Having a teacher first as a mother, and now one for a wife, I think of the year as mirroring the school terms, with the new year beginning in September. But, looking at the newspapers, it doesn’t appear the world has changed much in the last twelve months.
On the home front, the troubles in Northern Ireland keep getting worse, with the presence of British troops now seeming to be resented by both sides. Meanwhile, The Conservative party base is pushing the party to take a harder anti-immigration line, and union chiefs clash with the Wilson government.
British Troops in Ulster, caught in the middle of escalating violence.
Peace talks over Vietnam are once again being held in Paris and apparently going nowhere, there are continued conflicts in the middle East and the Junta in Greece seems as unstable as ever. A harsh crackdown has just finished in Czechoslovakia and the Soviets are still making threatening noises at the rest of Eastern Europe.
Scenes from the streets of Prague, one year on from the Soviet Invasion.
But, whilst the depressing politics of our time continues, so does the regularity of publishing. As such another anthology arrived in the post for me to review.
We open with another tale from the ever-reliable Mrs. Damon Knight. Here Janet Matthews returns to her hometown of Somerset after working in medicine in New York, where she wishes to look after her disabled father. At the same time, a Dr. Staunton is in town to study dreams. Annoyed by his pomposity Janet decides to join in with the project.
This is beautifully described, albeit with some unusual turns of phrase, but it goes on far too long for my tastes, only really becoming more SFnal towards the end. There are also a lot of interesting concepts, but I am not convinced they are explored well enough here to justify their inclusion.
Three Stars
The Roads, the Roads, the Beautiful Road by Avram Davidson
Highway Chief Craig Burns loves his vast new road constructions and does not accept any argument to the contrary. However, one day he misses his turn-off and finds himself in a labyrinth of tunnels and cloverleaf interchanges.
This is the kind of joke story Davidson used to regularly publish when editing F&SF, a feature I have not missed. Add on to this my general dislike of vehicular tales and I was not well disposed to this at all.
Hector, A Jewish father is estranged from his daughter, Lorinda, because of her marrying a form of Martian plant-life named Mor. Months later, the parents receive a letter from her, saying she is pregnant and asking them to come visit her on Mars.
I believe this is the first story from a well-known fan (and wife of Terry Carr) and it marks a strong start. It follows the familiar routes you have likely seen on television programmes but they are not as common in the SF realm. In addition, this is told using a great tone of voice that makes it feel believable.
King Argaven XVII of Karhide is having a recurring visions of executing a crowd of protesters. This madness is attempted to be treated by physician Hoge, but what could be the real cause?
I was originally unsure if this planet is indeed meant to be Gethen from The Left Hand of Darkness, as it is only referred to as “Winter” and the gender changes in the book are not referenced here. However, its connections to the Ekumen seem to confirm that it does indeed take place on the same world.
I found this a confusing read. I started again four times and afterwards I was constantly jumping back and forth to try to get to grips with what was happening. It does not have the usual easy style of Le Guin, instead told through a series of “pictures”. Honestly, I am scratching my head over what to make of it.
Three Stars, I guess?
The Time Machine by Langdon Jones
Jones seems to be emerging as one of the great polymaths of English SF. He has been involved in editing New Worlds for a number of years now, writes prose and poetry, has produced photographic cover art, is helping the Peake estate put together new editions of the Gormenghast trilogy and has an original anthology coming out in a couple of months. Amazingly he still had time to sell this tale to Orbit.
In an unnamed prisoner’s cell sits a photo of Caroline Howard. We hear the story of his past relationship with her and the construction of a time machine to see her again.
This tale is told in a passive distanced voice with the connection of the four different situations not immediately obvious. As such, I imagine it will be alienating to some, but I found it quite beautiful and cleverly constructed.
The titular Time Machine is not a HG Wells type of mechanical construct but a strange device containing a Dali painting and creating a “concrete déjà vu”. This may actually mean that it does not really “work” as such but these are merely the memories and delusions of the prisoner. I believe the ambiguity is intentional on the part of the author and makes the tale all the stronger.
Some may find the conclusion and meaning of the tale a bit mawkish, but I liked it a lot.
John Miller goes to analyst Robert Rousse to resolve an obsession he has had for the last 25 years, to reach the mythical Northern Shore. In order to cure this desire, they sail there in dreams.
Whilst I am a fan of what Mr. Jones does, the same cannot be said of Mr. Lafferty. As such this may work better for other people, but I found it all a little silly.
Two Stars
Paul's Treehouse by Gene Wolfe
Sheila and Morris’ son has been in a treehouse since Thursday and is refusing to come down. As they work with their neighbour to try to get him out, disorder is spreading throughout the town.
This is probably the Gene Wolfe story that has impressed me most so far. Not that it is brilliant, but it is well told and has a solid theme. Hopefully the start of an upswing in his writing.
A high three stars
The Price by C. Davis Belcher
The millionaire John Phillpott Tanker is in a traffic accident that caves in his skull. Whilst his body is still alive, he is braindead. After several tests the doctors conclude he is medically dead and use his organs to save a number of people. Whilst this is controversial, journalist Sturbridge writes a number of articles to win the public around. However, in a surprising turn of events, the recipients of the organ donations sue the Tanker’s estate claiming they are still the living John Phillpott Tanker.
These organ transplant stories are becoming a subgenre in their own right, and, unfortunately, this is among the poorer examples. Lem told a better version of this story in three pages last month than Belcher told in 27.
A low two stars
The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis by Philip Latham
At a track-meet at the Rose Bowl, three athletes all ran 100 yards in less than 9 seconds. If this wasn’t surprising enough, a whole set of other new running records were set that afternoon. What could be happening?
This spends a lot of time doing pseudo-scientific explanations for something incredibly silly. I was annoyed at having read it.
One star
Winston by Kit Reed
The Wazikis buy the four-year-old child of geniuses as a status symbol. Whilst he has an IQ of 160 they soon grow frustrated he is not yet able to win crossword competitions or answer any trivia question they pose.
This story irritated me for a number of reasons. First off, there is more than a whiff of eugenics about the concept here, with the child of a college professor being inherently smarter than this family with a name we seem to be encouraged to read as Eastern European or North African. At the very least, the way the Wazikis are portrayed feels classist.
Secondly, the fact that smart people are selling children to less intelligent people seems to imply that earning potential and IQ are inversely related. But the Wazikis see Winston as an investment, so are they just meant to be stupid and bad with money?
And then the story is just unpleasant with the amount of child abuse taking place in it. Maybe I am overly sensitive, as I am from the gentler school of parenting, but I found it to be gratuitous instead of aiding the storytelling.
One Star
The History Makers by James Sallis
John writes to his brother Jim about his arrival on Ephemera, a planet where the inhabitants live on a separate time-plane to humanity.
Sallis gives us another epistolary tale which, as usual, is written in a literary style and full of artistic allusions (including, strangely, the second mention of the same Dali painting in this anthology. I blame Ballard). I am not sure this has the same depth as his other works but it is still a wonderfully atmospheric read.
The US military has a problem. Their war against a guerrilla insurgency in Asia is not going well and they want to use tactical nuclear weapons to sort it out. However, the public are squeamish about this sort of thing. The solution? Using a violence obsessed rock group The Four Horseman, to spread their message.
A biting critique of both the American military-industrial complex and the hippy groups selling out. Incredibly timely, clever and disturbing.
A high four stars, bordering on five. (I recently discussed this with some friends over at Young People Read SF if you want to see more of our thoughts.)
The Cycle Continues
Some of the same artists, still in UK charts a year on
And so we complete another Orbit anthology, with it feeling pretty similar to the last one.
The main difference is that there is more New Wave influence creeping in (having stories by two of the editors of New Worlds will do that) but many prior authors reappear, doing similar things. Some of it brilliant, some mediocre, the rest best forgotten.
Will either Orbit or our politics break out of this cycle by autumn 1970? Only time will tell.
Is ten books a record for the Galactoscope? Lucky we have so many folks reading furiously for the Journey. And it's a good thing, because amidst the dross and mediocrity, there's a couple of gems…
Kate Wilhelm is perhaps better known for her debut short story, "The Mile-Long Spaceship" (1963) and Clone (1965), the Hugo Award nominated novel written in collaboration with Theodore L. Thomas. Perhaps you've read her work in Orbit, edited by her husband, Damon Knight.
The ominous title of this book, Let the Fire Fall, promises fire, brimstone, and a violent alien invasion—but the bad guys in this story aren't the extraterrestrials. The plot: A spaceship inhabited by pregnant alien women lands in small town America. The aliens are friendly, and clearly hope to be welcome on this new planet they’ve discovered. One vile and opportunistic man named Obie Cox– under normal circumstances, a small-town philanderer of no account, blessed with uncommon charisma–manages to worm his way to the pulpit. One there, he takes advantage of humanity’s rampant xenophobia and the ineffectuality of Earth’s bureaucracy through flat-out lies, hate, and fear mongering. What he wants is control and he achieves that by weaponizing humanity’s worst traits and using them to brainwash the populace and plunging the world into dystopian chaos.
At first, Wilhelm’s strangely familiar-feeling and deliberately matter-of-fact writing style, peppered with many clever twists of phrase, seems to capture the spirit of Ray Bradbury or an episode of the Twilight Zone. What we get, instead, is a riveting and decidedly tragic tale of First Contact gone awry in a world populated by an almost irredeemable cast of humans.
Wilhelm’s courage and ambitiousness in attempting to capture the vile side of human nature is admirable. Still, even a forward thinking and imaginative author such as herself cannot seem to escape the discriminatory views of our time. Let the Fire Fall perpetuates the sexist view that women must be submissive to men and even the women important to the plot are given no initiative to steer their own destinies. While Wilhelm is progressive enough to acknowledge the existence of homosexuals, the way she characterizes homosexuality as one of the “vices” permitted by the villainous Obie Cox’s vaunted religion suggests a personal disapproval of such individuals. (To be fair, what her characters feel, even the "good" ones, doesn't necessarily reflect Wilhelm's feelings on a subject.)
In any wise, Let the Fire Fall is an excellently written novel. The author’s insight and ability to imagine a dark future, all too possible, are incredible. I love this book but I hated reading it. The way it mirrors our current reality where opportunistic charlatans have risen to political power by preying on the gullibility of the American populace fills me with trepidation. Let the Fire Fall is an insidiously horrifying and damning condemnation of the human race. This book will make you squirm and fret about the world as we know it, and the future of our species. You will not feel comfortable reading this book. You should not.
Daphne du Maurier has been a favourite of mine for a long while. I read Rebecca in my teens and have slowly been building up a collection of her writings. However, she has only had one truly SFnal release to date, the marvellous collection The Apple Tree, most notable for containing the original short story of The Birds.
That was until this year, when she followed in the footsteps of fellow literary darlings Naomi Mitchison and Virginia Woolf and put out a book on a mainstay of science fiction, time travel.
Dick Young goes down to visit his old university friend Professor Magnus Lane in Cornwall. Dick agrees to be the test subject of the Professor’s new alchemical invention and finds himself transported back in time to the era of Edward III’s infancy. The story follows Dick and Magnus’ trips back and forth between the 14th and 20th centuries.
What Du Maurier always does well is give a real sense of atmosphere to her tales. As is usual in her books Cornwall takes on the mysterious atmosphere of Bronte’s Yorkshire and Doyle’s Dartmoor: a strange wild place where anything can happen. She also illustrates well the sense of dislocation Dick feels moving between the periods, making him feel like an outsider in both.
Cover by Susan Einzig
And yet, I don’t feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting here. The children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden explores similar themes better for me. Also, in spite of the period being underserved in historical narratives, I didn’t feel like I gained much more insight or understanding of it than I would have done from an encyclopedia summary.
This almost reads like one of those historical stories that had a touch of added SFnal content to get into the magazines. Of course, that is not the case here (DuMaurier could release her shopping list and it would be a best seller) and this is still a good read, but I did not feel like it is doing anything exceptional nor is it destined to be one of my favourites.
As John Carnell has now edited as many editions of New Writings as Ian Flemming wrote James Bond novels, he is entitled to enjoy himself. As such, he says this volume is entirely composed of stories he personally loved, rather than mixing in some he knew were good but not to his taste. But how much do my feelings ally with his?
Blood Brother by James White
We start with the always reliable James White with another tale of Sector General.
Following on from Vertigo, a team is returning with Surreshun to “Meatball” to assess the species' medical needs and to locate the manufacturers of their responsive organic tools. Unfortunately, the native entities of the planet believe that Surreshun was kidnapped by the crew of the Descartes and are not keen to let this happen again.
This once again is a fascinating exercise from White, trying to imagine a wholly alien species from our understanding and the problems it could cause. The natives of “Meatball” have an inbuilt dislike of anything similar to themselves and have no central form of government but exist in a deep layer of animal life. How to communicate ideas like friendship to a species like that is a true challenge.
What White is always great at is giving us a sense of how diverse the species in the Galactic Federation are, whilst still making it seem like an everyday occurrence at the hospital. For example:
Despite the fact that one species was covered in thick silver fur and crawled like a giant caterpillar and the other resembled a six-legged elephant, they were fairly easy to deal with because they had the same atmosphere and gravity requirements as Conway. But he was also responsible for a small ward of Hudlars, beings with hide like flexible armour plate whose artificial gravity system was set at five Gs and whose atmosphere was a dense high-pressure fog – and the odd-ball TLTU classification entity hailing from he knew not where who breathed superheated steam. It took more than a few hours to tidy up such a collection of loose ends…
He continues to know what he does well and produces the most consistently strong series currently ongoing in Science Fiction.
Four Stars
If You're So Smart by Paul Corey
Ibby has a mental disability and suffers from regular seizures, so lives permanently at a mental hospital. He also helps out in the animal testing lab. However, he may be able to understand the animals better than the scientists.
A pedestrian tale, poorly told. Whilst I have heard that Corey is an American writer and journalist of some renown, I am only familiar with him from his awful appearance in New Worlds earlier in the decade. Apparently he has an SF novel out from Robert Hale but this isn’t inspiring me to pick it up.
A low Two Stars
The Ballad of Luna Lil by Sydney J. Bounds
Gerard The Rhymer wrote The Ballad of Luna Lil many centuries ago. This work analyses the historical accuracy of the tale to the real life of Captain Bartholomew “Black Bart” Sparrow, a space free trader, and Lily La Lune, singing star of the videos.
I am a great lover of analyses of fictional works and this one doesn’t disappoint. It turns what could be a standard pulpy adventure into an exploration of a fictional universe, containing fascinating ideas and raising questions about the power of art.
A high Four Stars
The Eternity Game by Vincent King
In a tale told from four perspectives (A, G, P & Z), two different species find themselves in the Place, attempting to survive in their collapsing galaxy.
We learn from the introduction that Vincent King is also a visual artist and Carnell describes this work as being like an abstract painting. I am not sure I agree with that, it is certainly not as obscure as some of the writings of Ballard, Burroughs, or Farmer. Rather, you have a puzzle that fits together by the end.
I don’t think it is quite as effective as his usual Medieval Futurism, but still a worthy piece.
Four Stars
Tilt Angle by R. W. Mackelworth
The Earth has entered a new Ice Age, and Tomas and Donna are sent on a mission from the City to find food stores. But is this parasitic existence right or sustainable?
Another one of these Frozen Earth tales that have been popping up a lot recently in the UK (we do like to moan about the weather). Whilst evocatively told, it feels abrupt and incomplete. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw further stories in this world.
Three Stars
The Song of Infinity by Domingo Santos
Once again we have a work in translation, this time from a Spanish author. He is apparently well known in his own country but I am not aware of any prior translations into English. This one was selected and translated by the late great Arthur Sellings.
We get the internal monologue of an astronaut who finds himself accidentally floating through space without any hope of rescue.
This is a well told and melancholic tale but one that nevertheless didn’t really affect me as much as I felt it was trying to.
Three Stars
Green Five Renegade by M. John Harrison
Astronaut of the Green 5, Chad Redeem, encounters alien life forms. Discovering them to be naïve and peaceful compared to the human race, he goes on the run rather than risk his knowledge of them becoming known to the authorities.
Oh dear, I am not sure what happened here. Even putting aside some weird printing errors, it is overwritten, cliché driven and full of creepy descriptions of women. I know Harrison can do a lot better so I am surprised to see this come from his pen.
One Star
So, the good ship New Writings continues steadily on its course. Some good works, some poorer, still generally very much in Carnell’s usual mode. Much the same crew manning the rigging with nary a woman in sight*. Whilst it may not always be the most exciting voyage, it shows little signs of leakage. Onward!
*I believe it has now been over 5 years since Carnell published a story by a woman, the last being Dial SCH 1828 by Gweneth Penn-Bull in December ‘63’s Science Fantasy.
by Gideon Marcus
Ace Double 72400
The High Hex, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Here is the sequel to Target: Terra that nobody asked for. In this one, the African space station has begun broadcasting a menacing message, all chants and tribal drums, that seems to presage a heating up of the White/Black cold war. The crew of Space Station 1 are recalled to duty and tasked with infiltrating the second station. The plot is thickened with robots and destructive aliens, and the Africans aren't the bad guys after all.
If you enjoyed the gaggish and frivolous tone of the first book, you'll like this one. Otherwise…you won't.
If you read and enjoyed the four stories of John Grimes, a space captain running the rim of galactic space, then this is an opportunity to get all of them in one convenient package. In this fix-up, they are unchanged, with only short concluding scenes added to each piece to link them together.
They all appeared in IF, where David gave them three stars apiece. I see no reason to change his assessment.
by Victoria Silverwolf
War And No Peace
Two new novels deal with armed conflict, international or domestic. One takes place in the very recent past, but not the one with which we're familiar. The other is set in the near future, one we'd like to avoid. Let's start with something that didn't happen less than two years ago.
If Israel Lost the War, by Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littell
Uncredited cover art.
In the tradition of Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore (the Confederacy wins the American Civil War) and The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick (the Axis wins the Second World War), this book reverses the result of a war.
The title makes that obvious, of course. We're talking about the so-called Six Day War (June 5 through 10, 1967), in which Israel triumphed over a coalition of Arab nations.
I know less about military stuff than almost anybody, so I won't try to analyze the war. However, there seems to be general agreement that Israel's preemptive strike, devastating the Egyptian Air Force and giving Israel complete control over the skies, was a key factor in the victory.
What if Israel didn't attack first? What if Arab forces destroyed most of Israel's air power instead?
That's the premise of the novel. The result is overwhelming victory for the Arab nations, with Israel's territory soon being divided up among them.
The book's map, showing the progress of the imagined conflict.
The occupying forces initiate a reign of terror. As in many wars, looting, rape, and murder follow the victory. The big winner is Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who dominates his allies and intends to create a new, bigger United Arab Republic.
(The UAR was the name given to the union of Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961. The United Arab Republic is still the official name of the nation better known as Egypt.)
As I said, I'm no expert on war, so I don't know how plausible this scenario might be. It assumes closely coordinated action among the Arab states, which is questionable. It also presumes that Arab aircraft would be able to bypass Israel's early warning defense system. (There are even some lines in the book that indicate that this is unlikely.)
So how is the book as a work of fiction? Well, given the fact that the three authors are journalists (all working for Newsweek), it's no surprise that it reads like nonfiction. There are a few minor fictional characters, but all the major ones are real people. We follow politicians and military leaders from Israel, the Arab nations, the USA, and the USSR.
The work is obviously very pro-Israel. (Richard Z. Chesnoff is married to an Israeli woman, and used to live on a kibbutz.) Whether one sees the book as reasoned justification for Israel's preemptive strike, or as anti-Arab propaganda, it is sure to stir up controversy. Judged strictly on its literary merits, I'd have to say that it's readable enough. The authors are definitely more interested in getting their message across than in creating a work of art.
Three stars.
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Let's turn from an imaginary past to a speculative future.
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillion.
The race problem in the United States is much worse in the year 2014 than it was in our own time. Some cities (Detroit, Washington, etc.) are under the control of kneeblanks, while others are still firmly dominated by blanks.
Oh, you're not familiar with those terms? Maybe it'll help if I point out that blank is derived from the Afrikaans word blanc (white) and that kneeblank (often just knee) comes from nieblanc (not white.)
This is a sample of the book's futuristic terminology, which takes some time to get used to. It's not as difficult as the slang in A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, but it requires a little effort.
Anyway, ordinary citizens are forced to defend themselves with serious weapons, supplied by arms dealers. The dominant supplier of deadly devices is a family-run corporation that resembles the Mafia.
That's the background. What about the story? Well, it's complicated. There are a lot of important characters and a lot of plot threads. Let me try to come up with a greatly oversimplified synopsis.
There's a psychiatric institute under the direction of a megalomaniac who treats his patients with extreme isolation from society. One of the inmates is a kneeblank soldier who suffered a breakdown in war, but who now seems perfectly sane. In fact, he's an electronics genius.
A woman who produces enigmatic prophecies while under the influence of drugs (as in ancient times, she's called a pythoness) performs at the institute. A fellow who exposes scandals on television (the book calls him a spoolpigeon) records her act. He also happens to be married to one of the patients.
Meanwhile, a kneeblank spoolpigeon gets kicked out of Detroit by the city's kneeblank mayor, at the instigation of a blank South African. (The tragic situation of apartheid is still going strong in 2014.)
In addition to that, a kneeblank revolutionary who put kneeblanks in control of much of the United Kingdom is on his way to the United States. Even though US officials are terrified of him, he easily gets through customs.
What does this all have to do with a secret project of the arms dealers? Suffice to say that the kneeblank soldier I mentioned above isn't what he seems to be.
I've only given you a vague hint of what the novel is like. In addition to the convoluted plot, there's the narrative style. The first two chapters, for example, consist of a single word split into two parts. Many of the chapter titles are very long and often satiric. In the middle of the book, Brunner provides quotes from real newspaper articles about the American race problem.
The climax involves science fiction themes that are more speculative than those found earlier in the book. These may strain the reader's suspension of disbelief.
This novel isn't as groundbreaking as the author's stunning masterwork Stand on Zanzibar, but it's pretty close in quality.
Four stars.
by David Levinson
A Familiar Refrain
In music, it’s common for artists to cover an old standard or just something someone else has already done. Usually, they have a different approach that may be about the same, worse, or better. Once in a while, they’ll take an old song and make entirely their own (Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra have a singular talent for this).
There’s a similar phenomenon in science fiction. Someone comes up with an interesting idea—time travel, alien invasion, what have you—and eventually almost everybody tries to see what they can do with the concept. Harry Harrison’s latest novel is just such a work. How well did he do?
Two Aztec villages lie on either side of a river in a valley long isolated from the outside world. We soon learn that things are not as they seem. The serpent-headed goddess Coatlicue is a physical presence that stalks the river bank at night, and typical Aztec features include blonde hair and blue eyes.
Into this world is born Chimal, a young man with a penchant for asking uncomfortable questions. When he inadvertently causes the death of the high priest (and the sun fails to rise, because there is no one to say the necessary prayer), Chimal must flee the valley. The society he finds outside the valley is no less hidebound and no fonder of questions with uncomfortable answers.
Although I’ve talked around it for the benefit of those who would like to experience the surprise on their own, I suspect many of you have figured out what’s going on. Although Harrison adds one or two interesting flourishes, the novel follows the expected course to one of the standard endings. Indeed, the story follows such a predictable course, I found myself more interested in what happened centuries earlier to create the situation or what is going to happen a few decades after the end.
Is it worth your time? Maybe. Is it worth your money? Definitely not, especially not at hardback prices.
Dickson has been busy as of late, with his serial Wolfling currently running in Analog, and with a new paperback original alongside it. Spacepaw is a less serious novel and seems to be aimed at a younger readership, which is fine by me. It takes place on Dilbia, the same planet featured in Dickson's 1961 novel Special Delivery. Like that earlier novel it features the Dilbians, a race of nine-foot-tall bear-like aliens who are not exactly hostile but who certainly have a curious way of going about things.
Bill Waltham is an agriculture scientist sent to Dilbia, supposedly to meet up with Lafe Greentree, his on-site superior, and Anita Lyme, a "trainee assistant" working under Greentree. The problem (actually two problems) is that Greentree is not here: he had sustained an injury whose severity the off-planet hospital is strangely vague about disclosing, and Anita has been taken captive by a pack of Dilbian outlaws. The only possible help Waltham can get are the mischievous Dilbian the Hill Bluffer (that's his name, the Hill Bluffer) and a Hemnoid named Mula-ay (italics not mine). The Hill Bluffer is not terribly useful and Mula-ay seems to be working for a third party—in Waltham's favor or not remains to be seen.
This novel is basically a comedy of manners. To rescue Lyme and convince the Dilbians to pick up agricultural skills (the race is a rural lot that lives off the fat o' the land), Waltham will have to adapt to Dilbian customs. The black-furred giants are a comical lot, with silly names like More Jam, Perfectly Delightful, and Grandpa Squeaky; they even give Waltham a Dilbian name, "Pick-and-Shovel," which the serious-minded human does not appreciate. The leader of the outlaws, Bone Breaker, is pretty affable despite his name and occupation. The stakes are kept somewhat low, even when Waltham is duped into accepting a duel to the death, which is fitting for a comedy, even if doesn't leave the reader with much to think about.
Dickson's brand of humor is unlikely to spark laughter, but it's effective at often invoking a smirk. Waltham himself is a bit of a wet blanket, but the comedy mostly stems from this straight-laced hero type being forced to deal with some deeply unserious aliens. Lyme is a bit of a shrew, but Dickson does write her as competent and independent-minded, even if I suspect he does not think very highly of her.
A solid three out of five stars, possibly four for young readers.
A good deal less enjoyable is a new Gothic horror novel I picked up, by an author I've never heard of before. Despite having been published this year, The Tormented reads like a fossilized dinosaur, but not one of the interesting ones. It's a pastiche of late-19th century supernatural horror. I'm sure Daniels likes Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle, but unfortunately she is not remotely as good a wordsmith as James or even Doyle.
Sharon Aldrich lived on a New Orleans plantation called The Pillars until both her parents died, and it turns out all the money had dried up. After a stint or two abroad she returns to The Pillars as governess for a new family that's moved in, the Beaumonts. Craig Beaumont and his wife Emily are stuck in a loveless marriage while Emily's sister, Sarah, tags along as a third wheel. Cassie, Craig's daughter, is a reasonably well-adjusted child despite the fact that she had witnessed a horrific death in the family not long ago. And there seems to be a ghost problem on the plantation. The place is most certainly haunted (it takes all of about five minutes upon Sharon's arriving for a ghost to start whispering in her ear), and worse yet, Sharon must now deal with a dysfunctional upper-class family.
You would think that at only 160 pages this would be a densely packed narrative, but it's not. There's quite a bit of padding. Most of the wordage is dialogue, with characters often getting into arguments with each other and then almost immediately apologizing for causing a fuss. Emily and Sarah are major shrews, and Sharon is not much better. It soon becomes clear Sharon and Craig like each other but are hesitant to take action, what with the whole marriage thing. Even the ghost does not pose much of a threat. No wonder the Confederacy lost. The Tormented is probably a few thousand words longer than James's The Turn of the Screw, but feels shorter because it spins its wheels so often. Not much actually happens, and despite the New Orleans setting Daniels injects practically no atmosphere into her writing.
The most damning part is that this is 1969, not 1889. I kept thinking, "Why play such an old and tired genre straight? What point is Daniels trying to make by doing this?" After having read the whole thing, I still don't know.
A school for young wizards: What could possibly go wrong!
I wanted to like last year's City of Illusions, but the book fell flat. However, I saw the potential in Ursula K. Le Guin as a writer. Her ideas in the book were good, it was the execution that was lacking, so with her latest book out, A Wizard of Earthsea,I figured I’d give her another try.
Ged is an ambitious young wizard with a hunger for knowledge and power. The book follows his journey from childhood into adulthood, first starting when he attends a school for wizards. There he learns the basics of magic, makes friends and a rival. He also unleashes a dark being that wants him dead, but thanks to magic protection around the school, he is safe for the time being.
It isn’t until Ged graduates and becomes a practicing wizard for various villages that he really learns the hard lessons of magic. Now outside the protection of school, he is pursued by the dark being, eventually forced to turn and fight it, putting his skills to the ultimate test.
Fantasy as a genre doesn’t excite me as an adult, as it is often too whimsical and too escapist, too detached from our own world. A Wizard of Earthsea managed a careful balance, with an attention to the laws of magic and how it is able to be used. Wizards can only use so much magic at a time, and overexerting oneself or attempting a spell higher than one’s skill has physical consequences, causing wounds to appear on the body. Throughout the book, we see Ged test these limits, only to end up in lengthy recovery each time. Eventually, he does go too far and ends up permanently scarring himself.
I liked the concept of true names: learning the true name of a creature, plant, object or place is the key to all spells in this world. Even people have true names that they keep secret, instead using an alias in day to day life. While Ged is the main character’s true name, and the narrative refers to him as such, in dialogue he is called “Sparrowhawk” by other characters. I loved the intimate moments of friendship when true names were exchanged, showing a great amount of trust between characters.
Ged makes a compelling main character, with his distinctive flaw being his own hubris. Time and again, he tries magic that is way above his level only to be hurt. He attempts to raise the dead, despite knowing that it can’t be done, and suffers the consequences. It's because of his hubris that a dark creature is brought into the world who specifically hunts him, creating the main conflict of the book. But we’re shown that he has other values. He isn’t greedy. When he fights the dragon, his only motivation is duty to the town he serves. When the dragon offers him some of his treasure as a reward, he declines. Most of the time when Ged overexerts his magic, it isn’t in pursuit of fame. Ged truly wants to help people, even when it’s past his capabilities.
You know it's a good book when there's a map
With this book, I finally saw what I knew Le Guin was capable of as a writer. She's always created compelling unique worlds readers want to immerse themselves in, but now her writing can back up her ideas. Maybe because this is her first foray into juvenile fiction or perhaps she is simply growing as a writer.
I look forward to what she writes next.
Four stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Tomorrow and Yesterday
The latest Ace Double (H-95, two quarters and a dime at your local drug store paperback rack) contains one novel looking forward in time, and one collection glancing backwards at the author's recent career.
We begin with a brilliant mathematician from California sneaking around through a remote area of Wisconsin, ready to kill a man. We cut away from this scene to find a government agent from Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, preparing to assassinate the richest man in the world.
Why all this homicidal intent?
Flashbacks tell us what's going on. John Androki is a fellow who shows up out of nowhere. He convinces a rich guy that he can predict exactly how stocks will move up or down in the future. The millionaire sets him up with some cash in exchange for the information. Androki goes on to not only be the wealthiest person on Earth (yep, he's the intended target of the government assassin) but to wield immense political power all over the world.
Our protagonist is Bertram Kane, a brilliant mathematician (yep, he's the guy stalking a man in Wisconsin) who is working on a theory of multiple dimensions. He's a widower who's having an on-again off-again affair with Anita Weber, an art professor. His buddy is Gordon Maxon, a professor of psychology.
Maxon is convinced that Androki can perceive the future (hence the novel's title.) He calls him a downthrough, a word that's new to me. Kane isn't convinced, but when Weber dumps him for the incredibly rich and powerful Androki, he becomes suspicious.
Things get scarier when other mathematicians working on multiple dimensions are murdered. Coincidence, or is Androki arranging for their deaths? And is Kane next on the list?
You may figure out the main plot gimmick, which explains why Kane is out to kill a completely innocent man. (The government assassin's motive is less mysterious. Androki is changing America's relations with other nations in ways the United States government doesn't like.)
Basically a suspense novel with a science fiction gimmick, the plot creates a fair amount of tension, although parts of it are talky. There are quite a few murders along the way, and a pretty grim ending.
Three stars.
So Bright the Vision, by Clifford Simak
Cover art by Gray Morrow.
Four stories, dating from 1956 to 1960, by a noted author appear in this volume.
First printed in the June 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, this lighthearted yarn starts with a huge agate appearing in a guy's yard, along with the tiny critters mentioned in the title. Chaos ensues.
The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review when it first appeared, and that's fair. It's a pleasant enough bit of gentle comedy, but hardly profound.
The April 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction is the source of this oddly titled (and odd) story.
An elderly fellow collects stamps from alien worlds, piling them up in his rat's nest of a home. Some of the stamps are actually made up of living microorganisms. When mixed with broth made by an overly friendly neighbor, they jump into action and start organizing the guy's messy collection.
There's a strong resemblance to the previous story, which also had tiny creatures helping folks at first, but going a little too far. This one is a lot stranger than the other one, and a little more complex. (I haven't mentioned the role played by stuff that the old man receives from an alien pen pal, or what the weird title means.) Interesting for its eccentricity, if nothing else.
The August 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe supplies the story that gives the collection its title.
At a future time when Earth is in contact with several alien worlds, the only thing of value humans can supply is fiction. Other beings don't make up things that aren't true, and they're fascinated by the concept.
The fiction is created via programmed machines, with a little human input. Writing by hand (or pencil, pen, or typewriter) is considered old-fashioned, and even vulgar.
The plot follows the misadventures of a so-called writer who has fallen on hard times. His machine is on its last legs, and he can't afford a new one. A fellow writer's secret leads to a sudden decision.
Much of the story consists of discussions of the importance of fiction. The automated fiction machines seem intended as a dark satire of uninspired hackwork. It's clearly a heartfelt work, and the author manages to convey his passion.
This yarn comes from the pages of the September 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
A newspaper reporter investigates some odd events. There's the sudden, seemingly merciful death of someone suffering from a terminal illness. A scientist's papers are rearranged, giving him the clue he needs to complete his work. The reporter suggests, in a joking article, that these and other happenings might be the work of brownies. He's not too far off the mark.
Once again we have small beings helping humans. This time their efforts are entirely benign, unlike the golden bugs (who ignored people completely, and only worked for their own goals) and the microorganisms from the alien stamp (who went a little too far in their effort to organize things.) This is a sweet, simple little story, benefiting from the author's own experience as a newspaperman.
Three stars.
The title story is definitely the highlight of the collection. As a whole, that bumps the book up to three and one-half stars.
There's no question that Star Trek is a bona fide phenomenon. Now in its third season (and so far, quite a good season it is), it is a universe that has launched several dozen fan clubs, most with their own 'zines, many with Trek-fiction included. Professional tie-in merchandise is booming, too, from the AMT model kits of the ships in the show, to Stephen Whitfield's indispensable The Making of Star Trek, to Gold Key's dispensable comic book.
The latest release is the very first (that I'm aware of) professional original Trek story, Mission to Horatius by none other than SF veteran Mack Reynolds. That a familiar name should be tapped to write Trek tales is not a surprise. Episodes of the show have been written by SFnal talents Norman Spinrad, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby; and James Blish has written two collections of episode novelizations (well, noveletizations).
So how does Reynolds' effort rate? First, let's look at the story:
The Enterprise has been out on patrol so long that ship's stores are low and the crew is beginning to suffer from "cafard". This malady is a kind of isolation sickness that can lead to mass insanity. Before the ship can return to starbase, however, it receives a distress call from the Horatius system just beyond the Federation.
There are three Class M planets in the system, all inhabited by pioneers who don't want to be Federated. They are the primitive society of Neolithia, which operates in bands and clans; the theological autocracy of Mythria, controlled by a happy drug called "Anodyne" (a la "Return of the Archons"); and the Prussian military state of Bavarya. This world is the most dangerous, as they have designs on conquering the Federation, and they are building an army of clones ("Dopplegangers") toward that end.
Uncertain as to from which planet the distress signal originated, Kirk leads a landing party composed of his senior officers to each planet in turn. Meanwhile, the strings on Uhura's guitar break one by one, and Sulu's pet rat gets loose. Cafard causes 40 crew members to be put in stasis. It's not a happy trip. But in the end, it's a successful one when Kirk finds the that Anna, the daughter of "Nummer Ein" on Bavarya, summoned the Enterprise to thwart her father's nefarious scheme,
Well. There's quite a lot wrong with this book. Reynolds makes serving on the Enterprise feel like the worst duty in the galaxy. Maybe this is realistic, but from what we've seen, the crew isn't this unhappy. As for "cafard", if our nuclear submarine crews don't suffer from such issues, I can't imagine a crack Starfleet crew would.
Reynolds' characterizations are only cursorily accurate. Indeed, Mission feels more like a lesser story in his Analog-published United Planets series of stories, featuring a decentralized set of worlds with every kind of government imaginable. There's an undertone of smugness as Kirk destroys one society after another—first by beaming down an anodyne-antidote into the Mythran water supply (if Scotty can manufacture ten pounds of the stuff in ten minutes, why can't he synthesize new strings for Uhura?), and then by destroying all five million dopplegangers on Bavarya…who may well have been sentient beings.
And finally, McCoy staves off cafard by making the crew believe that Sulu's rat has Bubonic Plague, and that it must be killed to save the ship. The rat does not have a happy ending.
Most eyeroll inducing passage: "Anna, womanlike, had been inspecting Janice Rand's neat uniform. Now she responded to the bows of the men from the Enterprise. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, blond, and, save for a slight plumpness, attractive."
(emphasis added)
Even accepting that the target audience is on the younger side (given that the publisher is Whitman), this does not really excuse all the problems with Mission to Horatius. Moreover, the stirring introduction seems to have been written for an entirely different story!
There are pictures by Sparky Moore. They are adequate, but the characters don't look too much like our heroes.
Two stars.
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
In the run up to Christmas, I received a special treat through my letterbox: a second Orbit anthology for 1968. Will it do better than #3?
Orbit 4
Cover by Paul Lehr
Windsong by Kate Wilhelm
Starting with the series’ most regular contributor, Wilhelm’s story concerns Dan Thornton, an overworked executive. He is trying to solve the problem of an armored computer that should be able to act as a policeman. However, it cannot cope with the stress of unexpected situations. To get solutions he has been working with the psychologist Dr. Feldman to see if his dreams yield any ideas but, instead, he keeps dreaming about Paula. She was a free-spirited “windsong” from his teenage years, a person who could instantly analyse patterns to understand the world in ways others could not.
I have been noticing a pattern emerging with Wilhelm’s writing. She wants to experiment with form and content but rarely manages to deliver a strong balance between the two. In this case it is the style that works well, using the dream sessions in a way that would please the New Wave, but the actual plot leaves something to be desired, not really travelling anywhere fast and engaging in some obvious cliches.
Evens out at Three Stars
Probable Cause by Charles L. Harness
Harness recently returned from his parental leave and is back to writing, getting an even warmer reception this time around. Using his legal background, he brings us the discussion of a supreme court case, one where the constitutionality of a conviction depends on an interesting question. If a search warrant is granted based on a psychic reading, does this violate the fourth and\or fifth amendments?
Whilst some of the arguments here do not make much sense to me, I am neither a lawyer nor an American. As such, I am happy to bow to Harness’ knowledge of constitutional jurisprudence. What I question is the length of it all. At over 60 pages, this is the second longest story to yet grace the pages of Orbit. But it is just some justices sitting in a room discussing a piece of legal theory. This might be worth a vignette, but I needed more to justify a novella.
Two Stars
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison
Rudy has finally gotten out of the army on medical, only to find his fiancée Kris in a marijuana-drenched squat in downtown LA. Is he just not “with it” anymore? Or is something more sinister going on?
If this was from an older writer, I would assume it was a crass attempt to be relevant. With Ellison I am willing to assume he is in earnest in writing a hippy horror story. It is not entirely clear if what we see really happened or if it just a massive drug trip, but that actually makes it work better for me.
Four Stars
This Corruptible by Jacob Transue
This is an author of which no information is given, nor one I've heard of before. Is it perhaps a pseudonym?
Thirty-five years ago, scientists Paul and Andrew departed on bad terms. Whilst the former went into seclusion, the latter became vastly wealthy. Andrew now seeks out Paul after learning of his new discovery, the ability to renew a person’s life.
This reads like a middling story from 15 years ago. Whilst some horrifying imagery raises it up, it is pulled back down by lechery.
Two Stars
Animalby Carol Emshwiller
A strange animal is kept in the city by its keepers. What could it be?
This is a stylistic piece that will depend on your tolerance for this kind of prose:
It was said, on the second day, that he did not look too unhappy. A keeper of particular sensitivity brought him both a grilled cheese sandwich and a hamburger so it might be seen what his preferences were, but still he ate nothing.
This reader was unhappy, feeling nothing.
One Star
One at a Time by R. A. Lafferty
In Barnaby’s Barn, McSkee tells tall tales. But what if they are true?
I feel about Lafferty’s writing the way Superman does about Kryptonite. As such, I struggle with him at the best of times. This one I found it impossible to read. I don’t like bar-room frames or tall tales, I was confused by the style and was generally perplexed throughout.
A subjective One Star
Passengers by Robert Silverberg
In an interesting take on the Puppet Masters concept, Earth has encountered strange creatures called passengers. They can “ride” anyone, at any time, with no way to detect or stop them. Once a Passenger leaves a person, the memory goes. Our narrator wakes up to find he slept with a woman whilst he was ridden. However, upon exercising in Central Park he believes he has found her, even though she doesn’t remember him.
Anyone who has read Silverberg of late knows of his strange recurring writings about young women, so I will not belabour the point here. Your rating will probably result from how you balance the concept against this tendency. I come down in the middle.
Three Stars
Grimm's Story by Vernor Vinge
The planet Tu is a world that contains almost no metals. Whilst some technologies, such as pharmaceuticals, hydrofoils and optics, have been able to develop, others, such as heavier than air flight, have not.
It is on this world that Astronomy student Svir Hedrigs is approached by Tatja Grimm, the science editor of Fantasie magazine. She has a dangerous mission for Hedrigs, to stop the destruction of the last complete collection of Fantasie.
In less skilled hands this could easily have been contrived and fannish. Instead, Vinge spins a fascinating intricate plot and fully imagined world, touching on a number of interesting themes with complicated characters. It stumbles a little at the very end, stopping it from gaining a full five stars, but still very good.
A high four stars
A Few Last Words by James Sallis
Hoover is beset by bad dreams. He decides to head to Doug’s coffee shop where we learn from them why the cities are now so empty.
Well written and atmospheric, appealing to this sufferer of parasomnia.
Four Stars
Continuing a steady Orbit
Once again, Orbit contains some of the best and worst of SF for me. This issue more than most, though, is going to be a subjective one. So much is based on style that it cannot help but appeal to personal taste. I know others have considered Animal among the best and Grimm’s Story among the weakest. Whatever your tastes, I think there will be something in here for you to chew on.
This completely passed me by on first release but an ad for it from the Science Fiction Book Club in last month’s New Worlds was enough to convince me to get it. But was it worth me trialing a membership from them?
The so-called “end of the universe” is an area where physical laws as we know them break down. Sometimes this abstract nothingness recedes, sometimes it expands and swallows galaxies, leaving impossible creations in its wake. The Warden Corps have been set up at its current edge to monitor and explore the strange phenomena.
Among those who come to the current planetoid of the Warden Corps is Helena Kraag. Whilst the daughter of one of the richest men in the galaxy, she has become withdrawn from people since the loss of her mother. At first, she attempts to look straight into the nothingness and loses her sense of identity. In spite of this she still travels with the rest of the crew into this impossibility.
Unfortunately, their Heisenberg shields fail as they enter. As you can probably guess, things start to get strange.
Now, you might expect this to just then be a kind of surreal trip, a la Alice in Wonderland or Phantom Tollbooth. However, what Joseph produces is a kind of fractured character exploration. As we move through these different bizarre situations we learn more about each of the members of the crew and gain understanding of what motivates them.
There are so many delicious details. Initially this looks like it is going to be some kind of 19th Century comedy of manners, but we soon learn this has been carefully set up. Rather it is a kind of conditioning, one to allow the fliers to maintain a solid form of identity. Even when it feels like I am reading the lyrics to I Am The Walrus, there is clear intent and structure behind it.
Joseph is also a master of language and you feel yourself getting knowledge and beauty within the surreality. For example:
Everything and nothing had both happened and not happened; time was as broad as it was long; space was neither here nor there; the loop of eternity threaded itself through the eye of zero.
This kind of sentence could have been gibberish. But the way he phrases it and following the scenarios we have gone through, I absolutely understand what he is getting at.
I could go through all the characters and scenarios to explore the meaning behind it, but I think it is better to take the journey yourself. As Helena says, it is “like falling through the hole in the zero.” It may not be something that is at once fathomable but it is a new experience worth having.
Although primarily known as a poet, he clearly understands science fiction well and has an affinity for it (see, for example, the poem "Mars Ascending"). Here is hoping for more such forays.
Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann takes place in and around the ancient city of Jericho. Swann’s Jericho is a poverty-ridden city ruled by the Egyptians, its denizens apprehensive about the steady approach of the Wanderers, a flood of former slaves absconding from Egypt.
Bard ekes out a meager existence in this city with his mother and beautiful younger brother Ram. Ram is stolen one night and replaced by an unbecoming changeling. Bard accepts the fat, ugly Rahab and comes to think of her as a sister until years later when an elusive, feline creature known as a fennec arrives. Rahab then magically transforms into a beautiful woman with wings and disappears one night.
Determined to rescue Rahab, Bard enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb. Together they track Rahab down to the underground city, Honey Heart, where the fennecs rule as gods and Rahab’s kind, the People of the Sea along with beautiful human males–including the long lost Ram– are docile slaves to the fennecs. Bard and Zub must now find a way to wrest Rahab from the insidious control of the fennecs and make it out of Honey Heart alive.
Moondust is a highly imaginative and reasonably interesting story but I did not—could not bring myself to enjoy it. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me about this novel. Then it finally occurred to me. This book has no soul, no humanity. Moondust feels like a book written from the clinical lens of a white Westerner who thinks he’s better than the people he’s writing about.
Apparently, people living in poverty must always be dirty and have very little regard for personal hygiene. If humans own slaves, those slaves must be black. What else could they possibly be? Beautiful women are nothing but whores. Fat people are ugly, and the Israelites had very big, very ugly feet.
I believe these small details were meant to add color to the story’s world, but obviously originate from a place of thinly veiled disdain.
The main character, Bard, is not one with whom I could sympathize. His little brother is stolen—kidnapped in the dead of night. Even though Bard bemoans the loss, not once does it occur to the self-absorbed nincompoop to go looking for his five-year-old sibling. Instead, he magnanimously accepts the supposedly fat, ugly changeling named Rahab left in his brother’s place as a sister and simply carries on with his life as if that makes any sense.
Years later, when Rahab literally sheds her “ugly” skin and becomes a beautiful creature of a woman, she then becomes a harlot. What else could she possibly become?
When Rahab disappears, summoned back to the underground city of Honey Heart by the fennec, Chackal, Bard immediately enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb and races off in search of his beloved sister. This raises the question of why he was so desperate to save the sibling unrelated by blood–who left voluntarily–but had possessed no inclination to go off in search of his biological brother, Ram.
Once Bard and Zeb descend into Honey Heart, the story loses all coherence for me. The contrived mish-mash of magic, ancient Eastern culture, and biblical myth falls short of a finely woven tale. Moondust merely rankled.
If I’ve learned anything from Swann it’s that you can learn the history and possess infinite academic knowledge of a culture but your words aren’t going to touch anyone if you can’t actually feel the soul—the humanity of the people.
Three Stars
by Jason Sacks
One Before Bedtime by Richard Linkroum
What an odd novel. One Before Bedtime is part mad scientist novel, part social satire, part speculative fiction, and part self-centered character rationalization.
I'm not sure this is a good book, per se, but is certainly odd.
See, in a way, this book is all about the social satire. It's about Jeff Baxter, a kid just home from Vietnam, where he's seen some stuff, man, and who has gone back to work at his a pharmacy in his small midwestern town. Jeff just has one minor problem: his skin is in rough shape and he needs for it to clear up so his girlfriend can be happy. Thankfully (perhaps), the pharmacist turns out to be a tinkerer. Cortland Pedigrew has his own set of chemicals and other tools in the basement of the pharmacy. Pedigrew invents a pill which can clear Jeff's skin.
There's just one problem. The pill somehow turns Jeff's skin from White to Black.
And there the troubles begin.
Because Jeff's girlfriend, Peggy, is a bit of a militant and freedom fighter. She walks around everywhere barefoot and speaks at rallies for Black rights and sings folk songs and reminds one of someone like Joan Baez in her steadfast commitment to the hottest social issues of the day. (She probably wouldn't have cared about Jeff's skin, either, but the poor guy was too self-deluded to notice.)
As the story goes on, Jeff, Peggy and several other characters find themselves mixed up in campus protests, urban riots, and unreasonable hatred. Along the way they're forced to see their own prejudices – often reflexive and instinctive – and, well, pretty much stay the same people they were before the events in this book start.
On top of all the oddball problems I've just described, this 168-page quickie is written from different perspectives. We get no fewer than four different approaches to this character's story, each exceeding the previous one in its banality and strange affect. I kept wondering, over and over, how dumb these characters are, how stuck in their idiotic ways they are so they can't actually see the world differently than they did before their loved one was turned black?
Of course, that's also all part of author Linkroum's goal here, I'm sure. It's clear from his approach that he's interested in exploring the idea that racism is arbitrary and simple-minded, that mere skin color is not a diffentiator of the worth of a person, and that our present great national troubles are as absurd as his chracters all act here.
If only Mr. Linkroum had been more satirical, more biting in his humor. Instead the plot of One Before Bedtime all feels a bit undercooked, a bit bland and a bit too on-the-nose for it to really work for me.
I tried looking up Richard Linkroum in my collection of science fiction mags and found no other examples of his work. This is despite the fact that the book was published in hardcover by J.P. Lippincott, a reputable publisher. Finally I was tipped that there's a TV producer who goes by Dick Linkroum who might be our author here. That makes sense because One Before Bedtime reads like a bad episode of the old Twilight Zone: a bit undercooked and way too preachy.
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the UK’s National Health Service. There are many issues with it, patients often wait for hours to see a GP, doctors trained by the service are regularly leaving for better paid work overseas, and many of the hospitals taken over from the private sector are in disrepair and not fit for the modern era.
Long hospital queues. A perennial issue
Many of the major issues come down to spending choices. There are continually new innovations coming out that are expensive to use. For example, would it be better to spend the money on the new dialysis machines, rebuilding hospitals or reducing staff to patient ratios? All are important but they cannot all be achieved.
Is it better to invest in new technology or more staff?
However, in spite of this, it has already become a beloved institution. There are few that want to go back to the system of voluntary hospitals and medical aid societies, and the principle of a health service free at the point of use is hugely popular.
Both of the publications I am reviewing this month are similar to the NHS in this manner. They may be relatively recent and not without their flaws but are still loved for what they do.
Orbit 3
Cover by Jack Lehr
Much like its British equivalent New Writings in S-F, Damon Knight seems to have a stable set of writers to draw from, with 4 of the 9 authors in this issue having appeared in a prior volume.
Mother To The World by Richard Wilson
Martin Rolfe and Cecelia “Siss” Beamer appear to be the last survivors of biological attack on the US by China. Whilst Siss is devoted to Rolfe, she also has an intellectual handicap, and he grows increasingly depressed about his situation.
Yes, this is yet another “Last Man” story, the twist being that the lead here is an unpleasant creep. Maybe others want to read about domestic abuse and incest. I do not. Add on to that statements about being surprised that a “backward country” like China could develop powerful weapons (the same country that built a hydrogen bomb last year) and I found myself annoyed at the entire thing.
One star
Bramble Bush by Richard McKenna
We are told that McKenna’s back catalogue has finally been exhausted so this is the last of him we will see in Orbit, and it is his most baffling tale.
In a future where man has explored much of the galaxy, a team is dispatched to Proteus. This planet, in Alpha Centauri, has never been landed on, as every prior mission has mysteriously had to abort before arriving. After making landfall they encounter what appear to be primitive humans who they are unable to communicate with. But after these Proteans perform a ceremony, the world gets a lot stranger for the crew.
We are told this story “…deals with one of the most perplexing questions in relativity…If all four spacetime dimensions are equivalent, how is it we perceive one so differently to the rest? [Mckenna gives a] solution which involved the anatomy of the nervous system, symbology, anthropology, the psychology of perception and magic."
It is possible that is what the story is about. I was honestly utterly confused throughout.
Two Stars, I guess?
The Barbarian by Joanna Russ
Continuing the adventures of Alyx in this fourth installment of her tales. She is now 35 and back in the ancient world (I presume after the novel Picnic on Paradise as there is a reference to her disappearance) when she is approached by a mysterious powerful figure who offers her anything she wants for just one deed. To kill a future dictator who is currently only six months old.
Russ continues to impress with these adventures, finding ways to expand the world and offer new situations for Alyx to grapple with. Here the tables are turned on her somewhat, as she is now dealing with someone more powerful who looks down on her. How she navigates the situation is fascinating and reveals much more about her. Whilst I wouldn’t rate this quite as highly as the prior installments, it is still very good.
Four Stars
The Changeling by Gene Wolfe
A Korean war veteran returns to his hometown in the US. Everything seems much the same except for young Peter Palmieri, who has not aged. What is more, no one else remembers Peter as being alive back then. Is our narrator suffering from Gross Stress Reaction? Or is something stranger going on?
I found this a well-told story but also fairly obvious and not doing anything I hadn’t seen before.
Three Stars
Why They Mobbed the White House by Doris Pitkin Buck
Hubert is a veteran who has become frustrated with the growing complexity of completing his tax return, so he leads a movement to have them done by supercomputers. But will the machines be any happier with this state of affairs?
As I come from outside the US, the complexity of filling out their tax returns is such a mystery to me. Not only could I not relate, I found this silly and dull.
A low two stars
The Planners by Kate Wilhelm
In a large research facility, monkeys are being given pills to test if it will increase their intelligence, along with the intellectually handicapped and prisoners. Do they have the right to do this? And is this all that is going on?
This is another of the kind of story popularized by Flowers For Algernon. It has some interesting touches, but I don’t think it rises significantly above the crowd.
Three Stars
Don't Wash the Carats by Philip Jose Farmer
In this experimental vignette, surgeons find a diamond inside a person.
A couple of years ago I considered Farmer to be one of the best people writing SF, but he has recently gone off the rails. This is described as “a ‘polytropic paramyth’ – a sort of literary Rorschach test”. Well what I see is pretentious nonsense.
One Star
Letter To A Young Poet by James Sallis
In this epistolary tale, Samthar Smith writes to another young poet back on Earth about his life and works.
This is a pleasant little piece where a writer looks back on his life and ponders about it. There is not a huge amount to say about it, but it is enjoyable.
Three Stars
Here Is Thy Sting by John Jakes
It all starts when Cassius Andrews, middling journalist, goes to pick up his brother’s corpse and finds it missing. This sends him on a surreal journey involving an old WBI agent, a superstar singer and a mad scientist.
I found it fitting that this is the longest piece in the anthology but has the shortest introduction. It rambles on for pages without much there and I found the conclusion to be rather odd. I don’t see that if we could remove the fear of the act of death (not the ceasing to be, but the momentary pain) everyone would become melancholy and cease to have a purpose. If anything would that not make people more willing to take bigger risks? The one thing I will say for it is Jakes is able to spin a yarn well enough to keep me reading to the end.
Two stars…just.
Famous Science Fiction #7
This quarter’s cover is a detail of the cover from August 1929’s Science Wonder Stories by Frank R. Paul.
I have to say I find this Famous version much less effective. In a short article on the subject, it states that it is the first time a space station was illustrated on a magazine cover but adds some criticism for it seeming old fashioned, due to the lack of technical articles available to work from in the period. Interesting enough for what it is.
Men of the Dark Comet by Festus Pragnell
This story and the next are from the summer issues of Science Wonder Stories in 1933.
In a far distant solar system, a planet’s natural satellite had been set loose in order to escape a disaster from their sun. This “Dark Comet”, as it becomes nicknamed because it absorbs all light, eventually enters Earth’s system.
Heathcoate, the commander of the spaceship Aristotle, is rendered unconscious by the application of the Martian drug Borga. He wakes up on an out of control ship, his cargo gone and the only person left on board being a prisoner, the drug addict Boddington. Boddington is able to deduce Martian pirates were behind this, working with the native authorities to secretly build up their own space fleet.
Crossing paths with the comet, they manage to effect a landing. Inside they find themselves among a species of alien “Plant-Men”, Boddington hopes to stay and learn more, Heathcote wants to return to Earth to warn of a potential Martian invasion.
Art by Frank R. Paul
Whilst I am not opposed to slow starts in fiction, this novella is glacial. So much irrelevant detail is included it is hard to get a grip on the central plot for some time. It includes some interesting elements, such as Martians having three sexes for reproduction and an interplanetary drug trade, but mostly it is irritating. At the same time, the Martian invasion plot feels cliched.
What is interesting enough to raise it up are the attempts to communicate with the plant creatures. Pragnell does a good job of making them seem truly alien, with contact taking place via the electro magnetic spectrum.
A very low three stars
The Elixir by Laurence Manning
We now come to the conclusion of the five part Man Who Awoke saga. To quickly recap for the unfamiliar, Norman Winters developed the means of putting himself to sleep for thousands of years and has been waking up further and further in Earth’s future. At the end of the last story we learnt that Winters has set his device to wake him up in the year 25,000, but that Bengue has also decided to duplicate his process and follow him.
After awakening and traversing the wilderness, Winters finds himself in the laboratory of Ponceon. As luck would have it Ponceon has been developing an elixir of immortality. Now he is able to travel into the future without sleep, instead he can live through the millenia himself.
These advancements are possible due to the development of voluntary social contracts across mankind, stating they will not force any person against their will and to never refuse anyone help. Colonies now exist on Mars and Venus, machines can convert any raw material into products and currency has been abolished, with workers simply sharing new inventions for the common good.
Now able to use the process to explore the universe, humanity spreads away from the Solar System. Winters joins the disciples of Calcedon, who live on a far-off planet searching for the meaning of life. There they work on trying to use the Temples of Thought to understand the nature of creation.
Art by Frank R. Paul
This is a more sedate story. Any moments of conflict are solved quickly, instead we are simply meant to explore this utopian world we find ourselves in, and hop between locations and philosophical musings. However, it manages to avoid being dull.
Bengue’s appearance is an odd one. A big point is made of it in the prior story but here he turns up for a single paragraph where we are merely told:
…he had awakened a few months after Winters had left Earth and had actively been engaged on some breeding experiments ever since. The two spent a year and a half together and finding they had nothing of real interest in common, separated by mutual consent.
I can’t help but wonder if something was cut or if there was another story that was never published.
Not as strong as some of the other parts but a satisfying conclusion.
Four Stars
Why Bother With Criticism by R. W. Lowdnes
Another of Lowdnes’ editorial essays, this time looking at reading for fun vs art and looking at how criticism can be mind-expanding. It is an incredibly kind and well thought out section, with some standout parts such as:
When someone proclaims that something you have enjoyed is inferior…you will want to defend it. Because if something you enjoyed…is proclaimed inferior or bad, then there is an implication that you are a person who enjoys the inferior, enjoys trash – so there must be something wrong with you. If you are secure enough in your own estimation of your worth as a person so that you can shrug off such implications…then you might even acknowledge that a particular story is not great art…and let it go at that. Or others might be wrong, but your own security will not require you to produce defensive reactions. It is the insecure person, who has serious doubts about himself who has to be excessively defensive…under such conditions.
Advice I wish I was able to follow more often. Highly recommended for every reader.
Five Stars
Away From The Daily Grind by Gerald W. Page
In the first new story in this issue, Mr. Federer wants a way to hide away from civilisation and is put in contact with Mr. Parkhurst, but what does the deal entail?
Unlike the rest of this issue, I found I would completely forget this story after finishing it. It is not badly written but inconsequential and built around a bad pun.
Two Stars
The Fires Die Down by Robert Silverberg
This is a bit of a rarity. Not a new piece but one from Silverberg’s absurdly prolific period in the 50s, previously published in Britain in the much missed Nebula magazine.
The Thanians, a multi-galactic civilisation, have come to colonise Earth. Finding a low technology civilisation on a sparsely populated planet they expect to be worshipped as Gods. To their surprise humanity has given up this kind of imperialism millenia ago and are simply unbothered by their visitors. What could have happened?
What a wonderful surprise, I do recall some of Silverberg’s efforts in the British magazines but this one was not in my collection. It goes counter to so many of the clichés of science fiction and critiques the idea of expansionist space operas that dominate the genre (and thereby colonialism itself), instead showcasing a form of rural anarchistic utopianism. A story that still feels fresh now and I would easily call it the best work of Silverberg’s I have ever read.
Five Stars
Not By Its Cover by Philip K. Dick
We finish off with the other new piece, possibly by the most Famous author to grace these pages.
A publisher creates a series of special editions of famous books coated in the rare indestructible Martian wub-fur. However, the Wub’s consciousness lives on in the pelt and has opinions on the books it is coating.
It is easy to forget that sometimes Dick can be very funny when he wants to be, elevating what could have been a forgettable vignette to something better.
A high three stars
Imperfect Pieces
Advert for the NHS from 1948
As you can see, the quality varies considerably in both publications, some good, some bad, but I am glad that we have them here.
Are they to remain around for 20 years like the NHS has? Or are they destined to be experiments cast by the way-side, like Gamma or Star Science Fiction before them? Only time will tell.
I got a letter from Ted White the other day. Seems he's no longer assistant editor over at F&SF, which is a shame. Apparently, he was once under consideration for editor at Fantastic (and possibly Amazing) back when Celle Goldsmith (Lalli) left! Boy, would that have been an interesting tenure–certainly more interesting than what we got under Sol Cohen.
Anyway, keep reading, because this isn't the only time Ted's name will come up.
by Ronald Walotsky
The Colonies
Stranger in the House, by Kate Wilhelm
We've been seeing a lot more of Kate Wilhelm, lately, which is generally a good thing. Stranger seems as if it will be a fairly typical, if sinister, haunted house story. A middle-aged couple moves into a house in the country, a surprisingly good deal, to escape the hustle and bustle of the city after the husband suffers a heart attack. Immediately, the wife begins to suffer fainting spells and strange visions. A little research uncovers that, since 1920, the place has seen an inordinate number of deaths and inexplicable illnesses amongst its ocuppants.
Is it a vengeful spook? Radon poisoning? Actually, as we quickly learn, it's an alien in the basement. Not just any alien: this one was sent on a first contact expedition. The hope of its race was that they would get to see that transient moment when a species first makes the jump into space.
The problem is, said aliens are hideous, live in a toxic atmosphere, shed acid, and communicate via a telepathy that is about as conducive to human communication as an icepick in the forehead. How, then, can there be a meeting of the minds?
I love a good "first contact" story, and I appreciate that Wilhelm has created a truly alien being. What keeps this piece from excellence are a couple of factors. For one, it is overlong for what it does. More importantly, much of the story, particularly that told from the alien's point of view, is detached and told in past tense. This lack of immediacy in a story that deals with turbulent emotions puts a muffling gauze over the proceedings. I wonder, in fact, if the whole story might have been improved by only including the human viewpoint.
Three stars.
The Lucky People, by Albert E. Cowdrey
Why stay hitched to three channels on the boob tube when you can watch the cannabalistic mutants that prey on your neighbors from the comfort of your own picture window?
Notable for being the first mention of Star Trek I've seen in print science fiction, it is a cute but frivolous tale.
Three stars.
The Stars Know, by Mose Mallette
A young ad exec, graduate of Dr. Ferthumlunger's 40-week handwriting analysis course, is convinced that his boss, the comely Lorna D., is in love with him. How else to explain "the sex-latent capitals, the rounded n's and m's, the generous o's and a's, and the unmistakably yearning ascenders in late."
Never mind that the note which our hero has examined is an angry exhortation to get his work done on time.
The misunderstanding continues, with Lorna actually becoming infatuated with the exec, but said exec steadfastedly refuses to believe it, analysis of subsequent notes revealing (so he believes) that she isn't interested at all. Of course, he doesn't actually read the contents of the notes. He only looks at the handwriting.
What seems a silly story at first is actually, upon further analysis, an indictment of those who miss the forest for the trees: the mystics, numerologists, saucer enthusiasts, and what have you, who ignore the evidence and invent their own patterns to reinforce their beliefs. It's really quite brilliant satire!
Or…perhaps I'm reading too much meaning into the thing.
Three stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Aperture in the Sky, by Theodore L. Thomas
Thomas' essays are usually not worth the single page they are written on. This time, however, he's hit on a good'n: artificial satellites designed to occult radio sources for better measurement of their distance. It sounds rather brilliant to me.
Four stars.
From a Terran Travel Folder, by Walter H. Kerr
Less successful is this one page program, I think advising aliens on the joy of eating people. I read it a few times and did not find myself enjoying it.
Two stars.
He Kilt It with a Stick, by William F. Nolan
Then we hit the nadir of the issue. The author of Logan's Run offers up a tale of a man who hates cats and does horrible things to them until they get their inevitable, macabre revenge.
Not only is this story cliché in the extreme, but if I never read another account of cruelty to cats, it'll be too soon.
One star. For shame.
Wednesday, Noon, by Ted White
Quality returns with this short piece by Ted White. When the rapture comes, the music may not be heavenly in origin, but it'll be compelling, all the same. This story took a whopping three and a half years to be printed from the date of submission (latter 1964), but I'm glad it finally made it. White has a real knack for living in his characters, conveying their sensory experience and internal monologues with visceral effectiveness. Wilhelm's piece could have used his touch, I think.
It helps that White lives in New York, the setting of the story, and lived through that brutal summer when Martha Reeves' classic first hit the airwaves…
Four stars.
The Locator, by Robert Lory
Gerald Bufus, accountant, is meticulous to the extreme. He also has a hobby: tracking the visitations of flying saucers to ensure he can one day be present at a landing. Sadly, his overwhelming addiction to symmetry compells him to greet the alien ship at the exact center of their predicted arrival site.
The three human crewmembers of the first interstellar flight go mad in hyperspace, and presently, none are left alive aboard the vessel except the one robot steward, who mechanically goes through the motions of serving the dead humans.
The twist at the end is ambiguous: has the robot also gone insane? Or is he actually a fourth crewmember, who has retreated behind a fictional metal shell in his own kind of insanity?
Four stars.
To Hell with the Odds, by Robert L. Fish
I love "deal with the Devil" stories, and this one, about a washed-up golfer who bargains to win this year's Open, is great all the way up to the end…where it flubs the finish. The problem I have is the clumsy phrasing of his final wish (an attempt to get out of the deal, which of course backfires,) given that he had 18 holes to perfect it.
Three stars.
The Predicted Metal, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor continues his series on the discovery of metals, this time recounting the creation of the Periodic Table. It's a fine piece, but I feel as if it was recycled from his 1962 book, The Search for the Elements.
Four stars.
The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis, by Booth Tarkington
The last is a 40-year old piece. Two scholars meet to discuss a legend of Atlantis in which the women not only win equality, but then fight a cataclysmic war with Atlantean men for the right to retain the distinction of their femininity–the veil.
Tarkington wrote the piece to poke a bit of fun at the war between the sexes that was waging in the 20s, whereby women had the temerity not only to demand the vote, but also to engage in male or female fashion and hobbies as they chose, and men were affronted by their cheek.
Interesting as an artifact, I suppose. Three stars.
Summing up
All in all, a decent but not outstanding magazine this month. And now onto something in an entirely different vein…
by Fiona Moore
At the outset of The Magical Mystery Tour, which premiered in black and white on Boxing Day but which was released in colour on 5 January this year, we are promised the “trip of a lifetime,” and, later on, we are assured that everyone is “having a lovely time.” Whether or not this includes the viewer is more open to question.
The Mystery Bus attempting to flee its critics.
The movie has the loose framing premise of Ringo Starr taking his Auntie Jessie on a Mystery Bus tour, in the company of the other Beatles, a few swinging hip types, an assortment of British pensioners who seem a little nonplussed by the proceedings, and The Courier, a Number Two figure who leads the tour assisted by Miss Winters and Alf the Driver. What follows is a series of short musical interludes featuring a selection of numbers from the eponymous album, interspersed with sketches that are a cargo-cult cross between At Last The 1948 Show and The Prisoner, which seem to miss the point of either.
There’s a sketch with a sergeant-major drilling the tour participants; a sort of school games’ day and car race around an airfield or test track (featuring Angelo Muscat, the Butler in The The Prisoner); a whirlwind romance between Auntie Jessie and a character named Buster Bloodvessel; a tent in a middle of a field that turns out to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. But no real sense of what all this is supposed to be saying to the audience.
Yes, but why?
The highlights of the film are definitely the musical interludes. “Flying”, when seen in colour, is actually rather beautiful (which is rather lost in the black and white version). There are also short films for “Blue Jay Way,” featuring George Harrison playing on a chalk-drawing piano, and “Fool on the Hill”, with Paul McCartney standing on, well, a hill. Everything really comes together, though, in “I Am the Walrus”, with the surreal costumes of the performers echoing the imagery of the song, and the Beatles all seem to be enjoying themselves. This is far from true of the other sketches, in which John and, in particular, George seem more than a little surly.
Everyone having a lovely time, apparently.
The film hit its nadir, for me, with a rather disgusting dream sequence of Auntie Jessie being served mountains of sloppy spaghetti by John Lennon in a restaurant, while the bus crew sit around half-naked drinking milk. Similarly peculiar was the decision to have a sequence where the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band perform their song “Death Cab for Cutie” in a strip club complete with stripper, watched by George and John. And the movie more or less ends right there, with that sequence going straight into a 1950s Hollywood-musical-style production of “Your Mother Should Know.”
I’d say this is definitely one for Beatles completists more than anything else.
Two out of Five stars.
KGJ Weekly News is back! Come watch and find our what happened this week
After a mammoth twenty-four-and-a-half-hour Parliamentary session (the longest in 16 years) the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, more commonly called “The Abortion Act”, proceeded through its third reading before the summer recess. Meaning it will be going for final vote in the autumn.
This has been a change that has been long campaigned for and fiercely fought over. The existing law in the UK is over 100 years old and states:
Every woman, being with child, who, with intent to procure her own miscarriage… [or] of any woman, whether she be or be not with child, [by any] means whatsoever…shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable… to be kept in penal servitude for life
This extremely restrictive law allows only where a medical professional considers the mother’s life to be in immediate danger or a risk of severe mental and physical impairment.
This is a very high bar has forced numbers of women to be stuck between to choosing to keep unwanted and\or dangerous pregnancies to term, or make use of an illegal “backstreet abortion” which can also be hazardous, without trained medical professionals around
These have been featured as plots in many major works of fiction lately, such as Ken Loach’s adaptation of Neil Dunn’s Up The Junction or big screen hit Alfie.
Still from Alfie of a relevant scene
There are many objectors to reform, with objections to the new law including claims it will give Doctor’s a carte-blanche to euthanize infants, women claiming rape later as a means to have promiscuous sex without birth control, a method for genocide of the disabled by the back door, and other extreme claims.
The most dramatic moment in the debate came where the Bill’s sponsor David Steel brought out a seven-week-old half-inch fetus and said:
To talk of this in terms of crying, wriggling or anything like that is quite misleading. This is what we are weighing against the life and welfare of the mother and her family.
This was a direct refutation of the claim of The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children where Prof. Donald claimed at their conference that, at 28 days:
You have a live baby and it kicks, and goes on kicking for a long time.
Whilst there have been some amendments made in The House of Lords which will have to be debated when the Bill returns to The Commons in October, it looks set for there to be an expansion of abortion available on the NHS coming. And I myself am very glad of this. It has been a long time coming and represents a real move towards a women’s rights.
Perhaps this spirit of change is in the air, for in the latest anthology I am reviewing Orbit 2, the best stories are about the treatment of women in societies past and yet to come:
Orbit 2
The Doctor, by Ted Thomas
Dr. Gant takes part in a time-travel experiment and finds himself back in the stone age. There he attempts to continue his practice and medically help the early humans.
That is it. I came out of it saying “…and?” If there is some kind of moral in it, it is that savage people don’t appreciate modern science and don’t know what’s good for them.
In the future a new kind of entertainment has been developed where you can feel the emotions of another. The most popular is A Day in the Life of Anne Beaumont, eight hours of programming where they get to experience wealthy actress Anne Beaumont’s life.
Anne wants to break the contract as she is sick of the contrived situations they put her in and has fallen in love. However, at this point what is real and what is fiction?
This quite a terrifying story about the development of television as people seek out more shocking entertainment in the style of Candid Camera. The scenes of rape auditions are particularly striking, but in a way that I am sure was intended. It makes very fascinating points and is one of the most interesting pieces in this collection.
I do have a bit of trouble imagining why anyone would want to experience the edited highlights of the life of a rich starlet, but then I also don’t understand why so many people tune in to Crossroads or Peyton Place each week, so maybe these future TV producers are on to something.
In an unpublished story from the late author, a group of different people are stuck in a lifeboat adrift in the Ocean. To survive, Krueger gets them to believe in another world they can access, one they call Fiddler’s Green. At first it is just them there, but soon more people begin to enter.
The longest piece in the anthology and, my word, does it need editing! There are diversions, huge sections of extraneous detail and filled with the most horrendous stereotypes. The entire thing was a real struggle to get through. It feels like a cross between A Voyage to Arcturus and Farmer’s Riverworld tales, but considerably inferior to either.
One Star
Trip, Trap, by Gene Wolfe
This is a multiple narrative piece where we see events from different letters describing the events. On the one hand we get a fantastical narrative between Garth, son of Garth, and The Protector. On the other, a more scientific narrative between Dr. Finch and Professor Beaty, both chronicling the events on planet Carson III.
Honestly, like the two prior stories by Wolfe I have read, this one failed to work for me. An interesting idea that just seemed to be stretched beyond my interest. I was regularly checking how many pages I had left.
Two Stars
The Dimple in Draco, by Philip Latham
A strange object has appeared on a photographic plate at the Institute of Cosmological Physics. Its spectrum is unlike anything else seen, exhibiting a huge Red Shift. It is up to Bill and MacCready to work out what it is. However, there is also the small matter of organizing a party…
We are told in the introduction the author is an astronomer and it shows here, although not in a good way. Most of this is just people discussing in dull technical detail the observations they have made. But, for some reason, the story also includes points that seem intended for children, such as a footnote:
Stars do not have points sticking out of them. Stars are spherical.
Maybe it works for others but this, along with the regular disparaging comments about women, put me badly off this piece.
One Star (a spherical one)
I Gave Her Sack and Sherry, by Joanna Russ
The first of two adventures from Russ following the same character, the swashbuckling Alyx. Although we are only told her name at the end of this tale, I will use it instead of “she” for the sake of ease.
"Many years ago,” Alyx is a seventeen-year-old woman married to an abusive husband who expects obedience. Sick of the beatings she receives she cuts her hair, escapes and joins the ship of Captain Blackbeard.
This is predominantly setup, consisting of situations of men underestimating Alyx and her then defeating them for their trouble. However, as entertaining as this is on its own, there are many fascinating elements Russ employs to raise this tail up.
As I noted at the start Alyx isn’t given a name until the end of the story, before being referred to as she. This really reflects the nature of this tale, with her finding herself and going through a metamorphosis on this journey.
Russ also doesn’t make use of the common tactic of trying to suggesting age by writing this in an aged manner, such as cod-Shakespearean. It instead combines an ironic narrative voice with modern speech patterns. For example:
SHE: I wouldn’t do it if you were a —
(Here follows something very unpleasant)
HE: Woman go back with those pails. Someone is coming tonight.
SHE: Who?
HE: That’s not your business
SHE: Smugglers.
HE: Go!
SHE: Go to hell.
Perhaps he was somewhat afraid of his tough little wife. She watched him from the stairs or the doorway, always with unvarying hatred; that is what comes of marrying a wild hill girl without a proper education. Beatings made her sullen. She went to the water and back, dissecting every step of the way, separating blond hair from blond hair and cracking and sorting his long limbs. She loved that.
This is very different from what we would get from Howard or Leiber, pointing to something more contemporary. A new kind of tale rather than just attempts to recreate the works of the 30s and 40s.
This story takes place significantly later in Alyx’s life. When she was 23, she had gone down to the city of Orudh as part of a mission to convert people to the Hill God Yp. Alyx grew disillusioned with the religion quickly, so when the mission was chased out of Orudh by the authorities, she took up as a lockpick.
Seven years later, Alyx is employed by Lady Edarra to help her escape from Orudh. Whilst originally uncertain about taking on this role, the rewards convince her, even if Alyx is unsure due to how naïve and proper Edarra is.
This represents an older and more confident Alyx, one who is experienced in the world and now able to take charge of her own destiny. Yet it does not sacrifice the stylistic elements and clever touches that made the previous installment so enjoyable.
Homer Hoose comes home to his wife, but she realizes he is not the person she knows as her husband, and he proceeds to eat her. Another Homer comes home and retrieves his wife from the version that just ate her. They then need to work out why there are two different versions of himself in the same house.
In case you cannot tell, this is a darkly comic tale. Your enjoyment of it will probably depend on how much you like Lafferty’s shtick as all his usual tricks are on display. Unfortunately, it does not work for me–one for his fans I imagine.
Nelly likes eating and enjoys being fat. Her parents want a thin daughter. Both are willing to go to extreme lengths to get what they want.
This is a delicious take on our current thinness obsessed culture. It is full of great lines providing clever commentary on people’s attitudes such as:
Her mother used to like to take the children into hotels and casinos, wearing thin daughters like a garland of jewels.
In a The Machine Stops style future, machines have become incredibly advanced and now take care of all human needs. People only leave their home cities for either specific reasons or if they are “abnormal”. Balank travels out with a trundler to hunt werewolves that inhabit the countryside. But after meeting a strange Timber Officer, Balank begins to wonder if the machines are the real danger to humanity.
This is more traditional Aldiss in the mode of Hothouse rather than his recent Ballard-esque Charteris tales. But that is no bad thing, it is a science fiction fantasy blend with great style and concept that showcases why he is one of the best people writing today.
Four Stars
Whither The Future?
In my previous article I asked whether these kinds of anthologies are the new magazines. I would say that whilst I do not want the magazines to completely disappear, both these show the way forward.
Last month 9% of the magazine fiction was written by women. In these anthologies it is one third. They also manage to get in a balance of new writers, old hands, hard to obtain reprints and ongoing series.
True they lack the factual articles, but can TV not provide those through programmes like Horizon and Tomorrow’s World? And is the fan community not more enriched these days by conventions and fanzines than by the letter pages of Analog?
Whilst there may be some kinks still to work out, I say “Long Live the Paperback!”
Orbit, New Writings and Pan Horror, all out now in paperback!
Two new science fiction novels feature protagonists who get into big trouble without understanding things until the end. They don't know who's fighting them or who's helping them, or why. One book comes from the pen (or typewriter) of a relatively new voice in SF, the other from an old pro.
F. A. Javor has published about half a dozen stories here and there, sometimes using the first name Frank instead of the initial. My fellow Galactic Journeyers have not been greatly impressed by his work. He's never scored higher than three stars, and sometimes earns two or one. That's not promising, but let's keep an open mind as we take a look at his first novel.
The book starts with the narrator running from an angry mob. He hides himself in a swamp by breathing through a reed. A flashback tells us how he got in this mess.
Our hero is a professional photographer down on his luck. He gets an assignment from a mysterious woman. It seems easy enough; just take pictures of her husband, a magician, performing his act.
Things start to go bad when it turns out that his camera has been rigged to kill the magician. As luck would have it, the assassination attempt fails. Our hero isn't out of the woods yet, however. Somebody takes a shot at him, barely missing.
On the run from the cops as well as the bad guys, the photographer tries to stay alive while figuring out what the whole thing is about. Along the way, a guy he never saw before offers him a bunch of money for information about the boy. The narrator doesn't have a clue what the fellow is talking about. It all has something to do with an incredibly valuable item.
You'll notice that the above synopsis doesn't contain any speculative elements. That's because this is a crime novel disguised as science fiction.
It takes place on a planet at the edge of the galaxy. (Hence the title.) The camera is rigged with a laser. The hero almost gets killed by a ray gun that leaves him with intermittent muscular and neurological effects. The thing that everybody is trying to get ahold of isn't the Maltese Falcon, but a matter duplicator/teleportation gizmo.
As a suspense novel, this is a decent if undistinguished example. The plot moves quickly, with plenty of twists and turns. As science fiction, it's so-so. I'll give the author a few points for considering the social, economic, and philosophical implications of the device that serves as the book's MacGuffin. Worth killing a few hours with, but forgettable.
Veteran author Jack Williamson hardly needs an introduction to SF fans. Suffice to say that he's been going strong for forty years, and shows no signs of slowing up.
His latest novel takes place in the fairly near future. There's a thriving colony on the Moon, but no mention (unless I missed it) of the rest of the solar system, and certainly not of interstellar travel.
The protagonist breaks off his engagement with his fiancée, instead choosing to take part in a long-term project on the Moon. This upsets the young woman, of course, but it also distresses the hero's family and acquaintances.
He's willing to turn his back on everyone he cares for in order to pursue a dream. A lunar facility is searching for messages from aliens. Our hero believes that contact with extraterrestrials would benefit humanity to an almost unimaginable degree. As a secondary motive, his father, who died before he was born, was killed in an accident on the Moon, and he wants to find out what happened.
His stepfather argues with the protagonist, believing that progress is inherently bad. This scene serves as the philosophical heart of the novel. The stepfather points out the many dystopian works warning against the advance of technology. He argues that an alien species would lead the human race into this kind of dark future.
The book's title appears to be an allusion to Aldous Huxley's famous novel Brave New World, and Huxley is specifically mentioned in the text. Bright New Universe is the antithesis of that work. The hero believes that progress is good, and Williamson is obviously on his side.
(An in-joke appears at this point. Among other books depicting technology as a threat, the stepfather mentions This odd old book about the perfect machines, the humanoids, smothering men with too much perfection. This is obviously a reference to Williamson's own novel The Humanoids.)
On the Moon, the protagonist meets an alluring Eurasian woman. Unfortunately, her mission is to shut down the project as a waste of resources. She is much more than she seems to be, however, and we'll see a lot of her, in different roles, throughout the book.
Complications ensue when the hero finds out what really happened to his father, and winds up accused of murder. Back on Earth, he discovers a secret organization dedicated to fighting off aliens. (This group also happens to be extremely racist. Williamson is stacking the cards a bit here, making the xenophobes completely evil. I suppose the point is to compare two different kinds of prejudice.)
It's probably not giving too much away to reveal that highly advanced aliens have, indeed, been in contact with Earth. The protagonist's struggle to find out why this fact has been kept hidden leads up to a climactic confrontation between the xenophobes and the extraterrestrials.
The author depicts the two sides in this argument for and against progress in black and white, with no shades of gray. The aliens are completely benevolent, their opponents absolutely in the wrong. Although this renders the book's theme somewhat superficial, it's definitely worth reading. In addition to an action/adventure plot, you've got some very interesting aliens, and an enjoyably optimistic view of the future.
Just to explain the odd title, in the US Doubleday published this as The Killer Thing. However, my UK edition, from Herbert Jenkins SF, changed the title slightly to The Killing Thing. I am guessing they believed it was moderately more grammatically correct, although to my ear both are just as odd phrasing. I suppose the phrase “The Killing Machine” sounds slightly better than "The Killer Robot" but if they were that concerned should they not have called it The Thing That Kills?
All clear as mud? Good, good.
Kate Wilhelm is an author I have enjoyed via her short fiction but have yet to be impressed by her novels. The Clone read as an unnecessary expansion of Thomas’ excellent short and, whilst my incredibly smart colleague Victoria Silverwolf gave it 4 stars, The Nevermore Affair’s description sounded exactly the kind of book I do not enjoy and so I am yet to pick that one up.
But will her third foray into full length works be a marked improvement?
From the beginning there is definitely a sense of strangeness and unknowability to the whole enterprise, giving you more the sense of Moorcock’s New Worlds then Lalli’s Fantastic & Amazing (which formerly published a number of her pieces). We are immediately thrown into the fight against the titular robotic “Thing”, but it is not setup as an action-filled running commentary, but instead concentrating on lush imagery and the thoughts and reactions of those encountering it.
Within the text, I cannot help but read this as an anti-war novel. By this I do not mean the absurdist comedies of recent years, such as Bill The Galactic Hero or Catch-22, but more of a traditional serious piece like Wells’ The War in the Air or All Quiet on The Western Front. Whilst people seem willing to write about the potential horrors of the atom bomb, authors since World War 2 have seemed to shy away from criticizing conventional warfare. I cannot help but think this is due to current attitudes about it. Most new war films seem to portray the whole experience as a jolly jape of fine upstanding fellows and, in spite of some protests, polls still show a majority of the American public support the current US involvement in Vietnam. I feel the general view is summed up by Ian Chesterton in Doctor Who:
Pacifism only works when everybody feels the same
Pro-Vietnam War marchers in New York last month
Therefore, it is a pleasant surprise to see a work that is so clearly pacifist. Whether it is in the clever title, the horror of the action, the horrified responses to what they are seeing or the brutal statements of the generals, e.g.:
You have to take lands with your blood, yours and theirs, mixing together in the dirt so that in the ages to come you can’t tell whose blood it is that nourishes the trees and grasses. Then you know it’s your world, Colonel, and not until then.
As a member of the Society of Friends, pacifism is part of my beliefs and understanding of the universe. Given how rare it is to see displayed in fiction (although Dickson did a very good anti-war novel a few years back), I found it warming to read.
However, more there is a significant flaw I found, one that overrides my appreciation for the whole work, that is in the style. It unfortunately engages in one of my biggest pet peeves, that of over-description. Where we will get one line of action or dialogue and then nothing but description for ages, on a loop. For example:
He turned to look about.
The carrier was on tracks that were six feet above ground level… [23 lines of description]…Their heads as well as their faces were clean shaven.
‘Nice isn’t it’ Duncan said, at Trace’s side.
He was tall as Trace, and a twenty-three, three years younger. Both were second lieutenants. His black eyes were shining with the excitement of leave after four months’ running battle with the fleet dispatched by Mellic. ‘You have any plans for the duration?’ he asked.
They had come to a large shopping area, where stores were open to the warm, air and sunshine, and good were spread out to be seen and handled.
‘No,’ Trace said. ‘You?’
It creates a sense to me of a picture book with a complicated painted image and a tiny description without any feeling of motion.
As such, in spite of the ambition, I could not really love this particular thing.
Three stars (four for effort, two for execution)
by Jason Sacks
The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker, by Otto Binder
No, this novel isn't an adaptation of the wonderful Avengers TV series starring Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg as the eternally delightful John Steed and Emma Peel. Instead, it's an adaptation of those other Avengers, the Marvel super-hero team which features Captain America and his pals. (By the way, if you are looking for a good novelization of those British Avengers, I can recommend the book below. It's apparently written by MacNee himself!)
Written by longtime comics writer (and science fiction writer) Otto Binder, The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker had much promise. After all, Binder has written hundreds of comic book stories, including classic work on Captain Marvel as well as long runs at both National and Marvel, plus he's logged time at nearly every comic book company over the last 25 years. Beyond that, Binder has published dozens of prose novels, some under his own name and some under pseudonyms. Most of those books have been quick, fast reads.
Thus, with Binder at the helm, this book seemed like a big win for every Marvelite.
Sadly, though, Earth-Wrecker is pretty dire work. The book begins slowly and never improves from there, delivering a dull, sometimes campy work. This story likely would have been rejected by Stan Lee if it had been submitted for publication in the Avengers comic.
Earth-Wrecker begins as Captain America is leading a press conference to introduce his team of Avengers. The heroes quip and banter to the media in the most boring way (ten-foot tall Goliath complains about hitting his head, for instance) before the Avengers all agree to have a quick warmup battle for the media by playing their "Gladiator Games."
"Gladiator Games" seem like a combination of the X-Men's Danger Room and some arbitrary test of feats of strength. They also are something that never has appeared in any of the 43 issues of Avengers comics written by either Stan Lee or Roy Thomas. Mr. Binder obviously wanted the readers to get a sense of how the team bickers their way to victory, but the whole sequence falls completely flat. It's action for its own sake, without any consequences involved. Thus there's no reason for a reader to care about what they read.
And in fact, it falls even flatter as one of the Avengers suddenly realizes their teammate Iron Man isn't there with them and begins to wonder why that is the case. No member of the team thought they should try to get in contact with him or were keeping tabs on where Iron Man was. Maybe the team doesn't have telephones or telegraphs to stay in contact with each other?
Regardless, Binder's ramshackle plot has Iron Man flying over the Himalayas for some unknown reason when he's caught in a downdraft. That downdraft sucks our hero down towards Mt. Everest. Never mind that there's no explanation of how Iron Man can breathe in that thin Himalayan air, or even any good reason for the Armored Avenger to be there at all. No, the character just happens to be wandering through Asis so he can advance the novel's plot. And while at the roof of the world, Iron Man just happens to be attacked by a guy who wants to destroy the entire world.
That evil villain is called Karzz the Conqueror. He comes to our times from the 70th century. Karzzd has an extremely covoluted plan to conquer his future Earth by destroying it in the 20th century, and honestly his plans were so weird and complicated it gave me a headache to contemplate them. They verge on camp, on the sort of thing you can imagine the Riddler trying to do on the Batman TV series.
And that's on top of the fact that Marvel already have a a villain from the 70th century called Kang the Conqueror, who's been groomed for years to be the team's greatest enemy. Kang is fun, has a complicated backstory, and would have made comic readers smile. But no smiles are earned here. Nope: for no good reason, Binder decided to create an amazing facsimile of that real Avengers villain instead of having ol' blue-face appear in his novel.
Cynical me wants to say that's because Binder had never read an Avengers comic in his life, and was given a weekend to write this 120-page quickie. That complaint is certainly reflected in the book's pages. It may be why the book's plot seems to ramble and amble aimlessly, or why the Wasp is always described in the most sexist terms, or why Hawkeye is such a jerk, or why the ending seems so rushed and bland.
Oh heck, I could go on and complain more about this book, but perhaps I've said enough to persuade you to just give this one a pass. Roy Thomas and John Buscema are doing excellent comics in the monthly Avengers series (I'm very intrigued by the Red Guardian, an actual hero of sorts from the USSR!) So stick with that book and leave The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker for some other sucker to pick up at your local Kresge's.
Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
— from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
There's a common tendency for people to want to take control in order to make the world a better place. A pair of new science fiction novels feature characters who want to run things the way they see fit, with the goal of improving the planet. In all other ways, these two books could not be more different.
The Monitors, by Keith Laumer
Cover art by Richard Powers.
There's no need for me to talk much about prolific author Keith Laumer, since I recently discussed his career while reviewing another of his novels. You know this latest work is going to be a fast-moving adventure; the only question to ask is if it's going to be serious or funny. It soon becomes clear that the latter possibility is the correct one.
Out of the blue, every television, radio, public address system, or other form of electronic communication broadcasts the same message.
Citizens of Earth. I am the Tersh Jetterax. It is my pleasure to announce to you that a new government has now taken over the conduct of all public affairs.
He's not kidding. A bunch of handsome, polite young men in yellow uniforms show up. If you refuse to follow their orders, they simply wave their hands and take over your body, making you do what they want.
Our hero is Ace Blondel, unemployed pilot. He manages to get away from the Monitors for a while, leading them on a wild chase. There's no real way to avoid them, so he becomes a guest of the Tersh Jetterax. This character appears to be an elderly gentleman, who doesn't understand why Ace would object to the Monitors creating a better society.
The Tersh Jetterax, in charge of this area, offers a number of very convincing arguments about why corrupt, inefficient human governments should be replaced by the benign, selfless Monitors. He makes a very good case, really, as Ace watches recorded scenes of ignorant teachers, hospitals refusing patients without insurance, overcrowded courtrooms, and other abuses. It's hard for readers not to think of the Monitors as the good guys.
Despite this, Ace escapes. (Not too difficult to do, when your hosts are so kindly, and never keep their doors closed.) He winds up working with an organization called SCRAG — Special Counter Retaliatory Action Group — created by a paranoid General for just such an emergency. It's privately funded, because the General thinks the military is full of subversives.
This turns out to be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, as the General suspects Ace of being a spy. He gets away with the help of Nelda Monroe, a woman who is also disillusioned with the organization. The rest of the book sends Ace bouncing back and forth like a silver sphere in a pinball machine, never sure who he's supposed to be helping and who's after him.
It's a wild rollercoaster ride of a book, to be sure. There's plenty of satire of human foibles, almost as if Laumer were collaborating with Robert Sheckley. Nelda is an outrageous character, spouting intellectual jargon one moment, gushing over a good-looking Monitor the next, never consistent in her beliefs for a second. She could be seen as a caricature of a scatterbrained female, but the author spares no one from his poison pen. Just about all the folks Ace runs into, other than the blandly beneficent Monitors, are lunatics, fools, and scoundrels.
This is quite an amusing book, almost cinematic in style. In addition to satire, you've got quite a bit of funny dialogue, some of its mad logic worthy of a Marx Brothers movie. There's plenty of action, of course, a lot of it verging on slapstick. The resolution is not what you might expect, and offers another wry look at humanity.
Four stars.
The Nevermore Affair, by Kate Wilhelm
Kate Wilhelm started publishing stories in the science fiction magazines about a decade ago. She divorced her first husband a few years ago (but kept his last name, at least professionally) and married fellow SF writer Damon Knight.
A photograph from about the time she changed husbands.
Her first (and, to date, only) collection of short fiction has the same title as the first story she sold (although it was the second one to appear in print.)
Cover art by Richard Powers.
At least, that's true for the American edition. The British edition, for some reason, uses the title of another story in the collection.
Cover art by Richard Weaver.
Besides the book we're going to talk about here, she's published a mystery novel on her own, and a science fiction novel in collaboration.
Cover art by Lawrence Ratzkin.
The paperback edition of her whodunit tries hard to convince me it's a Gothic Romance. A beautiful woman running away from a spooky house is always a strong clue that a book is being sold as part of that genre.
Anonymous, and generic, cover art.
Her first science fiction novel, written with Theodore L. Thomas, was an expansion of a story with the same title by Thomas alone. I haven't read it, but apparently the title creature is a monster something like the one that appears in The Blob, but created by science rather than coming from outer space. It was nominated for a Nebula (along with a dozen other novels by other folks) but lost to Frank Herbert's Dune.
Cover art by Hoot von Zitzewitz.
As I've indicated above, Wilhelm's first solo science fiction novel is completely different from Laumer's latest book, despite a common theme of controlling the world. Starting with the superficial stuff, it's a hardcover, priced at $4.50, instead of a sixty-cent paperback. I don't know the word count of either novel, but Wilhelm's is nearly two hundred and forty pages long, while Laumer's barely makes it to one hundred and sixty. As we'll see, the contents, styles, and moods of the two books do not resemble each other at all.
Cover art by Lynn Sweat.
In sharp contrast to Laumer's breakneck pace, Wilhelm takes her time, setting the scene and introducing the characters. Lucien Thayer seems, at first, to be nothing more than a lazy playboy, living on a North Carolina horse farm without a real job. His wife, Doctor Stella Thayer, on the other hand, is a career-driven biologist.
Their lives get turned upside down when military types show up at the university where she works. They tell Stella and her colleagues that their work is now top secret, and they are going to be transported to an island facility to continue the project confidentially. Stella lies to the authorities, telling them that her husband knows all about her work, so he has to go with them as well.
(There are a couple of interesting points here. For one thing, it's assumed none of the wives of the male scientists know anything about the project. For another, the fact that Stella has to pretend that she's spoken to Lucien about it is the first indication that they have a very unusual marriage.)
In reality, they're taken to a secret base in the Rocky Mountains. The folks who abducted them put out a cover story that their plane crashed, killing all aboard. They're allowed all the equipment they need to continue the project, but they can't leave or communicate with the outside world.
David Carson is an old friend of Lucien, and the junior Senator from North Carolina. He smells a rat when Lucien leaves him a clue that he didn't leave home of his own free will. Much of the book concerns Carson's investigation into what's going on, using his relationship with the senior Senator from the state, his mentor, and other connections.
The reader, although not David, finds out quickly that Stella and the others are working on a drug that eliminates errors in cell reproduction; in essence, it stops aging and thus extends life indefinitely. Along with politicians who want to live for a very long time, there's a fanatical army officer who feels that it's his duty to restore the country to its glorious past, and a scientist who plans to shape society through the use of chemicals that alter emotions.
This synopsis makes the book sound like a thriller, and there are certainly parts of the novel that fit that category. David's slow realization of the extent of the conspiracy, and Lucien's efforts to escape imprisonment, provide plenty of suspense. The climactic scene reads like something from a James Bond story.
But Wilhelm is interested in other things, I think. The characters are of paramount importance, rather than the plot. All the major persons in the novel have lengthy interior monologues and flashbacks that reveal their inner natures.
Lucien, for example, proves to be much more than just an idle millionaire. He is an example of a complete person, which means that he has a perfect balance between emotional intuition and rational logic. His wife, for reasons revealed later in the book, fears her emotions, and seeks to lose them in her work. The way in which she evolves from a severely neurotic woman into another complete person, and the way that her relationship with her husband changes from a marriage of convenience to a true love match, serves as the heart of the book.
This is a serious work, with a depth to its themes and characters not often found in science fiction. (That may be why it's just called a novel on the cover.) It requires patience and careful attention on the part of the reader, who will be well rewarded.
All of West Germany is currently kept on tenterhooks by Moby Dick. No, I'm not talking about the classic novel by Herman Melville, but about our very own re-enactment thereof on the river Rhine.
On May 18, the skipper of a Rhine barge reported having seen "a white monster" in the polluted waters of the Rhine near Duisburg. The river police initially assumed that the man was drunk, but other sightings were reported as well. The unfortunately named Dr. Wolfgang Gewalt (his surname literally means "violence"), director of the Duisburg Zoo, identified the creature as a beluga whale, which had somehow managed to swim 450 kilometres upstream.
Dr. Gewalt and his crew hunt Moby Dick with stun guns and bow and arrow.
Discovering his inner Captain Ahab, Dr. Gewalt decided to capture the white whale and have it transported to his brand-new dolphinarium. However, he was about as successful as his literary counterpart and so Moby Dick, as the whale was nicknamed by the locals, repeatedly eluded the traps laid for him, with the aid of some people who believe that the whale should be free back to swim the ocean and not imprisoned in a too small basin.
The specialist diving bell vessel "Carl Straat" with a tugboat on the Rhine. The "Carl Straat" was built in 1963. My Dad designed the handling gear for the diving bell.
Eluding his would-be captors, Moby Dick even swam as far upstream as the West German capital of Bonn, where he interrupted a parliamentary press conference, most likely to protest the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the West German police as well as the heavy pollution of the Rhine, which turned the pristine white skin of a whale a splotchy grey. However, there is a happy ending, because Moby turned around and made it back to the North Sea unharmed.
A cartoonist's impression of Moby Dick interrupting the parliamentary press conference, much to the chagrin of Chancellor Ludwig Ehrhard.
All-new Anthology, All-new Stories:
Moby's adventures are enough to keep the entire country at the edge of their seats. But nonetheless, I still found the time to read the new science fiction anthology Orbit 1, edited by Damon Knight, which I picked up from the trusty spinner rack at my local import bookstore. The blurb on the backcover promised nine brand-new stories by the best science fiction authors working today, so how could I resist?
"Staras Flonderans" by Kate Wilhelm
Kate Wilhelm is not only one of the best up and coming science fiction authors, she also happens to be married to Orbit editor Damon Knight. That said, Knight wasn't playing favourites here, because Kate Wilhelm's contribution to the anthology is a genuinely good story.
A scout craft with a three person crew, two humans and the alien Staeen, approaches a derelict starship. The lifeboats are gone and the ship was abandoned by her crew in a hurry. However, our three brave explorers have no idea why, since the ship was in perfect working order. Nor is this the first time something like this has happened; other ships have been found abandoned as well.
Kate Wilhelm explores the mystery of the abandoned starship not through the eyes of the two human crewmen, but of the alien Staeen, who is described as looking like an inverted tulip at one point. Staeen is a truly alien creature, who can survive on land, underwater, in deep space and in high radiation environments. He is an empath, several millennia old and humans are ridiculously short-lived to him. In fact, Staeen's people, the Chlaesan, refer to humans as "Flonderans", which means "children" in their language. Staeen's human crewmates, two big, burly spaceman that would be at home in any issue of Analog, clearly have no idea how their comrade views them.
Staeen uses his empathic abilities and realises that the crew abandoned the ship in a fit of irrational panic. But whatever caused that blind panic is still out there, as our three brave explorers are about to find out…
At its heart, this story is a neat mystery in space that would have been at home in Planet Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories twenty years ago. What sets it apart is Staeen's uniquely alien view of the world as well as Kate Wilhelm's writing skills.
Four stars.
"The Secret Place" by Richard McKenna
I wasn't familiar with the work of Richard McKenna, who passed away two years ago at the way too early age of fifty-one. So "The Secret Place", which was found among his papers after his death, is my first exposure to his work.
First-person narrator Duard Campbell recounts his strange wartime adventures. As a young geology student, Campbell was part of a team that was supposed to track down a uranium mine in the Oregon desert. For in 1931, a boy named Owen Price was found dead with claw marks on his back as well as some gold ore and a piece of uranium oxide in his pocket. When uranium suddenly becomes vitally important with the onset of WWII, the US Army sends a team to locate the source of the uranium oxide. The chief geologist Dr. Lewis believes that this venture is futile, because the area in question is a volcanic high plateau, where uranium does not naturally occur.
When the team departs, only Campbell is left behind. He wants to prove Dr. Lewis wrong and find the uranium vein. So he hires Owen's sister Helen, who can see things no one else can see, as his secretary to pry the secret of the uranium mine out of her. But the game Campbell plays with Helen quickly becomes dangerous for them both.
I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of the Oregon countryside, though I have no idea how accurate they are. The ending is a bit abrupt, though, and the central mystery is not really resolved, probably because McKenna died before he could finish the story.
Three stars.
"How Beautiful With Banners" by James Blish
James Blish needs no introduction to the readers of the Journey.
Dr. Ulla Hillstrøm is a scientist who runs into problems when her living spacesuit merges with a native creature, described as a floating cloak, during a research mission of the Saturn moon of Titan.
Dr. Hillstrøm realises that the cloak is trying to mate with her spacesuit. She notes a second cloak creature and deduces that it might be jealous, so she tries to use the second creature to separate the cloak creature from her spacesuit. However, she is only partly successful, because the separation destroys the spacesuit. The last thing Dr. Ulla Hillstrøm sees before she freezes to death is the mating dance of the cloak creatures.
Beautifully written, but inconsequential. The stereotype of the icy female scientist who never knew love and companionship is overused. Science fiction writers, please go and meet some actual women scientists.
Two stars
"The Disinherited" by Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson is another author who needs no introduction.
The government of an overpopulated future Earth ends the galactic exploration program and recalls scientific personnel and spaceship crews. Understandably, no one is very happy about this.
"The Disinherited" follows two characters. Jacob Kahn is a starship captain and has been for a very long time due to the time dilation effect of travelling at lightspeed. Kahn is also an Israeli Jew, something which should not be unusual, considering how many science fiction writers are Jewish, but which sadly still is. Kahn's first mate is Native American, his chief engineer is from India, the assistant chief engineer from Africa. Anderson presents us a still all too rare future populated by people other than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, though most of them are still male.
David Thraikill is a scientist whose family has been living on the planet Mithras for three generations now and who has never been to Earth. As a result, Thraikill and the rest of the scientists do not want to leave Mithras, because this is their home now. Kahn tries to persuade them to leave by explaining that the human inhabitants of Mithras cannot maintain a high level of technology in the long run and that there will also be conflicts with the native population of Mithras, a race of peaceful kangaroo-like beings. Because as history shows, this is what always happens when one group of humans comes in contact with another group and colonises their homeland…
Considering how prolific Poul Anderson, it's no surprise that his works can be hit and miss. "The Disinherited" definitely falls on the "hit" side and offers a look at the dark side of colonialism, something our genre rarely explores.
Five stars
"The Loolies Are Here" by Allison Rice
Allison Rice is the only unfamiliar name in Orbit 1. However, the biographic note explains that Allison Rice is a joint penname used by Jane Rice, whose stories have been brightening up the pages of Unknown, Astounding and F&SF for more than twenty years now, and Ruth Allison, a mother of five and new writer.
The first person narrator – we later learn that she shares the name the authors have chosen to publish this story under – is a harried housewife and mother of four, who is dealing with a torrent of bad luck, appliances breaking down, children and pets misbehaving, etc… One day, she finds tiny footprints on the floor and wonders whether the loolies – mischievous goblins whom her sons blame for their own misbehaviour – are not real after all. Eventually, the narrator sees a bonafide loolie in the bathroom during a massive storm. But even though the loolie causes chaos, he does help the narrator get even with her useless husband.
"The Loolies Are Here" is very much a humour piece and the voice of the harried housewife and mother certainly rings true. In many ways, this story reminded me of Shirley Jackson's collection of semi-autobiographical short stories Life Among the Savages. It's a good story, but as a humorous domestic fantasy story, it doesn't really fit into what is otherwise a science fiction collection.
Four stars
"Kangaroo Court" by Virginia Kidd
Virginia Kidd is a well known name in genre circles as a member of the Futurians, poet, magazine publisher, literary agent, former roommate of Judith Merril and former wife of James Blish. Now she can also add short fiction writer to her resume.
A future Earth, where war is a thing of the past and space travel has been outlawed, receives strange messages from outer space, followed by the landing of a spaceship. A military officer named Tulliver Harms puts himself in charge of dealing with the alien Leloc, whom he is convinced must be dangerous – after all, they're aliens. Harms plans to annihilate the Leloc.
The only potential obstacle to this plan is the newly appointed liaison officer Wystan Godwin, who had no idea what is going on due to having spent the past few months on a retreat in monastery in Tibet. Harms does his best to keep Godwin busy and in the dark, but eventually Wystan gets to parley with the kangaroo-like Leloc, who are not just very alien, but who also believe that Earth is their long lost colony. Wystan has to muster all his diplomatic skills to avoid genocide or all-out war.
"Kangaroo Court" is an amusing story about how diplomacy rather than violence wins the day, featuring some truly alien aliens. However, it also goes on far too long and particularly the expositional sections in the middle about kangaroos, marsupials and the impossible nature of the Leloc spacedrive made my eyes glaze over like the gizmospeak in a bad Analog story.
Three stars
"Splice of Life" by Sonya Dorman
Sonya Dorman burst onto the scene a few years ago and has since established herself as one of our most exciting new writers.
"Splice of Life" opens with a young woman – she's only ever addressed as Miss D. – coming to after a car accident, just in time for a doctor to stick a hypodermic into her eyeball. The eye was injured in the accident and Miss D. worries that she may lose it. The doctors and nurses reassure her, but both Miss D. and the reader realise that something is not quite right in this hospital.
A neat tale of medical horror with a ending that packs a punch.
Four stars
"5 Eggs" by Thomas M. Disch
Thomas M. Disch is another newish author, who was one of Cele Goldsmith-Lalli's discoveries back when she was editing Fantastic and Amazing.
The unnamed writer protagonist of "5 Eggs" has been left by his lover Nyctimene on the eve of their engagement party. Gradually, we learn that Nyctimene was not quite human, but some kind of bird alien, as the reference to the figure from Greek mythology suggests. However, Nyctimene has left something behind: a basket of eggs. But leaving eggs lying around the house can be quite dangerous.
This story is well written, but there isn't much of a plot and the final twist is not as shocking as Disch probably thinks it is. The recipe for Caesar salad sounds good, though.
Two stars
If you're planning on making Thomas M. Disch's recipe for Caesar salad, mind the eggs.
"The Deeps" by Keith Roberts
British writer and artist Keith Roberts has been gracing the covers and pages of Science Fantasy and New Writings in SF for several years now, though this is his first US publication, as far as I know.
"The Deeps" starts with the by now familiar dystopian vision of an overpopulated Earth (for another recent take on this theme see Make Room, Make Room! by Harry Harrison, reviewed here by our own Jason Sacks). This time around, the ingenious solution to the overpopulation problem is cities on the ocean floor.
Mary Franklin is a suburban housewife living in one of those undersea cities. One day, her teenaged daughter Jen goes off to a dance and doesn't come home. Mary goes searching for her, wondering whether the children who grow up under the sea are not becoming steadily more fishlike.
"The Deeps" is well written. Roberts captures both Mary's frustration with her husband and her fear for Jen, though I wonder whether a frantic mother searching for her missing child would really spend two pages describing the infrastructure of undersea living. Atmospheric, but not a whole lot of plot and marred by long stretches of exposition.
Three stars
Summary Judgment
The Orbit anthology series is certainly off to a good start. The quality of the stories varies, but they do offer a good overview of the range of science fiction writing today.
Of the nine stories in this anthology, four are written by women. If we count Jane Rice and her collaborator Ruth Allison separately, we have five male and five female authors. Of course, women make up fifty-one percent of the Earth's population, so an anthology with fifty percent male and fifty percent female contributors shouldn't be anything unusual. However, in practice there are still way too many magazine issues and anthologies that don't have a single female contributor, so an anthology where half the authors are women is truly remarkable.
Three and a half stars all in all
Enjoying the summer sun with a cup of coffee, a slice of snow mousse cake and a good book on Bremen's market square.
On the Ecuadorian coast, the Valdivia archeological site is creating a great stir in the academic world. Renowned American archeologists Clifford Evans and Betty Meggers (along with colleagues from the Smithsonian) have put out a paper in Scientific American claiming the artefacts on the site bear a strong resemblance to those from Japan in the same period (c. 3000 BC).
Meggers (L) & Evans (R)
This conclusion is disputed by other archeologists, who claim the finds are of native origin, but whichever is the truth it is likely to rewrite our historical understanding. If the site is Asian in origin it shows both an advanced degree of navigation and Asian influence on the development of the Americas millennia before the arrival of Europeans.
Is this parrot figure a result of Japanese or native Ecuadorian culture?
Alternatively, if the site is indeed of native finds it will add to the continued evidence of a thriving advanced Americas at a time when Egypt was still trying to domesticate the camel.
Trying to rediscover and reinterpret is just as important in science fiction as it is in archeology. As such I was excited to discover Irene Shubik was reviving the format of ABC’s Out of This World for a series on BBC2, under the new title Out of the Unknown.
Travelling Into The Unknown
There are a couple differences between Unknown and World I want to point out before we start. Firstly, there is the obvious format point, that there is no longer a presenter to introduce each story as we usually expect on these anthology shows (although apparently a robot was considered for some time). More importantly are the stories themselves. Whilst World tended to choose faster paced stories more likely to entice the casual viewer (e.g. Asimov’s Little Lost Robot and Dick’s Impostor), Shubik seems to have selected more slower and meditative pieces, to really explore concepts.
As this is an archeological dig, I want to divide this series into three periods:
Episodes 1-4: An Emerging Concept
No Place Like Earth by John Wyndham – Unscientific but poignant
I think it is appropriate to start with the opening shot of the first episode (No Place Like Earth) of a lone human sailing across a sea on Mars to visit a native Martian. This divided viewers with some annoyed that the series was taking such an unscientific approach, whilst others loved the fairy tale quality of this fable. Personally, I was in the latter camp, just enjoying seeing something very different from the usual.
The Counterfeit Man by Alan Nourse – Tense but uninspired
For those unimpressed with Wyndham, they got to enjoy The Counterfeit Man, which felt like a hangover from Shubik’s previous series. It is a tense tale of an alien impostor on a spaceship heading back to Earth and the attempts to discover who it could be. But there seemed little point to it other than atmosphere.
A Stranger In The Family – An original play by David Campton – A source of nihilism
The same can be said of the first of the two original contributions to the series, A Stranger in the Family, which would probably not feel out of place in New Worlds magazine. Telling of a teenager with incredible psychic powers and the corrupt means to which they are put. It is certainly unnerving, but comes to naught except showing the corruption of power.
The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov – A talky but loyal adaptation.
The final of this early quartet is The Dead Past from Shubik’s favorite writer, Issac Asimov. In this we get one of the best encapsulations of the strengths and flaws of the early period. It is a faithful adaptation of a problem story with a twist in the tail and gets across the themes of nostalgia and privacy, with good actors bringing it to life. However, it does not stray from the text by more than half an inch and the episode is largely just people debating ideas in front of dull backgrounds.
It is notable that with these four stories together you get many of the standard concepts used in science fiction writing. An Earth apocalypse, alien worlds, oppressive society, doppelgangers, spaceships, psychic powers, time travel, dangerous inventions and more.
If nothing else this gives viewers the vocabulary to help them through what is to come.
Episodes 5-8: The Dark Ages
Sucker Bait by Isaac Asimov – Dark in more ways than one
Unfortunately, this is where things start to go wrong.
There are some technical issues we need get out of the way. Halfway through the transmission of Time In Advance the broadcast cut out, and we were instead treated to some Joan Baez music whilst we waited for the problem fixed. Also, the lighting in much of Sucker Bait was just abominable, even on the new 625-line broadcast resolution, it was impossible to tell what was going on in some sections. I found I had to rely instead on the dialogue and I had trouble really understanding what was happening on screen.
Time in Advance by William Tenn – A story that ends up being rather basic
However, the real problem with the stories selected and the direction the production team take them. Time In Advance by William Tenn is an inherently silly concept to begin with. What if you could serve time on a hazardous planet in exchange for a free pass for a future crime? The conclusion being, maybe the crime you committed wouldn’t go as planned. And whilst the technical issue above may have resulted in things being missed by myself, the whole logic played out in front of us seemed contrived.
Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come….? – An original play by Mike Watts – Not Firmly Rooted
The second original play also seems to have no direction to it. Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come…? is the story of a man obsessed with his tropical flowers, sent to him by a mysterious advert, which may be eating people… or he may just be mad. Neither conclusion would be satisfying nor make much sense. When silly spy comedy The Avengers does something better with the concept, you probably should take another look at your scripts.
The Fox and The Forest by Ray Bradbury – A significant lack of growth
However, the two worst offenders are from the two biggest names, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. Neither The Fox and The Forest, nor Sucker Bait have enough in the original text to justify their inclusion here. Bradbury’s piece is barely more than a vignette and Terry Nation seemed to think the best solution was just to keep stretching the plot out until the conclusion without adding anything more.
Sucker Bait, on the other hand, is a long novella, but the story is largely told through arguments in small rooms on a dingey spaceship. Whilst this may be fine for a piece of text (although I personally dislike the magazine serial) it does not make for compelling television. What is worse, the main character is a human computer, meaning most of the expositing we are getting is from someone meant to lack normal characteristics and mannerisms.
It would be easy to conclude at this point the series had fallen down without hope of getting up. However, after these missteps, something wonderful happens.
Episodes 9-12: The Renaissance
Andover and the Android by Kate Wilhelm – A revelation
Andover and the Android and The Midas Plague succeed in a similar way. The writers (Bruce Stewart and Troy Kennedy Martin respectively) are much more willing to take liberties with the original stories to great effect and produce dark satirical comedies. Both of these episodes, I would argue, are better than the original texts. The Midas Plague, in particular, should be called out for its excellent use of modern maxims turned on their head to highlight the ridiculousness of our consumer society.
Some Lapse of Time by John Brunner – Dark but fulfilling
Our own John Boston gave the short story of Some Lapse of Timea four-star review and it is indeed an excellent choice to adapt, by combining a creepy atmosphere, an unfolding mystery and a single concept added into a contemporary society. However, this adaptation tightens up some of the looseness of the original story and Roger Jenkins excellent direction of the dream sequences really helps connect everything together.
Thirteen to Centaurus by J. G. Ballard – A great character study with brilliant twists
Finally, Thirteen to Centaurus is a fantastic character piece, using largely the same story as was published in Amazing (which was given four stars by John once again) albeit with a different ending, we get to see the multiple twists in the tale unfold. But the excellent performances by Donald Houston and James Hunter, elevate this story into an excellent character study where we see power dynamics invert and their senses of reality change.
A Rich History
The Midas Plague by Frederik Pohl – Join the robots in toasting a successful first series
Overall, watching this series is like reading a great anthology. Not all stories will be to my tastes, but they are varied enough to complement each other and give a good picture of science fiction. A second season has already been commissioned, and so, just like with many of the other British anthologies that are ongoing, I look forward to the next release.
One last addendum, whilst the BBC appears to be hopeful of a US sale, others are not as optimistic. Isaac Asimov writing to Shubik:
It does make me long to see the show. I am terribly afraid that you haven’t made any of them sufficiently badly to interest American TV producers.
Let us hope The Good Doctor’s cynicism is not warranted and this gem of a series can be shared with the rest of the world.
![[September 8, 1969] Another Orbit around the sun (<i>Orbit 5</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/O5-3.png?resize=312%2C372&ssl=1)
![[February 18, 1969] (February Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690218covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Art by Paul Lehr
![[July 20, 1968] Beloved Institutions (<i>Orbit 3</i> and <i>Famous Science Fiction</i> #7)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Orbit-title.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[January 22, 1968] The Magical Mystery Tour (February 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>…plus the Beatles movie!)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/680122both.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
The Mystery Bus attempting to flee its critics.
Yes, but why?
Everyone having a lovely time, apparently.![[August 14, 1967] She Does Everything For Me (<i>Orbit 2</i> by Damon Knight)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/670816cover.jpg?resize=410%2C372&ssl=1)
![[June 16, 1967] What's Going On Here? (June 1967 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/670616covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[December 22, 1966] Who's In Charge Here? (<i>The Monitors</i> by Keith Laumer and <I>The Nevermore Affair</i> by Kate Wilhelm)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/661222covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[June 14, 1966] Aliens, Housewives and Overpopulation: <i>Orbit 1</i>, edited by Damon Knight](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ORBIT11966.jpg?resize=270%2C372&ssl=1)
![[January 18, 1966] New Discoveries of the Old (<i>Out of the Unknown</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Out-of-the-Unknown-Titles.jpg?resize=289%2C232&ssl=1)
