A recent film has made many of us aware of the first year of the next century. But what about the last year of this century?
(You do know that 2000 will be the last year of the twentieth century and not the first year of the twenty-first century, right? I thought so.)
A new anthology of original science fiction stories attempts to offer a glimpse of that evocative year to come.
The Year 2000, edited by Harry Harrison
Cover art by Pat Steir.
Obviously, all the stories take place three decades from now. Other than that, they have a wide range of themes and styles, from old-fashioned tales of adventure to commentary on social issues to New Wave experimentation. Let's take a look.
America the Beautiful, by Fritz Leiber
The narrator is a poet and scholar who travels to the United States on an academic tour. He stays with a typical American family and has an affair with the adult daughter of his hosts. Despite the fact that pollution has been eliminated and racism is no longer a problem, there's something about the place that makes him uneasy. Part of it has to do with the fact that the USA is still involved in small scale wars, similar to the current conflict in Vietnam.
Although there is a fair amount of futuristic content (rocket transportation between North America and Europe, for example), this reads almost like a mainstream story, something that might be published in a future issue of The New Yorker. It's impressionistic and introspective. Given that it's by Leiber, it's no surprise that it's very well written. Perhaps it's a bit too subtle for me.
Three stars.
Prometheus Rebound, by Daniel F. Galouye
An aircraft that uses the Earth's magnetic field gets in trouble. The huge plane, which looks like a flying saucer, keeps gaining altitude, beyond the control of the pilots. Can an elderly veteran flyer of World War Two help the crew save the lives of all aboard?
There's a ton of technical jargon throughout the story, the vast majority of which went way over my head. The plot depends on a character doing something really foolish.
In Kenya, an area formerly used for raising cattle now serves as a wildlife preserve. The main character is a warden who has to prevent elderly people from following their traditional ways by tending cattle in the region. Part of the preserve is an amusement park, something like an African Disneyland. The protagonist visits the space-themed part of the park, which offers hope for his son's future.
The story offers a thoughtful look at culture change. The warden bitterly regrets what has been lost, but also welcomes improvements. He's an ambiguous sort, not always sympathetic, which adds depth of characterization. The author obviously knows the area and its culture very well, and depicts them vividly.
Four stars.
After the Accident, by Naomi Mitchison
The title disaster contaminated the Earth with radiation. Genetic testing is used to find out which persons would be likely to produce offspring without mutations. The narrator, a biologist and historian, meets a man who plans to send colonists to another world. She becomes pregnant with their child, who will have mutations that will allow it to survive on the planet.
This is a quietly disturbing story. The narrator's calm acceptance of the situation and decision to bear a mutant baby are the most chilling aspects of it. The speculative biology is convincing, the stuff about colonizing another planet less so.
Three stars.
Utopian, By Mack Reynolds
A social activist who was in suspended animation wakes up to find that the world has become the kind of paradise he imagined. There's no money, because everybody has everything they need. The folks who revived him tell him what they need from him.
The fellow went into suspended animation only because the people in the year 2000 used a sort of mental time travel to take over his mind and make him abscond with funds from his organization and then freeze himself. I found this aspect of the story gimmicky and implausible compared to the rest. The impact of the piece depends entirely on its punchline.
Two stars.
Orgy of the Living and the Dying, by Brian W. Aldiss
A man leaves his wife in England to work for a United Nations famine relief agency in India. He has an affair with a physician. When the facility is attacked by bandits, he battles them in an unusual way.
This synopsis makes the story sound like mainstream fiction, without futuristic elements. The main speculative premise is that the man hears voices, some of them seemingly precognitive. Excerpts of what he hears alternate with the narrative portion of the text, giving the work a touch of New Wave.
The author creates an evocative setting, if one that could easily be set today rather than in the year 2000. The man's lust for the doctor causes him to force himself on her at one point. It's hard to accept him as a hero later, when he comes up with a technological way to defeat the bandits. (This technique, by the way, is the part of the story that most evokes the feeling of science fiction, even if there is nothing futuristic about it.)
(The book just calls the author Bertram Chandler, but we know better than that, don't we? It's also no surprise at all that it's a sea story.)
A sea captain (of course!) who went into suspended animation for medical reasons gets thawed out, cured, and given a job commanding a gigantic, automated cargo ship. When things go wrong, he has to make use of his experience with sailing ships to save the day.
Chandler can't be beat when it comes to describing nautical stuff, and in this case he doesn't even have to pretend that his vessel is a starship. It may be hard to believe that a guy whose experience with ships is thirty years out of date would be given command of a futuristic vessel. It may also raise a few hackles to learn that the ship's troubles are caused by a female member of the crew, who messes everything up.
Three stars.
Black is Beautiful, by Robert Silverberg
New York City is populated almost entirely by Black persons, with only a few White commuters and tourists. The main character is an angry teenager who sees the mayor of the city as an Uncle Tom. He stalks a White teenager out of a sense of injustice and seeks revenge.
A White author writing from the point of view of a Black radical is taking a big chance, I think, and could be accused of depicting Black stereotypes. In this case, the gamble pays off pretty well. The teenager is passionate but naive, the Mayor cynical but effective. The story might be read as a debate between two styles of Black activism.
Four stars.
Take It or Leave It, by David I. Masson
Two sections of text alternate, both featuring the same characters. In one, they face challenges like local crime bosses and being forced to move in a technologically advanced society. In the other, they struggle to survive in a world devastated by a plague.
This reads almost like two different stories. The first one is full of futuristic slang and nouns used as verbs. (The word visited is replaced by visitationed, for example.) The second one has more direct language, but is very grim. People hunt cats to eat them, for one thing.
The tricks with language make the story difficult to read. Given the title, I wonder if the author is saying that an imperfect future is a lot better than a horrible one. This is one for New Wave fans.
Three stars.
The Lawgiver, by Keith Laumer
As a way to fight overpopulation in the United States, a controversial law makes it mandatory to terminate pregnancies unless the mother-to-be has a birth permit. (There's also the implication that she has to be married.) The Senator who pushed this law through Congress, against much opposition, confronts a woman made pregnant by his son.
Given the fact that abortion is only legal under certain circumstances in a handful of states, it seems unlikely that it would often be mandatory a mere thirty years from now. (And the story makes it clear that the procedure has to take place even if birth is imminent.)
The author doesn't seem to be making a case for or against abortion, as far as I can tell. The plot is melodramatic, throwing in a car crash to add excitement (and maybe some dark irony.) Still, I have to admit that it held my attention throughout.
Three stars.
To Be a Man, by J. J. Coupling
A fellow is seriously injured in battle and has almost all of his body except brain, eyes, and part of his spinal cord replaced by artificial parts, indistinguishable from the original. He returns from the war to confront his lover.
Much of the story consists of exposition, as the man explains in great detail how his new body works. This makes for dry reading. In sharp contrast to this is the sexual content: it seems that the fellow can be programmed to be a tireless sex partner. This results in an outrageous scene in which all the nurses in a battleground medical facility have an orgy with the guy. Pure male fantasy.
Two stars.
Judas Fish, by Thomas N. Scortia
A man works in a deep sea facility, altering the genetics of fish so that they will lead members of their species into the facility's chambers, to be processed into food for a starving world. Squid-like beings, having intelligence at least as great as humans, steal the fish away. The man's capture of one of the creatures leads to a strange transformation.
This is probably the most speculative story in the book, with a common science fiction theme that goes far beyond just extrapolating the next few decades. Not overly plausible, but readable enough if you're willing to suspend your disbelief.
Three stars.
American Dead, by Harry Harrison
Black guerrillas wage open warfare against the United States government, making use of weapons stolen from the military. An Italian journalist observes an assault by one of the Black commanders.
This is a gruesome vision of the worst possible outcome of current racial tensions in the USA. The manner in which the rebels fight is clearly based on tactics used by the Viet Cong. A powerful and disturbing tale.
Four stars.
Worth Waiting Thirty Years?
Overall, the book is OK, if not great. Some low points, some high points, mostly decent stories if not outstanding ones. Worth reading once, but don't expect it to be in print three decades from now.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
All night long
Woody Allen likes to quip that being "bi-sexual" (liking both men and women) doubles of your chance of getting a date on the weekend.
NASA has just doubled the amount of weather they can look at in a single launch. TIROS-M (does the "M" stand for "Mature"?) was launched from California on January 23rd into a two-hour orbit over the poles. 12 times a day, it circles the Earth, which rotates underneath. Unlike the last 19 TIROS satellites, TIROS-M can see in the dark. That means it gets and transmits a worldwide view of the weather twice a day rather than once.
More than that, the satellite is called the "space bus" because it carries a number of other experiments, measuring the heat of the Earth as well as solar proton radiation. Launched "pickaback" with TIROS-M was Oscar 5, an Aussie satellite that broadcasts on a couple of bands so ham radio fans can track signals from orbit. Maybe Kaye Dee will write more about that one in her next piece!
Clouds got in my way
If the distinctive feature of the Earth as viewed from space is its swaddling blanket of clouds, then perhaps the salient characteristic of this month's Analog is its conspicuous degree of padding. Almost all of the stories are longer than they need to be, at least if their purpose be readability and conveying of point. Of course, more words means more four-cent rate…
Emil Darmody is the manager for the terran trading station on the planet of Suleiman, a sub-jovian hulk of a world with a thick hydrogen atmosphere, primitive alien inhabitants, and a rare and valuable spice. When Burbites, an off-world alien race who are the main purchasers of the spice, drop robots to harvest the spice themselves, Darmody must find an ingenious way to stop them without inciting an interstellar incident. In doing so, he attracts the attention of trade magnate Nicholas Van Rijn, who likes the adventurous sort.
by Kelly Freas
If someone were to ask for a generic example of a story set in the Polesotechnic League, you could do worse than to pick this one. It has all the usual features: compelling astronomy and sufficiently alien beings; a bold, if naive, hero; women as competent professionals; daring-do; and a cameo by the corpulent and lusty Van Rijn.
Three stars.
Dali, for Instance, by Jack Wodhams
by Peter Skirka
And now, the padding begins. Golec is a truly alien being who wakes up one day in the form of a human on present-day Earth. Eventually, he recalls that the mind transference was intentional, a form of reconnaissance. The problem is, it's not reversible, and he finds his new body disgusting. Knowing that there may be others of his race on the planet in the same predicament, he seeks them out. Golec is told that he might as well go native. Things could be worse.
All of this should have been a one-page prelude to an actual story.
Two stars.
The Wind from a Star, by Margaret L. Silbar
I'm very happy to see Ms. Silbar back, as her last piece, on quarks, was excellent. This time, she talks about a topic near and dear to my heart: the solar wind.
I've actually just given a talk on this very subject, so most of what she says is familiar. It's nicely laid out, very interesting, and with some details that are new to me. Newcomers may find it a little abstruse, and as with her last piece, an extra page or two of explanation, or splitting things up into two, simpler articles, might have been in order. Asimov would have taken three or four (though, to be fair, he has half the space).
Four stars.
The Fifth Ace, by Robert Chilson
by Kelly Freas
The planet of Hyperica is the outpost of the Realm of Humanity closest to the "Empire", a separate polity of unknown constitution. One day, a liaison between the two governments brings a gift from the Empire: several giant cat-creatures in cages. They break out of confinement at the same time an Imperial spy-craft crashlands on Hyperica. The local Hypericans attempt to deal with both.
This one took me two reads to grasp for some reason. Much of the story is told from the point of view from the felinoids, who are intelligent and the real invasion, the spy ship being a decoy. There is a lot of description of the stratified human culture, a host of characters, and a great deal of lovingly depicted gore.
A lot of pages for not a lot of story. I did appreciate the portrayal of actual aliens, but I didn't need a page of explanation of how their retractable claws work.
In this installment, the Daleth-drive equipped Galathea, takes off for Mars with an international contingent of observers. Shortly into the flight, both Soviet and American agents vie for control of the ship. The ending is not at all what I expected.
This is such a curious book, in some ways just a vessel for delivering polemics. Worthy polemics, perhaps, on the nobility and folly of national pride. Nevertheless, it's definitely not one of Harrison's best, with none of his New Wave flourishes, nor any of the progressive brilliance of, say, Deathworld. His characters are bland—Martha a particular travesty—and there's not much in the way of story. In fact, I think the whole thing could have been a compelling, four-star novella… forty or fifty pages, tops.
As is, the final installment keeps things from falling below three stars, but no more.
The Biggest Oil Disaster, by Hayden Howard
by Leo Summers
A man named Sirbuh ('hubris' backwards) has a penchant for wildcatting oil wells in the deep sea. When one of his digs creates the biggest oil spill in history, blackening California's beaches, Sibrah doubles down and calls for the use of a nuke to both seal it and create an undersea storage cavern. Sibrah's son, devastated by the environmental catastrophe and sickened by Sibrah's cold calculations, can only watch as the inevitable unfolds.
I assume this is a parable on the excesses of capitalism, though editor Campbell probably enjoyed it as an endorsement of the casual use of atomic weapons. Either way, it goes on far too long and repetitiously.
Two stars.
The Reference Library (Analog, February 1970), by P. Schuyler Miller
Miller is a great book reviewer; even though he's been writing for decades, and despite writing for the most conservative of the SF mags, he keeps an open mind. I'm afraid this year might have broken him, though. The New Wave claimed the Hugos, and so Schuy is trying to wrap his head around the New Wave. The result is a column that's a bit more scattered and less engaging than most.
He does have fun moments, though, particularly his review of Moorcock's The Final Programme:
"[Jerry Cornelius] is the Cthulhu mythos of the New Wave. Michael Moorcock..originated him in his "novel" but other authors are making him the antihero of their "stories" just as a group of authors did with the assumptions and beings created by H.P. Lovecraft..
May all of Lovecraft's most powerful entities help the poor befuddled soul who tries to fit all the Cornelius stories together."
Miller also reviews Asimov's Opus 100, which he liked better than Algis Budrys did. Perhaps Mrs. Miller hasn't had her posterior pinched by the Good Doctor.
Reading the data
It's not so much that Analog is bad these days, it's just that it isn't very good. The Star-O-Meter for this one pegged at 2.6. That's worse than virtually all the other mags/anthologies this month:
In the spirit of TIROS-M, here are some other vital figures for the month: ten magazines/anthologies were released this month (though Crime Prevention in the 30th Century only had two new stories). The four and five star stuff would fill three magazines, which I suppose is a normal distribution.
Women wrote 5% of new fiction. On the other hand, Silbar's piece means 33% of the nonfiction is by a woman. Progress!
Like NASA, the Journey is expanding its capacity to review the flood of new material. Let's pray for more stuff in the greater-than-three-star territory.
It's more fun to review "the day side" of fiction!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
Fireworks for saleThe town of Delmenhorst welcomes the new year and the new decade with fireworks.Some people welcomed the new year and the new decade with glamorous balls.Meanwhile, many private New Year's Eve celebrations in West Germany looked a lot like this: a family or a group of friends gathered in a living room decorated with paper streamers to celebrate… while at least one person fervently wishes they were somewhere, anywhere else.
And so the annual New Year's Eve celebrations felt a little cheerier, the fireworks were a little brighter and everybody seemed more optimistic, even though much of West Germany is currently covered in a thick layer of snow.
Old and young are frolicking in the snow on sledding hills around West Germany.You're never too young to learn to ski.
But before New Year comes Christmas and this year, Santa left two new books under my tree, both of which offer a glimpse into a future that is not quite as optimistic as West Germany feels at the moment.
A Paranoid Nightmare: Drug of Choice by John Lange
One of the brightest rising stars of the thriller genre is John Lange. He burst onto the scene in 1966 with the heist novel Odds On and has been delivering entertaining thrillers, usually set in exotic locations and often laced with science fiction elements, at a steady clip since then. I reviewed two of them – Easy Go and Zero Cool– for the Journey.
Eventually, we learned that John Lange was the pen name of a young Harvard medical student named Michael Crichton, who released a novel under his own name last year. The Andromeda Strain, reviewed here by my colleague Joe Reid, was unambiguously science fiction and also drew on Crichton's medical knowledge, since it is about a deadly microbe from outer space.
What is more, Lange/Crichton also wrote a medical thriller called A Case of Need under yet another pen name, Jeffrey Hudson. The novel deals with a controversial issue, namely illegal abortion and the fact that it often leads to the preventable deaths of young women, which is probably why Crichton chose a different pen name to distance it from his John Lange thrillers and the novels under his own name. In spite of the controversial subject matter, A Case of Need won a highly deserved Edgar Award last year.
But whatever name he writes under, John Lange a.k.a. Michael Crichton a.k.a. Jeffrey Hudson is always worth reading. And so I was excited to read his latest novel, Drug of Choice.
Drug of Choice once more draws on Lange/Crichton's medical experience, for protagonist Roger Clark is a medical resident at Los Angeles Memorial Hospital. One day, a Hell's Angel is brought in, comatose after a motorbike accident. It seems like just another day in the emergency room, until Clark notices that the biker has no visible injuries…. and that his urine is bright blue. Clark assumes that some unknown drug is to blame for the young man's condition. However, the next day the biker awakes from his coma as if nothing had happened… and the colour of his urine is back to normal.
The case is certainly strange, but Clark quickly moves on. But then it happens again. Up and coming actress Sharon Wilder is brought to the hospital, comatose for unknown reasons. And her urine is blue. This triggers Clark's inner Sherlock Holmes and he begins to investigate. Clark learns that both Sharon and the biker were patients of the same psychiatrist. Contrary to medical ethics, Clark also gets involved with Sharon herself and winds up accompanying her on holiday to San Cristobal, a new island resort in the Caribbean, which is billed as the perfect vacation spot.
San Cristobal indeed seems to be paradise and Clark enjoys wonderful days with Sharon Wilder. But absolutely nothing is as it seems at San Cristobal, for instead of a luxury resort, the hotel is just a few dingy rooms where the guests are kept in a state of comatose bliss by a mysterious drug, which also has the side effect of turning urine blue. Behind everything is the mysterious Advance Corporation… who want to recruit Roger Clark to work for them and they won't take "no" for an answer.
Similar to A Case of Need, Drug of Choice starts out as a medical thriller, dealing with a hot social issue, in this case drug abuse. However, once Clark gets to San Cristobal and sees the disturbing reality behind the glamorous façade, the novel takes a turn into Philip K. Dick territory – a world of paranoia, drugs and shadowy powers that one man cannot beat… or can he? Indeed, if you'd given me the novel in a plain brown paper wrapper and without an author name, I would have assumed that this was Philip K. Dick's latest novel. Except that from a purely stylistic point-of-view, Lange/Crichton is a better writer than Dick.
From the entertaining adventure thrillers of a few years ago via his Edgar winning A Case of Need to last year's The Andromeda Strain and now Drug of Choice, John Lange/Michael Crichton keeps getting better and better and is quickly becoming one of the most exciting new voices in both the thriller and science fiction genre.
Supposedly, Michael Crichton earned his doctorate last year, which means that the reason he started writing, namely to pay his way through medical school, no longer applies. Nonetheless, I sincerely hope that he will keep writing, under whichever name he prefers, because John Lange/Michael Crichton is too good a writer to lose him to medicine.
A paranoid nightmare of a thriller in the vein of the best of Philip K. Dick. Four and a half stars.
Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson
Another hot button issue of our times, particularly in the US, is rising crime rates that plague particularly the big cities and plunge their citizens into fear. However, crime rates are also rising in West Germany, albeit more slowly, and those crimes which most impact the average citizen such as burglary and theft also have fairly low detection rates, whereas the 1969 West German crime statistics boast high detection rates for offences such as abortion or sex between adult men (recently decriminalised) which many people believe should not be criminalised at all
In his introduction to the anthology Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, Hans Stefan Santesson, former editor of Fantastic Universe and The Saint Mystery Magazine and therefore familiar with both science fiction and crime fiction, addresses the fact that many people in the US and elsewhere fear rising crime rates, but also points out that crime isn't a new phenomenon, but has always been with us and always will. Just as there will always be a need for police officers and detectives to investigate those crimes.
"Jack Fell Down" by John Brunner
First published in the March 1963 issue of Science Fiction Adventures, this novelette introduces us to Marco Kildreth, a cybernetically enhanced engineer who is out fishing in a ferocious storm on the Atlantic, when he makes an unexpected catch – a dead body. A closer examination reveals that the dead man did not drown, but was dropped into the sea from a great height. What is more, Marco recognises the dead man as one Jack Yang, member of a delegation from the colony planet Morthia who was on Earth for an important conference. Marco Kildreth not only happened to attend the same conference, but negotiations to give Morthia and its neighbour planet a so-called Builderworld, an automated factory planet to supply all needs of the population, were blocked by the Morthian delegation, giving Marco a motive to want to get rid of Yang.
Marco Kildreth did not murder Jack Yang. But after some investigations of his own, he has a pretty good idea who did…
John Brunner uses the structure of the traditional murder mystery to tell a greater story about the post-scarcity Earth of the future and the colony world Morthia which is governed by a genetically determined feudalism. The establishment of an automated Builderworld to produce anything the impoverished population of Morthia needs would threaten the elevated position of Morthia's ruling elite, which is why the Morthian delegation is vehemently opposed to this.
As a science fiction story, "Jack Fell Down" is an excellent look at one or rather several future societies and manages to create a vivid setting in only 39 pages. As murder mystery, however, it is unsatisfactory. We do learn who committed the murder and why, but the clues are never properly planted.
Two stars, mostly for the background world.
"The Eel" by Miriam Allen deFord
First published in the April 1958 issue of Galaxy, this story follows the titular Eel, a particularly slippery thief who is wanted on eight planets in three different solar systems. The Eel does not operate on his homeworld Earth, though Galactic Police there wants him, too, to extradite him to the worlds where he committed his crimes.
After twenty-six years, the Galactic Police finally get lucky and catch the Eel. There's only one problem. Where should he be extradited, considering that he committed crimes on eight different planets, all of which are extremely interested in putting him on trial and punishing him according to their respective laws?
The Eel is finally extradited to Agsk, a world which does not have the death penalty, but which punishes criminals by executing the person they love most in front of their eyes. There is only one problem. The Eel has neither family nor friends and apparently never loved anybody except for himself. But just when the Agskians are about to execute the person the Eel loves most, namely himself, the Eel reveals that he has one more ace up his sleeve…
"The Eel" perfectly shows off Miriam Allen deFord's gift for dark humour and the solution for how the Eel wiggles out of his punishment is ingenious.
Five stars.
"The Future Is Ours" by Stephen Dentinger
The first mystery posed by this story is "Who on Earth is Stephen Dentinger?" The resolution to that one is quite simple: Stephen Dentinger is a pen name of prolific mystery writer Edward D. Hoch (the "D" stands for Dentinger) who also dabbles in science fiction and horror on occasion.
The story follows a police officer named Captain Felix who is about to test drive the time machine, or rather chronological manipulator, invented by one Dr. Stafford. Captain Felix plans to travel to New York City in the year 2259 AD to learn about new techniques for police work. What he finds, however, is not at all what he had expected…
This very short (only three pages long) tale is a typical example of the "twist in the tail" story that was popular twenty-five years ago, but has become rare since. This type of story relies on the twist being good and in this case it is.
Three stars.
"The Velvet Glove" by Harry Harrison
First published in the November 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe, this novelette follows Jon Venex, an unemployed robot living on a future Earth beset by anti-robot prejudice. One day, Jon responds to a job ad asking for a robot with his specific skills, and gets much more than he bargained for, when he finds himself strapped to a bomb and forced to work for a gang of drug-runners. Worse, he finds the remnants of his predecessor.
Jon uses all his robotic skills to alert the authorities without violating his innate programming never to harm a human being. But even if he succeeds, will a robot ever be treated as an equal on this future Earth?
Like John Brunner's "Jack Fell Down", Harry Harrison uses the structure of a crime story to present his vision of a future Earth. However, Harrison is a lot more successful at blending science fiction and crime fiction and "The Velvet Glove" manages to work as both. What is more, Jon Venex is a very compelling protagonist.
Four stars.
"Let There Be Night!" by Morris Hershman
Morris Hershman is another author better known for mysteries than for science fiction. His vignette "Let There Be Night!" first appeared in the November 1966 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine.
Curt Yarett is unhappily married to Edna, an alcoholic. However, alcohol abuse is a criminal offense in this brave new world of the future and so Curt has the perfect way to get rid of his wife by reporting her to the authorities…
The focus of this brief vignette is less on the "crime" committed and more on changing mores and laws, particularly with regard to intoxicating substances and how what is illegal in one time may well be considered perfectly acceptable in another. Considering the rise in drug use in recent years, this is certainly an important topic. However, the story itself is too brief to truly delve into the questions it raises.
Two stars.
"Computer Cops" by Edward D. Hoch
Edward D. Hoch puts in his second appearance in this anthology—this time under his own name—with this tale about a crime-fighting agency called the Computer Investigation Bureau, CIB for short, fighting electronic crime in the not too far off future of 2006 AD. It is one of the two non-reprints in the anthology.
One day, Carl Crader, director of the CIB, is summoned by Nobel Kinsinger, one of the richest men in the world, for someone has been using his SEXCO machine, a computer used to buy and sell stocks at the New York Stock Exchange, without authorisation. Crader quickly homes in on two likely suspects, John Bunyon, Kinsinger's assistant, and Linda Sale, his secretary. However, the truth turns out to be quite different…
Of the various stories in this anthology, "Computer Cops" matches the theme – how will law enforcement agencies investigate and hopefully prevent crime in the future – the closest. "Computer Cops" is very much a so-called police procedural, i.e. a type of mystery which delves into the methods the police uses to investigate crimes. To me, it felt very much like a futuristic version of the popular West German pulp crime series G-Man Jerry Cotton. "Computer Cops" also succeeds both as a science fiction and a crime story.
However, there are two problems with this story. The first is that the female characters are relegated to secretaries in miniskirts or bodystockings – all the investing and investigating is done by men. Compare this to Tom Purdom's "Toys", which features a female police officer, and John Brunner's "Jack Fell Down", which features a woman as the Secretary of Extraterrestrial Relations as well as a female professor of sociology and which also casually notes that not everybody in the future is white.
The other problem with this story is that 2006 AD is not very far off at all, only thirty-six years in the future, which means that many of us may well live to see it. As a result, this also means that many of the predictions that Hoch makes, either as part of the plot or casual off-hand remarks, may well turn out to be completely and hilariously wrong. Of course, it's reasonable to assume that New York City's World Trade Center, currently under construction and the tallest building in the world, once completed, will still be standing in 2006. Using computers to make deals on the stock market seems quite likely and billionaires getting involved into politics to the point of bankrolling or even leading invasions of independent countries sadly isn't too farfetched either. However, the assumption that Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba will crumble in the next few years may well turn out to be premature.
Probably the most successful blend of science fiction and crime fiction in this anthology.
Three stars.
"Apple" by Anne McCaffrey
The second new story is Anne McCaffrey's novelette, which opens with a seemingly impossible crime. A priceless fur coat, sapphire necklace, haute couture gown and jewelled slippers, have been stolen from the display window of a high-end department store in the brief time lag between security camera recordings.
The only way this crime could have been committed is via telekinesis. This is what brings in telepath Daffyd op Owen of the North American Parapsychic Center, an organisation which identifies and trains people with parapsychic talents and also works to end prejudice against them. All Talents at the Center were present and accounted for, when the theft occurred. This means that the thief must be a so-called "wild Talent", i.e. a Talent who's unregistered and unknown to the North American Parapsychic Center. Worse, this crime endangers the passing of a bill providing legal protection for Talents.
So the hunt is on for the telekinetic thief. Daffyd op Owen's Talents quickly zero in on an apartment block in a deprived part of town and find an apartment full of stolen goods – but not the thief. One of the Talents tracks the young woman – it is quickly determined that the thief must be female, because a man would only have taken the necklace and fur coat, but not the dress or the shoes – to a train station, where she uses her abilities to throw a baggage cart at her pursuer and crushes him. In spite of the girl killing one of his people, op Owen wants to bring her in alive and unharmed. But sometimes, there are no happy endings…
In recent years, Anne McCaffrey has been more interested in the dragons of Pern than in good old Earth, but she has also written a few stories about the Talented and their struggle for recognition.
"Apple" clearly shows McCaffrey's strengths as a writer. The action scenes are frenetic and there is some interesting characterisation, too, in the scenes where op Owen and his police counterpart Frank Gillings butt heads. However, this story also displays the issues I've always had with McCaffrey's work, namely latent prejudice that underlies much of it – ironic in a story that is about overcoming prejudice. And so the thief is the proverbial bad apple, because she is a) poor and b) of Romani descent, though McCaffrey uses a much less polite term.
A otherwise good story, marred by some of McCaffrey's persistent issues.
Three stars.
"Rain Check" by Judith Merril
Originally published in the May 1954 issue of Science Fiction Adventures, "Rain Check" follows a shapeshifting alien who was brought back from Mars and is being taken to see the US president aboard a secret express train. However, the alien escapes during a refuelling stop – not for malicious reasons, but out of pure curiosity.
After some time spent as a large package on the platform, the alien takes on the shape of a human woman and wanders into an all-night diner. However, the alien's appearance attracts the attention of Mike Bonito, the man behind the counter, who promptly tries to chat up what he thinks is an attractive woman.
Turns out Mike Bonito is a civil defence warden, when he's not bartending, and was specifically told to be on the lookout for the runaway alien, though all they have to go on is a vague description of a male human. However, there will be an important meeting of all civil defence wardens in the city later that day. The alien, now named Anita, gets herself invited to come along, after manifesting a civil defence badge.
The American astronauts who captured the Martian believe that the alien's special abilities will help them win a war. However, "Anita" has a reason of her own for wanting to explore Earth.
This is not so much a crime story, but a cloak and dagger type spy story. Of course, being a Judith Merril story, it's also very well written and "Anita's" observations about life on Earth and particularly the persistent rain, so alien to a Martian, are fascinating.
Five stars.
"Toys" by Tom Purdom
"Toys" begins with a hostage situation. A group of children and their "pets" – an elephant, a gorilla, two dragons (created via genetic engineering) and two tigers – have taken a family hostage and demand that a committee made up of parents negotiate with them. Meanwhile, various adults are congregating outside and threatening to enter the house and beat up the children.
Police officers Charley Edelman and Helen Fracarro are called in the deal with the situation. They storm the house and find themselves fighting off both the "pets" and the children who have transformed their educational toys such as genetic engineering kits into surprisingly effective weapons. Will Charley and Helen be able to diffuse the situation before someone – adults, kids or pets – gets killed?
"Toys" is an action-packed story and offers some interesting speculation about how even in an increasingly affluent world, there will always be those who have less than others, even if they would have be considered wealthy as recently as thirty or forty years ago. Anne McCaffrey's "Apple" makes a similar point and is also largely set in a modern housing estate like those that are increasingly replacing the slums of old, raising the living standards of the working class, while not changing their economic status.
"Toys" also succeeds at blending science fiction and police procedural. Charley and Helen are compelling protagonists and I wouldn't at all mind a series of Charley Edelman and Helen Fracarro futuristic police procedurals.
That said, I also had a big problem with this story and that is that I intensely dislike stories about evil children. Now fear of children and young people is a common theme in science fiction. With the children of the postwar baby boom now in their teens and early twenties, an age when they begin to have political opinions and demands that don't necessarily match their parents', we have seen an uptick in dystopian stories about tyrannies set up by young people such as Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson or the movie Wild in the Streets. But there are older examples as well such as the 1944 story "When the Bough Breaks" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore about a couple terrorised by a superhuman baby. "Toys" certainly fits into the tradition of science fiction terrified of young people having a mind of their own. But though it is well written, I just don't care for stories of this type.
Three stars.
"Party of the Two Parts" by William Tenn
First published in the August 1954 issue of Galaxy, this story is an epistolary tale in the form of a galactogram from one O-Dik-Veh, a patrol sergeant on duty out in the galactic boondocks, to Hoy-Veh-Chalt, desk sergeant at headquarters and O's cousin, wherein O recounts his latest case.
O has been assigned to watch over the third planet of Sol a.k.a. Earth to make sure that its inhabitants don't blow themselves up before they have matured enough to be inducted into the great galactic community. Much like "Anita" from Judith Merril's "Rain Check", O finds Earth damp and unpleasant. What is more, the patrol office had to be erected on Pluto, a planet O describes as "a world whose winters are bearable, but whose summers are unspeakably hot". These few paragraphs tell us both clearly and very entertainingly that whatever O and Hoy are, they are very much not human. O also refers to their commissioner as "Old One" and is mentioned to have tentacles, so I imagined O and Hoy as something like H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, only as a cop.
O's latest problem started when L'payr, a career criminal from the planet Gtet, escapes on the eve of the trial that will put him behind bars for life, steals an experimental spaceship and ends up on Earth, specifically the suburbs of Chicago. However, L'payr, who is basically a telepathic amoeba, can't survive on Earth for long, so he needs supplies to get his ship spaceborn again. So L'payr telepathically lures high school chemistry teacher Osborne Blatch to his hideout to trade alien pornography for chemical components from the high school lab. Though Blatch is less interested in the pornography – it is amoeba pornography, after all – and more in learning about where the mysterious puddle-shaped alien came from. L'payr, however, doesn't stick around to discuss the state of the galaxy with Blatch, but legs it once he has all the chemicals he needs. Blatch, meanwhile, finds an excellent use for the amoeba pornography he acquired and publishes a biology textbook with detailed illustrations of amoebas reproducing.
We haven't heard much of William Tenn lately, ever since he became a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. This is a pity, because Tenn's satirical science fiction has always been a delight. And indeed "Party of the Two Parts" starts out utterly hilarious, but then gets bogged down in a lengthy debate whether pornography is pornography, if it doesn't titillate anybody due to not depicting remotely the correct species and whether a crime has been committed that allows for L'payr to be extradited back to his homeworld. The way that O entraps L'payr and L'payr – with some help from Osborne Blatch – tries to wiggle out of his extradition are both ingenious and funny, but the story is still longer than it needs to be.
Four stars.
Police Work of the Future
All in all, this is a solid anthology of stories blending science fiction and crime fiction. That said, the title Crime Prevention in the 30th Century is something of a misnomer, since the stories are more focussed on police officers solving crimes or criminals committing crimes and trying to evade the law than on the prevention of crimes. What is more, none of the stories are explicitly set in the 30th century.
Nor is this anthology particularly useful as a blueprint for policing techniques of the future – only Edward D. Hoch's "Computer Cops" even remotely offers a look at what actual police work might look like in the future. However, Crime Prevention in the 30th Century is not a police academy textbook, but a science fiction anthology and as such it offers an entertaining look at several very different futures. I find that the stories which are at least somewhat humorous work better for me than the more serious tales.
Three and a half stars for the anthology as a whole.
After a long day of skiing, nothing is better than a hot cup of coffee, preferably fortified with something a little stronger.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
Pan Am makes the going great!
Thousands turned out in Everett, Washington, for the roll-out of the first jumbo jet ever built. The "wide-bodied" Boeing 747 can carry a whopping 362 passengers; compare that to the 189 carried by the 707 that inaugurated the "Jet Age" a decade ago. Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) took delivery of the aircraft, which flew to Nassau, Bahamas, thenceforth to New York.
Originally scheduled for regular service on Dec. 15, things have been pushed back to January 18. That's because 28 of the world's airlines have placed orders for 186 of these monsters, including American Airlines, which has ordered 16. Since their shipment won't arrive until June, and as air travel is strictly regulated in this country by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which ensures fairness of rates, routes, and other aspects of competition, the CAB ordered a delay until Pan Am leases American one of its fleet.
As impressive as the 747 is, it constitutes something of a bridge, aeronautically speaking. Very soon, we will have supersonic transports plying the airlanes. Eventually, we may even have hypersonic derivatives of the reusable "space shuttle", currently under development at NASA. The jumbo jet will allow for economical, subsonic flights until passenger travel goes faster than sound, at which point, the 747 will make an excellent freighter.
These are exciting times for the skies! And with that, let's see if we've also got exciting times in space…
John Campbell makes the going… hard
What Supports Apollo?, by Ben Bova and J. Russell Seitz
Apropos of the aeronautically pioneering theme, the first piece in this issue is a science article on what supports the Apollo, literally: the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building, where the three stages of the Saturn V are put together; the crawler that the rocket rides to the launch pad, and the 30-story gantry at the launch pad.
The mobile launcher (left) and the Saturn on the crawler (right)
It's a lot of numbers told in a wide-eyed fashion, but I enjoyed it. The pictures are nice, too.
Four stars.
The Wild Blue Yonder, by Robert Chilson
by Vincent diFate(right)
Engineer Ted Halsman had bought an old mine in rural Ohio and stuffed it with all kinds of advanced equipment. When the mine explodes with the force of an atomic blast, Halsman goes on the run, asserting that his discovery will warp the future of humanity if it escapes his clutches.
Told in documentary fashion, this story goes on waaaaay too long. Along the way, much speculation is made about the nature of the blast, and how it might require rewriting the laws of physics. That the speculations are patently absurd does a bit to foreshadow the joke ending. On the other hand, that ending is also rather implausible.
Beyond that, we're meant to sympathize with Halsman, who idly dreams of returning to civilization, decades after successfully escaping from it. That he murdered half a dozen people in cold blood while fleeing is glossed over.
Two stars.
The Proper Gander, by A. Bertram Chandler
by Leo Summers
A thoroughly humanoid flying-saucer pilot is reprimanded for being too showy about his jaunts to Earth. His bosses decide the best defense against discovery is hiding in plain sight: a saucer is ordered to land in front of a commuter, and out strolls a vivacious, thoroughly humanoid "Officer's Comfort Second Class" who claims she is from Venus. Since modern humans know Venus is uninhabitable, the saucer people figure that future sightings will be written off as gags or delusions.
This story is both stupid and sexist, both in spades. One star.
Curfew, by Bruce Daniels
A young Martian by the name of Matheson comes to Earth for the reading of his uncle's will. Said uncle was an inventor and a corporate spy, and his legacy includes some rather valuable patents that could be explosive in the wrong hands. Others are already after the secret, and in addition to dodging them, Matheson must meet with a shady unknown at night, outside the safety of his hotel.
Therein lines the inspiration for the story's title: as a solution to the crime problem, there is a night-long curfew enforced by mechanical beasts and aircraft. Can Matheson brave the rigors of his homeworld long enough to claim his prize?
This piece is somewhat juvenile in tone, but not bad. Three stars.
This story appears to take place in the same universe as "His Master's Vice", because that's the other place we've seen Prox(y)Ad(miral)s. In this tale, we've got a prison escapee named Olivine who has made a break with four other convicts. He heads out to a planet that he knows (as a former ProxAd) has been restricted and bears a resource of great value. Of course, the suspicious ease of Olivine's escape suggests that the authorities have a reason for letting him and his band scout out this world for them…
It's cute, in a Chris Anvil sort of way, though the space patrol must have been close to prescient to anticipate all of the twists and turns the story takes. Three stars, barely.
And now, Part 2 of the serial started last month, in which an Israeli scientists flees to Denmark to develop anti-gravity.
In this installment, Denmark builds a proper anti-grav spaceship, adapted from a giant hovercraft. We learn that its pilot likes to sleep around, and his wife is being leaned on by the CIA to steal secrets from the project. In all of this issue's 50 pages, the only scene that really matters is when the discoverer of the effect, Leif Holm, newly minted Minister for Space, gives a speech from the Moon. The rest is superfluous building scenes or bits with the pilot's wife, who exists solely to be weak, vulnerable, and jealous, so she can be traitorous.
"Did you read about our Mars visit?" is a line that is actually in the book, and I thought at that point, "No! But I'd have liked to!"
Also, can a diesel tractor really work on the Moon even with oxygen cylinders? And are the Danestronauts doing anything to sterilize their equipment, or are they just blithely contaminating the Moon?
I'm really not enjoying this one very much. Harrison is sleepwalking. Two stars.
The Reference Library: To Buy a Book (Analog, January 1970), by P. Schuyler Miller
Miller prefaces his book column with a fascinating piece on how books are distributed. In short, they aren't…not for very long, anyway. The titles sit on shelves for a vanishingly brief time, and unless the booksellers know they can sell a bunch, chances are they won't bother ordering any. The profit margin's just not there. This is a phenomenon I know very well as an author, and I don't imagine the paradigm will change for the next half century or so (until we all switch over to digital books, computer-delivered, as Mack Reynolds predicts).
There's also a nice plug for Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance, a comprehensive encyclopedia of all topics from the show. Then Miller gushes over a trio of reprint Judith Merril novellas, Daughters of Earth, the recently novelized Leiber serial, A Specter is Haunting Texas, and the very recently novelized Silverberg serial, Up the Line. His praise is slightly muted for Alexander Key's juvenile, The Golden Enemy.
It is appropriate that, on the eve of the dawn of a new era of air travel, Analog is continuing a serial about a new era of space travel. But despite that subject matter, this issue is straight out of Dullsville, continuing a flight into mediocrity that has been going on for many years now.
With a score of 2.5, this month's issue is only beaten to the bottom by the perennial stinker, Amazing (2.4). It is roughly tied with New Worlds (2.5), and exceed by IF (2.7), Vision of Tomorrow (3.2), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.5).
Aside from that superlative last magazine, it's been something of a drab month: you could take all the 4-5 star stuff and you'd have less than two full magazine's worth. And women wrote just 4% of the pieces.
Is this any way to run a genre?
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by David Levinson
Free press
American readers and those who follow American politics are no doubt well aware of President Nixon’s speech on the “Vietnamization” of the war in Indo-China. All three national networks carried the speech, of course, and followed it up with analysis and commentary. This apparently didn’t sit well with the White House.
On November 13th, Vice President Spiro Agnew addressed a regional Republican committee in Des Moines, Iowa, in which he attacked the networks, accusing them of political bias in their news coverage. He complained that the president’s speech had been subjected to “instant analysis and querulous criticism” without giving the American people time to digest the speech for themselves. Agnew accused “a small and unelected elite” of exerting undue influence on public opinion without any check on their power. He even called it a form of censorship.
Vice President Spiro Agnew addressing the Midwest Regional Republican Committee.
Some television executives accused Agnew of attempting to undermine the freedom of the press and intimidate a form of journalism that requires a government license in order to broadcast. I’d say the intimidation was at least partly successful, since all three networks carried the Vice President's speech. However, the networks are also fighting back. The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes devoted a full hour to rebutting Agnew’s charges.
When asked if anyone in the administration had an advance look at the speech, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler denied it. He also said that the White House would have no reaction to statements by other members of the administration and that Nixon and Agnew had not discussed the speech. That’s nonsense. A speech like this would never be made without approval at the highest levels, and if it had been, the White House would have promptly issued a statement distancing Nixon from the remarks or at least trying to soften them. I’d say the administration has fired a shot across the bows of the news media.
White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler
Seeking common ground
Carrying on the love theme from last month, this month’s IF offers us two romances. But the real focus is on learning to communicate, especially without a common point of reference. It also gives us two sequels to stories from several years ago.
Suggested by “This One”. Art by Gaughan.
Diary Found in the St. Louis Zoo, by Robert Bloch
Bob Bloch gives us his report on the Worldcon, held in St. Louis this year. It’s his typical mix of name-dropping and bad jokes. I generally enjoy Bloch’s fiction (I met him once, and he was very nice), but his humor is just awful. Unlike the delightful and funny drawings by Jack Gaughan that accompany this article. If you want to know what really happened in St. Louis, read the Traveler’s con report. It was timelier and much more informative.
Barely three stars.
A photorealistic portrait of Harlan Ellison. Art by Gaughan
The ConSentiency is an interstellar society composed of several intelligent species. Among them are the Caleban, a strange people who seem to be only partially in this dimension. Only 84 of them have ever been seen, but they are very important, because they gave the ConSentiency jumpdoors, which allow people to travel vast distances. Now, 83 Caleban have vanished, leaving millions dead in the disappearance of each one.
Enter Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinaire (the Bureau of Sabotage keeps government from becoming too efficient, so that nothing happens without due deliberation). He makes contact with the last Caleban, who calls herself Fanny Mae, and learns that she has entered a contractual relationship with the wealthy and sadistic Mliss Abnethe. In an attempt to treat her sadism, Mliss was conditioned so that she cannot stand to see another sentient suffer, but Calebans can barely be perceived and do not outwardly show suffering.
The problem here is that the flagellations are killing Fanny Mae, and if she undergoes “ultimate discontinuity,” every being that has ever used a jumpdoor—which is almost everyone—will die. To complicate matters, the BuSab is not allowed to interfere with private individuals, which seriously limits Jorj’s options. To complicate things even further, Fanny Mae declares that she has fallen in love with Jorj. To be continued.
Some Gaughan-esque abstractions. Art by Gaughan
We’ve seen McKie and the BuSab before, in the story “The Tactful Saboteur,” which the Traveler gave a mere one star. This installment is better than that, though it’s mostly just Herbert setting the scene. It can be difficult reading at times, thanks to Fanny Mae’s odd speech patterns and the difficulties she and Jorj have finding common referents to understand each other, but that appears to be the point of the story.
Three stars for now, mostly because of the interesting philosophical questions about language and understanding.
Harry Harrison has written a J.G. Ballard story. There is an unexplained natural phenomenon—in this case a waterfall that makes Niagara look like a faucet with a slow leak—and a bunch of suggestive, but not obvious symbolism that is never clarified. Line by line, the writing is fine; I might have liked it if I had any idea what Harrison was trying to say.
Two stars.
By the falls, like it says on the tin. Art by Gaughan
If a Man Answers, by Richard Wilson
Doctoral candidate Walter Hurd takes a job in remote western New York, hoping to finish his dissertation. For an hour a day he beams messages into space, and for another hour he monitors reception. The isolation soon gets to him, and along with the mathematical formulas he starts sending poetry and, eventually, thoughts from his own journal. When he starts receiving a female voice sending out her thoughts, he quickly falls in love.
More abstracts. Art by Gaughan
Here’s our first love story. Parts of it are rather silly, especially the reason Walter’s Star Girl speaks English, but it doesn’t ignore things like the speed of light. It’s a bit long and highly improbable, however there is some nice writing.
A low three stars.
Child’s Play, by Larry Eisenberg
The deeply annoying Emmett Duckworth returns. This time, the implausible chemist has figured out how to create life, including a six foot tall rabbit. I do not like these stories. I’d sooner read the most formulaic of Retief stories or a full novel of Paul Atreides contemplating the grains of sand in his navel. That said, this is the least stupid story of the series. It almost makes sense, and is just readable.
A generous just barely three stars.
Aunt Sam? Art by Gaughan
This One, by James Sallis
A human linguist falls in love with an alien woman. They’re torn apart, and he must search the galaxy to find her again.
I keep trying to see more than one face here, but it doesn’t work. Art probably by Gaughan
Our second love story was highly touted last month. Call me hard-hearted and unromantic, but I hated it. It’s overwrought and melodramatic. With very few changes, it could be a Victorian tale of a man searching the seraglios of the Near East for his lost love.
A low two stars.
O Kind Master, by Daniel F. Galouye
Centuries ago, spherical energy beings conquered the Earth. Now, humans are pampered pets. A group of wild humans have a plan to destroy the Spheres, but they need to know if the tame humans can handle the loss of their masters.
A wild human dwelling with a city of the Spheres in the background. Art probably by Gaughan
This is a sequel of sorts to “The City of Force” from 1959. The Traveler thought that one was solid, but not outstanding (no star ratings in those days). I say this story is only a sequel of sorts, because in the earlier tale, humans were pests, not pets. That story also left humans with powers equal to the Spheres.
It’s all horribly old-fashioned, even by the standards of 1959. Add in a solution to beating the Spheres that should have been found back during the initial invasion and my general vague dislike of Galouye’s work, and I didn’t like this one.
Two stars.
The Story of Our Earth: The Coming of the Dinosaurs, by Willy Ley
Ley’s survey has reached the Triassic and the first dinosaurs. He starts off with a discussion of the importance of jaws in paleontology, and then runs through both early dinosaurs and the mammals of the period, as well as some marine creatures. Interesting, but a bit perfunctory.
Three stars.
Summing up
Maybe the worst issue that editor Ejler Jakobsson has overseen. Some of that may just be me being curmudgeonly. There’s also a lot that isn’t here. We’re told that there’s no letter column due to the length of Bloch’s con report. That may also be why there’s no preview for next month and why Lester del Rey’s book review column is barely more than a page, with little of the depth he usually has. There’s also no new author this month. I’ve liked Jakobsson’s work so far, so hopefully this is just an aberration. Fingers crossed for next month.
In lieu of a preview, have a fanigator. Art by Gaughan
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
The news has been brewing for a while, and now it's on the front page: 1st Lieutenant William J. Calley Jr., a 26-year-old platoon leader stationed in Vietnam, has been "life or death" court martialed for the murder of 109 South Vietnamese civilians "of various ages and sexes."
This so-called "My Lai incident" took place northeast of Quang Ngai city on March 16, 1968 in a village called Song My—code-named "Pinkville". Calley, enraged at the death of his chief sergeant, appears to have ordered his unit to eliminate everyone in the hamlet. Several of his men went on a bloody spree; others did what they could to avoid involvement. One even shot himself in the foot so he could be medivaced out. A number came forward with the story, which was investigated and then dismissed by the 11th Infrantry Brigade. Letters to Congress have prompted the reopening of the case and investigation into the original investigation.
If Calley is convicted, he faces no less than life imprisonment, and death by firing squad is on the table.
The court martial comes on the heels of the July 21, 1969 charge of Green Beret commander, Col. Robert Rheault, and six of his officers with murder and conspiracy for the secret execution of a Vietnamese spy suspect. Those charges were dropped two months later when the CIA, whose operatives were key witnesses, refused to cooperate. Whether the government's tacit support of brutality increases or decreases the odds of Calley facing the music remains to be seen.
Mediocrities in Print
by Kelly Freas
December's final magazine is Analog. Let's hope this makes for pleasanter reading that the newspapers.
Turning first to the book review column, and skipping the editorial (for those who want recapitulations of Campbell's latest blatherings, go buy the collected volumes that have recently come out), P. Schuyler Miller offers up some nice coverage of translated Perry Rhodan books from West Germany. He goes on to cover a Silverberg collection of antediluvian tales called The Calibrated Alligator. They were written back when Silverbob was writing 50,000 words a week and rapidly killing himself. The quality of his work was moderate; he devoted most of his energies to the kinds of books once sold below the counter, but which are now on brazen display in New York newstands.
Miller liked Timescoop, though he thought it lesser Brunner (but not least Brunner). Pretty much what Jason said when he wrote about it. He also thought much of Isle of the Dead, by Roger Zelazny, as did Victoria Silverwolf early this year. Finally, before dispatching a bunch of reprints, he gives middlin' praise to Mack Raynolds' Time Gladiator, which is really just the serial Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes, a People's Capitalism story so old, it still has Joe Mauser in it! I liked the story, but I find Reynolds' near-future predictions fascinating, even if his writing is often just workmanlike.
This, by the way, is why I like Schuyler so much—he agrees with us! (And he doesn't play favorites; coming out first in Analog doesn't automatically increase the score).
That dopey looking sub-ship on the cover and as the headline illustration is, in fact, a submarine turned into a spaceship. How did it happen?
Arnie Klein is an Israeli researcher who develops…something. So explosive is this secret (literally—the story begins with his invention blowing up his laboratory) that he flees to Denmark, seeks asylum, and enlists the aid of his friend, Nobel Prize winner Ove Rasmussen. The two work together to build a woking model of the contraption, and then install it in a submarine.
Pretty early on, it's obvious what the thing will do: generate antigravity.
All of this takes us to about Page 40 of the serial, and none of those pages are necessary. The information conveyed in those dry ~10,000 words of text could easily have been woven into an in media res beginning—and Harrison is fully up to the task. That he padded things out so much, with uninteresting characters and inconsequential events, suggests he's in it for the per-word rates.
Anyway, after the Blæksprutten is commissioned, a trio of Soviet cosmonauts find themselves marooned on the Moon with a limited oxygen supply. Klein and Co. take their ship up to Luna and rescue them. Meanwhile, down on Earth, there's some Cold War spy machinations of limited interest.
Harrison can do much better. This is like cut-rate Mack Reynolds, really. Anyway, 3 stars, I guess, but if it's all like this, we're going to end up in the 2.5 zone.
Is Biological Aging Inevitable?, by Capt. John E. Wrobel, Jr.
This is an interesting piece on what we think causes mortality (lots of options), what's being done about it (not that much, surprisingly), the effects of immortality on society (only positive ones listed), and the mythological underpinnings of mortality acceptance (quite interesting).
I found the article quite graspable, and the use of chapter divisions greatly improved readability. Let's hope this becomes a feature for future nonfiction pieces.
Four stars.
Mindwipe, by Tak Hallus
by Vincent DiFate
"Tak Hallus" returns for his sophomore tale (his first, also appeared in Analog.) In this one, space-hand Ernest Schwab is on trial for a heinous crime: blanking the mind of the Terran governor of the planet Paria. It turns out Schwab is one of the very few telepaths known to humanity—even he didn't know he had this power. Now it is up to Public Defender Benson to prove that he was manipulated into action by another telepath rather than acting of his own volition. Doing so will take Benson on an adventure, from the courtrooms of Earth to the tunnels of the burrowing indigenes of Paria…and place a bullseye on his own head for meddling!
This is a pretty neat piece. It suffers for being rather workmanlike in execution, as if it were a little rushed, and I found the society of the future a bit too similar to that of the present (particularly the role of women). Nevertheless, it captures interest and offers up a decent mystery as well as, in the process, presenting an interesting alien race.
Three stars.
Testing … One, Two, Three, Four, by Steve Chapman
by Leo Summers
A bird colonel, stuck in service to an electronic brain, is given the task of overseeing a trio of servicemen who are undergoing computerized tests qualifying them for extraterrestrial deployment. What he doesn't realize (but what is obvious fairly early on) is that this assignment is, in fact, a test of his capabilities.
Not bad. The sort of thing Chris Anvil might have come up with.
Three stars.
Superiority Complex, by Thomas N. Scortia
by Leo Summers
Things fall off a cliff for these last two vignettes, probably accepted more for their useful length than quality. This one takes us to a time several generations after The Bomb wiped out half of humanity. Researchers are trying to revitalize the race through eugenics, specifically tracking down the descendants of "Phil Jason", an exceptional man who wrote screenplays in old Hollywood until he blew his own brains out. If society could manufacture more of his type, then perhaps it could be rejuvenated.
Turns out that "Phil" was really "Phyllis", and the spirit of her genius lives on throughout the human race…explaining why women always seem to rule from the shadows, preferring the power behind the throne rather than the throne itself (this is the story's contention, not mine).
A dumb, sexist piece. One star.
Any Number Can Play, by Richard Lippa
by Vincent DiFate
A meteorologist man-and-wife team investigate anomolaus weather off the coast of Florida and find the wreck of an enemy warship that had been creating the storm. Portentous intonations of "could this be happening globally?"
Weather control is all the rage these days, in fiction and nonfiction. Personally I can't buy that all the silver iodide crystals and laser beams will have half the effect that, say, a century of industrial society is having on the Earth. But I also take issue with attibuting harmful weather to malevolent foreign entities. That road leads to Silly Science. We had enough of that with folks like Lysenko. What's next? Railing against vaccinations?
Now that all the magazines are done, I can give you a sneak preview of what the Galactic Stars will look like. Here are all of the mags/anthologies in order of average:
New Writings 3.679824561
Fantasy and Science Fiction 3.102574451
IF 3.070572755
New Worlds 3.030241097
Galaxy 3.005917367
Vision of Tomorrow 2.921091331
Venture 2.824404762
Analog 2.688902006
Fantastic 2.645528083
Amazing 2.622086594
Orbit 2.571428571
Famous 1.897435897
As you can see, Analog finished pretty close to the bottom, barely acing out the Ted White mags (which are on their way up). Campbell's going to have to do better than this if he wants to keep his ~170,000 readers, I imagine.
In other statistics, women wrote just 3% of the new fiction this month, and the four and five star pieces would fill three small digests (out of the eight published). Not an auspicious way to end the decade, but perhaps the '70s will offer up a New New Wave.
See you on the other side!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
”There was a ship,” quoth he.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Northwest to Alaska
Almost from the moment Europeans discovered the Americas, they’ve been looking for a sea route to Asia across the top of the continent. Dubbed the Northwest Passage by the English (because they were trying to travel west), the name stuck, and the route has been of interest ever since. The McClure Arctic expedition showed there was a sea route in 1850, though much of it was blocked by ice, and the journey was partially completed by sledge. Roald Amundsen became the first to go from Atlantic to Pacific entirely by ship between 1903 and 1906.
When oil was discovered last year at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of Alaska, attention turned once again to the Northwest Passage. A pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to a mostly ice-free port like Anchorage or Valdez faces a number of technological and legal challenges, so, even though planning is well underway and several hundred miles of pipe have already been ordered, oil companies are taking a look at the viability of shipping through the Northwest Passage.
Enter the SS Manhattan, an oil tanker owned and operated by the Esso company; she’s also the largest merchant vessel registered in the United States. She has been refitted with an icebreaker bow by the Finnish shipbuilder Wärtsilä, which built a huge ice tank to help optimize the design.
The SS Manhattan breaking through the ice of the Northwest Passage.
The Manhattan left Pennsylvania in August and sailed for Alaska under the command of Captain Roger A. Steward. Sea ice in the M’Clure Strait forced her take a more southerly route through the Canadian Arctic archipelago. After she reached Prudhoe Bay, a token barrel of crude oil was placed aboard, and the return voyage began. The ship cleared the Passage on September 14th, becoming the first commercial vessel to make the transit.
Is the Northwest Passage now open for commerce? Maybe, maybe not. The Manhattan required the support of several American and Canadian coast guard icebreakers to get through. Also the legal challenges a pipeline faces may be nothing compared to the sea route. Canada considers all waters in the Arctic archipelago to be internal waters, not an international shipping lane. In fact, at one point a group of Inuit hunters stopped the ship and demanded the captain request permission to pass through Canadian territory. He did so, and permission was granted.
So there are legal problems. Whether the Passage can be used year-round is also unknown. There’s talk of sending another ship this winter to see if the way is open then. Time will tell, but I’m betting on the pipeline.
Involving, but avoiding, calamity
There’s something about a shipwreck that seems to resonate with people. From The Wreck of the Hesperus (the bane of schoolchildren for nearly a century) to A Night to Remember (something of a disaster itself at the box office), wrecks are found all through popular entertainment. Science fiction is no exception, although the ships are usually in space. This month’s Venture offers no fewer than three ship related disasters, not to mention a plane crash and a global disaster.
Thankfully, the issue itself is not a disaster. Quite the contrary, actually.
Art by Tanner
This issue’s cover is a slight improvement over the last. It’s recognizably science fiction, and there’s a second color.
Plague Ship, by Harry Harrison
The route from the Moon to Mars is supposed to be a milk run. But then a meteorite strike leaves the ship’s doctor, on his first ever space trip, the only surviving officer. After that, disaster follows fast and follows faster, to paraphrase Poe. The disease hinted at by the title isn’t even the last dreadful thing to befall the ship.
Disaster strikes the Johannes Kepler. Art by Tanner
The constant occurrence of a new disaster every few pages sometimes feels a bit overdone, but that may be the result of the condensed novel format. A full novel would give the characters some room to breathe between incidents. I enjoyed this a lot, but a little voice in the back of my head kept whispering that someone with more of a naval background, say A. Bertram Chandler, would have made this more believable.
A high three stars.
In Alien Waters, by Richard E. Peck
A scoutship crewed by water-breathing aliens crashes on a habitable world. They’re searching for intelligent life, even highly improbable surface dwellers, but don’t sense any. They effect repairs and attempt to take off. Interspersed with this story is a man reminiscing about the wreck of a ship he was on.
A somewhat abstract view of one of the aliens. Art by Keller
This is a decent story, but it’s weakened by the interwoven narratives. It quickly becomes obvious what ship the human narrator is talking about, which leaves the final line without any punch. The story might have been better served if Peck had moved more of that thread to the end, so it isn’t so obvious. That or relied a lot less on the impact of the final line.
Three stars.
IQ Soup, by Larry Eisenberg
Eisenberg inflicts another of his awful Emmett Duckworth stories on us. This one is even stupider than usual. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it’s less than a full page long.
Another of Anvil’s tales of the Interstellar Patrol and their unusual methods of recruitment and training. It’s much like the others, and there isn’t much more to say. It’s clearly meant to come before Test Ultimate in the September Analog, but reading order shouldn’t make much difference.
A low three stars.
Escape Velocity, by Robin Scott
Astronaut Hogate struggles to fight down his fears as he sits on the launch pad. He’d be fine if there was something to do, but whenever they pause the countdown all he can do is think about everything that brought him to this place. When his capsule fails to make orbit, he’s forced to try out an experimental escape pod.
Ground Control to Major Tom. Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Art by Keller
You might want to listen to David Bowie’s recent single while reading this one. This is very good, but I’m not sure Scott is quite up to what he was trying to achieve; it falls just short of the four stars it could have been.
In a world apparently devastated by nuclear war, a girl with no arms and a very intelligent wolf undertake a journey to investigate some wild humans. It’s difficult to say much more about this without telling the whole story, but it is so much more.
A girl and her wolf. Art by Bhob Stewart
The timing is difficult, but if this wasn’t written in response to Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog, I’ll eat my hat. I will admit that I’m not entirely sure about what Tiptree was trying to say right at the very end, but it’s an impressive piece. My only complaint is really that the girl manages to do a couple of things much faster than it seems she ought to even with wolf assistance. Initially, that was enough to pull it under the four-star line, but I’ve changed my mind. Either way, Tiptree is now officially an author to watch.
Four stars.
Summing up
Another issue of Venture in the books. It’s getting better, though maybe not quite up to the standards of its parent magazine, F&SF. The biggest improvement has to be in the art. Tanner’s cover is better than the previous issue’s, though it still leaves a lot to be desired, and the addition of other (dare I say better) artists inside is a step up. I’m particularly taken with the two pieces signed "Keller". They’re sort of a combination of psychedelic and Art Nouveau that works very well.
More of all of this, please, except for Emmett Duckworth and maybe Chris Anvil.
A week has gone by since Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28 year-old worker on Robert F. Kennedy's campaign, lost her life. Of course you've read the news. She went to Martha's Vineyard for a reunion with other campaign workers, where she met the last surviving Kennedy brother, Teddy. According to the Senator, Mary Jo was a bit tipsy, so he offered to drive her home. His car ended up off a bridge. He survived; she did not.
A tragedy. Moreover, it is a far from clear-cut strategy. Kennedy says he tried to save Kopechne, but that he was too exhausted to succeed—but he failed to call the police, who might have been able to help. Indeed, he called his lawyer instead. Last weekend, the Senator pled guilty to leaving the scene of the crime.
It's also unclear just what Kennedy and Kopechne were doing on the deserted dirt road that led to the scene of the accident. It wasn't on the way home. Was something clandestine in the works? Was Teddy also sozzled?
There's a lot of talk about what this incident means for Kennedy's career, how he's not going to be able to run for President in '72, etc. Perhaps this was all an innocent accident. Maybe the only lesson we should get from all of this is that it's not smart to drive under the influence.
All we know at this time is that there as many questions as answers, as well as inconsistencies in the Senator's testimony. I hope, for the Kopechne family's sake, if nothing else, that more is learned in the days to come.
In any event, once again, a Kennedy career has come to a sudden, unexpected halt.
Steady as she goes
If the political news is chaotic, such cannot be said for the latest issue of Analog, mostly composed of the plodding "problem" stories the magazine is known for. However, amidst the tired tales is one standout that is definitely worth your time.
by Kelly Freas
The Teacher, by Colin Kapp
by N. Blakely
On a distant world, evolution is locked in the Jurassic—reptiles rule the globe. Except these deadly dinosaurs are near intelligence, and quickly crowding out the race of sentient humanoids that shares the planet. Enter "The Gaffer", a spaceman from Earth who walks the fine line between providing the skills and technology to defeat the reptiles, and avoiding becoming deified, unduly influencing the native culture.
Sounds a bit Star Trek, doesn't it?
The story is competently written, though Edgar Rice Burroughs was far better at pitting technological man vs. primeval monster. I appreciated the acknowledgment that cultural and technical exchange is a dicey subject. I'm not sure with some of the assumptions, particularly that any group exposed to Terran culture is doomed to adopt its worst qualities.
Anyway, three stars.
The Timesweepers, by Keith Laumer
by Vincent Di Fate
This one starts out as the tale of a time traveler whose job is to repair the past from the meddlings of earlier time travelers… and it sort of ends that way, too! But in-between, it's a beautiful onion of adventure, moving at breakneck speed as the scope of the universe of time-lines expands into infinity. It is both gripping adventure as well as the apotheosis of time travel stories, and Laumer manages it all in just thirty pages. At first, I thought things were moving a bit quickly, but once I got to the end, I realized they'd taken just the time they needed.
I've often observed that there is "funny" Laumer and there is "serious" Laumer, and that the latter is the more worthy (though the ex-USAF officer makes a pretty good living on his endless parade of Retief stories, so what do I know?) The Timesweepers is serious Laumer, and it's seriously good. It'd make a phenomenal movie someday.
Five stars.
Minds and Molecules, by Carl A. Larson
Somewhere in this turgid mass of verbosity are some interesting concepts: injectable "memory" RNA that teaches, or at least aids memory. Drugs that stimulate enzymes to abet sanity and tranquility.
But man, this is just too hard to read to be a useful science article.
Two stars.
Chemistry … AD 1819, by William Henry, M.D., F.R.S.
Excerpts from a 150 year old chemical tome, illustrating how the useless powders of today might be the miracles of tomorrow. And also a cautionary tale against sampling your own wares… lead is a poor flavor-additive!
Three men descend in a bathyscape not to the bottom of the ocean, but to the surface of Saturn. Their mission: to install a matter transmitter in the seething, cryogenic sea that comprises the sixth planet's lower atmosphere for scientific study. Getting there's not the problem—it's getting back!
A decent technical tale with a lesson on morality and the role of the test pilot at the end. Definitely a dash-off for cash rather than one of Harrison's more subtle, worthy tales. Interestingly, Harry's time in England betrays itself; the name he chose for the base orbiting Saturn is the prosaic "Saturn One".
Three stars.
All Fall Down, by John T. Phillifent
by Vincent Di Fate
An interstellar transport suffers a malfunction and must make planetfall to effect repairs. The problem: they make landing amidst the only civilized place on the planet, which proves to be an autocracy that immediately impounds the ship and enslaves the crew. Worse yet, they're the second bunch from Terra to get this treatment; the first is a team of anthropologists who showed up a year before.
But Lennox, a bright young man with a computer-augmented brain, knows how to sell the local autocrat on a scheme that looks promising, but will ultimately be his undoing, affording the Terrans a chance to escape.
Phillifent, who also writes as John Rackham, is rarely brilliant, and he isn't here. Once again, we have entirely human aliens. I don't mind so much when Mack Reynolds uses his interstellar federation as a setting for interesting geopolitical stories—in that case, the planets are all human colonies with latitude to develop any societies they like. But when the aliens are just people, the whole thing seems contrived.
There is also never an explanation for why the stranded ship had to interact with the planetary civilization at all, which was restricted to a small peninsula. The indigenes could not help with repairs, so why not park in the woods and leave the natives alone?
But most of all, the story just isn't particularly interesting.
Two stars.
Androtomy and the Scion, by Jack Wodhams
by Vincent Di Fate
A spy is subject to a new torture, one that leaves his body completely at the mercy of his captors. It involves the insertion and cultivation of…something…inside the spy's brain.
Now that they have complete control over him through the judicious incitement of pain, they expect him to become the perfect double-agent. But the technique they use has a blind spot—and some hidden advantages.
Tolerable, though not particularly plausible, adventure. Three stars.
Womb to Tomb, by Joseph Wesley
by Leo Summers
In the far future, human combatants are shielded from the shock of high G space maneuvers by being encased within and filled with something akin to amniotic fluid. Since liquid is not compressible, they suffer no ill physical effects (once the requisite hookups are installed). The only problem—the soldiers sent out to fight revert to infancy, so seductive is the prospect of being returned to even a virtual womb.
This story is a reasonably placed mystery, and the proposed technology is pretty neat. It's just the stupid Twilight Zoney ending that kills it. Someone will probably nick the idea for their own piece, just dumping the dopey conclusion.
Three stars (because the innovation is nifty, even if the end is dumb).
Starved for choice
If not for the Laumer, this would be a thoroughly disposable issue. But that Laumer…
All told, we end up just north of three stars, putting us akin with Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1) and New Worlds (3), ahead of Galaxy (2.8) and Venture (2.8), and behind New Writings 15 (4.3) and Fantastic (3.4)
On the plus side, the four and five star works would fill nearly three digests. This is, however, largely due to the superlative New Writings and the serial that takes up most of Fantastic, so if you're looking for bang for your buck, those are the places to go.
Oh—the Hugo nominees have been announced. I can't say I much fancy the choices, but there's at least one in each category that isn't too bad. We'll, of course, have the results after Labor Day.
And so, our longest Japan trip to date has wrapped up. We're still developing the many rolls of film we took, but here are some highlights from our vacation that included the cities Fukuoka, Amagi, Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo:
Nanami and The Young Traveler zoom down a slide in an eastern suburb of Nagoya
Nanami and her husband perform at a Nagoya jazz club
This is Nanami's baby, Wataru, and her mother-in-law, Haruko!
Lorelei poses in front of Ultraman, one of Japan's newest superheros
Lorelei has become smitten with kimono and yukata. We had to buy a new suitcase to fit them all (and the model trains Elijah bought)
The trouble back home
On the doorstep to my house was a big pile of mail that my neighbor has kept for me. In addition to sundry bills, the latest FAPA packet, and a handful of independent 'zines (including the latest from the James Doohan International Fan Club), there was the latest issue of Analog. Interest piqued by the lovely (as always) Freas cover, I tore into the mag before unpacking. Sadly, it was all downhill from there…
by Kelly Freas
… And Comfort to the Enemy, by Stanley Schmidt
When an exploration ship lands on a seemingly uninhabited planet, its rapacious, by-the-book commander rubs his hands with glee at the prospect of colonizing plunder. But it turns out there are intelligent natives—it's just that their "technology" is actually the fine control of all of their fellow creatures creating a sort of artificial Deathworld. When the invaders refuse to leave, they take a hostage, who they use as a communications go-between. And then they unleash a deadly plague which ravages first the explorer ship and then their entire race. How the colonizers get out of the predicament is somewhat clever.
by Kelly Freas
This one starts a bit slowly, and the explorers are all too human, even though they're supposed to be aliens. However, once it gets moving, it's pretty good, and you can sympathize with both the planet dwellers and the decimated invaders.
A pharmaceutical company stumbles upon a brain-booster pill. Unfortunately, it promotes eggheaded learning, but not application of this learning. As a result, the nation's economy stumbles as more and more citizens would rather discuss than do.
This is a pretty thinly veiled attack on academia and the intelligentsia, which surely must have tickled editor Campbell's reactionary heart.
Boy this one was a disappointment. We last saw Verge Foray in a nice little piece called Ingenuity, which featured a post-atomic world where humanity was divided into psionically adept but primitive and regressing "Novos" and scientific, but conservative, "Olsaperns." Starn was the hero of that story—a Novo with a rare gift of insight and intuition who managed to get in good with the technical Olsaperns.
This sequel story involves Starn's attempts to develop technology that will augment psionic powers such that they can rival or exceed the technology of the Olsaperns. Fine and well, but really, this is just one of Campbell's "scientific" articles on psionics with a fictional coating. I already find psi to be a pseudoscientific bore, but to try to add a veneer of respectability to it by invoking scientific trappings is distasteful in the extreme.
It's also a really boring tale. One star.
The Choice, by Keith Laumer
by Kelly Freas
A three-astronaut explorer team from Earth is abducted by mysterious aliens who offer each of them a choice of fates—all of them some form of execution. The two military members of the crew meet their fate boldly; the third is a far out civilian cat who doesn't cotton to his own extinction. As a result, the story has a happy ending.
There is serious Laumer and there is funny Laumer. Funny Laumer is usually the more trivial, and this is trivial funny Laumer.
Two stars.
The Man from R.O.B.O.T., by Harry Harrison
by Peter Skirka
A couple of years back, Harrison brought out the droll The Man from P.I.G., about a secret agent who goes undercover as a pig farmer. The twist was that the pigs weren't his livestock but his accomplices. In a similar vein, here we have the story of an agent who goes undercover as a robot salesman, but the robots are his accomplices. Of course, given that the robots are intelligent, and one of them is even designed to look like the agent, one wonders why there needs to be human involvement at all in this case.
Anyway, the agent is dispatched to a rancher planet whose women folk all seem to be locked up, and whose men folk are all paranoid violence freaks. Is it genetic? Or is it in the cattle?
I always get "funny" Harrison (frex "The Stainless Steel Rat") and "funny" Laumer (e.g. "Retief") mixed up. And here they're back to back! Now I'll never disentangle them.
Two stars.
The Empty Balloon, by Jack Wodhams
by Peter Skirka
Last up, a throwaway story about a diplomat who thwarts a telepathic interrogation machine. There's no real explanation as to how he does it, really, and most of the story exists to set up the lame ending.
Two stars.
Wow. What a wretched month for magazine fiction! With the exception of the atypically superlative New Worlds (3.6 stars), everything else was mediocre at best. IF managed to break the three star barrier, but just barely (3.1), same as Fantasy and Science Fiction. Amazing scored 2.6—which is a good month for that mag, while Galaxy got the same score, which constituted a bad month.
Indeed, all of the better-than-average fiction would fill just one decently sized digest. Incidentally, we had exactly one (1) short story produced by a woman, and the one woman-penned nonfiction this month was a biography…of a man.
It just goes to show that all the good stuff seems to be happening overseas these days. I hope the next month of mags reinforces my decision to come home!
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?
![[February 10, 1970] Thirty Years To Go (<i>The Year 2000</i>, a science fiction anthology by Harry Harrison)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/THEYEARF51970.jpg)
![[January 31, 1970] Both sides now (February 1970 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/700131analogcover-631x372.jpg)
![[January 12, 1970] A Glimpse into the Future: <i>Drug of Choice</i> by John Lange and <i>Crime Prevention in the 30th Century</i>, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/CRMPNTRY7D1969-310x372.jpg)
![[December 31, 1969] …for spacious skies (January 1970 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/691231cover-672x372.jpg)
![[December 2, 1969] Communication Breakdown (January 1970 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/IF-1970-01-Cover-478x372.jpg)
Vice President Spiro Agnew addressing the Midwest Regional Republican Committee.
White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler
Suggested by “This One”. Art by Gaughan.
A photorealistic portrait of Harlan Ellison. Art by Gaughan
Some Gaughan-esque abstractions. Art by Gaughan
By the falls, like it says on the tin. Art by Gaughan
More abstracts. Art by Gaughan
Aunt Sam? Art by Gaughan
I keep trying to see more than one face here, but it doesn’t work. Art probably by Gaughan
A wild human dwelling with a city of the Spheres in the background. Art probably by Gaughan
In lieu of a preview, have a fanigator. Art by Gaughan
![[November 30, 1969] Capstone to a decade (December 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691130analogcover-672x372.jpg)
![[October 20, 1969] There was a ship (November 1969 <i>Venture</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Venture-1969-11-Cover-480x372.jpg)
The SS Manhattan breaking through the ice of the Northwest Passage.
Art by Tanner
Disaster strikes the Johannes Kepler. Art by Tanner
A somewhat abstract view of one of the aliens. Art by Keller
Ground Control to Major Tom. Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Art by Keller
A girl and her wolf. Art by Bhob Stewart![[July 31, 1969] Stranger than fiction (August 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/690731analogcover-672x372.jpg)
![[June 30, 1969] Anywhere but here (July 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/690630analogcover-656x372.jpg)
![[May 31, 1969] When eras collide (June 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/690531analogcover-665x372.jpg)
