This month saw such a bumper crop of books (and a bumper crop of Journey reviewers!) that we've split it in two. This first one covers two of the more exciting books to come out in some time, as well as the usual acceptables and mediocrities. As Ted Sturgeon says: 90% of everything is crap. But even if the books aren't all worth your time, the reviews always are! Dive in, dear readers…
by Gideon Marcus
Tired of it all
Antiwar protesting isn't just for civilians anymore.
About 25 junior officers, mostly Navy personnel based in Washington, have formed the "Concerned Officers Movement". Created in response to the growing disillusionment with the Indochina war, its purpose is (per the premiere issue of its newsletter) to "serve notice to the military and the nation that the officer corps is not part of the silent majority, that it is not going to let its thought be fashioned by the Pentagon."
Reportedly, C.O.M. came about because an officer participated as a marshal at the November 15, 1969 Moratorium anti-Vietnam War march, got featured in the Washington Post, and later received an unsatisfactory notation for loyalty in his fitness report. The newsletter and movement are how other officers rallied in his support.
Because C.O.M. work is being done off duty and uses non-government materials, it is a completely lawful dissent. According to Lt. j.g. Phil Lehman, one of the group's leaders, there has been no harassment from on high as yet.
We'll see how long this remains the case.
Really tired of it all
After reading this month's issue of Galaxy, I'm about ready to start my own Concerned Travelers Movement. Truly, what a stinker. Read on and see why:
cover by Jack Gaughan
I Will Fear No Evil (Part 1 of 4), by Robert A. Heinlein
Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is the mogul's mogul, controlling a vast financial empire. But he is at death's door, and you can't take it with you. So he contracts his lawyer to find a brilliant (but pariahed) neurosurgeon and a suitable donor so that he can be the subject of the first brain transplant. The brain-dead donor is found, the operation is made, and Smith wakes up—young and healthy, and with his memories intact.
But there's a twist…
So begins the first installment of what looks to be a very long serial, this installment alone taking up a good half of this month's issue. I've given you the synopsis, but how does this meager setup fill 80 pages?
Poorly. The first three chapters, comprising nearly half the run-time, are superfluous. Picture Robert Heinlein masturbating in a room filled with Robert Heinleins, each of them pontificating as they pleasure themselves, and you'll get the idea. It's as if Bob taped himself visualizing that scene as he delivered a stream-of-conscious solliloquy, and then made sure every word of it ended up in this story.
And so, we have Smith being an arrogant, prickly cuss. We have his attorney dogsbody Jackson being a slightly more circumspect prickly cuss. We have the secretary, Eunice, being a saucy minx, jiggling with every statement, her (lack of) clothing presented in excruciating detail.
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The story gets mildly interesting when Smith begins his post-operation recovery. It's clear from the beginning of this section that he's not in the kind of body he expected, and even the dimmest of readers will guess that he has switched sexes. What is not quite as obvious is the identity of the donor. The story gets really weird when it turns out the body's former occupant appears to still be a conscious entity, sharing a brain with Smith. Maybe the soul really is in the heart.
Presumably, this story takes place in the same universe as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just a bit earlier in the timeline. This draws unfortunate comparisons as Mistress is probably the best thing Bob ever wrote, and Evil…isn't. Aside from the overstuffed nature of this installment, there are some maddening moments, like when Smith decides to simper like a "typical" female to better suit his new gender. It's like Change of Mind with a sex rather than race change, but written by someone who had only gotten his knowledge of women from reading Playboy.
I have to wonder how this drek ended up in Galaxy. I have some ideas. For one, editor Ejler Jakobsson is spread pretty thin these days, between his flagship, sister mag IF, and the recently restarted Worlds of Tomorrow. A long serial, no matter the quality, fills a lot of space.
Perhaps, too, Ejler signed a contract with Bob promising no edits. This would be unusual, given that (per recent correspondence with Larry Niven), Ejler is an impossible editor who demands outrageous rewrites—like Galaxy's first boss, H. L. Gold, but with worse results. Nevertheless, I can see Heinlein's name being such a draw, especially since Mistress came out in IF, that Jakobsson was willing to take the risk.
Well, now he—and we—are stuck with it. God help me, this is going to be worse than Dune.
One star.
The Throwbacks, by Robert Silverberg
illustration by Jack Gaughan
Jason Quevedo is a resident of "Shanghai" in Urban Monad (Urbmon) 116, a metropolis-in-a-building sited somewhere between present-day Pittsburgh and Chicago. The self-contained skyscraper houses 800,000 citizens, each divided into a series of "cities" comprising several floors and numbering around 40,000 residents each.
A scholar, Jacob is researching 20th century morés in support of a thesis: that three centuries of living in high-density structures is breeding a new kind of human, one free from jealousy, proprietary feelings toward partners, and ambition. But Jason seems to be a kind of atavist, unhappy in his modern life, as if the pre-urbmon days are more his style. He engages in the urbmon tradition of "nightwalking", entering random apartments after midnight to have sex with the women he finds inside (women who apparently don't mind unplanned sleepless night—or the fact that it is taboo to refuse), but he does so far from his own city, as if he finds the act shameful. He resents his wife boldly doing her own nightwalking, normally the privilege of the male, as well as her constant nagging and desire to climb socially.
Eventually, things reach a boiling point between the pair. You'll have to finish the story to find out if the ending is a happy one.
Silverberg is so interesting. His writing is excellent, and he's pretty deft at drawing future settings. At the same time, his projections of relations between the sexes are downright reactionary. I might not have noticed this a decade ago, perhaps, but in these days of women's liberation, Silverberg's world of women fated to be wee-hours sexual receptacles for the quickest, most unimaginative rutting is not only depressing but unrealistic. This point was driven home recently for me: I caught a roundtable public television show where four women and three men were discussing the traditional roles of the sexes, and the women were chafing mightily. They noted the changes they wanted, which are already happening in our society. If 1970 is already different from 1960, one imagines 2370 should be even more so.
This story feels a bit like Silverbob's The Time Hoppers crossed with some Philip K. Dick domestic crisis. I know David Levinson didn't care for it, but I didn't find it too objectionable, noted objections notwithstanding.
Three stars.
Containers for the Condition of Man, by Laura Virta
The city-in-a-skyscraper has been a staple of science fiction for many years, but now the concept has a hip name: "arcology". It's a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", and architect Paolo Soleri believes they are the wave of the future. He's gone so far as to not only design enormous buildings to house a quarter million self-sufficiently, but even to break ground on a test settlement in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti. The latter will ultimately house 3,000 comfortably on just 10 acres.
It reminds me a bit of that Welsh city-in-a-mall community featured on Our World. I guess only time will tell if these giant edifices become reality or not. Personally, I think the initial cost of construction will keep them in the blueprint stage eternally—at least so long as we have space into which to sprawl our suburbs.
Three stars.
Goodbye Amanda Jean, by Wilma Shore
illustration by Jack Gaughan
A man comes home to find a pile of quartered meat on his stoop, and his wife in tears. Turns out their daughter was shot by a drive-by sportsman. It's not the killing that's illegal—it's the fact that the hunter made his kill from a moving vehicle. The husband vows to take revenge, and he does so in the manner of the world set up by the author.
This is the second tale by Wilma Shore, and it's no better than the first one, published six years prior. There's no science-fictional content whatsoever. The extension of acceptable game to include humans isn't the result of overpopulation or societal change. In fact, the single question presented is "what if hunting of people was legal per the same rules as hunting animals?" Maybe it's a subtle dig at the sportsman hobby. Who knows?
One star.
The All-At-Once Man, by R. A. Lafferty
illustration by Jack Gaughan
John Penandrew is resolved to live forever, so he announces to his four friends, brilliant and classically trained, all (with the exception of the one dilettante, who turns out to be the author, himself). To achieve the ultimate longevity, he plans to combine all of the stages of his life into one present, ageless being.
And he succeeds! But when one's 3D soul includes the entirety of its 4D lifetime, including the moments after death, the result is not what anyone expected.
This is a fascinating tale, quirky in the way Lafferty delivers when he really commits himself. The subject matter is perhaps more suited to F&SF, and the style more in the vein of G. C. Edmondson's Mad Friend series (which also includes the author as a character), but I'm perfectly happy with how it goes and where it turned up.
Four stars.
The Hookup, by Dannie Plachta
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The first Yankee-Russkie link-up in space goes awry when an alien vessel beats the Communists to the docking. Somehow, the Americans don't think to look out their window to see what docked with them.
It's a story that makes zero sense, particularly in this age of in-depth space coverage. Maybe it would have flown in the '50s, before we became familiar with radars and real-life dockings and rendezvous.
One star.
Ask a Silly Question, by Andrew J. Offutt
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The Cudahy equations have revealed a chink in Einstein's relativity, and humanity has developed a fusion-driven vessel to accelerate its way through the previously considered inviolate speed of light barrier.
The question: where are you when you end up on the other side?
Offutt seems to understand science about as well as Plachta. If something could go faster than light, and disappear from human ken as a result of doing so, we'd have noticed long ago. It doesn't take a starship to accelerate to such speeds if relativity is no longer an issue: countless natural and artificial nuclear reactions would do the trick, too.
One star.
Sittik, by Anne McCaffrey
illustration by Jack Gaughan
A little boy is bullied by kids calling him "sittick." His parents ignore the issue until the child, despondent, takes his own life. Then the bullies turn on his mother with the same tactic.
Oh! You thought that was the setup? No, that's the whole story.
One star.
Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, July 1970), by Algis Budrys
Budrys calls The Ship Who Sang "a pretty good adventure story." He notes that, despite her handicap, "Helva is, in fact, Wonder Woman. She can do everything except get felt, and she doesn't have be very smart. Nor is she…She goes along shouting and singing and heaving great metallic sighs. She becomes famous throughout the galaxy of course, because unlike all the other ships like her, she does this peculiar thing—she sings. She's a kind of freak, you see." I take this to mean Budrys enjoyed the stories, but Helva is a broadly drawn, histrionic caricature. So stipulated.
The reviewer goes on to note that "Catherine Moore is probably the best lady poet we've ever had in the field…What she lacks as a plotter of commercial fiction can normally be seen only when one looks over the impressive array of really great commercial stories turned out by her and the late Henry Cuttner…But if you would like to see what can be done with superb storytelling ability and an as yet not fully developed sense of plot, then Jirel of Joiry is your girl."
Jirel of Joiry is, of course, the collection of Weird Tales stories about the eponymous sword-and-sorcery heroine. And even if Jirel represents solo, inexperienced Moore (Budrys suggests that mature Moore is not incapable of plots, as Now Woman Born and Judgement Night demonstrate), she still makes for compelling reading.
Time to sleep
Wow. I don't know that Galaxy has ever managed a two-star rating in its entire run. I could look through my statistics, but that would just be a depressing exercise. With the revival of Worlds of Tomorrow being such a flop, I've got real concerns for the Gold/Pohl/Jakobsson franchise.
Which is a shame, since Galaxy got me started in science fiction. Surely this can only be a blip in its proud twenty year legacy, right?
You're gonna have to do better than that if you want more of my lucre, Ejler!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by David Levinson
Voyages into the known
Readers over 30 may remember Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947. He hoped to prove that the Pacific islands had been reached from South America before Polynesians got there from the west. The balsa log raft he built eventually ran aground in the Tuamotu archipelago in French Polynesia, demonstrating that such a voyage was at least possible. However, most archaeologists and anthropologists consider it far more likely that any contact between Polynesia and the Americas (there is some highly inconclusive evidence) was initiated by the Polynesian people, who have a proven track record of crossing vast distances into the unknown.
In any case, Heyerdahl has inspired a number of imitators hoping to travel farther, including some attempts to travel west to east. On May 29th, Spanish sailor Vital Alsar Ramirez started his second attempt to sail from Ecuador to Australia. The first attempt in 1966 failed after 143 days when the raft was rendered no longer seaworthy by teredo worms.
The new raft, dubbed La Balsa, has one major improvement over the Kon-Tiki: a moving keelboard. This will allow the raft to be steered toward more favorable currents, where Kon-Tiki could only drift with assistance from the simple square sail. Such keelboards are known to Ecuadoran natives and so are a perfectly reasonable addition. Best of luck to the four men aboard.
La Balsa puts to sea.
Speaking of Thor Heyerdahl, his current interest is in demonstrating that ancient Egyptians could have reached the Americas in reed boats. His first attempt last year aboard the Ra got within about 100 miles of the islands of the Caribbean before it became so waterlogged it began to break apart. Now he’s giving it another go.
The Ra II features a tether to keep the stern high, which should help keep the boat from suffering the fate of its predecessor. This is something the original ought to have had; such tethers are clearly visible in ancient Egyptian depictions of reed boats. The crew also plan to take marine samples along the way to study ocean pollution. The Ra II set out from Morocco on May 17th.
Of course, as with the Kon-Tiki, proving that such a voyage could have been made won’t prove that it was. The Egyptians were never great sailors, generally contracting ocean navigation out to more maritime cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Still, best of luck to Heyerdahl and his crew as well.
The Ra II under way. Note the tether keeping the stern high.
Polishing the family silver
Science fiction has a lot of tried and true plots, some better than others. But good writing can occasionally make a hackneyed, sub-par plot something better, and bad writing can turn an intriguing concept into a slog. Fortunately, this month’s IF has a lot more of the former.
Suggested by “Time Piece”. Art by Gaughan
Continue reading [June 4, 1970] Something old, something new (July-August 1970 IF)
by Victoria Silverwolf
Resurrection
Well, what do you know. A magazine I thought as dead as a doornail has risen from its grave. I've reviewed every issue of Worlds of Tomorrow from its birth in 1963 to its demise in 1967. After three years of mouldering in the grave, like John Brown's body, it has returned. Let's take a look at this revenant to see if it was worth digging up.
Continue reading [May 22, 1970] Back From The Dead (Summer 1970 Worlds of Tomorrow)
by Gideon Marcus
Rime of the Recent Mariner
I always cast about the news for tidbits to head my articles. After all, when people read my writings, say, a half-century hence, I want them to be appreciated in the context in which they were created. Creations, and critique of those creations, cannot stand in isolation (or so I believe).
But, wow, how many times can I talk about the latest protest/riot (six killed in Atlanta last week), or Cambodia (Admiral Moorer recently assured us that the reason we can't destroy the mobile NVA base is…because it's mobile; but we did liberate 387 tons of ammunition, 125 tons of prophylactics, and 83 tons of Communist finger puppets so the Search & Destroy mission was absolutely a success), or the Warm War going on in the Middle East (2 Egyptian Mig-21s shot down the other day, 2 Syrian Mig-17s the day before, but the Israelis absolutely did not lose an F-4 over Lebanon) before it all sounds the same? Even Governor Reagan's latest escapades into cost effectiveness and court stacking are old hat.
This iteration of Bull Wright instills less confidence than Dan Rowan's…
To heck with it. Today, I'm going to stick with news in my bailiwick, and nifty news to boot.
You folks surely remember Mariners 6 and 7, twin probes sent past Mars last year, returning unprecedented information and photos from The Red Planet. Well, even now, both probes are contributing to science, long past their original mission.
JPL astronomer Dr. John D. Anderson and Cal Tech astronomer Dr. Duane O. Muhleman are using the two spacecraft to test the validity of Einstein's theory of relativity. Per Einstein, the velocity of light slows in the presence of a gravitational field. If that's the case, then the signals from the Mariners, as they pass the Sun, should decrease—slightly, but measurably.
To measure this, the two scientists had to wait until Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 passed behind the Sun with respect to the Earth. For the former, this happened on April 30; for the latter, May 10. The precise distance-measuring system the two scientisits built in the Mohave Desert should register a slow-up of 200 millionths of a second in the spacecrafts' round trip signal.
This confirmation, should it be reported, will help put paid efforts by other scientists who say that Einstein's theories are wrong or inaccurate, by as much as 7% according to Princeton's Dr. Robert H. Dicke, who needs that to be the case for his theory of Mercury's curious orbital eccentricities.
In other Mariner news, New Mexico State Univ. astronomer and Mariner project scientist Bradford A. Smith has some neato news about Phobos, the larger of Mars' moons. Mariner 7 snapped a picture of the little rock at a distance of 86,000 miles. JPL photo-enhancement techniques indicated that Phobos was nonspherical and was larger and had a darker surface than previously thought. It's just 11.2 by 13.7 miles in dimension, elongated along the orbital plane. Its average visual geometric albedo is just 0.065, lower than that known for any other body in the solar system.
With its weird shape and composition, all signs point to Phobos not being a sister or daughter of its parent planet, but rather, probably a captured asteroid.
The issue at hand
In a happy, elevated mood, now let us turn to the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction—after all, it doesn't do to review stories on an empty soul.
cover by Jack Gaughan illustrating
Be sure to tune in tonight at 7PM Pacific for a terrific Science Fiction Theater!
by Gideon Marcus
It shouldn't happen here (or anywhere)
It was a scene out of Saigon or Prague. It shouldn't be happening in Middle America. On May 4, Ohio National Guardsmen, shot four Kent State students dead, wounding ten more. Here's what we know:
On April 30, President Nixon announced that U.S. troops had entered Cambodia, expanding the war in Southeast Asia. This sparked mass May Day protests across the country. After the Kent State ROTC building was burned down over the weekend, Kent Mayor LeRoy Satrom asked Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes to dispatch the National Guard to the campus.
Clashes between students and law enforcement escalated, with several students reportedly being stabbed by guardsman bayonets. Calls for the Guard troops to be recalled were refused. This set the stage for Monday's tragedy.
It is not certain what triggered the firing. Eyewitnesses said about 600 protestors surrounded a company of 100 Guardsmen and began pelting them with rocks and hunks of concrete. A single shot rang out, whether from a guardsman's rifle or someone else's firearm, is unknown. Without a warning, the guardsmen then began a three second volley, half of them pointing their guns into the air, the other aiming levelly—into the milling crowd of boys and girls.
Amont the dead were William K. Schroder, 19, a sophomore from Lorain, Ohio; Jeffery Miller, 19, a freshman from Plainview, New York; Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, a junior from Youngstown, Ohio; and Allison Krause, a 19-year-old freshman from Pittsburgh. John Cleary, 19, a freshman from Scotia, New York; Dean Kahler, a 20-year-old freshman from East Canton, Ohio; and Joseph Lewis, just 18, from Massillon, Ohio, were reported in critical condition at Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna. They were not all protestors—indeed, Miss Krause had just telephoned her parents to express disgust at the demonstration.
A wave of new protests is wracking the country, now with fresh ammunition. And it is ammunition that is at the center of this outrage, for the Guard did not use tear gas, rubber bullets, or blanks. Never mind if they should have been on the campus at all. At the very least, their rules of engagement should not have incurred collateral deaths on innocent students.
There are just two positive consequences of this tragedy. The first is that if the goal of calling in the Guard was to cow protestors, it has backfired spectacularly. The second is that, on May 5, President Nixon announced that American troops would be withdrawn from Cambodia in seven weeks. How much this decision is in reaction to the demonstrations and how much is due to the heavier-than-expected resistance of the Communists is presently unknown.
I suppose there's one more result—I've been radicalized, and I plan to start marching. It's something I've always supported in the abstract, but observed a modicum of restraint, recalling Tom Lehrer's sentiment, "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee house or college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against – like peace, and justice, and brotherhood, and so on."
But now we see that the audience doesn't all agree, and some of them shoot. I know I'm in the over-30 untrustworthy set, but you'll see my grizzled mug in among the protestors in the weeks to come.
Congratulations, Dick—you managed something Lyndon couldn't.
Shards
And so I plunge into fiction, hoping for a relief from the growing madness. I am greeted with more madness: each of the stories in The latest issue of Galaxy is broken into pieces, with their ends crammed into the latter half of the magazine, as if written like some strange BASIC program with too many GOTO commands. Nevertheless, it's the stories that count. How are they?
cover by Jack Gaughan illustrating The Moon of Thin Reality
Continue reading [May 8, 1970] Tower of Glass (June 1970 Galaxy)
[Be sure to tune in tonight at 7PM PDT for Science Fiction Theater! It's Nimoytacular—plus Apollo 13 pre-launch coverage!]
by Gideon Marcus
Backlash in D.C.
50,000 people marched on Washington last week protesting the course of the Vietnam War. Sure, you think, another day ending in "y", right?
Except these kooks were protesting for the war!
Organized by a fundamentalist coalition, religious fervor dominated the gathering. That said, there were plenty of Birchers and Nazis in attendance, too, making this a truly ecumenical demonstration.
There were even counter-counter protestors.
Which poses the question: can Nixon still call them a "silent" majority?
Calm after the storm
There's really nothing to protest in the latest issue of Galaxy, which offers, in the main, a pleasant reading experience.
by Jack Gaughan for A Style in Treason
Continue reading [April 10, 1970] A Style in Treason (May 1970 Galaxy)
by David Levinson
Counting coups
March saw not one, but two attempts to overthrow the established government in smaller countries. One failed, but the other looks like it may have succeeded.
Cyprus is the island south of Turkey, west of Syria, north of Egypt
Cyprus is a troubled nation. The populace is divided between those of Greek and Turkish decent, and the long-running hostility between Greece and Turkey spilled over to Cyprus. When the island sought independence from the United Kingdom, Greek Cypriots hoped for eventual union with Greece, which was not acceptable to Turkish Cypriots. The British were able to block annexation (or enosis, as it is called in Cyprus) as a condition for independence, but relationships within the island are so rocky that UN peacekeepers had to be brought in to keep the two populations from each other’s throats.
A major figure in the independence movement was Orthodox Archbishop Makarios III, who has led the country ever since. Before independence, he was a strong supporter of enosis, but was persuaded to accept that it would have to be put off as a hoped for future event. Makarios isn’t terribly popular with western leaders; he’s been a major voice in the Non-aligned Movement. Some in Washington have taken to calling him “the Castro of the Mediterranean.” In the last few years, he’s made himself unpopular at home as well. He’s taken away guarantees of Turkish representation in government and has also moved away from the idea of enosis. His justification is the Greek military coup of 1967, stating that joining Cyprus to Greece under a dictatorship would be a disservice to all Cypriots.
Archbishop Makarios III visiting the Greek royal family in exile in Rome earlier this year.
On March 8th, somebody tried to kill Makarios. His helicopter was brought down by withering, high-powered fire. Makarios was uninjured, but the pilot was severely wounded. Fortunately, nobody else was on board. At least 11 people have been arrested, all of Greek heritage and strong supporters of enosis. Given the military nature of the weapons used, some are also accusing the Greek Junta of involvement.
Meanwhile in south-east Asia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk is out as the leader of Cambodia. Like Makarios, he hasn’t been popular in the west, due to his cozy relations with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. He’s also allowed Cambodian ports to be used for bringing in supplies for the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, while also ignoring the use of Cambodian territory as part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Sihanouk was out of the country when anti-North Vietnamese riots erupted both in the east of the country and in Phnom Penh. Things quickly got out of hand, with the North Vietnamese embassy being sacked. By the 12th, the government canceled trade agreements with North Vietnam, closed the port of Sihanoukville to them, and issued an ultimatum that all North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces were to leave the country within 72 hours. When the demand wasn’t met, 30,000 protesters rallied outside the National Assembly against the Vietnamese.
On the 18th, The Assembly met and voted unanimously (except for one member who walked out in protest) to depose Sihanouk as the head of state. Prime Minister Lon Nol has assumed the head-of-state powers on an emergency basis. On the 23rd, Sihanouk, speaking by radio from Peking, called for an uprising against Lon Nol, and large demonstrations followed. A few days later, two National Assembly deputies were killed by the protesters. The demonstrations were then put down with extreme violence.
l: Prince Sihanouk in Paris shortly before his ouster. R: Prime Minister Lon Nol.
Where this will lead is anybody’s guess. The new government (it should be noted that the removal of Sihanouk appears to have been completely legal) has clearly abandoned the policy of neutrality and threatened North Vietnam with military action. Hanoi isn’t going to take that lying down; if the war spreads to Cambodia, will the Nixon administration expand American involvement? Add in Sihanouk urging resistance to Lon Nol and the deep reverence for the royal family held by many Cambodians, and it all looks like a recipe for chaos.
What is man
Some of the stories in this month’s IF deal directly or tangentially with what it is that makes humans human. The front cover also raises a question that we don’t have an answer to. We’ll get to that at the end; let’s look at the issue first.
Suggested by Troubleshooter. Art by Gaughan
Continue reading [April 2, 1970] Being Human (May-June 1970 IF)
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
There ain't no Justice
It was only a few months that President Dicky tried to ram a conservative Supreme Court justice pick through the Senate to replace the seat left open by the retirement of the much laureled Chief Justice Earl Warren. Clement Haynworth's candidacy went down to defeat in the Senate on November 21 of last year.
Now up is G. Harrold Carswell, until last year, the Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He was elevated to the Fifth Circuit Appellate Court last June. To all accounts, he is no less conservative than his predecessor, and he's a (former?) segregationist to boot. His jurisprudence is also lacking: 40% of his rulings were overturned on appeal! As Senator McGovern observed, "I find his record to be distinguished largely by two qualities: racism and mediocrity." Nebraska's Senator Hruska damned with faint praise in his reply, to the effect saying, "Sure he's mediocre…but don't the mediocre warrant representation, too?"
G. Harrold Carswell
But as LIFE and other outlets are noting, Nixon's soothing rhetoric thinly veils a deeply conservative agenda, cutting social programs, withdrawing from world affairs, and trying to stack the Court with allies. Carswell's nomination passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 16 of this year. We'll see if the Senate as a whole can stomach him for the Court proper.
Plus ça change
Galaxy's editor Eljer Jakobsson is like Richard Nixon (well, perhaps this is a stretch, but indulge me—I need some sort of transition here!) He is trying all of the styles at his disposal in this new decade of the 1970s and seeing what sticks. The result remains inconsistent, but not unworthy.
cover by Jack Gaughan
by David Levinson
The Veep that couldn’t shoot straight
I’m no fan of golf (unless it involves little windmills), but a lot of people seem to like it. They show it on TV and not a week goes by without at least one golf joke in the funny pages. It also intersected with politics last month. February continues to be the month that gives me very little to talk about, so I guess this is it.
The Professional Golfers’ Association likes to start their tour early in the pleasant climes of Hawaii and California. One such event is the Bob Hope Desert Classic held on a variety of courses in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs. The highlight of the tournament for many is the pro-am event, where the pros competing in the tournament are matched with (celebrity) amateurs for one day’s round.
Pro Doug Sanders—best known for his odd swing and dapper dress—found himself in a foursome with Bob Hope, California Senator (and former song-and-dance man) George Murphy, and Vice President Spiro Agnew. On his very first shot, the Veep managed to hook the ball so far to the left it ended up on the path for an adjacent fairway. (Probably the farthest left he’s gone since being elected governor.) Trying to get back to the right fairway, he then sliced hard to the right. (This whole thing is starting to sound like a metaphor for Agnew’s political career.)
Bob Hope and Doug Sanders were standing in the path of the ball. Hope managed to duck out of the way, but Sanders was struck on the head. The blow drew blood, which Hope mopped up with a towel. Agnew was duly apologetic, and Sanders played gamely onward. At the nine-hole break, he was examined by a doctor, and the wound was sprayed with a pain-deadener.
Wire photo of the aftermath.
Agnew went on to have a terrible day. He frequently missed putts and took penalties for giving up on a hole. As the AP put it, “Agnew chatted amiably with the fans when his ball landed in or near them, which was often.” Sanders didn’t do much better, though he was already having a poor tournament. He won $200, far less than the top prize of $25,000. Agnew rather crassly quipped that it should just about cover his medical bills.
Am I picking on Spiro Agnew? Yes. Yes, I am. After his recent attack on the press, he deserves all the opprobrium he can get. He’s already being talked about as the clear front-runner for the Republicans in 1976. Let’s nip that idea in the bud right now.
Down the fairway
When he took over as editor, Ejler Jakobsson got off to a strong start. Since then, there’s been something of a return to form, although those C+ to B- issues have felt fresher than they did in recent years under Fred Pohl. Has he sent this issue cleanly down the fairway, hit a hole in one, or—worst of all—smacked the reader in the head with an errant shot? Let’s find out.
Arrival at Ocean-Deep. Art for “Waterclap” by Gaughan
Continue reading [March 2, 1970] Par for the course (April 1970 IF)
![[June 16, 1970] <i>Solaris</i>, <i>Year of the Quiet Sun</i>…and a host of others (June 1970 Galactoscope #1)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/700616covers-672x372.jpg)
![[June 10, 1970] I will fear <i>I Will Fear No Evil</i> (July 1970 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/700610galaxycover-435x372.jpg)
![[June 4, 1970] Something old, something new (July-August 1970 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/IF-1970-07-Cover-472x372.jpg)
![[May 22, 1970] Back From The Dead (Summer 1970 <i>Worlds of Tomorrow</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/COVERSMALL-1-672x372.jpg)
![[May 8, 1970] Tower of Glass (June 1970 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/700508galaxycover-645x372.jpg)
![[April 10, 1970] A Style in Treason (May 1970 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/700410galaxycover-651x372.jpg)
![[April 2, 1970] Being Human (May-June 1970 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/IF-1970-05-Cover-472x372.jpg)
![[March 8, 1970] They say that it's the institution… (April 1970 <i>Galaxy</i> and the incomplete Court)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700308galaxycover-412x372.jpg)
![[March 2, 1970] Par for the course (April 1970 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IF-1970-04-Cover-476x372.jpg)