To the surprise of almost no one, September 1st saw a military coup in Libya. King Idris has grown increasingly unpopular ever since the United Kingdom of Libya was proclaimed in 1951. His government was initially seen as weak, due to the federal structure of the kingdom, sharing power between the three main regions of the country: Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitania in the northwest, and Fezzan in the southwest. After Idris dissolved the federal system in 1963, he was seen more as an autocrat. Always more a religious leader than secular, he was viewed by more progressive elements in the country as a hindrance to making Libya a modern nation. His government has also been widely seen as corrupt. Once one of the poorest countries in the world, Libya has grown rich in the last decade since the discovery of oil, but little of that wealth has gone beyond the king and his advisers.
So when Idris traveled to Turkey for medical treatment, everyone was expecting a coup. The king himself had offered to abdicate a few weeks earlier while he was on vacation in Greece. The blow was expected to come from Abdul Aziz Shahli, Chief of Staff of the Libyan Army, and his brother Omar, the royal councilor. The two are the sons of Idris’ longtime chief advisor, who had been murdered by a nephew of the queen.
King Idris from a couple of years ago.
But they were beaten to the punch by a group calling themselves the Free Officers Movement, no doubt inspired by Nasser’s Egyptian Free Officers who toppled King Farouk. The coup was swift, seemingly bloodless, and has been accepted in the country with no resistance and a fair amount of enthusiasm. The Revolutionary Command Council which heads the FOM quickly informed foreign diplomats that treaties and agreements would be respected and that foreign lives and property would be protected. Recognition of the new government followed almost immediately, including from the United States on the 6th.
Since then, a cabinet of eight ministers has been appointed to implement the policies of the Revolutionary Command Council. Six of ministers, including Prime Minister Soliman Al Maghreby, are civilians, and the two military men are not members of the RCC. The new government has announced that Libya will not be renewing the leases on British and American air bases as they come due over the next two years. That means Wheelus Air Base will be closing down next year, but the base’s importance has declined over the last few years, and there had already been discussions with the previous government about the U.S. withdrawing from Libya.
Libya’s new Prime Minister, Soliman Al Maghreby.
A deep but dazzling darkness
We’re all still wondering what direction Ejler Jakobsson is going to take the magazines he helms. Based on this month’s IF along with the story Survival in last month’s issue, I’d say he likes stories with a darker tone, because, boy, is this issue full of dark stories.
This month’s cover depicts nothing in particular. Art by Gaughan
Fresh out of command school, Lieutenant Quent expects a plum assignment. After all, he finished high in his class and his father is an admiral. Instead, he’s assigned to a mere patrol boat, one of the first with an integrated crew of humans and aliens. The lieutenant doesn’t—quite—share his father’s extreme prejudices, but he’s going to have to make a lot of adjustments.
Deathly ill, the captain has some advice for his first officer. Art uncredited
This was really good, right up until the last two or three pages. The ending felt a bit confused, and the story seems to be saying integration isn’t a good thing. It’s not really clear on the point, because the very end seems to contradict that. Nevertheless, Tiptree continues to improve. I may not necessarily like what I read, but it always seems to hold my interest.
A high three stars.
To Kill a World, by Irwin Ross
When his wife died, Colonel Ward crawled into a bottle. Now he’s desk-bound and in command of an air force base, while the arrival of his commanding general signals that his career is over. But the landing of an alien spaceship changes the trajectory of his life.
An alien invader, or is it? Art uncredited
Here’s our first dark story. Once the action gets going, it seems fairly obvious how things will turn out. But Ross takes his tale in a different, more poignant direction, and it is much the better for it.
Four stars.
Genemaster, by Barry Alan Weissman
Far, far in the future, Earth is forgotten, and humanity has been messing with its genes so long that nobody looks what we would call human. When proof is found that humans came from a single world, an aristocrat with a zoo hires the protagonist to provide him with an Original human.
If the previous story went somewhere unexpected, this one goes exactly where you think it will. It also gets to the punchline far too easily. The only thing this story has going for it is the narration, which is brisk and engaging. I’d call it Zelaznyesque if the first-person narrator were more sarcastic. That’s just enough to pull it over the three-star line for me; you might think otherwise.
Barely three stars.
For Sacred San Francisco, by Alfred Coppel
A century or so after World War III, men are a scarce resource that the women of the city-states of the shattered United States go to war for. Jere is a fighter pilot for San Francisco. She survives being shot down and encounters a wild man.
A San Franciscan gunner, not our protagonist. Art uncredited
Back to darkness, though I can’t say much about it without giving away the ending. The story stands on its own, but would probably work better as part of a novel. Many aspects of the world Coppel has created go unexamined, and the consequences of the conclusion could be far-reaching.
Three stars.
The Story of Our Earth: The Conquest of the Land, by Willy Ley
Having taken us through the formation of the Earth and the emergence of life, Ley shows us the Devonian period, when life first crawled onto land. Unfortunately, the fossil record for this period is scarce (most creatures were soft-bodied and didn’t fossilize well), so he spends most of the article talking about trilobites. I think a few lines may be missing at the end, because it is very abrupt, but what we have is interesting and engaging.
Three stars.
By Civilized Standards, by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Barrett offers us a first contact story in which humans and aliens struggle to find a point of commonality. Eventually, they think they found one, but how well do the humans really understand? And once again a very dark story that’s also well-written.
In Part 1, Jeff Mallory woke to find that three months had passed, his town in the thrall of alien invaders, and his daughter Lori missing and forgotten. He escaped, joined up with Lori’s best friend Sally, and wound up drafted by Colonel Strang, who believes it is the Chinese who have conquered his town.
As the story picks up, he discovers Lori in Strang’s camp, but she is a true believer in the colonel’s vision. He and Sally attempt to kidnap her and things go wrong. Sally is shot and Jeff must flee on his own. Guided by memories that don’t seem to be his own, he comes to a large house, where he meets a very old man named Gonyl. The old man claims to be an alien and explains what’s going on. As the story ends, Jeff expresses disbelief and demands the truth. To be concluded.
Gonyl is not in good shape. Art uncredited
This is all fairly typical for Laumer in adventure mode. There are a lot of elements he’s used before: two aliens who have lived on Earth for centuries, an imminent threat they were originally sent to stop, a hero plagued by strange memories who may be connected to the aliens. Much of this feels like he’s just going through the motions, and a lot of the action has been episodic, not really advancing the plot (though he may wind up bringing it all together in the end). Right now, it’s average at best.
A low three stars.
Appropriate Punishment, by Theresa M. Treadway
This month’s new author tells the story of an old man facing judgment on the last night of his misspent life. It’s extremely well-written, but rather trite. Worse, the ending could be read as supporting a racist stereotype; that’s probably not intended, but it’s there.
Three stars.
Judgment night. Art uncredited but clearly signed by Gaughan
I’ve been wondering if Jakobsson would carry on with the IF first program. The issues under his leadership have all had a new author, but there was no acknowledgment of the fact. This time, there’s a note at the top of the first page of the story announcing “an IF first,” and the author bio makes its return (though somewhat insultingly never referring to Miss Treadway by name; I’ll put that down to poor editing for now).
Summing up
With this issue, IF begins to at least feel different from the Pohl years. Not significantly better or worse, but different in tone. It’s a gloomy issue, though looking at each story individually it’s not quite as dark as the overall impression I initially came away with. I don’t mind too much; the best story in the issue is also the darkest. But let’s not overdo it either.
Right now, my biggest complaint is that the art is all uncredited. It all appears to be by Jack Gaughan, who was on the masthead last month (there isn’t one this month) as Associate Art Director. Maybe that’s a fancy way of saying he’s doing all the interior art now. I hope not. I like Gaughan’s work, but I also like a bit of variety.
Looks like another of Dickson’s military stories. Those are often quite good.
[And now, for your reading pleasure, a clutch of books representing the science fiction and fantasy books that have crossed our desk for review this month!]
by Victoria Silverwolf
Ye Gods!
Two new fantasy novels, both with touches of science fiction, feature theological themes. One deals with deities that are now considered to be purely mythological, the other relates to one of the world's major living religions. Let's take a look.
Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty
Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.
The title of this strange novel comes from a book written by Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Christian mystic of the sixteenth century. This work, known as The Interior Castle or The Mansions in English, compares various stages in the soul's spiritual progress to mansions within a castle. From what I can tell from a little research, the Fourth Mansion is the stage at which the natural and the supernatural intersect.
(I'm sure I'm explaining this badly. Interested readers can seek out a copy of Saint Teresa's book for themselves.)
I understand that Lafferty is a devout Catholic, so this connection between his latest novel and what is considered to be a classic of Christian literature must be more than superficial. Be that as it may, let's see if we can make any sense out of a very weird book.
Our hero is Fred Foley, a reporter who is said to be not very bright, but who seems to have some kind of special insight or perception as to events beyond the mundane. (A sort of Holy Fool, perhaps.) He gets involved in multiple conspiracies of folks, who may be something other than just ordinary human beings, out to change the world.
There are four such groups, said to be not quite fit for either Heaven or Earth. Each one is symbolized by an animal.
The Snakes, also known as the Harvesters, are a group of seven people who blend their psychic powers to influence the minds of others. They are intent on bringing about a sort of hedonistic apocalypse. Their connection to Foley and other characters allows for telepathic communication, and sets the plot in motion.
The Toads are folks who are reincarnated, or somehow take over new bodies. (It's a little vague.) Foley's investigation into one such person starts the novel. They intend to release a plague, wiping out most of humanity and ruling over the survivors.
The Badgers are people who are something like spiritual rulers of a kind of parallel world that most ordinary people can't perceive. Foley pays a visit to a couple of these seemingly benign people for information. In one case, this involves a trip to a mountain in Texas that shouldn't be there.
The Unfledged Falcons are would-be fascists, military leaders trying to take over the world by force. Only one such person appears in the book, a Mexican fellow named Miguel Fuentes. He gets involved when the Snakes try to influence an American named Michael Fountain (see the connection in names?) and wind up entering his mind by mistake.
I would be hard pressed to try to describe all the bizarre things that happen. Lafferty has a way of describing extraordinary events in deadpan fashion. (We're very casually told, for example, that one character brought a dead man back to life when he was a boy. One very minor character is a demon, and another one is an alien.)
The book's combination of whimsey and allegory is unique, to say the least. There's a lot of dialogue that sounds like nothing anybody would ever say in real life. Did I understand it all? Certainly not. Did I enjoy the ride? Yep.
Four stars.
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
Cover art by James Starrett.
Zelazny's recent novel Lord of Light offered a futuristic twist on Buddhism and Hinduism. This one makes use of ancient Egyptian gods, as well as a bit of Greek mythology. There are also a lot of original concepts, making for a very mixed stew indeed.
The time is the far future, when humanity has settled multiple planets. Don't expect a space opera, however.
We begin in the House of the Dead, ruled by Anubis. He has a servant who has lost his memory and his name. Anubis gives him the name Wakim, and sends him to the Middle Worlds (the physical realm) to destroy the Prince Who Was A Thousand. Meanwhile, Osiris, who rules the House of Life, sends his son Horus on the same errand.
You see, Anubis and Osiris keep the population of the Middle Worlds in balance, bringing life and death in equal amounts. The Prince threatens this system with the possibility of immortality. Although the two gods have the same goal, they are also rivals, so their champions battle each other as well as the Prince.
This is a greatly oversimplified description of the basic plot. A lot more goes on, with many equally god-like characters. There's a sort of scavenger hunt for three sacred items, with the protagonists hopping around from planet to planet in search of them.
Zelazny experiments with narrative techniques, from poetry to a play. There's some humor, as demonstrated by a cult that worships a pair of shoes. (They actually play an important role in the plot.) The pace is frenzied, with plenty of purple prose.
Full understanding of what the heck is really going on doesn't happen until late in the book, when we learn the actual identities of Wakim and the Prince. Suffice to say that this requires a lengthy description of apocalyptic events that took place long before the story begins.
Some readers are going to find this novel disjointed and overwritten. Others are likely to be swept away by the richness of the author's imagination. I'm leaning in the latter direction.
Roger Zelazny’s been busy this month! His new novel Damnation Alley expands his novella of the same name into an action piece which is exciting enough but ultimately unsatisfying, a sort of postapocalyptic pony express with futuristic vehicles and implausible characters.
Cover of Damnation Alley by Jack Gaughan
The story is set in a relatively near-future USA after a nuclear war which has split it into isolated states within a radiation-ravaged wasteland, the only relatively safe passage through which is a corridor known as Damnation Alley. There are pockets of radiation, giant mutant animals and insects, tornadoes and killer dust storms. The descriptions of these is the book’s real strength, with some of them verging on the genuinely poetic. Our protagonist is Hell Tanner, a former Hell’s Angel who is offered a pardon for his crimes by the State of California, if he’ll deliver a shipment of vaccines to Boston, which has been hit by an outbreak of plague. Of course, this necessitates driving through Damnation Alley, but never fear, Tanner is also driving a super-tough vehicle bristling with weaponry.
The whole thing is almost laughably macho in places, and I say that as someone who really quite likes both cars and adventure stories. Tanner is that implausible archetype, the bad guy who nonetheless somehow has other people’s best interests at heart. However, there’s also some nice contrasts set up between Tanner and the criminal world he inhabits and the much more normal parts of society he encounters on his journey, where people seem to be on the whole generally decent and kind, making Tanner’s casual violence seem all the more out of place.
The book has a lot of problems. Some are clearly the result of padding it out to novel length, with several episodes which go nowhere and add little to the story. The characterisation of everyone aside from Tanner is weak to nonexistent. In particular, the main female character, Cordy, is a frustrating cipher: she is a woman who Tanner essentially abducts, and yet she shows none of the emotions one might expect under the circumstances, while Tanner seemingly comes to think of her as his girlfriend despite neither of them making any moves in that direction.
However, the biggest problem is that there are too many holes in the story for it to stay afloat. Despite the devastation of the land around it, the state of California somehow still has the resources to build giant armoured cars bristling with every kind of weapon from bullets to flamethrowers. Only two human beings are apparently capable of making the trip from California to Boston, which is surprising given the aforementioned level of technology and that there is clearly no shortage of young men with a death wish. Tanner makes it almost to Boston before encountering anyone who makes a serious effort to steal the vaccines, which I also find somewhat implausible. And so on, and so on.
Damnation Alley held my attention for the duration of a train journey and had nicely surreal, well-paced prose in places, but it was just too unbelievable for me to really enjoy it. Two and a half stars.
by Brian Collins
Since he returned to writing some half a dozen years ago, Robert Silverberg has tried to reintroduce himself as a more “serious” writer. This is not to say his rate of output has slowed down in favor of more refined work; if anything the past few years have been the busiest for him since the ‘50s. This year alone we have gotten enough novels from Silverberg that a bit of a catch-up is in order. The first on my plate, Across a Billion Years, hit store shelves a few months ago, from The Dial Press (I believe this is Silverberg’s first book with said publisher), and it seems to have flown under the radar—possibly because there’s no paperback edition, and also it might be aimed at younger readers. The second book we have here, To Live Again, is from Doubleday, and it too is a hardcover original; but unlike Across a Billion Years, To Live Again is a new release, fresh out of the oven.
It’s the 24th century, and humanity has not only spread to other worlds but encountered several intelligent alien races along the way. Tom Rice is a 22-year-old archaeologist on an expedition to find the ruins of a bygone race called the High Ones, who apparently lived a billion years ago (hence the title) but who have since vanished. Whether or not the High Ones have gone extinct is one of the novel’s core mysteries, although Silverberg takes his time raising this question. The novel is told as a series of diary entries, or rather messages Tom sends to his sister Lorie. In a curious but also frustrating move, Lorie is arguably the most interesting character in the novel, yet we never see or hear her, as she’s not only away from the action but stuck in a hospital bed for an indefinite period. Lorie is a telepath, and enough people are “TP” to make up their own faction, although telepathy only works one-way and Tom himself is not a telepath. The one positive surprise Silverberg includes here is finding a way to tie telepathy together with the mystery of the High Ones, but obviously I won’t say how he does it.
As for bad surprises, well…
Even taking into account that Tom is a young adult who also has personal hang-ups (his father wanted him to enter real estate), his treatment of his colleagues is abhorrent in the opening stretch. He dismisses the aliens on the team as mostly “diversity” hires and has a standoffish relationship with Kelly, the female android on the team, whom he more than once compares to a “voluptuous nineteen-year-old.” Why someone of Tom’s age would make such a comparison is befuddling…unless you were really a lecherous man approaching middle age and not a recent college graduate. There are a few other humans here, but the only human woman present is Jan, whom Tom gradually takes a liking to—just not enough to do anything when he sees Leroy, a male colleague, sexually assault Jan near enough that he could have intervened. This happens early in the novel, and I have to admit that Tom’s indifference regarding Jan’s wellbeing, a weakness in character he never really apologizes for, cast a cloud over my enjoyment of the rest of the novel. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop. That Tom and Jan’s relationship turns romantic despite the former’s callousness only serves to rub salt in the wound. The bright side of all this is that while some of Silverberg’s recent work has bordered on pornographic, Across a Billion Years is relatively tame, almost to the point of being old-fashioned.
Indeed, this feels like a throwback to an older era of SF, even back to those years when Silverberg (and I, for that matter) had not yet picked up a pen or used a typewriter. In broad strokes this is a planetary adventure of the sort that would have been serialized in Astounding circa 1945. We’re excavating alien ruins on Higby V, a distant planet where High Ones artifacts have been supposedly found. During a drunken escapade one of the alien diggers stumbles upon (or rather breaks into) a piece of High Ones technology, something akin to a movie projector, not only showing what the High Ones look like but revealing a clue as to the location of their homeworld. This should sound familiar to most of us, and I suspect Silverberg knows this too, because this novel’s biggest problem and biggest asset is how it uses perspective. We’re stuck with Tom as he sends messages to Lorie, recounting events in perhaps more detail than he has to, knowing in advance that his sister won’t receive these messages until after the fact. As with a disconcerting number of Silverberg protagonists, Tom can be annoying, and honestly quite bigoted; and since he is the perspective character we’re never relieved of his oh-so-interesting remarks. But, and I will give Silverberg this, he does put a twist on the epistolary format very late in the novel, which does the miraculous thing of making you reevaluate what you had been reading up to this point.
In other words, this is not an exceptional novel, but it does have its points of interest, and with the exception of an early scene and its ramifications (or lack thereof), nothing here made me want to throw my copy at a nearby wall. For the most part this is inoffensive—possibly even decent. Three stars.
Those who want a bit more sex with their science fiction can do worse than this one, which looks to be the fourth (or maybe fifth—I’ve lost count) Silverberg novel of 1969. It’s the near-ish future, and the good news is that for those with enough money, death is not necessarily the end. Courtesy of the Scheffing Institute, a person can have their memories stored periodically, making copies or “personae” of themselves, which can be transplanted to the brain of a living host. The host and the persona will cooperate, lest the latter erase the former’s personality and become a “dybbuk,” using the host’s body as a flesh puppet.
The infamous businessman Paul Kaufmann has recently died, with his persona waiting to be claimed. Paul’s nephew, Mark, and Mark’s 16-year-old daughter Risa each see themselves as ideal candidates for Paul’s persona, but one of the rules at the Institute is that close family members can’t host each other’s personae: the implications of, for example, a teen girl hosting her grandfather’s persona, would be…concerning.
While we’re on the lovely topic of incest, let’s talk more about Risa, who must be one of the thorniest of all Silverberg characters, which as you know is a tall order, not helped by the fact that Silverberg describes, in almost poetic detail, every curve of this teen girl’s nude body—and she does strut around naked a surprising amount of the time. Risa is such a depraved individual, despite her age, that she at one point tries seducing an older male cousin and rather openly has an Electra complex (they even mention it by name), which Mark is understandably disturbed by—with the implication being that Mark has lustful thoughts about his own daughter. This is the second Silverberg novel I’ve read in two months to involve incest, which worries me.
The only other major female character is Elena, Mark’s mistress, whom Risa sees as a rival for her father’s affections and who (predictably) starts conspiring against Mark. Not content to ogle at just 16-year-olds, Silverberg also takes to describing the nuances of Elena’s body in wearying fashion, which does lead me to wonder if he was working the typewriter one-handed for certain passages. It’s a shame, because there’s an intriguing subplot in which Risa acquires her first persona, a young woman named Tandy who had died in a skiing accident—or so the official record claims. Tandy, or rather the persona of Tandy, recorded a couple months prior to her death, suspects foul play. Of the women mentioned, Tandy is the least embarrassingly written, but then she is only tangentially related to the plot and, what with not having a physical body, Silverberg is only able to ogle at her so much.
I’ve not even mentioned John Roditis and his underling Charles Noyles, business rivals of Mark’s who are clamoring for Paul’s persona. You may notice that this novel has more moving parts than Across a Billion Years, and certainly it’s the more ambitious of the two, the problem being that its shortcomings are all the more disappointing for it. Silverberg raises questions that he can barely be bothered with answering, and he alludes to things that remain mostly unrevealed. Much of To Live Again is shrouded in speculation, which is to say it uses speculation as a night-black cloak to cover things we sadly never get to see.
Another rule at the Institute is that a persona has to be of the same gender as its host, a rule that characters mostly write off as bogus. And indeed why not? Why should a male host and female persona not be able to coexist? Or the other way around. The prohibition has to do with transsexualism, which is certainly uncharted water for the most part. There has been very little science fiction written about transsexualism or transvestism—the possibility of blurring and even crossing gender lines. Unfortunately the novel does little with the ideas it presents. There are multiple references to religion and mythology (the word “dybbuk” refers to an evil spirit in Jewish mythology), including lines taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a minor subplot about white Californians appropriating Buddhist practices, in connection with the Institute, but this is so tangential that the reader can easily forget about it.
Finally, I want to mention that I was reminded eerily of another novel that came out this year, Philip K. Dick’s masterful and deranged Ubik, which I have to think Silverberg could not have known about when he was writing To Live Again. Both take cues from the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, although in Dick’s novel people who have died are kept in a state of suspended animation called “half-life,” whereas Silverberg’s characters die the full death, or “discorporate,” only that their personalities (up to a point) are kept intact. Not to make comparisons, but given that Silverberg’s novel is longer than Dick’s I have to say he does a fair bit less with the shared material. Of course, these are both talented writers, who at their best do very fine work indeed. Silverberg has become a major writer, but sadly he is not firing on all cylinders with either of the novels I’ve covered.
This book made me think of a Bulwer-Lytton novel for the Space Age.
This book could make Damon Knight take back everything he said about van Vogt.
This book made me long for the complexity of Commander Cody shorts.
This book’s style is so out of date that I think it fell out of the TARDIS.
This book wishes it had the character depth of a Lin Carter work.
And yet, I can't hate it the way I hated Light A Last Candle. That book was one mass of forgettable hate, but The Glass Cage is not hateful. It's incompetent at every turn, from line editing to plot development (I really don't know how it got the hardcover copy I received), but the overall effect is an oral record of a children's game.
There's this guy, Stephen, he’s twenty! He's a neophyte to the priests of the computer, TAL! It keeps life going in the city beneath its glass dome! Stephen is a perfect physical specimen, and his only flaw is being too curious about things. But that's because he’s secretly a spy for the Rebellion outside the glass dome!
The sentences are short and rarely have the benefit of internal punctuation. The characters are, generally, exactly how they appear — wicked characters with their close-together eyes, good characters with their strong jaws, straightforward manner, and perfect blonde hair. If this is chosen for adaptation, Tommy Kirk is made for the lead part.
The treatment of nuclear power seems to come from another time, where the leaders of interstellar development are in the Baltimore Gun Club rather than NASA. The giant computer, TAL, is attached to a nuclear bomb, to go off at a certain date, destroying the whole glass dome and the people within! No need to worry, though, Stephen and his various Rebellion people get most everyone out in time, except for the bad guy head priest of TAL, who is determined to die with his machine. Stephen and the gangster leader of the in-Dome Rebellion try to get him out, but to no avail! The nuclear bomb is about to go off, so the two of them hop on their air-sled, turn it skyward, and smash through the glass dome, just as the nuclear bomb goes off! Luckily, the nuclear bomb just pushes them a few miles away from the blast, where they are safe and unharmed.
One point of the book that is surprisingly forward-thinking is its treatment of one of the main characters being severely disabled. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, he is a leader of the Rebellion, commanding through his immense psychic ability. But that cannot keep me from giving it…
Two stars
[A bit of a downer note to leave on, but at least there's some fine stuff upstream. See you next month, tiger!]
My local rag, The Escondido Times-Advocate, isn't much compared to, say, The Los Angeles Times. But every so often, they are worth the subscription fee (beyond the TV listings and the funnies). Take this article, for instance, which might well be at home in a Willy Ley column:
Basically, CalTech has a new timepiece with more precision, accurate to the hundredth of a second, so that when it is used in conjunction with a seismometer, earthquakes can be better mapped. More excitingly, the new clock weighs just eight pounds—less than a tenth that of the hundred-pound monster it replaces.
Transistors have made it to geology.
We hear all about small computers and more efficient satellites, but this story really drives home just how quickly the miniaturization revolution is diffusing to all walks of life. Is a computerized pocket slide rule or a Dick Tracy phone that far off?
Making waves
by Gray Morrow
A lot has happened this year at the old gray lady of science fiction, Galaxy. They changed editors. They lost their science columnist. And as we shall see from the latest issue, things are starting to change, ever so slightly.
Tomorrow Cum Laude, by Hayden Howard
by Jack Gaughan
The revolution does not begin with this piece, a direct sequel to "Kendy's World", which came out at the end of last year. If you'll recall, Kendy was a boy during the National Emergency, a time of civil and racial strife that rocked the nation into a semi-permanent police state. Kendy was recruited by a Mr. Smith, who gave him a scholarship at National University—which turned out to be a training camp for spies. "Tomorrow Cum Laude" details Kendy's first mission.
He is sent to the University of Southern California to take pictures of a biological centrifuge. Why he is sent on a domestic espionage mission when he has been trained in Russian is never explicitly stated. Moreover, the overarching mystery remains: why did the first cosmonaut to Mars chicken out after finding…something…on Phobos, and why are the Soviets building a secret base on the Moon? Did they find a monolith? Two?
All of this is background to Kendy's personal story, his slow, jerky maturation into adulthood. His growing feelings for his accidental roommate, the beautiful woman, Amani, from the southern Californian all Black city-state of Nairobi. His conflicted loyalties to the government of the United States.
Aside from an overuse of the word "amble" (hint: try sprinkling in a "saunter" or two), it's not a bad story, actually. It reads a bit like a juvenile except the subject matter is rather deep, and at one point, Kendy describes himself as, frankly, horny.
I'm enjoying this series more than his first one, about the Esks.
Three stars.
Truly Human, by Damon Knight
Here is where the change becomes noticeable. Knight, who predates but has embraced the New Wave, offers up this interesting piece about triune aliens, who can only think as trios. They abduct three humans to see if they can be adapted to their way of thought. The test is, unfortunately, not altogether scientific.
The beginning and end are the most interesting bits, creatively rendered. The middle part is wanly droll, though effectively conveyed.
Three stars.
The God of Cool, by J. W. Schutz
A smuggler is shot by fellow gang members on the steps of the hospital. As he had willed his body to the organ banks, he finds life after death in a myriad of don-ee bodies. There are three wrinkles:
The recipients of his organs end up being members of his gang;
The smuggler retains a degree of consciousness in his frozen state; and,
The smuggler retains a degree of control over his scattered parts…
The setup sounds a little silly, but I actually found it quite an effective story. It's not played for silly, as it might have been in F&SF, and it doesn't try to explain the psi in scientific terms, as might have happened if it had shown up in Analog. It sure wouldn't work in Niven's universe as detailed in "The Organleggers" and "Slowboat Cargo", though!
Cytheron is a young being on the cusp of adulthood. He fears maturity, afraid to lose his identity in the adult shared mind, so he flees to the edge of a quasar. There, he believes he is free from pursuit as no information can leave the gravitational warping of the dead star/collection of stars. But he is also trapped—and for him to be freed will require a minor supernova, one which might have an effect on a neighboring star system with a familiar number of planets.
It's a mildly cute story, but I am generally averse to Catastrophism in my science fiction. The universe seems to work by general rules; our Sun is not unique. In any event, the piece feels like a veneer of fiction on a science article Shaw happened to read recently, sort of how Niven's "Neutron Star" is based on an Asimov science fact article (I can't remember when it came out—probably '64 or '65).
Yet another tale of John Grimes, this one from early in his career when he was a Lieutenant in command of a tiny courier ship. It is, in fact, the direct sequel to "The Minus Effect", which came out just two months ago. Is a fix-up novel in the works?
In this tale, the exalted passenger isn't a chef-cum-assassin, but rather an amiable robot on a mission—to lead a mechanical movement that places humans on the bottom of the command chain for a change. Luckily for Grimes, not all computers think alike.
As always, pleasant but not particularly memorable. Three stars.
Ersalz's Rule, by George C. Willick
by Jack Gaughan
Two aliens have been playing a competitive sport for the last forty years. Their playing pieces are one human being each, born at the same time. The winner of the game is the one whose human survives longer.
At first, it seems one alien has all the advantages: his human can do no wrong, suffer no lasting malaise. He is, however, bored and reckless. The other alien's piece is a slob whom the breaks never favor. These circumstances lead to the rare invocation of Ersalz's Rule, which affords the possibility of the two pieces switching places. It's a Hail Mary gambit, but it's all the player's got at this point.
The problem with this tale, aside from its heavy handed clunkiness, is that everything is arbitrary. The rules of the game are introduced such that there are no real stakes, and the ending is just kind of stupid.
Two stars.
Take the B Train, by Ernest Taves
by Jack Gaughan
On a train trip through France with his distant wife, a fellow discovers that his garage opener doesn't just trigger his door—it also swaps out his spouse with parallel universe versions of herself. Investigating further, the man determines that the gizmo does a lot more than just that, and he ends up hip-deep in a temporal, spatial, and emotional trip from which he may never return.
This would have been a fantastic setup for a stellar novel, perhaps by Ted White. As it is, I still enjoyed the romantic and fulsome writing of the the piece. I also appreciated the protagonist's mixed feelings toward the various might-have-been marital partners. Taves never does explain how how our hero acquired the device, though there are hints.
Four stars, but a bit of a missed opportunity.
For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, October 1969), by Willy Ley
At the beginning of the century, there were just 92 "natural" elements. Humanity has added 12 to the roster by dint of atom-smashing effort. Ley talks about them and provides tables describing their stability (or lack thereof).
Asimov would have done it better (though we might not have gotten tables in F&SF). Three stars.
Stella, by Dannie Plachta
A lonely man, perhaps one of the last, is sitting on the frozen surface of his world, watching as The Last Star rises. He is alone, as his estranged wife has sought shelter and warmth underground. Only a surgically implanted broadcast power receiver protects him from the elements.
Then Stella arrives on a dot of blue flame. She is invisible, but she describes herself as desirable, and her voice and touch certainly indicate that she is. When she begs the man for his receiver, he finds he cannot resist her entreaty, though it means his death.
It's all very unclear and metaphorical, and I suspect if I knew what Plachtas was trying to say, I might like it less than I did. Nevertheless, I found it moving. Maybe it's a Rorschach Test of a story and it hit me at the right time.
This was supposed to be the final installment of Dune Messiah, but the editor said he had just too much good stuff to fill the magazine. Hence Part 4 rather than Part Ultimate. Of course, having trudged through the prior three bits, I was not looking forward to yet another slog.
I was pleasantly surprised. Oh, it's still a series of conversations. Sure, not a whole lot happens. But we do have an interesting situation set up and then resolved: Hayt, the resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho, is mesmerized by Bijaz the Tleilaxi dwarf and given a frightful compulsion. The tension of Part 4 is how this episode will play out, and Herbert manages it reasonably well.
Sure, there is way too much time spent on the now eyeless Paul and his frightening visions. Yes, I could give two figs about Chani, Paul's true love, destined to die for the last two installments. True, everything in the last 150 pages could probably be compressed to 50, and I'm still not sure if the payoff will be worth it.
That said, I was not disposed to skim, as had happened in each of the prior sections. For that, Frank Herbert, you get…
Three stars.
Aftershocks
Thus, nothing Earth-shattering. Nevertheless, there's a certain gestalt to this issue that feels a bit fresher than prior ones—even though almost half of the issue is devoted to continued serials! Maybe it's because those authors are finally turning in better work than they have in a while.
Perhaps we are finally witnessing a moment of change for this fading pillar of SFnal fiction. It would be pretty neat to see Galaxy transform itself into a leading magazine again.
Stay tuned!
Hopefully, the magazine will fare better than this Ocotillo Wells home that got damaged in last April's quake…
It’s considered a truism in journalism that nothing happens in August, so the papers run filler stories about silly things to make up their page count. Sure, Hurricane Camille killed hundreds as it raged from Mississippi to Virginia, and China and the Soviet Union are on the brink of war, but that doesn’t sell papers. Madison Avenue also has a truism: sex sells. Now, the two have come together.
Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was disgusted by the schlocky, sex-obsessed books that regularly make the best-seller lists, so he recruited a bunch of fellow journalists (19 men and five women, by one count) to write a deliberately bad, oversexed book. The result is Naked Came the Stranger, in which the editors worked hard to remove any literary value from the tale of a New York woman’s sexual escapades.
When the book sold 20,000 copies, McGrady and his co-conspirators decided they’d better come clean. Nineteen of them appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, being introduced as Penelope Ashe (the book’s purported author) and walking out to the strains of A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody. As a result of their confession and discussion of their motives, the book has become even more popular. And as of last Sunday, it’s on the New York Times list of best-sellers. You have to laugh to keep from crying.
Penelope Ashe, in part, with the cover model superimposed.
This puts me in mind of a similar literary hoax with a more sfnal connection. Back in 1956, radio host Jean Shepherd was unhappy with the way best-seller lists were being compiled and urged his listeners to ask their local bookstores to order I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. He offered some vague hints about the plot, and many listeners who were in on the joke created references to the book elsewhere. Demand was so high, publisher Ian Ballantine convinced Theodore Sturgeon to knock out a quick novel based on an outline from Shepherd. Betty Ballantine wrote the last chapter as Sturgeon lay in exhausted sleep on the Ballantines’ couch after trying to write the whole thing in one sitting. The cover by Frank Kelly Freas is full of visual jokes and puns. The book is rumored to have gone to number one, but it doesn’t seem to have been on any lists, probably out of pique on the part of the list makers.
The pub sign features a shepherd’s crook and a sturgeon. Art by Frank Kelly Freas
New and old
I think we’re starting to see some of the influence of new editor Ejler Jakobsson. Editor Emeritus Fred Pohl doesn’t seem have ever had anything nice to say about the New Wave, while there is at least one story in this month’s IF with a nod in that direction. There’s a new printer, with a crisper typeface (though it seems better suited to a news magazine than fiction). No one’s mixed up their e’s and o’s, but instead of lines being printed out of order, some lines are just missing. Hopefully, that will be corrected in future issues.
Supposedly for Seeds of Gonyl. If so, it’s from later in the novel. Art by Gaughan
Frank Herbert appears to have tried to write a Philip K. Dick story. There’s a computer that keeps changing the world in an attempt to carry out its function, an unhappy marriage, and an old man who gets a glimpse of why the world he lives in is the way it is.
Art uncredited, maybe by Gaughan
Unfortunately, none of it works. The lines of reality aren’t blurred; people know the computer is changing things, just not why. And the marriage isn’t as unrelievedly grim as in a Dick story (thank goodness). We’re left with none of the good things that either author brings, and the flaws of both.
Two stars.
By Right of Succession, by Barry Malzberg
A man named Carson shoots the occupant of a motorcade. As he leaves the building he fired from, he’s met by a policeman who escorts him to his next destination on a strict timetable. Eventually, all is explained. Sort of.
Is that Nixon? Art uncredited
Here’s our New Wave—or New Wave-ish—story. It’s fine for what it is, but I don’t quite see the connection between the events and the explanation.
Three stars.
None But I, by Piers Anthony
When last we saw him, interstellar dentist Dr. Dillingham had been accepted as an instructor at the galaxy’s top dental school. Now he’s off to cure the oral ills of a long-buried robot that has vowed to kill the person that frees it from 10,000 years of imprisonment.
Dr. Dillingham meets his patient. Art by Gaughan
Anthony is developing a reputation at the Journey, and not a good one. That’s largely down to the way he writes women. Fortunately, none of that is on display here, possibly because the only female character is a highly efficient secretary who looks like a giant spider. We’re left with an inoffensive and mildly entertaining story, whose only flaw is that it specifically makes note of the old tale it is clearly modeled on of a genie with a similar vow.
Three stars.
Survival, by Steven Guy Oliver
A day in the life of an old man living in the irradiated ruins of a city.
Ignore the blurb. These aren’t the last people on Earth. Art by Gaughan
This month’s new author offers us a grim tale of life after World War Three. It’s very well written, but also very depressing, what I believe kids these days call “a real downer.” I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more from Oliver. But did I mention that the story is grim?
Three grim stars.
Down on the Farm, by W. Macfarlane
Three agricultural salespeople were brought from Earth to a distant planet. Now their contract is up, and the local autocrat who hired them struggles to find a way to pay what they’re due. Unbeknownst to him, they have ulterior motives.
Erasmus Ballod is having a bad day. Art by Gaughan
A bit old-fashioned, but otherwise an enjoyable enough story. Ask me what it was about a month from now, and I won’t be able to tell you, but it didn’t waste my time. For some reason, Macfarlane’s name was left off the first page; fortunately he was credited in the table of contents.
Three stars.
The Story of Our Earth: 2. The First Traces of Life, by Will Ley
The second part of Willy Ley’s sadly incomplete final book looks at the latest theories as to how life began. He discusses the idea of the “primordial ooze” and how and why it has fallen out of favor. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of continental drift.
While still very good, this chapter didn’t engage me quite as much as the previous did. I can’t say if that’s down to my interest in the subject matter or the quality of Ley’s treatment of it.
Jeff Mallory wakes up to discover that three months are missing, the house shows little sign of cleaning and maintenance, and his wife and two younger children are frightened and worn down. Worst of all, no one remembers his oldest daughter, and her room doesn’t even exist. He soon learns that the town has been taken over by things that are barely human, which force everyone to work on a mysterious project.
Remembering that his daughter was planning to stay with a friend who lives well outside of town, Jeff makes his escape. At the friend’s house, he finds only the friend and several unpleasant occupiers, who tell him that the United States has fallen to Russian forces and that his town is a bombed-out, plague-ridden ruin.
He and Sally, his daughter’s friend, move on and are arrested by Russian military. But the Russians are working together with Americans led by a Colonel Strang, who tells him that the Russians were called in to fight the real occupiers, the Chinese. As the installment ends, Jeff finds himself drafted into Strang’s army. To be continued.
Tonight, the role of Colonel Strang will be played by Ronald Reagan. Art by Gaughan
So far, so Laumer. He may be influenced by some of his work on those books he wrote based on The Invaders, what with people not believing in the invading aliens. Honestly, the main thing that stands out to me in this part is the way young Sally abruptly and quickly throws herself at our hero. Jeff put up at least a token resistance so far, though there is a vague paragraph that suggests things could be otherwise. It plays uncomfortably.
Three stars so far, if you like this sort of Laumer story.
One-Girk-Two is undergoing a field test to see if he will be promoted to One-Girk-One. If he passes, he will become the thinking portion of a composite creature called a Unit.
Our hero. Art by Gaughan
This is probably the Chapdelaine story I’ve enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, like all of Chapdelaine’s work, it’s too long. On the other hand, it didn’t go where I thought it was going. Best of all, it has nothing to do with Spork.
Three stars.
Machines That Teach, by Frederik Pohl
Fred took a trip to Tennessee A. & I. In Nashville, where Perry Chapdelaine is a professor of mathematics and is running a lab researching computer aided instruction. There, through a computer in the lab, a computer at Stanford in California administered a test to measure competence in mathematics. Neat stuff, even if the headline is misleading. Maybe even more interesting is the simple fact that he was able to use a computer in Tennessee to interact with another computer a couple thousand miles away
Three stars.
Summing up
We’re starting to see some of the new editor’s influence, though things aren’t really that different. I’m wondering if Jakobsson is going to continue the IF first program, running a story from a new author every month. The issues he’s been in charge of have had such a story, but he hasn’t called attention to it the way Fred did.
The other thing that stands out to me is that the interior art is all uncredited. Where I’ve indicated it’s by Gaughan, it’s because his signature is visible either on the piece reproduced here or a different piece for the same story. I’m not too keen on all the art coming from just one artist (although if the alternative is “art” by Dan Adkins…). More importantly, they give out Hugos for art. If we don’t know who did it, how do we know who to nominate and vote for?
Tiptree is the only name that means anything to me. A bit of a coin flip as an author, but definitely improving with every story.
Senseless mass death is no stranger to the headlines these days. We've had the Boston Strangler. The Texas sniper. The Chicago nurse murderer. But this last week, southern California got a shocking introduction into this club.
At least seven were killed on the nights of the 8th/9th and then the 9th/10th, including Valley of the Dolls actress, Sharon Tate (pregnant with her first child), in two Los Angeles neighborhoods: ritzy Beverly Crest and SilverLake. At first, the scenes were so grisly and bizarre that police suspected some kind or ritual. Jay Sebring, the famous hairstylist who gave Dr. McCoy his "brainy" JFK-style hair-do, and Tate were found stabbed, tied up and hanging on alternate sides of the same rafter, both wearing black hoods. Market owners Leon and Rosemary La Bianca, the SilverLake victims murdered on the second night, were similarly hooded, the latter with red X marks carved into her body.
Wheeling Sharon Tate from her home
Homicide squads are currently swarming the San Gabriel Valley, and while Inspector Harold Yarnell and medical examiner Thomas Noguchi had no insights to offer when they appeared before NBC's cameras on the 10th, police do see connections. "Pig" was scrawled on the door of the Tate home, while "Death to Pigs" was found on the home of the La Biancas, formerly the residence of Walt Disney. Police have not indicated whether they believe the homicides were done by the same person or persons, or if a copycat was inspired by the first murders.
It's shocking, senseless, and tragic. While the murders took place in upper class homes (one of the deceased was heir to the Folger coffee fortune), the motive appears not to have been robbery. Just angry, hateful death. It's not a happy time in the Southland right now.
Death in New York
While not of the same magnitude, at least in terms of human misery, nevertheless the latest issue of Galaxy science fiction is so bad, that one wonders if someone is trying to put the institution down.
by Donald H. Menzel
Humans, Go Home!, by A. E. van Vogt
by Jack Gaughan
A married human couple, immortal but catching the death-wish that has killed most of humanity, has lived on the world of Jana for 400 years. They have used that time to accelerate the development of the humanoid species there, urging 4000 years of technological advance in that time—in part through the use of Symbols, abstract concepts made real by the power of belief. The Janans have their own problems: the women don't like procreation or children, and the men must rape them to propagate the species.
Eventually, the humans are put on trial for their efforts, and (I'm told) we learn there is a lot more to the setup than meets the eye, and that everything the characters believe is actually some kind of falsehood.
I found this first piece impenetrable, giving up about halfway through. Thankfully, a friend of mine, who is fonder of Van Vogt, gave the piece a write up in his 'zine. That's good, as I was dreading having to slog through this one and analyze it, as if it were a book report for a hated school-assigned novel. At 50 years old, I'm allowed to pick my poison.
One star.
Martians and Venusians, by Donald H. Menzel
by Donald H. Menzel
Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at Harvard offers up his clairvoyant images of Martian wildlife, complete with pictures (q.v. the cover). I wonder if Dr. Menzel has an eight-year old child who really wanted to get published, as well as some blackmail leverage on Galaxy editor Jakobssen, because I can't see any other way this peurile, pointless piece ever saw print.
Braaxn the G'drellian is the adolescent member of an alien anthropological team. He was selected to infiltrate the humans for his shape-changing abilities; unfortunately, the youth also has a racial fetish for the infliction and appreciation of pain—common to all of his kind at that age.
Can he be stopped before he unleashes a terror that will exterminate the entire human race?
An unpleasant, but competently written story. Haldeman is new, so of course, there's a "clever" twist to finish things off.
Three stars
The Martian Surface, by Wade Wellman
Wellman's wishful thinking in poetry is that, despite the obvious hostility of the Martian surface, life could still somehow cling to it. Written to coincide with the arrival of the new Mariners, it is no more or less accurate for their flyby.
A ramscoop pilot stumbles upon a professional people-watcher in a park. The "rammer" has a story to tell, a tale of being lost among the stars, and of the titanic alien he encounters in the blackness of space.
This is one of Niven's few stories not set in "Known Space", and it's a simple one. That said, it reads well, particularly out loud, and there is the usual, deft detail that Niven imparts with just a few, well-chosen words.
Janice liked it, but thought it rather shallow. Lorelei, on the other hand, loved that it had a philosophical message beyond the good storytelling.
So, four stars, and easily the best piece of the issue (not much competition…)
Citadel, by John Fortey
by Jack Gaughan
Aliens descend on Earth, erecting mysterious edifices and offering the secrets of the universe. Twenty years later, most of humanity is under their thrall; those who enroll for alien "classes" invariably leave society and end up part of the worldwide hive mind. One organization has a plan to infiltrate the extraterrestrials, to at least find out what's going on, if not stop them.
A "corpsicle" wakes up after a century, but instead of finding a cure for his disease, he finds he's been roused for a more sinister purpose.
This story doesn't make much sense, and it's also about the bare minimum one can do with the concept of frozen people (again, Niven's covered these bases pretty thoroughly with The Jigsaw Man and A Gift from Earth.
Two stars.
For Your Information (Galaxy, September 1969), by Willy Ley
For reasons that will shortly become apparent, it's a real pity that this non-fiction column is not one of Ley's best. It's a scattershot on rocket fuel (well, the oxidizer one combines with the rocket fuel to make it burn), modern pictographic writing, and the latest crop of satellites.
It's just sort of limp and dry, a far cry from the scintillating stuff that helped make early '50s Galaxy such a draw.
It is astonishing how little Frank Herbert can pack into 50 pages. In this installment, Paul Atreides, Emperor, is trying to make sense of a recurring vision, that of a moon falling (his precognition having been hampered by the presence of a clairvoyant "steersman"—the spice-addicted navigators of the space lanes).
He visits the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, whom he has locked up in prison, to let her know that his consort, the Fremen Chani, is finally pregnant (despite Paul's wife, Irulan, furtively feeding her contraceptives for years). But Paul also knows that the birth of the heir will mean Chani's death.
Then Paul heads out to the house of a desert Fremen, father of the girl who had been found dead by Alia last installment. The Emperor heads out there at the girl's invitation—she's not actually alive, but rather, her form has been taken by a shapeshifting assassin.
At the home, Paul meets a dwarf who warns him of impending danger. Whereupon, an atomic bomb explodes overhead.
Along with the endless viewpoint changes and the nonstop italicized thought fragments, we also have more of the innovation Herbert came up with for this book: repetition of dialogue through slightly different permutation. Seriously, the whole story so far could have been a novelette, and we're almost done!
Anyway, I didn't hate Dune, but I felt it was overrated. This sequel, however, is just wretched.
One star.
Credo: Willy Ley: The First Citizen of the Moon (obituary), by Lester del Rey
by Jack Gaughan
And now the real tragedy—Willy Ley is dead. He was only 62.
I knew that he was a science writer who fled Nazi Germany. I did not know how integral he was to the field of rocket science. A key member of the German rocketry club, he was a mentor to Wehrner von Braun. The key difference between the two is Ley immigrated to the U.S.A. rather than serve Der Fuhrer. Von Braun did not.
Ley went on, of course, to be one of the most esteemed science writers—up there with Asimov, at least in his main fields, zoology and rocketry. He died less than a month before Armstrong and Aldrin stepped on the Moon. Denied the Holy Land, indeed.
I have no idea whether there are more Ley articles in the pipeline. There was supposed to be a new, twelve-part series, but who knows if it was ever completed or submitted.
Sad news indeed. Four stars.
Autopsy report
Galaxy hasn't topped three stars since the June hiatus accompanying editor Pohl's departure/sacking, but this is, by far, the worst issue of the magazine in a long time. Was Pohl fired for his declining discernment? Or did he accept a bunch of substandard stuff as a flip of the bird to the new ownership?
Whatever the answer, I certainly hope things improve soon. Without Ley, without quality stories, Galaxy is heading for the skids, but quick.
Land reform has been a major issue in Central America since not long after the War. Honduras passed a land reform law in 1962 to take land illegally occupied by immigrants and squatters and give it to Hondurans. Most of the immigrants who have been displaced are Salvadorans, many of whom held their land legally. Thousands have been uprooted and sent back to El Salvador. Tensions between the two nations are high.
The two countries have also been vying for a spot in next year’s soccer World Cup. They faced each other twice in June, with the home team winning each time. Both events were marred by riots and other unpleasant incidents. On the eve of the playoff match in Mexico City on June 26th, El Salvador severed diplomatic ties with Honduras, claiming 12,000 Salvadorans had been forced to flee Honduras while the government did nothing.
Early July saw various border skirmishes, largely involving violation of air space. Honduras asked the Organization of American States to step in, but the OAS largely just dithered. On the 12th, Honduras claimed to have killed four Salvadoran soldiers on Honduran territory, and the next day six Honduran civilians were injured during an exchange of mortar fire.
War began on the evening of the 14th, when the Salvadoran air force launched a bombing raid on Honduran airfields. That was followed up by a two-pronged ground invasion. The Honduran air force struck back the next day, destroying 20% of El Salvador’s fuel reserves, but quickly fell back to a defensive posture. After early successes by El Salvador, both sides stalled due to a shortage of ammunition.
Salvadoran President and General Fidel Sanchez Hernandez inspecting the troops.
The OAS stepped in quickly after the war began and formed a committee to oversee the negotiation of a ceasefire. They were successful and a ceasefire was announced the evening of the 18th, going into effect at midnight. The Salvadoran army was given 96 hours to withdraw, but as the deadline approached they announced they were staying. They would respect the ceasefire, but demanded the Honduran government guarantee the safety of Salvadorans living in Honduras (300,000 people by some accounts, over 10% of the population of Honduras), the payment of reparations, and the punishment of the anti-Salvadoran rioters. At the time of writing, they are still in place. (As we go to press, El Salvador has withdrawn in the face of threatened sanctions by the OAS.)
It’s been a strange little conflict. The extensive air war was fought without a single jet, mostly P-51 Mustangs and F4U Corsairs. We’re not likely to see that again. Some are calling it the 100 Hour War, the length of time from the first bombing raid to the announcement of the ceasefire. Others are calling it the Football War (that’s soccer to Americans, Canadians, and Australians), reflecting some of the language used to report on the June matches and their role in escalating tensions. Whatever history knows it as, let’s hope it’s over.
The bad old days
For unstated reasons, IF failed to appear last month. It’s pretty clear that this September issue was intended to be dated August. If you look at the cover, you can see that the old month was overprinted with a black bar, and the new month was added below.
A robot carrying off a fainting human woman. It’s not as old-fashioned as you might think. Art by Chaffee
In the far future, our unnamed protagonist is captured on a primitive human world and brought to civilization to fight in the arena. There, he rises to Grand Champion, makes his escape, vows revenge, and winds up learning things.
Our hero digs his way through a mountain. Art by Gaughan, but uncredited
Chapdelaine writes well, and this is one of his better stories, but there are some caveats. First, he has a tendency to be long-winded, though when a writer is paid by the word, that’s to be expected. More he importantly, he nearly always writes stories about Van Vogt-style supermen, and that’s just not my bag. I’m also bored with future gladiatorial combat to the death, even if there is a reason for it here. It’s become a tired cliche.
Three stars.
And So Say All of Us, by Bruce McAllister
Art by Gaughan, but uncredited
Speaking of tired cliches, Bruce McAllister offers us a story of trying to find mental powers among the mentally ill. You’ll see where this one is going pages before it gets there. I think my problem with McAllister is his tendency to hint vaguely at depth and then suggestively waggle his eyebrows Groucho-like until you get it. He needs to dig into the depth more. This story, for example, would make an interesting first chapter to a novel or (significantly pared down) the first part of a novella or novelette that explores the consequences. He could be good, but he needs to put in more effort.
Three stars, but towards the lower end.
The Posture of Prophecy, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Art uncredited
This month’s new author gives us a tale of aliens discussing the impossibility of life developing on what is obviously Earth. Not exactly a new idea, but it takes a not uninteresting, dark turn at the end. I wouldn’t mind seeing more from this author, though perhaps with a little more originality.
Three stars.
Robot 678, by E. Clayton McCarty
Another uncredited piece. The style is reminiscent of Gaughan, but isn’t signed.
A cantankerous old prospector, along with his antiquated robot, winds up as the administrator of a nearly empty planet, decides to bring the daughter-in-law and grandchildren he’s never seen to live with him, the kids get in trouble, and the titular robot saves the day. Not McCarty’s best work, though acceptable. But can we please stop looking at the antebellum South through rose-colored glasses? Replacing slaves with intelligent robots or supposedly barely intelligent aliens doesn’t make it better; it just dehumanizes the millions of Black people who were held in bondage. This is at least the third story in just the last month to play this game, and it needs to stop. I’m about ready for William Tecumseh Sherman to go marching through science fiction.
Barely three stars.
Star Seeder, by T.J. Bass
Humanity’s first probe of the Andromeda galaxy held the means to plant numerous human colonies through the use of human zygotes raised by computers. This rapid expansion is opposed and blocked by aliens known as Dregs to humanity and Symbiots to themselves, but they will allow one human to be aboard. Zuliani earns the right to be that person through his victory in the Procyon Games. Humanity may have a way to get around the Dreg ban.
Art uncredited, but both illustrations in the story are clearly by Gaughan, though unsigned.
Bass is a doctor, and his sophomore effort once again puts his medical knowledge to use, though less gruesomely than his debut. He writes very well, and if he can find the time to pursue the craft, he could be someone to watch. I was particularly impressed with the misdirection of the comparison between the highly competitive humans and the somewhat collectivist Symbiots. The story makes a very different and much better point than you might be expecting.
But once again, I find myself being put off by blood sports in the far future. The first round of the Procyon Games is a round-robin of all-out unarmed fights in which anything is allowed, including potentially lethal blows. The Competitors are able to heal themselves somewhat between bouts, but it’s about as effective as a boxer’s trainer using styptic pencil on a cut that will need stitches after a fight.
An expedition under religious authority is seeking proof of the 20,000 year-old legend of lost Earth. On a planet bombed back into primitive savagery 1,500 years ago, they find the locals worshiping what seems to be a long dead robot. Primitive doesn’t mean stupid, and appearances can be deceiving.
The scene from the cover again. Art uncredited, but could be Gaughan.
Here’s another hoary old theme from the pulp days, but it feels fairly modern (though not at all New Wave). I’m reasonably sure that St. John is a pseudonym for Lester del Rey; at least, a story that originally ran under that by-line appeared in a collection of del Rey stories a year or so ago. When he puts his mind to it, del Rey can write some very good stories. This is certainly in the upper half.
A high three stars.
The Story of Our Earth: 1. How Long Is the Past?, by Willy Ley
Willy Ley comes over from Galaxy to begin the promised series on the history of the planet. Here he discusses estimates of the age of the Earth, from the calculations of Rabbi Hillel and Bishop Ussher to to the most recent scientific proposals. Along the way, he also talks about how and when the various geologic ages were proposed. The difference between a work he has taken the time to polish thoroughly and something knocked out for his monthly column is clear.
Alas, Willy Ley died suddenly at the end of June, just as this issue was going to press. I suspect the delay in publication is the result of the editors dithering over what to do with the incomplete series. They’ve decided to run those installments which were already delivered.
Four stars.
Reading Room, by Lester del Rey
Normally, I wouldn’t cover a book review column, but this is a new feature for IF. When this was announced in the last issue, I wondered if we really needed another venue for reviews. What del Rey gives us is closer to critical analysis than reviews. More so even than the most incisive commentary from Judith Merrill. What this most reminded me of is the reviews Damon Knight used to do fifteen or twenty years and mined for his In Search of Wonder. If the column maintains this level of quality, it’s worth the loss of a story or two.
The mobile town cum artists’ colony of New Woodstock is on its way to South America. Shortly after crossing into Mexico, town sheriff Bat Hardin ran into a conspiracy of locals unhappy with the influx of gringos. As this installment begins, Bat has warned the town of the threat, but they vote to continue. At first the threat seems empty, but after Bat lets his guard down, the town is lured into a trap.
The wagon train rolls into an ambush. Art by Gaughan
I enjoyed the first half of this story, but this half doesn’t live up to the promise. It’s fine, and the battle scene is good; there’s just not enough here to justify the length. The whole thing could have been told in two-thirds of the wordage or less. This is average Reynolds. There’s a hint we’ll see more of Bat in the future, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. This one just ran out steam along the way.
Three stars for this installment and the novel as a whole.
The Cosmic Philosophy of K.E. Tsiolkovsky, by Alexis N. Tsevetikov
Tsiolkovsky is the father of Russian rocketry and is usually mentioned alongside Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth. He also dabbled in philosophy, developing ideas that had as much to do with mysticism as rationality. Those ideas have been suppressed by the Soviet state as anti-materialist. This precis of his thought makes him sound like your everyday saucer nut.
Two stars.
Summing up
We’ve all been wondering what the changes in ownership and editor at IF and Galaxy will mean for the magazines. While some of Fred Pohl’s fingerprints are on this issue, we may be getting a clearer picture. Ejler Jakobsson’s first editorial for the magazine tells us that “IF is the magazine of infinite Alternatives.” I guess that means the science will be a little less “hard” than in Galaxy, but that’s all right. The letter col is given over to a letter by Anne McCaffrey in her role as SFWA Secretary asking a number of pertinent questions, all of which Jakobsson answers.
Reading the tea leaves from this issue, there’s a lot of non-fiction in a magazine that used to be exclusively fiction. I’ve had my say about the new book column. If the rest of Will Ley’s (sadly incomplete) series is as good as the first part, I’m all for it. But we could have done without the article on Tsiolkovsky’s nonsense.
On the art front, the illustrations are of the usual quality, but only the cover is credited. Most or all of the pieces are by Jack Gaughan, who is now on the masthead as Associate Art Director. I hope that doesn’t mean he’ll be the exclusive interior artist. I like his work, but I also like some variety. Either way, credit your artists!
A final hopeful note: In a conversation in the Journey offices, my colleague Kris rated Super Science Stories as the best magazine of the early 50s. Jakobsson was the editor for that incarnation of the magazine. Fingers crossed he can replicate that feat for the early 70s.
Every one of these authors is a coin flip when it comes to quality.
Aside from the stray short story I have to admit I had not read any of John Jakes’s novels, of which there have been many as of late—so many, in fact, that we folks at the Journey have not been able to cover every new Jakes book. Just this year alone we’ve gotten three or four Jakes novels, with at least one more already in the can as I’m writing this. So consider this a bit of “catching up,” for the both of us. Jakes started a new science-fantasy series a couple years ago with When the Star Kings Die, and this year he has put out not one, but two more entries in this series. For the sake of not overwhelming the reader, though, let’s just keep it to the first two entries… for now.
Humanity has spread across the stars in what is called II Galaxy, with a planet-spanning league of aristocrats called the 'Lords of the Exchange' (the titular star kings) keeping things in check. The star kings are supposed to live for centuries, being near-immortal, but something has been leading these long-lived aristocrats to early deaths. Maxmillion Dragonard (a name I certainly did not pull out of a hat) is a Regulator, one of the enforcers for the star kings, who starts out imprisoned for a bout of intensely violent behavior but is soon freed on the condition that he investigates why the star kings are dying young. He soon travels to the planet Pentagon, a backwater home to little in the way of technology or civilization, but which seems to house the answer to the mystery; and there he gets involved with a group of rebels who go by the 'Heart Flag'. Dragonard’s sense of loyalty gets split between his allegiance to the star kings, personified by a mischievous spy named Kristin, whom Dragonard quickly falls in love with, and the leaders of the Heart Flag group, Jeremy and his sister Bel.
If you read certain passages out of context you might think you’re reading an adventure fantasy yarn in the Robert E. Howard mode, which Jakes is no stranger to, but overall this is much more evocative of Leigh Brackett’s planetary adventures—low on scientific plausibility but high on swashbuckling action. We have swords and daggers, but also blasters and “electroguns,” not to mention spaceships. Another thing carried over from both Howard and Brackett is this heightened sense of sexuality—or to put it less charitably, the fact that there are only two female characters of note in this novel, and both of them want to jump Dragonard’s bones. Jakes also can’t help himself when it comes to focusing on the women’s breasts, especially Kristin’s. In fairness, Dragonard is a man who has just been broken out of prison, and ultimately this is not a very serious novel. When the Star Kings Die was published in 1967, although the Journey didn’t cover it then; but if not for the publication date you might think it was printed in 1947, possibly as a “complete” novel in the likes of Startling Stories and other bygone pulps. It seems deliberately retrograde, but it’s unobtrusive so far as that goes.
This is a short novel, such that I’m actually surprised Ace didn’t bundle it with another short novel or novella. Even so, with just 160 pages Jakes is able to give us a future world, somewhat believable power dynamics among the parties, a few good villains, and a climactic battle that manages to take up a good chunk of the text. Kristin, despite being Dragonard’s main love interest, is absent for much of the novel, but to compensate his growing admiration for Jeremy and budding affection for Bel are given ample room to develop. The trio’s tenuous but promising relationship at the end of the novel is undermined, however, by the fact that when we did get a follow-up to When the Star Kings Die it was not a sequel, but instead a distant prequel.
This novel does a few things well, but not exceptionally well; and, let’s face it, we’ve been here before. It’s fine, but nothing special.
Jakes’s ode to the sword-and-spaceship adventures of yore continues with The Planet Wizard, published just this year, although given that it’s about the same length as When the Star Kings Die I’m still a bit surprised it was not released as one half of an Ace Double. The Planet Wizard has a more focused narrative, and more than its predecessor it heavily uses the fantasy elements of the pulp material it’s clearly taking cues from; but even so it feels less like a full novel (certainly now that we have behemoths like Dune and Stand on Zanzibar in the field) and more like a somewhat constipated novella. I very much enjoy novellas myself, but not so much when they look bloated and could use a laxative.
Say goodbye to all the characters from that first novel, since here we’re jumping back over a thousand years in time; conversely all the characters featured in The Planet Wizard will have been long and safely dead by the time we get to When the Star Kings Die. Some cataclysmic event has pushed civilization across planets almost back to medieval times, with the planet Pastora having only a semblance of civilized humanity, with its sister planet Lightmark faring even worse. Superstition has taken over the minds of the masses. Swords and daggers have replaced firearms. Instead of spaceships we have “skysleds.” Magus Blackclaw (another name I did not just pull out of a hat) is a middle-aged “wizard” who lives with his beautiful daughter Maya. The problem is that Magus isn’t really a wizard, for magic doesn’t really exist in this world. Whilst on the run the two cross paths with a tenacious swordsman named Robin Dragonard, who as you may guess is an ancestor of the Maxmillion Dragonard of the first novel. Magus gets captured and put on trial, as a fraud; but the High Governors, the pseudo-Christian religious leaders of Pastora, have a proposition for Magus: go to Lightmark and rediscover the fallen commercial house of Easkod, and maybe these charges will be dropped.
Not only does Magus have to deal with the “Brothers” of Easkod, a league of mutated and vicious humans who watch over Easkod City, but the job to exorcize Easkod of its “demons” quickly turns into a race. Philosopher Arko Lantzman wants his hands on Easkod as an alleged treasury of technology that got lost after the cataclysm, while William Catto, a descendant of one of Easkod’s higher-ups (so he claims), wishes to return the house to its former glory. Given that this is a prequel to When the Star Kings Die, and thus knowing the basic history of the star kings themselves, you can guess the broad trajectory of The Planet Wizard. Given also that Robin (who sadly lacks the charisma of his descendant) will contribute to a bloodline that persists over a thousand years later, it’s safe to guess as to his fate. What keeps the tension alive is that unlike some prequels, wherein we already know the fates of the cast (a kind of dramatic irony granted to the reader), we’re unsure if Magus and Maya will come out of this ordeal unscathed. While Robin is a flatter character than Maxmillion, Magus is a rather fun protagonist, being a middle-aged confidence man who nonetheless does care deeply for his daughter, and goes above and beyond to rescue her when she inevitably gets kidnapped.
In a sense The Planet Wizard complements its predecessor, and I’m not sure if Jakes intended one to be the other’s both opposite and equal. Not better, nor worse, but at least different enough to not feel like a repeat. I do recommend both—if you can find copies below the retail price.
Three stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Initial Response
Two rip-roaring novels of space adventure fell into my hands recently, both by authors who use two initials instead of first and middle names. (Yes, I notice trivia like that.) Let's take a look.
Prolific British writer Edwin Charles Tubb (E. C. to you!) has been reviewed several times by Galactic Journeyers, including your not-so-humble servant. He usually earns three stars, once in a while a bit more. Will his latest novel earn him another C or C+ on his report card?
Wordiest cover I've ever seen. Pardon the lousy image.
I must have held the cameras at a bad angle.
A project to launch the first starship is under way, funded by the American government. What the boys and girls in Washington D. C. don't realize is that the folks behind the project believe that humanity is doomed to be wiped out by radioactivity. (There are hints that there have been a few limited nuclear wars, as well as a lot of atomic tests.) They plan to escape and find a world to colonize.
Meanwhile, a would-be dictator and his followers plan to stop the starship, by force if necessary. Don't worry about this subplot, because the vessel manages to leave Earth very early in the book, not without a lot of bloodshed.
(This brings up an odd thing about the book. The protagonists are just about as bloodthirsty as the antagonists. They're ready to destroy an entire community in order to launch the starship. Besides that, a lot of the folks aboard were literally kidnapped, forced to be colonists against their will.)
Pretty soon the escapees find a livable planet, which they name (with heavy irony) Eden. In addition to huge, deadly animals, the place has something in the atmosphere that ensures that any woman giving birth and her child will die.
The book has still barely started. A lot more goes on. There's an attempt at mutiny. There's the mysterious disappearance of the first probe to land on the planet, and its equally mysterious reappearance.
The author throws a lot at the reader, often at random. Some subplots don't lead anywhere. For example, we've got an attempt to activate the brain of a dead scientist in order to extract his knowledge. This is just dropped, and doesn't change anything. The whole thing reads as if it were written as quickly as possible, with a completely improvised plot.
American writer C. C. MacApp also has a fast hand at the typewriter, often showing up in If. He's been reviewed a lot here, generally getting three stars. Sometimes less, sometimes more. (Sounds a lot like Tubb, doesn't he?) Will his latest novel be below average, above average, or just plain average?
Cover art by John Berkey.
Wait a minute! I hear you cry. I thought we were talking about MacApp, not this Capps person!
Yep. C. C. MacApp is actually Carroll Mather Capps in real life. If you'll open the book, you'll see it's been copyrighted in the name of C. C. MacApp. Don't ask me why his real name is on the cover.
Anyway, our hero is an Earthman who caught an alien disease somewhere in space. Before killing him, it's going to make him blind. The good news is that some friendly, semi-humanoid aliens are willing to take him to a place where he can be cured, if he undertakes a mission for them. (The aliens recently arrived in the solar system and have the knowledge of faster-than-light travel, but haven't let humans in on the secret.)
His mission is to track down a renegade alien who kidnapped an alien scientist and stole a powerful piece of ancient technology from a species of extraterrestrials who vanished long ago. In order to do this, the aliens take him to a planet without a sun (hence the title) which is able to support life due to its internal heat.
His contact is a multi-tentacled space pirate with two snake-like heads. This roguish character takes him to a hospital, where a spider-like surgeon operates on his eyes.
Wouldn't you know it? There's a catch. The pirate blackmailed the surgeon into doing something to our hero's eyes so that he needs routine treatment with a certain chemical in order to keep his vision. As a side effect, the operation gave him the ability to see clearly in almost total darkness, even able to perceive radiation. This makes him a very useful tool of the pirate on this planet without natural illumination except starlight.
The guy goes along with the pirate, while also spying on him. Meanwhile, the local inhabitants of the planet spy on both him and the pirate. (There's a lot of spying in this book.) The renegade alien and the kidnapped victim show up, as well as other aliens intent on conquest.
I've only given you a synopsis of maybe half the novel. There are plenty of complications in store. The hero winds up on yet another planet, and finds out about the ancient vanished aliens.
The main difference between Tubb's book and this one is that McApp's is much more tightly plotted. There aren't any pointless subplots. As a bonus, the octopus-like pirate is an enjoyable character, usually several steps ahead of the hero. Not the most profound story ever told, but competent entertainment.
The Palace of Eternity is the first of Bob Shaw’s works that I’ve read. Shaw is a man of many talents, having worn a myriad of hats from taxi-driver to structural engineer and aircraft designer. He has added writing fiction to his repertoire with works such as The Two Timers, Night Walk, and his breakout short story, "Light of Other Days."
The Palace of Eternity is set in a distant and turbulent future where humanity has discovered FTL space travel, taken to the stars, and struggles to weather the onslaught of violent attacks from an alien species known as the Pythsyccans.
The protagonist, Mack Tavernor, is a battle-hardened former soldier who had been orphaned when the Pythsyccans devastated his childhood home. Naturally, Tavernor doesn’t view the Pythsyccans in a positive light but he also seems disillusioned enough with humanity to keep his own kind at arm’s length.
The Pythsyccans attack Mnemosyne, an idyllic, almost utopian world dubbed a haven for writers, artists, and other creators of varied talents. Tavernor, naturally, takes up arms against the invading enemy and dies in battle. This is where the story takes an interesting turn.
After shucking this mortal coil, Tavernor encounters the egons, a non-corporeal race of cosmic beings whose very existence is threatened by the proliferation of humanity’s FTL-ramjet technology, the Butterfly Ships. Tavernor, the newest egon, gets another lease on life, inhabiting the body of a newborn human child named Hal. The goal of his mission, to somehow interfere in the war between the humans and Pythsyccans in order to save the endangered egons.
The Palace of Eternity is a fantastic and eloquently written and fast-paced story that fires on all pistons where the things about science fiction that excite me are concerned. And yet…somehow, though, this book failed to move me. For all its eloquence and imaginativeness, I found myself unable to feel strongly about the characters and events of this story. It failed to fill me with a sense of wonder, even amidst the wondrous imagery. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on why.
It wasn’t just that much of the story felt glossed over—and probably should have been explored in greater detail. My main source of dissatisfaction was with the story’s main character’s development.
Mack Tavernor is admirable. He's truly a man's man in all the ways a man ought to be a man. Yet, I could not bring myself to either like or dislike him. At no point did I become emotionally invested in the things that happened to and around him. In short, as a protagonist, Mack falls flat. Lacking the kind of depth and complexity that makes fictional characters feel real in my mind, he is like soda pop that has lost its fizz.
Had Mr. Shaw given The Palace of Eternity the extent of thought and care it deserved, the book could have turned out to be a true phenomenon. It is, indeed, still an excellent and worthy read. Even so, I feel it's almost a tragic waste of the author's very clear intellect and truly wondrous imagination.
This is my first encounter with the fiction of the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. A prominent astronomer with a long tenure at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, Hoyle is perhaps best known for a slew of rather controversial opinions. For instance, Dr. Hoyle has rejected the idea of the Big Bang, and for many years has promoted the idea that life on Earth began in the stars.
Yes, he is an eccentric, but Dr. Hoyle is quite a genius, really; a thoroughly unique figure and someone I would really enjoy meeting.
Dr. Hoyle is also a prominent science fiction writer. In collaboration with his son Geoffrey, he recently authored Rockets in Ursa Major, a thoroughly entertaining, if too brief, science fiction yarn reminiscent of the sort of thing which John W. Campbell might have published. If your kind of space fiction involves brilliant and fearless scientists battling bueaucracy and evil aliens, Rockets in Ursa Major is your kind of book.
I kind of giggled a bit when I realized the main characterof Ursa Major is a deeply accomplished and slightly eccentric scientist and that the book is told in first person – do you look in the mirror a bit too much, Dr. Hoyle? As the story begins, the genius Dr. Richard Warboys is at a very boring professional conference when surprising news pops up on the telly: a spaceship which has been lost for thirty years has suddenly reappeared, streaming towards Earth’s atmosphere.
Only a brilliant scientist can help the ship land! And only a brilliant scientist can help discover the ship's great secret of invading alien species! And only a brilliant scientist can fly a seeming suicide mission to battle those invaders! And only a brilliant scientist can figure out a complicated way to use solar flares to defeat those invaders! And, you guessed it, only a brilliant scientist can then fly towards the sun, release those solar flares and save our planet.
Are you shocked if I tell you that scientist's name is Dr. Dick Warboys?
So, yes, the plot of Rockets in Ursa Major is pure wish fulfillment: the 54-year-old Dr. Hoyle cast a genius scientist aged in his mid-30s as the man who basically singlehandedly saves Earth. And it’s all rather silly.
Dr. Hoyle
But Rockets is all tremendously fun, too, in that marvelously light-hearted way one might imagine Campbell publishing next to a Heinlein juvie or van Vogt brain-twister. I’m not sure if it’s the influence of the younger Mr. Hoyle the author, but this book moves at a kinetic speed, with almost too many twists and turns in its breathless style (I’m not sure why we needed a sequence in which Dr. Warboys breaks into the research college by stealing a boat and running through tunnels, for instance).
At the end of this book, the Hoyles hint at the possibility of a sequel. I would enjoy another thoroughly light-hearted and thoroughly indulgent visit with Dr. Warboys.
John Brunner is one of the most prolific science fiction authors of the latter half of this decade, to the extent that it sometimes feels hard to keep up with his work. I’ve always enjoyed Brunner’s work, which often manages to tread a fine line between smart concepts and exciting action. And I was a huge fan of his grand step into literary science fiction, the remarkable Stand on Zanzibar.
This month sees the release of a new Brunner, called Timescoop, but the zines are already reporting the autumn '69 release of another Brunner novel, called The Jagged Orbit [Actually, it's already been released—the Autumn release is a re-release (ed.)]. Based on the blurbs, Orbit sounds like another book of strong literary ambitions.
Timescoop, however, is not a novel of strong literary ambitions. It’s a goof, a novel in which Brunner played with some clever ideas and delivered a quick little satirical piece. Timescoop clears the palette between works of deep seriousness.
Our protagonist here is one Harold Freitas III, a self-obsessed inheritor of his family’s fortunes who is looking to live up to the legacy his father, recently deceased, has left to him.
Fortunately for Freitas, an amazing invention called the Timescoop has been invented, and he has control of it. The Timescoop can bring anything forward in time and allow it to live in the book’s present. Thus the Venus de Milo and Hermes of Praxiteles can exist – with their original arms – and so can people.
Imagine the Hermes – with arms – in a private house near you!
Looking to make a mark with publicity, Freitas brings forward nine of his ancestors in time and brings them to a family reunion broadcast throughout the galaxy. After all, men of the past were men of great virtue and character and the future world can learn from their insights. But… as one character states prophetically… “How much do we really know about these people? One always looks at the past through rose-colored –"
So Freitas brings forward nine of his ancestors – a steadfast medieval king and a medieval Crusader and a 17th century British merchant and a fire-and-brimstone preacher and a female cowboy, among others – and readies them to face the world and make Freitas famous.
But be careful what you wish for, and especially be careful what you create. Because these ancestors are not the good people Freitas wishes they could be. They are pederasts and nymphomaniacs, gluttons who are covered with filth and who have ancient racist attitudes. One even indulged in the slave trade.
Mr Brunner
Most of this is played for laughs, and it’s easy to imagine someone like Peter Sellers or Alec Guiness playing all the roles in a film adaptation, taking on silly voices while someone like Peter Cook keeps rolling his eyes at the chaos.
But there is also a small element of satire, a small joy at bringing down the rich and pompous and allowing their obsessions to blow up in their faces.
Timescoop is another quick little novel, and at a mere 156 pages it doesn’t wear out its welcome. But this is clearly Brunner relaxing and doing a small warmup for his next literary work.
In my first conversations with the Traveller, I was warned that some of the works I would cover here would be unpleasant. This is my first, and it does not even have the decency to be memorably terrible (Ole Doc Methuselah by L. Ron Hubbard), or bland yet competent (One Against Herculeum by Jerry Sohl). Light A Last Candle is knockoff Heinlein, wrapped in knockoff Doc Smith and shot through with attempts at imitating Bester.
Our main character is one of the few remaining humans on a planet. There’s “Mods” — modified humans — which our main character doesn’t like. Like a low-energy Gully Foyle, he doesn’t like anyone or anything very much. He doesn’t have a name, our main character, nor does “the girl”. She’s lucky, as all other female figures are called Breeders. The character our main character can stand the most is an old, fatherly figure simply referred to as Rutherford. They are the only two original humans, Free Men, left on the planet, which is mostly under the mind control of the Aliens, and their Mod slaves…or are they?
Social commentary is attempted, as are twists, and like in The Devil’s Own by Nora Lofts, the revelations provided to the reader are ultimately shallow. The more they appear, the more insignificant they are revealed to be. The Devil’s Own is in fact a rather poor comparison; since that is a fine book. In truth, the story Light A Last Candle most reminds me of is Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), with its clunky twists, bland characterization, pervasive male chauvinism, and failing to convey travel in a story that is ostensibly all about traveling. Distance is compressed like an accordion, details are skipped over, days pass offhandedly when we could be learning more about anything we are reading. This ultimately becomes a paucity of both showing and telling, which certainly is new to me. Like Star Man’s Son by Andre Norton, the book centers around bringing the reader to encounter different cultures in this alien future. Like The Weirdstone of Brisigamen by Alan Garner, that travel also takes place in tight, dangerous caves. In both of those books, however, distance and time were characters in themselves. You felt the pressure of travel, the hard work the characters put in, their sense of purpose.
The only talent that really appears throughout the work is a pervasive sense of disgust, of fleshy horror that I know William Hope Hodgeson in The Derelict and Arthur Machen in The Three Imposters did better sixty years ago. I think it's this author's first book, but his grouchiness is beyond his years.
I am writing this review as quickly as possible, because after finishing this book less than a half an hour ago, it is rapidly leaving my mind. I have filled this page with references to other works, so that the reader may enjoy books much better than this one.
We are broadcasting LIVE coverage of the Apollo 11 mission (with a 55 year time slip), so mark your calendars. From now until the 24th, it's (nearly) daily coverage, with big swathes of coverage for launch, landing, moonwalk, and splashdown.
If you, like me, are a regular watcher of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, you might be excused for having a rather simple view of the current situation in the Middle East. According to that humorous variety show, Israel devastated the armies of its Arab neighbors in June 1967, and (to quote another comedian, Tom Lehrer), "They've hardly bothered us since then."
It's true that the forces of the diminutive Jewish state took on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, like David against Goliath, smiting armies and air forces in just six days, ultimately ending up in occupation of lands that comprise more area than Israel itself.
But all has not been quiet…on any front. Hardly had the war ended that both Israelis and Arabs began trading significant shots. A commando raid here, a bombing mission there, a naval clash yonder—none of it rising to the level of a mass incursion, but nevertheless, a constant hail of explosives. Last summer, Egyptian President Nasser, eager to recover prestige he lost in the '67 debacle, declared a "War of Attrition". The fighting has escalated ever since.
Just the other day, the Egyptians and Israelis exchanged artillery fire across the Suez Canal—the current de facto border between the nations—for twelve hours. Two Israelis were wounded; the Egyptians are keeping mum about any of their losses. Last month, Israeli jets buzzed Nasser's house in Cairo, which Jerusalem claims is the reason for the recent sacking of the Egyptian air force chief and also Egypt's air defense commander.
Israeli mobile artillery shells Egyptian positions
The United Nations views this conflict with increasing concern, worried that it might expand, go hot, and possibly involve bigger powers. The Security Council this week is working on a resolution calling for an arms embargo against Israeli unless the state abandon its plans to formally annex East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan two years ago.
It seems unlikely that the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) or Prime Minister Golda Meir will buckle to foreign pressure, however. Nor can we expect that President Nasser, Jordan's King Hussein, or the coup-rattled government of Syria to be particularly tractable either. The beat goes on.
Same ol'
One generally looks to science fiction for a refreshing departure from the real world, but as the latest issue of Galaxy shows, sometimes you're better off just reading the funnies.
A while back, John Boston noted that Dominic Flandry, an Imperial Officer serving during the twilight of the intragalactic Polesotechnic League, has become a James Bond type, or maybe a Horatio Hornblower. Basically, he's Anderson's stock character when he wants some kind of adventure story set against the impending Dark Ages of his interstellar setting. The results are a mixed bag since the tales are less about Flandry and more about whatever nifty astronomical phenomenon Anderson wants to showcase this month.
This time, Flandry, who has just been promoted Lieutenant j.g. On the backwater planet of Irumclaw, a two-bit crime boss named Leon Ammon offers him a million if he'll go out of his way to survey a planet reputedly rich in heavy metals. Flandry takes the gig, and since Ammon insists on having one of his mooks accompany him, Flandry opts to have his chaperone be female. The trip is more fun that way, you see.
The journey takes us to the hostile world of Wayland, a tidally locked moon of a big gas giant. Airless, except for when the sun sublimes the methane and carbon dioxide ice that comprises Wayland's surface, it nevertheless (and surprisingly) teems with life. Flandry's scout, Jake, is waylaid by birds and forced to land. Now, Flandry and his companion, Djana, must trek across the frozen wastes of Wayland to reach an abandoned, sentient mining computer, which just might have the facilities needed to repair Flandry's vessel.
Along the way, we learn that the hostile "life forms" are really robots, and that the old computer just might be responsible for Wayland's unique "ecosystem"…
Unlike a lot of Anderson's work (and certainly the last Flandry story), this piece was pretty interesting. Sure, the characters are paper thin, but again, this story isn't meant to showcase character. If you want that kind of story in the same setting, try "A Tragedy of Errors" from last year.
Three stars.
Starhunger, by Jack Wodhams
by uncredited
Starships have been plying the local constellations for decades, but despite the investigation of 31 systems, nothing even vaguely Earthlike has been found. One last expedition goes out with nought but a forlorn hope. Even with three systems on the schedule, it is doubtful that the unlucky streak will end—especially since the scientists on board, who want to meticulously evaluate every inhospitable rock, are at odds with the star hungry Captain, who wants to find the next Earth.
This is not a great story, consisting mostly of repetition ad nauseum of the scientist/captain struggle. However, I did like a couple of things:
1) The notion that terrestrial planets are actually rare. That's not a common theme in science fiction, and I feel it more likely than the converse.
2) The conflict between a simple, focused mission and a balanced, scientific endeavor is something the Ranger Moon program suffered from, with Rangers 3-5 failing largely because they tried to do too much. Once NASA focused on just hitting the Moon with a camera, they had three out of four successes.
Speaking of ongoing characters, John Grimes, the spacefaring alter-ego of author (Australian Merchant Marine Captain) A. Bertram Chandler, gets another chapter of his life fleshed out in this tale. Well, sort of.
Lieutenant Grimes has gotten his first command: a Serpent class courier boat with a crew of six. On this particular mission, he has been tasked with transporting a VIP. Mr. Alberto is a strange person, an extremely talented chef, but also something of a cipher and very physically fit. After Alberto is delivered to the planet of Doncaster, his unusual nature is revealed.
There's not much to this story, and there's no SFnal content at all—at least none that isn't discardable. It could have taken place in the '60s as easily as the 3060's.
A high two stars.
When They Openly Walk, by Fritz Leiber
by Jack Gaughan
Ages ago, Fritz wrote a cat's-eye view story of Gummitch the suburban feline artist called Kreativity for Kats. In this long-awaited sequel, we follow Gummitch and his adopted little sibling, Psycho the kitten, as they interact with their family and a bonafide UFO.
It's an adorable piece, spotlighting the inner life of housecats (and demonstrating what I've known my whole life: that cats are clearly Earth's other sentient race). It reminds me a bit of an episode of Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro I caught in Japan last year, in which cats take over a village and are (properly) revered.
Four stars.
Life Matter, by Bruce McAllister
by Jack Gaughan
In the far future, mankind, mutated by hard radiation, has developed a sentient heart. Normally, there is an Operation for humans who reach the 21st year of life, the year that the heart begins communicating with the mind in earnest. The biological heart is replaced with a silent, artificial pump.
Some refuse to lose their heart, pursuing a life of coronary freedom. But is it really the romantic prospect literature would have us believe?
Like most of Bruce's work, it's a lyrical, metaphorical piece, but not quite as moving as he'd like it to be. Fans of Bradbury may be more impressed than I was.
This is a kind of mood piece reminiscent of James Blish's "Okie" stories. In a flurry of starflight, the cream and even the bulk of humanity has left its homeworld, leaving behind a wretched refuse of humans and robots. The folk left are essentially poor Appalachians. The people, as the robots call themselves, are the antiquated and damaged specimens. Crying is told from the point of view of one of the robots, a farmer, who is at once the lowest of the low, and also the highest.
Fine but incomplete. Three stars.
For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, August 1969), by Willy Ley
Our German expat educator explains how ELDO (the European Space Agency) is planning a Jupiter mission. There are special considerations like how to power the probe so far from the Sun, and how massive the craft can be depending on the rocket.
Last time began the continuation of the story of Paul Atreides, now Paul Muad'dib, Mahdi of a galaxy-wide crusade against the old Imperial order. Paul, now thirty, sits unsteadily on the Arrakeen throne—endless factions are arrayed against him, and his favored Fremen consort has borne no heir, this the deliberate result of being unwittingly sterilized by Irulan, an Imperial princess, and Paul's other consort.
Foreseeing that a child of Irulan's will spell Paul's doom, he avoids consummating their marriage. On the other hand, this makes him vulnerable to the allures of his…sister. Yes, Alia, born a saint and fully sapient from being in the womb of her mother when she overdosed on the precognition-enabling spice "melange". She's 15, fights mechanical foes in the nude, and is excessively nubile. As it turns out, an incestuous coupling is exactly what Gaius Helen Moiham, Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit (the organization that is trying to dominate the galaxy through selective breeding) wants, as it foretells ultimate genetic victory.
Meanwhile, members of the Navigation Guild, whose members use spice to navigate hyperspace, want to break the Arrakeen monopoly on the stuff, so they're trying to sequester elements of the Dune planet's biology to start up their own production.
In a final twist, the resurrected form of Duncan Idaho, one of Paul's old sword-companions, begins an affair with Alia. But this ghoule, who goes by the name Hayt, says he is to be the intrument of Paul's destruction, so maybe this isn't a great development either.
It's all so glacial and pretentious and filled with things that rub me the wrong way: aristocracy, eugenics, fantasy masking as science fiction. (And it's printed in smaller type face to make it both less readable and more dense.) I really don't like this book. Frankly, I'd give it one star, but I guess I appreciate how hard Herbert is trying.
On the other hand, John Norman tries, too, and we don't even review his books anymore.
Two stars, but I'm guessing the work as a whole is going to get one when it's all over. Bleah.
A vignette about first contact in a time when humans and robots have become one and the same species.
Kind of pointless. Two stars.
The New New Frontier
Fred Pohl was editor of Galaxy for almost a decade, taking over from H. L. Gold when he got sick and couldn't do it anymore. Now he's out, and I'm still waiting for the shoe to drop: to see how different Galaxy gets under the new regime of Ejler Jakobsson. The biggest new thing is the Dune serial, but Pohl might have bought that anyway. It's not as if Herbert has been absent from the mag. I guess we'll see where things are in a year.
All I can say is I hope things get better. As with the war in the Levant, the status quo is getting us nowhere fast…
Thanks to centuries of tradition, we tend to think of the Far East as…well…east! But for us, going to Japan means a 12-hour flight west—literally into tomorrow, as we cross the International Date Line to do it.
This week marked the beginning of our fourteenth trip to Japan. How things have changed since we first went back in 1948, when flying via Northwest Orient meant an entire day of travel with multiple stops. Travel these days is practically instantaneous by comparison.
We were even able to hop on a same-day domestic flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka, which is where I'm writing this. I've been able to develop my first roll of color film, the results of which I am happy to share:
The Alient
The latest issue of Galaxy is, like this month's IF, the first under the helm of Ejler Jakobsson, and it's also a month late. Will it be more interesting than the rather dull IF? Well, it's certainly different. After all, the lead piece is one I would have expected to appear in Analog. Why wouldn't Campbell want the sequel to the incredibly popular and presumably lucrative Dune. Dunno… but here it is:
And so we return to Arrakis, the Dune planet, the only source of the spice melange, which gives the power of prophecy, allows the navigators of the Guild to ply the hyperspace lanes, and is the only currency of note in the Empire.
Last time, Paul Atreides, son of the murdered Duke of Arrakis, had seized his destiny as the kwizatz haderach, leading his army of desert Fremen against the Padisha Emperor in a coup that placed the young general in charge of a galactic domain.
It is now twelve years later, and disparate factions are plotting to overthrow Paul, who has become a figurehead in an interstellar Jihad. The plotters include the Bene Geneserit, the sisterhood that manipulated Paul and his sister, Aria's, genetic destiny; the navigators' Guild, and Irulan, wife of Paul, and daughter of the cruel Baron Harkonnen, who wrested Arrakis from Paul's father.
We know there's a plot because it is the subject of an endless scene at the beginning of the serial installment. And because Paul then discusses the plot at length with his companins at an endless meeting of state in the latter part of the serial. The plot involves predestination, an heir for Paul (his true love, the Fremen Chani, is being kept secretly sterile by Irulan, who wants to beat the child), and the reincarnated form of Duncan Idaho, one of Paul's comrades in the last book.
There. Now you don't actually have to read this chapter, which is all for the best, as it's as deadly dull and motionless as the worst parts of Dune. At least the viewpoints don't change every five sentences.
Two stars so far.
Full Commitment, by Robert S. Martin
Senator Clint is on an investigative junket to Burma, where America is in an endless war against… the Capitalists? What happened to the Communists? And why do all the soldiers parrot the exact same line when explaining why they're there to fight?
Brainwashing, obviously…which is how Clint is ultimately disposed of.
A pointless story, poorly done. One star.
The City That Was the World, by James Blish
by Dan Adkins
James Blish tells the story of a man who makes Howard Hughes look like a piker. John Hillary Dane is a man with vision…or perhaps visions is more appropriate. First, he builds an enormous pair of telescopes four miles high in the Andes. Then he erects a mile-high skyscraper in Denver, the mile-high city. While the reason for the former is never really explained (other than the obvious reasons—the seeing is much better above the majority of the atmosphere), the purpose of the immense building is the point of the story.
I don't really want to spoil things, so I'll just say that the tale deals with time travel, Malthusian overpopulation, and the value (or lack thereof) of friendship. It's a good story, although few of the elements are really plausible.
Four stars (and the best piece in the issue).
For Your Information: Eugen Sanger and the Rocket-Propelled Airplane, by Willy Ley
Willy Ley's article is on Eugen Saenger, the Austrian cum German rocket scientists perhaps best known for his design of the America Bomber—a rocket-plane that would fly high enough to skip on the upper atmosphere until it reached New York. There's a lot of good information that probably can't easily be found elsewhere, since Ley relies on at least one personal source. That said, it's kind of a dull piece.
Three stars.
A Brief History of the Revolution, by David Lunde and James Sallis
In a piece that might well have come out in Fantasy and Science Fiction (or maybe the old Galaxy sister mag, Beyond), we have a young couple hounded by their animate furniture until they are effectively evicted. The cause of all this appears to be the wife's desire to have a child.
Last up is the latest journey of Commodore John Grimes, the famed skipper of the Galactic Rim. In a direct sequel to The Rim Gods, Grimes and his First Mate (though likely not his first mate) Sonya head back to Kinsolving’s Planet. You may recall from the last story (or the review thereof) that the team Grimes escorted tried to exploit some time-space weakness to psionically summon Jehovah. Instead, they incarnated the Olympian pantheon.
This time, their efforts throw Grimes into a fantasy land populated exclusively by fictional characters, from a certain Baker Street detective to larger-than-life but real people like Oedipus and Achilles. Things get really weird when Grimes starts to question his own reality…
I always enjoy Chandler's Rim stories, but this one is just a bit too cute. It also looks like the author is tired of the Grimes series and would love to end it…if only the money weren't good.
Three stars.
Things that came and things to come
And that's that. Quality-wise, a thoroughly unremarkable issue. Indeed, the only real bit of note is how many of the stories seem to be in the wrong magazine. I confess I am kind of looking forward to the post-Pohl era. I want to see how things change for this venerable magazine.
Of course, I also know to be careful what I wish for…
The end may be near for the nascent would-be-state of Biafra. For two years, the Nigerian breakaway has seen its land systematically (re)taken, and the eight million Biafrans, mostly Ibo people, have been crammed into ever small regions under Biafran control—just 3,000 out of an original 29,000 square miles.
Starvation rages, killing more than gunfire. Yet the Biafrans remain unbowed, converting diesel generators to run on crude petroleum, keeping churches open (at night, anyway), and getting food via threatened air strips.
But on the 22nd, the capital and last Biafran city, Umuahia, fell to Nigerian forces. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, President of Biafra, has vowed he will continue the struggle in guerrilla fashion. Only Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Zambia have recognized the secessionist state, although tacit assistance has been provided by such diverse states as France, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and Czechoslovakia.
At this point, it's hard to imagine the Biafran experiment succeeding. But surely there must be more that we can do apart from watch helplessly. I wish I knew what it was. Support the Red Cross, I suppose.
Impending mediocrity
I don't have a great segue from that bummer of a news item. All I have is the lastest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. While it's not entirely unworthy (the opening serial is pretty good), the rest offers little respite from the bleakness of the real world:
Back in the '50s, Poul had a great series that took place on a parallel Earth. Its history was not dissimilar to ours, but wizardry replaces technology in many regards. It's a bit like Garrett's Lord D'Arcy series, but a touch sillier. The stars of the series are a magical duo comprising a werewolf and a magic-using dragoon Captain. In the latest story (a decade ago!) the two had gotten married. In the latest installment, Ginny and Steve are the proud parents of a beautiful little girl.
Unfortunately, Valeria Victrix has been born into a difficult time. Adherents of St. John, whose outwardly clement brand of Christianity hides disturbing cultist elements, are waging a war against authority and the military-industrial complex—including the defense contractor that employs Steve. The Johnnites are essentially stand-ins for the current peace movements, albeit more sinister.
The conflict with the less-than-civil resisters recedes in importance, however, when on her third birthday, Valeria is abducted by no less than the demonic forces of Hell. It is now up to Steve and Ginny to rescue their little girl before she is incurably corrupted…and to determine if the Johnnites are at all responsible!
Anderson has three main modes: crunchy, compelling science fiction; crunchy, dull-as-dirt science fiction; and lightish fantasy. This short novel, despite the dark subject matter, promises to be the most fun romp since Three Hearts and Three Lions.
Four stars so far.
The Beast of Mouryessa, by William C. Abeel
A French sculptor is commissioned to create a replica of an obscene, demonic figure, unearthed recently in the Avignon region. The original stone creature has a history of causing catastrophe to those who behold it, but the lovely matron who wants the copy seems unperturbed. Of course, the sculptor has all sorts of ill feelings and second thoughts, but he does nothing about them. In the end, he is possessed by the spirit of the thing, and awful stuff ensues.
Aside from all the sex and frequent references to the statue's enormous dong, this story is pretty old hat. Lovecraft did this kind of thing better.
Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
London Melancholy, by M. John Harrison
A host of eerie mutants roam post-apocalyptic London in this absolutely impenetrable, unreadably purple piece.
One star.
For the Sake of Grace, by Suzette Haden Elgin
Thousands of years from now, Earth and its solar colonies have organized into a patriarchal, caste-based system. The Kadilh ban-Harihn has much cause for joy: four sons who have all passed the stringent test to become 4th degree members of the Poet caste. But he also has a hidden pain; his sister was one of the rare women to dare entry into the coveted ranks of the Poets. Her fate for failing was that of all women who fail—eternal solitary confinement.
'Unfair!' you cry? Well, at least it keeps women from trying such a foolhardy endeavor. Which is why it hits the Kadilh all the harder when he learns his youngest child, his only daughter, also has decided to try to be a Poet, a task of which she is most certainly incapable…
This is a scathing piece, a refreshing attack on sexism. I'd give it higher marks if it had included even one poem, given the theme, but I still quite liked it.
Four stars.
The Power of Progression, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor explains why our current rate of population growth cannot go on—even if we manage to get off planet, that just means the universe will be clogged with humanity within the millennium.
I appreciate the doomsaying sentiment, but there comes a point when exponents become specious, a masturbatory effort in mathematics.
Three stars.
Copstate, by Ron Goulart
I used to like the tales of Ben Jolson, lead agent of the shapechanging Chameleon Corps, but they've gotten pretty tired of late. This last entry is the least. Ben is tapped to infiltrate a tightly controlled security state to retrieve a revolutionary polemic.
Goulart is capable of writing funny, light, riproaring stuff, but this one is just a bust.
Two stars.
The Flower Kid Cashes In, by George Malko
Item two in the cavalcade of anti-utopian incomprehensibility. Per a conversation I recently had with David and Kris:
Me: Can anyone explain the last story in this month's F&SF to me?
David: Not really. Aging hippie survives after the Bomb falls and sort of commits suicide by staying true to his priniciples? I think it was too concerned with being literary to mean something or be about anything.
Kris: I am not even sure if it is trying to be literary so much as "with it". But either way it seems very hollow.
Your guess is as good as mine. At least it's short. Two stars.
The Body Count
Comparing the lastest F&SF to the Biafran tragedy is probably beyond the realm of good taste. I'll just note that 2.7 stars is an inauspicious sign. However, given that the first few issues of the year were significantly better, I don't think this lapse foretells a permanent downturn.
At least some things are salvageable. See you next month.
![[October 2, 1969] Darkness, Darkness (November 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/IF-1969-11-Cover-503x372.jpg)
King Idris from a couple of years ago.
Libya’s new Prime Minister, Soliman Al Maghreby.
This month’s cover depicts nothing in particular. Art by Gaughan
Deathly ill, the captain has some advice for his first officer. Art uncredited
An alien invader, or is it? Art uncredited
A San Franciscan gunner, not our protagonist. Art uncredited
Gonyl is not in good shape. Art uncredited
Judgment night. Art uncredited but clearly signed by Gaughan
Looks like another of Dickson’s military stories. Those are often quite good.
![[September 16, 1969] September 1969 Galactoscope](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690916covers-672x372.jpg)
![[September 12, 1969] Earthshaking (October 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690912galaxycover-397x372.jpg)
![[September 4, 1969] <i>Plus ça change</i> (October 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IF-1969-10-Cover-487x372.jpg)
Penelope Ashe, in part, with the cover model superimposed.
Supposedly for Seeds of Gonyl. If so, it’s from later in the novel. Art by Gaughan
Art uncredited, maybe by Gaughan
Is that Nixon? Art uncredited
Dr. Dillingham meets his patient. Art by Gaughan
Ignore the blurb. These aren’t the last people on Earth. Art by Gaughan
Erasmus Ballod is having a bad day. Art by Gaughan
Tonight, the role of Colonel Strang will be played by Ronald Reagan. Art by Gaughan
Our hero. Art by Gaughan
Tiptree is the only name that means anything to me. A bit of a coin flip as an author, but definitely improving with every story.![[August 14, 1969] Twin tragedies (September 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/690814galaxycover-417x372.jpg)
![[August 2, 1969] Specters of the past (September 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/IF-1969-09-Cover-494x372.jpg)
Salvadoran President and General Fidel Sanchez Hernandez inspecting the troops.
A robot carrying off a fainting human woman. It’s not as old-fashioned as you might think. Art by Chaffee
Our hero digs his way through a mountain. Art by Gaughan, but uncredited
Art by Gaughan, but uncredited
Art uncredited
Another uncredited piece. The style is reminiscent of Gaughan, but isn’t signed.
Art uncredited, but both illustrations in the story are clearly by Gaughan, though unsigned.
The scene from the cover again. Art uncredited, but could be Gaughan.
The wagon train rolls into an ambush. Art by Gaughan
Every one of these authors is a coin flip when it comes to quality.![[July 16, 1969] Not all Jake(s) (July 1969 Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/690716covers-672x372.jpg)
![[July 8, 1969] Nowhere fast (August 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/690708galaxycover-450x372.jpg)
![[April 26, 1969] Downbeat (May 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690424coverfsf-667x372.jpg)
