a comedy of manners. To rescue Lyme and convince the Dilbians to pick up agricultural skills (the race is a rural lot that lives off the fat o' the land), Waltham will have to adapt to Dilbian customs. The black-furred giants are a comical lot, with silly names like More Jam, Perfectly Delightful, and Grandpa Squeaky; they even give Waltham a Dilbian name, "Pick-and-Shovel," which the serious-minded human does not appreciate. The leader of the outlaws, Bone Breaker, is pretty affable despite his name and occupation. The stakes are kept somewhat low, even when Waltham is duped into accepting a duel to the death, which is fitting for a comedy, even if doesn't leave the reader with much to think about.
Dickson's brand of humor is unlikely to spark laughter, but it's effective at often invoking a smirk. Waltham himself is a bit of a wet blanket, but the comedy mostly stems from this straight-laced hero type being forced to deal with some deeply unserious aliens. Lyme is a bit of a shrew, but Dickson does write her as competent and independent-minded, even if I suspect he does not think very highly of her.
A solid three out of five stars, possibly four for young readers.
A good deal less enjoyable is a new Gothic horror novel I picked up, by an author I've never heard of before. Despite having been published this year, The Tormented reads like a fossilized dinosaur, but not one of the interesting ones. It's a pastiche of late-19th century supernatural horror. I'm sure Daniels likes Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle, but unfortunately she is not remotely as good a wordsmith as James or even Doyle.
Sharon Aldrich lived on a New Orleans plantation called The Pillars until both her parents died, and it turns out all the money had dried up. After a stint or two abroad she returns to The Pillars as governess for a new family that's moved in, the Beaumonts. Craig Beaumont and his wife Emily are stuck in a loveless marriage while Emily's sister, Sarah, tags along as a third wheel. Cassie, Craig's daughter, is a reasonably well-adjusted child despite the fact that she had witnessed a horrific death in the family not long ago. And there seems to be a ghost problem on the plantation. The place is most certainly haunted (it takes all of about five minutes upon Sharon's arriving for a ghost to start whispering in her ear), and worse yet, Sharon must now deal with a dysfunctional upper-class family.
You would think that at only 160 pages this would be a densely packed narrative, but it's not. There's quite a bit of padding. Most of the wordage is dialogue, with characters often getting into arguments with each other and then almost immediately apologizing for causing a fuss. Emily and Sarah are major shrews, and Sharon is not much better. It soon becomes clear Sharon and Craig like each other but are hesitant to take action, what with the whole marriage thing. Even the ghost does not pose much of a threat. No wonder the Confederacy lost. The Tormented is probably a few thousand words longer than James's The Turn of the Screw, but feels shorter because it spins its wheels so often. Not much actually happens, and despite the New Orleans setting Daniels injects practically no atmosphere into her writing.
The most damning part is that this is 1969, not 1889. I kept thinking, "Why play such an old and tired genre straight? What point is Daniels trying to make by doing this?" After having read the whole thing, I still don't know.
Winter is the wet season for Southern California, and we've been just drenched these past weeks. I understand seven inches of rain fell in the Los Angeles area, causing terrible mudslides, property damage, and injury. Apparently, things were made worse by a spate of arson last year that got rid of the stabilizing undergrowth.
Ontario's Foothill Boulevard looking west toward Red Hill Country Club Drive, flooded. (Daily Report photo)
I've had many friends ask if we're alright, afraid we might have been swept downstream in the torrent. Rest assured that Vista is disaster-proof (knock on wood), and our house is at the top of a hill. We had some deep pools of water in the backyard, but they've since drained. Our neighbors have gotten invaded by bugs seeking refuge from the storm, though.
A man runs past a station wagon that was washed two blocks down Carnelian Avenue, along with part of the road surface. (Daily Report photo)
Ups and Downs
If the physical world is getting washed away, one edifice that manages to stand firmly, if not always proudly, is Analog, science fiction's most popular magazine. Has this month's issue slid at all, or is it holding fast? let's see:
A Womanly Talent, by Anne McCaffrey
by Kelly Freas
We're back in the world of psionic talents, perhaps related to the stories that involve ladies in towers. A pair of politicians want to pass a law protecting and enabling the psionically adept, legitimizing things like professional prognosticators and psychic manipulators. A Luddite strawman, name of Zeusman, is against it.
Meanwhile. Ruth is the wife of Lajos, a precog. She is frustrated because she has an unidentified talent, and also because she really wants to be a mom. Eventually, the latter frustration is relieved, and her daughter ends up demonstrating what Ruth's power really is.
Aside from the tale beginning with ten pages of conversation that reads more like a Socratic dialogue than a story, I just find McCaffrey's writing so flat and amateur. I'm sure all the psi stuff was music to editor Campbell's ears, including lines like "Those who truly understand psionic power need no explanation. Those who need explanation will never understand," but it doesn't work for me. Beyond that, McCaffrey's attitudes on the relations of the sexes is so atavistic, although I suppose she gets points for talking about sex at all. Maybe Campbell likes that, too.
Two stars.
You'll Love the Past, by J. R. Pierce
by Leo Summers
A time traveler from the 21st Century takes a trip in a time machine to the 24th Century. A war has transformed society: America is now largely mixed race, with the whitest of the population an inbred and stupid group. Socially, the continent is organized into placid socialist cooperatives run by religious Brothers, advanced technology provided by the Japanese. It's the sort of world one can be happy in…provided one is favored by the status quo. Every so often, one of the non-favored tries to escape.
Not a bad story, even if it seems to be obliquely casting aspersions on Communists of darker hue.
Three stars.
The Man Who Makes Planets, by G. Harry Stine
by Leo Summers
Yet another piece set in the (anti-) Utopian future of People's Capitalism, where North America has become a stratified welfare state, and money is a thing of the past.
Rex, last of the private dicks, is engaged by a government minister to find out who stole the plans for a miniaturized nuclear bomb, and why said criminal is blackmailing him, threatening to distribute the plans should a ransom not be paid promptly.
The solution to this mystery is actually trivial, and the story isn't quite long enough for what it's trying to do. Nevertheless, I always find this setting interesting. And perhaps prescient. There was piece in last week's newspaper about the National Urban League's proposal for a universal income…
Back in part one, Jim Kiel was sent from Earth to study the intergalactic empire whose fringes were discovered when a Terran probe made it to Alpha Centauri. An anthropologist and ubermensch, Jim is essentially a spy, though the High Born of the empire don't know that—they think that he's an interesting curiosity, favored for his bullfighting skills and independent thinking.
This installment begins just after Jim's first encounter with the Emperor, a genial, capable man who, nevertheless, seemed to suffer a stroke. A stroke that no one but Jim noticed. Much of this middle installment is devoted to Jim's navigation of High Born society, attempting to master the reading machines to determine if Earth really is a long-lost colony of the empire or something else, and also how he discovers and foils an insurrection attempt with designs on incapacitating the empire's leader. In the last portion, Jim is promoted to the equivalent of a Brigadier General and sent to quell a rebellion. This is actually a trap designed to kill him, but he neatly sidesteps it. Now he wants to know why he's marked for death.
The pot continues to boil. There's a lot of the flavor of Dickson's Dorsai series, but with a different, perhaps even more interesting, setting.
Four stars.
A Chair of Comparative Leisure, by Robin Scott
by Leo Summers
A stammering professor somehow manages to be the most magnetic, as well as effective at conveying information. Does his technique go beyond the verbal?
(Yes. He has the power of psychic projection. Whoopee. Two stars.)
Calculating the damage
You win some, you lose some, and this month's issue clocks in at exactly three stars. While nothing could compare with the superlative four-star Fantasy and Science Fiction, three stars is still lower than New Worlds (3.3) and Galaxy (3.2). It does beat out IF (2.8) and Fantastic (2.2), however.
You could fill as many as three issues with good stuff out of the six that were put out—in large part thanks to how great F&SF was this month. Nevertheless, women contributed very little of that, with only 6.67% of new fiction written by female writers, most of that Anne McCaffrey's drudge of a story.
Still, in an uncertain world, I can't complain too much. Especially since, mudslides or no, the Post Office still manages to get me my magazines on time!
First, there was the stirring flight of Apollo 8, a bit of unmitigated good that gave the holiday season additional poignancy. And then, just last week, the crew of the Pueblo were finally released. Vietnam peace talks appear to be stumbling forward.
On a more personal level, I got to prepare the Galactic Stars for the year, which involves reading all of the four and five star stories recommended by my colleagues. For one month, everything I read is terrific.
It is in this euphoric mode that I get ready for tonight's New Year's celebration…and present to you the last of this month's magazines, the January 1969 Analog.
A galaxy-spanning empire makes contact with Earth. Amazingly, the denizens of the sprawling star-society appear to be humans, though the ruling caste is distinctive due to selective breeding—onyx white, seven feet tall, and brilliant. Because of the clear relation between the species, the prevailing belief is that Earth is some kind of lost colony.
by Kelly Freas
James Keil, bullfighter extraordinaire, is adopted by the High-born for display at the Throne World. Keil is also a trojan horse, dispatched by the United Nations to gather information about the non-alien aliens.
The hidebound High-born possess tremendous powers, from teleportation to matter conversion, but they are also just as petty and Machiavelian as any Earthers. Keil's only ally is Ro, a (comparatively) dark-skinned High-born tasked with caring for the High-born queen's menagerie.
Dickson spins an interesting tale, detailing how the "Wolfling", Keil, walks the diplomatic tightrope, navigating a literal lion's den all through his FTL journey to the heart of the galaxy. Though the story featueres eugenics, it is clear that the tale is an indictment rather than an endorsement. Of course, the message might have been more strongly made were Keil's surname "Chang" or "Ojukwu".
Four stars so far.
The Hidden Ears, by Lawrence A. Perkins
by Leo Summers
A renegade UFO on the lam breaks through the cordon placed around Earth by the interstellar fuzz, taking refuge in the barn of a rural homestead. The cops scratch their carapaced heads for a while, until they figure out a way to locate the hidden fugitive. The genuinely amusing conclusion is the one bright spot in an otherwise frivolous story.
Two stars.
The Other Culture, by Ted Thomas
by Kelly Freas
If ever the word "pedestrian" described a story, it's now. Thomas strings the most colorless sentences together, most of which are superfluous, and none of which are more than adequate.
The plot? The Weather Council has to decide who will be prioritized for the increasingly demanded amount of world rainfall. Because, as we all know, that's the kind of minor issue that is solved at a single conference.
That would be silly enough, except for the bombshell dropped about a quarter-way into the story: continental drift is suddenly speeding up, and all land masses will reunite as Pangaea in half a century.
Turns out this (ludicrous) plan is the work of BROW, the Brotherhood of the World, a rival underground (no pun intended) society. But this potentially disastrous plan also, fortuitously, contains the solution to the water problem.
"Culture" is a talky, ridiculous story with no merits whatsoever. It makes no scientific sense—moving continents around like bumper cars will produce a million 1906 San Franciscos—and the prose is dull as dishwater, as are all of the "characters".
One star.
"On a Gold Vesta … ", by Robert S. Richardson
This is a pretty neat piece about how we measure the density, size, and albedo (reflectiveness) of the myriad minor planets in the solar system. All of these values are related, and without a firm grasp of at least one of them, it's virtually impossible to estimate the others. A little short, but valuable.
Four stars.
Classicism, by Murray Yaco
by Kelly Freas
It's been eight years since we last heard from Mr. Yaco, and quite frankly, he might as well have stayed in hiding. This is the "funny" tale of a young engineer from the last planet that believes in "classical economics". He is sent to the big universe to become a cog in the command economy—specifically, to manage planet-wide garbage operations. In his spare time, he works on perfecting a teleportation system, which he hopes to sell at great profit.
Too silly to be truly offensive; too lightweight to be worth your time. Two stars.
Krishna, by Guy McCord
by Kelly Freas
Last year, Mack Reynolds…er… "Guy McCord" wrote a tale about Caledonia, a strange planet that was an odd combination of Scots and American Indian societies. Krishna is a direct sequel, and a much better (though incomplete) story.
John of the Hawks is now a man, Raid Cacique for his clan, in fact, when Outworlders return. The villain of the last piece, Mr. Harmon, is now wearing the black cloak of an acolyte of Krisha. His ship, the Revelation, houses a bunch of missionaries who offer cures to all diseases if only they will partake of soma, a powerful hallucinogen. Those who ingest soma become peaceful, one with Krishna…but also sterile and apathetic. Obviously, such is anathema to the hardscrabble, lusty Caledonians.
"McCord" balances the clan politics with the Outplanet menace much better this time around, and John's endeavor to "steal" Alice Thompson for a bride is pretty gripping. I don't mind that this novella is obviously the first (second?) installment in a novel, and I look forward to the next one.
Four stars.
We rate it
The word for this month is "vicissitudes". On the face of it, none of the magazines did very well—Analog finished at 2.9 stars, well above Amazing (2.4 stars), but below New Worlds (3 stars), Galaxy (3.1 stars), IF (3.2 stars), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.3 stars).
Yet, every mag save Amazing had at least one four-star story in it. Several had more than one. If you took all the good stuff this month, you could fill two magazines with it and have some quite good reading ahead of you. Women contributed 12% of the new fiction published, which is on the high end.
So, a foreboding or auspicious sign for the New Year, depending on whether you fill your scotch half full or half empty with soda. Either way, here's looking forward to a lovely 1969 with you all. May your holiday season be bright!
![[April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (<em>Infinity One</em>, edited by Robert Hoskins)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ANCL00221-400x372.jpg)
![[March 4, 1970] Harry's Heroes (<em>Nova 1</em>, edited by Harry Harrison)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NVFCNDXTDF1970-421x372.jpg)
![[November 2, 1969] Love and Hate (December 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/IF-1969-12-Cover-505x372.jpg)
l. Soviet Foreign Minister Alexei Kosygin, r. Chinese Foreign Minister Chou Enlai
Vaguely suggested by Ancient, My Enemy. Art by Gaughan
Hehog taunts Kiev. Art probably by Gaughan
The doomed couple study the map room. Art by Gaughan
A crackpot’s time machine. Art probably by Gaughan
I don’t know if this is a printing error or a deliberate choice, but it’s awfully hard to read. Art by Gaughan
Waiting rooms will never change. Art probably by Gaughan
Art by Gaughan
The hero and an ally fight an invader. Art by Gaughan
Sounds like the big story would have fit right in this month.![[May 31, 1969] When eras collide (June 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/690531analogcover-665x372.jpg)
![[May 16, 1969] Strange Dreams (May Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/690516covers-672x372.jpg)
![[April 12, 1969] A New Venture (May 1969 <i>Venture</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Venture-1969-05-Cover-494x372.jpg)
The first and last covers for the first run of Venture. Art in both by Ed Emshwiller
This singularly unattractive cover is by Bert Tanner.
I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s almost the only art in the issue. Art by Bert Tanner![[March 1, 1969] Beyond this Horizon (March 1969 <i>Analog</i> and Mariner 6)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690301cover-672x372.jpg)
![[February 18, 1969] (February Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690218covers-672x372.jpg)
Art by Paul Lehr
![[January 28, 1969] Slidin' (February 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690128cover-672x372.jpg)
A Womanly Talent, by Anne McCaffrey
![[December 31, 1968] Auld Lang Syne (January 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/681231cover-672x372.jpg)
