Tag Archives: j.t. mcintosh

[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)


by Fiona Moore

I was interested in reading this month’s Ace Double because I’d never read any Rackham, but had heard some good things about his writing. Ipomoea turned out to be a mixed bag, a pacy adventure story with some interesting themes that didn’t quite live up to its early promise.

Cover of the short novel Ipomoea
Cover of Ipomoea

The story takes place in a future society where interplanetary travel is as easy as taking an ocean liner is now, and a small number of people are making it rich on a trio of exoplanets which are within easy reach of Earth’s solar system. Our protagonist, Sam Hutten, is the son of one of those exoplanetary billionaires, but he has rejected his father and is now working as a sociologist on Earth. He receives, and obeys, a request to visit his father but clearly the request is more than social: assassination attempts, and contact with mysterious government agents investigating a new super-addictive drug going by the name of “Happy Sugar” (and derived from plants of the Ipomoea genus, hence the title), are to follow. When Hutten’s father turns up dead, Hutten investigates and finds a plot for universal domination by another of the billionaires, involving the drug and some gems capable of mentally conditioning their wearer.

There’s some very good and timely ideas here. The drug plot clearly draws on anxieties in the news about the possibility that the “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture of today might make people susceptible to influence by Communists or worse. There are also some good SFnal touches of imagined technology, with humanoid robots and a character who has, Frankenstein-like, been formed through melding three different people (meaning he lacks an ego and is therefore conveniently immune to psionic suggestion).

However, what I found most intriguing about the novella was the initial setup of a world where Japan has become the dominant economic and cultural power. Rackham’s argument is that the Japanese will come to this position through their production of cheap goods at low prices: “They made their stuff cheap not in competition, not to undercut anyone else, but because it could be made cheap.” Through pursuing excellence for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of conquest, they become top nation. While I’m not thoroughly convinced at the idea that the Japanese are non-competitive, the country’s recent technological and economic progress suggests that a Japanese-dominated twenty-first century might not be an outside possibility. This idea that success is achieved through non-competition and selflessness becomes a thematic link through the book, in that the villain enslaves his victims psionically through appealing to their subconscious desires, and it is only through sublimating the ego that one can resist.

Unfortunately, a lot of this early setup goes by the wayside. Apart from a few brief scenes, we don’t actually get much sense that this world is Japanese-influenced. Although this might be excused on the grounds that the villains, on the exoplanet, appear to be Europeans and into the idea of racial purity, one would expect a bit more comment on the distinction between their worlds and Earth from our protagonist.

Furthermore, we never get much exploration of why Hutten became estranged from his family, or why he became a sociologist beyond that this allows him long passages of exposition on the nature of society. Indeed, by about three-quarters of the way in Hutten’s profession appears to have been forgotten, as the story takes a sharp twist into James Bond territory. Hutten and his special agent friends must bring down a villain who is depressingly keen on making speeches explaining his plans for universal domination, and the resolution is telegraphed rather obviously to the reader.

It’s even more disappointing since, early in the story, Hutten argues, based on the rise of the Japanese, that “world domination will not work, either through force or persuasion… No government can long persist against the will of the governed,” which suggests that, if that theme were pursued, the villain would be defeated through collective action on the part of the people. Instead, we get superheroes with convenient powers saving the day, without any challenge to the economic status quo that, for all Hutten’s speechifying about the Japanese values of doing well by doing good simply for its own sake, has allowed eight billionaires to dominate its economy. A more self-aware novella might have made something of the cognitive dissonance between Hutten’s theories and the fact that the world he’s in doesn’t work that way at all (to say nothing of Hutten’s complete obliviousness of this problem), but not this one.

Two and a half stars, mostly for the setup.

Cover of the short novel The Brass Dragon
Cover of The Brass Dragon

I won’t say too much about the second half of the double, The Brass Dragon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It’s an oddly good fit with the Rackham but for the wrong reasons, namely that it also sets up an intriguing mystery only for the revelation to prove rather disappointing.

The story revolves around Barry Cowan, a young man who turns up in a Texas hospital with no memory of his past life other than a vague impression that he used to live in California, a few disconnected memories of some place that may or may not be Earth, and a little brass statue of a dragon in his pocket. The mystery builds as he is found by his (very normal) family and returned home, but is stalked by strange people apparently looking for something in his possession, and who threaten him and his family. Is he a time-traveler? An arrival from a parallel universe? An alien in human form?

About halfway through the narrative, his memory is restored, and everything falls into place for himself and for the reader. In case anyone here is planning on reading this, I won’t reveal too much other than to say that it becomes a fairly straightforward, even banal, space adventure. I’m also not quite sure who the intended audience is: the age of the protagonist (eighteen) suggests it’s supposed to be a juvenile, but there’s no real reason why he couldn’t be an adult.

Two stars, again mostly for the buildup.



By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Six Gates from Limbo, by J.T. McIntosh: A Comparison

Six Gates To Limbo Cover depicting Adam and Eve in a glass bowl full of sea creatures
Cover Design by Colin Andrews

A funny thing happened to me on the way to my magazines recently. I had already read my copy of Six Gates From Limbo, from Michael Joseph when I saw it was being serialized in If. I delayed my reading of these issues but I did look at my colleague David’s reviews of them. This is when a few odd things occurred to me.

Firstly, it took place over two issues which also contained many other stories, yet my issues of If were not particularly thick to make up for this. In addition, I noticed David’s reviews stated how rushed the story seemed, when no such point had occurred to me.

Now I know magazines do cut down stories, but this had no explanation as this was essentially a novella version. When New Worlds is forced to cut down, they have given summaries of what has been excised and have been the subject of attacks in fanzines for losing parts of the original content. I have not yet seen anyone had comment on this in the case of If.

So, in the obsessive way I like to do things, I performed a chapter-by-chapter wordcount comparison to see what was lost. By my estimation, the serialized form constitutes only around 40% of the novel length!

Covers of magazine and book versions of Drowned World and Flowers for Algernon

This is not as much of a change between the novelette and novel versions of Flowers For Algernon but not dissimilar to the different versions of Drowned World. As such I thought some in-depth investigating was in order.

To start with, where have the changes been made? The answer is, throughout. The only chapter which appeared to be in-tact is the final one. This makes some sense as the final discussion between Rex and Regina is necessary to accentuate the themes. In addition, it is the shortest so there is less to remove.

Jack Gaughan illustration from the magazine serial showing Rex in the cathedral in Mercury

The only other without much cut from it is the next shortest chapter, Rex’s return to Limbo from Mercury. From the rest, all have between 40 and 80% of their content removed.

As such, the central plot remains predominantly the same. Three people awake in an idyllic artificial environment with six portals to other planets. They investigate through them but find each flawed in some way. They have to work out what has happened and what they will do about it.

What changes between the novel and magazine versions are the details and emphasis. To take the “return to Limbo” chapter that I mentioned before, the start provides a good example of what is often removed:

Here are the first few paragraphs in its serialized form:

His awakening in Limbo was the worst of the three he had experienced, but there was one good thing about it. Regina was there. She was crying. Vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…

He went down in his pajamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

And in the book form:

Regina got him back to the house with some difficulty. She was crying – vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days. In Limbo it was night. She had rushed to the Gateway in her nightdress the moment she sensed his return.

This awakening was the worst of the three because he had no sleep and little food on Mercury. Only some twelve hours after the ordeal of transference, it had been repeated. The thirst was familiar, and the hunger, but this time there was also a desperate lassitude and weakness that put talking out of the question, other than the occasional gasped word.

Again he had his memory unimpaired and he wanted to restore himself the way that seemed natural to him, by crawling in the bushes, chewing fruit, drinking clear water and bathing in the lake. But the lake, Regina reminded him, was seven miles away, and the house less than one mile.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…It couldn’t be fresh killed meat, because Regina on her own would certainly not have killed a cow or a bull but it smelled far fresher than anything he had smelled in Mercury.

He went down in his pyjamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

As you can see the facts given are largely the same, but the serialized form lacks any reasoning or flavour. You do not need to know that Rex welcomes the return to the naturalness of life in Limbo compared to the artificiality of Mercury via his thoughts on food as a restorative, but it highlights the themes and makes him a more fleshed-out character.

But are there more substantive changes? Limbo is much more thoroughly explored in the novel, with details of the flora and fauna greatly expanded, along with the nature of their maintenance. With this it is also made explicit the parallels with Adam and Eve, with Regina believing the gateways are the serpent, along with many references to Greek mythology.

Another key element is that the magazine does not contain Rex’s vivid dreams. I can see that they could seem superfluous but I would argue they are, in fact, important for understanding the ending.

I do feel the book length version is more likely to appeal to the hippy crowd, with its rejection of society and the ecological themes.

As David noted, many of the planets get short shrift in the magazine version and that is definitely a notable difference. In addition to much more detail and complexity applied to the transfers, the six gateway worlds are expanded, even Mercury which had the longest section in the magazine. Along with the aforementioned discussions on the artificiality of food, there are also mentions of isolation, suicide kiosks, people overdosing on Pex and other such features of the city.

Possibly the most frustrating excision is almost an entire chapter laying the groundwork about the people on Cresta, why they are central to the final plan and then subsequent sections on what happened as a result. It is instead reduced to Rex making the gateway switch and saying he told someone on the planet about it. Which, even with the final chapter intact, likely makes it confusing for most readers.

So, would my opinion be that the book version is better? Unfortunately not, for there is another element that was expunged by Pohl and it is one I wish McIntosh had not included in his novel: the poor treatment of Regina. (Those of a sensitive disposition may be advised to skip the rest of this section).

Jack Gaughan illustation from the magazine of Regina dancing on stage in a skimpy outfit whilst people throw things at her
Regina in sexual slavery on Landfall. Not linked to her womanhood in magazine form.

McIntosh’s restrained descriptions of Regina in the serial brought praise from David. Unfortunately, this is definitely not the case in its book form. There Rex sees her as a “girl”, a young nineteen to his twenty-five, with regular descriptions of how pert her breasts are and “child-like” her body is. This is until she is almost raped and turned into a sex slave on Landfall. It is only at that point he can see her as a woman.

Unfortunately, this isn’t even the first rape scene. After his return from Mercury, Rex attempts to rape Regina declaring:

I waited, remember? But after a man and woman are wed, with or without ceremony, after they made love, he can’t rape her. You’re mine, Regina.

Mr. McIntosh is certainly not a devotee of Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir.

If you want my judgement each version succeeds and fails in different ways. Somewhere there is a full length-version which removes the questionable details but continues to expand on the more interesting themes and ideas McIntosh draws out.

Two Stars for both variations



by Brian Collins

Both of the novels I got for this month did not work out, sadly; but interestingly they're failures of different breeds, or rather they fail in different ways. I've read much of what Anne McCaffrey has written over the past few years while this is my first time reading Kenneth Bulmer. Both are pretty close in age, indeed being of the literary generation that preceded the New Wave. How have they adapted—or more importantly, how have they not?

Decision at Doona, by Anne McCaffrey

Cover by richard Powers depicting a psychedelic image of what seems to be a cat icon.
Cover art by Richard Powers.

Anne McCaffrey technically debuted over fifteen years ago, though she has only been writing consistently for the past few years. In those few years she has built quite the following. She became the first woman to win a Hugo in any of the fiction categories, and her Pern and "The Ship Who…" stories have undoubtedly been popular. I'm not a fan.

Decision at Doona is a new standalone novel from McCaffrey, with a premise that will sound familiar for those who remember the Good Old Days of science fiction—the early '50s, incidentally when McCaffrey sold her first story. It's the future, and humanity is scouting for habitable planets, mainly because there's no room left on Earth. Humans live in alcoves, like bees, and have basically depleted the planet's resources. Finding a planet fit for human colonization would already be difficult, but there's an extra criterion: the planet must be devoid of intelligent life comparable to mankind. Doona at first seems like the perfect candidate—until it isn't. The Hrrubans, a race of cat-like aliens, already live on Doona, keeping their existence secret from the first human scouts. The Hrrubans are about as "civilized" as the humans, but that's not going to help either party, as mankind finds itself at an impasse.

So, a first-contact narrative in which, by sheer coincidence, two advanced races meet on a planet which doesn't strictly belong to either of them. The humans are haunted by the collective memory of having encountered another intelligent race before, the Siwannese, which ended tragically. I will say, how the Siwannese became extinct is not what you would expect if you're familiar with colonialism in the Americas. Then again, I'm not sure McCaffrey did much research with regards to real-world colonialism. To give McCaffrey some credit she does delve into the subject, which is an inherently thorny one, with characters even referring to Christopher Columbus with some shame. The central question of the novel, though, that of whether the Hrrubans are indigenous to Doona (if they are then the humans must pull out, and if not then there's room for cooperation), is an odd one that assumes would-be colonizers have the best intentions with a would-be indigenous population.

The strangely tone-deaf optimism and belief in colonizers as basically good people (as opposed to people actively perpetuating a system of death and imprisonment) is a tune that will sound familiar to Analog subscribers. Indeed it's here where I think McCaffrey's key to success lies. While I'm not personally fond of McCaffrey's writing, it's not hard to see why she has become so popular in the past few years. Reading her must be a comfort for a lot of people. After all, in McCaffrey's world it's 1959 and not 1969. Ike is still in office, and Jack Kennedy is a strapping young senator—and alive. Vietnam is a country without any acreage in the minds of suburban Americans. Unfortunately Jack Kennedy is dead and so are we, in some metaphysical sense. We have cast the runes against our own souls. But for McCaffrey, and indeed for the humans within this novel, nothing much has changed since 1959. The distant future will not be too different from how it was in the Good Old Days. Now isn't that a comforting thought?

To make matters more worrying, McCaffrey is just not a very good writer. Even comparing her to some other conservatives (and I do believe McCaffrey is a conservative) in the field, like Poul Anderson and Larry Niven, her worlds and aliens are not as vibrant. Anderson, whose politics are very different from mine, can still be interesting because of his moodiness and at times surprising moral complexity, whereas McCaffrey might be living under a rock. The Hrrubans reminded me somewhat of Niven's Kzinti, but whereas the Kzinti can be easily distinguished from spacefaring humans, McCaffrey's aliens are more analogous to American indigenous peoples. And Doona itself is such a boring location, with barely any thought or writing given to description and mechanics. Surely we deserve better than this.

Two stars.

The Ulcer Culture, by Kenneth Bulmer

A rough drawing of a human with what appears to be seven breasts. Do I count seven breasts?
Cover artist not credited.

I got mailed this new Bulmer, a British import, because Kris Vyas-Myall is a Bulmer fan and I've not read any of his work before. This may have been a bad idea for a starting point. Firstly, what the hell is this cover? Who is responsible? The artist is uncredited so I'm actually not sure. The novel itself is evidently an attempt on Bulmer's part to get hip with the kids, so to speak. The Ulcer Culture is a dystopian SF novel all about drugs (especially drugs), sex, and violence; and yet I was still bored for much of it.

The plot doesn't really exist, and anyway it would be hard to summarize. The world of the novel is more the point, ya know. It's the future, in what I have to think is fish-and-chips merry goddamn England, and it's "the Age of Material Plenty." There are two groups of people, the Uppers (haha) and the workers, with the former keeping the latter in check with a hallucinogen called Joy Juice. The welfare state has gotten out of hand, with workers lounging around experiencing lifelike hallucinations, having a far-out time as it were. The real problem starts when, for no apparent reason, these hallucinations which normally would provide fantasies for the workers start turning nightmarish. Is the drug supply going bad? Are people's bodies adapting to the drug and having adverse effects? Who really killed Jack Kennedy? Why am I asking you?

Now, science fiction has had a storied history with drugs. When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World almost forty years ago, he theorized that drugs could be used to pacify the proletariat and reinforce subservience, through a Freudian understanding of pleasure. Baby wants nipple, baby cries until he gets nipple, baby acquires nipple, baby stops crying. Huxley would later change his mind profoundly on the subject of drug use, although it seems Bulmer has not gotten the memo. The problem for the reader is that The Ulcer Culture reads like a middle-aged conservative's attempt at trying to understand the hedonistic antics of the younger generation. This is a "New Wave" novel, but within limits. Sexuality plays a major role, yet women only appear in the margins and to a symbolic capacity; and despite the lack of female interest there's no mention of homosexuality. I thought the British were all about buggering each other. Is that the word? And there's basically no swearing either—no "cock," no "pussy," not even a token "fuck" thrown in as a treat.

At first I was led to believe Bulmer knew what he was doing, but then I realized he's merely puppeteering the corpse of some nonexistent New Wave writer with this outing—which, mind you, is a failure in writing that was not due to laziness or cowardice. I don't like it, but I at least respect the effort.

Two stars.



by Cora Buhlert

Conan with a Metafictional Gimmick: Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, by Gardner F. Fox

Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox

There has been an invasion at my trusty local import bookstore, an invasion of scantily clad, muscular Barbarians, sporting furry loincloths and horned helmets and brandishing gigantic swords and axes, while equally scantily clad maidens cling to their mighty thews.

The genre that Fritz Leiber dubbed "swords and sorcery" was born forty years ago almost to the day, when Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom" was published, instigating a veritable invasion of sword-wielding heroes and heroines into the pages of Weird Tales, Strange Tales and Unknown. The first Barbarian boom only lasted a little more than ten years, cut short by the death or defection of many of its authors as well as World War II paper shortages and changing reader tastes.

However, in the past ten years, Barbarian scouts have occasionally made forays into a landscape dominated by science fiction, making camp in the pages of Fantastic in the US and Science Fantasy in the UK, recruiting fans and authors penning new adventures for modern day Barbarians. Then, four years ago, the walls were breached with the runaway success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Barbarian hordes invaded the bookstore. Nowadays, there is more sword and sorcery on the shelves than there ever was during the genre's heyday in the thirties.

These days, whenever I go to my local import bookstore, half-naked Barbarians greet me from the paperback spinner rack, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, J. Jones or their lesser imitators. And I have to admit that I inevitably reach for the books with these striking covers to read the blurb on the back. For while not every scantily clad Barbarian can hold a candle to Robert E. Howard's Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser or even John Jakes' Brak, even the lesser entries into the genre are at the very least entertaining.

The latest Barbarian to invade the bookstore shelves is the aptly named Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, penned by pulp and comic book veteran Gardner F. Fox with a stunning cover by the talented J. Jones. The tagline promises that Kothar is "the mightiest fantasy hero of the enchanted, terrifying world before – or beyond – recorded time". With such hyperbole, how could I resist?

Two Distinguished Scholars – or are they?

However, the slim paperback does not open with Barbarian action. Instead, we get an introduction penned by one Donald MacIvers PhD. There are a lot of literary scholars in the world, but the number of academics who take pulp fiction and science fiction and fantasy seriously can be counted on both hands and Donald MacIvers PhD is not one of them. Fascinating…

MacIvers opens his introduction with a quote from Albert Kremnitz, whom he describes as "a German philosopher who is no longer widely read". Indeed, Albert Kremnitz is so little read that even my sixteen volume 1908 edition of the encyclopaedia Der Große Brockhaus has never heard of him. Hmm, the plot thickens…

MacIvers quotes Kremnitz stating that even though the Industrial Revolution would seem to have driven mysticism back, while science, technology and reason reign supreme, mysticism would rise again roughly in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing about a new Age of Heroes. For someone not even Der Große Brockhaus has heard of, Albert Kremnitz is certainly prescient.

MacIvers then informs us that this new Age of Heroes will lead to "the recreation of mythological supermen, or, as [Kremnitz] predicted with amazing insight, the invention of heroes so magnificent, so fantastically endowed with super-powers, that they exist only in the fantasy projections of man. Such a superhero is Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman."

At this point, I was beginning to suspect that Gardner F. Fox, who after all created the original Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and many other superheroes for National Comics, was pulling our collective leg here and that both Donald MacIvers PhD and Albert Kremnitz, a German philosopher so obscure that even Der Große Brockhaus has never of him, were in truth just alternate identities of Gardner F. Fox, who promptly describes himself as a "distinguished American writer".

But rather than begrudging Mr. Fox this little metafictional game, I was instead amused, especially since I have engaged in similar subterfuge, passing myself off as the American pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore on occasion.

Besides, Fox in the guise of Donald MacIvers PhD actually makes an interesting point here, namely that the disenchantment of modern life has given birth to our desire for larger than life heroes, be they the costumed superheroes of comic books, the square-jawed spacemen and brass-bra wearing maidens of golden age science fiction or the muscular and scantily clad Barbarians that have invaded our newsstands and bookstores of late. The reasons these stories are so popular, no matter how much literary scholars may decry them, is because we need them to escape our day to day reality for just a little while.

To quote MacIvers or rather Fox, "Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman is an epic hero for any age, but it would appear that our age needs him more than any other."

Bad Luck Barbarian

After this introduction, we get – no, not sword-swinging action, but a prologue informing us that "The Universe is old. Old!" just in case we didn't get it the first time. Fox sets the stage by telling us that Kothar's adventures take place eons after mankind has conquered the stars and "an empire of Man was spread throughout the universe. This empire died more than a billion years ago, after which man himself sank into a state of barbarism." So Kothar's world is closer to Jack Vance's Dying Earth than Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age.

Once this prologue, billed as a fragment of "The Lord Histories of Satoram Mandamor", is over, we at last meet our hero, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman. Though it seems that Kothar is not long for this world or any other, for at the beginning of the story "The Sword of the Sorcerer" (like the Conan, Kull or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, the novel is a fix-up of three novelettes) the sellsword Kothar is grievously wounded, having just lost a battle. On the run from enemy soldiers intent on capturing him and flaying him alive, Kothar stumbles into an ancient crypt, where he encounters the shrivelled corpse of the sorcerer Afgorkon. Raised from the dead by Queen Elfa, Afgorkon bestows upon Kothar the magical sword Frostfire, forged from a meteorite and able to cut through any substance, even steel. However, the blade comes with a curse, for as long as he wields Frostfire, Kothar must remain poor and possess nothing. Since Kothar is a mercenary, who fights strictly for gold and treasure, this is of course a problem.

However, before Kothar can figure out how to lift the curse upon his sword, he first has to defeat Lord Markoth, who has dethroned Queen Elfa. To no one's surprise, he succeeds, but not without picking up a second curse in the form of Red Lori, a beautiful witch in the employ of Markoth, whose spirit keeps haunting Kothar by day and night, appearing in a cup of ale and in his dreams, even though her body is imprisoned in a silver cage in Queen Elfa's castle.

The relationship between Kothar and the vengeful witch who haunts him is fascinating, especially since Red Lori is not above occasionally aiding Kothar, for none shall harm him until Red Lori has had her vengeance. It's almost a twisted love story.

After restoring Queen Elfa to her throne, Kothar, his devoted horse Greyling and the magical sword Frostfire, take off for more adventures and are hired to find "The Treasure in the Labyrinth", a treasure which happens to be guarded by all sorts of traps and monsters. After fighting his way through these traps and monsters – and rescuing a lovely and grateful maiden – Kothar faces the final guardian, a Minotaur straight out of Greek legend. Naturally, Kothar prevails and slays the Minotaur, but he is in for a surprise, for the Minotaur turns into a beautiful woman, the lover of a sorcerer who was cursed by his rival. Kothar has managed to lift this curse, though he still cannot lift his own and is promptly double-crossed by his employers, too, losing the treasure to them. However, Kothar's treacherous employers don't get to enjoy the treasure for long, before poetic justice strikes again…

In the final story, Kothar meets "The Woman in the Witch Wood", Lady Alaine of Shallone, who is forced to live alone in the woods, unable to leave due to a spell cast by the villainous Baron Gorfroi. Lady Alaine asks Kothar's help to free her and her people from this evil spell and sneak into the castle to slay the Baron and retrieve the means by which Lady Alaine is kept imprisoned, a lock of her white hair kept in a golden coffin. Unsurprisingly. Kothar succeeds, only to find himself double-crossed yet again by Lady Alaine who uses her magic to turn him into a dog. However, this time around, Kothar expected betrayal and in turn tricks the Lady Alaine…

Pure Barbarian Fun

Regardless of what Donald MacIvers PhD has to say, the adventures of Kothar are not as good as the works of past masters like Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith nor are they quite up to the standard set by the best of the modern practitioners of the genre such as Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny or Joanna Russ.

That said, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman, is a lot of fun. It's the sort of book you will devour in one sitting – I did, interrupted only by consulting Der Große Brockhaus about the mysterious Albert Kremnitz – and smile throughout. Kothar may not be the most original of heroes, though there is enough to distinguish him from the other Barbarians clogging up bookshelves, and his adventures may not be the most original either, though there is usually at least one or two surprising twists. And while "the distinguished American author Gardner F. Fox" may not be Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber – but then who is? – he is a skilled enough writer to weave thoroughly entertaining tales. He is certainly a better writer than Lin Carter who pens similar stories.

I was debating how to rate this book. It's not a masterpiece nor Hugo material, but is so much fun that I shall give it four stars anyway. And should Mr. Fox ever decide to revisit Kothar – who after all is still suffering from the dual curse of sword-induced poverty and a sexy witch haunting him – I will certainly pick up further adventures of the sellsword from Cumberia.

Pure entertainment. Four stars.






[January 4, 1969] Not following through (February 1969 IF)


by David Levinson

The misrule of law

You may recall that Brazil underwent a military coup back in the spring of 1964. The reasons were the usual ones, and the U.S. response can be characterized, at best, as “turning a blind eye,” because then-president João Goulart (popularly known as Jango) was leaning a little too far to the left. The military junta which has ruled Brazil since prefers to call it a revolution, not a coup, but whatever you call it, the result is the same.

Seeking to give themselves more legitimacy, the military instituted a two-party system in 1966. The National Renewal Alliance (ARENA) officially represents the military dictatorship, while the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) gets to make speeches against and vote no on things that are going to happen anyway. That way, the legislature doesn’t look like the rubber stamp it is.

Or was. Unrest has been growing, particularly among the young. Arbitrary arrests and the torture of politcal prisoners has been ongoing. In March, a teenager who was leading a protest against rising food prices was shot point-blank by military police. This murder sparked further unrest, to the point that officials felt they had no choice but to allow a large protest march, hoping it would let the students blow off steam. The March of the One Hundred Thousand in June saw little violence, as the protestors demanded an end to the military government.

The March of the One Hundred Thousand. The banner reads “Down with dictatorship. People in power.”

Enter Márcio Moreira Alves. He started out as a journalist and opposed the Goulart government. After initially supporting the coup, he soon began to oppose it as well, with his primary cause being an end to the torture of political prisoners. He was elected as a Federal Deputy in 1966 and has continued his fight. In September, he called for a boycott of Brazil’s Independence Day celebrations on September 7th, and urged young women not to dance with military officers (or perhaps not date them, I have seen both mentioned in reports).

That was too much. The Justice Department asked the legislature to lift Alves’s immunity so that he could be tried for treason.  On December 12th, a joint session of the Federal Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate resoundingly refused to do so with a vote of 216-141.

Márcio Moreira Alves delivering the speech that got him into trouble.

The very next day, President Arturo da Costa e Silva issued Institutional Act Number 5. This act, which is not subject to judicial review or legislative oversight, allows the president to rule by decree, eliminates habeas corpus for political crimes, establishes censorship, and lets the government suspend any public servant who is found to be subversive or uncooperative, along with a number of other heavy-handed measures. Costa e Silva ordered hundreds of arrests of government critics the very next day.

There is strong opposition even within ARENA, the party founded to support the junta. Whether this is merely a crackdown or the beginning of cracks in the foundation of the dictatorship remains to be seen.

Passing judgment

If last month’s issue was about forgetting, this month’s IF is about the law and judgment. There’s something else that ties almost all the fiction here together, but we’ll get to that at the end.

Time travelers on their way to meet their ancestor. Art by Vaughn Bodé

The “Hoax” Story, by H.L. Gold

Former editor H.L. Gold offers a guest editorial on the two threads in science fiction that have dominated since the days of Verne and Wells. Today we might call them hard science fiction and speculative fiction, though Gold doesn’t use those terms. It’s interesting, but rather muddled. Gold’s definition of what constitutes a hoax seems ridiculously broad and not connected to his theme.

Three stars.

Beside the Walking Mountain, by Burt Filer

After being cashiered out of the GS (never explained, but probably something like Galactic Service), Hatch bought the planet where he ruined the careers of his superior and himself, hoping to right some of the wrongs they committed. Now that superior has returned to finish what he started and get revenge on Hatch. And he has the law on his side.

In desperation, Hatch tries to get his barge over the moving mountain. Art by Brock

Filer has been an inconsistent author, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Here, he demonstrates the full range of his quality in one story. He’s created an interesting, if implausible, planet, with a mountain that follows the terminator during the 14-month day. The conflict is solid, though the antagonist may be a little overdone. But the resolution falls flat on its face. Largely because eminent domain doesn’t work the way the author thinks it does. In fact, the precedent cited in the story invalidates the ending.

Good and bad average out to three stars.

Praiseworthy Saur, by Harry Harrison

A boy is taking home an interesting lizard he’s caught. His walk is interrupted by a group of time-traveling lizardoids descended from his new pet. They want him to let their ancestor go, so she can lay her eggs safely.

A tight little story with a sting in its tail. Harrison packs a lot into a very small space and does so with skill. The boy is also a believable and skeptical modern boy, which is a nice touch. Is that enough to get it to four stars? For me, it falls just short.

A very high three stars.

At Bay with Baycon, by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch reports on last year’s Worldcon in Oakland. After a rocky start and the requisite namedropping, he settles in to a fair report, though a lot of the humor is forced. Of course, the Journey covered Baycon several months ago, and we had pictures.

Three stars.

How many of these folks can you identify? Art by Gaughan

The Defendant Earth, by Andrew J. Offutt

It turns out that Mars, Venus, and a few other places in the solar system actually are habitable and are joined in an interplanetary union of sorts. Now, they’d like to give Earth the chance to join, but there’s one problem. The Martians are unhappy with the way they have been depicted in science fiction, going all the way back to Wells. It falls to Ohio lawyer Joe Blair to negotiate a solution.

Offutt is another author who’s been very uneven, but he does a good job here. The story is enough fun that I can overlook the lack of explanation for why the job fell to the protagonist and the reliance on a somewhat tired cliché for the resolution. It’s not a deep tale, but it is enjoyable.

Three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, Lester del Rey has been reading The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rattray Taylor, which looks at all the recent advances in the biological sciences, what scientists are working on and advances they expect to see in the not too distant future. Organ transplants, cloning, sex selection of children, tinkering with DNA (both intentionally and unintentionally), artificial life. There’s a lot coming down the road that society, politics, and the law are going to have to deal with. Hopefully, science fiction will have plotted a safe path forward by the time these changes hit us.

Three stars.

Trial by Fire, by James E. Gunn

John Wilson is in something resembling a fugue state, unsure of anything, even his own name. His consciousness drifts between two worlds. In one, he’s on trial for arson and murder, though he has apparently been framed by an anti-science political party which is using him to further their agenda. In the other, he works as a witch doctor in a fractured United States, secretly using science to help the superstitious peasants. There he has been arrested by the secret police for witchcraft.

This isn’t happening in the world you might expect. Art by Gaughan

This rumination on anti-science and anti-intellectual attitudes is a sequel to a much older story (“Witches Must Burn,” Astounding, August 1956), but having read that isn’t necessary. Most of it is summarized by the prosecution in Wilson’s trial. Either way, it’s not very good. The drift between the worlds is interesting at first, but having the viewpoint character addled and unsure of what’s going on around him wears out its welcome quickly. Gunn still managed to keep my interest most of the way, but then we get several pages of philosophical rambling about science and the duty of scientists, followed by a climax that’s difficult to believe. Even less believable is the suggested connection between the two worlds Wilson inhabits. And all that in about twice the length the story needed.

A high two stars.

Authorgraphs: An Interview with Harry Harrison

In what appears to be a new feature, we have another interview transcribed directly from tape and again without the questions. This month, as you can tell from the title: Harry Harrison. This was a little more interesting than last month’s interview with Roger Zelazny, but then Harrison is a dozen years older and has spent time living in Europe. The highlight for me was him talking about his transition from comic book writer and inker to SF author.

Three stars.

A caricature, but recognizably Harry. Art by Rudy Cristiano

The Fire Egg, by Roger F. Burlingame

This month’s new author is a 38-year-old minister and former Fulbright scholar who wrote his story—which begins with a peasant finding the titular fire egg—as an assignment in the Famous Writer’s School. It’s well-written, as you might expect from the author’s background. Unfortunately, it’s also obvious and superficial. The sting at the end feels more sarcastic and nasty than ironic and deep.

A high two stars.

Six Gates to Limbo (Part 2 of 2), by J.T. McIntosh

In part 1 of this story, a man and two women found themselves in a pleasant but sealed off region with six portals leading away.  The man knows nothing, one woman a little, and the other more than she’s saying. As the first installment ended, Rex and Regina had run into trouble while exploring one of the worlds beyond the gateways. In this part, the explorations continue, and many questions are answered, with some surprising revelations. Finally, the trio must make a momentous decision.

Rex and Venus discover an empty world. Art by Gaughan

Last month, I feared that McIntosh didn’t have enough room to explore all six worlds. The final three are given very short shrift, with each character exploring one alone and merely reporting on what they found. Everything is rushed, the reason behind the sense of ennui and doom afflicting all of humanity made little sense to me, and the solution was far too extreme. A weak finish to a promising start.

A low three stars for this installment, but still three stars for the novel as a whole.

Summing up

In baseball, they tell batters to swing through the ball, not at it. The same goes for golf and probably every other sport that involves hitting one thing with another. It’s the follow-through that makes the difference, and that’s what is missing from all the stories in this issue except for Harrison and Offutt. The rest feel like the author simply rushed to get the story over and offers no sense of what, if anything, might come after. Gunn hints at it, but I don’t see how he gets from the end to what he tells us is coming. (Admittedly, I was bored and rushing to get it over with myself by that point.) The result is another C- issue with no standout stories. IF deserves better.

Another Hugo winners issue. Dare we hope?






[December 2, 1968] Forget It (January 1969 IF)


by David Levinson

Forget the future

It’s official. As if it weren’t already clear from the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia over the summer, the Soviet Union has now openly declared that no communist nation in the Soviet sphere of influence will be allowed to go its own way or engage in any sort of reforms not approved by Moscow. Addressing the Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party on November 13th, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated, “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” That’s the justification for military intervention wherever the U.S.S.R. feels like, especially within the Warsaw Pact. We all know who will get to decide if something is a move towards capitalism.

Leonid Brezhnev after addressing the Soviet Central Committee earlier this year.

The backlash has already begun. After years of strained relations, Albania formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in protest over the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Of course, they have Yugoslavia as a buffer state, and the close proximity of Greece and Italy probably also offer a deterrent. As we go to press, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu has publicly condemned this new doctrine as a violation of the Warsaw Treaty. Only time will tell how this shakes out.

Forget the past

Forgetfulness seems to be the theme of this month’s IF. The issue is book-ended with stories featuring protagonists with amnesia, while two of the remaining three stories offer a man who doesn’t know his name and an entire year blotted from everybody’s memory.

Just some random art not associated with any of the stories. Art by Chaffee

Six Gates to Limbo (Part 1 of 2), by J.T. McIntosh

A man awakens naked in a field with no idea who he is or how he got there. It proves to be a pleasant place about 50 miles in circumference, surrounded by a dome of gray mist. He dubs the place Limbo. Set in the dome, about 20 feet above ground are six ovals that he believes to be portals. Eventually, he also finds a house with a well-stocked kitchen, a library full of books (printed on Earth, all before 3646), and three bedrooms, two of which have women’s clothes in them.

In the basement, he finds three coffins with windows set in the lids. One is empty and is labeled Rex, giving him a name. The second, labeled Regina, contains a very pretty woman, while the third holds a beautiful woman apparently named Venus. Regina comes to, already knowing her name and also with the ability to know where anything (and anyone) is.

After a time, Rex passes through one of the gateways. He discovers a huge city called Mercury, which is laden with a sense of doom that depresses all its inhabitants. On his return, Rex discovers a freezing sub-basement with clues that the gateways are portals to other planets. Regina deliberately triggers Venus’s awakening, and the three get along fairly well, without Venus interfering in the relationship between the other two.

As this installment ends, Rex and Regina pass through another portal and find themselves on a hot, desert planet. While investigating an immigration office, Rex blunders and the police – or worse – are summoned. To be concluded.

Rex investigates the first portal. Art by Jack Gaughan

McIntosh has given us an interesting set-up and an intriguing mystery, but I don’t see how he’s going to extract Rex and Regina from their current predicament and explore four more worlds in just one installment. I’m eager to see the rest of this. But one thing really stood out to me. Take note Robert Silverberg and many other authors, in and out of science fiction: McIntosh makes very clear to the reader that Regina is quite petite without once referring to her breasts or hips, nor is there anything describing her as childlike. He does describe her once as a girl in comparison to Venus, but Rex clearly views her as an adult. Similarly, we know that Venus is voluptuous without any reference to her secondary sexual characteristics.

A high three stars.

The Year Dot, by William F. Temple

Bart Cabot grew up an orphan in a small town. His fascination with the X-men in the next valley repeatedly gets him into trouble with the Sheriff. He’s also curious why the year 1978 is missing from all the records in the library, but nobody else seems to see a discrepancy. Finally, he pushes the Sheriff too far, and only intervention by one of the X-men saves his life. Bart learns a lot about what’s going on and has a choice to make.

Doesn’t look like any of the X-Men I know. Beast maybe? Art by Brock

The story’s well told, if nothing special. There’s a strong implication that what’s going on is global, but the focus of the story makes it feel entirely local. The missing year thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. And calling the aliens in the next valley X-men is just confusing to anyone with a passing knowledge of comic books.

Three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, Lester del Rey looks at changes in agriculture. Sure, we have things like corn that produces large, uniform ears, strains of plants that grow in soil that was once unsuitable, and fertilizers to replenish exhausted fields. But do those fertilizers replenish minerals that occur in vanishingly small amounts; do the new strains take up those sorts of minerals, if the soils they now grow in even have them? Maybe that will affect taste (ask a vintner about how the tiniest variation can affect their product) or maybe the lack of those “unimportant” minerals will have unsuspected health effects. Lots to think about.

Three stars.

The Steel General, by Roger Zelazny

Zelazny picks up where Creatures of Light left off. Wakim, the servant of Anubis, desperate to find out who he once was, and the Prince Who Was A Thousand do battle in time. Eventually they are transported to another planet, where Horus, son of Osiris, comes also seeking to kill the Prince, as does the Steel General, who supports the Prince merely because he is the underdog.

Anubis doesn’t want Wakim to learn who he really is. Art by P. Reiber

Now Zelazny has me hooked. The intermediate material following Wakim leaving the House of the Dead that weakened the previous story might have fit better at the beginning here, but this works without that, too. Although the ending is something of a cliff-hanger, there’s enough here to make a complete tale, and it’s a doozy. Poetic, mythic, Zelazny at his best.

A high four stars.

Operation High Time, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Simes are an offshoot of humanity who must take life energy from normal humans, or Gens (short for Generators; Sime from symbiote maybe?). The process was once fatal, but the two groups have found ways to live together, with many restrictions on the Simes. Protagonist Farris is a Sime who has found a way to ease some of those restrictions. His lobbying in Washington leads to his strongest opponent in the Senate being kidnapped. Following a hunch, Farris is kidnapped as well.

Farris is imprisoned with his political nemesis. Art by Brand

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been complaining about badly-done exposition by authors who should know better. This month’s new author shows how to do it right. The exposition in this story comes in small, natural chunks, giving just enough for the story to make sense while hinting at much more. The rest of the story is also done quite well. This is probably the best IF First debut since Larry Niven.

A very high three stars.

In the Shield, by Dean R. Koontz

The latest from Dean Koontz starts off with an amnesiac man in a spaceship filled with weapons that have no maker’s marks on them. In short order he winds up with two unexpected companions and then follows post-hypnotic orders to go to one of the main worlds in the galaxy.

That was the look on my face at about this point in the story. Art by Reese

The story starts off fine, but quickly brings in two astronomically unlikely coincidences, and then goes completely off the rails, descending into a sophomoric attack on religion. Koontz keeps missing the mark, but he does aim high. Maybe he should aim a little lower until he has the chops to match his ambition.

Right on the line between two and three stars. I’ll be generous and give it the lowest three stars possible.

Authorgraphs: An Interview with Roger Zelazny

Zelazny on himself, science fiction, writing and so on. According to the editor’s blurb this was transcribed directly from a recording of him answering questions (which we don’t get). Interesting and informative, if a bit shallow.

Three stars.

I wonder if he’s always this dapper. Art by Gaughan

Summing up

Yet another middle-of-the-road issue. I’m starting to come around on McIntosh, but he’s on probation until next month. Zelazny managed to pull me in, where I had been less interested, and we got a very impressive debut from an author I hope to see more of. But there are times when I feel like Galaxy gets all the choice stories, and IF is left with the dregs.

Can’t say anything here really excites me.






[September 30, 1967] Ain't that good news! (October 1967 Analog)


by Gideon Marcus

End of Summer

The long, hot summer is over, and with it a general cooling across the country, both in temperature and in tension.  While San Francisco enjoyed a summer of love, with folks as disparate as Eric Burdom and Scott McKenzie coming to just be-in, the rest of the nation was rocked by civil strife, strikes, and protest.


Ashes in Cambridge, MD


Teachers on strike

And why not?  The cities have been bubbling kettles for a long time, and too many mayors and councilmen are ignoring the problem.  Too many workers have been stiffed and neglected.  Too many young men, too young even to vote, have lost their lives in Vietnam.

Now, the strikes are largely settled in the workers' favor.  The racial problems, well they're still there, but harder to ignore, and with the departure of sultry weather, tempers are a little less frayed.  Vietnam…well, they had a free election didn't they?  Surely things must be getting a little better.

Surely.

In any event, enjoy the respite.  We're going to need our strength.

So goes the nation…

The nation of science fiction, that is.  SF had a rocky summer, with a slew of lackluster magazines, inconsistent books, and of course, endless reruns on TV.  I'm happy to report that the dog days are over, at least for now: not only has it been a good month for SF mags in general, but the latest issue of Analog is the best in more than a year and a half.


by John Schoenherr

Weyr Search, by Anne McCaffrey


by John Schoenherr

Jack Vance and Frank Herbert have made sweeping, quasi-fantastic tableaus the in thing.  Universes that feel thousands of years old, with venerable, somewhat tattered institutions vying for power in a decadent setting.  Now Ann McCaffrey, best known for her The Ship Who series, has tossed her hat in the ring.

Pern is a planet somewhere in the galaxy, once settled by Earth, but long since forgotten.  It is a verdant, pleasant world save for one feature.  Every few hundred years, a rogue planet comes close enough in its eccentric orbit to launch deadly spores of "thread".  These burrow into Pern's soil, destroying native life, scourging farms and people.

To combat them, humans formed a sort of treaty with the native intelligent life: sapient dragons, with whom their riders bond telepathically.  These dragons not only breathe fire, but they can teleport.  This makes them formidable defenders, indeed!  Clearly, they once dominated Pernian politics.  Long ago, there were six "Weyrs"–barren fortresses wherein lived the dragons and their human brethren.  From these strongholds, Pern was kept safe from the baleful "red star".

But humans have short memories, and when Weyr Search begins, it has been several centuries since the last orbital conjunction.  Human politics have supplanted other concerns, and the "Holds", fortresses against human incursion, reign supreme.  Only one Weyr, called Benden, remains in operation–a shabby shadow of itself.

Nevertheless, with the rogue planet approaching, and the queen of dragons recently dead, it is imperative that the Benden riders find a new rider for the next queen, one who has the requisite psychic talents and the necessary strength of character.  Can any such person exist in these fallen times, when even proud Ruatha hold, whose royal family's blood once ran with a strong vein of dragon talent, has become a wreck under the cruel ministrations of Lord Fax of the High Reaches?

Well, of course the answer is yes.  It's obvious from the first page, told from the point of view of Lessa, Ruathan scullery girl, who is secretly scion of the dead lineage.  Weyr Search is not a story to surprise, a tale of twists and turns.  It is not even really a complete story; it is clear there will be sequels.  What it is, however, is an intriguing setup for a story.

As such, it really succeeds or fails on its writing.  McCaffrey is better at her job than Herbert, whose reach regularly exceeds his grasp.  She is less talented than Vance (who wrote a somewhat reminiscent tale several years ago called The Dragon Masters).  The first portion of the story is a bit stiltedly told, and Lessa comes across as something of a caricature, a wish-fullfilment vehicle akin to Cinderella ("I may seem a nothing, but I'm really a secret princess-queen!") Not that this kind of character can't work–after all, look at Roan in Earthblood, but Laumer and Brown did a better job with it.  And, of course, there are the tics that sold the work to Campbell: psionics and the idea of people being genetically special.

Nevertheless, the writing gets better as it goes along, and the concepts are interesting.  I've read some great stuff by McCaffrey, and I've read some tepid stuff by McCaffrey.  This installment gets four stars.  We'll see how the serial (in all but name) does as a whole when its done.

(Note: There's a bit in the prologue where Pern's "Yankee" colonists are mentioned.  I'll bet my bottom dollar this was a Campbell edit, as nowhere in the rest of the story is the race of the colonists suggested.  Heaven forbid anyone but WASPs settle the galaxy…)

Toys, by Tom Purdom


by Leo Summers

I'm always happy to see a piece from my good friend, Tom.  This one involves a cop duo (male and female) taking on a gang of pre-teenage kids, who have taken their families hostage using a host of homegrown weapons: genetically engineered apes and tigers, chemistry-set psychedelic drugs, erector-set shock guns.  The work of the police is complicated by their standing directive to minimize casualties.

A little insight from the author:

I have a lot of thoughts on Toys. I gave a talk on it at a Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting this month.

Basically, it's built around three ideas.

The first came from a John Campbell editorial I read around 1950 or 51.  What are you going to do, Campbell asked, when an angry teenager can blow up a city merely by twisting a pair of wires in a certain way?  It's a thought experiment that gets at the heart of some of the issues raised by technology.  I reduced the problem to a world where children have access to all kinds of potentially lethal technologies.

The second big idea is economic growth.  I got interested in that years before, and it figures in many of my stories. The standard of living in the industrialized nation has been doubling two or three times per century since about 1700.  The children in my story are lower middle class or might even be considered poor, but they have access to things like home genetic kits.  They are poor in land, however, living in a five story house on a narrow plot.  And lots of other kids have a lot more.

The third element is a Utopian police force.  In a world with so much potential for violence, you need a first class police force and a society willing to pay for highly trained, well educated cops.  Edelman [the viewpoint character] understands that he is supposed to resolve this situation without harming the kids.  He takes bigger risks than he has to because he is responsible for the kids' welfare.

Thus, both utopian and anti-utopian predictions.  Purdom excels at these concepts, painting a future world with realistic touches.  For instance, complete equality of the sexes (exemplified by the cop partners), and one of the few stories that takes monetary inflation into account ($50,000 a year is a poor salary; $200,000 is pretty good.)

Where Tom always has trouble is combat scenes.  It's no coincidence that his best works, like I Want the Stars and Courting Time, focus on people rather than fighting.

Toys is essentially a non-stop fight sequence.  Thus, three stars.

Political Science—Chinese Style, by Research Group of the Theory of Elementary Particles, Peking

Editor Campbell offers up the preamble to a Chinese paper on subatomic particles, the realm of the "quark".  The actual paper is not included; instead, we get many pages of explanation as to the philosophy that let to the composer's discoveries–all guided by the pure thought of their leader Mao Tse Tung.

It's pretty obvious that such folderol is necessary to get anything published in China.  I'm sure the Nazi and Stalinist publishers had to do the same.  What's special about this paper is that the science is reportedly "first-class".  Which makes me sad that the whole paper wasn't included.  Subatomic physics is fascinating stuff.

Anyway, it's short and interesting for what it is.  And given the quality of fiction in this mag, I didn't miss the (hit and miss) science column too much.

Three stars.

The Judas Bug, by Caroll C. MacApp


by Kelly Freas

C.C. MacApp, using his first name rather than an initial for some reason, offers up this tale of a colony in peril.  Two settlers of a new planet have been found dead in the field, their faces, throats and hands gnawed away.  The fauna of the planet just don't seem harmful enough to be the culprit; Mechanic James Gruder worries that a human conspiracy is involved.

This is a perfectly competent story, although I found the resolution a little rushed.  Three stars.

Free Vacation, by W. Macfarlane


by Leo Summers

I really liked the concept behind this story: Terran convicts are offered a choice–imprisonment, or teleportation to a roughhewn world as conscripted explorers.  Day Layard, a brand new draftee, is paired with an old hand, who proves invaluable in keeping him alive.  It turns out Layard's partner is particularly happy with his lot in life; it gives him the opportunity to seek out signs of the "Prodromals", the race of beings that preceded humanity in the galaxy.

This is another tale that runs along just fine until the somewhat rushed ending.  An extra page or two would have perhaps garnered a fourth star.  As is, a pleasant three.

Pontius Pirates, by J. T. McIntosh


by Leo Summers

The planet of Molle is a rich, advanced world, with nothing to hide.  So why is it the moment Jack Sheridan makes planetfall from Earth, he is under 24 hour surveillance?  Nothing formal, mind you–just subject to the attentions of four jovial fellows eager to get him drunk, and a pretty young girl employed to spend the night with him…or at least tell him she did when he wakes up with no memory of what went on the previous day.

Could it be that Molle is actually the home base for the piratical Buccaneers, and the surveillance is to make sure no one gets too close to the secret? That's certainly why Sheridan, actually an Interstellar Patrolman, was dispatched to the planet.

On the surface, this is just a secret agent thriller.  The plot is interesting, but nothing noteworthy.  The average reader will probably enjoy it and move on.

As a writer, I found much to admire.  The thing is, Jack Sheridan is never wrong.  He has his working theories, he tests them, and they always turn out to be more or less as expected.  There are plenty of stories with characters like these, from Retief to James Bond, and they quickly run into one or both of two issues:

1) When you know the hero is always right, where's the tension?

2) When the hero knows he's always right, he tends to become insufferable.

McIntosh, who has been writing for two decades now, neatly avoids both pratfalls.  The mystery is unfolded piece by piece, and at each juncture, Sheridan is plagued with doubt.  He doesn't know if he's right, he lists all the reasons he could be wrong, and he explains what he'll do in that event.  The thing is, he isn't some schnook like Bond who stumbles upon the truth.  He lands on Molle with enough information to be pretty sure it's the Buccaneer base.  After that, it's logical and plausible deduction.

We also learn a lot about Sheridan, his character and his values, without ever explicitly being told about them.  It's a lovely piece of oblique writing, all showing and no telling.

So, well done, Mr. McIntosh.  Perhaps others in Campbell's stable can learn from your example (*ahem* Chris Anvil).  Four stars.

Doing the math

With a star-o-meter rating of 3.4 stars, Analog tops its competition.  But competition it did have!  New Worlds and Fantasy and Science Fiction both scored 3.3, and even Amazing got 3.0.  Only IF and
Galaxy lagged, with 2.8 and 2.7, respectively.

If you took all the four and five star stories, you could fill two slim digests.  The only really sad statistic is that, out of 33 new pieces of fiction, just one was written by a woman.  Looks like women have struck out for books and screenplays, where the money's better.  A smart move, but not a happy sign for magazines in general.

Nevertheless, let's dwell on the positive.  Good job, Analog, and thanks for a happy punctuation to the month of September!



Speaking of books by women…

You've probably heard of Marie Vibbert, one of the biggest names in SFF magazines (of the far-future year 2022).  Her book, The Gods Awoke, is what I've been calling "a new New Wave masterpiece":

Do check it out.  You'll not only be getting a great book, but you'll be supporting the Journey!




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[August 18, 1967] The Best and the Brightest? (September 1967 Fantasy and Science Fiction)


by Gideon Marcus

Inside baseball

In the latest issue of Science Fiction Times, author Norman Spinrad complains that with just four science fiction magazines left, under the helm of three editors, it is impossible for the 250 members of the newly formed Science Fiction Writers of America to make a living at short story writing.  Spinrad also says that the editors have their chosen pet authors (Spinrad calls them "whores"), and because they are gauranteed slots, other writers are left in the cold. This, Spinrad maintains, is why so many folks are turning to novels or TV to make ends meet.  He feels this is a shame since you can do things with short stories and novelettes you can't do with novel-length pieces.  Spinrad notes that we'll never get another Sturgeon, Bradbury, or Cordwainer Smith under the current situation (I note with some amusement that Cordwainer Smith was one of Pohl's so-called "pets", which I guess makes him a brilliant "whore", according to Spinrad's definition).

Spinrad ends his piece urging that writers demand that Amazing and Fantastic end their mainly-reprint policy (they don't pay for them, which has provoked an SFWA boycott) and that Pohl be fired from at least one of his magazines.  This, Spinrad asserts, will create more slots, which will encourage more writers, which will generate audience demand, which will promote the creation of more short length outlets, whether magazines or paperbacks.

A name Spinrad does not specifically mention as having a pet policy is Ed Ferman, editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Ferman is fairly new to the job, and F&SF has typically cast a wider net to gather its stories.  There are also more slots per issue, as F&SF tends toward shorter pieces.

I would thus conclude that, if any place in science fiction would still offer a quality selection of stories, it would be F&SF.  They can, after all, print the best of the best that the 250 SFWAers can offer.

Let's open up this month's F&SF and see if that be the case.

Off the slush pile


by Richard Corben

Out of Time, Out of Place, by George Collyn

The lead piece is by a fellow we normally see in mags on the other side of the pond (Spinrad did not mention the UK mags as potential markets, but to be fair, there's only one left).  Collyn's tale features a spaceman returned from a fifty year voyage to find the world completely changed.  He is but ten years aged thanks to relativity, and so he is a young, lonely man utterly divorced from society.

But one day, he finds the most extraordinary woman, and they marry and live in bliss.  Until he discovers what she does for a living, and how it relates to an advance in mass media technology called "altrigo"…

The problem with this story, aside from the disturbing ending, is that it's just been done by Kate Wilhem in her piece, Baby, you were great!, which just appeared in Orbit 2.  Thus, I knew what was coming miles early.  Very distracting.

Three stars.

The Cyclops Juju, by I. Shamus Frazer

The next two stories involve African magic clashing with Westerners.  I'm always leery of such tales.  They smack of parochialism and usually hinge on a pretty narrow idea of what goes on in the vast continent that straddles the equator.  Neither of these pieces disabused me of this view.

Juju takes place in an English boarding school.  One of the students has brought a wooden statue of a cyclops, apparently modeled on the prow of an old slaver ship and worshiped as a totem by an African tribe.  All of the students who sleep in the same room with it begin experiencing a sequential dream, that they are captive slaves on the ship who break free and land on an island with the slaver crew as captives.  Over time, the totem exerts greater and greater control over the students until it is uncertain what is dream and what is reality.

Of course, stories like this depend on willful ignorance on the part of the authority figures so things can get sufficiently out of hand.  In the end, this is a reasonably well told horror/fantasy that feels like it would have done well in a prior decade.  It feels out of touch here.

Three stars.

Night of the Leopard, by William Sambrot

Faring worse is this piece, involving missionaries sent to Sierra Leone on a peace-corps-esque endeavor.  Opposing them is a witch doctor with a draconian control over a starving village and the putative ability to turn into a leopard.  The linchpin to defeating him is Eunice Gantly, an American of African extraction (specifically Masai).  The witch doctor's attempts to seduce and subvert Eunice end up backlashing.  The result is pure Twilight Zone corn.

The problems with this story are several-fold.  For one, it was done before, and better, by Richard Matheson in 1960.  For this same magazine.  Moreover, I take umbrage at the idea that people have these racial memories that can be unlocked.  And even then, Eunice and the witch doctor are as related as me (Eastern European Jew) and my wife (Western European mutt).  That is to say, we might be the same color, but I doubt our genetics have been within a thousand miles of each other.  The idea that all Africans, or even all Sub-Saharan Africans, belong to a single society is laughable and a bit offensive.

Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson — I think his feature does not better this magazine

The Saw and the Carpenter, by J. T. McIntosh

SF veteran McIntosh offers up this serviceable murder mystery: the son of a space station commander is murdered by a robot.  Since robots must be programmed, the culprit must be human.  A robot expert is sent to investigate.

The story is reasonably executed, even if the characters all have exotic names like "Bob" and "John" and "Lucy" (one wonders if they were placeholders the author forgot to modify).  The ending is…interesting.  Apparently, Asimov's Three "Laws" don't always apply.

Anyway, three stars.

A Thousand Deaths, by Jack London

Because there are so many writers submitting pieces to F&SF, it follows that the editor would run…a 70 year old reprint.  This early London tale is about a seaman who is subject to a hideous series of experiments in resurrection.  Captive of a mad scientist, said sailor is murdered again and again, only to be brought back by a wonder process.  But is a life of dying really what you'd call living?

It's all very breathless and pre-pulp, and while fun to an extent, and valuable historically, I'm not sure I'd rather have it than a new story.

Three stars.

Donny Baby, by Susan Trott

A married couple, part of the avocado tree crowd, have a baby the same day their seed finally sprouts.  The sapling and the infant seem to have intertwined lives.

Had I read this as I was putting together Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), I might have given it three stars.  Ten years after the fact, I'm afraid it merits just two.

The Great Borning, by Isaac Asimov

The science article by Dr. A is something of a highlight.  I had grown up with all of the names of the geological eras, periods, epochs, etc., but I'd never grasped their meaning.  This is an informative etymological piece.

Four stars.

A Secret from Hellas, by I. Yefremov

Finally, another reprint, though it is probably more accurate to call it an import.  A sculptor feels compelled to make a particular kind of statue, though he is hampered by an injury to his hand sustained in the war.  This piece bears some kinship with the African duo earlier in the piece, although the dreamscape and racial memories in this tale are of Greek origin rather than African.

It is the definition of forgettable but inoffensive.  Three stars.

Throw it back

One of Spinrad's points was not only that writers can't find enough short story slots to make a living, but that writers are so discouraged that they aren't even trying to write SF short stories anymore.  I suppose that could be the explanation why the once proud Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is reduced to publishing tired clichés and reprints.

But it's a chicken and egg thing, right?  If there's no supply of good stories, demand wanes.  Once demand wanes, how do you build it back up?  Maybe Damon Knight has found the answer with his Orbit series.  It may well be time to think about new media for shorter pieces.  I think I'd rather have several paperbacks of excellent stuff than a dozen issues of mediocrity.  Sure, I'll miss the attendant quirks of each publication — the science articles, the lettercols, the editorial comments, etc., but I think I'd rather just have the good stories and save the auxilary stuff for fanzines and Scientific American.

What do you think?



Better stories from the heyday of science fiction magazines can be found in the two Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women volumes.  Highly recommended!




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[December 2, 1966] Mixed Bags (January 1967 IF)


by David Levinson

November was no more or less eventful than most months, but nothing really caught my eye. The Republicans made modest gains in the mid-term elections, California elected a so-so actor as governor and New Orleans is getting a football team in what certainly looks like recompense to Representative Hale Boggs and Senator Russell Long for shepherding the merger of the American and National Football Leagues through Congress. But there’s really nothing there to talk about. So, as with the last time this happened, let’s talk about the art.

Art matters

Regular readers of this column will know that I am often less than complimentary to the art in IF, especially the interior illustrations. There have been some changes in Fred Pohl’s stable of artists over the last year, some, but not all, for the better. John Giunta seems to have disappeared entirely, but several artists have stepped in to fill his shoes. We’re seeing a lot more from Wallace Wood and his assistant and imitator Dan Adkins, neither of whom is all that good, despite their years in the industry. On the other hand, Virgil Finlay has returned after a long absence, and he’s one of the best in the business.

We’re also seeing more of the mononymous Burns after a short absence. Unfortunately, his current style seems to combine the worst of Nodel and Giunta (and I like Giunta’s work generally). This month brings us a new artist: Vaughn Bodé. His figures are a bit cartoony, but not objectionable. I also like his landscape and VTOL aircraft. I won’t be sorry if we see more of his work.

A return to form

Something of a mixed bag in this month’s IF. A decent end to one serial and a promising start to a new one. A silly story and something experimental from established writers. Let’s take a closer look.


Just for a change, the cover actually depicts something inside. Art by Morrow

The Iron Thorn (Part 1 of 4), by Algis Budrys

Honor (pronounced “honner”) White Jackson is pursuing a bird-like Amsir across a red desert. As long as he wears his pointed metal cap and maintains line-of-sight to the Iron Thorn, he will be warm and able to breathe the thin air. If he can make his kill and bring it home, he will become a full-fledged Honor. Surprisingly, his quarry carries a metal spear (his own equipment is made largely of Amsir parts) and speaks, ordering him to yield when it thinks it has the upper hand.

On his way back, he is met by his older brother Black, who cautiously tests his reaction to the discoveries he has made. Disturbed by what he has learned, White (now Secon Black) enters the Iron Thorn for the first time and speaks with the Eld Honor, who says he may have what it takes to become Eld himself one day. Our protagonist comes to the conclusion that if he stays, he will be killed, and so, after giving a drawing of an armed Amsir to a girl he’s had his eye on, he sets out into the desert to be captured by an Amsir. He succeeds after killing the man who killed his father (making him Red Jackson) and is taken to a giant dish-shaped valley, filled with green plants and air dense enough to let the Amsir fly. There is also an Iron Thorn at its center, upright and shining, unlike the one his people call home. A vision of his people’s heaven, Ariwol. To be continued.


Honor White Jackson chases his prey, but who is hunting whom? Art by Gray Morrow

Last month, I noted that I’ve never really enjoyed Budrys’s work, but was pleased to learn that I liked his story in that issue. The streak continues. There’s an awful lot packed into these 35 or so pages, but it mostly works. The exposition, in particular, is a masterpiece of “show, don’t tell”. Parts of it are a bit rushed; the protagonist goes through three names (and has a secret fourth, Jim), and his decision that his life is in danger seemed precipitous. Maybe that will be fleshed out more if this appears as a novel. It’s a good start, though, and I look forward to more.

A solid three stars.

A Hair Perhaps, by J. F. Bone

Major William Bruce has arrived at the remote, top secret tracking station where he will spend the next two weeks all alone. When he is kidnapped, along with his living quarters, by aliens who plan to use him as their first test subject to determine if humans are worth enslaving, he has to find a way to defeat them with the limited tools at hand.


Two examples of Bodé’s art I mentioned earlier. I like the first one, but the figures need a little work, especially the human. Art by Vaughn Bodé

It’s been a few years since we saw anything from Bone. Unfortunately, like his last offering, this one is a stinker. Not as bad as “For Service Rendered”, but not up to his usual quality by a long shot. Bruce is thoroughly unpleasant (and explicitly stated to be so in the text), and the whole story is in service of a weak punchline.

Two stars.

– Still More Fandoms, by Lin Carter

Our Man in Fandom picks up where he left off and gives us some more fandoms that appeal to many science fiction fans. He starts off with one of the biggest groups, the Baker Street Irregulars, devoted to Sherlock Holmes, moves on to a couple of fellows in Missouri who are trying to start a fan group dedicated to James Branch Cabell, and on to the well-established Oz fandom. He finishes up with a look at the somewhat fragmented comics fan groups. Contact information is provided for the Cabell group and a couple of comics groups.

Three stars.

The Scared Starship, by D. M. Melton

Mars has been divided between the western and Sino-Sov blocs, with some neutral territory where finds must be shared. Rainbow Smith tells us how the group he was exploring with found a dead alien and a starship. The captain and the geologist rescue the find from the machinations of the evil Mao Lee, but it’s computer specialist Margot Harris who figures out how to get to the starship and win it over for the “good guys”.


Brains and beauty, but I don’t know how she gets all that hair in her helmet. Art by Nodel

Melton’s biggest problem thus far has been the handling of female characters. That’s largely corrected here, though there is one passage that feels more like “how men think women think”. Unfortunately, we have a nasty bit of Yellow Peril storytelling in the vicious Mao Lee (and an accompanying picture by Nodel). The whole Cold War tension subplot could have been dropped, leaving a decent problem story.

A low three stars.

By the Seawall, by Robert Silverberg

A great stone wall, sixty meters high and twenty meters thick, extends six thousand kilometers along the Eastern seaboard to protect humanity from the monsters which have risen from the sea. Micha-IV is an artificial person whose job is to patrol a one kilometer section of the wall, triggering additional defenses against monsters that scale the wall, reporting damage and also conducting tours. Suddenly, people have begun jumping off the wall, with or without a parachute; suicide either way. Micha-IV struggles to understand.

This can best be summed up as Robert Silverberg writes a J. G. Ballard story. How you feel about both those writers will probably determine how you feel about the story. I like Silverberg and don’t care for Ballard, but I can see that others might enjoy this.

Three stars.

On the Shallow Seas, by Robert Mason

Lant is a convict on the prison world of Exonam. Prisoners spend their days harvesting golden oysters. Fail to meet your quota of meat and you don’t eat, but find a rare gold pearl and you’ll be pardoned.


The “oysters” aren’t much like Earth shellfish. Art by Burns

Mason is this month’s new author. There’s enough here that shows promise. Line by line, the writing is good, though we’re treated to almost every prison story cliche there is. My biggest problem is the use of gold as the plot's linchpin. There’s no real reason for it to be that valuable. Mason would have been better served by using something much scarcer or making up his own element or alloy.

A low three stars.

The Impersonators, by C. C. MacApp

Inspector Kruger of the Interstellar Division has been sent to the planet Phrodd to arrest the embezzler Borogrove O’Larch. It’s diplomatically sensitive, because Phrodd is an alien world, so Kruger will have to step carefully. The locals are also perfect mimics, and O’Larch has hired a lot of them to pretend to be him. Kruger is soon at his wits’ end.

I usually groan when I see MacApp’s name and breathe a small sigh of relief when I see it’s not a Gree story. I sighed too soon. MacApp does not have a hand for humor. Laumer or Goulart could have had moderate success with this, but the story here is just plain bad.

Two stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 4 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

A group of strange young people have come from the future to witness the Great Fire of Shuteley. They also have an interest in Val Mathers and his cousin Jota. Now trapped in the heart of the fire storm in a protective dome set to disappear at dawn, Miranda guides Val through his memories of Jota to help him understand what they hope to do. All his life, two things have been true for Jota: people who got in his way died, and he could have any woman he wanted.

In Miranda’s day, some three percent of people have the Gift, and they’re making society ungovernable. The much smaller percentage who are immune aren’t enough to stop them. Miranda and her team have come to the past to save Jota’s life in the hope that will eliminate the Gift, but they’ve failed. However, by convincing Val that he can have children without them turning out mentally handicapped like his younger sister, Miranda has accidentally succeeded. Now, Val and his sister just need to survive the collapse of the dome. Can Miranda meet the price he demands?


Val and Greg fight for the future. Art by Gaughan

And so McIntosh brings everything to a reasonably satisfying conclusion. There’s a small flaw in the plot, in that Jota has no children and so his death ought to have eliminated the Gift. But there’s a bite in the final paragraph that more than compensates for any weaknesses elsewhere.

Three stars for this installment and for the novel as a whole.

Summing up

After last month’s excellent outing, this issue is something of a return to form. The serials are the main reason to read the magazine, and the stuff in between is average at best. Next month we have the continuation of the Budrys novel, which is promising, as is a new Niven tale. A new Retief could go either way. But the March issue will have a contribution from every winner of a professional Hugo at TriCon: Asimov, Ellison, Herbert and Zelazny, plus a cover by Frazetta. So we’ve got that to look forward to.






[November 6, 1966] Starting Over (December 1966 IF)


by David Levinson

Autumn is a strange time for new beginnings, but that seems to be something of a theme, both in life and in the latest edition of IF.

Carnival atmospheres

On October 5th, the highest appeals court in Texas ruled that Jack Ruby, the man who shot the man who shot President Kennedy, should be granted a new trial. The court said that, given the tremendous amount of publicity in Dallas about the shooting, the judge should have granted the request for a change of venue made by Ruby’s lawyer, Melvin Belli. The court also ruled that some statements made by Ruby to the police should have been excluded. Oddly, the court didn’t have a problem with people who watched the shooting on television being on the jury. The new trial will probably be the big news story early next year.


Jack Ruby shortly after his arrest.

The Texas court may have followed the Supreme Court ruling in Sheppard v. Maxwell back in June. In 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted of the brutal murder of his wife Marilyn. He maintained that she was killed by a “bushy-haired” man, but he was tried and convicted in the press before he was even arrested. The story became a national sensation, and the jury was exposed to further declarations of Sheppard’s guilt in the press throughout the trial. Before the trial began, the judge even told Dorothy Kilgallen that Sheppard was obviously “guilty as hell.” Jury selection for a new trial began on October 24th, and the prosecution should have begun to present their case by the time you read this.


Sam Sheppard’s mug shot from 1954.

Rising from the ashes

In this month’s IF, it seems like almost everybody is starting over. Whether it’s their personal lives, civilization or the human race, they’re all trying to put things back together.


This doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the Niven story. And they got the title wrong. Art by Gaughan

Be Merry, by Algis Budrys

Several years ago, a Klarri interstellar liner suffered an accident. The people aboard piled into lifeboats and made a crash landing on Earth. Unfortunately, they were unable to take any precautions and Klarri diseases swept through the human population, while human diseases did the same to the Klarri. Both populations were cut in half, and human civilization collapsed. The survivors have pulled together, human and Klarri alike, in small communities outside of the big cities. Rations are short and no one is really healthy, but the communities support each other as best they can.

Ed Dorsey and his Klarr partner Artel are investigators in the Western District of Greater New York. Their boss sends them to check out Ocean Heights, New Jersey. Unlike other places, the people there take whatever they’re sent without complaint, not even begging for more medical supplies. Entering the town late at night, they find signs of a pre-pandemic lifestyle, as well as a crashed lifeboat and a building that seems to be holding a number of Klarri prisoner. Returning in daylight, they find people in robust health who are very cagey about conditions in the town.


Ed and Artel make a discovery. Art by Gray Morrow

Historically, I’ve not been a big fan of Algis Budrys’s work. I can see the skill in his writing, but never really connect with it. This story is another matter entirely. I found myself fully invested and eager to solve the mystery of Ocean Heights. I also liked that, unlike in many stories, survivors were pulling together instead of being at odds, even recognizing that the Klarri are also victims and integrating them into their communities.

Four stars.

The Thousandth Birthday Party, by Durant Imboden

It’s Ogilvy Carr’s one-thousandth birthday. Since medical science can keep almost everyone alive indefinitely and birth control, and interplanetary colonies aren’t enough to reduce population pressure, a solution had to be found. Anyone who reaches the age of 1,000 has to draw a ping pong ball from a bin. A lucky few are named Immortals; the rest are shot in the head by a sniper before they know they’ve lost. It’s no wonder Ogilvy is nervous.

Imboden is this month’s first time author. A more seasoned writer could have found a way to explain the significance of the birthday without two full pages of flat exposition interrupting the flow of the narrative, but this isn’t a terrible first outing.

Three stars.

Starpath, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

The Starpath is an energy-intensive method of instantaneous travel between planets that few men are capable of using. Major Keith Waldermann is taking Cadet Matt DeLuso on his first tour. After five quick jumps, they get some unexpected R&R on the planet Primera. But while there, a Priority Red is announced. Hostile aliens have been encountered, and the entire power output of dozens of planets will be consumed to get men and materiel to the point of contact as quickly as possible.


Priority Red means all hands on deck. Art by Adkins

This story starts out as an Arthur C. Clarke travelogue as written by Robert Heinlein, before shifting gears to a war story at the halfway mark. If you’ve seen a war movie made in the last 20 years, you know how it’s going to turn out. Still, it’s an engaging tale and worth the read.

Three stars.

A Relic of the Empire, by Larry Niven

Dr. Richard Schultz-Mann is on a planet orbiting the double star Mira. He’s studying the stage trees left over from the ancient Slaver empire in the hopes writing a book that will sell well enough to restore his lost fortune. (With a trillion potential readers, getting just one percent to buy your book means a lot of money.) His investigations are interrupted by the arrival of a ship under the command of a man calling himself Captain Kidd. The captain and crew have done the impossible and made money at space piracy, because they managed to stumble across the puppeteer home world. Now they’re on the run from the police. Mann’s only hope is his knowledge of the local flora. Maybe he can find another way to get rich.


Richard Mann makes his escape. Art by Burns

Niven appears to be pulling his stories together into a future history. Mentions of puppeteers and Slavers connect the Beowulf Schaeffer stories and World of Ptavvs. As for the story itself, pretty good. Not as good as the two about Beowulf Schaeffer, much better than some of Niven’s other recent work.

A solid, maybe a high, three stars.

The “Other” Fandoms, by Lin Carter

This time out, Our Man in Fandom takes a look at fan groups outside of, but somewhat adjacent, to science fiction fans. Some of them even hold their annual meetings at the World Science Fiction Convention. Carter takes us on a whirlwind tour of groups dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan, Tolkien, horror and movie monsters. Better, he provides contact information for most of them. If none of these catch your interest, there are more to come next month.

Three stars.

Call Me Dumbo, by Bob Shaw

Dumbo lives in a pretty little cottage far outside the village with her husband Carl and their three sons. She has begun to have disturbing thoughts about things other than hoping for a daughter; things like her name. Following Carl to the village in secret, Dumbo discovers that there is no village, just a cylinder of black metal, lying on its side. She also spies Carl throwing away a glass box that turns out to contain an eyeball. As her world spins ever further out of control, Dumbo makes a number of alarming discoveries.


Dumbo makes a discovery. Art by Virgil Finlay

This dark and disturbing story deals with a theme we’ve seen before. It can be seen as the unpleasant flip-side of “Another Rib” by John J. Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as more directly (though less poetically) dealing with a theme in Cordwainer Smith’s “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal”. I honestly don’t know what to do with this one. It might well be a four-star story, but the ugliness at the core of it makes me want to go take a shower.

I just can’t give this more than three stars.

The Forgotten Gods of Earth, by Andrew J. Offutt

The barbarian Kymon of Kir has come to the ancient world of Earth in search of a treasure worth an emperor’s ransom and a captive princess. Armed with powerful magics and his mighty blade Goreater, he overcomes the guardian monsters and penetrates deep into the Black Castle of Atramentos, home of the sorceror Gundrun.

This cross between Conan and Clark Ashton Smith’s Dying Earth straddles the line between parody and pastiche, though more firmly on the side of the latter. An entertaining, though occasionally turgid read, it would have fit perfectly in the pages of Weird Tales 30 years ago. As with the tales of Brak, I find myself asking if we really need this sort of old-fashioned guff. Fritz Leiber has shown that it’s possible to keep the tone and still write a modern story.

Three stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 3 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

Shuteley, England has been visited by a strange group of young people whom Val Mathers and his old friend Jota have figured out are from the future. Leaving Jota with the giants, Val has begun to repair his marriage, but as he and his wife return they find the whole town on fire. After helping organize the fire brigade, Val heads upriver to investigate the giants. He sees them guiding many of the people of the town out of danger and apparently sending them to the future.

After witnessing a fight between Greg, the giants’ apparent leader, and Miranda, the Snow White of the title, and losing his own fight with Greg, Val regains consciousness in a protective dome in the heart of the firestorm consuming the city. He discovers Jota apparently about to rape Val’s mentally handicapped sister, and the two fight. Jota is pushed out of the dome and is instantly killed by the intense heat. Soon after Miranda shows up and begins to explain things. Val will be considered the villain of the fire, because he failed to enforce modern standards of fire prevention. But the point of the expedition was to save Jota’s life, because he possesses “the Gift”. As the story ends, Miranda guides Val through his life to understand what that means. To be concluded.


As Shuteley burns, only the protective gear of the giants can withstand the firestorm. Art by Gaughan

Lots of action this time. McIntosh spends a little too much time describing the course of the fire, perhaps because the extreme destruction it causes seems rather improbable. We’re teased with learning the purpose of the visitors from the future, but we still don’t know what the deal is with Jota or why most of the supposed victims of the fire are being rescued. Hopefully, all will be made clear in the finale.

Three stars.

Summing up

Just looking at the ratings, this is a pretty good issue. Unfortunately, the darkness of “Call Me Dumbo” sits atop it all. It’s counterbalanced to some extent by the hopefulness of “Be Merry”, but I don’t know that it’s enough. I suspect most of the discussion will be about the Shaw piece.


After his story in this issue, I’m more interested in a new Budrys novel.






[October 2, 1966] At Heart (November 1966 IF)


by David Levinson

Throughout the millennia in every human culture, the heart has been a key symbol. From the center of the body to the seat of life, emotion, mind or soul, its meaning varies, but it is always important. These days, it’s mostly a symbol of love, but it’s also connected with courage and desires of other kinds. It can also mean the center of something, from arguments to artichokes. Whatever it may mean, you gotta have it.

Hearts of darkness and light

It’s been a rough month for the civil rights movement. On September 2nd, Alabama governor George Wallace signed a bill refusing Federal education funds, believing that will prevent the integration of Alabama schools. Two days later, the Congress of Racial Equality marched in Cicero, Illinois and was met by a mob hurling rocks and bottles. By the end, 14 were injured and nearly 40 people (mostly white) had been arrested. But the ugliest scenes were in Grenada, Mississippi.

Back in June, the March Against Fear passed through Grenada, and marchers spent about a week there. Town officials appeared cooperative. They gave police protection to the marchers, six Black voter registrars were hired and 1,000 Black voters were registered. But it was all for show. Once the country’s attention moved on, the registrars were fired, and it was discovered that none of the voters were actually registered. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference set up shop in town and went to work.

In August, a Federal judge ordered Grenada to allow Black students to enroll in previously all white schools. Many parents took advantage of this, but a campaign of intimidation caused many to change their children’s enrollment to Black schools. School started on the 12th, and things went smoothly at one elementary school, but it was very different at the local high school. A white mob prevented Black students from entering the school, chasing Black children through the streets and beating them with chains and pipes. They even attacked reporters. And the police turned a blind eye to the whole thing. Federal protection finally arrived for the children on the 17th.


Martin Luther King walking children to school in Grenada, Mississippi. Photo by Bob Fitch

A few days earlier, a car carrying Martin Luther King and some other SCLC leaders was stopped at a red light in Grenada. A man at a nearby gas station recognized him, ran over, stuck a gun in Dr. King’s face and threatened to blow his brains out. Dr. King simply looked the man in the eye and said, “Brother, I love you.” Stunned, the man lowered his gun and walked away. That is a heart full of courage and love.

Hearts of men and robots

From the heart of battle to the heart of the galaxy, this month’s IF is full of action. Let’s dive right in.


Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots dispute the best way to care for humans. Art by Adkins

Truce or Consequences, by Keith Laumer

The Terran embassy on Plushnik I has been built in that most neutral of territories: no-man’s land. Now, the invaders from Plushnik II are planning an all-out offensive this evening, leading right through the embassy. Worse yet, CDT inspectors are due to arrive in the morning. If they find a state of war, everyone’s career is in jeopardy. Once again, it’s up to Retief to save the day.


Retief proposes peace talks. Art by Gaughan

It’s been a while since we last heard from Retief, and I noted at the time that the series had grown stale. The break seems to have done Laumer good. The only thing new here is the introduction of formal diplomatic maneuvers – such as Kindly Indulgence with Latent Firmness or Reluctant Admonition with overtones of Gracious Condescension – but that alone wouldn’t be enough to lift things out of the doldrums. The real difference is that Laumer seems to be having fun with his super-diplomat again.

Three stars.

At the Core, by Larry Niven

Four years after his daring flyby of a neutron star, Beowulf Schaeffer is again out of money. The puppeteers of General Products approach him for something less dangerous. They’ve developed a new faster-than-light drive, capable of traveling at nearly one light-year per minute. The problem is that it’s huge. Installed in the largest cargo hull available, there’s barely room for a cockpit and a tiny cabin for one person. In order to get wealthy investors interested in the project, they want Schaeffer for a publicity stunt. Fly to the galactic core, return and write an article. He jumps at the chance. Schaeffer encounters serious problems along the way, but what he finds at the core will have consequences for all of known space in both the short and very long terms.


Beowulf Schaeffer in the cockpit of the Long Shot. Art by Adkins

This is a solid story. There’s a bit of handwaving about why the mass detector can’t be automated, but get past that it’s good. And at the end, Niven waxes a little philosophical and elevates the story.

Four stars.

Science-Fiction Fanways, by Lin Carter

This month, Our Man in Fandom looks at some more bits of fan slang. He starts off with “future slang” from early novels, moves on to nonsense words and acronyms, and thence to a few more words like Neohood and Completism. He then wraps it up with tales of the Great Staple War of the 30s and the Great Stationery Duel, which may be going on to this day. Mildly entertaining, but not as informative as some of the earlier articles.

A low three stars.

The Sign of Gree, by C. C. MacApp

A mysterious enemy has been attacking Gree ships with devastating effect. Hoping that the enemy of his enemy might be his friend and that he might find out what happened to Fazool, Steve Duke infiltrates the survivors of an attack in order to be captured. Taken to a prison camp operated by the Remm, catlike centaurs, he finds Fazool. Together, they hatch a plot to gain the attention of these new aliens and win them over as allies against Gree.


Steve Duke meets the Remm. Art by Gray Morrow

What can I say that I haven’t already said about the Gree stories? This is a fairly typical example of the series. It’s marginally entertaining, but too many things happen because the plot needs them, rather than following logically, and once again the story ends with the feeling that the anti-Gree forces have more than enough to end the war. It’s long past time for this series to end.

A very low three stars.

A Code for Sam, by Lester del Rey

Sam is a robot assisting the Gregg Archaeological Expedition on the planet Anubis. Dr. Gregg and everybody else treat him like just another person. Recently arrived are Dr. Dickson and the experimental robot Pete. Robots are rare on Earth, and people are wary of them, so Dickson has come up with new programming based on “the three laws of Asenion robots” from old science-fiction stories. Unfortunately, they work about as well as they did in the stories, and that intersects badly with the natives’ uneasiness with what the archaeologists are digging up.


Sam and Pete have different motivations. Art by Lutjens

Del Rey is clearly basing this on Asimov’s robot stories, but I’m not sure if he’s taking a poke at them or trying to sum them up into a more important message than the Good Doctor ever intended. One member of the expedition dismisses the three laws as “slavery and racism,” while Dr. Gregg says they were just a bit of fun to make a good story. I’m torn in my assessment. The story raises some interesting philosophical questions, but it also sags a bit in the middle. The questions are probably enough.

A low four stars.

The Babe in the Oven, by John T. Sladek

Honestly, I don’t think I can summarize this surreal tale of suburbia. Let me quote the editorial blurb. “Tough day! The baby was a spy, and the friendly parish priest was his accomplice!” If Phil Dick, R. A. Lafferty and David Bunch collaborated on a story, it wouldn’t be half this strange. I think Sladek is trying to say something about suburban life, but I couldn’t find it.

A high two stars for me, might be three for somebody else.

Halfway House, by Robert Silverberg

Wealthy and brilliant industrialist Franco Alfieri is dying of cancer. Luckily for him, he can afford to enter the Fold, the place where all the universes meet. There, he is judged to determine if he is worthy of being saved. He is found to be, but he will have to give five years of his life in service to the halfway house. Alfieri jumps at the chance, but is the price higher than he thought?

This is Silverberg at his best. It’s an excellent character piece, following the protagonist through arrogance and desperation to his final understanding of the price he pays. This is the best thing he’s written since To See the Invisible Man.

A high four stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 2 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

During the hottest summer in memory, the English town of Shuteley is visited by a strange band of young people. At the end of the first installment, narrator Val Mathers and his old friend Jota decided to investigate the strangers’ camp. There, they are forced to duel the giants. Jota is killed and Val barely manages to stay alive. Suddenly, Val and Jota are entering the camp once again. Jota talks his way into staying, while Val heads home.

There, he encounters Miranda – the Snow White of the title. Val works out that the gang are from the future. Miranda learns that Val is reluctant to have children, because he fears that his mother’s madness and sister’s mental handicap are congenital. She offers to find out, but having sex with her is part of that. He doesn’t hesitate. She informs him that all his children will be normal, and he realizes he really wants them. This could repair his marriage to Sheila.

Later, Val and Sheila head out of town on a date, partly at Jota’s urging, partly because Miranda said they would stay home that night. Their romance seems to be rekindled, but on the way home they see a fire. Shuteley is burning. The fire is so intense the only bridge in town has buckled. The fire brigade is trapped on the side away from the center of town and can’t find enough water to defend the small bit on their side of the river. Val organizes the defense, finding water and getting civilians to safety. Did the giants have something to do with the low water level in the river? To be continued.


Val fights for his life. Art by Gaughan

I wasn’t too keen on the first installment, noting particularly McIntosh’s handling of the female characters. While that doesn’t get much better, the rest is much improved. This feels like the McIntosh from several years ago. There’s obviously a lot more going on here than just some time-travelers come to watch a disastrous fire (shades of Vintage Season by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner). I’m actually interested in seeing where this is going now.

Three stars.

Hairry, by Mike Hill

Jake explains how he first met Hairry. He was working on a geological survey team hunting for oil on some planet (presumably Mars, but never named). When his scout car falls into a deep canyon, he runs into gigantic ten-legged spiders. The only thing keeping him from being dinner is his love of jazz.

Hill is this month’s first time author. He gives us an old-fashioned bar tale on an old-fashioned Mars, and we can all see where things are going several pages before the end. On top of that, the jazz slang feels at least a decade old, which is positively ancient.

Two stars.

The Boat in the Bottle, by Thurlow Weed

The Boat is the grandest passenger ship ever built. In an act of hubris, the owners send its maiden voyage through the Bahama Abyss. And hubris always has a price.

Thurlow Weed may or may not be a first time author. Perhaps the author is a descendant of the man who helped found both the Whig and Republican parties. He or she certainly has reason not to want their name associated with this story. It’s dull and has no redeeming features.

One star.

Summing up

This is an issue of highs and lows. We have some of the best stories IF has had in quite a while, and some of the worst. But the highs are very high. Silverberg came very close to a fifth star, and del Rey might have gotten there with a bit more polishing. There’s life in the old mag yet.


Can Niven knock it out of the park again?






[September 14, 1966] All the Old Familiar Places (October 1966 Galaxy)


by Gideon Marcus

Where Men Have Gone Before

Last week saw the debut of the exciting science fiction anthology show Star Trek.  The opening narration describes a five-year mission, going "where no man has gone before."  Indeed, the second pilot of the program bore that very title.  Never mind that in two of the three episodes I've seen thus far (and in the sole episode yet officially aired), the featured space ship Enterprise went places men had gone before; the promise is still there.

This month's Galaxy, on the other hand, treads entirely familiar ground.  Not necessarily in the subject matter or the plots — these are reasonably fresh.  I mean that pretty much every story save the last constitutes the continuation of a prior story or setting.

Magazine editor Fred Pohl once explained that he has a reliable stable of authors for Galaxy.  As Pohl travels the country on various speaking engagements, he hits his writer friends up for new material.  Cordwainer Smith was on that list until his tragic passing last month.  Frank Herbert is (sadly) also on that list.  And so are most of the authors below.  I imagine each conversation with his pet authors eventually wanders around to "when do you think I might see more of…"

This isn't a bad thing, especially if you like the universes that get expanded.  On the other hand, it is the reason there about are twice as many Retief stories as there should be.

So let's see how this series of sequels fares:

Old Stomping Grounds


by Sol Dember

The Palace of Love (Part 1 of 3), by Jack Vance

In Vance's novel The Star King, we were introduced to Kirth Gersen.  Gersen is a vigilante, roaming the galactic space lanes to track down the elusive and nearly omnipotent "Demon Princes" of crime.  His first target, a fellow named Grendel, is defeated in the wild Beyond, the belt of untamed systems that ring the placid inner worlds.

Now, in Palace, Gerson applies the vast wealth of Grendel toward the next Demon Prince on his list, the volatile slaver and crime boss, Viole Falushe.  This time, the trail leads back to the original home of humanity, specifically, the portion of Europe known as Holland.


by Gray Morrow

I like Vance a lot, but this particular universe has never appealed to me.  Indeed, Palace has the exact same issues that plagued Kings.  At first, Vance's detailed setting descriptions and odd dialogue are compelling.  Over time, they just get tiresome.  Moreover, whereas in stories like The Dragon Masters or The Last Castle, Vance creates a rich world almost from nothing, filled with exciting new places and ideas, the far future in which Kirth Gersen resides feels almost unchanged from 20th Century Earth. 

I have a suspicion that the remainder of this book is going to be a slog.  Three stars so far.

How the Heroes Die, by Larry Niven


by Virgil Finlay

Larry Niven returns us to the Mars he set up in this year's short story, Eye of the Octopus.  The initial expedition that discovered evidence of indigenous Martians has been succeeded by a dozen humans in a bubble dome archaeological base.  When the natives prove elusive, tedium and frustration sets in.  One of the members of the all-male crew makes a pass at another.  Enraged, the target of his advances kicks him in the throat and watches him die.

Knowing that the rest of the team won't stand for it, murderous John "Jack" Carter plunges his Mars buggy through the dome in an attempt to release the air and kill his compatriots.  His plan fails, thanks to the fast reactions of the team.  Alf Harness, the party's linguist, heads out in pursuit.

The cat and mouse chase, with each of the two trying to outsmart the other such that only one can come back alive, working within the constraints of their air supply and their equipment at hand, is a pretty tight bit of writing.  I could have, however, done without the several paragraphs Niven devotes to the motivation of the crime: Lieutenant-Major Shute drafts a report to Earth explaining that a bunch of isolated men together always succumb to homosexuality.  Just like in the Navy.  Or boys-only schools.  Or the Third Reich (I'm not making these examples up).  The solution: Earth needs to send women with them, damn the Morality Leagues that frown on co-ed missions. 

This reminds me of stories I read last decade where female crew members were carried along solely for their convenient orifices.  I had hoped tales endorsing such notions were a thing of the past.  As for modern-day temperance leagues, while I recognize that cultures can regress, it seems to me that women have been serving alongside men for decades now.  Why, I recently saw an episode of Gomer Pyle featuring a woman Marine Captain.  I can't imagine that the trend over the next century is toward a reversal of that practice.

At least the characters in Heroes don't endorse the victim's murder.  The characters (and thus the author) seem to be saying that queers are people too, but that they are the sad creations of circumstance.  (Mr. Niven is apparently unacquainted with Dr. Kinsey, or the excellent documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected).

Three stars.

A Recursion in Metastories, by Arthur C. Clarke

Too short to describe.  A literary joke of unlimited scope if limited value.

Three stars.


by Jack Gaughan

The Ship Who Killed, by Anne McCaffrey


by Nodel

Many years ago, in The Magazine of Science Fiction, Anne McCaffrey introduced us to KH-834, the cybernetic spaceship.  The story was called The Ship Who Sang.  It involved the close relationship between the vessel's female resident brain, Helva, and the ambulatory "brawn" component, a man named Jennan. 

Jennan dies in that story, leaving Helva devastated but still spaceworthy.  She is detached from scout duty, instead being used for a sequence of odd job missions.  Her first, in which Helva's passenger is a doctor dispatched to a plague-ravaged world, was detailed in a recent Analog in a story titled The Ship Who Mourned.

And now Killed, appearing in yet another magazine.  This time, Helva is to be a metallic womb, ferrying a hundred thousand frozen fetuses to a world that has suffered a sterilizing catastrophe.  Her passenger is Kira, responsible for obtaining the unborn children from various worlds and taking care of them on their journey.  She has suffered the recent loss of her partner, too, and is expressedly suicidal.  Helva's orders are explicitly to avoid worlds on which suicide is legal.  Unfortunately, not all such worlds are cataloged…

One interesting bit is that Kira is a "Dylanist", part of a sect of cynical singer-songwriters who have almost deified ol' Bob.  She even plays "Blowin' in the Wind" at one point.  It's rather bold to extrapolate such a huge impact from something so recent as a popular singer (is there a rival faction known as "The Beatlers"?) And while it is possible that the former Mr. Zimmerman may go on to be so influential as to spawn religious adherents, McCaffrey fails to account for musical evolution: Kira employs the acoustic guitar in Killed, an instrument Dylan has already abandoned.

Such is the danger of precise prediction!

Anyway, that's just a side note.  The story itself has a reasonably good setup, but McCaffrey's writing style, filled to the brim with adverbs and acid repartee, just isn't doing it for me.  Each story in this series has been less compelling than the last.  This may explain why each one has been published in a new magazine; usually, editors hold onto writers as long as they can.

Two stars.

For Your Information: The Delayed Discovery, by Willy Ley

Willy Ley meanders through the history of atomic chemistry, covering a great many topics shallowly and without a lot of causality.  Asimov usually needs to trim his articles; Ley needed more connective tissue to make this one work.

Two stars.

Too Many Esks, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

We're now four stories into the saga of the Esks, inhuman hybrids of Eskimos and an alien invader, who live above the arctic circle in Canada.  Esks grow to maturity in just five years.  Female Esks gestate and bear a child every month.  This new race has already outgrown its food supply, relying on government handouts to stay alive.

Dr. Joe West has been warning of a Malthusian nightmare for months now.  At last, some folks are starting to listen to him.  But the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and West is concerned that once the hybrid Esks interbreed with humans (as one did with West), homo sapiens will be displaced by the more fecund breed.  Once this happens, there are signs that the original aliens will return to enslave the Earth.

And so, West hatches a plan to sterilize the Esks through biological warfare.  Like all of West's other endeavors against the Esks, the mission is a dismal and emotionally fraught failure.

These Esk tales oscillate between tedious and mildly engaging, all requiring a healthy dollop of suspension of disbelief.  I've been along for this ride long enough that I'm now kind of curious as to how it will end.

Three stars.

Planet of Fakers, by J. T. McIntosh


by McClane

McIntosh is an author with a long career.  He's written five-star stories, a number of pedestrian pieces, and a few truly awful ones.  Often, his works contain Sexist (or at least anti-feminine) portrayals of women.

So it was that I approached this last piece of the issue with some trepidation (especially given the weird art that suggested a sexual farce).

I am happy to report that I was pleasanty surprised.

Planet starts in medias res.  A tense trio, one man and two women, are subjecting a queue of persons to a test.  Their goal: to prove the humanity of each subject. 

Through adroit exposition, McIntosh slowly clues us in to the situation.  A colony of a few hundred has been besieged by an alien race of body possessors.  The fake humans are in telepathic communion with one another, so while it was once a trivial task to tell humans from sham-people, tests can only be used effectively once.  And the colonists are running out of tests.

While Planet does not take place in a preexisting universe, the bodysnatching genre has been around for decades, including such classics as Campbell's Who Goes There? and Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (and, of course, the 1956 movie which gave the genre its label).  Nevertheless, what McIntosh does with it is so deftly executed, and so neatly contrived, that's it's clear the old subject still has life in it.  At least in the hands of a master.

I'd originally planned to give it four stars, but it has stayed with me such that I think it earns a full five.

Dust Bowl's a comin'

With the exception of the standout final story, the October 1966 Galaxy is pretty mediocre stuff.  I think the lesson I've gotten is that fields can grow fallow, especially ones that weren't very fertile to begin with.

I think Pohl's writers would do themselves well to find some new land to plow.  And maybe Galaxy could use a more diverse set of farmers…



(If you're looking for something new, join us tomorrow at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings) for the next episode of Star Trek!)

Here's the invitation!




[September 2, 1966] On the Edge (October 1966 IF)


by David Levinson

Big Trouble in China

Back in May, I wrote about the political maneuvering going on in China, and I predicted purges would follow. Rarely have I been so sorry to be right. On August 13th, Mao Tse-tung announced a purge of Party officials as part of the Cutural Revolution. And he has a frightening new tool to carry out his will.

At the end of May, a group of high school and university students calling themselves Red Guards embraced the principles of the Cultural Revolution and hung up posters criticizing university administrators. Originally condemned as counterrevolutionaries and radicals, they were officially endorsed by Mao early in August. On the 18th, a mass rally was held in T’ien-an-min Square in Peking. A reported one million students listened to speeches by various Party officials. Mao appeared in military fatigues for the first time in years, a look favored by the Red Guards.

On the 22nd, they began putting up posters “advising” people to abandon bourgeois habits such as Western clothing and warned shopkeepers against selling foreign goods. They gave people a week before they would “take action”. Since then, the Red Guards have run amok. On the 26th, they gave foreigners and bourgeois Chinese to the end of the day to leave Peking. They poured into the Tibetan capital Lhasa, destroying ancient relics, vandalizing shrines and abusing monks. Now, word has come out that they are beating and killing people in the Ta-hsing and Ch’ang-p’ing districts of Peking, and the police have been ordered to look the other way. This is likely to get worse before it gets better, and however it ends won’t be pretty.


Soong P’in-p’in, a Red Guard leader, pins an armband on Mao Tse-tung.

Life on the edge

This month’s IF features not one, but two stories set on the edge of the galaxy, and just about everyone else is on the edge in some way or another.


Amazingly well done for Dan Adkins. Art by Adkins

TV by the Numbers, by Fred Pohl

We rarely mention editorials, but this one’s interesting. A recent discussion with Murray Leinster about one of his patents that lets TV studios use a photograph of a set backdrop in place of the physical thing got Fred to thinking. A single line on a black-and-white TV screen consists of around 420 phosphor dots that are either on or off. With 525 lines to a frame, it would take a string of 220,000 ones and zeros to describe one frame. A 25 billion digit number would be enough for a one hour show; 600 billion for 24 hours. But you probably need a lot less. In the thirtieth of a second between frames, most of those dots don’t change, so it should be possible to find a way to tell the TV to only change certain spots from the last frame. Could there come a day when not only the stage sets, but even the actors aren’t real?

Neutron Star, by Larry Niven

Out-of-work space pilot Beowulf Shaeffer is facing debtor’s prison when an alien blackmails him into taking on a suicide mission. The puppeteers (something like a headless, three-legged centaur with Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets for arms) have a near-monopoly on spaceship hulls, which are supposed to be impervious to everything except visible light. But something reached through one of their hulls and reduced two scientists studying a neutron star to bloody smears. Now Shaeffer finds himself following the exact same course, and he has to figure things out before he meets the same end.


Beowulf Shaeffer aboard his invisible starship. Art by Adkins

A nice little problem story. While the answer may seem obvious to the reader, that answer is incomplete. There’s a subtle bit more to it that the puppeteers can’t see, and the reason they can’t see it means a sizeable bonus for Shaeffer. Another detail has Shaeffer recording everything happening, so there is some record if he’s killed. In an interesting coincidence, a voice recording is being analyzed for the first time in the investigation of a plane crash in Nebraska last month.

Three stars.

Your Soldier Unto Death, by Michael Walker

The centuries-long war with the Kreekal has ground to an end. With their hive-like society, the alien soldiers were specially bred to fight. Ultimately, humanity began raising soldiers from birth to do two things: to hate Kreekan soldiers and to be good at killing them. Now that the war is over, what do you do with 5 billion soldiers who are barely human?

While there’s some apparent skill in the writing, Walker is this month’s new writer — and you can tell. The pieces don’t quite fit together, and most of the story consists of people sitting around talking about things. The germ of a good story is here, but the author just isn’t up to it.

A high two stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 1 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

In the quite English country town of Shuteley, sweltering under the hottest summer on record, Val Mathers wishes something would happen. His marriage to Sheila is in a rough situation, partly because of a difference over whether to have children, partly because of his mentally handicapped sister Dina, who lives with them, and partly because his old school friend Jota seems to have tried to force himself on Sheila three years earlier. Now Jota is on his way back from his job in Cologne, Dina is worried about the fairies in the garden, and a strange group of young tourists has appeared in town.

With one exception, these tourists are all very tall and very fit. The women wear dresses that seem to disappear occasionally, causing a commotion. The exception, whom Val dubs Snow White for her fair skin and dark hair, differs from the others only in her size. They all behave a bit oddly and when asked where they’re from, they reply “Here.” Even stranger, they all seem to know Val and are expecting Jota. After Jota arrives in town, he and Val decide to investigate where the strangers are camping. To be continued.


Val and Sheila investigate strange lights at the bottom of the garden. Art by Gaughan

It’s difficult to judge where this is going, since this installment is almost all McIntosh setting the scene. None of the characters are terribly appealing. Val is passive, Sheila short-tempered, and Jota obnoxious. Honestly, it feels like McIntosh could have moved the story forward a lot more quickly.

McIntosh tends to be hit or miss, and his biggest weakness is his female characters. That’s on display here with the childlike Dina and the mysterious Miranda (Snow White’s real name). Worst of all is Sheila, who is snappish and unpleasant toward Val and his sister – but the narrative ignores her reasons for being that way. The biggest would seem to be Jota’s assault, and Val’s attitude seems to be “he shouldn’t have done it, he’s promised not to do it again and he’s going away, so let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.” Awful.

Two stars for now.

Handy Phrase Book in Fannish, by Lin Carter

Any in-group tends to develop its own lingo. This month Our Man in Fandom takes a look at the slang commonly used by science fiction fans. He starts off with a look at various fanacs (fan activities) and the different types of fans, from the sercon (serious, conservative fan) to the faaan (the obnoxious kid in a propellor beanie). Then he looks at the various names given to and taken by prominent fans, such as Forrest J. Ackerman (4e, 4SJ, etc.) or OMF himself (LinC). He wraps things up with the fannish (or fenly) fondness for nonsense words that serve as catch-alls, like vombic and fout. LinC is clearly having fun, but it’s all a bit breathless and shallow.

A low three stars.

Tunnel Warrior, by Joseph P. Martino

World War III has somehow managed to keep the exchange of atomic weapons to East and West Germany. The fighting is still ongoing, but the front is now in tunnels deep underground. Sergeant Alvin Hodge has been ordered to accompany a group of military geologists to the front lines so they can test out a new method of determining where the Russians are digging.


Sgt. Hodge examines what’s left of the city of Kassel. Art by Gray Morrow

The military action bits are fair, but the overall premise is just ridiculous. Even if the nuclear exchange were confined to the German border, there’s just no way the fighting would be limited to such a small area. This story would be much better served by setting it on the Moon or some alien planet with a more believable reason for the combat to be underground.

A high two stars.

On the Edge of the Galaxy, by Ernest Hill

Colonel Geoff Carruthers and his exploratory team have spent 5 years on planet VX91/6 supposedly looking for titanium and zirconium, but achieving nothing. Now they face a military inspection.


The inspecting general meets Rastus. Art by Virgil Finlay

I have no idea what was going on in this story, and I’m not sure any of the characters do either. What a confused mess.

Barely two stars.

The Spy Game, by Rachel Cosgrove Payes

A letter of complaint from an angry parent to the makers of the Interstellar Secret Agent Kit.

Humor is subjective, but I doubt many people will find this funny. Much of it is clearly attempting to satirize aspects of modern society, but it rather fails at that, too.

Two stars.

Edge of Night, by A. Bertram Chandler

In the first installment, Commodore John Grimes led a volunteer group to a parallel universe to investigate the origins of a mysterious spaceship. There, they found humanity on the Rim of the galaxy enslaved by intelligent rats and vowed revenge. The rats are mobilizing against Grimes and his crew, but the one place they aren’t contacting is the planet Stree. In his universe, Grimes was the first human to land on that planet and make contact with the psychic philosopher lizards who live there, a peaceful and positive contact. Reaching Stree with subterfuge and a bit of luck, Grimes finds himself expected and recognized.

It seems that the Wise Ones of the Streen know their lives in every universe. They have also come up with a plan to stop the rats by “killing the egg before it hatches.” To do so, one of them will take Grimes and his ship centuries into the past to keep the ship bearing the mutated ancestors of the rat people from reaching Port Forlorn.


Serressor and Mayhew pilot the ship backwards in time. Art by Gaughan

One thing really stood out to me here. As they’re getting ready to stop the ancestors of the rats, Grimes contemplates the fact that he’s about to commit genocide, and it bothers him. Not a lot, but it’s far more than Dick Seaton can say. Once again, I thought it was a four-star story while I read it, but cooled on it later. It’s a big airy dessert, delicious but a bit lacking once it’s finished.

A high three stars for this installment and the novel as a whole.

In the Bone, by Gordon R. Dickson

Harry Brennan sets out on humanity’s first interstellar journey aboard the John Paul Jones, a ship so small it’s almost an extension of himself. On the fifth Earth-like world he finds, he enounters an intelligent alien. The alien strips him of his ship, telling him to go and be a beast. Harry goes mad and becomes little more than an animal, but gradually his humanness returns.


Still more beast than man, Harry makes his way into the alien’s ship. Art by Virgil Finlay

The plot is so Campbellian, I wonder what it’s doing here. Dickson can usually handle this sort of story, but he’s not at his best. He’s too direct in telling us the point at the beginning and end, and the style holds the reader at a distance.

A low three stars.

Summing up

Well, that was a mediocre issue. One exciting read that isn’t as good when you think about it, two fair works from authors who can do better, and a whole lot of filler, including a poor start to a long serial. Fingers crossed that next month turns out better.


Every one of those could go either way. All four are going to have to come up heads to counterbalance McIntosh.

And if you are in Cleveland (physically or in spirit) this weekend, be certain to join us for the showing of the first Star Trek pilot at 7pm Eastern (4pm Pacific!).