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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 8, 1969] Around the Universe (April 1969 Galaxy)

March 8, 2024 Gideon Marcus 1 Comment

by Gideon Marcus

Around the World

Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, is back from a tour of Europe. All of his visits made headlines, particularly when he went to the Vatican and a couple hundred students held signs that said, "Nixon go home!"

Hey now—we don't want him either!

The Dick met with the "Jesus of the Franks", General DeGaulle, for a high profile religious summit. Our President failed to return with the next Ten Commandments nor a commitment to allow Britain into the European Community (much less France's return to NATO).

Nixon is now back in the States. Apparently, Jack Benny managed to buy more than a gallon of gas at Texaco since he made it all the way to Andrews Air Force Base to amuse the President upon his return. Well, maybe the air fare was on the country's dime.

One of the places Nixon did not stop, but sent a staffer in his stead, was the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The Jewish leader's death was rather a surprise, and his interim replacement is something of a dark horse: 70 year old foreign minister Golda Meir. She is the first woman leader of the Jewish state, and one of the few female national leaders this century. It is possible she will step down in favor of her party confederate Yigal Allon when he stands for the next regular election against conservative rival General Moshe Dayan.

Into the wild Blue/Black yonder

As I type this, Apollo 9 is currently in orbit, its crew practicing a series of maneuvers that will be duplicated on this summer's trip to the Moon. It's sort of like a Gemini training mission (two of the astronauts, Scott and McDivitt, are Gemini veterans) but with Apollo hardware. It is fitting, therefore, that the latest issue of Galaxy deals with space in almost all of its stories:

by Reese

Witch Hunt, James E. Gunn

by Adkins

Centuries after a nuclear apocalypse, the Earth's four billions reduced to just one hundred million, humanity lives in a patchwork of low-technology communities. There are the farmers, who make up the vast majority; the villagers who comprise a rude middle class; the Luddites, barbarians who plunder, mostly for fun; the arrogant Neo-Scientists, who enslave many so that a few may reconstruct the wisdom of the past; and the Empires—petty states whose influence extends no further than their capital regions.

And there are the witch-doctors, who use "magic" to heal and educate, and the pilgrims, who seek the truth. "Witch Hunt" is the tale of two such pilgrims, their tour of America's degraded communities, and a survey of their relative merits and lacks. Of course, the story reveals the truth they have been searching for.

There is more than a whiff of Silverberg's Nightwings serial here, and while the prose is not quite so beautiful, it is serviceable.

Four stars.

Beam Us Home, James Tiptree, Jr.

Hobie was a precocious child whose life was irrevocably influenced by Star Trek, though the TV show is never mentioned by name.

A successful teen and, later, frustrated serviceman, he can't shake the feeling that he is somehow separate from the human race. The story's conclusion bears much in common with that of "Witch Hunt". I wonder if putting thematically-similar stories together was deliberate or coincidental?

Something about this story reminds me a bit of the works in our Rediscovery anthologies, or perhaps a bit of the works in the fanzines. In particular, the focus on Trek and also the fact that the protagonist is a minor for much of the piece set it apart from many of the stories we encounter regularly. I had to check the byline to make sure it wasn't by Evelyn E. Smith, or Rosel George Brown, or Zenna Henderson, for example.

As a whole the story isn't bad, but unfortunately, Tiptree botches the end. Three stars.

How Like a God, Robert Bloch

by Reese

Pride goeth before a fall: Mok is an incorporeal being who refused to surrender his personality to the group; as a consequence, the divine Ser confines him to an alien, physical body and banishes him to a planet of primitives. There, Mok becomes a kind of Prometheus, elevating the aborigines' culture and technology. But is Mok a God…or a serpent in the garden?

Kind of a neat piece. I think it falls on the lower side of the three/four star divide.

Buckets of Diamonds, Clifford D. Simak

by Reese

Simak loves to write "pastoral science fiction" set in his stomping grounds of Minnesota, and so, "Buckets of Diamonds" reads a bit like The Andy Griffith Show meets The Twilight Zone. Drunk Uncle Charlie gets locked up in the pokey one day when he is found staggering down the street, an Old Master's canvas under one arm, and carrying a bucket of diamonds. Later, he disappears from jail and turns up driving a hovercar alongside a sour-faced alien…who presently encourages all of the citizenry to dispose of their technological gadgets!

All of this is much to the chagrin of Charlie's nephew-in-law, a local attorney who must sort the mess out.

Not much to this tale, which ultimately doesn't go anywhere, or when. Three stars.

Slave to Man, Sylvia Jacobs

Tony is an editor for one of those schlock-houses that produces "the sexies" (prurient pulps). One day, he notices he's getting a lot of torn off covers from returns that say "Help! Help! I am being held in bondage! I am only 15 years old!"

Who he finds when he seeks the poor soul out, and how said soul revolutionizes the sexies industry is both amusing and, perhaps, prescient.

Four stars.

And Now They Wake (Part 2 of 3), Keith Laumer

by Jack Gaughan

The saga continues of two immortal aliens destined for a final confrontation somewhere in 21st Century America. Last time, we learned that Gralgrathor had self-exiled from his stellar Federation to go native amongst medieval Vikings. His confederate, Lokrien, murdered 'Thor's wife and child to incentivize his return to galactic civilization.

In this installment, Lokrien, now fully healed from vicious scars he carried for decades, is looking for 'Thor, who now goes by the name of Grayle. Grayle, as you recall from last time, escaped from the Caine Island maximum security prison, where he had been languishing for over a century. Both immortals have assistants: Lokrien's is a mercenary cabbie who is efficient with his fists; Grayle has picked up a lovely woman named Anne who insists on helping him despite not knowing the whole story.

Meanwhile, an enormous whirlpool is growing in the middle Atlantic, generating hurricane force winds across the hemisphere. It seems to be powered by the newly online broadcast power plant on the Eastern seaboard. Attempts to shut down the plant are all thwarted by some unknown force. You can bet that the aliens are somehow involved, however…

Still interesting stuff. Four stars.

For Your Information: The Drowned Civilization, Willy Ley

This month's article is a potpourri dedicated to three questions: 1) how easy would it be for a planet to capture a new moon, 2) how would the Earth's land contours change should the ice caps melt, and 3) what kind of creature is the biblical zaphan?

Three stars.

There and back again

Well, that was rather fun! Nothing spectacular, but all in all, a rapid, enjoyable read. Galaxy remains my favorite of the monthlies, and I can't wait to see how the Laumer turns out. I am also happy to see that we're getting at least one woman writer each month again. The magazine was at its best when that was the case back in the '50s, and Sylvia Jacobs turned in one of my favorites of the issue.

Until next time…keep up to date with Nixon on Laugh-In, and science fiction on the Journey!

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

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

January 4, 2024 David Levinson Leave a comment

by David Levinson

The misrule of law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing judgment

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

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

The “Hoax” Story, by H.L. Gold

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

Three stars.

Beside the Walking Mountain, by Burt Filer

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

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

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

Good and bad average out to three stars.

Praiseworthy Saur, by Harry Harrison

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

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

A very high three stars.

At Bay with Baycon, by Robert Bloch

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

Three stars.

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

The Defendant Earth, by Andrew J. Offutt

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

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

Three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

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

Three stars.

Trial by Fire, by James E. Gunn

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

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

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

A high two stars.

Authorgraphs: An Interview with Harry Harrison

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

Three stars.

A caricature, but recognizably Harry. Art by Rudy Cristiano

The Fire Egg, by Roger F. Burlingame

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

A high two stars.

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

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

Rex and Venus discover an empty world. Art by Gaughan

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

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

Summing up

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

Another Hugo winners issue. Dare we hope?

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 12, 1968] Galaxy's the One? (the September 1968 Galaxy)

August 12, 2023 GalacticJourney 8 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Live from Miami Beach!

If you, like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (and me), soldiered through the four days and nights of GOP convention coverage, you saw the drama unfold in Miami Beach as it happened. Dick Nixon came into the event a "half-inch" shy of having the nomination sewed up, his chief competition coming from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. California governor Ronald Reagan, best known for his Chesterfield cigarette ads, coyly denied that he was a candidate…until he suddenly was, in a desperate bid to court "the New South".

The suspense was all a bit forced. By Day Two, it was understood that the New Jersey delegation, which had been putatively firm in supporting native son Senator Clifford Case through the first ballot so as to be able to play kingmaker later on, was now breaking for Nixon. On Day Three, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had expressed that his first and second choices were Ronald Reagan, suddenly declared his support for Nixon.

And so, after endless seconding speeches for candidates who had no intention of being President, like Governor Hatfield of Oregon and "dead duck" Governor Romney of Michigan, Nixon won on the first ballot.

After that, the only unknown was who would be his running mate. The South made loud objections to any GOP liberals being tapped, like New York mayor John Lindsay and Illinois Senator Charles Percy. The smart money was on a Southerner like John Tower of Texas or Howard Baker of Tennessee. So everyone was surprised when Maryland governor Spiro Agnew got the nod at a press conference the morning of Day 4, overwhelmingly winning the ballot that night (though not without loud protest from Romney's Michigan contingent).

Why Agnew? Here were a couple of comments from the NBC reporter pool after the convention:

"It's not that Agnew adds anything to the ticket; it's that he doesn't take anything away."

"Everybody loves Agnew–no one's ever heard of him!"

Agnew, who is kind of a Southerner, and kind of a liberal, but who has recently come out in favor of strong "law and order" (which means urging cops to shoot Baltimoreans if they steal shoes), will enable Nixon to retain his chameleon qualities while Agnew acts as attack dog. And since being the actual Vice Presidency is worth exactly one half-full bucket of warm piss, it doesn't really matter that Agnew is brand new to large scale politics.

Long story short, Nixon is the One, which we've known since February. God help us all.

Live from New York!

When Galaxy first appeared in 1950, it was also "the One", breathing fresh new air into the science fiction genre. 18 years later, it is still a regular on the ballot for the Hugo Award. Last month's was a superlative issue; does this month's mag maintain that level of quality?

cover by Jack Gaughan

Nightwings, by Robert Silverberg

Silverbob presents a richly drawn future world, one in which humanity has soared to great heights only to stumble back to savagery twice. Now, thousands of years later, Earth is in its Third Cycle. The planet is an intergalactic backwater, and its people are rigidly divided into castes.

Our heroes are a Watcher, a Flier, and a Changeling. The first, whose viewpoint we share, is an aged itinerant, hauling in a wagon his arcane tools with which he clairvoys the heavens three times a day (or is it four? The author says both.) for any signs of an alien invasion. The Flier Avluela, the only woman in the story, is a spare youth who is able to soar on dragonfly wings when the cosmic wind is not too strong. And finally, there is Gorman, who has no caste, yet has such a broad knowledge of history that he could pose as a Rememberer.

art by Jack Gaughan

All roads lead to Rome, so it is said, and indeed the three end up in history-drenched Roum, where the Watcher finds the city overcrowded with his caste. The cruel Prince of Roum, a Dominator, takes a shine to Avluela, compelling her to share his bed. This incenses Gormon, the crudely handsome mutant, who vows his revenge.

Gormon has the advantage of knowing that justice will not be long delayed–the alien invasion is coming, and he is an advance scout…

There's something hollow about this tale, rather in the vein of lesser Zelazny. Oh, it's prettily and deliberately constructed, but the story's characters are merely observers rather than actors. The stage is set and the inevitable happens. When the alien conquest occurs, it is our Watcher who sounds the alarm, but it is implied others were about to do so (why they did not cry out the night before when the invasion first became apparent is left an inadequately explained mystery). It's a story that doesn't really say or do anything.

Beyond that, I object to the lone female existing to be loved and/or raped, depending on the man involved. She is there to be a pretty companion, a object of pity, a tormented vessel. I suppose the small mercy is she is not also a harpy, as Silverberg is occasionally wont to present his women.

Anyway, I give it just three stars, but I imagine it'll be a Hugo contender next year…

When I Was Very Jung, by Brian W. Aldiss

art by Brock

A weird mix of sex, cannibalism, and archetypes. I found it distasteful and out of place.

One star.

Find the Face, by Ross Rocklynne

One of science fiction's eldest veterans offers up this romantic piece. It has the old-fashioned narrative framework, with an aged tramp freighter captain describing the day he was contracted by a wealthy widow, and what ensued afterwards. The widow's husband and family had been lost in a space accident, but somehow, his face remained, etched across the sky in cosmic clouds and star clusters. The widow saw this phenomenon once, and she was determined to find from what vantage in the universe it could be reliably observed again.

The captain, meanwhile, was looking for Cuspid, the planet whence the green horses that sired his favorite racer came. Together, they went off on their separate quests, and in the process, found the one thing neither had been looking for: new love.

It's something of a mawkish story and nothing particularly memorable. That said, it is sweet, almost like a romantic A. B. Chandler piece, and I appreciated the two characters being oldsters rather than spring chickens. Moreover, these were not ageless immortals, but silver-haired and wrinkle-faced septuagenarians.

More of that, please. Three stars.

The Listeners, by James E. Gunn

art by Dan Adkins

In the early 21st Century, Project Ozma continues, despite fifty years of drawing a blank; even with the efforts of dozens of astronomers, hundreds of staff, and the entire survey calendar of the great Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, not a single extraterrestrial signal has been encountered. Low morale and lack of purpose are the rule amongst these dispirited sentinels.

This is an odd story, with much discussion and development, but no resolution. At times, the author hints that a message is forthcoming, or maybe even already being received, if only the listeners could crack the code to understand it. But the climax to the tale has little to do with the story's backbone, and, as with Nightwings, the characters drift rather than do.

It feels like the beginning of a novel, not a complete story. Larry Niven could probably have done a lot more with the piece in about half the space.

Three stars.

For Your Information: Mission to a Comet, by Willy Ley

Now this piece, I dug. Willy Ley talks about why comets are important to understanding the early history of the solar system, and which ones could feasibly be approached with our current rocket and probe technology. The little chart with all the astronomical details of the Earth-approaching comets was worth the piece all by itself. I particularly liked the idea of Saturn for a "swing-around" mission to catch up with Halley's Coment from behind!

We truly live in an SFnal reality. Five stars.

The Wonders We Owe DeGaulle, by Lise Braun

art by Brock

Newcomer Lise Braun offers up a droll travel guide to a mauled Earth. It seems a French bomb that exploded in Algeria sundered our planet's crust, sinking half the Americas and turning the Sahara into a stained glass plain.

It's mildly diverting but Braun's clumsy writing shows her clearly a novice. I think the setting would have served better as background than a nonfact piece.

Two stars.

A Specter is Haunting Texas (Part 3 of 3), by Fritz Leiber

art by Jack Gaughan

Lastly, the conclusion to Leiber's latest serial, a sort of fairytale version of a hard science epic. The "Specter" is really a spaceman named de la Cruz, a gaunt, eight-foot figure kept erect by an electric exoskeleton, denizen of a circumlunar colony. He has been the centerpiece of a Mexican revolution, which is trying to throw off the literal yokes (cybernetic and hypnotic) forced upon the Mesoamerican race by post-Apocalyptic Texans. The spaceman's comrades include two quite capable and comely freedom fighters, Raquel Vaquel, daughter of the governor of Texas province, and Rosa ("La Cucaracha"), a high-spirited Chicana; then there's Guchu, a Black Buddhist, reluctantly working with the ofays; Dr. Fanninowicz, a Teutonic technician with fascist sympathies; Father Francisco; and El Toro, a charismatic leader in the revolution.

In this installment, de la Cruz finally makes it to Yellow Knife, where he wishes to lay claim to a valuable pitchblende (uranium) deposit. Unfortunately, the Texans have gotten there first–and what they have established on the site finally reveals just what all those purple-illumined towers they've been planting across the North American continent are for. 'T'ain't nothin' good, I can assure you!

Last month, I read a fanzine where someone complained that this was a perfectly good story ruined by being turned into a tongue-in-cheek fable. Certainly, I felt the same way for a while. By Part II, however, I was fully onboard. While this last bit didn't thrill me quite as much as the middle installment, it's still a worthy novel overall. When it comes out in paperback, pick it up.

Four stars for this section and for the serial as a whole.

art by Jack Gaughan

Roll Call

Like the Republican convention, the outcome seemed certain, but a few twists and turns along the way did create a bit of doubt. But in the end, if this month's Galaxy is perhaps not all the magazine we hoped it would be, nevertheless, it's one we can live with.

For the time being, Galaxy remains The One. May it continue to be so for four more years.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 6, 1967] Happy Anniversary (February 1967 Amazing)

January 6, 2022 John Boston 6 Comments

by John Boston

January 6! A portentous anniversary! On this day in 1838, Samuel Morse publicly demonstrated the telegraph, sending a message two miles; and in 1912, German geophysicist Alfred Wegener announced his theory of the continental drift, to much skepticism until very recently.

by Arnold Kahn

The February 1967 Amazing is here too, in a burst of bright yellow surrounding a glum-looking guy who seems to have a head problem. The table of contents captions Arnold Kahn’s cover as Slaves of the Crystal Brain; research reveals it first appeared as the cover of the May 1950 Amazing, where the head was bordered in black rather than yellow. It is hard to imagine why anyone thought the change to be an improvement. However, the subject’s disgruntled expression so acutely characterizes the issue that I fear my comments may be superfluous.

Born Under Mars (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner

The prolific and versatile John Brunner has provided us with such thoughtful works as The Whole Man and such well-turned entertainments as Echo in the Skull. Born Under Mars, unfortunately, is neither, though it might be viewed as a caricature of both, with an overstuffed action plot against a background of Big Thinks that seem to have been drawn with a crayon.

by Gray Morrow

In the future, Earth has established interstellar colonies, their nations and residents known as Centaurs and Bears respectively. Mars, earlier colonized, has become unfashionable and neglected in this new and larger configuration, and its inhabitants are a bit resentful about it. These include Ray Mallin, a space engineer who has just returned to Mars on a Centaur ship, only to find himself kidnapped and tortured with a nerve whip to obtain information he does not have about the ship he arrived on.

There ensues much to-ing and fro-ing as Mallin tries to find out what is going on, including reliance on outrageous coincidence: Mallin, at the Old Temple containing ancient Martian artifacts, pushes on a random spot on the wall, which opens to reveal the room where he was nerve-whipped, along with one of the perpetrators. He returns the favor of torture and interrogation but his former tormentor knows nothing.

Eventually Mallin corners his old mentor Thoder and the Big Thinks begin to emerge. Humanity is stagnating, with no major scientific breakthroughs for a couple of centuries, and needs to get a lot smarter. How? They don’t really know, but “a pair of strongly opposed societies was devised: the Bears, happy-go-lucky, casual, living life as it came, and the Centaurs, thinking hard about everything and especially about their descendants.” In effect they are trying eugenics by bank shot: creating societies to order to see if either one of them breeds—literally—the intellectual superpeople who are needed (i.e., those who have “a talent—extra psychological muscle if you like”).

And who contrived all this, and how did they manage to keep it secret, and what rational basis is there to believe that anyone can create societies to order and have them stick to the program for the generations necessary for this project? How is manipulating social arrangements and behavior going to jump-start human heredity? Is Lamarck consulting on this project? There’s no pretense of an explanation; these large concepts are merely brandished like slogans on placards.

But—the author asserts—it’s worked! Six generations early, in fact, unto the Centaurs is born an infant who will have “an IQ at the limits of the measurable, empathy topping 2000, Weigand scale, and virtually every heritable talent from music to mathematics, all transmissible to his descendants!” And he’s here! He’s, as Hitchock would put it, the macguffin everyone has been chasing after, torturing Mallin en passant because this miracle child, kidnapped, was brought to Mars on the ship Mallin rode on.

So what’s the plan? Educate him on Mars. “Then, when he’s grown, to use the random mixing of genetic lines available in Bear society to spread a kind of ferment through half the human race.” In other words, this kid is intended to grow up to be a playboy in interstellar Bohemia, and that’s how humanity will be transformed.

But wait—now somebody has snatched the kid away from the people who snatched the kid! More hurly-burly ensues, along with more elevated yakety-yak, and in the last 20 pages a Girl emerges for the hero to get. And there’s a redeeming note: she wants to know what the hell all these people are doing treating an infant like nothing but an object to be manipulated, which doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone previously.

Born Under Mars is another of many examples of pseudo-profundity in SF: the semblance of large ideas waved around without the author’s doing the work of thinking them through and making them plausible, or abandoning them when their implausibility becomes obvious. Brunner is certainly not the only offender of this sort, but he seems sufficiently capable that I expected better of him.

Bah, humbug. Oh, wait, that was last month. Two stars, mainly for effort.

Tumithak of the Corridors, by Charles R. Tanner

“Special,” says the cover, about Charles R. Tanner’s Tumithak of the Corridors—a “complete novel” at 56 pages per the table of contents. The interior blurb calls it “as good as early Wells, as fresh as the latest Zelazny.” And indeed this story, from the January 1932 Amazing, does have a certain reputation among older fans.

by Leo Morey

It seems that humans made it to Venus, whose inhabitants, called shelks for no reason I can discern, had no idea there was anything outside their eternal clouds. But once they found out, they proceeded straightway to build their own space fleet (“All over the planet, the great machine-shops hummed and clattered”) to invade Earth. Earth responded by creating great underground fastnesses, full of corridors of sorts, and after losing the war, humans fled into their deepest recesses and regressed to ignorance and barbarism. But—of course—one brave young man will not accept humanity’s fate. He has found an old book that recounts the history of the shelks’ invasion, and he is going to find his way the surface to kill a shelk!

This mass of cliches actually turns into a pretty good old-fashioned story. Tanner’s style is clear and uncluttered. Tumithak is presented as heroic but not superhuman. His odyssey through the corridors, including the territories of other human tribes (one of them not too friendly), manages not to become any more ridiculous than the starting premises, except for a portion towards the end in the territory of the Esthetts (sic!) which is all right because it’s purposefully satirical. Altogether, the story is a fairly charming relic. Three stars, and by the standards of its times it would merit more.

Methuselah, Ltd., by Wallace West and Richard Barr

Methuselah, Ltd. (from Fantastic, November-December 1953), is as you might guess about immortality, or its absence. In the future, disease, disability, and aging have been conquered by the Life Ray, but people still die around age 90. Dr. Weinkopf, age 88, would like to do something about this, and he thinks it has something to do with the pineal gland, and with “brain sand”—calcareous salts with a “concentric laminated structure” found in the brain after death, it says here. Surgery has been made illegal, but there is an underground Society for the Preservation of Surgical Techniques that performs operations in speakeasy fashion before an audience of sadists. Dr. Weinkopf hopes to piggyback on a brain tumor operation to remove the pineal and dig out the brain sand. But the patient, hearing talk of this plan, chickens out and leaves. By the rules of the Society, the jilted surgeon must be subjected to surgery himself, so the doctor chooses to have his nurse do the surgery on him, with predictable bad end looming as the story ends. This is apparently intended as a sort of farcical black comedy, but it’s not especially funny and is just as big a mess as my description suggests. The authors should improve their farce technique by studying the works of Ron Goulart—not the kind of sentence I ever expected to write. One star.

The Man with Common Sense, by Edwin James

by Leo Morey

The other reprinted short story, from the July 1950 Amazing, is The Man with Common Sense, by Edwin James, an early pseudonym of James E. Gunn. It’s another dreary farce, though better-wrought than Methuselah, Ltd. Malachi Jones is a “dapper, wizened little man” equipped with cane and derby hat who is an interstellar insurance agent for Lairds of Luna. Lairds has issued a policy guaranteeing peace on Mizar II, and Jones is there to make sure Lairds doesn’t have to pay off. He tames the planet’s rebels and makes peace in the accidental company of one Rand Ridgeway, who is distinguished mainly by his stupidity (en route, he takes his shoes off and forgets to put them back on). Two stars, barely. Here’s another case for Ron Goulart.

Two Days Running and Then Skip a Day, by Ron Goulart

by Gray Morrow

Speaking of Ron Goulart, here is the man himself, with the issue’s only new short story, Two Days Running and Then Skip a Day. Goulart has been on a tear about the medical profession for a while; see his Calling Dr. Clockwork in the March 1965 Amazing, about a man who winds up in the hospital and then can’t get out, and Terminal, in the May 1965 Fantastic, about a nursing home system designed mainly to get rid of the troublesome elderly and the even more troublesome investigators. Here, Goulart tees off, or I should say flails in all directions, against celebrity doctors who can’t be bothered with their patients, robot assistants of dubious competence, modern apartments and appliances that are badly built, sleazy landlords, and I probably missed something. It’s insubstantial but amusing, which seens to sum this writer up, and to compare favorably with Gunn and West/Barr, whose entries are merely insubstantial. Three stars, barely.

Summing Up

As I said at the beginning, the expression on the cover acutely captures the contents of the issue, and requires no elaboration.

by Arnold Kahn (detail)

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction