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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 24, 1965] "What time is it?" (October Galactoscope)

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By Jason Sacks

Well, so far this has been a great month. Last week saw the end of a dynamite World Series, in which Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher of his generation, showed himself to be one of the greatest Jews of his generation as well. It was tremendously meaningful to my family that Sandy refused to start Game 1 for the Dodgers against the Minnesota Twins since the day coincided with our holy day of Yom Kippur.

As Sandy said, "I've taken Yom Kippur off every year for the last 10 years. It was just something I've always done out of respect."

As if that wasn't good enough, Koufax dominated games 5 and 7 of the series, with his electric fastball mowing down batters in a pair of crucial shutout victories. The Twins played well, and  were outstanding American League champs – Tony Oliva is a monster – but it seems the Koufax gave the Dodgers the edge, and turned the '65 Series into a classic.

At the movie theatre, my wife and I caught The Bedford Incident last week at our favorite theatre here in north Seattle. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, the film is well worth a night out — if, that is, you can handle an intense and sometimes bleak drama.


Richard Widmark turns in a powerful performance as a zealous battleship captain on the search for an elusive Soviet nuclear submarine. Also featuring Sidney Poitier and Martin Balsam, this black and white drama treads similar ground to last year's thrilling Fail Safe and ends in a similarly dramatic way.

The Hunter Out of Time, by Gardner F. Fox

If it seems like I'm dragging my feet a bit before talking about my entry for this month's Galactoscope, well, you're right. Gardner Fox's new novel is the epitome of mediocrity, a book that will give you 40¢ worth of excitement but not a whole lot more. The fantastic Mr. Fox is a prolific author who churns out more books and comic book stories than nearly anyone else living. Sometimes that causes him to create some delightful work. Other times it seems like he is just delivering words just to deliver him a paycheck. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that – I'm sure the man has a mortgage to pay – but it also represents a lost opportunity.

See, this book starts out with one of the most striking first lines I can remember.

I saw myself dying on the other side of the street.

The first page builds on that momentum, with the protagonist describing his body as "blood oozed over my fingers where I held that awesome wound."

I mean, seriously, how can you read a first page like that without feeling like you have to read more? Mr. Fox is an old pro and he clearly knows some classic tricks. As I read that book, I leaned back, took a deep breath, and readied myself for a page-turning thrill ride.


Cover by Gray Morrow

But, dear reader, I'm sorry to inform you that all the best writing in The Hunter Out of Time happens on the first couple of pages. It soon turns out that the man who falls to Earth is a time traveler from the far, far future who traveled back through a supposedly impregnable barrier to steal the man's identity. The time traveler is named Chan Dahl and soon other time-displaced men come to our time, confuse our guy, Kevin Cord for Dahl, and that unleashes the most obvious and cliched adventure you can imagine.

There's little in The Hunter Out of Time you haven't seen before. Fox gives us fantastic devices, headspinning time travel with seemingly arbitrary rules, and the obligatory beautiful, weak babe from the future.  Of course Cord uses his native 20th century skills to overcome his opposition, of course Cord and the woman fall in love, and of course Fox leaves room for a sequel if somehow people want to read more of this frightfully ordinary pap.

I could go on and on about this book, but hey, it costs 40¢, it'll take you a couple hours to read, and it's got a pretty nice cover by artist Gray Morrow. I'd rather spend my time watching young Warren Beatty in Mickey One in the theatres, but you won't hate this book and it's pleasing enough entertainment for a rainy Seattle Sunday.

2 stars.

Solid Fuel


by John Boston

The rising star John Brunner has produced ambitious work such as The Whole Man and the upcoming The Squares of the City, both from Ballantine in the US, and a raft (or flotilla) of unpretentious upscale-pulp adventures for Ace Books. Some of the best of the latter were mined from the UK magazines edited by John Carnell.


by Jacks

But there’s a lot more. Brunner has been one of the mainstays of the UK magazines for a decade, but much of his best magazine work has not been reprinted because it’s too short for separate book publication and too long to fit in the usual anthologies or collections. The UK publisher Mayflower-Dell, previously distinguished by its unsuccessful attempt to bring Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to the British public, remedies a bit of this omission with Now Then, a collection of three novellas, two from the Carnell magazines and the other, his first professional sale, from Astounding in 1953.

Some Lapse of Time

The book opens with the energetically clever and creepy Some Lapse of Time, from Science Fantasy #57 (February 1963). Dr. Max Harrow is having a bad dream of a group of starving people living in ruins, one of whom is holding a human finger bone in his hand. He wakes and there is someone at his door: the police, because a tramp has collapsed in his garage. The tramp proves to be suffering a rare disease (heterochylia, an inability to metabolize fats, which become lethal) that Harrow is uniquely qualified to recognize, his infant son having died of it only recently, and which should have made it impossible for the tramp to survive to adulthood. The tramp also has clamped in his hand a human finger bone—the same bone, the end of the left middle finger, as in Harrow’s dream.

Unintelligible to the hospital staff, the tramp proves when examined by a philologist to speak a badly distorted version of English, like one might expect a primitive and isolated group to use. Meanwhile, Harrow’s marriage is blowing up under the emotional stress caused by his son’s death and his own preoccupation. When his wife slams the car door in his face, she catches his hand in the door and severs the end of his left middle finger, which falls down a gutter. Meanwhile, the tramp is sent for a head x-ray, but he turns out to be so radioactive that not only do the films turn out unusable but he has to be put in strict isolation.

Brunner brings all these elements to a thoroughly grotesque resolution—it doesn’t entirely work, but is a grimly ingenious nice try. Others apparently think so too; it is rumored that a dramatization will be broadcast later this year in the BBC’s Out of the Unknown TV series. Four stars.

Imprint of Chaos

Next up is Imprint of Chaos, also from Science Fantasy (#42, August 1960), one of a number of outright fantasies Brunner contributed to that underrated magazine. This one introduces us to a character mainly called “the traveler,” who we are repeatedly told has “many names but one nature,” unlike the rest of us who I suppose contain multitudes.

The traveler has been appointed (by whom, or Whom, or What is not explained) as a sort of metaphysical supervisor over part of the universe, charged with ensuring the primacy of order over chaos. He is on his way to Ryovora, a formerly sensible town where they have now decided they need a god.

So the traveler nips out to our Earth and snatches the unsuspecting Bernard Brown from a hike in the wood, tells him he’s unlikely to find his way home, but gives him directions to Ryovora. There, to his discomfiture, Brown is welcomed as a god, and when the next city over hears about it and sends over their god, Brown sends it packing in terror. Then the Ryovorans say they could have done it themselves (though they didn’t), and excuse Mr. Brown, after a final scene where he and the traveler bruit the futility and undesirability of magic.

A fantasy writer bad-mouthing magic may seem incongruous, but this rationalist in spite of himself really hates it, and comes not to praise magic but to bury it, though only after enough colorful magical episodes to entertain the rubes. Here the tension is more extreme than usual. His earlier fantasies mostly featured incursions of magic into the world of ordinary salt-of-the-earth types. Here, the entire setting is exotically magical, and the story is told in the fey and pompous cadences of high fantasy.

For example, from a conclave of the necromantic elite of Ryovora: “The Margrave nodded and made a comforting gesture in the air. He said, ‘But this cannot be the whole story. I move that we—here, now, in full council—ask Him Who Must Know.’” Brunner walks the edge of parody at times (“Tyllwin [a particularly powerful magician] chuckled, a scratching noise, and the flowers on the whole of one tree turned to fruit and rotted where they hung.”). But the story is clever and entertaining and merits its three stars, towards the high end.

Thou Good and Faithful

Thou Good and Faithful is older; as mentioned, it is the first story Brunner sold to an SF magazine—and it was featured on the cover of the top-of-the-market Astounding (March 1953 issue). Moreover, the readers voted it best in the issue, and it was quickly picked up by Andre Norton for her pretty respectable YA anthology Space Pioneers. Not a bad start for an 18-year-old! Though Brunner has had some second thoughts about showing us his juvenilia; the acknowledgements note it appeared in the magazine “in a somewhat different form.” I haven’t compared the two texts, though there’s clearly some updating; in this version Brunner refers to something as “maser-tight,” and masers were barely invented when this story was first published.

The story is for most of its length a bog-standard though well-turned rendition of a basic plot: find a planet, there’s a mystery, what’s going on, are we scared? The mystery is an idyllic Earth-type planet inhabited only by robots, who presumably didn’t make themselves; what happened to the makers? The final revelation is partly in the direction of, say, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and partly in the one suggested by the story’s title, so in the end it’s much more high-minded than the puzzle story it starts out as. This is all older news nowadays than it was in 1953, but it too merits a high three stars.

Summing Up

Now Then is a solid representation of the mid-length work of this very readable and thoughtful writer, and there’s enough in the Carnell back files for several more worthwhile volumes of Brunner novellas.

Two by Two


by Gideon Marcus

The Journey has made a commitment to review every piece of science fiction released in a year (or die trying). In pursuit of this goal, I've generally tried to finish every book I've started, and if unable to, I simply don't write about it.

It occurs to me, however, that the inability to finish a book is worth reporting on, too. And so, here are reports on two of this summer's lesser lights:

Arm of the Starfish, by Madeleine L'Engle

The latest from Madeline L'Engle, author of the sublime A Wrinkle in Time, starts promisingly. Adam Eddington is a freshman biology minor tapped to work with a Dr. O'Keefe on the Atlantic island of Gaia off the coast of Portugal. O'Keefe (a grown up Calvin, from Wrinkle) is working with starfish, zeroing in on an immortality treatment. Just prior to Adam's departure from Kennedy Airport, he runs across the beautiful young daughter of an industrialist, Kali, who warns Adam to stay away from the sinister-looking Canon Tallis, who is chaperoning the O'Keefes' precocious daughter, Poly.

Adam finds himself embroiled in international intrigue, not knowing who to trust. This is exciting at first, but a drag as things go on. Gone is the quietly lyrical prose of Wrinkle, replaced by a deliberately juvenile style leached of color. Events happen, one after another, but they are both difficult to keep track of and largely uninteresting. By the time Adam made it to Gaia, about halfway through the book, I found myself struggling to complete a page.

Life's too short. I gave up.

Quest Crosstime, by Andre Norton


Cover by Yukio Tashiro

Andre Norton has come out with the long-awaited sequel to her parallel universe adventure, The Crossroads of Time, starring Blake Walker. The universe Walker lives in is a bit like that of Laumer's Imperium series and Piper's Paratime stories: there's one Earth that has mastered the art of crossing timelines, and it has built an empire across these alternate Earths.

On Vroom, the imperial timetrack, there had been a devastating war that killed most of the female population, making them particularly precious. Also, mutation has made psionic ability the rule rather than the exception. The timeline is ruled by an oligarchy of 100 meritocrats.

At the start of Crosstime, Walker is dispatched to assist Marfy, whose twin sister, Marva, has been lost amongst the timeless — and all signs point to a kidnapping. Of course, the allure of all parallel universe books is the exploration of what-if, and so Walker and Marfy's trek spans a dead Earth where life never arose, a strange saurian Earth where sentient turtles and lizardmen rule, and ultimately, an interesting timeline in which Richard III won the battle of Bosworth Field while Cortez lost the battle of Tenochtitlan. By the Mid-20th Century, there is a Cold War between Britain and the Aztec Empire along a militarized Mississippi river. It is to this world that Marfy and her abductors are tracked, and it turns out that the kidnapping is part of a plot to topple Vroom's Ancien Regime.

True to form as of late, Norton sets up some genuinely interesting background, but the characters are as flat as the pages they appear on. This time, I made it through two thirds of the book, partly on momentum from the first book in the series, which I rather enjoyed. In the end, however, disinterest won out.

Call it two stars for both books.

Don't miss the next exciting musical guest episode of The Journey Show, October 24 at 1PM Pacific!




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Book

[July 12, 1965] A pair of Aces (July 1965 Galactoscope)

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by Rosemary Benton

A happy duo

The newest Ace Double is an absolute blast. On the one side is veteran writer John Brunner's new novel The Altar of Asconel, which was previously covered in serialization by David Levinson.  On the other side is the first solo project of science fiction fandom superstar – Ted White. Android Avenger! The very title of this book sings with promise of action and adventure, and while it certainly delivers I would say that it goes well beyond a short fun read.

Out of Place in Plain Sight

The story takes place in a future on Earth where maintaining sanity has become the objective of the human race. There is an orderly mundanity to everything, and deviation from this norm in any form, from rebellious fashion choices to antisocial tendencies, is punishable by death. Such executions are merged into the daily lives of the citizens of the metropolitan areas. Just like jury duty, anyone of legal age can be called upon to be part of the assembly that collectively pushes the button on the condemned's electric chairs.

Living his own mundane life is Bob Tanner, a resident of Manhattan who, oddly shaken and distracted after attending to his Citizen's duty as an executioner, has a mishap and gets his leg mangled in one of the city's moving walkways. Upon waking up to find that he is entirely healed from such a grievous injury, he overhears some disturbing information about the results of the scans that were run on him while he was unconscious – his bones are made of metal and he may not be entirely human.

Since extreme physical deviancy is also considered an unacceptable trait, Bob realizes that he must run for his life. Planning on journeying out into the countryside where there are fewer police and mental scanners, Bob manages to escape the hospital. Unfortunately his plans quickly careen off course when control of his body is seized from him. Piloted by unknown individuals for unknown reasons, Bob is made into the murderous pawn of one of the best kept secret societies in the city.

Ultimately our protagonist is put in the precarious position of balancing his human identity with the purpose for which an automaton such as himself was created. The story ends on a relatively upbeat note with Bob successfully regaining his autonomy, accepting his mission as an android, and still maintaining a precious, personal human identity. But after reading White’s book and thinking on it, one is still left wondering if technology unknowingly guiding humanity is such a good thing after all. 

A Little Background

Ted White is an extremely active member of the fandom community. He is a regular contributor, editor and a fanzine founder. He’s also got an impressive number of letters and essays reviewing, dissecting, and speculating on the numerous subgenres and authors out there.

Currently White is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. To date this opinionated author has four professional writing credits to his name: three collaborative stories (two with Terry Carr and one with Marion Zimmer Bradley) and of course, Android Avenger. With such a passion for the genre, it was only a matter of time before White began releasing his own lengthier original works of science fiction.

Breaking Down the Components

First and foremost, Ted White is to be congratulated on telling a compelling story of android self-realization mixed with a heavy dose of noir elements. The intensity of Bob Tanner's character as he struggles with his body betraying societal norms, his self doubt when he begins to question his own mind and consequently his basic sense of self – all of this speaks to the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir. Yet it is encased in a science fiction paperback. 

This blend of genres in turn segues nicely into White's talent for writing action sequences that are clean cut and descriptive without being too wordy. The events of this book are fast paced. So much so that the reader, like the protagonist himself, might feel thrown and unable to get their feet under them before they are swept up in another scene. It’s destabilizing without being disruptive to the flow of the novel. It’s just enough to keep us guessing at what will happen next right there alongside Bob.

Finally, White is to be commended on the excellent job he does writing the protagonist's first person narrative. Successfully accomplishing this type of narration is no small feat for a writer. It's very easy for the tension to be sucked from a book if the storyteller is untrue to their inner voice, specifically in terms of their changing perspective and the information they are aware of at any given point in the story.

But in Android Avenger the reader is never given too little to work with, and even when the events get pretty surreal it's all brought back down to Earth with well written dialogue and succinct descriptions. It may not be the deepest intellectual exploration of humanity and technology, but judged on sheer enjoyability this book is well worth a five star rating.

That puts it well above what my colleague, David, rated Altar, but ACE Double M-123 is still well worth picking up!

Ace Books: Pirate Publisher?

Photo of Erica Frank
by Erica Frank

In addition to its usual science fiction double, this month, Ace is releasing the second and third books of Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy. The first, Fellowship of the Ring, has been selling amazingly well at its new low price of 75¢, a scant fraction of the former hardcover price. Ratatosk 12 had a brief review of Fellowship:

I am not all that crazy about Jack Gaughan's cover (tho other, less critical Tolkienists have expressed satisfaction with it), and there is no mention that the title illo is borrowed from the d/w of the American edition b*u*t: illos are not a book, and the fact that the volume is now available at less than 1/6 of the original U.S. price is a Very Good Deal. The typography is clear, and I have as yet found no typos to stumble over in reading.

While professor Tolkien was adamant that his works not be published in so "degenerate a form" as paperback, it appears that Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of the U.S. hardcover editions, failed to properly copyright them — and so the works are in the public domain here.

Three book covers: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King

Feast your eyes upon either a stealth mission to evade the enforcers of a corrupt empire, or a dastardly attack against the rightful rulers of the text. You decide.
Photo by Gwydion M. Williams

Fanzine Focal Point 8 mentions a few of the details:

Houghton Mifflin, the hardbound publishers of the Ring Trilogy in the United States, was either too cheap or too stupid to have the finest fantasy epic of our century copyrighted in the United States; they ran, instead, a notice that the book was copyrighted in England, which only protected the work until it was published in the United States.

The way copyright law works, in this case: Nations that have joined the Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, agree to honor the copyrights of member states' works as if they had been published in their own country. So: a work copyrighted in the UK, is protected in the US; a publisher can't just grab a book and publish it here. However… once it's published here, it's subject to normal US copyright law, not the UCC. By publishing it in the US without a proper copyright notice, the work falls into the public domain. (Or so the claim goes. I am not a copyright lawyer. Don't quote me in court.)

So Wollheim gave up on trying to arrange licensing with Tokien and decided to meet the demand of the fannish readers, and all's well in the world of epic tales of elven adventures, yes?

…Perhaps not. Tolkien has protested the publication, claiming it is an infringement of his author's rights, and his publishers in the UK and the US are working to print a new authorized edition while he investigates his legal options.

So for now… buy quickly; these editions may not stick around for long.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 2, 1965] Gallimaufry (August 1965 IF)

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by David Levinson

A gallimaufry is a kind of stew. Like any stew, it’s composed of a bunch of things thrown together and so has also come to mean any sort of hodge-podge. Since I haven’t been able to come up with some sort of overarching theme this month (and perhaps because, as I write this, I skipped lunch and it’s a couple of hours until dinner), let’s just look at the mish-mash of things that caught my eye (and ear) this month.

The British Invasion continues

On June 12th, the Beatles were named Members of the British Empire. That’s the lowest level of honor granted by the British government, but unsurprisingly a lot of old fuddy-duddies are unhappy with popular musicians being so honored. Member of the Canadian House of Commons Hector Dupuis complained, “British royalty has put me on the same level as a bunch of vulgar numbskulls.” According to my research, apart from seven and a half years in the Canadian Parliament, Mr. Dupuis’ main contribution to society is selling insurance. I’m not sure he’s the one who ought to be complaining about the comparison.


James P. McCartney, George Harrison, John W. Lennon and Richard Starkey showing their medals. You didn’t think his parents named him Ringo, did you?

Sticking with music for the moment, lately I’ve really been enjoying For Your Love by the Yardbirds. It’s a catchy little number that’s been moving up the charts the last few weeks and unusually features a harpsichord. The band took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, England when the Rolling Stones went on to bigger things and then acted as the backing band for Sonny Boy Williamson when he toured Great Britain in early 1964. They’ve had a bit of airplay with some old blues numbers, but this is their first real hit. Alas, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. One of their guitarists, a young man by the name of Eric Clapton, has left the band, unhappy with the move to a more commercial sound. He’s since been replaced by Jeff Beck. Let’s hope that Mr. Clapton is content with the relative obscurity of the blues scene.

The Miracles of Technology

On June 14th, a test planned by American and French doctors and communications experts sent an electrocardiogram from a ship at sea to a hospital in France. The ECG was taken from a passenger aboard the SS France in the Atlantic Ocean and transmitted via facsimile machine first to Cornell University hospital, then RCA Communications, Intelsat, D'Liaisons Radiotelephotographiques de France and then to Boucicaut Hospital in Paris. The image that arrived in France was clear enough for doctors to use for diagnosis. Look for this technique to be used in earnest in the future.


Facsimile technology has been used in meteorology for several years. Its use in remote diagnostic medicine shows promise.

Eppur si muove

The British journal Nature dated June 19th included a paper by astronomers Gordon Pettengill and Rolf Dyce titled "A Radar Determination of the Rotation of the Planet Mercury". They have determined that the planet Mercury is not tidally locked to the sun, but rather has a rotation period of approximately 59 days. That means a day on Mercury is about two-thirds as long as its year. Bad news for Larry Niven, whose very first story, “The Coldest Place”, hinged on the planet always showing the same face to the sun, but those are the breaks in the science fiction game.

An IFfy stew

Speaking of science fiction (and the magazine Niven first appeared in) what is Fred Pohl putting on our plate in this month’s IF? Let’s take a look at the ingredients.


Retief makes his way across town. Art by Gaughan

Trick or Treaty, by Keith Laumer

Things are looking grim for the Terran cause on the planet Gaspierre. The planetary parliament is set to decide if they’re going to be neutral, on the side of the Terries, or support the warlike Krultch, and the presence of a Krultch warship heavily outweighs that of the CDT mission under Ambassador Sheepshorn. Anti-Terry riots are blowing up all over, and Krultch soldiers walk the streets with impunity.

We open with Retief using his usual good relations with the locals to get lodgings for a troupe of Terran entertainers (if four people can be said to constitute a troupe). On his way back to the embassy, Retief cripples a couple of Krultch soldiers (they did start it) and learns from the local police that the Terrans are confined to their embassy until the ambassador is due to make his speech to parliament. After a brief consultation with the ambassador, Retief escapes the embassy, makes his way across town and enlists the aid of the entertainers in tossing a monkey wrench in the Krultch plans. Will he succeed in tipping the balance in Earth’s favor? Of course, the only question is how. Will he win the favors of the lovely, red-headed acrobat with the tattoo? Unusually, no, or at least not on the page.


The Krultch captain gets the drop on Retief. Right where Retief wants him. Art by Gaughan

I’m on record as a fan of Retief, but even I have to admit that things are getting a little stale. To carry on with the stew analogy, this is an onion that’s gone a little spongy or a rubbery carrot. The means by which Retief and friends take the wind from the Krultch’s sails are deeply improbable, bordering on the ridiculous. On the plus side, Ambassador Sheepshorn is one of the best names Laumer has come up with in ages. Is that Sheeps-horn or Sheep-shorn? I suspect that the ambassador and the author have very different opinions on that. In any case, long-time readers of the series will likely find this one a bit dull, though newcomers might enjoy it more. However, it’s not the best entry point for the series. A low three stars.

Against the Odds, by John Brunner

On the planet Galrex, an apparent crank is making a scene outside the office of the Superintendent of Galactic Records, warning that the human race is in danger. Superintendent Motice Bain emerges from his office and agrees to listen to the man’s concerns.

Falkirk, as his name proves to be, once planned to make a career in archaeology studying the vanished civilization of the planet Gorgon. The story goes that the natives of Gorgon had learned to manipulate luck and ultimately bored themselves to death. The planet was originally found three or four hundred years earlier by one of the pioneering starscouts, Morgan Wade, who supposedly figured out the lost secret and ultimately became extremely wealthy. Eight or nine years before the time of the story and before Falkirk could go to Gorgon and begin digging, a starship made an emergency landing on the planet. It took several weeks for a needed spare part to arrive, but once the ship was repaired the crew managed to destroy all that was left of the ancient civilization when taking off. Now every member of that crew is the ruler of a planet. Falkirk is convinced that these ten men are going to take over the galaxy.

Using the example of the birthday problem, which shows that it takes a remarkably small number of people to ensure that two members of the group share a birthday, Bain points out to Falkirk that in a galaxy of two trillion people, it isn’t that unlikely for ten of them to become important. After a despondent Falkirk leaves, Bain gets down to business.

There’s a twist at the end of this tale that anybody who has been reading science fiction for more than a handful of years can see coming. It’s a reasonably well told story, but a far cry from the more modern sort of stories that Brunner is capable of writing. Apparently, IF is where he sends his more old-fashioned work. It’s not bad, it’s just not anything special. Three stars.

We Hunters of Men, by Bruce McAllister

Edmond Reud is out hunting scalps when he is attacked by another hunter. He kills the attacker and takes the other man’s scalp. Ignoring the “mind-prickling” that urges him to go toward the Minced Mountain, which touches the ocher-colored sky, he returns to the underground city to exchange his scalps for pellets. Eventually, he reaches the Minced Mountain and meets an old man trapped there by a broken leg. Without pellets, the old man has had his long-term memory return. Together, they solve the mystery of the “mind-prickling”.

Interspersed throughout this are naval communiques between a ship orbiting the planet Tinni and Base Roquefort. It seems that Tinni was one of twelve planets beset by the Judicians, who managed to close the planet in a charge field when they lost the war. The navy believes that the Judicans’ weapons were destroyed, but because they are physically weak they must have found some way to control the human population. They did manage to get a device through the field which will home in on charge field generators and send out cortex wave emissions to get humans to come and tinker with the generators.


The scalper scalped. Art by Giunta

This is McAllister’s second story, and it’s not very good. Clearly the pellets affect memory and are addictive, giving the Judicians a way to get the humans to kill each other, but I fail to see how the system was originally imposed. Further the tonal shift between the two narratives is rather jarring. That on the planet is somewhat grim and rather fitting to the circumstances, while the naval communiques are rather light and a bit jokey. On the other hand, McAllister is only 18 and does show some raw talent. If he spends some time working at his craft and honing his skills he could be a decent writer down the line. But this story? Two stars.

The Crater, by J. M. McFadden

Insurance investigator Johnny Andrews appears to be on vacation in Hawaii. Actually, he’s on the trail of a group that has hijacked two shipments of irillium somewhere between the asteroids (at a guess, it’s never specified) and landing at the docks in North Africa. Waikiki is a good spot to observe the ships entering parking orbit and firing their retrorockets for landing. He figures he’s on the right track, since a couple of suspicious characters have started watching him.

After observing the next hijacking from out beyond the surf line, he manages to get pictures of the two goons, but they grab him before he can contact his home office. He’s bundled into an interisland subway and taken to Wailuku, the main city on the rather rural island of Maui. Johnny escapes and takes refuge in Fenner’s Grill, the best Mexican restaurant in the islands run by a fellow of Chinese extraction who goes by the name Manuel. From Manuel (who is seemingly related to everyone on the island), Johnny learns of the mysterious group which has taken over the ranch in Haleakala crater. With Manuel’s help, he infiltrates the ranch and sets out to thwart the hijackers for good.


Manuel and Johnny discover some really high tech cattle ranching. Art by Nodel

McFadden is this month’s first-time author. According to Fred Pohl, he’s a former naval officer and has already sold another story to IF. Beginning authors are often advised “Write what you know.” I’d bet that McFadden spent a fair amount of time stationed in Hawaii and was likely a radar officer. Anyway, this one was a rather fun adventure tale with a good dose of humor. Maybe a bit of Keith Laumer influence here. Also Manuel is a great sidekick who feels like a real islander without being an offensive stereotype. Three stars.

Patron of the Arts, by Fred Saberhagen

As the Berserker fleet closed in on Sol, the artistic treasures of Earth were loaded aboard the museum ship Franz Hals to be carried to safety at Tau Epsilon. Aboard are a two man crew and famous artist Piers Herron, a man who has lost all interest in living and with it his ability to create. The ship is captured by a Berserker and the crew killed, but Herron is kept alive for observation. He attempts to paint the Berserker and he and the Berserker, using one of its smaller remote units, discuss the meaning of art on the basis of Titian’s Man with a Glove.

Herron tries to capture his captor, while the subject looks on. Art by Gaughan

I mentioned above that Retief is getting stale. Saberhagen has certainly avoided that problem in his Berserker series. Each of the stories has been very different, even when the settings have been similar, such as one or more people being held captive by the great killing machines. That’s most likely because these stories are really about people. In the hands of many other authors, this series would be one massive space battle after another, while with Saberhagen the one story that actually was about a space battle had a tight focus on some of the people involved.

This is an ambitious story, and while that ambition carries it a long way, it doesn’t quite hit the mark. There’s a subplot about a stowaway that really doesn’t work. If Roger Zelazny wrote a Berserker story, this might well be it, and he might have gotten all the way to where Saberhagen was trying to take it. A high three stars, and I mourn what could have given it that fourth.

Skylark DuQuesne (Part 3 of 5), by E. E. Smith

As DuQuesne watches, Dick Seaton launches a brutal counterattack against the mysterious force that struck at the end of the last episode. The Skylark of Valeron, grievously damaged, beats a hasty retreat, and DuQuesne slinks away toward Earth. Seaton has identified their attackers as Chlorans, the bad guys from the last book. Apparently, intelligent life which develops on any Earthlike (or Tellus-type, as Smith would have it) world will be human. They might be green or squat and hairless, but still human. Any intelligent life that develops on a world with a chlorine atmosphere will be Chlorans, and so on. Look, if you shout at every bit of nonsense science in this thing, you’ll lose your voice and probably frighten your neighbors. Just go with it.


The Skylark of Valeron takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Art by Gray Morrow

Seaton hatches a plan to find an enslaved human world in the Chloran controlled galaxy and find or create a resistance. That will give the Skylarkers a base of operations to fight the Chlorans. Naturally, all of the men volunteer to be the one to go down and carry out the plan while all of their wives object. They leave the choice of the best person to the ship’s Brain. It, of course, chooses Seaton. He goes down to the planet chosen by the Brain, meets the resistance, turns them into an effective fighting force and snatches the planet from the clutches of those humans who willingly serve their Chloran masters.

Meanwhile, DuQuesne returns to Earth and looks up Stephanie “Hunkie” de Marigny, brilliant scientist and the one woman who can come close to piercing the armor of cynicism and disdain he’s wrapped himself in. While his agents buy up all the materials he needs to build his own Valeron, Blackie and Hunkie go on a date (Dutch at her insistence). Afterwards, he hotfoots it off to the opposite side of the universe from the Chloran galaxy, finds an uninhabited Earthlike world and, using the plans he got from Seaton, builds his new ship, which he dubs the DQ.


Dick Seaton settles a labor dispute with his foreman. Art by Gray Morrow

Although the “wherefores” continue to fly, this installment is a small step up from last month. In fact, the stuff involving Seaton setting up his resistance movement actually isn’t all that bad. Of course, Smith crams a novel’s worth (or at least a novella’s) of material into 15 or 20 pages. DuQuesne also moves back toward being a slightly more complex villain than he was last time. Two stars.

Summing Up

So, what does the dish that Fred Pohl has given us look like overall? A couple of ingredients that aren’t as fresh as they might be, but are still acceptable; a couple of tasty morsels, not quite gourmet but good; one that’s not very good, but under normal circumstances would be drowned out by the other ingredients; and then there’s the giant lump of meat that’s really gone off at the end. Outside of Skylark, there does seem to be a slight uptick in quality over the way things have been over the last year or so. That or Skylark is making the rest of the stuff look good by comparison.

Every cloud, so they say, has a silver lining. Skylark has been a big black cloud lowering over IF for a while and will continue to do so for a couple of months. The demands it has made on space (originally intended to be just three installments) has made the editorial team take a look at some of their production procedures. Starting next month IF will have 32 more pages in every issue. Fred says that’s enough for two more novelettes, four or five short stories, a complete short novel, or an extra serial installment. Best of all, the price is staying at 50¢. Five months of Doc Smith is a heavy price to pay, and 32 pages isn’t going to make up for Amazing and Fantastic going bimonthly and running more reprints, but it’s a step in the right direction.




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Book

[June 26, 1965] Disappointing Duo (June Galactoscope #2)

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by Rosemary Benton

Modern Man, Primitive Man (Robert Nathan's The Mallot Diaries)

The Mallot Diaries is a new science fiction drama from novelist Robert Nathan. The author, best known for his 1940 fantasy mystery novel Portrait of Jennie, is a highly prolific individual whose style primarily balances satirical allegories with poetic waxing on the transient nature of the world.  

Given that he has some stories which have been categorized as supernatural/horror and generally fantastical, I was eager to pick up what I thought would be a merger of high literary talent exploring themes commonly found in popular literature. A story about modern man interacting with a species lost out of time? Now that’s a fruitful area for an author such as Nathan! What The Mallot Diaries turned out to be was far more unsettling.

 

First Contact

The book takes place in the present day within the remote regions of Arizona. It is written from the titular firsthand accounts of an Associate of Anthropology at Meriden College named Professor Mallot. He, along with his fellow academic Professor Osgood, Curator of the Archaeological Wing of the Museum of Natural History in Yuma, set out to look into rumors of an elusive tribe of indigenous peoples who have resisted contact with the outside world. Their inquiries with a local Apache man quickly lead them to the very people they seek. Having made contact with the tribe, they soon deduce that the people are actually the remnants of a Neanderthal group who are part of the Bear worshipers that Mallot is studying.  

The elected leader of the tribe welcomes them after they provide reassurances that the purpose of their visit is neither to kill his people or "take away their god".  This tribal leader, or "Jefe", declares that the two men may stay with them in order to act as historians who will document the history and culture of the People of the Bear. Things quickly get messy, however, when the internal power struggles of the tribe begin to draw the outside observers in – both due to their desire to document the People of the Bear, and because of their own weaknesses of the flesh.  

The World Before Recorded History

The modern-day discovery of a lost tribe of Neanderthals is a solid enough base for a good story. Nathan does an admittedly decent job of working in the wonder and respect that his main characters feel as they begin to understand the world of their hosts. It’s refreshing to read a story in which the modern world explorers would be able to appreciate that the only real differences which separate modern humans from their primitive roots are as superficial as looks or clothing choices.  

It’s pessimistic, but Nathan writes on page 73, "I often think of Professor Osgood's remark, that man has not changed in a hundred thousand years. He is still a scoundrel". To this point he again and again drives home the facts that things such as wealth, status, lust and ambition are as alive and well in the predecessors of homo sapiens as they are in modern man himself. At times these parallels come off as a little too trite, however.  

The Youth Revolution

Perfect examples of this are the implications within the buildup to the children's revolution at the climax of the book. This plot thread is clearly a thinly veiled satire of today's youth culture. Under the current leadership of the tribe, children (meaning anyone under the age of 21) are not subjected to any forms of rules or consequences for their bad behavior.

The Jefe indulgently dismisses rude or violent acts as just youthful arrogance. Ultimately this lack of discipline for any crimes, from adultery to assault, results in the 109 children of the tribe taking up spears and killing the elders.  

Heavy handed satire aside, by far the worst flaw of Nathan's book is the sensuality with which young girls are described and the societal sexualization of the youths in the tribe, some of whom are as young as eight years old.

As the story progresses and the anthropologists learn more about the internal politics and social structure of the tribe, both of Nathan's protagonists develop very disturbing feelings for two of the young girls, one of whom is twelve and the other is between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.  

Highly Disturbing

This attraction is in part explained as being an effect of the two professors integrating into the tribe. Thirteen is the current age of consent amongst the Neanderthals and young girls and boys are not strictly forbidden from sexual exchanges, but it’s still a very disquieting turn in the story that comes into play over and over again.

The touting of pedophilia as romantic, cute and "basic human nature" frankly ruins the experience of reading The Mallot Diaries, and because of it I can’t recommend this book at all. 

If Nathan was trying to write the next Lolita he has not succeeded. I have to give this book only a half star. Even with the pointed realizations about humanity which Nathan occasionally drops during the plot, the fetishization of young girls as well as the repeated attempts to write blatant pedophilia off as star crossed love makes The Mallot Diaries a book that is best avoided at all costs.  


By Jason Sacks

On a much lighter note…

Sometimes it's exhilarating to read a book that seems to be positively overflowing with ideas, a book where the author seems thrilled to share a whole universe of concepts and drag an empathetic reader along in a journey that feels complex and rich, even if the book is short.

And sometimes it's just exhausting to read a book like that.

The Martian Sphinx, by Keith Woodcott

The Martian Sphinx, by journeyman science fiction author Keith Woodcott, is an exhausting book.  It's full of clever moments, great excitement, and some intriguing alien races. Sadly,  in this case, the whole of this brief 160-page Ace novel is not greater than the sum of its parts.

The Cork Floats to the Top

The protagonist of this novel is a graduate student named Jason Lombard, who is attending the finest college in Africa but who is ostracized due to his European birthplace. Lombard may be part of a miserable minority, but his brilliance wins the day. Despite his neurotic worries, Lombard is a genius level scientist who has thought through the deeply troubling problem of the Earth's decaying orbit around the sun.

Lombard comes across as a compelling character in the early chapters of this book, albeit in the Philip K. Dick tradition. Jason is a worrier, an outsider, a man who feels deeply ostracized from the university he's attending. It's hard not to see in Lombard echoes of the children integrating Southern elementary schools and college these days, though filtered through a different sort of personality.

I would happily have read a whole book exploring Lombard's world, with its overpopulated Europe and the advancement of the Red Chinese to the top of the world's most advanced societies. Sadly, Woodcott wanders elsewhere before exploring that theme enough to satisfy the reader's curiosity. I wish he had taken a stand to explore the problems of overpopulation, as that problem seems richly deserving of exploration in sci-fi.

The Power of Gravi

A second intriguing theme in The Martian Sphinx depicts how the world has moved beyond its dependence on fossil fuels and has learned to use a safe and endless source of power which is all around us. Gravipower sends a spaceship into space, provides all the energy the world needs, and essentially acts as a magic handwaving plot device to move the story along.

Again, the development of gravipower would alone have been enough for an entertaining book, because its effects on the book's characters is intriguing. But, again, we just don't get to spend much time considering what is essentially only a plot device.

First Contact

Instead, the heart of the book is a trip Lombard and a team of astronauts take to Mars to investigate a strange alien contraption dubbed "The Martian Sphinx." I'll get to the "Sphinx" in a paragraph or two, but first I should mention the aliens who are also questing after the object.

Two races swiftly land on Mars when the Terrans land there, and both alien races are bizarre, unique and totally fascinating in their vast differences from mankind. One race attacks the other, and the effects of the battle make up some of the most passionately written sections of the novel. Though these creatures are as different from people as insects are from us, readers are still made to feel the aliens' pain and fear. I was legitimately moved by a scene in which a number of the beings slowly die due to the battle.

In a way, their very alienness added to the pathos of those those scenes. Readers feel themselves in the boots of Lombard and his companions, struggling to make sense of the cryptic, unexplained war that lands on humanity's doorstep and the terrible toll that war takes on everyone involved. Again, this section alone might make for an intriguing novel of its own, maybe as a parable for our deepening conflict in Vietnam.

Not this Sphinx…

The Sphinx

Lastly, at the heart of the book but far from the center of its action is the "martian sphinx" of the book's title. An alien obelisk on our nearest planetary companion, the sphinx is a perplexing object which bespeaks of a long-lost alien civilization and seems to promise a fascinating future for humanity.

Woodcott makes the sphinx intriguing but it ultimately delivers mostly riddles rather than answers. Though that makes its name appropriate, the sphinx also deserves more than the space it receives here to begin to reveal its secrets. It's a rich enough idea for a whole series of novels, and I hope Woodcott can write those novels.

One of Mr. Woodcott's previous novels

Few Riddles Answered

The Martian Sphinx is Woodcott's fourth published novel and it overflows with ideas. Sadly, perhaps due to the brevity of this book, none of those ideas pay off in fulfilling ways. It's easy to ponder how a writer like Philip K. Dick or John Brunner might explore these ideas which read similar to some of their best work. Sadly Woodcott is no Brunner and this novel just doesn't fulfill its considerable potential.

3 stars.

[I am looking forward to the interesting mail we receive in regard to Jason's last statement. I suppose Woodcott is no Brunner much like Winston P. Sanders is no Poul Anderson and Cordwainer Bird is definitely no Harlan Ellison…]



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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests

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by John Boston

The Collectors

SF anthologies are not neutral vessels.  They are shaped by editors with agendas.  Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be. 

The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948.  The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954.  Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.


by Frank McCarthy

There was abortive competition along the way.  Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again.  The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy.  The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it.  There was no second volume.

But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it.  Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years.  The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication.  After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books.  We await the tenth, slated for December.


by Ed Emshwiller

Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF.  Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable.  She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.

The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline.  As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years.  Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published.  Oh, and three cartoons.  Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.

Merril’s agenda is clear.  Let her tell you about it.  In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:

“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy).  Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too.  Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well.  The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”

English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field.  That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.

You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to.  I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity.  I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be. 

Yin and Yang

But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition.  Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.

So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”?  First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies.  And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories.  The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book.  Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.

First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline.  We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility.  But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire.  It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines.  The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions.  It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age.  This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end.  It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.

The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands.  Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published.  Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation.  The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length.  Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like.  The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.

Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus.  Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included.  Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list.  Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.

And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse.  The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.  Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated.  Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?). 

This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another.  At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.

There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea.  And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”

But that’s the bad news.  The good news is a number of worthwhile stories.  Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea.  William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction.  John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way.  Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less. 

Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life.  New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.

To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms.  In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics.  Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length.  The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation.  C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around.  It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.

But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material.  The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith.  And there is too much overt dross.

So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test.  Maybe the next one will be more startling.  Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine/Anthology

[April 30, 1965] Back-door uprising(May 1965 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Pirates of the Caribbean

The Dominican Republic, half of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, has never been a beacon of democracy.  The Trujillo dictatorship lasted three long decades, ending only in 1961 after his assassination.  The nation's first democratic elections, in 1963, brought Juan Emilio Bosch Gaviño to the Presidency.  In the same year, a military junta removed him from power, elevating Donald Reid Cabral to the position.

Reid was never popular, and on April 24, military constitutionalists and Dominican Revolutionary Party supporters launched a coup, José Rafael Molina Ureña taking the top post.  He lasted all of two days.  A counter coup restored the Reid government to power, although Reid, himself, had fled the country.

Meanwhile, the American military worked to evacuate some 3,500 U.S. citizens living in the country.  Just this morning, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division landed at San Isidro Air Base, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo.  Their mission is to enforce a ceasefire and guide the country back to democracy.

Thus, our nation is now involved in stabilizing missions on both sides of the globe.  Will this action mark a long term involvement?  Or, in the absence of a Communist menace (Haiti is not North Vietnam!) and with the aid of other O.A.S. nations, will this be a quick exercise to hasten Caribbean democracy?

Only time will tell.

Insurgency in the Old Country

At the very least, we can be certain that the Dominican involvement has no chance of developing into a nuclear confrontation (unlike Vietnam, where Sec. Def. MacNamara did not rule out that possibility).  So it's a conventional affair for now.

Appropriately, we now turn to the most conventional of science fiction magazines, the oft-hidebound Analog.  Like the Dominican Republic, it has been under a single strongman for several decades.  And yet, like that island nation, we occasionally see signs of progress.  Indeed, this latest issue has some refreshing entries, indeed.


by John Schoenherr

Trouble Tide, by James H. Schmitz

On the world of Nandy-Cline, herds of sea cows are abruptly and mysteriously disappearing from the costs of the Girard colonies.  Danrich Parrol, head of the Nandy-Cline branch of Girard Pharmaceuticals, teams up with Dr. Nile Etland, head of Girard's station laboratory, to find the cause of the vanishing food animals.  They suspect foul play from a rival company, Agenes.  The poisoning of a herd of mammalian but native fraya seems somehow connected, too.  The two embark on a forensic adventure that takes them across a thousand miles of coast and under miles of ocean.


by John Schoenherr

There are many features that make Tide stand out.  What a delightful story this is, with an interesting pair of protagonists and a cute scientific solution.  I appreciated the depiction of a planet as a big place, big enough to support many economies, colonies, and criminal activities.  I also particularly liked the appearance of female characters.  Indeed, Dr. Nile Etland is an equal partner in the investigation and is not a romantic foil — simply a competent scientist.

Why is this remarkable?  I had become so inured to the lack of female characters in my science fiction that I'd almost started to challenge my convictions.  Was it really fair of me to judge fiction (at least in part) by whether or not it included female characters?  Isn't modern SF just a reflection of the male-dominant society we live in?  Can we blame authors for writing "what they know?"

Yes, yes, and yes.  The erasure of women in any kind of fiction, particularly one that projects present trends into the future, is inexcusable.  Any portrayal of a world where women play minor roles or none at all isn't just unrealistic, it propagates a kind of ugly wish fulfillment.  That's why, when I get a story like Tide with realistic and positive representation of women (and, indeed, Schmitz has always been good in this regard) it's such a breath of fresh air.  Ditto the British import show, Danger Man, which regularly features competent professional women who are integral to the episodes.

It's what I want to see.  It's what I should be seeing.  That I'm seeing it in Analog of all places gives me hope.

Four stars.

Planetfall, by John Brunner


by Alan Moyler

A young Earth woman eagerly greets a young astronaut man, an ecologist on the crew of a starfaring colony with 2,500 residents that is making a brief stop.  She's set on falling in love with and departing with this exotic fellow, who represents freedom, the exotic, and most of all, purpose in life. 

He, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to jump ship, to escape the stultifying space-kibbutz life, to experience the beauty of humanity's Home.

Each of them poison each other's greener grass, and the encounter is an unhappy one.

If there's such a thing as a "meet cute," then this is a "meet ugly," but it's quite poignant.  Brunner does good work.  Four stars.

Magnetohydrodynamics, by Ben Bova

I really wanted to like this nonfiction article.  After all, it's about a genuinely scientific topic, a revolutionary one.  MHD allows the generation of power without moving physical parts, instead using magnetic fields and plasma.  It's the kind of technology required if we ever want to build fusion power plants.  Plus, Asimov likes the guy.

But boy is this piece dull.  It's not quite as dry as reading a patent, but it's in the same ballpark.  I've heard similar reviews of Bova's work in other magazines, so I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Anyway, two stars.

The Captive Djinn, by Christopher Anvil


by John Schoenherr

Captured human on a planet of cats at a 19th Century technology level outwits his jailers through the use of basic chemistry and the exploitation of the felines' stupidity.

If there were an award for "Story that best exemplifies Chris Anvil's work for John Campbell," this would win.  Two stars.

Beautiful art by Schoenherr, though.  He's definitely going to get a Galactic Star again this year!

The Prophet of Dune (Part 5 of 5), by Frank Herbert

And now we come to the greatest coup of all, the finale of the longest serial I've ever read in a magazine.

Technically, Dune is two serials, and there have been other five-part novels.  But Prophet of Dune is not a sequel to Dune World but the latter "novel's" conclusion.

It's been a long trek. It started with Duke Leto Atreides acquiring the fiefdom that included Arrakis, a desert planet and the only source of the spice melange. This cinnamon-smelling spice is an anti-agathic and also conveys a limited form of precognition.

For the Empire's rich, it livens food and lengthens lives.

For the Navigators' Guild, the spice allows its specialists to navigate the hazardous byways of hyperspace.

For the Bene Gesserit, a religious order of women, it facilitates their plans to manipulate history through the deliberate mixing of blood-lines; their hope is to eventually produce the "Kwisatz Haderach," a sort of messiah, a man with the powers of the Bene Gesserit.

Duke Leto was not long for his reign.  The Harkonnen family from whom Arrakis was transferred immediately schemed to regain it, attacking the planet, killing Leto, and forcing Leto's concubine, the Bene Gesserit Jessica, and their son, Paul, to go into hiding among the native "Fremen."  So ended the first serial.


by John Schoenherr

Baron Harkonnen installed a ruthless nephew on Arrakis with the goal of fomenting a rebellion. His plan would then be to take personal control, relax the tyranny, and turn the Fremen into the greatest army the Empire had ever seen, even more fearsome than the Saudukar, the Imperial guard.

Out in the desert, Paul spends a harsh two years learning the ways of the desert. Moisture is priceless, and all sand-dwellers wear water-recycling "still-suits."  The voracious sandworms are both a constant threat and a valuable commodity, for it is their waste that is refined into spice. 

While among the Fremen, Jessica becomes a Reverend Mother, transforming poisonous sandworm effluence into a substance that allows her to commune with all of her brethren, living and dead.  Because she does so while pregnant, her unborn daughter, Alia, gains the wisdom of a thousand women and is born an adult in a child's body.

Paul is initiated into Fremen culture, eventually assuming the mantle of Muad'Dib, savior of the desert people.  Under his leadership, the Fremen are united.  They will revolt, as Harkonnen expected, but the event will not unfold as the Baron desires.

In this final installment of Dune, Paul launches his attack even while the Padishah Emperor, himself, has visited the planet with five legions of Saudukar, and all of the great families have surrounded Arrakis with warships.  But the hopeless position of Muad'Dib turns out to be unbeatable: for Paul controls the production of spice.  Without it, the nobility is crippled, space is unnavigable.  Thus young Atreides emerges utterly triumphant with virtual control of the Empire, a bethrothal to the Emperor's daughter, and freedom for the people of Arrakis.

I have to give credit to Frank Herbert for creating a universe of ambitious scope.  There's a lot to Dune, and the author clearly has a penchant for world-building.  He takes from a wide variety of sources, particularly Arabic and Persian, creating a setting quite different from what we usually see in science fiction.  The result is not unlike the landscapes generated by Cordwainer Smith, whose upbringing included time in China, or Mack Reynolds, whose writing is informed by extensive travel behind the Iron Curtain and in the Mahgreb.

But.

There's plenty not to like, too.  Herbert is an author of no great technical skill, and his writing ranges from passable to laughably bad.  There wasn't so much of his third-person omniscient and everywhere-at-once in this installment, but it wasn't completely absent, either.  The writing is humorless, grandiose (even pompous), and generally not a pleasure to read. 

Beyond that, the work is highly reactionary.  I was originally pleased to see several female characters in the story.  Lady Jessica often is the viewpoint, though given Herbert's love of switching perspective every third line, that's not quite so noteworthy.  But in the end, even the most prominent women are limited to their medieval roles, that of wife and bearer of greatness.  Dune is a man's world. 

Then there are the fedayken, the people of the desert clearly modeled on the Arabs.  And who should lead them to freedom?  Not a local son, no; only T. E. Lawrence Jesus Atreides can save them. 

It's an unsettling subtext in our post-colonial times: a galactic empire, decadent and crumbling, requires an infusion of European boldness to restore it to vigor.  Is it any surprise that this novel came out in Analog?

So, on the one hand, I give this installment four stars.  It kept me interested, and I appreciated the intricacy of the conclusion.  Looking over my tally for the other seven parts of this sprawling opus, that ends us at exactly three stars. 

I think that's fair.  Some will praise the book for its vision and be undaunted by the quality of the prose or the offensiveness of its underpinnings.  Those folks will probably nominate it for another Hugo next year.  Others will give up in boredom around page 35.  I read the whole thing because I had to.  I didn't hate it; I even respect it to a degree.  But I see its many many flaws.

Let the adulatory/damning letters begin!

Running the Numbers

Once again, Analog finishes at the top of the heap; at 3.3 stars, it ties with Science-Fantasy.  It's been a good month for fiction overall, with New Worlds and Amazing scoring 3.2. 

Fantastic gets a solid 3 stars, and IF just misses the mark at 2.8. 
Fantasy and Science Fiction disappoints with 2.7, though its Zenna Henderson story may be the best of the month.

While women may be making a comeback as fictional characters, as writers, they're still conspicuously absent.  Only 2 of the 38 fiction pieces were written by women.

Perhaps it's time for a coup.  Summon the 101st Airborne!

Our last three Journey shows were a gas!  You can watch the kinescope reruns here).  You don't want to miss the next episode, May 9 at 1PM PDT, a special Arts and Entertainment edition featuring Arel Lucas, Cora Buhlert, Erica Frank…and Dr. Who producer, Verity Lambert! Register today and we'll make sure you don't forget.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 28, 1965] Mermaids, Persian Gods and Time Travel New Worlds and Science Fantasy, April/May 1965

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by Mark Yon

Scenes from England

Hello again!

We seem to be heading into warmer weather here in England. Say it quietly, but Spring might actually be here.

[Flowers in Stratford upon Avon]

First up: Science Fantasy.


[Art by Keith Roberts – who else?]

This month’s ‘arty’ cover is by the prolific Keith Roberts, who seems to be everywhere at the moment. His colour artwork was last seen on the cover of the January issue, this one to my mind is just as odd. Are British magazine covers meant to look like they are painted by a child? I despair, especially when I see the covers for the US magazines, which by comparison are so much more than what we get here. The best that can be said here though is that they reflect the changes in the magazines at the moment. They are determined to be different.

The Editorial this month mentions the up-coming British Worldcon later this year – now less than four months away! – and how to apply to attend. It also enquires about letters on the idea of genre and also mentions that there will be a letters page – soon! However, before readers get their hopes up that Science Fantasy will take on other New Worlds staples like the Ratings list – it’s not going to happen.

To the stories themselves.

The Impossible Smile (part 1), by Jael Cracken

Last month our first story was one by the up-coming Worldcon Guest of Honour, Brian Aldiss. This month – its actually the same, though Brian is writing under a pseudonym. (Why do authors do that?)

The Impossible Smile begins with an assassination. Jim Bull, leader of the British Republics is killed in his bathroom. The assassin escapes to a hall near Norwich, the nation’s capital, where Conrad Wyvern lives. It appears that the dictatorship are hunting for telepaths. Although Wyvern is working for the Republics in training new recruits, he is also a man with a secret, and a determination to revenge the apparent death of his sister.

The Impossible Smile is another dystopian future. It reminded me of the future depicted by Hilary Bailey in Moorcock’s New Worlds in the July/August 1964 issue. This covers similar ground but being Aldiss-by-another-name, is in my opinion, better written.

It is quite understated in the way it describes some of the horrors this future holds. Troops shoot citizens with little provocation and this seems to be accepted.

Suspects are taken for interrogation at the base on the Moon and, in a nod I rather suspect is to Orwell, all there work to try and support the supercomputer rather amusingly named ‘Big Bert’. (The American computer by comparison is amusingly named ‘Fall Guy’.)

Weirdly, The Impossible Smile comes across as a mixture of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ian Fleming’s James Bond, with a touch of A E van Vogt’s Slan, a combination I am sure is deliberate.  The general tone is a little uneven however, lurching from torture to comedy sometimes in the same paragraph.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot I liked about this one and a great cliff-hanger ending. Another strong start to an issue, and I look forward to the last part next month. 4 out of 5.

The Middle Ground, by Keith Roberts

Another issue, another Anita story by Keith Roberts.  This time, our teen-witch meets a lonely ghost, recently killed in a road accident. She discovers why the ghost is still haunting around The Dog and Duck and after a bizarre matchmaking ritual with the local witch Controller, manages to get the spirit to leave to a better place. A relatively minor tale, which has the blessed relief of there being a lack of Granny Thompson in this story, although she does appear briefly. Little to add here other than what has been said before. Fans will like it, others will remain unmoved. 3 out of 5.

Housel, by Alan Burns

A weird one. A housel appears to be a mental magnifier that transforms where you live into where you’d want to live, creating a virtual reality environment. This one sets things up nicely but when it attempts to add aliens and interplanetary warfare it becomes too silly and far-fetched for me. There’s an interesting idea here but when it is pushed to its extremes just wouldn’t work. 2 out of 5.

Vashti, by Thomas Burnett-Swann

Perhaps this month’s most anticipated story (at least, by me). Having taken on Greek mythology in the Blue Monkeys serial, which has been one of the highlights of recent Science Fantasy issues for me, this time around Thomas takes on Persian mythology in this novelette.

It is the story of the dwarf Ianiskos, who has moved from Greece to Persia with King Xerxes. Vashti is the King’s wife, who up to now has been barren, despite the King wanting children. Under the threat of death, Vashti leaves the King and returns to her land of Petra, followed by Ianiskos.

The land of Persia is an area rich in mythology to choose from and this is a great story, written in Burnett-Swann’s lyrical fashion. The way that Thomas rewrites these stories for contemporary audiences is still magical. 4 out of 5.

Timmy and the Angel, by Philip Wordley

Another story from Philip, last seen in the March 1965 issue. It is a minor tale to finish the issue on. A story of how an alien ambassador, who has taken the form of an angel, manages to get seven-year-old Timmy to use his latent telekinetic powers to make the Human Race take pause before launching themselves into Space. It’s a nice enough first contact story which trades on the innocence of children to do something for the greater good. Well-meaning and generally positive, it’s about as anti-war as you can get. Think of it as an alternative to Clarke’s Childhoods End, with aliens guiding humans towards mutual benefits for all. But in the end, perhaps not one that’ll be remembered for too long. 3 out of 5.

Summing up Science Fantasy

Another issue that I liked a lot. The Cracken/Aldiss serial is good, the Anita story acceptable, but the novelette by Thomas Burnett Swann is the best story of the issue by far. My only quibble with it is that it is very similar in style to the serial of a few months ago.

The Second Issue At Hand

This month’s New Worlds was heralded as being special and I was hoping for a bit of a treat.


[Art by Robert J. Tilley ]

The Robert J. Tilley cover though is a bit of a disappointment and looks rather cheap, although unusually the inside front cover shows us more than normal:

And what handsome chaps they all look! This might be promising, after all.

Oh, but hang on – the editorial is a guest one by none other than E J (John) Carnell, the recently deposed editor of New Worlds.

Now, I must admit that Mike Moorcock and the new staff of the magazines have always been respectful to the efforts made by John and valued his contribution to the genre, even when minor mortals such as myself have been less positive. As expected, this is a self-satisfying, rallying call acclaiming the importance of British SF, not just to us regular readers but also to the world.  It is a bold statement, which is uncharacteristic of us normally self-restrained Brits. Perhaps that’s why I’m uncomfortable about it.

Time Trap, by Charles L. Harness


[Art by James Cawthorn]

The novella begins in a court. Jon Troy and his telepath wife Ann are accused of murdering leader Provinarch Blogshak. The wife has been convicted already and put under some sort of drugged suspended animation, but Jon seems strangely unperturbed by his death sentence.  He manages to avoid incarceration on a legal technicality, expertly manoeuvred by his advocate Mr. Poole. On leaving court, Poole shows Jon that he as a special power that makes him extremely useful. Using his wife as a hostage, Jon is forced to help the not-really-dead Blogshak save the life of an alien renegade known as the Outcast. Jon is persuaded not to save it but to kill it. The reason for it is revealed by the end of the story.

This is one of those stories that seems to fit with many of the old clichés of science fiction. We have alien monsters, telepathic superpowers and big cosmic ideas that wouldn’t be out of place in a Golden Age space opera story. This is to such an extent that I thought it was meant to be an homage to those stories at first. However, what the editor Mike Moorcock doesn’t tell us is that this is a reprint of a story first published in 1948. As it makes some of the current writers look shabby, Harness deserves credit for writing an energetic tale – a debut story, as well – with big, ambitious aims, if a little lacking on the execution of the ideas. In fact, the story seems unbalanced. The court scenes at the beginning are good, but too long, with the result that the end is rushed and rather too convenient. There are some interesting and unusual ideas here, but in the end I was disappointed.  3 out of 5.

The Small Betraying Detail, by Brian Aldiss

And after the story in Science Fantasy, another story by Brian this month. However, this one is quite different. It tells of Arthur who is being taken to a TB sanitorium on the Norfolk coast. Whilst on the way he seems to see things around him, including his carers, change and then return back to ‘normal’. Is it that Arthur is now seeing reality or is it evidence of a psychotic break? Aldiss doesn’t make it clear, but the increasing discord between what is ‘real’ and what Arthur sees as an alternative relentlessly increases the disquieting nature of the story. Arthur’s perspective at the end brings things to an almost Lovecraft-ian conclusion. It is an unsettling piece and shows us that Aldiss can write dark stories as well as his usual humorous ones.  3 out of 5.

Nobody Axed You, by John Brunner

John Brunner, another stalwart of these pages over the last decade or so, gives us a novelette with a frankly awful pun-ish title. This one begins with what seems to be a decapitation with an axe, although in reality it is an actor watching his ‘performance’. Gene Gardner appears to kill people for entertainment on television in his weekly programme The Gene Gardner Show-to-Kill-Time. In his efforts to maintain his viewer ratings, measured by the number of deaths occurring by that method the week after the transmission, the actor is driven to gaining better and better DOA ratings.

The world setting is interesting in that the show's purpose seems to be to reduce the population by inspiring viewers to copy the programme. There is an overpopulation issue. A lack of reproduction is seen as a virtue, echoed in both nursery rhymes sung to children and the F-girls, who wear makeup that highlights this letter. (The F stands for 'Frigidity', which is seen as a social aspiration rather than an insult.)

I get the impression that Nobody Axed You is one of those stories that is intended to either amuse or shock – or possibly both! – but did neither for me. Instead it takes a good idea – how far will people go for future entertainment? – and ramps it up to such an absurd degree that it just becomes rather silly in the end. Some may see this as some form of future satire, but it lost that ever-so-important sense of believability fairly early on for me. It is a story with something to say, but seems to do it crudely, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, Nobody Axed You is about 3 out of 5 in the end.

Prisoner of the Coral Deep, by J G Ballard

Last time we had something new from J G it was slightly disappointing – an extract from a clearly bigger story that was to be published later as a novel. This one is different. It starts rather matter-of-fact-ly, with the lead character finding a seashell in a coastal cave where he is sheltering from a storm. He meets a mysterious and alluring woman (possibly a mermaid?) there, who encourages him to listen to the shell, when he appears to find himself somewhere else at another time. The siren has lured him into a strange future – or is it the past? This story is Ballard playing with time again. The reasons for this happening are unclear, yet it is quite vivid in its descriptions of what the man hears. It’s OK, but is it outstanding Ballard? Not really. It is a one-point idea in a short story. Remember to never talk to strange women at the seaside! 3 out of 5.

Alfred's Ark, by Jack Vance

The latest American import to this British magazine.  Is this an attempt to mollify the old guard? Possibly – after all, the recent reprint by Arthur C Clarke did very well in the readers ratings, as I will show later.

Alfred’s Ark is a short story of a small-town American farmer who decides to build an ark against an impending flood, and the effects on his town and his neighbours. As to be expected, it is well-written, very easily read, and pleasantly amusing, but somewhat out of step with the style of the new incarnation of New Worlds. And rather short. 3 out of 5.

The Life Buyer (part 2 of 3), by E.C. Tubb

So, here’s the second part of this three-part serial from a long-time SF writer.

At the end of last issue we were left with a cliff-hanger ending and a number of unresolved issues. Billionaire Marcus King seems to be the target of someone who is trying to kill him. Our hero-detectives Markham and Delmonte are still trying to find out why, but as we discovered last issue, it may be something to do with King’s major product, the krown, which is due to be rolled out into a new version. The krown, when fitted to your head can adapt mental and physical reactions and can allow others to experience your thoughts. It may even be a power-play on the part of King himself.

Tubb is still building this up to an ending and the pages turned easily. I still like this story, although as this is the second of three parts, there’s a lot of running about and checking up of suspects without much really happening. Still interested to see how it ends next month though. 4 out of 5.

Articles and Books

There are no Articles or Letters Pages this month, as the Editor admits that they’ve been left out to give more room to the fiction this month. Nevertheless, there is one small paperback review by James Colvin (aka Mike Moorcock), which is for a non-fiction collection of articles named Fads and Fallacies (in the Name of Science) by Martin Gardner. It seems well liked and thoroughly recommended.

Also welcome, although split across two pages, is a potted summary of the contributors in this issue.

Ratings this month for issue 148 (that’s the March 1965 issue). As I mentioned earlier, the reprint of Arthur C Clarke’s Sunjammer story took the top spot. As I said back then, it’s a good story, but it’s a reprint.  Whilst I’m pleased it did well – I love me a good Clarke story – it is very out of place in this new magazine.

Summing up New Worlds

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the 150th issue is good, but not entirely the treat I was hoping for. Some of the story choices are a little unusual – a 1940’s reprint, a lesser offering from one of our brightest stars at the moment, an unusual one from one of our other bright stars, a minor story from a Hugo Award winner –  but it’s a readable issue on the whole.

It is a little ironic that we have John Carnell writing a self-congratulatory Editorial for a magazine that has moved on so far from what he was selling about a year ago. This issue is not the absolute best New Worlds can do, but it does give a reader an idea of the scope and range of what is out there are the moment. It is still streets ahead of those last Carnell issues.

Summing up overall

Both magazines continue their runs of success for me. The Burnett- Swann novella is perhaps my favourite story of all, but what else could be the winning issue this month but the 150th issue of New Worlds? Even with an eclectic mix and the return of John Carnell…

And that’s it for this time. Until the next…

mall>

 

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Magazine/Anthology, Serial

[April 2, 1965] SPEAKING A COMMON LANGUAGE (May 1965 IF)

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by David Levinson

The Common Tongue

March 7th was the first Sunday of Lent. It's a particularly special event this year as Catholics can now hear mass in their local language, rather than Latin. Pope Paul VI marked the occasion by conducting services in Italian at a small church near the Vatican. Mass in the vernacular is not required, but it is encouraged. This is one of the reforms instituted last year as a way to get parishioners more involved in the Catholic faith.

In Living Color

Color television appears to be moving beyond the fad phase. And for that to happen the broadcasters and receivers need to “speak the same language.” The signal the antenna on your roof receives carries a lot of different information. Most of it tells the TV set how bright to make each phosphor dot, some of it tells the speaker what sound to make. The color information is a subset of the brightness information.

In the United States, a standard was developed about a decade ago by the National Television System Committee, commonly known by the committee’s initials, NTSC. It works pretty well, but under poor transmission conditions the colors can shift. (The joke among signal engineers is that NTSC stands for “Never the same color.”) Europe is subject to geographic and weather conditions which are bad for NTSC and so the governments of Western Europe have been looking for a new system better suited to Europe. Two have been developed: the French SECAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire or sequential color with memory) and the German PAL (Phased Alternating Line).


Rectangular screens. That’s a big improvement.

On March 22nd, the France announced that they had signed an agreement with the Soviet Union under which the Russians will use a slightly modified form of SECAM. Two days later, a conference opened in Vienna to discuss a common system for Western Europe. Ultimately, the conference chose PAL. The French however are sticking to their guns, so while most of Europe will be using PAL, France and the East Bloc will be going with SECAM. So much for commonality.

Speaking of Common

This month’s IF certainly delivers a heap of the familiar, from old, familiar faces to old, familiar themes.


Art by Schelling

When Is a Robot? (Editorial), by Frederik Pohl

Normally, we don’t discuss editorials here (and when it comes to Analog that’s better for everyone’s sanity and blood pressure), but Fred touches on an interesting, science fictional and probably controversial topic that’s worth examining. He’s been reading The Semi-Artificial Man by Harold M. Schmeck, which discusses the ways in which doctors are using machinery to temporarily replace the functions of various organs. The example Fred offers is the dialysis machine which does the work of the kidneys, but other examples would be the pacemaker or the heart-lung machine.

Right now, these devices are mostly poor and, at best, temporary substitutes. But what happens when they offer better functions than the organs they replace? Electronic lungs that can breathe seawater or the noxious gases of Jupiter. Or prosthetic limbs that can allow their wearer to run faster or lift heavy things. Pohl introduces the term “cybernetic organism” or cyborg for short. The question he asks is if someone equipped with such replacements might become something other than human. Is there a point at which you become something other than you as your parts are replaced? This is related to what is known in philosophy the Ship of Theseus problem. You might be more familiar with the Grandfather’s Axe: This is my grandfather’s axe; my father replaced the handle and I replaced the head. In any case, it’s an interesting area of speculation, and there are probably several good science fiction stories to be told dealing with this.  [Nick Chooper a.k.a. The Tin Woodman has thoughts on the matter, too. (Ed.)]

Raindrop, by Hal Clement

Raindrop is a ten mile wide sphere of water orbiting the Earth. It was created by melting comets. At its core, is a rocky asteroid and whatever solids may have been contained in the comets. The water is protected from the vacuum of space by a self-repairing skin of genetically tailored algae. Because it came from comets, the water currently has a fairly high concentration of ammonia, which is slowly being broken down by algae, fungi, and various single-celled organisms. The original purpose of Raindrop was to find a way to produce food to help feed the 14 billion people on Earth, who are slowly crowding out arable land and facing a Malthusian catastrophe.

Orbiting nearby is a wheel-shaped space station which rotates to provide gravity for the scientists who come up to study Raindrop. There is only one permanent resident, Bert Silbert, who monitors and maintains both the station and Raindrop.

As the story opens, Raindrop has been purchased by a private group and a high-ranking member of the group, Aino Weisenan, has arrived with his wife Brenda and assistant Bresnahan (who never gets a first name). Silbert is showing Bresnahan around the Raindrop, providing tons of exposition and a couple of lessons in orbital mechanics. We learn that the Weisenans have brought lots of equipment and macroscopic life and are planning to settle Raindrop. Ultimately, we learn that they and the group they represent are the descendants of people who were illegally genetically tailored to live in low and zero gravity conditions. Bresnahan starts an argument with his boss about abandoning the original purpose of Raindrop, and he and Silbert find themselves abandoned at the core.


Aino Weisenan sets an anchor. Art by John Giunta

If you’re at all familiar with the work of Hal Clement, you undoubtedly are expecting a happy ending, and you won’t be disappointed. This is a very typical Clement piece, centered on one or two scientific principles and turning them into the solution to a problem. Unusually, he does make a small scientific error. There are a number of cargo loads, each weighing 1000 pounds on Earth. In the extremely low gravity of Raindrop, they weigh only a few ounces each, and the men handle them easily. But Clement has forgotten the difference between mass and weight. Those loads might only weigh a few ounces, but they should still have the inertia of a thousand pounds. Anyway, if you like Clement – and I do – you should like this. Three stars.

Guesting Time, by R. A. Lafferty

People suddenly begin appearing all over the world. The rate at which they appear increases exponentially until there are 10 billion of them in just two days. According to the arrivals, they are from Skandia, and they are shocked and saddened to see how few of us there are. They also announce that they are a token force just here for a short visit and haven’t brought their children with them.

We see the effects of this invasion largely through the eyes of the suburban Trux family and President Bar-John. Whole cities are built in people’s backyards — so many they carpet the ground, vehicular traffic is blocked, and pedestrian traffic is stacked five high, with people riding on each other’s shoulders. They start handing our fertility charms to help us with our obvious problems in having children.

Through all of this, most people seem to really like the friendly Skandians. The few dissenters appear as cranks and street-corner preachers. Aside from those, only government leaders try to do anything about the Skandians, but the visitors prove to be impervious to bullets. After a week, they begin to disappear, but promise to come back next week with the kids.

Although this story shares the theme of overpopulation with the previous story, there’s certainly nothing common about R. A. Lafferty and the language he uses. He’s a very odd duck. Generally speaking his stories and the ways he tells them should not work, yet they do. Not always and not for everyone, but enough so that his stories sell. I tend to find him a bit hit or miss, and this one comes very close to being a miss for me. I think my biggest complaint is that an additional 10 billion people scattered all over the world aren’t going to produce conditions that make Calcutta look like Wyoming. You can put it down to typical Lafferty hyperbole, but it nagged at me. Three stars, but just barely.

Sign of the Wolf, by Fred Saberhagen

A shepherd lad by the name of Duncan is having trouble with a wolf attacking the village sheep which are in his care. He is also hoping to have a mystical experience, which would allow him to attain adulthood. Through his wandering thoughts we learn that people are said to have come here from Earthland, which is somewhere in the sky, though most consider that to be allegorical. That dawn, he sees a bright flash in the sky and hopes that it is his vision.

The scene switches to a Berserker entering a star system. It is wary, because it senses defensive satellites in orbit around one of the planets. They should not be a problem, but if there are also planetary defenses, it could be destroyed. These are things it has learned during the centuries that Berserker and humans have been at war. As a test, it launches a missile at the planet, where it is destroyed by the satellites.

Duncan learns from a passing priest that too many people saw the flash for it to count as a private vision. Later he is visited by Colleen, a girl from his village. She stays too long and, after leaving Duncan, returns to him, because she can’t get home before dark. During her absence, Duncan has begun to hear voices from the ground, but following them would mean abandoning the sheep. Her return allows him to follow the voices to an unknown cave, where they are announcing that an attack is in progress and requesting a human to give “Order One.” Duncan’s response resolves the story.

This is interspersed with more scenes involving the Berserker. It continues to be wary, but remembers one other planet which had defensive satellites but no cities or radio, because the life there had gone to war with itself. Eventually, it sends down robotic units to begin eliminating life.

Saberhagen continues to keep these Berserker stories diverse and about a lot more than just killing machines and space battles. They’re about people. The parallels here between the wolf and the Berserker are pretty obvious, but they aren’t too heavy-handed. Indeed, Saberhagen handles it all with a fair amount of skill. A high three stars, with the obviousness of the parallel keeping it from that fourth star.

Way Station, by Irving E. Cox, Jr.

At Marstation, teacher Bruce Haywood is on trial for heresy against Orthodox Science. He has been telling his charges that it is safe to leave the airseal dome without a sacred helmet when performing the routines and rituals of the landing field. Through the trial, we get the story of his life through flashbacks. As a boy, he learned that the girders of the dome have neither glass nor an atomic energy field between them. As a student, he was allowed to read the actual works of St. Einstein and St. Darwin. In the end, he is cast out of the dome, though perhaps not to the fate he fears.


Honestly, this is the least ugly of the illustrations for this story. Art by Nodel

Irving Cox turned out quite a few stories during the 50s, averaging four or five a year. Most of them were sold to the lesser mags, but he had a few in Astounding and IF as well. His work has tapered off in the last few years, but he was never the sort of writer that would make you wonder “What ever happened to…?” A journeyman at best, and this continues that trend. Thing is, if you’re going to give your story the same name as last year’s Hugo-winning novel, then you had better hit a home run. At best, this is a bouncing single that got through because the shortstop was out of position. It’s not terrible, but I can’t find my way to giving it more than a high two stars. Maybe I was put off by the hideous art.

Strong Current, by David Goodale

Scout Ship 1014 is forced to make an emergency landing on the planet Toran. The three-man crew is barely able to escape the ship with a few supplies before it explodes. They know that the planet is inhabited, but the rest of the information was lost in the crash. They make their way to a coastal city, only to find it empty and its streets flooded. There don’t appear to be any ground-level doors, and there are a number of metal rods sticking out of the buildings, each of which gives off a strong electrical shock. Once they make their way into a building through the roof, they find many more metallic objects which give off shocks. Eventually, the youngest member of the crew figures things out, enabling them to make contact with the locals and to get in touch with the nearest base.

Goodale is this month’s new author, and he gives us a pretty good problem story, of the sort you might expect to find in Analog. In fact, I wondered why I wasn’t reading it there. Then I realized that 1) the person who solves the problem is a slender Asian, not one of the two brawny men of northern European extraction, and 2) the aliens are friendly, competent, and engage with the humans as equals. In any case, it’s a good story marred only by the author capping it off with a not very funny gag. A solid three stars.

The Altar at Asconel (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner

When last we left our “heroes,” teenage mutant telepath Eunora was threatening to bend everybody to her will. Turns out she can’t. Not for any special reason. She just doesn’t have the power, which, frankly, is a rather poor resolution to a decent cliffhanger. In any case, Spartak then mentally browbeats her with the state she was in when she came aboard and all the awful things she would have to do in order to maintain her control if she had it. There’s that wonderful non-violence again. Vineta then takes over the girl and mothers her into joining their group and their cause.

Off they go to Asconel, deciding to bypass the resistance ensconced on an outer world of the star system. They land in secret on a small island, the only city of which has a temple to Belizuek, disguise themselves, and head for town. The brothers are distressed to see how far society has regressed in just a few years. We’re talking very far, from high-tech to pre-industrial, which seems like it ought to have taken decades.

Their entire plan consists of going to the local temple in order to find out why people have been so easily won over. During services they are exposed to a psychic vision of the galaxy and a mind of immense power. Spartak seems to have succumbed, but he’s just lost in thought about what he’s seen. Afterwards, they make contact with a man by the name of Tharl. By good luck and happenstance, he had served under Vix and has resisted Belizuek, because his wife and child were the first in their town to give themselves up for whatever unspeakable purpose people are being taken.

Spartak takes readings of the temple and discovers that the inner dome holds an atmosphere unlike that which humans can breathe. Unfortunately, they are caught. Spartak and Eunora escape, but Vineta is wounded and Vix and Tiorin are captured. A ceremony where they will willingly give themselves to Belizuek in the grand temple in the capital is announced and Spartak hatches a plan (involving, naturally, somebody else doing something violent) to free them and the rest of Asconel. Thanks to luck and coincidence, it succeeds.

In the end, Tiorin is the new Warden of Asconel. Spartak is planning to go out to the Big Dark, where humans are said to be building their own spaceships. Eunora will accompany him. Vix, unable to stay on the world where Vineta died, offers his ship and his services as pilot.


A montage of the heroes and villains. Art by Gray Morrow

It’s all really just fair to middling space opera. Not as much coincidence and excessive exposition as in the first installment, but some. There were also some dropped plot threads, like the injunction on Spartak to avoid violence and the loyal resistance on the outer planet. Neither really served any purpose in the story. I think I was most annoyed by the death of Vineta, more so because it happened off screen, so to speak. And apparently it was just so Vix would have a reason to go off with Spartak at the end.

I gave the first half a grudging three stars, and this half is better that the first, so I guess it gets three stars as well, as does the story as a whole. I’d probably feel less reluctant about that rating if this had been written by someone else. C. C. MacApp or J. T. McIntosh, for example. Brunner is a much better writer than this hackneyed stuff, and he fails to elevate it to something more. Alas, it seems like he has more of this story to tell.

Summing Up

A bit of a mixed bag of common elements this month: authors who’ve been around for a while, authors who are still fairly new, but have made names for themselves; two stories about overpopulation, two about societies that have lost their technological capabilities (two-and-a-half, if you count Asconel), a good, old problem story. It’s not as bad as last month, but it wasn’t that long ago that IF was one of the best magazines out there.


Speaking of space opera…

We had so much success with our first episode of The Journey Show (you can watch the kinescope rerun; check local listings for details) that we're going to have another one on April 11 at 1PM PDT with The Young Traveler as the special musical guest.  As the kids say, be there or be square!

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Magazine/Anthology

[March 12, 1965] Sic Transit (April 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

No-Sale, Sale

The big news, previously rumored, is that Amazing and its stablemate Fantastic are to change hands.  The April Science Fiction Times just arrived, with the big headline “ ‘AMAZING STORIES’ AND ‘FANTASTIC’ SOLD TO SOL COHEN.” Cohen is the publisher of Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow, but will resign at the end of next month to take up his new occupation. 

Why is this happening?  Probably because circulation, which had been increasing, started to decline again in 1962 (when I started reviewing it!).  The SF Times article adds, tendentiously and questionably, that “the magazine showed what appeared to be a lack of interest by its editors.” Read their further comment and draw your own conclusions on that point.

Whatever the reason, it’s done.  The last Ziff-Davis issues of both magazines will be the June issues.  Whether they will continue monthly is not known, nor is who will edit the magazine—presumably meaning Cele Lalli is not continuing. 

The Issue at Hand


by Paula McLane

The previous two issues were much improved over their predecessors.  Of course the improvement could not be sustained (viz. the current issue), but it has at least reverted to the slightly less mean than on some occasions.

The Shores of Infinity, by Edmond Hamilton


by George Schelling

Who was it who first said “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like”?  Dorothy Parker?  Mark Twain?  Pliny the Elder?  Anyway, Edmond Hamilton’s latest in his backwards-looking saga of the far future featuring the Star Kings may not even rise to the level of that truism.  The generically titled The Shores of Infinity spends about 10 of its 33 or so pages on background and build-up, and then the generically named John Gordon of ancient (i.e., contemporary) Earth takes off to the capital of the Galaxy to hobnob with the Emperor in the imperial city of Throon. 

There, he learns of more rumors of the previously encountered mind-controlling menace, is sent off on a dangerous secret mission to investigate, is captured, victimized by treachery and benefited by its reversal, and the author seems as bored by the whole perfunctory and hackneyed business as I was.  It’s ostentatiously inconclusive, so we are guaranteed more.  To paraphrase W.C. Fields, second prize would be two more sequels.

A recurring theme here is Gordon’s alienation from the beautiful Princess Lianna.  This seems to be the special Woman Trouble issue of Amazing; see below.  (Note to Betty Friedan: if the viewpoint characters were female, it would of course be the Man Trouble issue.  Tell women more of them should be writing SF.) Also worth mentioning is the cover, by Paula McLane, which portrays a giant space-helmeted visage peering into a room where two small diaphanous figures are trying to close the door against him.  Obviously metaphorical, right?  Actually, it’s a quite literal rendering of a passing scene in the story.

Anyway, this one has little going for it except the usual space-operatic rhetoric (“The vast mass of faintly glowing drift that was known as the Deneb Shoals, they skirted.  They plunged on and now they were passing through the space where, that other time, the space-fleets of the Empire and its allies had fought out their final Armageddon with the League of the Dark Worlds.”) The problem with this decoration is there’s not much here to decorate.  Two stars, probably too generous.

No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism, by John Jakes


by George Schelling

John Jakes’s long novelet No Vinism Like Chau-Vinism [sic], the title obviously a play on the all too familiar song There’s No Business Like Show Business, inhabits the territory demarcated by Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, Ron Goulart on a good day, and the Three Stooges.  In the future, everything is showbiz.  The populace is entertained and distracted by constant scripted and broadcast warfare between commercial forces, in this case the American Margarine Manufacturers Association versus the United Dairy Expedition Force, fighting of course in Wisconsin.

The script is disrupted by the appearance of a real gun in the hands of the rogue margarineer (Jakes calls them margies) Burton Tanzy of the Golden-Glo Margarine Company, who executes a cow on live TV, initiating a slapstick plot in which among other things besides real guns, the fake commercial war turns into a real union dispute.  The protagonist Gregory Rooke of the Dairy forces must try to calm things down and restore order, lest the public get wind of the fraudulence of their world.  His chief antagonist proves to be his ex-wife, who has dumped him to pursue her overweening ambitions, consistently with the Woman Trouble motif, though things work out better for Rooke than for poor forlorn John Gordon.

This story is actually quite amusing; Jakes has a knack for the farcical tall tale.  Unfortunately it goes on too long and palls a bit by the end, keeping the final reckoning down to three stars.

De Ruyter: Dreamer, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges contributes Ensign De Ruyter: Dreamer, another in his tiresome series about the space navy guy who triumphs over cartoonishly stupid extraterrestrials through the clever use of basic science—in this case, it’s Fun with Electromagnetism.  These stories barely rise to the level of filler.  One star.

Greendark in the Cairn, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer continues in his “almost there” vein with Greendark in the Cairn, featuring a space captain who is either going nuts, or is being driven nuts by transmissions from the extraterrestrial enemy, but figures out how to defeat them and prevent himself from giving the game away.  It’s gimmicky and facile but well rendered.  Two stars, but do try again.

Speech Is Silver, by John Brunner

The earnest John Brunner undertakes a satire of American commercialism in Speech Is Silver, in which the protagonist Hankin is selected in the Soundsleep company’s “Great Search” for the man with the perfect voice for a program of sleep counseling—that is, counseling while one sleeps on how to handle the difficulties of the day.  Except of course that’s not really how things work, and his new-found fame destroys his life.  (Also—Woman Trouble again—his wife, who prodded him to enter the Soundsleep competition, leaves him, apparently because he was never ambitious enough, like Rooke’s wife in No Vinism [etc.].) At the point where Soundsleep decides to replace him with a younger near-double, Hankin detonates.

Like the Jakes story, this one is an acid satire on contemporary image-mongering American capitalism.  Its problem, aside from being too long (also like Jakes), is that it isn’t crazy enough.  Brunner’s calm and methodical style and storytelling muffle the plot’s antic qualities.  Maybe he should get Jakes to introduce him to the Three Stooges.

Two stars.

Religion in Science Fiction: God, Space, and Faith, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz forges on with Religion in Science Fiction: God, Space, and Faith, rendered on the cover as Science-Fiction Views of God With a Profile of C.S. Lewis.  It’s a rambling description of various SF stories on religious themes, starting reasonably interestingly with several older books that most readers will not have heard of, continuing with the promised account of C.S. Lewis, followed by Stapledon, Heinlein, Wyndham, Simak, Leiber, Keller, Bradbury, Blish, Miller, del Rey, Boucher, and Farmer.

In this recitation Moskowitz manages to miss Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo-winning The Star and his equally well-known The Nine Billion Names of God; Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question; Leigh Brackett’s tale of a different sort of theocracy, The Long Tomorrow; Harry Harrison’s anti-theological polemic The Streets of Ashkelon; Katherine MacLean’s acerbic Unhuman Sacrifice; and, astonishingly, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.  Remarkably, he says, “Heinlein, who introduced [religion] into the science fiction magazines, has long since tired of it as a focal plot device.”

But this (mis-)observation does not deter him from his conclusion: “Neverthess, the decision is made.  The science fiction writer has come to the conclusion that scientific advance will not mean the end of belief.  He feels certain that a truly convincing portrayal of a hypothetical future cannot be made without considering the mystical aspects of man.”

Can we say fallacy of composition?  Two stars: another “almost,” some interesting material, some of it unfamiliar, the whole brought down by Moskowitz’s fatuous generalizations.

Summing Up

So, mostly not too bad (except for the egregious Ensign Ruyter), but mostly not as good as it should and could have been either.  There have been issues that would make one regret that this regime is ending, but this isn’t one of them.




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Magazine/Anthology

[March 8, 1965] An Alien Perspective (April 1965 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Understanding the Other

Civilization is about building a society out of disparate units.  It has to go beyond the family and clan.  The key to organizing a civilization is empathy, recognizing that we are all different yet we share common values and rights.  Once we understand each other, even if we don't agree on everything, then we can truly create "from many, one."

Science fiction allows the exploration of cutting edge sociological subjects, one of them being the understanding of the "other".  That's because the genre has a ready-made stand-in for the concept: the alien.  Indeed, many science fiction stories are allegorical; they address colonialism, the Cold War, societal taboos, in ways that might currently be too touchy or on-the-nose for conventional fiction.  We can hope that, with the bottle uncorked, less allegorical stories will be required in the future. 

Of all the science fiction magazines that come out every month, I think Fred Pohl's trio of Galaxy, IF, and Worlds of Tomorrow has the strongest tradition of incorporating aliens (Analog also has aliens, but thanks to its editor's sensibilities, they are almost invariably both more evil and inferior to human beings; Campbell likes a certain kind of allegory…)

Meeting the Minds


by George Schelling (it says it illustates War Against the Yukks, but it doesn't)

This month's Galaxy is a case in point, with six of its nine tales involving aliens of one kind or another.  There's some good stuff in here, as well as a number of slog stories.  Let's look, shall we?

Committee of the Whole, by Frank Herbert


by Nodel

Watch your step — there's a rough patch right at the start. 

Whole is a meandering preach piece about an inventor who appears before a Congressional committee with news of a new, revolutionary invention.  I'll just tell you about it because the first two thirds of the story are less suspenseful than obtusely annoying: it's a ray gun.  Its applications are infinite, but the one most of the Congressmen are worried about is that every owner has a weapon more powerful than the atom bomb at their disposal.  And, because of the way the invention has been disseminated, everyone in the world has access to them.

The result, the inventor opines, is going to be a world of true libertarian equality.  "An armed society is a polite society" is how the expression goes.  It's the kind of naive sentiment that would go over well at Analog, but for adults, it's just ridiculous.  In equalizing humanity through armed neutrality, the inventor has made aliens of us all.  I'll wager that Earth's population of humans will be dead inside a week…and probably most of the animals. 

One star, and yet more disdain for the Herbert byline.

Wrong-Way Street, by Larry Niven

Ah, but then our fortunes truly turn around.  Wrong Way Street gives us the unplanned adventure of Mike Capoferri, a scientist stationed on the Moon late this century to investigate an alien base and space ship.  They have lain on the lunar plain for countless millions of years, and their provenance and function are completely unknown.  That is, until Mike unwittingly not only discerns the motive force for the space ship, but also activates it.  Here, understanding the alien way of thinking proved hazardous to Mike's health.  Can he get home?  Will the human race survive his journey?

This is author Niven's third story, and he continues with the same deftness he displayed with his recent short novel, World of Ptavvs.  I guarantee that the ending of Street will stay with you.

Four stars.

Death and Birth of the Angakok, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Peterluk is a young Eskimo out hunting when a horrifying bunch of one-eyed Seal People arrive.  He panics and entreats his powerful Grandfather, holed up in Peterluk's igloo, to aid him with his mystical powers.  But Grandfather is too weak to assist and, in the end, Peterluk is left to defeat one of the aliens with a conventional rifle.

When the Seal People ship surfaces from beneath the ice, much to Peterluk's surprise, it disgorges not aliens but white people in uniform.  And Peterluk begins to doubt the power, and even the human nature, of his strangely humped, ever demanding Grandfather.

Confusing at first, Angakok is actually a pretty neat tale of two types of aliens (human and truly extraterrestrial) as seen from the point of view of one completely naive to other cultures.  While the bones of the plot are fairly conventional, I appreciated the novel viewpoint.

Three stars.

Symbolically Speaking, by Willy Ley

Any meeting of the minds between human and alien will require a common symbology to convey ideas.  A science fiction writer looking for inspiration for such a symbol set could do worse than to read Willy Ley's latest science article for Galaxy, in which he discusses the evolution of symbols for the planets, alchemical substances, numbers, etc.

Fairly dry, but there's interesting information here.  Three stars.

A Wobble in Wockii Futures, by Gordon R. Dickson


by Gray Morrow, channeling Bill Gaines

Tom and Lucy Reasoner are a recurring pair in a series of stories, this being the fourth.  Sort of a "Nick and Nora" meets Retief, the stories of the Reasoners began charmingly enough, with Tom an interstellar diplomat with a mystery to solve, and Lucy his sometimes discerning assistant.

Last time around, Tom had not only gotten inducted into the interstellar assassin's guild, but he'd also catapulted Earth onto the galactic scene, dramatically increasing his home planet's clout.  Now the humans have gotten themselves hip-deep in a planetary investment that made turn out to be completely worthless.  Tom must find out who hoodwinked the Terrans and why before humanity is bankrupted.

This installation has the same problem as the last one — Lucy is sidelined and played for stupid, and the humor of the tale just isn't funny.  Dickson can, and usually does, do better.

Two stars.

Wasted on the Young, by John Brunner

The concept of the "teenager" is a fairly recent one.  It used to be that kids enjoyed a relatively short childhood before transitioning to the labor force and/or marriage.  Now there is an intermediate phase before adulthood during which a youngster can learn the ropes of grown-up society.

Brunner's latest story posits an even longer period of immaturity, one in which kids are given free credit until age thirty to do whatever they want.  The catch: once they reach their fourth decade, they have to pay back what they've spent by being productive members of society.  Thus, the wastrels find themselves indebted indefinitely, while those who lived a spartan life get to be free agents.

Hal Page, age 32, believes he knows a way to cheat the system…but in the end, society has use for people who have spent it all, even their life.

There's a great idea here, but I feel it was somewhat wasted on the gimmick (and not particularly logical) ending.  Still, three stars.

The Decision Makers, by Joseph Green


by Jack Gaughan

Allan Odegaard is a Practical Philosopher, a kind of emissary for humanity to other worlds.  His job is to judge whether a planet is inhabited by intelligent life or not; if so, Terran policy is to keep hands off.  As one would expect, such a determination is often strongly opposed by financial interests.

Capella G Eight is an ocean planet, though during times of Ice Age, three continents emerge from the sea as the water level drops.  Its dominant life form is a seal-like creature.  Though it possesses a relatively tiny brain pan, somehow it lives in a communal society and can use tools.  Is it intelligent?  Does the fact that these creatures live near a rich uranium deposit factor into Odegaard's decision?

We've seen this kind of story before — H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy series is probably the purest example, though J.F. Bone's The Lani People should also be noted.  It's a worthy subject, and Green does a pretty good job, though the ending is abrupt and not quite as momentous as I would have liked.

All in all, it's the best story I've seen from Green in an American publication (he tends to stick to the English side of the Atlantic.) Three stars.

Slow Tuesday Night, by R. A. Lafferty

We're back to Earth for this one.  We all know that the pace of life has only quickened over the generations.  Lafferty, whose middle name would be "whimsy" if the initial were a W. and not an A., writes of a future society in which society is speeded up a hundred-fold compared to now.  Fortunes are made and lost in minutes.  Marriages last an hour on a good night.  And a lifetime can be lived in a week.

It's cute, but the satire wears thin about halfway through.  Also, there are only two female characters, and their sole goal appears to be competing for the earliest wedding of the evening.

A low three, I guess.

Sculptor, by C. C. MacApp

Eight years ago, a disgraced spaceman abandoned his crewmates on an alien world, rushing home with a set of invaluable statues — and a hole in his memory about the affair.  Now he has been shanghaied by a criminal bent on returning to this world and plundering it for more of the exquisite figurines.

What race made these wrought-diamond minatures?  And why does the amnesiac spaceman feel such dread on the planet's surface?

This is another "they looked like us" yarn that has been around since Campbell kick-started the genre with Who Goes There (and Heinlein made it popular with The Puppet Masters).  It's so prevalent, in fact, that there's another example of it in this very issue! (Angakok) Despite not really treading on new ground, it may well be the best work I've seen from C. C. MacApp, a fairly recent author who never fails to never quite succeed.

Three stars.

War Against the Yukks, by Keith Laumer


by Gray Morrow

Six years ago, the Journey had the (dubious) pleasure of reviewing Missile to the Moon.  It was one of a long line of movies involving a man-less society, run by a bunch of sex-starved female beauties just waiting for a hunk to tip the order on its ear.

Laumer's latest is the same old story: this time, the men are an anthropologist and his stereotypically British assistant, who are whisked to Callisto where they encounter the last remnants of an ante-diluvian war between the sexes.  High Jinks ensue(s?)

Only the author's puissance at writing elevates this story above the level of dreck.  Even then, it's a disappointment.  I understand that satirizing a hoary cliche can be fun, but the whole point of Galaxy is that the magazine doesn't even acknowledge the existence of said cliches, much less indulge in them.

It really deserves two stars.  I'll probably give it three anyway.

Summit's End

This month's Galaxy was as alien-heavy as usual, and there was a broad variety of stories.  On the other hand, with the exception of the Niven, there were no stand-outs.  Indeed, the issue read more like an overlong issue of IF (which has also dipped in quality) than Galaxy of old.

Nevertheless, Ad Astra per Aspera.  What goes down must come up again, and when humanity finally does meet the alien denizens of the stars, should they exist, our starship crews will doubtless have been inculcated with the lessons learned in SF, particularly in magazines like Galaxy.




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