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[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis)

March 26, 2025 Brian Collins 5 Comments

by Brian Collins

"Rome. Before Christ. After Fellini."

Federico Fellini is unquestionably one of the most beloved filmmakers in the so-called international arthouse circuit. Despite shooting Italian productions, working well outside the Hollywood system, Fellini has already garnered a back-breaking eight Oscar nominations. I won't be surprised if his latest, Fellini Satyricon (which henceforth I'll simply refer to as Satyricon), nabs him another nomination, despite its immense strangeness. United Artists, responsible for distributing Satyricon here in the States, have been shrewd in their marketing, seemingly aiming at the overlap between those who frequent arthouse theaters (people like me) and those who watch B-movies at the drive-in (also people like me).

Fellini Satyricon

Normally, when writing about a film, or really any narrative, I try to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot; however, in the case of Satyricon, I don't think this would be feasible or desirable. This film is the latest effort from Fellini as both a fantasist and a storyteller who, at least since La Dolce Vita a decade ago, has clearly become disillusioned with traditional narrative. Satyricon is so loose in plot and yet so rich in imagery that to go over the plot would be doing it a disservice. I can at least give you the setup, though.

Photograph of a curly-haired blonde man wearing a belted mustard tunic, standing in front of a wall covered in graffiti — Martin Potter as Encolpius.

Photograph of a smiling, oiled, and tanned young white man, close cropped to only show his face and shoulders — Hiram Keller as Ascyltus.

We're in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, or so it seems. The truth is that while the setting is ostensibly the time and place of the Roman Republic, it's a historical Rome fused with a Rome that only exists in one's dreams—or nightmares. Encolpius (Martin Potter) is a young man whose lover, Gitón (Max Born), has been taken by Encolpius's friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) and, as it turns out, sold as a slave to some depraved theatre actor. Encolpius rescues Gitón from the actor's clutches, but upon returning to their tenement building (one of several impressive sets in the movie), the feminine and elusive Gitón decides to become Ascyltus's new lover anyway. It's here that Encolpius, distraught, contemplates suicide, but an earthquake demolishes everything before he can reach for his sword.

It's here that Satyricon goes from strange to positively "far out."

Photograph of a ruddy-haired white person with bedroom eyes wearing a white strap of fur as padding under a golden strapped quiver, drawing an arrow in a golden bow, all against a backdrop of beaten brass. — The uncannily beautiful Max Born as Gitón.

Photograph of a multi-story stone and plaster building with a courtyard active with people, even as it grows dark. — The tenement building where Encolpius, Gitón, and Ascyltus live.

Photograph of an effects shot featuring a crowd of largely unclothed white people, gathered around a few white people clothed in brightly dyed clothes, and a Black woman wearing earth tones. In the background the clouds are dyed the red of late sunset — Encolpius, soon after the earthquake, surrounded by mourners.

Something happens to Encolpius, although your guess is as good as mine. The most sensible explanation, both literally and symbolically, is that Encolpius and the others had been killed in the earthquake, sending them over to Hades, the Roman afterlife. There are, of course, quite a few things that go unexplained, even if we assume that everything after the earthquake is Hades. If this is indeed Hades, then nearly everyone here, including Encolpius, seems to be unaware of their own deaths. We meet many colorful characters along the way, as Encolpius voyages through this demented version of Rome in search of his lover and former friend. The most memorable of these might be the local despot Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), one of the few holdovers from Petronius's Satyricon. One of the eeriest scenes in the whole film is when Trimalchio sets up an elaborate rehearsal for his own funeral, complete with his slaves mock-crying near his still-living body.

Throughout the film, Encolpius and Gitón cross paths, but only rarely; rather the former is stuck with Ascyltus as the two men narrowly escape death, capture, or both. It's worth noting, at this point, that all three forementioned characters are men, and that Satyricon, on top of being immersed in death and sex, is especially focused on homosexuality. The topic was not exactly taboo for Fellini before, but here he explores romance and sex between men, indeed the psychology of the young homosexual, so overtly that it's both daring and unignorable. The love-hate relationship between Encolpius and Ascyltus, oscillating between antagonistic and homoerotic, is arguably the only thing keeping the movie together as a narrative. There's a tender and yet also perplexing scene where the two men, having taken refuge in a somewhat abandoned villa, have what the French call a ménage à trois with a servant girl (Hylette Adolphe), Fellini implying that the two men also have sex with each other.

Photograph of mourners covering their faces over a reclining and richly garbed elderly white person whose eyes are closed — The tyrannical Trimalchio rehearsing his own funeral.

Photograph of a bare-chested Black woman with long, braided hair smiling while gazing at two white people who are lying down and touching each other — The servant girl looking mighty pleased as Encolpius and Ascyltus cuddle.

Photograph of a smiling and tanned man pulling what appears to be a molded leather full-head mask of a bull up from over his head — George Eastman as the "Minotaur."

As I mentioned earlier, Fellini's Satyricon is loosely based on the ancient Roman narrative of the same name by Petronius—the problem being that the latter has been partly lost to time, including its ending. Much of the film, thus, is of Fellini's invention, although in a stroke of mad genius he apparently decided to not fill in the gaps of the original text. Scenes rarely ever connect with each other, in terms of setting and characters, not helped by the occasional frame narrative which the in-movie characters are being told about. Encolpius and Ascyltus are escorting a hermaphrodite with allegedly special powers in one scene, and just a bit later, without explanation, Encolpius has to fight a man (George Eastman) who's dressed as the Minotaur from Greek mythology. Stuff like that. If you've seen La Dolce Vita or 8½, then you already know Fellini has become increasingly sympathetic to fragmented and nonlinear narrative structure; with this in mind, it makes perfect sense that he would adapt a story that only survives in fragments.

Photograph of a picture of a costumed quartet, posing, painted on since-damaged plaster — Portrait of Encolpius and others on a fragment of wall.

Satyricon stands out as Fellini's most violent, erotic, and somehow most esoteric film to date, if not necessarily his best. At a little over two hours, one does start to feel as if the movie is spinning its wheels occasionally. Some will find the plot (or lack thereof) to be incomprehensible while still others will find Fellini's nonjudgmental treatment of sexuality to be too grotesque. While certainly fantasy, it is a sort of fantasy that stands apart from Professor Tolkien's holier-than-thou puritanism, and yet it's far more layered and sophisticated than your average sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I do suggest that anyone who sees cinema as a serious artform ought to watch Satyricon, if only because it is truly unique, and because it stretches the boundaries of what can even be done with a movie camera.

A high four stars, possibly five if I ever rewatch it.

by Jason Sacks

And now for a film that's not exactly Fellini level…

Some friends and I decided to go to the movies on a cold and wet March Saturday in Seattle. We wandered to the tri-plex at scenic Northgate Mall. My friends went to see Patton again. My sister saw Start the Revolution Without Me. They all shared full and excited theatres. For me, well, I was committed to review the new film Skullduggery for this column. I was "lucky" enough to get a nearly private screening of this film in theatre 3 – I think the two couples in my theatre enjoyed the peace and quiet so they could have some intimate time together, away from the violence of Patton and the laughs of Revolution.

As for my reaction, well…

Skullduggery

Skullduggery is a very bad film.

Oh, this film starts pretty well, as a high adventure story. Anthropologist Dr. Sybil Greame (Susan Clark) leads an expedition into remote Papua New Guinea to find ancient human remains. In her group is a handsome explorer named Douglas Temple (Burt Reynolds), with whom she has a quick romance. Soon, though, things change. Temple finds gold in those hills. Greame finds potential glory of her own, in the form of a tribe of apelike creatures. These creatures are called the Tropis and are enslaved by local humans. These primitive creatures just might be the missing link in the evolution of mankind from ape to person. The discovery of these strange creatures leads to pandemonium and confusion and the beginnings of an intriguing moral debate.

That debate is smashed before it really starts. When one of the Tropis is allegedly murdered, Temple is charged with the crime and is forced to stand trial. The latter half of the film examines what it means to be human, the complexity of a human/Tropi hybrid, even the nature of race relations in America.

Skullduggery is a mess. It veers almost drunkenly from high adventure to comedy to tragedy to trial, lumbering from one topic to the next, seemingly without a lot of reflection on what has happened before. Reynolds seems dramatically miscast, Clark is remarkably uncharismatic, and director Gordon Douglas (a man who’s been working in film since the 1930s) shows little dexterity behind the camera, by and large employing few camera tricks.

This fiasco is a shame for a few reasons.

First, the early scenes of exploration (apparently filmed in Jamaica rather than the much more dangerous New Guinea) are legitimately lovely, all brilliant vistas and setting suns. However, Douglas moves to obvious soundstages and static, dull shots for the majority of the film, making all of this very boring.

Secondly, Reynolds obviously has talent and charisma. He could be a breakout star in the ‘70s, but he’ll be working in community theatre in Florida before long if he can’t find more suitable roles. I’ve seen him in a few things recently – the Jim Brown/Raquel Welch bomb 100 Rifles for one – but he needs to be in a film which clicks for him to show off his obvious charm.

But most importantly, Skullduggery just never delivers on any of the promise of its core ideas. What would happen if the missing link suddenly was found? How would that change our perceptions of the past and how would that affect the religion/science dichotomy with Nixon’s Silent Majority?

Even with the strange trial of Temple, in which a white supremacist and a Black Panther are brought to testify, we're never even given much lip service about the lives of these creatures and their place in the world. In our turmoil-filled world of 1970, when racial tensions remain high and our country is deeply scarred, it seems like malpractice for a film like this one to openly avoid the very ideas it raises.

2 stars.

by Amber Dubin

Horton Hears a Who, and You Should Too

If you were looking for a light, whimsical flight into a lovely fantasy land of the Seussian-variety, you will be disappointed by Horton Hears a Who. While this short, animated film is typical of the type of whimsical art and color we’ve come to expect from Dr. Seuss’s children’s stories and picture books, its plotline is anything but light.

Movie poster featuring a colour illustration of a wide eyed elephant facing the viewer, holding a fluffy blossom in his trunk. Looming in the background are a couple of smirking blue apes, and in the foreground a kangaroo wearing a pince-nez rests her chin on her fist, eyes closed as though lost in thought. — Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, March 19th, 1970

We open whimsically enough, following a speck of dust along a gust of wind flowing through the Jungle of Nool as it circles closer to an elephant taking a carefree bath in a river. The elephant, named Horton, is soon shaken from his reverie by the speck of dust we’ve been following, as it seems to be issuing a plea for help. With Horton’s enormous ears, he picks up this call and goes to investigate a clover that the dust spec has alighted on.

Illustration of a fluffy dust mote on top of a shaggy pink clover blossom — The speck of dust that all the fuss is about

We come to know that this dust speck is actually a fully occupied world filled with a tiny populace calling themselves Whovians. The voice was coming from Dr. H. Whovie, classically cast as the lone possessor of the knowledge that their entire society literally balances on the head of a pin, or a clover as it were. Being in agreement with their desire to protect and shelter this delicate society, Horton and the Doctor join forces to make sure the world doesn’t fall victim to such devastating hazards as a drop of rain or a particularly rough gust of wind. The altruistic Horton dedicates himself to this cause so freely because he declares “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Illustration of a kangaroo leaning down over a clover blossom and inspecting it with opera glasses — Kangaroo Jane who can't keep her nose to herself

The trouble begins when a local busybody kangaroo overhears Horton’s conversation with the clover and proceeds to insert herself into the situation, determining that Horton must be talking to himself and thus is a crazy, dangerous menace to society. She turns the rest of the jungle’s occupants against Horton and finally conscripts the help of the Wickersham Brothers to more violently separate Horton from the clover, hoping that if it is destroyed, that will bring Horton back to his senses and he will stop talking about little people talking to him from dust specks. These Wickersham brothers, which are drawn more like horrifying gremlins than the apes they’re supposed to be, take the clover and conscript a vulture to fly it into a huge field of clovers.

Illustration of a trio of greenish apes mugging against a background of sallow-yellow-and-candy-pink flowers — The Wickersham brothers, creatures horrifying enough to inspire nightmares in adults and kids alike

Meanwhile, inside the dust ball itself, pandemonium has broken out, as the Whovians are suddenly forced to acknowledge the Doctor’s warnings and recognize that there is in fact a giant dangerous and bigger world outside the clouds that frame their existence. Through trial and tribulation, when Horton finally is reunited with Whoville, we find that their town has been thrown into disarray, buildings cracked and the townsfolk strewn about after the violent ride in the vulture’s beak. Horton assures them their troubles are over when he plucks them from the 3 millionth clover he checked and resumes caring for the now united peoples of Whoville.

Illustration of a silhouetted elephant on the cusp of entering an ocean frothing with pink clover-blossoms — Horton on his way through picking 3,000,005 clovers just to find his friends.

This reprieve is short lived when the Wickersham brothers, now bolstered by the entire Jungle of Nool, swarm upon Horton and rather upsettingly decide drastic action is necessary to keep his dangerous belief in tiny people from spreading insanity throughout the jungle. They threaten to cage him and boil the clover in “Beezle nut oil.” Backed into his last corner, Horton begs the citizens of Whoville to make as much noise as possible so that his tormentors finally hear them and believe they exist and are worth protecting. The Doctor rallies his people, getting every member of the town to participate to no avail, until the very smallest resident, Jo-Jo with his yo-yo, lends the final voice that breaks free from their clouds and finally reaches the encroaching mob. Furies are quelled, everyone reaches an agreement that “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” happy endings are had by all, and we drift away from the story just as the Doctor is gifted an even smaller world of his own on another dust speck that he must take care of, thus starting the cycle anew.

Illustration of a sprawling, swoopingly curved cityscape from above, its buildings all in yellow over pink grounds, with clouds shrouding the near buildings peaks — The beautiful yet tiny town of Whoville

There are obvious moral overtones stating that society is capable of great evil when fueled by routing out sedition, and that it is important to not lose sight of the humanity in our fellows, whether the evil we are being told we’re defeating is insanity, witchery or, more recently, communism. The production is, as usual, well done. It looks like a quality Dr. Seuss show, and it is.

However, I can’t help but respond to this with a personal sense of dystopia fatigue. Maybe it’s because I was expecting much more fun than despair, but I felt like this story was so overly harsh to the protagonist that I came away wishing that Dr. Seuss wasn’t trying so hard to scare the children. Why can’t they be allowed to chase talking dust specks or pick millions of clovers without being jailed for insanity? Aren’t they just children after all?

Illustration of an elephant in a cage having his trunk tied to a rope pulling him against the bars. A boiling pot over flame is beneath this tug-of-war, and at stake between the two is the blossom held by Horton — Is it a little extreme to threaten children with boiling their friends alive? Dr. Seuss didn’t think so.

While I do love the art and style of the piece, I feel the need to deduct a point for the storyline being a little more cruel and upsetting than I would have preferred from a children’s story.

4 stars

Illustration of a sadder but wiser elephant gazing teary-eyed at a blossom held by his trunk — Horton may have heard a Who, but comes to wish he hadn’t.

by George Pritchard

Necropolis

I am on a brief holiday while my flat is getting treated for mold, so I decided to go see Necropolis, an Italian-British production, billed as a strange and fantastical film on the nature of evil.

After twenty minutes of filler involving a man in stereotypical “barbarian” furs searching for the Mona Lisa, there appears a beautiful man with a painted face and a green velvet suit. By this time, I confess that I was checking my watch in worry. “Perhaps this will all make sense in time,” I told myself, “perhaps it would immediately make sense if I were more familiar with Art, with the political landscape inhabited by the filmmakers, but I do not know for certain.”

The first twenty minutes of this film.

Subtitles are played with, sometimes included and sometimes not, and sometimes the subtitles are used as title cards. Throughout the film, characters switch at random between English, Italian, and sometimes French. Apparently this was inspired by Warhol’s films, right down to including Viva in the cast list. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt much of anything while interacting with his art, so perhaps I am the wrong audience.

Viva!

The man in green wanders through a warehouse of red plastic sheets. He says, “The universe is in my head,” and with the ouroboros painted on his face, I believe him. ”If only I could convert you. If only I could communicate with you, then you’d know.”

A man who I do not trust, but who I believe.

All right, now we’re getting somewhere. This film feels like I am at a festival of short films — some are wonderfully strange, others are dull slogs. A witch in a cement pipe initiates a young man, in a ceremony that makes me think, after the first 40 minutes of this 118-minute movie, that the art film amateur hour has leveled out, and incredible images have begun to bubble up through the depths.

A glorious moment that promises more.

Unfortunately, this hope is crushed directly after, and never fully recovers. Because just as we think there’s something good, it collapses again into joyless sitcom bits played out in a warehouse. Press papers describe this film as an exploration of evil. Perhaps this speaks to the misery of touch-and-go rasping against the nerves, but it seems more like an exploration of poor sound mixing. Annoying noises and annoying people, broken up with occasionally beautiful things. I would have liked to go into the projection room and clip a new copy for myself.

Fellow travelers…is this something you have seen play out in your own counterculture spaces? (observe the flagrantly spilled coffee, which no one is keen to clean up)

Unfortunately, this film drags for minutes at a time — people often speak and move in slow motion, and the 2-hour runtime is wholly unnecessary. The speeches are so slow that the subtitles only provide disjointed fragments. I never guessed that a film about evil would make me think of a Burma Shave road ad. I fell asleep halfway through, and so bought a second ticket in order to complete this review.

I can’t believe this movie has the gall to reference Kenneth Anger, and multiple times, at that. Mr. Anger makes beautiful, meaningful films, but most of all, they are short. There is an excellent Kenneth Anger-length film here, but there is so much to cut out around it that I cannot recommend Necropolis in good faith. I would recommend that anyone interested in this film should seek out Mr. Anger’s films, instead.

Two stars.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 6, 1970] The Waters of Centaurus, And Chaos Died, and High Sorcery

March 6, 2025 Victoria Silverwolf Leave a comment

As luck would have it, the first three novels to be reviewed this month were all by women! They all have something else in common—they each have both merits and demerits that sort of cancel out…neither Brown, Russ, nor Norton quite hit it out of the park this time at bat.

by Victoria Silverwolf

In Memoriam

An unavoidable note of sadness fills this review of a newly published novel. The author died of lymphoma in 1967, at the very young age of 41. With that in mind, let's try to take an objective look at her final novel.

The Waters of Centaurus, by Rosel George Brown

Cover art by Margo Herr

This is a direct sequel to Sibyl Sue Blue. My esteemed colleague Janice L. Newman gave that novel a glowing review. In fact, our own Journey Press saw fit to reprint it in a handsome new format.

Order a copy today!

Sibyl Sue Blue is back. She's a forty-year-old police detective and a widow with a teenage daughter. She's fond of cigars, gin, fancy clothes, and attractive men.

After her previous adventure, she's on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Familiarity with the first novel would help get the reader oriented, but let me try to sum up the situation quickly.

The planet is inhabited by at least three varieties of humanoids. Those dwelling on the main continent can't mate with humans, and don't play much of a role in the plot. The folks living on an island are semi-aquatic, can mate with humans, and are the main focus of the book. The third kind, from a northern continent, supplies our story's antagonist.

Sibyl Sue Blue and her daughter are on the planet as part of a working vacation, enjoying the beach while acting as ambassadors from Earth. Sibyl is attacked by somebody and nearly drowns, but manages to fight off the bad guy handily. That's bad enough, but things get worse when her daughter, in a sort of trance, walks off into the ocean. What's going on?

Let's try to make a complex plot, a lot of which depends on what happened in the first novel, simpler. The antagonist, acting like a James Bond villain, plans to flood the planet by melting the ice caps. He's got a secret underwater lair, as well as a substance that turns air-breathers into water-breathers.

There are several other characters involved, and plenty of plot twists. Unlike the first novel, this one doesn't seem to have much in the way of social commentary. It somehow manages to be action-packed while also spending quite a bit of time describing Sibyl's wardrobe. There's a bit too much drinking of gin and smoking of cigars for my taste.

The antagonist has a very weird love/hate feeling for human women. Sibyl and he somehow manage to be lovers while also trying to kill each other. The speculative biology at the heart of the plot isn't much more plausible than this odd relationship.

Overall, I'd say this is a readable but forgettable potboiler. It's nice to have a middle-aged mother as the heroic protagonist, anyway.

Three stars.

by Jason Sacks

And Chaos Died, by Joanna Russ

Two months ago, I reviewed one of the worst books I’ve ever covered in this column: Taurus Four by the absolutely deplorable Rena Vale. This month I review the second novel by promising newcomer Joanna Russ. In some ways And Chaos Died and Taurus Four have nothing in common. In other ways these books have a huge amount of thematic overlap.

I wish I could say Russ’s novel is completely successful. She’s clearly ambitious. And Chaos Died is a novel of heady ideas and language. Russ plays in fascinating ways with internal and external perspectives, delivering a novel of alternating views and alien attitudes. But I feel like she simply fails to reach the heady levels she's aiming for with this novel.

And Chaos Died and Taurus Four both have long sequences which take place on strange alien worlds. On those worlds, beings live in primitive states. Both worlds are Edenic, full of civilizations who are one with the land they live in. The locals in both novels are naked and unashamed, in a world of boundless plenty on a fertile plain. Vale took that setup and revealed her hatred for “primitive” society. Russ takes that setup and delivers something complex and uncanny.

Cover by Diane and Leo Dillon

See, the locals on the planet “speak” telepathically and have psionic ability. Children can speed up or slow down their aging:

"I'm nine," she went on pedantically, "but actually I'm fifteen. I've slowed myself down. That's called 'dragging your feet.' Mother keeps telling me 'Evniki, don't drag your feet,' but catch me hurrying into it!"

There’s playfulness about the ideas of language:

"By the way," she said in a low voice, "I know what it means to cannibalize; it means to eat something. I heard about that." She seemed to hesitate in the half-dark.

But tell me, please," she said, "what does it mean exactly—radio?"

And Russ gives us beautiful literary-minded ideas about perception and peace and communications which abound in this book – at least until Jai returns to an overpopulated, warlike Earth. A shift in global temperatures and climates has devastated our planet; wars and starvation and hatred have made our planet a dystopia. And Jai has been so changed by his experiences on the alien planet that he finally is able to see things on Earth as they really are.

I loved the wildly imaginative approach to this book. The writing here is elliptical and dense. The prose rewards slow reading and attention to detail, but I was never lost in the book. In fact, I often find myself swept away by its literacy and ambitions. At times Russ reads like a less academic, more playful Ursula LeGuin.

Joanna Russ

Russ has deeply inventive ways of putting readers in the mind of psychic people of all ages as well as the ordinary people who have to interact with the natives. The book deserves high marks for the sequences on the alien planet, though I found her Earth-bound scenes a bit cliched.

But the book has another flaw: its treatment of homosexuality.

Our lead character is named Jai Vedh, and very early in the novel Jai proclaims himself to be a homosexual. But partway through And Chaos Died, Jai falls into a relationship with a woman. We are led to believe Jai’s homosexuality is “cured” with that relationship, and he himself even declares his happiness in a “straight” lifestyle.

I know we live in a world in which the American Psychological Association still declares “gayness” as a mental illness. But I still find it unthinkable that an intelligent and well-spoken woman like Joanna Russ would ally herself with the idea that homosexuality can – or even should – be “cured”. Love is love, whether between genders or in the same gender, and I was shocked Russ has her lead character change his whole approach to intimacy so quickly.

[I had a similar issue when I reviewed an excerpt of the novel, published as a stand-alone story earlier this year. (ed.)]

I would expect that approach from a Rena Vale, but not from a Joanna Russ. It’s jarring to see, and it really hurt my opinion of the novel.

There’s really nothing wrong with falling short when taking on heady ambitions. Joanna Russ is clearly a talented writer with many ideas. She falls squarely in the cohort of new wave sf authors who are elevating science fiction to new levels and confronting our new decade with a revolution. And Chaos Died aims to feel revolutionary. I feel it’s merely evolutionary.

3 stars.

by Winona Menezes

High Sorcery, by Andre Norton

High Sorcery is an anthology featuring three short stories and two novelettes from Andre Norton. I had a good time with it, though it's not obvious to me why these particular stories were chosen, as any thread linking them together feels no stronger than that of any other in Norton’s body of work, which does have better to offer. Still, it felt like a pretty decent cross-section of her work, and her skill as a writer and storyteller is on full display.

by Gray Morrow

"Wizard’s World" opens on a world ravaged by nuclear war, scattered with mutants who have been subjugated and enslaved for the psychic abilities they developed in the aftermath. Craike is one such mutant, and we find him fleeing a mob wishing to hunt and kill him for his abilities. Unexpectedly, he falls through a rift between worlds and awakes in a land much unlike his own, less technologically advanced and more akin to the days of Medieval Europe. He discovers a man and woman being persecuted for the magical psionic powers they were born with, much like his own, and feels compelled to help them out of an affinity for the hunted.

This story – its premise, its characters, its plot and setting – feel very much at home in a Norton anthology. The dissonant combination of a post-nuclear apocalypse and an Old World fairytale landscape is very characteristic of her tendency to combine genre cliches or buck them altogether, and the equitable inclusion of women and characters of color is still unfortunately rare enough to be notable. I can’t fault this story on any technicalities. Rather, I simply felt that it didn’t quite live up to what we are now well aware the author is capable of.

Beyond our main character, who is given the moral high ground to an extent verging on gratuity, I didn’t feel that any other characters were fleshed out enough to make me properly care about them. Norton has a flair for slowly revealing information to the reader as it is discovered by the protagonist in a way that normally builds excellent suspense, but here I found it disorienting. I don’t even think I properly knew what was going on until far too late in the story, and the female main character’s skittishness toward the Craike meant that I effectively knew too little about her to form an attachment until the end. The ending itself was cut tantalizingly short just as things were happening that I could actually be bothered to care about.

"Wizard’s World" feels like an unfinished draft of a story that could have been excellent, but was forgotten by its author before she could add embellishment enough to distinguish it from any other second-rate fantasy pulp. Sorry, but just two out of five stars for this one.

[David reviewed the tale when it came out a couple of years ago in IF—he was not overly enamored, either (ed.)]

Fortunately, its only up from here.

"Through the Needle’s Eye" is a charming little short story about a young girl named Ernestine, crippled by polio and longing for connection with her able-bodied peers. She meets an older woman named Miss Ruthevan and is struck by her stately beauty, as well as the handicap they both share. Miss Ruthevan has a gift for creating otherworldly masterpieces with embroidery, and takes Ernestine under her wing to teach her the art. But under her tutelage, Ernestine begins to discover that Miss Ruthevan’s talent, passed down through generations of women, comes at a magical cost.

I love bite-sized stories like this; it takes a skilled storyteller to write one in a way that feels satisfying, but still trusts the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The portrayal of disability felt sympathetic without being pitiful. Miss Ruthevan is the type of scorned woman-turned-unsettlingly powerful witch that I love and appreciate. I also love to see a story making use of the underappreciated beauty of the fiber arts. It’s short, but it excels at what it sets out to do, so it's five stars from me. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head for days.

"By a Hair" (originally published July 1958, in Phantom) is another short one. This one concerns a small Balkan village struggling to rebuild and defend itself after being plundered by Nazis. The once-lovely Countess Ana was taken to an extermination camp and now returns maimed beyond recognition. She chooses to devote her now-reclusive life to midwifery and the supernatural arts in service of her small village. Meanwhile, the incomparably beautiful Dagmar has chosen to use her dangerous allure to scheme and climb her way to security. She requests that Ana use her occult powers in service of a treacherous gamble, and receives her desire at a tragically ironic price.

This story left less to the imagination, but was no less effective. Though both women were positioned as diametrically opposed foils of each other, I still found both of their motives perfectly understandable given the desperation of their war-ravaged lives. I could not bring myself to condemn Dagmar for her desire for self-preservation, and that made the ending of this story as bleak as its setting. Of course, it’s also possible that I may have a blind spot in my moral code for beautiful scheming women in a world that leaves them few options. Either way, four stars.

"Ully the Piper" is the final short story in this anthology. In the sleepy, idyllic village of Coomb Brackett, young Ully longs for a life of normalcy after a fall in his childhood rendered him paralyzed. One day he discovers a beautiful flute, and his time spent in the tranquility of nature inspires him to become a talented piper. He wishes to share his gift with the other villagers, until the town bully Matt antagonizes him by taking his flute and leaving him lost in the forest. But Ully’s musical skill did not go unnoticed by the ancient fae who called the forest their home long before it was Coomb Bracket, and it is by their favor that Ully receives his heart’s desire and rises above Matt’s torment.

This one feels like a true fairy tale in its simplicity. Its uncomplicated morals and expected ending did nothing to detract from its beauty. The fae were as mischievous and mysterious and beguiling as they are in all the best fairy stories. There isn’t much for me to say about this one, other than that it feels like the sort of enchanting bedtime story that was read to you as a child, the kind that echoes in the back of your mind when you find yourself wandering through nature alone on moonless nights. Four stars.

"Toys of Tamisan" is the longer of the two novellas, which thankfully left enough room to develop the scenery. Tamisan is a skilled “dreamer,” an occupation inhabited by those who possess the skill to create vivid imaginary worlds and share them with their clientele via a psychic link. She is hired to create engaging dreams for the entertainment of the wealthy Lord Starrex and his cousin Kas, but when she attempts to build a dream world that mirrors an alternate history of their own something goes horribly wrong. She loses control of the world she has created, and is stuck within it and left to devise a way out of her own dream.

The premise of this story certainly appealed to me. I felt that the idea of a dreamer effectively enslaved to create beautiful dreams for a wealthy lord was a poignant distillation of the way that employing artisans to use their creativity in service of creating capital for a wealthy ruling class demeans human creativity as a whole. Other than that though, the story did drag along a little slowly, and after a while I found myself losing track of the plot in a way that made me care even less. This was made even worse by the fact that the ending failed to tie up several loose ends, which made me feel a little silly for even trying to follow.

What did stand out to me, however, was how well-crafted the dialogue was. I think that Norton is uniquely good at writing incisive dialogue, and this was on display in a way that made me look forward to the next line that was about to be said, regardless of where it was about to take the story. It was impressive how economically Norton uses short lines to precisely convey ideas, tone, and mood. It was enough to keep me reminded that Norton is a master of her craft regardless of how boring this story was, and for me that’s enough to elevate the story to a three out of five [Which is also what David gave it when it came out in the May 1969 IF (ed.)]

That puts us at 3.4 stars for the collection, with the two non-reprints being some of the strongest work. It's probably worth 60 cents, even if it's not the best Norton can produce.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide

February 18, 2025 Jason Sacks Leave a comment

[We've saved the best for last this month—one of these books is sure to be a pick for the Galactic Stars. Read on about this remarkable quartet of science fiction tales…]

by Jason Sacks

Time Trap, by Keith Laumer

Sometimes a back cover blurb sells a book. “ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?” the cover reads in breathless bold sans-serif type. “He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar.” Hooked yet? How about the mention on the cover of “an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniards, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…”

Yeah, you probably thought, take my 75¢ plus tax, because that’s a book I have to read. Especially if it’s scribed by the always delightful Keith Laumer, he of the wildly satirical Retief series. At the very least, Time Trap has to be readable, right?

Well, yes, Time Trap is readable, very much so in fact. I flew through its 143 pages in near lightspeed. But there’s just no there there. Time Trap is like a Big Mac: enjoyable at the time but utterly devoid of any nutrition.

Laumer’s latest is fun, sure, but maybe it’s too much fun. Because the novel is just too silly, too whimsical, too full of absurd wordplay and pointless tangents and the sense that Laumer was scripting little bits of this story between partying with friends and warming up for his next, more serious novel.

cover by Richard Powers

You know those kind of classic Twilight Zone episodes where a character leaves a place to go on a journey, only to end up at the same place they left? Laumer starts Time Trap with a scene similar to that, and I was initially intrigued. My receptors came up, the same way they do when I flick on channel 11 at 6:30 and spend some time with ol’ Rod. But Serling always gives us a twist in the tail that lays a moral lesson on us, gives us something to think about. Laumer, on the other hand, just never really builds on the idea time loop.

Instead the book turns its focus on a different guy, Roger Tyson. His crappy car breaks down on the side of a dark country road on a wretched, rainy night. When a motorist, impossibly, happens to drive down the remote road, Tyson wildly waves his hands to beckon them to stop. The driver turns out to be a girl riding alone on a powerful motorcycle. But, oh no, the cycle crashes into a heap of destruction on the side of the road. The girl is dead… but with her last words, she passes an earpiece over to Tyson.

And there his adventure begins.

It’s a wild and wooly adventure as Tyson and his pals (including the girl, Q’nell, who’s not actually dead but kind of is actually dead– it’s complicated) journey from the deep past of Earth to the far future, all over the world, dodging dinosaurs and armies and molten lava and all manner of obstacles along the way. There’s a body swap and some crazy weapons and an alien who’s a higher level being and all kinds of over-the-top silliness. And all along the way Tyson plays the fool: frightened, confused, acting like a Doctor Who companion who traveled without the Doctor.

The adventure is fun enough read episodically, one chapter per night or something. Reading it all at once was a dive into a short attention span I found exhausting. It all would have been worth it if the destination was entertaining.

But Laumer doesn’t quite nail the landing in any sort of thrilling way; instead, the book ends like one of those human- Meets-God moments which grew so tiresome on Trek (to mix my TV metaphors). The threats to wipe out all life on Earth seem a bit breathy and unconvincing, too much connected to the cliches and not quite as wackily transcendent as Laumer clearly wants them to be.

So, yeah. Time Trap. It’s goofy, silly fun. But where most of Laumer’s other comedic works are smart while also being silly, this is pure silliness. It’s a good book to read to clear your head after watching images from Vietnam on the 6:00 News, but this book probably won’t keep looping in your mind. It will likely be forgotten by the time the Twilight Zone comes on tomorrow.

3 stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

Seems Familiar

Back in 1958, Aldous Huxley published a nonfiction book that took a look back at his 1932 novel Brave New World.

Why do I bother to mention this fact, which is familiar to science fiction fans and literary mavens alike? Because a new novel by a bestselling author reminds me so much of Huxley's classic satiric dystopia that it, too, might have been called Brave New World Revisited.

This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin

Cover art by Paul Bacon.

Levin is, of course, best known for his popular novel Rosemary's Baby and the smash hit film adapted from it. Can he handle science fiction as successfully as he did horror fiction?

Some centuries from now, the world is inhabited by people who all look very much alike, with a few minor exceptions. The central authority tells folks where to live, what kind of work to do, who they should marry, and whether or not they should have children.

The populace is kept under control through the mandatory administration of drugs that keep them calm and unaggressive. Words like hate and fight are profanities. Starting at adolescence, people have sex once a week.

Television viewing, apparently for the purpose of propaganda, is a daily ritual. Everything is planned by a huge computer.
Everybody wears a bracelet that is difficult, if not impossible, to remove, and which much be scanned everywhere they go.

Our protagonist is Li RM35M4419, known as Chip. That's because his grandfather, who isn't quite as much a conformist as younger folks, thinks he resembles his great-great-grandfather, and calls him a chip off the old block.

I might note here that there are only four first names for women and an equal number for men. That symbolizes the rigidness of the society, I suppose, but it also seems like a pointless restriction.

Chip is an oddball because he has one green eye and one brown eye. Grandpa takes him to see the real computer, hidden underneath a false facade that is meant to satisfy tourists. This becomes a plot point much later in the book.

We see a lot of Chip's childhood and teen years. Suffice to say that he eventually joins up with a small group of rebels. It turns out to be really easy to avoid the constant bracelet scanning, which makes me wonder why there aren't a lot more rebels. Quite a bit later, Chip discovers a way to avoid the tranquilizing drugs. This is almost as simple as skipping the scanners. Not the most efficient totalitarian dystopia ever imagined!

There's a lot of back and forth running around, but let's sum up. Chip falls in love with one of the rebels, who has gone back to her old tranquilized ways. He kidnaps her and takes off for an island of rebels. Again, this is remarkably easy to do, but at least this time there's a reason, revealed in a plot twist.

I have to mention that Chip rapes the woman he supposedly loves. When she comes out of her drugged state, she accepts this as natural, and their romance continues. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Long and somewhat tedious climax short, Chip leads an attack on the computer, leading up to a surprising revelation as to what's really been going on. This part of the novel is very melodramatic, in sharp contrast to the rest, which is often as bland as the world in which it's set.

Neither original nor plausible, this simply isn't a very good book. It could benefit from some serious editing. Keith Laumer would have told the same story in one-third the length. Robert Sheckley would have made it more satiric. Stick to the scary stuff, Ira.

Two stars.

by Winona Menezes

Whisper from the Stars, by Jeff Sutton

cover by Paul Lehr

The year is 2231, and jet-setting science journalist Joel Blake is at the top of his field. His glamorous job has him rubbing shoulders with the brightest minds of his age, and affords him a level of comfort that rarely has him challenging the technological utopia that Earth has become thanks to the control of a world government determined to maintain peace and progress… at any cost. His easy complacency is rattled for the first time when he meets the brilliant astrophysicist Ann Willett at a party she doesn’t want to be at; her aloofness betrays a discontent with the world that he finds fascinating. All his probing yields from her is a frustration at the government’s unwillingness to fund research into any field without an immediate profit motive, leaving her feeling like a great discovery lies just beyond her reach. He’s never met a mind like hers, and he doesn't meet another until work assigns him an interview with the visionary polymath Mark Randall.

Randall’s scientific work spans multiple fields, with seemingly nothing beyond the grasp of his prodigious mind. Feeling as though he has conquered the known world of science, he has turned his attention to the unknown: dimensions beyond human perception, elongation and reversal of the passage of time. Randall and Willett immediately find kindred spirits in each other, leaving Blake to feel insignificant under the shadows of their intellects. But when the tyrannical rulers of their gilded world discover their attempts to liberate mankind from the order they’ve imposed, both scientists are forced to flee into the cosmos, and Blake is left behind to piece together their radical vision for the future of humanity.

Now, I don’t feel that this book did anything I haven’t seen before: the oppressive government, the predictable utopia, the geniuses turned space-fugitives. Randall is very much a stock genius character, as though Sutton wished to rely heavily on our shared cultural knowledge of the Sci-Fi Genius to fill in the gaps left by his sparse characterization. It's all familiar, but familiar in the way my favorite blanket is familiar. If I didn’t like this genre with all its conventions, I wouldn’t be here. No, the reason I connected with this book lay in its smaller details.

The character of Ann Willett was so interesting to me, and though she could (and should!) have been explored in greater depth, I did also get the sense that the tantalizingly sparse but dense scenes centering her character contributed to the air of mystery, the self-imposed isolation that so intrigued Blake and drew him to her. Sutton’s intimate descriptions of spaceflight were scattered with those delightfully technical imaginative flourishes that always betray a writer’s engineering background. Blake’s charmed life as a high-society journalist is simply everything I’ve ever wanted, and I brimmed with envy the entire novel.

My absolute favorite detail was Willett’s violin motif. I’ve always found it hard to put into words the way that the sound of a violin can sound so haunting to me, so profoundly lonely. It fills a room with sorrow and longing in a way to which no other sound compares, and this is the motif through which Sutton conveys Ann Willett’s loneliness. She expresses her solitude in the melodies she plays on her violin, and the invocation of violin music had such a visceral sensory effect on me that she instantly became one of the more unforgettable characters I’ve read. I was so enchanted to read Sutton put into words the lonely beauty of violin song and to know the feeling is more universal than I thought.

It was the details in Whisper From the Stars that appealed to me, minutiae small enough to pass by a reader unnoticed but which felt tailor-made to suit my sensibilities. On its face it's a good, solid, unremarkable book, but it’s so rare and wonderful to recognize so much of your own eccentricities in a book that I’m going to have to give this one four stars.

Society's Fears Made Uncannily Manifest

by Amber Dubin

The Incredible Tide, by Alexander Key

by Davis Meltzer

I cannot think of a more fitting name for Alexander Key's stunning piece of fiction than The Incredible Tide. This fast moving ride of a story immerses the reader immediately with a forcefully aggressive pace and doesn't release one's attention until it has crashed upon the shores of its abrupt conclusion. It takes what appears to be a fantastical hero in a uniquely broken world and anchors to a coming of age anti-fascistic message so masterfully that the reader truly feels the author’s societal warning.

In order to dispel all doubt that the story within is meant as a warning, Alexander Key begins The Incredible Tide with the ominous dedication “To a people unknown, of a land long lost – for surely what is written here has happened before. It depends upon us alone whether it is a reflection or a prophecy.” It is thusly that the reader embarks on the plot like a scavenger unearthing a sandy message in a bottle. Like a freshly unburied treasure, the remarkable 17 year old castaway, Conan of Orme, shakes himself loose of his seemingly unsurvivable circumstances, marooned alone on a tiny cluster of rocks with only birds as companions. It is revealed that he has endured in this solitary state for five years after a catastrophe coined “the incredible tide” drowned a previously Earth-like environment in endless water.

He is “rescued” involuntarily by elderly, frail representatives of one of the fascist factions responsible for plunging the world into this regrettable state. Once taken prisoner, it is revealed to Conan that the New World Order, an Axis-powers-like force, is still greedily fighting over the scraps of this decimated planet, clinging to the totalitarian, short-sighted ways that caused its own destruction. Thankfully, all hope is not lost because Conan and his ilk possess certain super human abilities of perception and telepathy, and they use these powers along with the sometimes equally powerful and very human capacity to love, empathize, and connect with each other and a very strong spiritual source. Conan and all his allies will need to use every opportunity they can to be able to survive and ultimately overthrow the oppressive, greedy and powerful government whose obsession with clinging to its own past threatens to doom the entire future of humanity.

In my experience of dystopian world creation, The Incredible Tide's is vague and as enshrouded in mists as their planet is presently, but I don't think this takes away from the story. I felt like the story could have been longer and the character development and relationships could have had more room to take wing, but there was also something beautiful in the story's conciseness. The way Alexander Key was able to somehow balance a Lord of the Flies-esqe uprising on one shore with a colliding tsunami of Animal Farm oppressive governmental takeover was particularly masterfully done in a short amount of pages. I was also impressed by the way he was able to communicate the absurdity of maintaining an Orwellian Big Brother police state (a la 1984) on the remains of an actively rotting planet. Intriguing too, is a moment very much reminiscent of the unheard warnings that Superman's parents conveyed to the stubborn oligarchs on the planet Krypton before their willful self-destruction; though I felt the way it was communicated here was much more gritty and frustratingly human than the comic book version.

Overall I found The Incredible Tide to be an awe-inspiring, page-turning, and unique adventure that deserves a singular place alongside many other powerful works of dystopian fiction, and I'm rather pleased to see another heavy-hitting ominous warning make it into the 70s, as it has been decades since we've seen such cautionary tales as were more commonplace in the 40s and 50s.

5 stars

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Movies

[January 24, 1970] War: Individualism and Insubordination (Patton and MA*SH)

January 24, 2025 Jason Sacks 4 Comments

by Jason Sacks

War is on everybody’s minds these days as the controversies around the Vietnam War rage on.

Two new films, Patton and M*A*S*H, provide complex and nuanced views of war. These two films contrast strikingly, overlapping with some ideas, but dramatically far from each other with others.

The two films also present a complete contrast in look and feel. Patton has a traditional roadhouse production look and feel. But the film isn't stiff – it celebrates the quirkiness and depth of its lead character, making it a surprisingly complex film whose revolution rests with General Patton, himself. M*A*S*H focuses on the eccentricities of its lead characters but is surprisingly conservative in terms of gender roles and expectations. In its filming and style, however, M*A*S*H is like nothing we've seen before.

Following the General

Patton, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, stands as an epic portrayal of one of the most controversial and enigmatic military figures of World War II, General George S. Patton. The film not only delivers a stunning performance by George C. Scott but also delves into deeper themes that reflect the complexity of war and the man who seemingly thrived in it.

General George S. Patton, a larger-than-life figure with an unyielding belief in his destiny to lead and conquer, appears almost mythic in his determination and ferocity. Yet, within this portrayal, there's an underlying tragedy – Patton is depicted as a man out of his time, someone whose ideals and mannerisms belong to an era long past.

Patton: A Man Out of Time

Patton’s character is deeply rooted in the ethos of classical warfare, where personal glory and valor were the hallmarks of a military hero. He draws inspiration from historical military figures and battles, often romanticizing the past and seeing himself as a continuation of a warrior tradition. This is evident from his astounding opening speech, where he declares, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser."

Throughout the film, Patton’s anachronistic views are at odds with the modern world. His reverence for discipline, his belief in reincarnation, and his disdain for weakness are portrayed as attributes of a bygone era. In a poignant scene, he compares himself to a gladiator, reflecting his belief that he is fighting not just a modern war but a timeless battle of wills.

Patton’s rigid adherence to these antiquated ideals often puts him at odds with his contemporaries. His confrontational and abrasive leadership style contrasts sharply with the more politically astute and strategic approaches of his peers. This tension culminates in moments where his actions, though tactically brilliant, are questioned for their diplomatic and ethical implications.

General Patton at home in some Italian military ruins

Pro-War Elements in Patton

The film does not shy away from showcasing the pro-war elements that define Patton's character. His speeches and actions glorify the warrior spirit and the thrill of battle. He revels in the chaos of war, viewing the battlefield as the ultimate test of character and leadership. Patton’s relentless pursuit of victory, his insistence on pushing his troops beyond their limits, and his disdain for those who falter, all underscore a pro-war narrative that valorizes aggression and tenacity.

A significant pro-war element is the depiction of Patton’s belief in destiny and divine guidance. He sees himself as an instrument of fate, chosen to lead and conquer. This almost messianic conviction drives him to extraordinary feats of leadership, inspiring his troops to achieve seemingly impossible victories. His charisma and unwavering confidence create a sense of inevitability about his success, reinforcing the idea that war, for him, is a stage where great men prove their worth.

Director Schaffner with actor Scott

Anti-War Elements in Patton

Yet, the film is not a one-dimensional glorification of war. Director Schaffner and writers Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North present a nuanced view that also highlights the anti-war elements intrinsic to Patton’s story. The personal costs of Patton’s relentless drive for victory are evident in the toll it takes on those around him. His relationships are strained, his subordinates are pushed to their breaking points, and his superiors are often exasperated by his unyielding nature.

The film also critiques the destructive consequences of Patton’s actions. His obsession with glory and his impatience often leads to reckless decisions that jeopardize lives and missions. He is a man who hates what he sees as cowardice. He refuses to believe in battle fatigue. In fact, one of the most infamous incidents in Pattton’s career – and in this film – happens when he strikes a shell-shocked soldier. Victory is the crucial goal, no matter that a victory without human honor is disgraceful.

Patton has the long view of any military adventure.

Moreover, the film portrays the political and moral dilemmas of warfare. Patton’s disdain for diplomacy and his confrontational attitude often clash with the broader strategic goals of the Allies. His near-dismissal for insubordination highlights the tensions between individual heroism and collective responsibility. The film underscores the notion that war is not just a series of battles but a complex interplay of politics, ethics, and human cost.

This film’s portrayal of Patton raises important questions about the nature of leadership and the morality of war. It invites viewers to consider whether greatness in war justifies the personal and ethical compromises that come with it. Patton’s character serves as a lens through which the audience can explore the dualities of war: its capacity to elevate and destroy, to inspire and to devastate.

Patton’s presentation

Patton was filmed in a process called Dimension 150, similar to the old Todd A-O process which allowed extreme widescreen films (with a ratio of 2.25:1) to be shown with standard projectors. But as you know if you live in a big city, Patton is being marketed as a roadshow experience like The Sound of Music or Lawrence of Arabia.

Just look at that glorious widescreen image!

This results in Patton having a true epic feel: battle scenes feel titanic and powerful, filled from edge to edge with soldiers struggling through the mud or firing their rifles. It’s a powerful effect, though a dramatic contrast to our national character at the dawn of this decade. This approach reinforces the “great man” feeling of George Patton as a titan astride the fights he unleashes. It also helps to make him feel like a dinosaur.

Suicide is Painless

M*A*S*H, on the other hand, feels as fresh as this week’s underground newspaper—irreverent and dismissive, full of tangents and wild moments. Patton may feel like a dinosaur, but Hawkeye, Trapper John, Painless Dentist, Nurse Hot Lips and the rest feel like people who just walked off the street in your home town.

There are acres of mud in Patton, but the world of M*A*S*H feels even muddier. Set in a military unit during the Korean War but clearly paralleling the Vietnam War, director Robert Altman delivers a film which feels like a revolution – even if its characters sometimes reinforce conservative values.

The Revolutionary Approach

M*A*S*H has rightly been celebrated for its unconventional and groundbreaking approach to filmmaking. One of the most striking features is Altman’s use of overlapping dialogue and improvisation. This technique not only adds a layer of realism but also enhances the chaotic and unpredictable nature of life in a wartime medical unit. The characters speak over each other, conversations blend together, and the audience is plunged into the midst of the chaos. Patton allows characters to make speeches. M*A*S*H doesn’t want speeches.

A word here about the script: Ring Lardner Jr. is credited as the scriptwriter, adapting Richard Hooker’s novel. As I mentioned in a recent review, Lardner was one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters who were blacklisted by the Hollywood system for their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. It’s an act of heroism to give Lardner work today, and a great sign of the changes to American politics. I do wonder how much of this film Lardner actually scripted – M*A*S*H feels thoroughly improvised – but I welcome seeing his name again.

Appropriately, M*A*S*H shuns the typical heroic combat narrative. Instead of glorifying war, M*A*S*H presents it as absurd and grotesque. The surgeons, led by the irreverent Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould), cope with the horrors of war through dark humor, practical jokes, and general insubordination. The anti-establishment sentiment that runs through the film mirrors our own countercultural movements of the 1960s, making it resonant. Patton’s insubordination is internal; the insubordination in M*A*S*H is societal.

This insubordination makes M*A*S*H feel thoroughly contemporary. Everybody hates the army, its inflexibility, command structure, even its jeeps and the terrible movies it provides to the troops. Not even the intercom works as expected (the intercom also serves as a kind of Greek chorus for the film, an unexpected bit of meta-humor). I also found the insubordination to be thoroughly hilarious.

Altman’s use of non-linear storytelling and episodic structure further sets M*A*S*H apart. The film lacks a traditional plot, instead unfolding as a series of vignettes that illustrate the day-to-day lives of the characters. This approach allows for a more nuanced and multifaceted exploration of the war’s impact on individuals, eschewing the neat resolutions and moral clarity often found in war films.

Trapper John and Hawkeye conning and confusing a helicopter pilot

Individualism is at the center of everything Altman creates with his cast. None of these people are simple grunts manning their job. Instead, all the characters in the film, even those on the edges of the frame, feel like unique human beings. It even feels as if the movie could focus on those characters without sacrificing what makes this movie unique.

Revolution in Style, not Society

Despite its innovative approach, M*A*S*H is deeply conservative in its portrayal of the sexes. The film’s treatment of its female characters is troublesome. Women in M*A*S*H are largely depicted as objects of desire or sources of comic relief, reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes rather than challenging them.

Take, for example, the character of Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, played by Sally Kellerman (Star Trek and Outer Limits). She is portrayed as a rigid, by-the-book officer who becomes the target of the male characters’ ridicule and pranks. The already-infamous shower scene, where her tent is lifted to expose her naked body to the entire camp, is a particularly glaring instance of the film’s sexist undertones. This scene is played for laughs, reducing Houlihan to a mere object of male amusement and stripping her of dignity.

The entire camp of the MASH unit mocks Major Houlihan

Furthermore, the film’s male characters frequently objectify and demean their female counterparts. Nurse Lt. Dish, for instance, is referred to more by her physical attributes than by her professional capabilities. The interactions between male and female characters often revolve around sexual innuendo or outright harassment, reflecting a chauvinistic attitude all too common in both the military and society then (and, of course, now).

This presents an interesting paradox for director Altman. Many reviewers rightly lauded Altman for his complex and nuanced portrayal of a female lead in his previous film, That Cold Day in the Park. M*A*S*H critiques many aspects of military life and the absurdity of war but does little to challenge the status quo regarding gender dynamics.

The only defense I can muster to that attack is to note how M*A*S*H shows a mostly male world at the hospital. Nearly all the officers are men, and all the injured are all men. Therefore, a male attitude prevailed at camp. M*A*S*H takes place in the early 1950s, when women had recently been sent back from factories and battlefields to the kitchen and motherhood. It was a conservative era in terms of gender roles, and male chauvinism was pervasive. Surely M*A*S*H would feel strange if women, even well-trained nurses, were treated as equals.

Col. Blake is the only one who treats Houlihan as even slightly equal to him – but he is an ineffectual goof.

The film’s humor, often at the expense of its female characters, underscores a broader societal acceptance of sexist behavior. In this sense, M*A*S*H may be revolutionary in its approach to storytelling and its anti-war message, but it remains entrenched in conservative views on gender roles.

Which is the conservative film?

M*A*S*H is a reminder of the limitations of our era’s progressive movement. While the film challenges many societal norms and offered a fresh perspective on war, it offers a discordant view in its representation of women, reflecting the broader struggles of the feminist movement as we enter the 1970s.

In fact, I adore M*A*S*H. I walked out of the theatre on an emotional high from seeing the film much like the high I get after seeing a great rock concert (I still think about that Blind Faith/Delaney & Bonnie show at the Seattle Center Coliseum last fall!) M*A*S*H feels like the revolution. It feels like the future. It feels like a new generation of film and I can’t wait to see what Robert Altman delivers next.

Altman directing Gould and Sutherland

But Patton was also a movie that really shook me, particularly the oddly naïve ways General Patton strove for glory. General Patton may have been a figure from my parents’ generation, but his attitudes and life philosophy were surprisingly nuanced in the hands of George C. Scott, Franklin J. Schaffner and the writers.

The characters in M*A*S*H could come of the streets of any American town. George Patton was one of those men who seemed like he could only succeed in war.

Both films provided me experiences I’ve never had before in a movie theatre.

Five stars for each.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 18, 1970] Below par (The Long Loud Silence, Sex and the High Command, Beachhead Planet, and Taurus Four)

January 18, 2025 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

by Gideon Marcus

The Long Loud Silence, by Wilson Tucker

It's been a while since we've heard from Wilson Tucker, fan-turned-pro-but-still-very-much-a-fan. Hence, I was delighted to see that he had a new book out last month. Except, of course, it's not new at all, as I soon found out.

The story: Corporal Russell Gary, Fifth Army, veteran of "Viet Nam" and now Stateside on a recruiting stint, has gone on a bender for his 30th birthday. When he wakes up in a seedy motel room in a small town outside of Chicago, he finds that everyone in town is dead. Several days dead.

Turns out that some unnamed enemy has ravaged the American northeast with atomic fire and plague. Within 48 hours, almost everyone east of the Mississippi has died. West of the river, what's left of the country has set up a nationwide blockade, ensuring that the pestilence remains contained. No attempt is made to give succor to the thousands of Americans who have proven immune to the diseases.

Silence follows Gary as he braves the increasing barbarism until he can make his way back to civilization. Not a particularly bright nor sympathetic character, but with the instinct and training for survival, he partners up when convenient, kills without compunction when advantageous. He never becomes a brave hero or a romantic figure. Aside from a brief reference to New Orleans' straggling along, there are no enclaves of east-bank recovery. This is a holocaust from which no one is trying to rebuild. Just bands of increasingly hungry and desperate marauders, of which Gary is simply the one Tucker chooses to make his viewpoint.

There is no happy ending—indeed, there can't be. Gary is a disease carrier. The western United States has abandoned the east, and the east is a rotting corpse. And so, we have a story that starts like Andromeda Strain, continues like Alas, Babylon, and ends like a sour version of Spawn of the Death Machine.

Per the copyrights page, The Long Loud Silence originally came out in 1952, and was "specially revised and updated" for this release. That sparked my curiosity—how adroitly would Tucker handle the modernization? 17 years is a fair stretch, so it didn't seem like a slap of paint would be sufficient.

It wasn't. The story feels very much of its time (right around the time I got into science fiction, actually). There are no hippies, no reference to television. Lots of talk about radio and movies. The attack on the country is localized, believed to have been launched from Greenland…because ICBMs hadn't been invented yet. I'm pretty sure the Soviets now have missiles that can hit any part of the country. Certainly the new Russian bombers could hit Los Angeles as easily as New York. There's also a point in the book where a misprinted dogtag is an issue, and the implication is that it dates to the early 40s, which would match if Gary had been a WW2 war vet, which (having gotten a copy of the '52 release) it looks like he originally was. In fact, comparing the two versions, it looks like Gary's war background is the only change.

Setting that aside, and just reading "Europe" for "Viet Nam", how is the book? Well, it reads extremely well up through page 81. Gary teams up with interesting characters, including a fellow soldier/school-teacher, a jewel-mad girl named Irma, and a starving refugee named Sally. Seeing the ravaged geography and following the details of survival are compelling. The abortive probes of the Mississippi are exciting and tragic.

But after that, not only does Gary become more and more unlikable, but the author keeps repeating himself, copying whole passages from earlier in the book. The story just isn't long enough to need reminders like that.

I do appreciate that Tucker was willing to write an anti-hero, gritty and realistic. On the other hand, it means the narrative and the message of Silence is necessarily limited. The journey is interesting, but it doesn't say much other than that everyone is something of a bastard, civilized or otherwise.

Still, I actually finished the book, and quickly, which is more than I can say for the other two books I received last month.*

3.5 stars.

*The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon, is about a planet settled by a generation ship. There are three factions: the greens, espousing the terraforming of the world; the blues, espousing adaptation of humans to the world; the yellows, asserting that landing was a mistake. The yellows were right, but the totalitarian government doesn't want to hear about it. I lost interest around page 40.

*Star Giant, by Dorothy E. Skinkle, is about a seven foot humanoid alien genius who is exiled to Earth. It was too juvenile and silly for me.

by George Pritchard

Sex and the High Command, by John Boyd

I used to know a follower of Aleister Crowley, back in California. A little flighty and blustering, like most of his sect, but he told me something that’s stuck with me ever since:

“If you can't be good, be bad.”

That is a phrase that was in my mind throughout reading Sex and the High Command, the new novel by John Boyd. His last novel, The Rakehells of Heaven, was reviewed last year by Victoria Silverwolf. She described it as "an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke." This novel is much the same, although it has far more dirty jokes than blasphemy. Dedicated “For Aristophanes and Lenny Bruce”.

Ugh. We haven’t even started the book and I’m already rolling my eyes.

by Paul Lehr

Our story follows Navy Captain Benjamin Hansen, captain of the UNS Chattahoochee, bringing his crew to Norfolk, VA, after eighteen months in Antarctica. But the docks are strangely peaceful…

It transpires that a peculiar new drug from California called Vita-Lerp is allowing women to orgasm without the involvement of a man. I have it on good authority that this is possible without drugs, but Vita-Lerp also allows for “self-childbirth” — women are able to reproduce independently, although it seems to result in no boy children being born to those women. Dr. "Mother" Carey, who developed Vita-Lerp, is also president of a movement called the FEMs, which has created cells through women’s meetings and book clubs. These cells have also taught the women “New Logic” and “New Grammar”, which puts a feminine ending on all masculine nouns, and has only female and “neuter” genders.

To help defend against the obsolescence of men, Captain Hansen is brought into the confidence of the highest offices of US power, as well as a crewman of his, Chief Water Tender McCormick. The latter has been chosen for President against Dr. Carey, as he is “Lothario X”, the ideal lover. In return, he asks for a wife of his own, one guaranteed to be “uncorrupted” by the FEMs movement. According to him, ”’I’m not particular, sir. I just want me some pretty little mountain doozy, not over eighteen, with a good shape, who can cook crackling bread.’”

(I’ve never understood that, the belief that women are most desirable when they’re teenagers. Everyone is so awkward and gangly, and pimply besides.)

A man named John Pope is sent to find the woman in question. He is a man’s man, and is the most likeable character in the book by a fair margin. However, not long after he completes his mission, Pope is killed by a prostitute and framed to look as if he died while having sex with another man. Is that the worst fate in the world? Is that the only context in which homosexual love can be imagined by this author?

It is discovered that Vita-Lerp may be used as a rectal suppository, and allows men to become women. The remaining men immediately accept the transformed person as "she” and a woman, an enlightened attitude which is surprising, given how stupid everything has been up to now. Speaking of which, Hansen is eventually taxidermied as an example of the now-extinct male species.

I have had real trouble writing this review, because I couldn’t decide how to go about it. Do I address it as science fiction? As a comedy? If the latter, what humor is there? If I am unable to understand the humor, what conclusions can I draw from the book itself?

”After the ceremony, Dr. Carey’s all-girl crew got the yacht away from the dock at Newport News with a minimum of scraped paint and the loss of only one bollard off the dock.”

Is this funny? I know that there is a stereotype of women not being able to drive well, but I think that is a matter of the limited practice time often afforded them. Beyond the plot’s suggestion of Lysistrata (a play by Aristophanes about women denying their warring husbands sex until they negotiate peace), there doesn’t seem to be much to suggest Aristophanes' wit, either.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it’s never boring. I always was interested in learning what happened next, no matter how stupid or silly.

If you can’t be good, be bad.

Two stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover

Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Let's see; this sure looks like it's a sword-and-sorcery yarn, with a mighty-thewed hero and a dragon. Too bad that has nothing at all to do with what's between the covers. More false advertising, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, let's take a look inside and see what we've got.

Beachhead Planet, by Robert Moore William

We begin at an abandoned gold mine and ghost town that have been changed into a tourist attraction. A guy wearing nothing but a pair of torn shorts runs out of the mine. A ten-foot-tall monster with two heads blasts him with something that causes him to explode from the inside out. There's also a helicopter full of tourists, so old Two Heads blasts them, too.

That gets the reader's attention, anyway. We next meet our hero, a brilliant scientist who has a vast organization working for him. Among his employees are a guy who tells fortunes with a deck of cards and a woman who uses a crystal ball.

Why all this mystical stuff? It seems this guy also uses psychic methods to figure things out. He and his colleagues have a way of looking into their minds, kind of like mediation, and getting glimpses of the future.

Anyway, a military officer shows up and asks our hero to check things out at the site of the helicopter disaster. Heading for the same place, but separately, are two of his associates, a statuesque woman and a ape-like fellow.

(At this point, I was reminded of the old Doc Savage yarns that Bantam Books has been reprinting as slim paperbacks for the past few years. In a lot of ways, this new novel harks back to the pulp magazines of the 1930's.)

From this point on, the chapters alternate between the hero and his two pals. Suffice to say that they all get captured and wind up underground. Besides the two-headed monsters, we've got small robot miners and a bunch of kidnapped humans brainwashed by invisible aliens intent on taking over the world. Did I mention that there's also a Mad Scientist and his Beautiful Daughter?

At times, I thought the author was pulling my leg. There's a fair amount of teasing banter between the hero's two friends, and constant arguments between the monster's two heads. Then there's the scene in which the hero and the Beautiful Daughter keep their conversation secret from the aliens by speaking in Pig Latin . . .

This is a very silly book. Despite what I've said above, I can't really call it a satire or a comedy, because there's also some pretty gruesome violence. It's a quick read, and too goofy to be boring, but hardly worth slapping down four bits at your local drug store.

Two stars.

by Jason Sacks

Taurus Four, by Rena Vale

When writing reviews, it’s generally a good habit to separate the writer from the work. We reviewers have a responsibility to consider a book or story based on the quality of its writing, characterization and themes. We feel obligated not to fixate on a writer’s personal life nor on their political beliefs. Whether that creator supports Reagan or Brown, McCarthy or Nixon, is less important than their ability to write a compelling piece of fiction.

That’s true unless their personal life or political philosophy fuels their fiction – and most especially if that fiction is propaganda for that writer's philosophy.

Taurus Four by Rena Vale is a work of propaganda which shows the true colors of its author. This novel is sexist, pro-colonial, anti-Women’s Lib, anti-hippie, anti-Communist propaganda. Its author is one of the more repulsive creatures to be part of California’s political scene since World War II.

Those are strong words, I know, but please hear why I say them.

Rena Vale has been associated for many years with the work of the California Un-American Activities Committee (CUAC), even into the last decade. She has actively worked against the efforts of anti-War protesters, framed the questions the CUAC used to interrogate their witnesses, and painted the Free Speech Movement a communist plot.

Book cover, with the title 'The Red Court, The Story of the Revolution to Come' appearing to be partly scratched in relief of a blood spatter, all printed in scare red — Rena Vale's 1952 treatise on the evils of Communism

Vale has the feeling of a zealot, because she was a convert away from Communism. During the 1930s, she briefly joined the Communist Party, attending meetings alongside luminaries as John Steinbeck, but she felt pushed out by sexist Party members. Vale believed Steinbeck’s research into The Grapes of Wrath demonstrated that the acclaimed author was looking to advocate communism. Vale even claimed that in 1936, while still dabbling with Communist Party membership, she attended a Party meeting at the home of Lucille Ball. Yes, Rena Vale believes Lucille Ball is a Communist.

Vale, in short, is a conspiracy theorist who sees an evil Communist around every corner and a traitorous subversive behind every anti-War protester. She tracked civil rights activists as early as 1963, cataloging the daily lives of members of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination, the Berkeley Peace Center, the Free Speech Movement and other Northern California organizations into a massive compilation of detailed information which might have rivaled that of the national HUAC.

Thus Vale has a significant and long-lasting role in the anti-Communist crusade. That crusade led to loyalty oaths, repression of free speech, and to groups like the Hollywood Ten, skilled screenwriters whom studios denied employment (in fact, I'm reviewing the 'comeback' film for one of those blacklisted writers later this month. Ring Lardner Jr. is credited as the screenwriter of the new film M*A*S*H).

Vale is an avowed anti-Communist. She's a woman who makes her living through the organized and brutal oppression of those who disagree with her.

Vale believes science fiction can be used as propaganda to further her repugnant beliefs. And though science fiction has been used for propaganda since at least the days of H.G. Wells (see The Shape of Things to Come, among other works by him), authors must demonstrate some real grace to make that propaganda compelling.

Cover by Robert Foster. It has has absolutely nothing to do with the book.

There is little grace in Taurus Four. The propaganda is not compelling. I think this brief excerpt will give you a bit of an idea of why I was repulsed rather than compelled by the ideas in this novel.

To communicate, to permit one’s self to become involved emotionally with alien creatures, brought doubt of the total rightness of Earth and Mankind. Did the strong and virile men of the American old West (sic) ever doubt the rightness of white Yankees in pushing westward to the Pacific Ocean? Were there any among them who had the bad judgment to listen to the redman’s tale of woe? If so, history obliterated them. History recorded the words of the strong, not those of the weaklings who fell by the wayside.

Taurus Four is peppered with ideas and phrases like that fragment. At its base in her novel is the pessimistic thought – pessimistic to Vale anyway – that at the end of the Cold War, the Soviets “dictated fashion as well as many other social, political and scientific customs,” that Soviet supremacy “was accepted and [it] became a matter of historical record that the ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ countries were decadent, the people degenerating into pulpy softness.”

From that world we meet our protagonist, Dorian Frank XIV, a pudgy and henpecked 32-year-old “space sociologist” from that soft society who can’t even pilot his landing vessel correctly. Frank crash-lands his ship on Taurus Four, and rather than obey orders and stay close to his ship, Frank decides to wander off in search of food.

More concerned with protecting his tender feet and avoiding sunburns than with prudence, Dorian eventually finds himself in a strange village settled by descendants of 1960s San Francisco war protesters. Those people have gone wild in the 300 years since their ship landed on this distant world: living naked, not cutting their hair or nails, descending into a kind of pidgin English, and eating only fruit from the sacred “manna” tree. They are ruled by a cruel and despotic leader who orders sacrifices to a native god.

While most of the members of the tribe resemble American Indians, the chief’s daughter looks more European-descended: her “skin was almost white instead of the reddish tan of the others; her hair was fine and pale, muscles firm, stomach flat and breasts perfect.”

The girl, Teeda, is racially superior to her peers from a colonial standpoint, which helps cause Dorian to fall for her – despite the fact she’s just 14 years old. Yes, this girl has a man twice her age admiring her breasts (I feel a little sick just quoting that line). But that sexualization is all fine in the context of the novel because, well, the couple barely even kiss before Dorian is rescued. And even beyond that, Teela is hard-wired for the traditional work of women. Despite the fact she’s lived naked all her life, when asked to wash clothes she embraces the work: “I wash now. I think I do more better than you.’ He laughed. ‘It's instinctive I guess—something carried in the genes that makes women want to wash clothes!”

photo of a pair of typewritten cards bearing a C.V. — An example of the cards Vale maintained as part of CUAC, this shows how John Steinbeck's activities were tracked.

Frank adopts a paternalistic approach to Teeda – perhaps logical since she is practically young enough to be his daughter. But he also takes a paternalistic approach to the colonists, embracing a James T. Kirk-style approach to upending their peaceful life and introducing chaos and worry into a long-stable existence. Of course, this peaceful society embraced communal property, lack of individual rights, and a feverish devotion to their absolute monarch. All those attributes could be found in the Soviet Union, so by definition they are evil philosophies which must be destroyed.

Therefore Frank, quickly coming into his own as an aggressive man who has even lost his baby fat, is the logical man to redeem these primitive people. He grows into a true Colonial whose mission becomes the need to modernize the natives’ civilization. Frank won't listen to "the redman's tale of woe."

I’ve already written 1000 words on this essay, and I hope my points here are cogent. But I’d like to note one more thing: this book is just not well written.

Oh, sure, Vale is literate. Her sentences aren’t too long, and her settings are vivid enough. But she struggles badly with characterization, she writes a pathetically clichéd villain, and the details of this world are sketchy at best. Over and over, I found myself slightly compelled by a hint of gracefulness in Taurus Four, only to become overwhelmed by bland events of political grandstanding or a disgusting glimpse into her politics.

The book feels amateurish, like the work of someone who understands the mechanics of writing but has no idea of its skills. Since she is 72 years old, I don’t expect Rena Vale to improve.

This is not a good book, and I can’t recommend it. Furthermore, I don’t want Vale to receive another penny of anybody’s money.

1 star.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 28, 1969] Cinemascope: Two if by Sea, Three if by Space! (Captain Nemo and the Underwater City and Marooned)

December 28, 2024 Jason Sacks Leave a comment

by Fiona Moore

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City

I had low expectations for Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, thinking it would be a bit of enjoyably fluffy escapism. For the most part this is true, but it does have a few things to recommend it beyond that.

Poster for Captain Nemo and the Underwater City

The Nautilus rescues a small band of survivors from a shipwreck, and takes them to, yes, an underwater city founded by Captain Nemo (Robert Ryan) called Templemer (everyone pronounces it Temple-mere, which makes it sound like a small town in the Home Counties or possibly a plantation in the Old South). They include a plucky and intelligent widow (Nanette Newman) with a young son (Christopher Hartstone), a rugged-faced American senator (Chuck Connors), two comedy Cockney wide-boys (Bill Fraser and Kenneth Connor), a cute and suspiciously well-behaved kitten (name unknown), and an engineer who is clearly about to go over the edge of sanity (Allan Cuthbertson).

Templemer is a utopian community where food and drink and education are free, everyone lives their best lives, and gold is as common as steel is for us. At this point I rolled my eyes, expecting that the surface people would all decide that There’s No Place Like Home and plot to escape this perfectly decent hippie paradise; however, in fact, the newcomers are divided on that point, and their reasons for wanting to leave or stay are all in character and plausible.

Nemo's guests are less than thrilled at their accommodation.

The movie explores the frequently-asked question of our time: whether it’s better to engage with the problems of society or just to tune in, turn on and drop out, building a better world outside instead. Nemo and his cohorts have definitely chosen the latter, while Senator Fraser’s reason for wanting to return to the surface is to do the former. The story explicitly takes place at the time of the American Civil War, and Nemo has undergone an ethnic shift to become an American. This gives the implication that Nemo is rejecting his own country’s troubles by retreating to Templemer and, consequently, inviting comparisons with the modern USA (and with Ryan himself, well known as a pacifist and an outspoken critic of the American government). Although the movie seems to want us to side with Senator Fraser, I personally remain unconvinced.

There's also some nice modelwork, even if it's often hard to see.

Of course, there are a lot of preposterous things that are overlooked or else are simply there to drive the story along. There’s a giant manta ray for our heroes to fight, which I suppose is a change from the usual giant squid. There’s only the briefest explanation of where Templemer’s population come from. The engineer’s mental collapse is so heavily telegraphed that I kept wishing someone would try and help the poor man rather than let him become another plot complication. There’s also a very long and very boring sequence where Nemo shows his guests around Templemer’s undersea farming setup, which contributes little to the story and isn’t particularly engaging and mostly seems to be there to show off the fact that MGM spent money for an expensive and complicated underwater shoot.

In short, I wouldn’t urge you to rush out and see it, but if it’s on at your local cinema and you have time to kill during the holidays, you could do worse. Two and a half stars.

by Jason Sacks

Marooned

What if the real heroes of NASA weren’t the astronauts but instead the ground crew? What if the astronauts were all either bland or jerks, while Mission Control were all brave, steadfast problem solvers to a man? What if a movie with those premises promised a thrilling story but delivered leaden action?

Imagine that movie, and you’ll get something like Marooned, a new film from director John Sturges seemingly released to capitalize on America’s fascination with the space program and our incipient worries about space failures. We might expect Marooned to be a thrilling and au courant film about man's perils in space. But Marooned is more concerned with the men on the ground than the men in space. That fact helps make for a slow trudge of a film.

As the film begins, three astronauts played by Richard Crenna (The Real McCoys, Slattery's People, The Sand Pebbles), James Franciscus (The Investigators) and Gene Hackman (Hawaii, Bonny and Clyde) have completed their assignment to spend several months working in an orbiting laboratory. As the pilots begin their efforts to return to Earth, however, they find the thrusters malfunctioning on their rocket. It will take a heroic effort from the ground crew, led by Gregory Peck (needs no introduction) and David Janssen (The Fugitive), to return the astronauts to Earth. But will that dedicated crew succeed before oxygen runs out in the space capsule? And how will a hurricane at Cape Kennedy affect the rescue efforts?

It's an intriguing narrative for a movie (not to mention a book), and it's certainly very on-target for our country’s current obsessions. Marooned had the promise to be something pretty special; instead, it is a conservative, hide-bound, badly-acted failure.

Much of the film’s failure comes from an odd decision by the filmmakers: instead of focusing on the astronauts, the film spotlights their ground crew, particularly the efforts of their brave leader, Gregory Peck, to save the spacemen. In theory this could be a logical approach to the story which harnessed celebrity charisma to add seriousness to the rescue effort. Peck is a longstanding, proven screen presence. He gives the film a feeling of gravitas. But, come on, film fans: would you rather watch Gregory Peck struggle though rescue contingencies or spend more time with the astronauts trying to come up with plans? Without Cronkite (or even Chet and David) to spice things up, I can't imagine an audience is interested in watching the efforts of a bunch of white-shirt-and-tie men reading long lists of protocols off checklists, scene after tedious scene.

All that focus on protocols makes the film feel slow. But that very same slowness feels like a deliberate approach to the story. This is a workmanlike film which focuses on the amazing power of bureaucracy to solve complex problems. Solving these problems takes time, and it’s important to be able to be systematic and mark important items off a checklist. If only this movie had been cut to a crisp 90 minutes, the filmmakers’ gambit might have worked. Instead, Marooned is sluggish.

Peck seems to phone his role in. The intended gravitas from his role comes across more as torpor than as professionalism. Janssen and Franciscus bring their usual decent TV-level acting to their roles. But Hackman is especially badly selected for his role – his character, Buzz Lloyd, is impulsive and self-centered. Viewers grow tired of Buzz's histrionics and wonder how in the world someone like that made it through astronaut school. It's surprising to see Hackman perform so poorly after he recently delivered fine performances in Bonnie and Clyde and Downhill Racer, so hopefully this was just an anomaly. With his rugged good looks, Hackman looks more like a cop than an astronaut.

The film offers viewers a few small moments with the astronauts' wives. Those moments perhaps convey the most sense of the astronauts' peril, since the wives are allowed to actually emote. Veteran actresses Lee Grant (Peyton Place, In the Heat of the Night), Mariette Hartley (Star Trek: All Our Yesterdays) and Nancy Kovack (Star Trek: A Private Little War) have all done good work in the past. Here they are called upon to do little more than look concerned and show a little attitude. The actresses actually execute their assignments with aplomb. I especially enjoyed Kovack's frustrated resignation about the life she signed up for as the wife of an astronaut. She conveys a lot in small gestures and facial expressions.

The ending, again slow, is genuinely captivating nonetheless, and takes a few surprising twists. I became very invested in this film in its last 20 minutes and wish we had more scenes like these. Though it was a bit hard to root for these dull men to be rescued, the attention to detail around astrophysics and international cooperation were stellar.

John Sturges is usually an excellent director of action movies – see Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven or The Great Escape. But he probably shouldn’t have journeyed into space with our boring astronauts. Marooned just never comes alive like The Magnficent Seven did: the characters never popped, the action never coruscated, and the direction lacked flash.

But there’s a deeper problem here as well. One of the reasons The Great Escape was such a smash hit was that many viewers could see themselves in the zealous Steve McQueen, endlessly looking to escape his prison life. McQueen’s Virgil Hilts felt like a counterculture hero on the run, not dissimilar to the characters in Easy Rider or Bonnie and Clyde. But Marooned is a conservative, conventional movie. Its message is to trust the government, pray for the best to happen, and follow rules. Marooned is a film for Nixon’s Silent Majority and feels woefully out of place next to this year’s big hit films like Butch Cassidy, Midnight Cowboy, and Goodbye, Columbus.

Two stars.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 16, 1969] Holiday haul (Black Corridor and the December Galactoscope)

December 16, 2024 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

We have a fine sextet of science fiction books for you this month: largely readable, with two clunkers and one superior read…

by Gideon Marcus

Ace Double 66160

Earthrim, by Nick Kamin

by Panos Koutrouboussis

A generation or two from now, the Earth is recovering from a devastating war between the Western World and the Chinasian alliance. At first, the latter was winning, surging into Australia and with a plan to cross the Bering Strait. Then things bogged down. Eschewing the use of nuclear weapons (for an unexplained reason), the death rate became fantastic.

One day, the war just stopped. Or, more specifically, someone stopped them. Sounds like a positive development, but whoever did it is now exerting dictatorial control over the globe, futzing with governments, economies, even population growth rates and somehow slowing the age of human maturity!

Now, a decade after the war, Michael Standard, a battered veteran of the Australian front, is the one man who can stop the war-stopper. He is equipped with a prosthetic arm which is set to fire its hand like a cannon when face to face with the entity who styles himself "The Rim".

In many ways, Earthrim is a conventional action yarn, not too different from the series hero paperbacks like the new "Executioner" series. Standard is an irascible brute who lurches from fight to fight, surviving by animal cunning and will to live. The world Nick Kamin (a new author) creates is not particularly visionary. There is one lady character, and she is a prostitute, existing for the sole purpose of 1) being Standard's lover, and 2) getting Standard to Rim.

But Kamin does some interesting stuff. He begins the story with a compelling hook: Standard is put under to have his prosthetic arm's shoulder put back into its socket, which brings a hapless doctor into the plot. Then we get scenes from Standard's past, woven in quite deftly, making his character more interesting and his personality a bit more palatable (though how he acts like a moron most of the time, but can whip out an erudite observation on topology is a bit strange).

The other characters are actually well drawn, from Jeannine the prostitute to Dr. Graystone. Even the cops on the trail of Standard get decently fleshed out, though their role is somewhat incidental. Kamin is also a compelling author. He's got the modern style down pat, and the lurid mode works well for Ace Doubles.

The biggest problem with the book is the revelation at the end that no character has exercised free will. Everything that happens is ultimately the will of Rim or Condliffe, the fellow who equipped Standard with the arm-gun. The journey is interesting. The writing is good. But the story is a steel lattice that the characters can only inhabit, not change.

Three and a half stars.

Phoenix Ship, by Leigh and Walt Richmond

by Jack Gaughan

The Richmond husband-and-wife team (supposedly, the wife does the typing, with the husband sending telepathic instructions from his living room easy chair) has another Ace Double for us. Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald (S.T.A.R.) Dustin is an Earther, nephew to an asteroid belt-dwelling rabble-rouser named Trevor Dustin. Stan's dad wants his son to be nothing like his uncle, so he enrolls him in an arctic university for a proper indoctrination…er…education. Said education is most unusual. Stan gets weekly "inoculations" and then is given a series of exams. The questions are highly technical—impossible to answer without years of classes. Yes somehow, unconsciously, Stan seems to have the answers floating in the back of his mind.

Not content to let his hindbrain do the work, Stan spends all of his waking hours studying so that he could pass the tests even without the mysterious, subconscious aid. As a result, after four years, Stan has one of the most remarkable minds in the solar system. He finishes his schooling just in time for his uncle to lead a rebellion against Earth, winning independence for the Belt through a series of brilliant space naval maneuvers.

This makes Stan persona non grata on Earth, whereupon the school's headmaster sneeringly informs Stan that he has been drafted into the Marines, and he will have to report for duty in two weeks as one of Earth's finest. Well, Stan won't stand for that—he skips town, heads to orbit, and then off to the Belt…where he has a date with destiny and a second war with Earth.

Written in a much (much!) more juvenile vein than the Kamin, this is an odd duck of a book. With its cardboard characters, mustache-twirling villains, perfunctory inclusion of a single female (to be the love interest, natch), and its basic plot, it feels like something out of the 30s. On the other hand, the loving detail lavished on things like weightless maneuvers, dealing with explosive decompression, and space station construction are pulled from the current pages of Popular Science. There are tantalizing details on living in the Belt. Most interesting was that virtually all of its denizens are scarred or deformed, testament to the hostile environment, but no less human for it. Anderson and Niven have written about Belters, but the Richmonds have taken the first, if clumsy, steps to flesh out living in the Belt, I think.

The problem is neither Anderson nor Niven wrote this book, and the Richmonds really weren't up to it. The subject matter required twice its length. At the hands of a Heinlein, it could have been a second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As is, it's an occasionally entertaining, but largely turgid and by-the-numbers throwaway.

Two and a half stars.

by Jason Sacks

Lord of the Stars, by Jean and Jeff Sutton

Speaking of husband and wife writing teams… Lord of the Stars is a new juvenile sf adventure co-created by the husband-and-wife team of Jean and Jeff Sutton. Stars is readable and fun, but lacks the fire and flash of the best juveniles.

Like many juveniles, Stars is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of how a young boy discovers a world around him much more complex and interesting than he ever could have expected. As in many of these types of books, Danny has a destiny to fulfill, and as he learns of his destiny, the boy also learns the creature who had mentored him is evil, and he meets his true friends along the way.

Hmm, it occurs to me there is a lot of familiar archetyping in that description. That archetyping is a big part of the strength and weakness of this book. Because sophisticated readers know basically how a story like this will proceed, we're looking for signposts that indicate a different viewpoint or more complexity – as in the recent Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. But the Suttons aren't after the same level of complexity as Panshin was, and that leaves this book as merely an average juvenile sf yarn.

Cover by Albert Orbaan

The Suttons center Lord of the Stars around Danny June. As we meet Danny, he's all alone on a mysterious planet. He's been lost on the planet since his parents' colonist ship blew up, wandering the planet with the help of an amazing telepathic octopus-creature named Zandro. Zandro has incredible abilities and is extremely intelligent, guiding our boy in his means to survive the planet, and seeming to groom Danny for a greater fate.

But others want Danny as well. The great Galactic Empire, spanning thousands of stars, is after Danny. In chapter two we are introduced to the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire, led by Sol Houston, who see Danny as the kind of creature who can destroy their empire.

That aspect of the book is dully familiar, but at least the Suttons bring in a bit of playfulness with the names of the Galactic leaders. For reasons lost in the fog of time, the names Sol and Houston are legendary, so the leader of the empire is named Sol Houston. And so on, names explained in fun and clever asides which added to my pleasure with this book.

Similarly, there's an amusing tangent in which a set of Empire bureaucrats try to figure out what they can do to affect the lives of Danny and his friends. The bureaucrats fall into an almost talmudic debate about which regs to follow, which rules can be broken. It's in those moments one can see real-life arguments with governments and school boards made manifest. (Jean Sutton works as a high school teacher while Jeff Sutton works as an aerospace consultant, so both know plenty about bureaucracy).

But the core of the book centers around Danny, his great psychic powers, and the attempts by his friends and allies to break Danny away from Zandro's influence. Along the way, Danny battles the plans of Gultur, Lord of the Stars; communicates psychically in subspace with a group of androids; and makes friends.

All of this is quite fun, since the Suttons bring just the right amount of seriousness to bear with Lord of the Stars. This is also a well-written, crisp little novel — no surprise since Jeff Sutton has written fiction and nonfiction since he left the Marines after the War. Still, Danny comes across as bit of a cipher and the plot machinations are a bit creaky.

Overall, a pleasant novel that's a bit of a throwback but still is worth the read.

Three stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

The Best Laid Schemes o' Mice an' (Space)Men

Two novels in which interstellar voyages gang agley (with a tip o' the Tam o' Shanter to Bobby Burns) fell into my hands recently. One is by a Yank, the other by a Brit. Let's take a look at 'em.

The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd

Wraparound cover art by Paul Lehr

Atlanta-born Boyd Bradfield Upchurch writes under the penname listed above. He's whipped out a couple of previous novels quickly. The Last Starship from Earth came out last year, and The Pollinators of Eden just a few months ago.

This latest work starts with a psychiatrist interviewing a spaceman who came back from his voyage too early. More concerning is the fact that it was supposed to be a two-man effort, and his partner isn't with him.

The text quickly shifts to first person narration by the astronaut himself. His name is John Adams, better known as Jack. (I'm not sure if his name is supposed to be an allusion to the second President of the United States or not.) He's a Southern boy, just like the author.

His missing buddy is Keven "Red" O'Hara, a stereotypical Irishman who has a toy leprechaun as a good luck charm and wears underwear with green polka dots. (The latter is actually part of the plot.)

We get quite a bit of background about their days before the spaceflight. Suffice to say that, after an encounter with an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher and his nubile daughter, Jack gets religion and Red gets the girl. (He actually marries her but, as we'll see, that hardly ties him down.)

Their mission takes them to a planet in another galaxy. (There's no real reason the place has to be so far away. In other ways, this isn't the most realistic space voyage ever to appear in fiction.) The inhabitants are very human in appearance, the main difference being very long, strong legs that are used in about the same way as arms.

The aliens live in a logical, technologically advanced society with no apparent form of government. Society is made up of what are pretty much universities. The two Earthmen are welcomed, and even allowed to teach classes.

It should be noted that the locals wear extremely short tunics and nothing else, not even underwear. This very casual almost-nudity (which really conceals nothing) goes along with the fact that they consider sex to be no big deal, just something they do when they feel like it. Children often result, of course, and never know who their fathers are.

For Red, this is an opportunity to have relations with as many of the beautiful young women surrounding him as possible. Jack, on the other hand, wants to convert the natives to Christianity. That includes dressing modestly, courting the opposite sex chastely, etc.

Can you guess that this is going to backfire?

Complicating matters is the fact that Jack falls in love with one of the aliens. It seems that Earth doesn't consider extraterrestrials to be human unless they meet a long list of very specific conditions. That includes being able to defend their planet from invaders. (Obviously this is a cynical ploy on the part of Earthlings to be able to enslave any aliens who are weaker than they are.) In essence, Jack is marrying an animal, legally, unless he can prove they meet all the conditions.

Things reach a climax during the performance of an Eastertime Passion Play, meant to convey the story of Christ's sacrifice to the aliens, who are entirely without religion. (Red, nominally a Catholic, goes along with Jack's evangelism, mostly because he enjoys putting on shows.)

Yep, that's not going to go at all well either.

This is a satiric novel, not quite openly comic although it's got some farcical elements. There's also quite a bit of sex. This may be the only science fiction book I've read with a detailed description of a woman's genitalia.

The last part of the novel, which goes back to the psychiatrist, has a twist ending that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe the best way to describe this odd little book is to compare it to an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke.

Three stars.

The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock

Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon

Prolific author and controversial editor Moorcock needs no introduction to Galactic Journeyers.

A fellow named Ryan is aboard a starship heading for a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Barnard's Star. The trip will take five years, and three have already gone by. He's the only person awake on the ship. In hibernation are his wife, their two sons, and other relatives and friends.

(We'll find out, by the way, that a couple of the men have two wives each. This drastic change in Western European society [everybody is British] is taken for granted, with no discussion.)

Flashbacks take us to a future Earth that is rapidly disintegrating into chaos. Tribalism rears its ugly head. Ryan, the manager of a toy company, fires a kindly employee just because the fellow is Welsh. Things get much, much worse as the book continues. Ryan and the others hijack the starship in order to escape Earth, which they feel is doomed.

Aboard the ship, Ryan suffers nightmares. These are often surrealistic. At times, the text turns into words in all capitals that are placed on the page to form other words. These typographical tricks contrast strongly with the main parts of the narrative, which use simple language to convey truly horrific happenings.

It's hard for me to say much more about what happens, because Ryan is quite obviously experiencing a mental breakdown. You can't trust that what you're told is real.

This is a very dark and disturbing book. The New Wave narrative technique associated with the nightmares is a little gimmicky, but otherwise the novel is compelling in its portrait of both individuals and society in general falling apart.

(It should be noted that, according to scuttlebutt, many of the scenes set on Earth were written by Hilary Bailey, who is married to Moorcock. He rewrote that material, and added everything set in space. The resulting work is credited solely to Moorcock, apparently with Bailey's consent.)

Four stars.

Only one book from me this month, and unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's also, for better or worse, a familiar face. John Jakes has been writing at a mile a minute this year, with The Asylum World being what must be his fourth or fifth novel of 1969. Unlike some previous Jakes novels (a couple of which I reviewed), which lean more towards fantasy, this one is very much science fiction. If anything, the changing of genres is for the worse.

The Asylum World, by John Jakes

Cover of the book The Asylum World. Text on the cover says: A mind-blowing science fiction satire of our times. The illustration shows a human figure with a mirror instead of a face. A night landscape is visible in the mirror and behind the human figure. — Cover artist not credited.

The year is 2031, and while mankind still lives on Earth, to an extent, a widespread race war between blacks and whites (I am not kidding) has resulted in not only Earth being split into Westbloc and Eastbloc (obviously a futuristic equivalent of our current cold war with the Soviets), but, I suppose on the bright side, a Noah's Ark of humanity has been established on Mars, where people live in domes, more or less in racial harmony. Sean Cloud is young, brash, and a "subadministrator" of this Martian colony. He's also hopelessly in love Lydia Vebren, who likes Sean but is hesitant due to his mixed racial heritage. Sean is half-black and half-white, is apparently unable to pass as the latter, and Lydia has a prejudice against black men.

There's also another, larger problem: a fleet of alien ships is making its way through the solar system, to Mars, possibly for peace, but also possibly to make war. The Martian colony does not have the armaments to defend itself, so Sean and Lydia are sent to Earth to bargain with the leadership in Westbloc, which itself is on the verge of turning to shambles.

The back cover says The Asylum World is satire, which strikes me as a bit odd, because in my experience satire is supposed to a) be humorous, and b) provide a topic on which the author may try to prove a point. No doubt this novel is Jakes's attempt at providing commentary on the current political climate in the U.S., especially racial strife over the past decade, not to mention that yes, tensions between the Americans and Soviets have resulted in us nearly blowing ourselves to bits at least once already. The problem is that I'm not sure what the hell he is trying to say, other than to make some center-of-the-road statements such as, for example, bemoaning the irrelevance of the family unit in this not-too-far future. There's a general sentiment of "Why can't we just get along and learn to speak honestly with each other?" which is all well and good, but men around my age and younger are dying. Sean's mixed racial heritage, which seems like it should be fodder for symbolic meaning (he is, after all, the offspring of two races, and now he must join Westbloc with Mars), but Jakes does very little with this.

I could continue to berate Jakes's political naivete, and I could also delve into how even at 170 pages this novel spins its wheels a fair bit (it really could have been a novella); but instead I'll focus some on how, despite taking place several decades into our future, The Asylum World strikes me as having been written only in the past year, maybe in the span of a month or two (why not? Michael Moorcock has written novels in a matter of days), and that I do not see how it could remain relevant in say, another ten years. When Sean comes to Earth he spends most of the novel at the "Nixon-Hilton." Sure. There's also the "Statue of the Three Kennedys." The bubbling conflict between Westbloc and Eastbloc is more or less what we are now dealing with, despite the very real possibility that the Soviet Union may not exist in 2031. Or indeed the United States. This seems like a novel written specifically to be published in 1969, so that readers may "get it" while it still gives the impression of being timely—at which point, having finished the novel in a day or two, said readers will toss it aside. At least Jakes is now slightly less at risk of having to beg for money on a street corner.

Two stars. I will surely forget about it.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[November 10, 1969] A Great Miracle Happened There (The Mets and the Orioles at the World Series!)

November 10, 2024 Jason Sacks 2 Comments

by Jason Sacks

A miracle happened in New York City this October.

That fact might have escaped the rest of you, especially our international readers. But it began in Queens, New York this summer, and that miracle culminated in the fall.

The New York Mets won the 1969 World Series.

On the surface, it seems normal for a New York team to win the World Series. In fact, New Yorkers might feel jaded by one of the local teams winning the Series. After all, the Yankees won as recently as 1962 and played in the series only five years ago.

The winners of twenty World Series once boasted some of the most famous names in baseball history: you might have heard of legends like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle. But it wasn’t the Yankees who won the Fall Classic in ’69. No, the ’69 Yankees finished in 5^th place with an 80-81 record—merely mediocre—and a shocking 28.5 games behind the first place Baltimore Orioles (more about the Orioles shortly).

No, the champions of the 1969 World Series boasted players you’ve probably never heard of before the Series began. Who but the most avid baseball fan knew of Cleon Jones, Ron Swoboda, Timmie Agee, Gary Gentry, or Nolan Ryan?

The worlds’ champs are the New York Mets, who once entered the league as the most misbegotten of all teams. In their first year, the ’62 Mets lost more games than any other team in this century and were the laughingstock of the league (and much beloved by sophisticated New Yorkers for their ineptitude after decades of dull but excellent Yankees play). Their manager, the great Casey Stengel, once said about those original Mets, “The Mets have shown me more ways to lose than I even knew existed.”

Those original Mets were so much fun to watch because they played so badly. Their ineptitude knew no bounds. Just as one example, the ’62 Mets played “Marvelous” Marv Throneberry, at first base. He committed an astronomical 17 errors and earned one of the great baseball stories of all time. One day he hit a triple but was called out for failing to touch second base. Manager Casey Stengel went out to argue but the umpire told him, “Don’t bother arguing, Casey…he missed first base too.”

You needed some bromo watching Marv field the ball

The team had a 17-game losing streak in May, lost 11 in a row in July and 13 in August. Their longest winning streak all season was 3 games. But the fans loved them. The Mets were the anti-Yankees. They were anti-corporate. They were the team of Greenwich Village rather than Madison Avenue. They were fun to watch and fun to root for: winning and losing became secondary to pure, sheer fun. This fact appealed especially to younger people looking to separate themselves from their parents’ interests.

The 1962 New York Yankees, with stars like stars like Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford, won yet another World Series. But the Yanks were serious and stolid, your father’s favorite team. As comedian Joe E. Lewis said in 1958, “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.” The Mets were terrible that year, but they led the League in having fun.

Things started turning around for the young team in 1967, as the Mets started building a good nucleus of great players. Long gone were the likes of Throneberry, banjo-hitting (unable to hit the long ball) Rod Kanehl, and twenty-game losers Roger Craig and Al Jackson. Instead, Tom Seaver, the Miracle Mets’ ace pitcher, arrived in 1967, won 16 games with a low-low 2.67 Earned Run Average (ERA), and promptly won Rookie of the Year. Seaver’s ERA has decreased (improved) in subsequent years, and he has just won the Cy Young Award, for best National League pitcher of ’69.

Seaver, the cornerstone of an excellent starting pitching staff which boasted the young lefty Jerry Koosman and fine righty Gary Gentry, led the Mets to an amazing 100 wins and first place in the new National League East division. The team started strong and just kept rolling all season long.

Oddly, their main rival for first place in the division was the long-suffering Chicago Cubs, led by their charismatic shortstop Ernie Banks. The Cubbies faded down the stretch, however, and the Mets emerged on top. (It’s often commented how the Cubs started really losing when a black cat ran in front of their dugout during a crucial game – a sign of how the fates hate the Cubbies, I suppose).

Meanwhile, in the American League, the mighty Baltimore Orioles emerged on top once again. The O’s are one of the most formidable teams of our time, with a roster which boasts many of baseball’s greatest superstars, household names like Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and the incomparable Frank Robinson. The Robinsons, Palmer and most of their compatriots were on the team which dominated the Dodgers in the ’66 World Series.

Thus the ’69 series could be compared with David’s epic battle with Goliath. The up-and-coming Mets had momentum, but they seemed overmatched in a battle with the best team of our era. Needless to say, the Orioles were prohibitive favorites.

Game One seemed to prove the prognosticators right. Orioles left fielder Don Buford belted Seaver’s second pitch over the fence for a home run, barely eluding Ron Swoboda’s leap. In the fourth inning, Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar drove in an RBI (his turn at the plate resulted in a score), and the Orioles took the game 4-1. Cuellar was dominant on the mound, and the die seemed to be cast for the end of the Mets’ Cinderella story.

Jerry Koosman took the ball for game two for the Mets against the Orioles’ brilliant Dave McNally. The young Koosman outdueled his counterpart, as Koosman took a no-hitter into the seventh before Brooks Robinson hit a single which drove in Paul Blair (the Mets’ very first draft pick, long a starter on the Orioles). But the Mets rallied back with clutch hitting of their own and took the game 2-1. Clearly these youngsters deserved their place in the Series.

Mets outfielder Tommie Agee basically won game three on his own. Agee led off the game with a home run off Orioles ace Jim Palmer, then made two amazing outfield catches to save at least five runs on Orioles rallies. Agee’s catches are still the talk of the town, just astounding feats of athleticism.

The first of two amazing Tommie Agee catches.

Two other notable players contributed to the victory. Ed Kranepool, the final member of the original Mets still on the team, hit a crucial homer. Nolan Ryan, the widely praised young flamethrower out of Texas, hurled the final 2¹⁄₃innings. He’s been touted as an ace of the future, so I hope to see more of him in the ‘70s.

Game four had controversy before it started and more controversy as it ended. October 15, 1969, was Vietnam Moratorium Day, of course, and many New Yorkers called on Major John Lindsay to order flags flown at half-mast at Shea Stadium in Queens to honor those who died in Vietnam. Lindsay agreed, but baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn overrode Lindsay’s decision and ordered flags to fly at full staff. This caused anger on both sides.

The ending controversy happened on the field. Seaver delivered another excellent game, aided by an outstanding game-saving catch by Ron Swoboda in the ninth. The score was tied 1-1 in the 10^th as the Mets hit in the bottom half of the inning. The Mets got men on first and second as pinch-hitter J.C. Martin came up to bat for Seaver. Martin laid down a sacrifice bunt, dashing down the first base line inside of the baseline. Orioles reliever Pete Richert grabbed the ball and hit Martin on the wrist with his throw. The ball went wild, the crowd went wild, and the Mets suddenly found themselves up 3-1 in the Series. After the game, many questioned whether Martin should have been called out for interference, and in fact pre-game co-host Mantle agreed.

Game five had its own controversies with two questionable calls by the umpires. In the sixth inning, Frank Robinson seemed to be hit by a Koosman pitch but the umpire ruled the pitch had hit Robinson’s hand. Therefore the pitch was a foul ball rather than a free trip to first base. Robinson subsequently struck out and a potential rally was quenched.

The opposite happened in the bottom half of the sixth when Mets left fielder Cleon Jones claimed he was hit on his foot by a Dave McNally pitch. The umpire initally said the ball bounced in the dirt, but Mets manager Gil Hodges carried the ball out to home plate and showed shoe polish on the ball. The ump awarded Jones first. Conspiracy theories abound about the ball, most claiming the polish was applied after the fact, and there is a lot of evidence which backs up that assertion.

Perhaps that weird moment presaged fate intervening for a Mets win, as in the seventh inning, light-hitting Al Weis delivered his only home run at Shea Stadium. In the eighth inning, the ubiquitous Swoboda drove in the game’s go-ahead run. By the ninth inning, the impossible looked to be happening: the Mets were three outs away from taking the Series.

As Jerry Koosman mowed down the final three outs in the ninth, Shea Stadium seemed ready to explode with pandemonium. The sounds were deafening, even on my console TV, as the third out was recorded, the New York fans flooded the field, and the most improbable event in baseball history was official.

Cinderella kept her shoe, with a bit of shoe polish scuff on it. The New York Mets, once baseball’s laughingstock, are World Series champions for 1969.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 16, 1969] The March Goes On (Heartsease, Masque World, The Shadow People, Avengers of Carrig…and more!)

October 16, 2024 Victoria Silverwolf Leave a comment

by Gideon Marcus

Unusually for the Galactoscope, our monthly round-up of new science fiction publications, we're starting this article with a stop press. It's simply too big an item to ignore.

If you read the papers this morning, you know the big news was that the Mets played the winning game of the World Series last night, against the Orioles. Competing for inches on the front page was the largest, the most coordinated, the most widespread anti-war demonstration this country has yet experienced.

Demonstrators in Washington

One million people, in every state of the union, participated in Vietnam Moratorium Day. Originally planned as a nationwide strike, instead, attendees made highly their protests highly visible—and peaceful. A quarter of a million marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital, echoing Dr. King's march on Washington in 1963. 100,000 gathered in Boston, with similar numbers protesting in New York (where Mayor John Lindsay is rumored to have given tacit support) and Miami. My local rag reported that there were counter-protests, too, but I have to wonder how big they were.

Closer to home, 1,500 gathered in Los Angeles to burn their draft cards. And at Palomar Community College, just ten minutes from my home, hundreds of students gathered for a "Teach-In". When word got out that protestors might take down the flag in front of the student union, a squad of football players was stationed at its base. No altercation occurred.

Protestors at Palomar

Will this demonstration alter the course of a war, which has killed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese? A spokesman for Richard Milhouse Nixon said last night, "I don't think the President can be affected by a mass demonstration of any kind." Comedian Dick Gregory retorted to the crowd in New York, "The President says nothing you kids do will have any effect on him. Well, I suggest he make one long-distance call to the LBJ ranch. "

Card-burners in Los Angeles

In any event, this may be just the first salvo fired in a peace offensive. Washington protest organizer Sam Brown said last night, "If there is no change in Vietnam policy, if the President does not respond, there will be a second moratorium."

And now on to book news—are this month's science fiction titles as noteworthy?

By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Heartease by Peter Dickinson (as serialized in Look and Learn)

Copies of Ranger and Look and Learn from my collection inside the official binders

Regular readers of the Journey will probably know I am a big fan of British comic books. They may even recognize the name Look and Learn due to it containing the multi-Galactic Star winning Trigan Empire (formerly of Ranger).

However, I have not talked much about Look and Learn itself. It is by far the most expensive comic book on the market at 1/6-, almost triple the price of your standard copy of June or TV Century 21. In spite of this it has retained a significant market presence by presenting itself as an educational magazine for young people, in contrast to the naughtiness of Dennis the Menace, or the pulp space adventures of Dan Dare.

This, however, is not merely a trick. They have both some of the best comic strips on the market and non-fiction articles–better than you see in most magazines aimed at adults. Looking at the contents of a June issue we have:

Ongoing comic book adaptation of Ben-Hur
How to prevent forest fires and how to apply for a career in forestry
A short story on a Gypsy boy winning the Natural History Prize
The life of the current Prince of Wales
An interview with a Chicago police officer on what crime fighting was like in the 1930s
Story of the ship Emile St. Pierre in the American Civil War
How the Magna Carta came to be
Regular series of identification of coins, planes, stamps and trains
Rob Riley comic: Adventures and daily life of English school boys
Laugh with Fiddy: Short uncaptioned humour comics
Wildcat Wayne: Action adventures of a troubleshooter for an oil company
Trigan Empire: Tales from the history of an interstellar empire, centering around its ruling dynasty
Dan Dakota – Lone Gun: Western comic
Origin and meaning of the saying The Widow’s Mite
Diary entries from James Woodforde in 1786
The history of RADAR in British aviation
Ongoing prose serialization of The Mark of the Pentagram, a tale of slavery in the 18th century
How tea came to be imported to Britain
Marsh land reclamation efforts on river estuaries
How William and Dorothy Wordsworth influenced each other’s work
Picture series on how heavy loads have been transported over the centuries
Feature on the novel Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
About the game Takraw
Picture series on Iceland.

As such, it is much easier for a kid to justify dropping their pocket money on this each week when they can also show their parents a page on the lifecycle of a butterfly and give them a series of facts from the life of Jane Austen between reading about spaceflight and the adventures of cowboys.

Example illustations for I Am David (left) and Tarka the Otter (Right) (uncredited)

However, outside of the comic strips Space Cadet and Trigan Empire, SF content is rare inside. Keeping to its educational mode, it tends towards historical fiction or uncovering the natural world. With serials tending to be works like The Silver Sword, Tarka The Otter or I Am David.

In fact, I cannot recall any prose serials that have been science fiction, before now. As such, with adult responsibilities getting the better of me, I hadn’t paid too much attention to these pieces. It was only when flicking back through them recently that I perked up at the name Peter Dickinson.

Last year he published The Weathermonger, a book that was much enjoyed by the folks here. This was not only by the same author but Heartsease also takes places in England under The Changes. It was serialised in 10 parts (from 8th March to 10th May 1969).

This is set in an earlier time in the history of this world. Whilst Weathermonger is set when The Changes are a well-established way of life, this is in the earlier stages of these events. As we are told at the beginning:

This is a story about an England where everyone thinks machines are wicked. The time is now, or soon; but you have to imagine that five years before the story starts, because of a strange enchantment, people suddenly turned against tractors and buses and central heating and nuclear reactors and electric razors. Anybody who tried to use a machine was called a witch or stoned or drowned.

Illustrator uncredited

In the Cotswolds, Margaret and her cousin Jonathan live with her Aunt Alice and Uncle Peter, plus two servants Lucy and Tim, the latter of which is unable to speak. Near their village, an outsider is found using a radio and is sentenced to be stoned as a witch.

The horror of witnessing the stoning seems to break Jonathan out of the hatred the adults have, so he works with Margaret, Lucy and Tim to free the man condemned for witchcraft. Hiding him he reveals his name is Otto, he is an American sent to investigate the situation in Britain when he was caught. The children agree to get him back to his ship.

However, the local Sexton, Davey Gordon, is still on the hunt for Otto. What’s more he is suspicious of Lucy and Tim, given the latter’s disability. They all form a plan to help him escape using an old tugboat called Heartsease.

Illustrator uncredited

I can understand why this would appeal to the editors of Look and Learn. With the removal of technology, it resembles historical fiction and does not have the magical elements of The Weathermonger. In addition, it contains information on how locks work, so it can be marketed as educational.

It is a much smaller tale than The Weathermonger, just about young people trying to do the right thing as they get caught up in horrific events. But, for that, it becomes a bit of a deeper tale. As well as having plenty of adventure, it looks at how we treat others and posits some darker reasons why things may be happening than is revealed in the prior novel:

“…they’ve done so many awful things they’ve got to believe they were right. The more they hurt and kill, they more they’ve been proving to themselves they’ve been doing God’s will all along.”

Gollancz book edition. Unknown illustrator

Based on some fag-packet-maths I estimate the word count here is somewhere between a third to a half of what is in the book version, so there is likely more story to be told.

But for this serialized form, I will give it Four Stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

Bigger and Better?

Two novels that are expanded versions of earlier, shorter works fell into my hands recently. Will this added verbiage improve them? Let's find out.

Worlds of the Wall, by C. C. MacAppp

Anonymous cover art. Human and pterodactyl number one.

This book started life as a novelette called Beyond the Ebon Wall in the October 1964 issue of Fantastic. I reviewed it at the time, giving it two stars. That's not a good omen, but let's not give up hope.

Our hero is inside an experimental starship. He winds up near a planet that seems to be missing an entire hemisphere. Forget all this science fiction stuff, because the rest of the book is pure fantasy.

Landing on the weird world, the guy finds out that the place is divided in half by a gigantic wall. He sees two naked men fighting and an elderly fellow with a scarred face. The latter seems very familiar, which is a clue as to the novel's major plot twist.

The protagonist passes through the seemingly solid wall as if it weren't there. He meets a double for the elderly guy and hears a huge magpie recite an enigmatic poem. This begins an odyssey that involves becoming a galley slave, taking part in a hunt for a gigantic beast (which develops a bond with a hero), and battling a pirate captain allied with a sorcerer. It all winds up where it started.

This is the plot of the novelette, so what's new? The middle section of the novel, detailing the hero's adventures as a galley slave, is much longer. There's a vivid scene of the protagonist and his shipmates climbing down a gigantic cliff.

The new version is a slight improvement on the old one. The explanation for what's going on, involving multiple continua and time travel, still doesn't make much sense, but it's a little less incoherent that before.

Two and one-half stars.

Thbe Avengers of Carrig, by John Brunner

Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Human and pterodactyl number two.

A shorter version of this novel appeared in 1962 as half of an Ace Double, under the title Secret Agent of Terra. It was reviewed by my esteemed colleague Rosemary Benton, who gave the twin volume four stars as a whole.

The setting is a planet settled by human refugees from a nova that wiped out another colony world many centuries ago. The survivors have evolved into a medieval, feudal kind of society. Carrig is the dominant city-state. The place has an ancient ritual of choosing its leaders in an unusual fashion.

Contenders for the title of regent board gliders and try to kill the biggest and strongest specimen of the giant flying beasts that inhabit the planet. (The winner is called a regent because the creature is considered to be the true king.) If nobody slays the animal, which definitely puts up a good fight, the former regent retains the title.

A couple of strangers show up, one of whom easily kills the so-called king with what is obviously highly advanced technology. It's clear to the reader, if not the locals, that they're from another world. Along the way they kill a fellow who discovers their nefarious plan.

The victim was secretly an agent for the folks who keep an eye on refugee planets like this one, being careful to avoid interfering with their natural development, but also making sure other people don't take advantage of them.

When the dead man stops sending messages back to his superiors, they send a fledging agent, along with an older, more experienced one, to the planet to find out what happened. (The young agent is something of a snob and unpopular with the others, so this is one last chance for her to prove herself during what is supposed to be a routine mission.)

They don't know the bad guys are there (they think the deceased agent has gone silent for some other, less sinister reason) so they're taken completely by surprise when an enemy spaceship attacks. The young agent winds up in a frozen wasteland. We don't find out what happened to the older man until later.

As luck would have it, she joins forces with the fellow who was the favorite to become the next regent. Both of them win an unexpected ally in the form of one of the flying creatures, who turns out to be a lot more intelligent than they thought.

Like MacApp's novel, this is strictly an adventure story. The big difference is that Brunner offers a tighter, more unified plot (even if it does depend on some remarkable coincidences.) It's not a complex, ambitious work like Stand on Zanzibar or The Jagged Orbit, but it's highly competent entertainment.

Three and one-half stars.

Masque World, by Alexei Panshin

by Jason Sacks

Last year I reviewed the first book in Alexei Panshin's "Anthony Villiers" series, Star Well . I praised the book for its wry, often post-modern take on heroic fiction, digging Panshin's frequent absurd sidebars and silly takes on events.

Now the third book of the Villiers series is out, and Masque World offers much the same as his earlier book: it's absurd and wise, clever and sometimes frustrating, and a pretty delightful "shaggy dog" story.

cover by Kelly Freas

This time Villiers and his pal, the Trog named Torve (a deliberately odd alien creature who is thoroughly uncanny for most people) have found their way to Delbalso, "a semi-autonomic dependency of the Nashuite Empire," as the introductory text informs us. When there, the duo gets deeply involved in all kinds of affairs in the kingdom, many centered around Villiers's uncle Lord Semichastny who is obsessed and addicted to melons (did you know there are over 100 different types of melons? Semichastny can tell you all about that topic, and many more, as if he's some sort of savant or young child in adult form).

Cultures are games played to common rules — for convenience. The High Culture, while not superior to very much, is a fair-to-middling game, and that is all.

There's also an angry robot bulter who seems to resent his subservient role and who tells spooky stories to the other mechanical creatures in Semichastny's castle, and there's a Semichastny friend who gets transformed when he puts on a costume, and there's a cult who seem incredibly happy – perhaps too happy for their own good.

Monism promises only one thing, to make you very very happy. There is a catch, of course. To be happy as a Monist, you must accept Monist definitions of happiness. If you can — you have a blissful life ahead of you. Congratulations.

A lot of this story, therefore, centers around the idea of identity, how to shed identity and how to transform identity; how identity conforms to crowds and how identity stands alone. This all does a wonderful job of showcasing Panshin's elusive commentary on the human condition. As becomes clear by the end, it's the humor and commentary which matter here, not the story.

Do places dream of people until they return?

For the longest time I kind of fought this book, trying hard to make sense of the twists and turns of its plot. Until, that is, I realized that plot is meant to be arbitrary and somewhat confusing. Its twists and turns reflect the mindset of Mr. Panshin, and that and his wordplay – highlighted here as excerpts – are the key things he wants to share with readers.

Holidays are no pleasure for anyone but children, and they are a pleasure only for children only because they seem new. Holidays are no pleasure to those who schedule them. Holidays are for people who need to be formally reminded to have a good time and believe it is safer to warm up an old successful party than to chance the untried.

Masque World is very loose and fun, a bit arbitrary and silly, and I enjoyed it alright. The book feels a bit indulgent at times, and Panshin's having a bit of a goof, but it's well worth 60¢ and 3 hours of your time.

The ending promises a fourth book in the series, to be called The Universal Pantograph. I do hope we get to spend more time in this wildly discursve world of the one and only Anthony Villiers.

3 stars

The Shadow People, by Margaret St. Clair

by Tonya R. Moore

I had never encountered any works of fiction written by Margaret St. Clair before reading The Shadow People. The story’s premise is wonderfully dark and imaginative but the reader’s sense of wonder is drowned out by the book’s glaring faults.

cover by Jeff Jones

Aldridge, our hero, descends into a strange and alien underworld in search of his girlfriend who has gone missing. He finds her while navigating this strange dimension, but something about her has been irrevocably altered. Even so, Aldridge seeks a way back to the human world for himself and for the love of this life. When he/they finally returns to the surface, he finds that during his absence, human civilization was twisted into a dark, futuristic dystopia where people are now heavily policed and managed like cattle.

The fact that a female author would center a male character in her work feels like some kind of betrayal. I understand that science fiction tends to be a male-dominated genre, where only men can be the heroes and only men are expected to save the day. But Carol is the one who disappears into the fae realm first. Why does she need to sit on her laurels and wait for The Man to come and save her?

Furthermore, Carol is transformed into a mindless shell of a human, devoid of any ability to express any will of her own or even think for herself. Ultimately, The Man must dictate the woman’s fate. So much for the Women’s Rights Movement. There is a part of me that expects female authors to push back against such demeaning notions and St. Clair, in very bad taste, seems to capitulate to this male chauvinist ideology. Perhaps it was this bias that made it impossible for me to resonate with this story’s protagonist.

Aldridge is a canned character. He is everything a heroic male protagonist “ought” to be and possesses very little depth or complexity in personality. He responds “correctly” to every situation and never seems to doubt or question himself. This leaves a discerning reader with little choice but to question his humanity.

Another possible reason the story rankled was the way elves are portrayed in The Shadow People. St. Clair's version runs counter to the commonly held mental image of elves, portraying them as grotesque and malevolent, instead of beautiful, good-willed, and elegant. St. Clair’s elves are more like the lesser known spriggans of elven lore. This, I agree, is very clever of St. Clair but still, broadly classifying these beings as “elves” felt like needlessly shattering the average reader’s fanciful notions about fae-kind.

There are some disconcerting allusions here to the alienation and institutionalized oppression of the Negro people. As a black woman, I felt that there was a certain lack of sensitivity in drawing these parallels while also side-stepping the cruel reality plaguing modern society.

The imagery in The Shadow People is visceral and draws the reader into every moment. The events of the story are quite dramatic and would make a great film. For some reason, though, none of this resonated with me. I could not fully appreciate or enjoy reading this book nor could I quite rid myself of the vague suspicion that this author had to be a man, a misogynist at that, writing under the guise of a female author.

2.5 stars.

West of Sol

by George Pritchard

Postmarked the Stars

Cover by R. M. Powers

There is a phrase, deja vu, which refers to feeling or seeing something that you have not interacted with before, yet seems intensely familiar. These are now believed to be psychic echoes, but it is a useful term for Andre Norton's latest work, Postmarked the Stars. I was excited to begin this, as the last thing I read of hers was Star Man’s Son, which I enjoyed deeply and still own a copy of.

I want to emphasize that I did not hate this book, nor did I find it incompetent, but reading Postmarked feels like watching a piston engine. Smooth and efficient and automatic, but always quite obviously a machine. This is the fourth entry in the Solar Queen adventures, although no previous books need to be read to understand this one. The previous book in this series came out a decade ago, but I am not particularly familiar with what interest there was, or is.

Dane Thorson, assistant cargo master to the Free Trader ship Solar Queen, discovers that a strange, radioactive box on board is causing the creatures near it to change, becoming larger and more intelligent. Before the crew can figure out what to do with this information, the ship is caught in a tractor beam, and they are dragged to the planet’s surface. Dane, Tau the medical officer, and the psychic cat end up separated into a search party. A group of dead miners are found, an enormous insect monster is battled, before another tractor beam drags them and the planetary ranger onwards towards a secret base in unexplored territory. It all seems to be connected to that strange, radioactive stone!

Is there indeed gold in them thar hills?

One thing I have always enjoyed about Norton's writing, particularly given the genres she works in, is the equal footing she gives to non white characters. Even the names she gives to background characters vary in ways that speak to strength in differences amongst the stars — names from the Indian subcontinent right alongside Welsh, Jewish, and Chinese! For another example, a prospector type is introduced, and it's only mentioned half a chapter later that he is dark-skinned.

This story is a space Western, plain and simple. The recent movie, Moon Zero Two [review coming out October 18] is my immediate point of comparison, but this has been a rich vein in the genre for a long time. The potential for racism in the story is, for better or worse, replaced by that dullest of Westerns, the claim jumper plot, combined with the Pony Express or stagecoach robbery.

Norton has been publishing continuously for almost two decades at this point. Maybe she needs a break, taking a chance to look at the New Wave trends and use them for her own. I know that, given time, she can make them shine the way Star Man’s Son pushed the boundaries of boy’s adventure novels. Norton can do better, and has, but Postmarked the Stars does nothing at all.

Two stars.

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Movies

[October 10, 1969] Everybody's Talkin' At Me: Midnight Cowboy and Urban Tragedy

October 10, 2024 Jason Sacks 2 Comments

Science Fiction Theater Episode #7

Tonight (Oct. 10), tune in at 7pm (Pacific) to see what terrific, sciencefictional goodie the Traveler has got in store for you. A hint: it was made by a real Pal…

by Jason Sacks

My friends know I'm a big fan of the emerging "New Hollywood" films which has been mushrooming over the last few years. The new film Midnight Cowboy is an outstanding exemplar of that movement, and I'd like to tell you why this film is so great — and why this film movement is so exciting.

"New Hollywood" has emerged as a term over the last few years for a specific type of film. Coming out of the dual filmic earthquakes of the end of the hated Hays Code and the crumbling of the studio system, New Hollywood films are differentated from their more traditional studio counterparts for a few reasons: New Hollywood films tend to prpesent a narrative focus on the lives of ordinary people, tend to use location shooting to heighten their reality, and tend to present an anti-establishment view of the world.

You might remeber the article from late 1967 by influential Time critic Steven Kanfer which praised that year's Bonnie and Clyde as "a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend." Kanfer continued, "The most important fact about the screen in 1967 is that Hollywood has at long last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema calls 'the furious springtime of world cinema."" That "new trend" has evolved into the New Hollywood movement.

Bonnie and Clyde was the cover story in Time in late 1967, with an accompanying article which described a new cinema which was evolving quickly.

In fact, Bonnie and Clyde was a kind of siren song of this movement — though other bold new films preceded it (notably the work of John Cassavettes and Robert Downey), this was the first sophisticated feature film which really broke through and really embraced youth culture (to be sure, the films of Roger Corman, among others, embraced youthful rebellion but never with the panache or breakthrough success of Bonnie and Clyde). It also helps that Clyde is also a damn good – and very funny – film.

Since '67, we've seen a plethora of remarkable new films which fall into this new trend, including The Graduate, Targets, Head, the outrageous Putney Swope and the terrifying Night of the Living Dead. Last year's Rosemary's Baby can be called a New Hollywood film. And of course, the most ubiquitous film of 1969 is Easy Rider, a film which seems to be on the lips of everybody under the age of 25. Each of those movies seems to represent a new approach to filmmaking and even to narrative. Head is shockingly surreal. Easy Rider uses innovative editing techniques. Rosemary's Baby explicity satirizes the patriarchy. And Targets literalizes the generation gap between traditional and modern entertainment – and finds terror on both sides.

This new filmic philosophy is an explicit rejection of the dictates of the Hays Code and of the overtly conformist morality of the 1950s. The newer generation of filmmakers feel the freedom to delve into subjects which previously would have been explicitly off-limits. And that makes the film-goers’ life thrilling as we move into a new decade.

Now we get Midnight Cowboy, a film which elevates the New American school, throwing down a new gauntlet for realism, for tragedy and comedy, and for character. I went into this film with high expectations due to strong reviews from critics I appreciate. But it's funny— Midnight Cowboy both was a lot like what I was expecting and a profoundly different experience.

I was expecting a sad, smart, outsiderly story of two desperate and pathetic souls living on the edge of gay hustler culture in a version of New York that seems teetering on the edge of malaise but hasn't quite tipped over the edge. I was expecting great performances from leads Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, a deep portrayal of what it means to be an outsider in a world that just doesn't care about you, and to see an interesting portrait of a New York suspended between outsider culture and Nixon's silent majority, desperate to flee an urban wasteland.

I got all that, and Midnight Cowboy was poweful as expected; moving and thoughtful and crazily weird at times and often plotless seeming and a particularly intense movie experience.

But I also got a lot of stuff I didn't expect. The first maybe half hour of the film lingers on Voight playing Joe Buck as Buck slowly ambles out of his small Texas town to begin the journey to New York City. That segment of the film takes its time, with long, languid but suffocating shots which make the town feel claustrophobic. His old home town is poised on the edge of an all-encompassing landscape but the human space in that landscape is proscribed.

And yet, and yet: people are friendly; they smile and greet each other and seem to welcome the company of others. The Southwest might be desolate, but the human capacity there seems strong.

So Buck leaves town, but we see elliptical, dreamlike flashbacks which reveal Joe's past life, his obsessions, and his deep sadness. Some of those dreams are representational, some are allusional, but they all take the film to a different level, an unexpected level which sets Midnight Cowboy clearly in that same milieu of modern angst as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Easy Rider.

Buck isn't just leaving Texas because the big city is beckoning him. He has a traumatic secret connected to his old home town, something which truly tortures him emotionally and pushes him to jump on a Greyhound for the long, lonely journey to the big city.

All the while, the film's now-ubiquitous (in the film and on our radios) theme song keeps playing, illustrating Buck's inner life. True freedom, Nilsson is singing is inside our own heads:

Everybody's talking at me
I don't hear a word they're saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Buck lands in New York, and as you can see from that evocative still posted above, he literally towers above all the people around him. Joe Buck is a big man, with big dreams.

In a more traditional movie, Buck would aspire to be an actor, or strike it rich on Wall Street, or hobnob with the rich and famous. But those dreams would be unrealistic for a man of Joe Buck's means.

Instead. those big dreams lead him to a life where he tries to make some cash by hustling, offering sexual favors to older women who find his cowboy personality a massive turn-on. Joe seems to like the life for a while, as he tries it on, but he has no idea how to actually live such a life, and he ends up living on or near the streets. Desperate for cash, Buck falls in with a loose amalgamation of hookers, hustlers and runaways who inhabit the alleyways and avenues of a fading New York City.

it is in this world that Midnight Cowboy confronts its most surprising element and the aspect of the film which moves it away most from the era of 1950s morality. The Hays Code explicitly forbade even a glancing mention of homosexuality (which didn’t prevent clever filmmakers from depicting homosexual characters onscreen, albeit using winks and nods to the audience). But here gay culture is explicitly shown onscreen, with even a touch of respect and affection for the kinds of struggles Buck has to go through. In the wake of July’s riots around New York’s Stonewall Tavern, this depiction of homosexuality couldn’t feel more contemporary.

Director John Schlesinger tells Buck’s story with angst and grace, but also with a remarkable amount of humor which keeps the proceedings from getting too heavy.

While hustling men and women, Joe Buck meets Hoffman, who plays the unforgettable Ratso Rizzo, a man of pure id and ansgt, a TB-ridden conman who takes Buck under his broken wing and shares an apartment in an abandoned, desolate tenement which seems like it's been waiting for a Robert Moses wrecking ball for decades.

Dustin Hoffman is absolutely astonishing as the motormouthed, self-delusional Rizzo, a man who both seems unique in film history and utterly familiar. Rizzo is every New Yorker who talks nonstop, with an accent and an attitude which embodies his city. But Rizzo has a beguiling tenderness and prickliness, a sort of personal pride and complex inner life that causes the character to pop off the screen.

Rizzo couldn't be further away from Hoffman's character in The Graduate, Ben Braddock. But just as Hoffman seemed to embody our generation of aimless, privileged young men in the earlier film, here he embodies an aimless man utterly without privilege or power, a man swallowed up by the desolate New York streets and his own disease. And where Ben Braddock is driven by a sex drive stuck on his odd relationship with Mrs Robinson, here Hoffman’s Rizzo seems completely uninterested in sex, even bemused by Buck’s bizarre life which centers around sex.

That odd state of bemusement gives a lot of energy to this film. The fast-talking Ratso can’t help but babble in and on about how strange Buck’s life is. It’s as if Rizzo simply doesn’t understand why people need to have sex and why they make decisions based in that sex drive. And yet, he grows a deep fraternal love for Buck.

it’s often hilarious, often heartbreaking how tight the bond is between these two men who are so very different from each other.

At the heart of the film is the deep friendship between Buck and Rizzo, a frankly shocking level of intimacy these men develop for each other. This relationship inspires empathy in viewers, too, so that when this movie reaches its inevitable ending, we are left adrift like the movie's characters are.

So yeah, Midnight Cowboy is kind of a tragedy, and the ending left people in my theatre sobbing, and it earns its X rating with its story of hustlers and unsensationalized view of sex and its general feeling of grime.

But still: this movie is not a bummer. It's not a bad acid trip. There are many moments which illuminated life with empathy and intelligence and humor. Heck, in fact, the acid trip in this film (at a place similar to Andy Warhol's famous Factory) is a lot of fun as well as a brilliant conceptual counterweight to the rest of the story: some hustlers were able to find kinship and a sense of family with freaks like themselves. And for others a glimpse into that life helps deliver a small sense of grace.

Brit John Schlesinger came over to America to direct this film, and it's easy to sense his comfort in every scene. Best known for his 1965 film Darling, which introduced Julie Christie to worldwide audiences as a headstrong girl in swinging London, Schlesinger seems to be attracted to stories about people who can't quite find their footing in society but remain resolutely themselves: Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd and Billy in Billy Liar are rebels without a clue.

But Schlesinger has never helmed a film like Midnight Cowboy, which seems to reject the very concept of a middle-class life, which seems devoted to its New York-in-decline setting and that city’s bottomless underclass of weirdos, drug addicts and hustlers. Adam Holender's cinematography adds to the beautiful despair, a lovely widescreen tragedy of urban decay.

Ultimately, Midnight Cowboy is suffused with the dream of freedom, which comes into conflict with the deep ennui of our late '60s reality. We're living in the shadows of the tragedies of '68 and the dimming of the post-War consensus. Yeah, director Schlesinger seems to say, you can be free, you can live outside the law, but the gravity of middle-class normative Americana will always pull you either into death or into conformance no matter how hard you try to resist. The deeply moving ending of this film reinforces that sense that it’s unbelievably hard to stay an outsider in our modern world, that the lessons of ‘68 show the optimism of ‘67 has given way to a massive societal bummer.

Midnight Cowboy is a remarkable film which represents the great promise of the New Hollywood movement: John Schlesinger’s film is explicitly in dialog with our current era. Yeah, everybody’s talkin’ at us, but we don’t hear a word they’re saying’.

5 stars.

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