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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 4, 1967] The Sweet (?) New Style (March 1967 IF)

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by David Levinson

In the 13th century, a new style of poetry emerged in Tuscany. Developing from the troubadour tradition, it turned the idea of courtly love into one of divine love, in which an idealized woman guided a man’s soul to God. More importantly, it was written not in Latin, but in the Tuscan vernacular, which formed the basis of modern Italian. Its most famous practitioner, Dante Alighieri, referred to it as dolce stil novo (sweet new style) in his most famous work, and the phrase was eventually applied to the poetic school in the 19th century.

Science fiction also has a new style, though many readers disdain it and I doubt even its proponents would be inclined to call it “sweet”. Whether you call it the New Wave or the New Thing, the move is away from adventure and scientists solving problems and toward a more literary style, difficult topics like sex, drugs and politics, and generally kicking against the traces of modern constraints. Whether it’s just a passing fad or will change the language of science fiction forever remains to be seen.

Inferno

I’ve written before about the so-called Cultural Revolution in communist China, including the growing power of the young people calling themselves the Red Guards. Egged on by Chairman Mao, the Red Guards have run amok. High-ranking public officials have been publicly humiliated, beaten (sometimes to death), or have committed suicide. The number four man in the party, T’ao Chu was publicly purged, which led to violent riots in Nanking between his supporters and the Red Guards; at least 50 are dead and hundreds are injured. In Shanghai, the local government has been toppled and replaced by a revolutionary committee. Both President Liu Shao-ch’i and Party Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p’ing have been condemned as “capitalist roaders”. Mao has also signaled a coming purge of the army.


A Red Guard hands out papers proclaiming the end of the Shanghai government.

Meanwhile, in spite of the internal chaos, China is also flexing her muscles on the border, particularly in Portuguese Macao. Late last year, a dispute over building permits led to a riot in which 8 Chinese were killed and 212 were injured. On January 22nd, six Chinese gunboats pulled into the inner harbor of Macao, but left again after an hour. One week later, the Governor General of Macao, under a portrait of Mao, signed an admission of guilt for the deaths, promising never again to use force against the Chinese community, to pay a large sum of reparations to the Macao Chinese, and to give a greater voice to the Chinese community in the person of Ho Yin, a man with close ties to Mao.

Near miss

Last year at Tricon, IF won the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine. Editor Fred Pohl came up with the idea of putting out an issue with all of last year’s winners: Isaac Asimov (Best All-Time Series), Harlan Ellison (Best Short Fiction), Frank Herbert and Roger Zelazny (tied for Best Novel) with a cover by Frank Frazetta (Best Professional Artist). He’s been touting it for a few months, but the best laid plans and all that. Herbert was unable to finish his story due to a hospital stay, and Frazetta was swamped with priority work. So, how did this month’s IF turn out?


Putting the most interesting element of the picture on the back is an odd choice. Art by McKenna

The Billiard Ball, by Isaac Asimov

James Priss and Edward Bloom have known each other since university. Priss went on to earn two Nobels and become the most famous scientist of his day. Bloom dropped out to go into business and became fabulously wealthy – mostly by turning Priss’s theories into practical devices. The two men don’t like each other much, but they get together to play billiards once or twice a week, and they play at a very high level. Is Bloom’s death the accident it appears to be?


Bloom’s had a rough day in the lab. Art by Vaughn Bodé

This is a solid Asimov story, with more character than is usual for him (not really a high hurdle). A good story in the old style; the Good Doctor doesn’t seem to be at all rusty at fiction.

Three stars.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison

There were three Allied Mastercomputers – Chinese, Russian and American – which gained sentience and merged. Dubbing himself AM, he then killed every human being on the planet, except for four men and one woman. For 109 years, AM has tortured them physically and psychologically. The youngest of them, Ted, has found a way to free the others, but the price is high.


AM’s revenge. Art by Smith

Harlan Ellison has never shied away from dark or difficult themes. Here he sends five people to Hell, but does so without wallowing in the ugliness he shows us. This is a powerful piece, but not an easy read. I’ve penalized authors in the past for their handling of themes like this, but Ellison transcends it all.

A high four stars, but not for the faint of heart.

This Mortal Mountain, by Roger Zelazny

Jack Summers is the best mountaineer in the galaxy. He is famous for climbing Kasla, the highest known mountain in the universe. Now an even bigger mountain has been found on the planet Diesel, the Gray Sister, which stands 40 miles high, rising out of the planet’s atmosphere. Summers assembles a team and makes an attempt on the mountain. Along with the usual problems, they encounter hallucinations that may be real, and the mountain seems to be actively fighting them. This mountain holds a secret.


An angel bars the way. Art by Castellon

Zelazny is clearly taking inspiration from Dante’s Purgatory. Indeed, I could probably write several thousand words on the subject. In any case, he’s written an absolutely wonderful piece. Two things keep it from five stars: he explicitly draws attention to the Dantean parallel, and he stumbles at the finish line, turning a thing of mystic, mythic beauty into something more prosaic.

A high four stars.

Moonshine, by Joseph Wesley

The Cold War has moved to the Moon and turned warm. Admiral Jones has come to the moon to negotiate with the Russians. His orderly, Sven Christensen, is very good at his job and a man on the make. He set up a still shortly after arrival, but when moonwort (the only life found on the Moon) overruns his still, he smashes it up and throws it into the mash in a fit of pique. Before he can cut the final product with water, the Russians come to the table, and when they offer a toast with vodka (expecting the Americans to be unable to respond in kind), the Admiral signals Christensen to find something. What’s a guy to do?

This isn’t a bad story, though it pales in comparison to those before it. Implausible, but fun.

Three stars.

Flatlander, by Larry Niven

Flush with cash and depressed at his role in the departure of the puppeteers from the galaxy, Beowulf Schaeffer decides to visit Earth. On the way, he meets Elephant, an Earthman who’s sick of being called a Flatlander, no matter how much time he spends in space. After getting his pocket picked, Bay (as his friends call him) quickly realizes he’s in over his head and takes Elephant up on his offer to show him around. Elephant turns out to be Gregory Pelton, one of the richest human beings alive. They come up with the idea to ask the Outsiders for the location of a truly unique planet, regardless of the risk, so that Elephant can make a name for himself as a spacer. He will learn why he is and always will be a Flatlander.


The complete failure of a General Products hull is supposed to be impossible. Art by Gaughan

Niven is on a roll. He’s cranking out long pieces and they’ve all been good. This one is full of little details that make his universe feel like a real place. It took me a while to realize it, but the whirlwind tour of Earth isn’t just flavor; it helps show the differences between Elephant’s and Bay’s outlooks. I’ll even forgive the absolute groaner of a joke.

Four stars.

The Hugo and the Nebula, by Lin Carter

This time, Our Man in Fandom takes a look at some of the winners of the Hugo and the new Nebula, as well as some who, surprisingly, haven’t.

Three stars.

The Sepia Springs Affair, by Rosco Wright

A series of letters from the unusual members of the Sepia Springs Science Fiction Club to Fred Pohl, describing the club’s turbulent summer of 1970.


A couple of Fred’s correspondents. Art by Wright

It’s cute. Something of a satire on the sort of petty politics that often afflict small clubs. This is as close as we come to a new author this month, though Wright is probably the same as the Roscoe E. Wright who wrote a Probability Zero short-short for Astounding many years ago.

Three stars.

Where Are the Worlds of Yesteryear?, by L. Sprague de Camp

A short poem by the Tricon Guest of Honor on the effect the growth of scientific knowledge has on our stories.

Three stars.

The Iron Thorn (Part 3 of 4), by Algis Budrys

Having made his way inside the Thorn Thing just ahead of the spears of the Amsirs, Jackson finds himself talking to the Self-Sustaining Interplanetary Expeditionary Module or Susiem. In quick succession, he is given command, healing, food and the education a spaceship captain should have. Unable to get the deformed Amsir Ahmuls off the ship, Jackson subdues him and then orders Susiem to take them to Earth. Arriving in Columbus, Ohio, they are met by a group of naked people as the ship is taken apart by a swarm of bugs. To be concluded.


Jackson subdues Ahmuls. Art by Gray Morrow

This story continues to move at a breakneck pace. I find myself wondering how much has been cut for magazine publication, but I can’t see any seams. I have no idea how Budrys is going to wrap this all up, but it remains interesting despite the frenetic storytelling.

Three stars.

Latter-Day Daniel, by Betsy Curtis

Bob Beale works for the Brooklyn Zoo, getting his arm torn off by the lion Nero every other day. After a show, he is approached by Delia Whipple, who works for the Animal Protective League. She warns him of a plot by another zoo to kidnap Nero, the last African lion in the United States. Time is short, and it’s going to be up to Beale (and Nero) to prevent the kidnapping.

Betsy Curtis put out a handful of stories in the early 50s…and this feels like it could have been written then. The nicest thing I can say is that it’s better than Answering Service, which it reminded me of a little.

Two stars.

Summing up

What an issue! Two of our Hugo winners have already put themselves in contention for next year, and both are representative of the new style. Add in another excellent story and more ranging from good to very good. There’s really only one clunker in the bunch. This is going to be a hard act to follow.


Can Niven keep his streak going? He easily tops the rest of this list.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 2, 1967] Different perspectives (February 1967 IF)

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by David Levinson

We all know the adage about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. Trying to see the world through others’ eyes is a good way to understand them, and that can help ease tensions and make it easier to find compromises. Of course, it’s also possible to come up with some pretty ridiculous ideas about the way other people think.

Failures of diplomacy

At the end of 1965, I wrote about the troubles in the British colony of Rhodesia. The white minority government refuses to consider the idea of granting equal rights or a role in government to Black Rhodesians. Early in December, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Rhodesian Prime minister Ian Smith, and ousted Rhodesian Governor General Humphrey Gibbs met aboard the HMS Tiger to try to hash out a solution. Smith left with a proposal he seemed willing to accept, but rejected it out of hand as soon as he returned to Salisbury. In response on December 16th, the United Nations Security Council approved an oil embargo and economic sanctions against Rhodesia 11-0, with France, the Soviet Union, Mali and Bulgaria abstaining. Four days later, Wilson withdrew all offers and announced that the United Kingdom would only accept a Black majority government. On the 22nd, as the trade ban was about to go into effect, Smith declared that the U. N. had forced Rhodesia out of British control and out of the British Commonwealth, making the country an independent republic by default.

Bechuanaland to Rhodesia's south may have peacefully become Botswana last year, but it seems that most of southern Africa is ready to go up in flames. While dealing with the condemnation of the rest of the world, the Smith government is also fighting two Black nationalist movements. Meanwhile, armed resistance is developing against South Africa’s illegal control of South West Africa, and armed independence movements are appearing in the Portuguese overseas provinces of Angola and Mozambique (formerly Portuguese West and East Africa respectively). If any of these embers becomes a conflagration, it’s hard to see how this won’t also spill over into South Africa as well.


Wilson returns with what looked like an acceptable deal, but Smith swiftly vetoed it.

Through alien eyes

John Campbell supposedly said he wanted someone to write an alien that “thinks as well as a man, but not like a man.” At least one author in this month’s IF makes a pretty good attempt at doing so. Others at least offer characters trying to understand how aliens (and in one case a door) think.


At least they aren’t even pretending this illustrates something in the magazine. Art by Wenzel

The Soft Weapon, by Larry Niven

A dozen years after the discovery that the galactic core is exploding, the mad (not because of his manic-depression, but because he’s courageous) puppeteer Nessus has hired Jason and Anne-Marie Papandreou, who operate the passenger ship Court Jester, to take him to see the Outsiders in deep space. While concluding his unspecified business, Nessus has also purchased a stasis box, an item potentially containing a piece of technology from the long-gone Slaver empire. On the way back, Jay decides to make a detour to Beta Lyrae, hoping the sight will snap Nessus out of his funk.

There, they fall into the clutches of the kzinti Chuft-Captain and the crew of the Traitor’s Claw. Among other things, the box proves to contain a strange device which can change its shape. Some of the settings include a rocket booster and a talking computer, but the device also seems capable of converting matter to usable energy with perfect efficiency. It’s up to Jay to use what he thinks the device is in order to escape with his wife and client and keep a dangerous technology from winding up in the hands of kzinti.


Jay discovers a hidden setting. Art by Gaughan

Niven has given us insight into the kzinti mind before and goes into greater detail here. We also get his speculation on what might be valued in a society of sentients descended from herbivores. The action is done fairly well, we have a female character who isn’t just motivation for the protagonist, and the story flows quite well. This might be the best thing Niven has written yet.

A high four stars.

Gods of Dark and Light, by Bruce McAllister

Gregory Shawn is a member of a religious movement which has come to V-Planet-14 to live according to their own rules. Things aren’t going well. Most of the story consists of Gregory’s prayers as the harsh conditions test and shape the group’s faith. These are interspersed with the prayers of one of the native life forms.

There isn’t much to say about this one. I think McAllister has something he’s trying to say, but it’s not entirely clear. The whole thing is very dark.

Two stars.

Forest in the Sky, by Keith Laumer

The Terran Mission to the planet Zoon is having trouble finding the natives. It turns out the Groaci have beaten the CDT to the punch, though they aren’t doing any better. Once again, it’s Retief to the rescue.


The Terran Mission sets off to look for the local government. Art by Castellon

I noted back in October that Laumer seemed to be having fun with Retief again. That still seems to be the case, but while this is more than just going through the motions, it’s still the same old formula. If you’re new to Retief, this is probably a lot of fun. Otherwise it’s palatable, but more of the same.

A low three stars.

The Fan Awards, by Lin Carter

This month, Our Man in Fandom takes a look at the Hugos. Carter traces the development of the award and tells us a bit about who Hugo was. Next month, he promises to talk about some of the Hugo winners and to look at the new Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Three stars.

The Iron Thorn (Part 2 of 4), by Algis Budrys

Hunting his first Amsir, Honor White Jackson learns that his prey is an intelligent being with better technology than his own people have. Eventually, he decides to defect to the Amsir and is taken to their home, a deep bowl filled with dense air and greenery. A vision of his people’s paradise. But paradise it is not. The food of the Amsir is poisonous to humans, and Jackson faces death by starvation. His only hope is to find a way into the Thorn Thing, a short metal tower with a locked door at the top of a ladder. The door instantly destroys any Amsir attempting to go through it after issuing a warning in an unknown language. The only one who can get close is Ahmuls, who is deformed in such a way that he resembles humans more than he does Amsir. If the door likes humans, then presumably there’s something Jackson can eat on the other side. As this installment ends, Jackson convinces the door to open and dives through, followed by Ahmuls and the spears of the Amsir.

To be continued.


Jackson enters the Thorn Thing. Art by Gray Morrow

This story certainly moves fast. Nothing feels as rushed as it did in the first part, but Budrys isn’t wasting any time. I have some suspicions about what’s going on. Much of that will probably be resolved next month, though I have no idea how it will all be wound up.

Three stars.

Confession, by Robert Ray

Father Hume sits on his veranda, waiting for the oppressive heat of an Australian afternoon in the back of beyond to dissipate. He closes his eyes for a moment, but must have nodded off, since there is suddenly a stranger in his back garden. A stranger who would like the Father to hear his confession, but can’t wait until church tomorrow. What Father Hume hears will change his life and, hopefully, the world.

On first reading, this seemed like the sort of story you read, don’t mind and then forget. As I’ve thought about it, though, some other aspects have occurred to me. I can’t really say anything without giving the whole story away and ruining its impact, but it’s a little better than I first credited it.

A solid three stars.

The Evil Ones, by Richard Wilson

Wally Hengsen beat a murder charge with an insanity plea. Now, he’s biding his time until his organization can bust him out. When an alien spaceship lands on the grounds of the rest home, he starts looking for an angle to play, but a reminder of events in New Guinea during the War sets him on a different path.


Hengsen wonders if he really does belong in an asylum. Art by Vaughn Bodé

This is a decent story. It sags in a couple of places, and Hengsen’s change of heart relies so much on a flashback that it feels a little out of place. On the other hand, it does finish strongly, which is probably enough.

Three stars.

The Dangers of Deepspace, by Mather H. Walker

A colonel of the Deepspace service is interviewing a volunteer and seems to be doing his best to discourage the young man from signing up.

Here we have this month’s first-time author. The whole thing is very obvious, doesn’t entirely make sense and isn’t worth your time. The nicest thing I can say is that the prose is serviceable.

Barely two stars.

A Beachhead for Gree, by C. C. MacApp

Steve Duke and friends go behind enemy lines. They make contact with the locals, use a ruse to infiltrate an enemy base and thwart Gree’s plans.


This time the locals are humanoids who can build wings for themselves. Art by Burns.

I’m going to make several carbons of that summary and whenever a Gree story appears, I’ll just cut one out and paste it into my manuscript. Will this interminable series never end?

Two stars.

Summing up

No matter how you look at it, this month’s IF is par for the course. One really good story, some decent stuff and some junk. And as good as it’s been so far, the serial needs to start paying off next month. At least we have the special Hugo edition to look forward to next month. The authors are good, but will they offer up their best stuff?


No mention of Frank Herbert this time. Hmmmm.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 12, 1966] A Family Tradition (December 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Identical cousins

My brother Louis and I diverge quite a lot.  He's an observant Jew, I'm an atheist.  He served in World War 2 (drafted into the Navy), I did not.  He's an affluent pawnbroker.  I'm a writer of questionable success.

But where we differ the most is the subjects of our avocational devotion.  Lou loves opera.  Specifically operas written in 1812 between October and November.  I kid, but his musical tastes are really quite narrow; his radio knob never turns from the FM classical stations.  I am far more catholic in my interests, enjoying everything from classical, to the swing of my teen years, to the brand new sounds.

Also, Lou hates science fiction.

Interestingly, his son David (thus, my nephew), loves SF as much as I do.  Must be this newfangled "generation gap" we're starting to hear about. 

For the last 15 years or so, he and I have swapped recommendations, and he's even lent me some of his magazines.  Our tastes are not identical.  He recently canceled his subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he is a big fan of Analog.  But we have some strong overlap, particularly where it comes to Galaxy.  In fact, that picture is him in his San Pedro home enjoying this month's issue.

I am thankful that my own daughter, David's first cousin, is also a devoted science fiction fan.  I'd hate to have to throw her out of the house before her eighteenth birthday.

Kidding, again!  I'd surely wait for her to be of age before disowning her.

But, that's not anything we have to worry about, for we are all one big happy family of fen, and we all dug the December 1966 Galaxy — read on and see why!


by Paul E. Wenzel

The issue at hand


by Virgil Finlay

Door to Anywhere, by Poul Anderson

Humanity has developed teleportation technology, and Mars has become a hub for galactic exploration.  But a recent jaunt to the edge of the known universe caused the destruction of several portals and the loss of a senator's brother-in-law.  Now the politician has arrived on the Red Planet to investigate.

When Poul Anderson sets his mind to it, he can write.  Not only is this an effective story, with the mystery disclosed one layer at a time, but it is technically interesting.  It's the first depiction of teleportation I've read that takes relative velocities into consideration.  A trip to a nearby star could require hops to a dozen intermediaries across the galaxy, or multiple galaxies, to ensure the difference in relative momenta is not too great.  I also appreciated the political discussion over the virtues and peril of building a teleporter too close to the Earth.

Where the story falters to some degree is its characterization: Anderson is still in the Kowalski, Yamamoto, Singh habit of defining players by their nationality — and women are strangely absent.  Also, the Hoylean/Hubblean fusion of cosmological theories seems like a lot of gobbledegook.

Nevertheless, it's a riveting read.  Definitely four stars.

Children in Hiding, by John Brunner

I'm told there are two John Brunners.  One is the brilliant Englishman who produced Listen…the Stars! and The Whole Man, both Star-winners and Hugo nominees.  The other is the American who produces schlock.

The latter wrote Children in Hiding.  The premise: the children on a colony world are born healthy but never develop mental capacities beyond that of infants.  A terran troubleshooter is brought in to fix the problem.  He does, but not to the benefit of the colony.

There's a lot of angry dialogue and excessive use of exclamation points, and the end is just stupid.  I'll give the piece two stars because both Brunners write coherently, but all in all, it's a disappointing story.

The Modern Penitentiary, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Ah, and now we have another story of the Esks, a race of Eskimo/alien hybrids that spawn children every month.  Children that mature in five years.  Throughout the series, we've seen the Esks explode in population, exhausting their environment and crowding out the real Eskimos.  In this, they are facilitated by the do-gooder Canadians, who refuse to see the Esks for the meance they are.  Instead, they give the Esks food, relocate them to other areas, etc.

Only one man, Dr. West (who always conjures up the Lovecraft character), knows the truth.  When no one listened to his Cassandra cry, he tried to sterilize them with a disease (last story).  The plan backfired, killing 23 actual Eskimos.  For this, he was imprisoned in the nicest cell ever, complete with a therapeutic nurse-lover.  Modern Penitentiary details West's attempts to escape, as well as his rather difficult-to-read sexual adventures.

These installments stand less and less on their own, and they become more implausible every time.  Thankfully, we've only one left. 

Two stars.

For Your Information: The Sound of the Meteors, by Willy Ley

I really dug this article, all about whether or not one can hear a meteor.  It was timely, too, as I read it right before our trip out to the desert to stargaze last weekend.

Four stars (and enjoy these pictures of Borrego Springs!)

At the Bottom of a Hole, by Larry Niven


by Hector Castellon

The latest Niven story is another set on Mars, a locale we've visited in Eye of the Octopus and How the Heroes Die.  Hole takes place a good seventy years after the last story.  A smuggler on the run from Belter cops tries to take refuge on Mars at the old base.  He finds the crew long dead, murdered when someone, or several someones, slashed their bubble.  Was it Martians?

The story also features the return of Luke Garner and Lit Schaeffer from World of Ptavvs, tying Mars to that universe.  Along with this month's A Relic of the Empire, which ties Ptavvs in with The Warriors (featuring the Kzinti) and the Beowulf Schaeffer stories set several centuries hence, it appears Niven has knit together six hundred years of future history to play in.  Fun stuff!

Four stars.

Decoy System, by Robin Scott

This is a Mack Reynoldsy thriller featuring an American agent's meeting with his Soviet counterpart.  Some third party has been sabotaging both the US and USSR's early warning systems so that they will indicate massive nuclear strikes.  Aliens are determined to be the culprit.  An era of peace and cooperation ensues.

Of course, it was all a Yankee plot.  I think I'd have liked this story if I hadn't read the premise before (and seen it as recently as The Architects of Fear).  It feels a lot like an Analog story.  Also, it's a lot of buildup for an ending that is obvious early on.

Two stars.

The Palace of Love (Part 2 of 3), by Jack Vance


by Gray Morrow

Last time, if you'll recall, I hadn't been overly enamored with Jack Vance's latest novel, a direct sequel to The Star King.  Kirth Gersen, a rich and supertalented assassin, is on the hunt for Viole Falushe, one of the "Demon Kings" of crime who murdered his parents.  The prior installment took us to Earth, where Gersen, disguised as a reporter (working for a paper he has purchased), investigates Falushe's childhood home.  Back then, he was known as Vogel Filschner.  His best friend and inspiration, before he went into kidnapping and slaving, was the poet, Garnath. 

It is the houseboat-dwelling, nigh-incomprehensible Garnath, who provides Gersen his opportunity to meet and kill Falushe.  Along the way, he becomes increasingly entangled with Garnath's ward, "Zan Zu of Eridu", who is an exact likeness of Falushe's childhood infatuation. 

The first two thirds, in which Gersen plays a cat and mouse game with Falushe, is riveting.  The final section, which sees Falushe invite Gershen to his private sanctum ("The Palace of Love") in the far reaches of space, is heavy on description but light on interest. 

Still, I'd give this section four stars.  It'll be up to the last installment to determine if the whole affair ends up on the three or four star side of the ledger.

Primary Education of the Camiroi, by R. A. Lafferty

Last up, an obtuse piece on the differences in educational policy and success between two planets.  It's supposed to be whimsical (when isn't the word applied to Lafferty?), but it's mostly tired.

Two stars.

Summing up

Finishing up at 3.1 stars, I'd say Fred Pohl has done his job to keep Galaxy on our subscription lists for another year at least.  And I do mean our — you have to count me in, too!

[Speaking of stories you and your family will enjoy, Sirena, the second book in The Kitra Saga, is out!  Fun for adults, young and old.

Buy a copy…you'll be supporting me and getting a great read at the same time!]



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[November 6, 1966] Starting Over (December 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

Autumn is a strange time for new beginnings, but that seems to be something of a theme, both in life and in the latest edition of IF.

Carnival atmospheres

On October 5th, the highest appeals court in Texas ruled that Jack Ruby, the man who shot the man who shot President Kennedy, should be granted a new trial. The court said that, given the tremendous amount of publicity in Dallas about the shooting, the judge should have granted the request for a change of venue made by Ruby’s lawyer, Melvin Belli. The court also ruled that some statements made by Ruby to the police should have been excluded. Oddly, the court didn’t have a problem with people who watched the shooting on television being on the jury. The new trial will probably be the big news story early next year.


Jack Ruby shortly after his arrest.

The Texas court may have followed the Supreme Court ruling in Sheppard v. Maxwell back in June. In 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted of the brutal murder of his wife Marilyn. He maintained that she was killed by a “bushy-haired” man, but he was tried and convicted in the press before he was even arrested. The story became a national sensation, and the jury was exposed to further declarations of Sheppard’s guilt in the press throughout the trial. Before the trial began, the judge even told Dorothy Kilgallen that Sheppard was obviously “guilty as hell.” Jury selection for a new trial began on October 24th, and the prosecution should have begun to present their case by the time you read this.


Sam Sheppard’s mug shot from 1954.

Rising from the ashes

In this month’s IF, it seems like almost everybody is starting over. Whether it’s their personal lives, civilization or the human race, they’re all trying to put things back together.


This doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the Niven story. And they got the title wrong. Art by Gaughan

Be Merry, by Algis Budrys

Several years ago, a Klarri interstellar liner suffered an accident. The people aboard piled into lifeboats and made a crash landing on Earth. Unfortunately, they were unable to take any precautions and Klarri diseases swept through the human population, while human diseases did the same to the Klarri. Both populations were cut in half, and human civilization collapsed. The survivors have pulled together, human and Klarri alike, in small communities outside of the big cities. Rations are short and no one is really healthy, but the communities support each other as best they can.

Ed Dorsey and his Klarr partner Artel are investigators in the Western District of Greater New York. Their boss sends them to check out Ocean Heights, New Jersey. Unlike other places, the people there take whatever they’re sent without complaint, not even begging for more medical supplies. Entering the town late at night, they find signs of a pre-pandemic lifestyle, as well as a crashed lifeboat and a building that seems to be holding a number of Klarri prisoner. Returning in daylight, they find people in robust health who are very cagey about conditions in the town.


Ed and Artel make a discovery. Art by Gray Morrow

Historically, I’ve not been a big fan of Algis Budrys’s work. I can see the skill in his writing, but never really connect with it. This story is another matter entirely. I found myself fully invested and eager to solve the mystery of Ocean Heights. I also liked that, unlike in many stories, survivors were pulling together instead of being at odds, even recognizing that the Klarri are also victims and integrating them into their communities.

Four stars.

The Thousandth Birthday Party, by Durant Imboden

It’s Ogilvy Carr’s one-thousandth birthday. Since medical science can keep almost everyone alive indefinitely and birth control, and interplanetary colonies aren’t enough to reduce population pressure, a solution had to be found. Anyone who reaches the age of 1,000 has to draw a ping pong ball from a bin. A lucky few are named Immortals; the rest are shot in the head by a sniper before they know they’ve lost. It’s no wonder Ogilvy is nervous.

Imboden is this month’s first time author. A more seasoned writer could have found a way to explain the significance of the birthday without two full pages of flat exposition interrupting the flow of the narrative, but this isn’t a terrible first outing.

Three stars.

Starpath, by Neal Barrett, Jr.

The Starpath is an energy-intensive method of instantaneous travel between planets that few men are capable of using. Major Keith Waldermann is taking Cadet Matt DeLuso on his first tour. After five quick jumps, they get some unexpected R&R on the planet Primera. But while there, a Priority Red is announced. Hostile aliens have been encountered, and the entire power output of dozens of planets will be consumed to get men and materiel to the point of contact as quickly as possible.


Priority Red means all hands on deck. Art by Adkins

This story starts out as an Arthur C. Clarke travelogue as written by Robert Heinlein, before shifting gears to a war story at the halfway mark. If you’ve seen a war movie made in the last 20 years, you know how it’s going to turn out. Still, it’s an engaging tale and worth the read.

Three stars.

A Relic of the Empire, by Larry Niven

Dr. Richard Schultz-Mann is on a planet orbiting the double star Mira. He’s studying the stage trees left over from the ancient Slaver empire in the hopes writing a book that will sell well enough to restore his lost fortune. (With a trillion potential readers, getting just one percent to buy your book means a lot of money.) His investigations are interrupted by the arrival of a ship under the command of a man calling himself Captain Kidd. The captain and crew have done the impossible and made money at space piracy, because they managed to stumble across the puppeteer home world. Now they’re on the run from the police. Mann’s only hope is his knowledge of the local flora. Maybe he can find another way to get rich.


Richard Mann makes his escape. Art by Burns

Niven appears to be pulling his stories together into a future history. Mentions of puppeteers and Slavers connect the Beowulf Schaeffer stories and World of Ptavvs. As for the story itself, pretty good. Not as good as the two about Beowulf Schaeffer, much better than some of Niven’s other recent work.

A solid, maybe a high, three stars.

The “Other” Fandoms, by Lin Carter

This time out, Our Man in Fandom takes a look at fan groups outside of, but somewhat adjacent, to science fiction fans. Some of them even hold their annual meetings at the World Science Fiction Convention. Carter takes us on a whirlwind tour of groups dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan, Tolkien, horror and movie monsters. Better, he provides contact information for most of them. If none of these catch your interest, there are more to come next month.

Three stars.

Call Me Dumbo, by Bob Shaw

Dumbo lives in a pretty little cottage far outside the village with her husband Carl and their three sons. She has begun to have disturbing thoughts about things other than hoping for a daughter; things like her name. Following Carl to the village in secret, Dumbo discovers that there is no village, just a cylinder of black metal, lying on its side. She also spies Carl throwing away a glass box that turns out to contain an eyeball. As her world spins ever further out of control, Dumbo makes a number of alarming discoveries.


Dumbo makes a discovery. Art by Virgil Finlay

This dark and disturbing story deals with a theme we’ve seen before. It can be seen as the unpleasant flip-side of “Another Rib” by John J. Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as more directly (though less poetically) dealing with a theme in Cordwainer Smith’s “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal”. I honestly don’t know what to do with this one. It might well be a four-star story, but the ugliness at the core of it makes me want to go take a shower.

I just can’t give this more than three stars.

The Forgotten Gods of Earth, by Andrew J. Offutt

The barbarian Kymon of Kir has come to the ancient world of Earth in search of a treasure worth an emperor’s ransom and a captive princess. Armed with powerful magics and his mighty blade Goreater, he overcomes the guardian monsters and penetrates deep into the Black Castle of Atramentos, home of the sorceror Gundrun.

This cross between Conan and Clark Ashton Smith’s Dying Earth straddles the line between parody and pastiche, though more firmly on the side of the latter. An entertaining, though occasionally turgid read, it would have fit perfectly in the pages of Weird Tales 30 years ago. As with the tales of Brak, I find myself asking if we really need this sort of old-fashioned guff. Fritz Leiber has shown that it’s possible to keep the tone and still write a modern story.

Three stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 3 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

Shuteley, England has been visited by a strange group of young people whom Val Mathers and his old friend Jota have figured out are from the future. Leaving Jota with the giants, Val has begun to repair his marriage, but as he and his wife return they find the whole town on fire. After helping organize the fire brigade, Val heads upriver to investigate the giants. He sees them guiding many of the people of the town out of danger and apparently sending them to the future.

After witnessing a fight between Greg, the giants’ apparent leader, and Miranda, the Snow White of the title, and losing his own fight with Greg, Val regains consciousness in a protective dome in the heart of the firestorm consuming the city. He discovers Jota apparently about to rape Val’s mentally handicapped sister, and the two fight. Jota is pushed out of the dome and is instantly killed by the intense heat. Soon after Miranda shows up and begins to explain things. Val will be considered the villain of the fire, because he failed to enforce modern standards of fire prevention. But the point of the expedition was to save Jota’s life, because he possesses “the Gift”. As the story ends, Miranda guides Val through his life to understand what that means. To be concluded.


As Shuteley burns, only the protective gear of the giants can withstand the firestorm. Art by Gaughan

Lots of action this time. McIntosh spends a little too much time describing the course of the fire, perhaps because the extreme destruction it causes seems rather improbable. We’re teased with learning the purpose of the visitors from the future, but we still don’t know what the deal is with Jota or why most of the supposed victims of the fire are being rescued. Hopefully, all will be made clear in the finale.

Three stars.

Summing up

Just looking at the ratings, this is a pretty good issue. Unfortunately, the darkness of “Call Me Dumbo” sits atop it all. It’s counterbalanced to some extent by the hopefulness of “Be Merry”, but I don’t know that it’s enough. I suspect most of the discussion will be about the Shaw piece.


After his story in this issue, I’m more interested in a new Budrys novel.




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[October 2, 1966] At Heart (November 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

Throughout the millennia in every human culture, the heart has been a key symbol. From the center of the body to the seat of life, emotion, mind or soul, its meaning varies, but it is always important. These days, it’s mostly a symbol of love, but it’s also connected with courage and desires of other kinds. It can also mean the center of something, from arguments to artichokes. Whatever it may mean, you gotta have it.

Hearts of darkness and light

It’s been a rough month for the civil rights movement. On September 2nd, Alabama governor George Wallace signed a bill refusing Federal education funds, believing that will prevent the integration of Alabama schools. Two days later, the Congress of Racial Equality marched in Cicero, Illinois and was met by a mob hurling rocks and bottles. By the end, 14 were injured and nearly 40 people (mostly white) had been arrested. But the ugliest scenes were in Grenada, Mississippi.

Back in June, the March Against Fear passed through Grenada, and marchers spent about a week there. Town officials appeared cooperative. They gave police protection to the marchers, six Black voter registrars were hired and 1,000 Black voters were registered. But it was all for show. Once the country’s attention moved on, the registrars were fired, and it was discovered that none of the voters were actually registered. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference set up shop in town and went to work.

In August, a Federal judge ordered Grenada to allow Black students to enroll in previously all white schools. Many parents took advantage of this, but a campaign of intimidation caused many to change their children’s enrollment to Black schools. School started on the 12th, and things went smoothly at one elementary school, but it was very different at the local high school. A white mob prevented Black students from entering the school, chasing Black children through the streets and beating them with chains and pipes. They even attacked reporters. And the police turned a blind eye to the whole thing. Federal protection finally arrived for the children on the 17th.


Martin Luther King walking children to school in Grenada, Mississippi. Photo by Bob Fitch

A few days earlier, a car carrying Martin Luther King and some other SCLC leaders was stopped at a red light in Grenada. A man at a nearby gas station recognized him, ran over, stuck a gun in Dr. King’s face and threatened to blow his brains out. Dr. King simply looked the man in the eye and said, “Brother, I love you.” Stunned, the man lowered his gun and walked away. That is a heart full of courage and love.

Hearts of men and robots

From the heart of battle to the heart of the galaxy, this month’s IF is full of action. Let’s dive right in.


Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots dispute the best way to care for humans. Art by Adkins

Truce or Consequences, by Keith Laumer

The Terran embassy on Plushnik I has been built in that most neutral of territories: no-man’s land. Now, the invaders from Plushnik II are planning an all-out offensive this evening, leading right through the embassy. Worse yet, CDT inspectors are due to arrive in the morning. If they find a state of war, everyone’s career is in jeopardy. Once again, it’s up to Retief to save the day.


Retief proposes peace talks. Art by Gaughan

It’s been a while since we last heard from Retief, and I noted at the time that the series had grown stale. The break seems to have done Laumer good. The only thing new here is the introduction of formal diplomatic maneuvers – such as Kindly Indulgence with Latent Firmness or Reluctant Admonition with overtones of Gracious Condescension – but that alone wouldn’t be enough to lift things out of the doldrums. The real difference is that Laumer seems to be having fun with his super-diplomat again.

Three stars.

At the Core, by Larry Niven

Four years after his daring flyby of a neutron star, Beowulf Schaeffer is again out of money. The puppeteers of General Products approach him for something less dangerous. They’ve developed a new faster-than-light drive, capable of traveling at nearly one light-year per minute. The problem is that it’s huge. Installed in the largest cargo hull available, there’s barely room for a cockpit and a tiny cabin for one person. In order to get wealthy investors interested in the project, they want Schaeffer for a publicity stunt. Fly to the galactic core, return and write an article. He jumps at the chance. Schaeffer encounters serious problems along the way, but what he finds at the core will have consequences for all of known space in both the short and very long terms.


Beowulf Schaeffer in the cockpit of the Long Shot. Art by Adkins

This is a solid story. There’s a bit of handwaving about why the mass detector can’t be automated, but get past that it’s good. And at the end, Niven waxes a little philosophical and elevates the story.

Four stars.

Science-Fiction Fanways, by Lin Carter

This month, Our Man in Fandom looks at some more bits of fan slang. He starts off with “future slang” from early novels, moves on to nonsense words and acronyms, and thence to a few more words like Neohood and Completism. He then wraps it up with tales of the Great Staple War of the 30s and the Great Stationery Duel, which may be going on to this day. Mildly entertaining, but not as informative as some of the earlier articles.

A low three stars.

The Sign of Gree, by C. C. MacApp

A mysterious enemy has been attacking Gree ships with devastating effect. Hoping that the enemy of his enemy might be his friend and that he might find out what happened to Fazool, Steve Duke infiltrates the survivors of an attack in order to be captured. Taken to a prison camp operated by the Remm, catlike centaurs, he finds Fazool. Together, they hatch a plot to gain the attention of these new aliens and win them over as allies against Gree.


Steve Duke meets the Remm. Art by Gray Morrow

What can I say that I haven’t already said about the Gree stories? This is a fairly typical example of the series. It’s marginally entertaining, but too many things happen because the plot needs them, rather than following logically, and once again the story ends with the feeling that the anti-Gree forces have more than enough to end the war. It’s long past time for this series to end.

A very low three stars.

A Code for Sam, by Lester del Rey

Sam is a robot assisting the Gregg Archaeological Expedition on the planet Anubis. Dr. Gregg and everybody else treat him like just another person. Recently arrived are Dr. Dickson and the experimental robot Pete. Robots are rare on Earth, and people are wary of them, so Dickson has come up with new programming based on “the three laws of Asenion robots” from old science-fiction stories. Unfortunately, they work about as well as they did in the stories, and that intersects badly with the natives’ uneasiness with what the archaeologists are digging up.


Sam and Pete have different motivations. Art by Lutjens

Del Rey is clearly basing this on Asimov’s robot stories, but I’m not sure if he’s taking a poke at them or trying to sum them up into a more important message than the Good Doctor ever intended. One member of the expedition dismisses the three laws as “slavery and racism,” while Dr. Gregg says they were just a bit of fun to make a good story. I’m torn in my assessment. The story raises some interesting philosophical questions, but it also sags a bit in the middle. The questions are probably enough.

A low four stars.

The Babe in the Oven, by John T. Sladek

Honestly, I don’t think I can summarize this surreal tale of suburbia. Let me quote the editorial blurb. “Tough day! The baby was a spy, and the friendly parish priest was his accomplice!” If Phil Dick, R. A. Lafferty and David Bunch collaborated on a story, it wouldn’t be half this strange. I think Sladek is trying to say something about suburban life, but I couldn’t find it.

A high two stars for me, might be three for somebody else.

Halfway House, by Robert Silverberg

Wealthy and brilliant industrialist Franco Alfieri is dying of cancer. Luckily for him, he can afford to enter the Fold, the place where all the universes meet. There, he is judged to determine if he is worthy of being saved. He is found to be, but he will have to give five years of his life in service to the halfway house. Alfieri jumps at the chance, but is the price higher than he thought?

This is Silverberg at his best. It’s an excellent character piece, following the protagonist through arrogance and desperation to his final understanding of the price he pays. This is the best thing he’s written since To See the Invisible Man.

A high four stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 2 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

During the hottest summer in memory, the English town of Shuteley is visited by a strange band of young people. At the end of the first installment, narrator Val Mathers and his old friend Jota decided to investigate the strangers’ camp. There, they are forced to duel the giants. Jota is killed and Val barely manages to stay alive. Suddenly, Val and Jota are entering the camp once again. Jota talks his way into staying, while Val heads home.

There, he encounters Miranda – the Snow White of the title. Val works out that the gang are from the future. Miranda learns that Val is reluctant to have children, because he fears that his mother’s madness and sister’s mental handicap are congenital. She offers to find out, but having sex with her is part of that. He doesn’t hesitate. She informs him that all his children will be normal, and he realizes he really wants them. This could repair his marriage to Sheila.

Later, Val and Sheila head out of town on a date, partly at Jota’s urging, partly because Miranda said they would stay home that night. Their romance seems to be rekindled, but on the way home they see a fire. Shuteley is burning. The fire is so intense the only bridge in town has buckled. The fire brigade is trapped on the side away from the center of town and can’t find enough water to defend the small bit on their side of the river. Val organizes the defense, finding water and getting civilians to safety. Did the giants have something to do with the low water level in the river? To be continued.


Val fights for his life. Art by Gaughan

I wasn’t too keen on the first installment, noting particularly McIntosh’s handling of the female characters. While that doesn’t get much better, the rest is much improved. This feels like the McIntosh from several years ago. There’s obviously a lot more going on here than just some time-travelers come to watch a disastrous fire (shades of Vintage Season by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner). I’m actually interested in seeing where this is going now.

Three stars.

Hairry, by Mike Hill

Jake explains how he first met Hairry. He was working on a geological survey team hunting for oil on some planet (presumably Mars, but never named). When his scout car falls into a deep canyon, he runs into gigantic ten-legged spiders. The only thing keeping him from being dinner is his love of jazz.

Hill is this month’s first time author. He gives us an old-fashioned bar tale on an old-fashioned Mars, and we can all see where things are going several pages before the end. On top of that, the jazz slang feels at least a decade old, which is positively ancient.

Two stars.

The Boat in the Bottle, by Thurlow Weed

The Boat is the grandest passenger ship ever built. In an act of hubris, the owners send its maiden voyage through the Bahama Abyss. And hubris always has a price.

Thurlow Weed may or may not be a first time author. Perhaps the author is a descendant of the man who helped found both the Whig and Republican parties. He or she certainly has reason not to want their name associated with this story. It’s dull and has no redeeming features.

One star.

Summing up

This is an issue of highs and lows. We have some of the best stories IF has had in quite a while, and some of the worst. But the highs are very high. Silverberg came very close to a fifth star, and del Rey might have gotten there with a bit more polishing. There’s life in the old mag yet.


Can Niven knock it out of the park again?




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[September 14, 1966] All the Old Familiar Places (October 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Where Men Have Gone Before

Last week saw the debut of the exciting science fiction anthology show Star Trek.  The opening narration describes a five-year mission, going "where no man has gone before."  Indeed, the second pilot of the program bore that very title.  Never mind that in two of the three episodes I've seen thus far (and in the sole episode yet officially aired), the featured space ship Enterprise went places men had gone before; the promise is still there.

This month's Galaxy, on the other hand, treads entirely familiar ground.  Not necessarily in the subject matter or the plots — these are reasonably fresh.  I mean that pretty much every story save the last constitutes the continuation of a prior story or setting.

Magazine editor Fred Pohl once explained that he has a reliable stable of authors for Galaxy.  As Pohl travels the country on various speaking engagements, he hits his writer friends up for new material.  Cordwainer Smith was on that list until his tragic passing last month.  Frank Herbert is (sadly) also on that list.  And so are most of the authors below.  I imagine each conversation with his pet authors eventually wanders around to "when do you think I might see more of…"

This isn't a bad thing, especially if you like the universes that get expanded.  On the other hand, it is the reason there about are twice as many Retief stories as there should be.

So let's see how this series of sequels fares:

Old Stomping Grounds


by Sol Dember

The Palace of Love (Part 1 of 3), by Jack Vance

In Vance's novel The Star King, we were introduced to Kirth Gersen.  Gersen is a vigilante, roaming the galactic space lanes to track down the elusive and nearly omnipotent "Demon Princes" of crime.  His first target, a fellow named Grendel, is defeated in the wild Beyond, the belt of untamed systems that ring the placid inner worlds.

Now, in Palace, Gerson applies the vast wealth of Grendel toward the next Demon Prince on his list, the volatile slaver and crime boss, Viole Falushe.  This time, the trail leads back to the original home of humanity, specifically, the portion of Europe known as Holland.


by Gray Morrow

I like Vance a lot, but this particular universe has never appealed to me.  Indeed, Palace has the exact same issues that plagued Kings.  At first, Vance's detailed setting descriptions and odd dialogue are compelling.  Over time, they just get tiresome.  Moreover, whereas in stories like The Dragon Masters or The Last Castle, Vance creates a rich world almost from nothing, filled with exciting new places and ideas, the far future in which Kirth Gersen resides feels almost unchanged from 20th Century Earth. 

I have a suspicion that the remainder of this book is going to be a slog.  Three stars so far.

How the Heroes Die, by Larry Niven


by Virgil Finlay

Larry Niven returns us to the Mars he set up in this year's short story, Eye of the Octopus.  The initial expedition that discovered evidence of indigenous Martians has been succeeded by a dozen humans in a bubble dome archaeological base.  When the natives prove elusive, tedium and frustration sets in.  One of the members of the all-male crew makes a pass at another.  Enraged, the target of his advances kicks him in the throat and watches him die.

Knowing that the rest of the team won't stand for it, murderous John "Jack" Carter plunges his Mars buggy through the dome in an attempt to release the air and kill his compatriots.  His plan fails, thanks to the fast reactions of the team.  Alf Harness, the party's linguist, heads out in pursuit.

The cat and mouse chase, with each of the two trying to outsmart the other such that only one can come back alive, working within the constraints of their air supply and their equipment at hand, is a pretty tight bit of writing.  I could have, however, done without the several paragraphs Niven devotes to the motivation of the crime: Lieutenant-Major Shute drafts a report to Earth explaining that a bunch of isolated men together always succumb to homosexuality.  Just like in the Navy.  Or boys-only schools.  Or the Third Reich (I'm not making these examples up).  The solution: Earth needs to send women with them, damn the Morality Leagues that frown on co-ed missions. 

This reminds me of stories I read last decade where female crew members were carried along solely for their convenient orifices.  I had hoped tales endorsing such notions were a thing of the past.  As for modern-day temperance leagues, while I recognize that cultures can regress, it seems to me that women have been serving alongside men for decades now.  Why, I recently saw an episode of Gomer Pyle featuring a woman Marine Captain.  I can't imagine that the trend over the next century is toward a reversal of that practice.

At least the characters in Heroes don't endorse the victim's murder.  The characters (and thus the author) seem to be saying that queers are people too, but that they are the sad creations of circumstance.  (Mr. Niven is apparently unacquainted with Dr. Kinsey, or the excellent documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected).

Three stars.

A Recursion in Metastories, by Arthur C. Clarke

Too short to describe.  A literary joke of unlimited scope if limited value.

Three stars.


by Jack Gaughan

The Ship Who Killed, by Anne McCaffrey


by Nodel

Many years ago, in The Magazine of Science Fiction, Anne McCaffrey introduced us to KH-834, the cybernetic spaceship.  The story was called The Ship Who Sang.  It involved the close relationship between the vessel's female resident brain, Helva, and the ambulatory "brawn" component, a man named Jennan. 

Jennan dies in that story, leaving Helva devastated but still spaceworthy.  She is detached from scout duty, instead being used for a sequence of odd job missions.  Her first, in which Helva's passenger is a doctor dispatched to a plague-ravaged world, was detailed in a recent Analog in a story titled The Ship Who Mourned.

And now Killed, appearing in yet another magazine.  This time, Helva is to be a metallic womb, ferrying a hundred thousand frozen fetuses to a world that has suffered a sterilizing catastrophe.  Her passenger is Kira, responsible for obtaining the unborn children from various worlds and taking care of them on their journey.  She has suffered the recent loss of her partner, too, and is expressedly suicidal.  Helva's orders are explicitly to avoid worlds on which suicide is legal.  Unfortunately, not all such worlds are cataloged…

One interesting bit is that Kira is a "Dylanist", part of a sect of cynical singer-songwriters who have almost deified ol' Bob.  She even plays "Blowin' in the Wind" at one point.  It's rather bold to extrapolate such a huge impact from something so recent as a popular singer (is there a rival faction known as "The Beatlers"?) And while it is possible that the former Mr. Zimmerman may go on to be so influential as to spawn religious adherents, McCaffrey fails to account for musical evolution: Kira employs the acoustic guitar in Killed, an instrument Dylan has already abandoned.

Such is the danger of precise prediction!

Anyway, that's just a side note.  The story itself has a reasonably good setup, but McCaffrey's writing style, filled to the brim with adverbs and acid repartee, just isn't doing it for me.  Each story in this series has been less compelling than the last.  This may explain why each one has been published in a new magazine; usually, editors hold onto writers as long as they can.

Two stars.

For Your Information: The Delayed Discovery, by Willy Ley

Willy Ley meanders through the history of atomic chemistry, covering a great many topics shallowly and without a lot of causality.  Asimov usually needs to trim his articles; Ley needed more connective tissue to make this one work.

Two stars.

Too Many Esks, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

We're now four stories into the saga of the Esks, inhuman hybrids of Eskimos and an alien invader, who live above the arctic circle in Canada.  Esks grow to maturity in just five years.  Female Esks gestate and bear a child every month.  This new race has already outgrown its food supply, relying on government handouts to stay alive.

Dr. Joe West has been warning of a Malthusian nightmare for months now.  At last, some folks are starting to listen to him.  But the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and West is concerned that once the hybrid Esks interbreed with humans (as one did with West), homo sapiens will be displaced by the more fecund breed.  Once this happens, there are signs that the original aliens will return to enslave the Earth.

And so, West hatches a plan to sterilize the Esks through biological warfare.  Like all of West's other endeavors against the Esks, the mission is a dismal and emotionally fraught failure.

These Esk tales oscillate between tedious and mildly engaging, all requiring a healthy dollop of suspension of disbelief.  I've been along for this ride long enough that I'm now kind of curious as to how it will end.

Three stars.

Planet of Fakers, by J. T. McIntosh


by McClane

McIntosh is an author with a long career.  He's written five-star stories, a number of pedestrian pieces, and a few truly awful ones.  Often, his works contain Sexist (or at least anti-feminine) portrayals of women.

So it was that I approached this last piece of the issue with some trepidation (especially given the weird art that suggested a sexual farce).

I am happy to report that I was pleasanty surprised.

Planet starts in medias res.  A tense trio, one man and two women, are subjecting a queue of persons to a test.  Their goal: to prove the humanity of each subject. 

Through adroit exposition, McIntosh slowly clues us in to the situation.  A colony of a few hundred has been besieged by an alien race of body possessors.  The fake humans are in telepathic communion with one another, so while it was once a trivial task to tell humans from sham-people, tests can only be used effectively once.  And the colonists are running out of tests.

While Planet does not take place in a preexisting universe, the bodysnatching genre has been around for decades, including such classics as Campbell's Who Goes There? and Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (and, of course, the 1956 movie which gave the genre its label).  Nevertheless, what McIntosh does with it is so deftly executed, and so neatly contrived, that's it's clear the old subject still has life in it.  At least in the hands of a master.

I'd originally planned to give it four stars, but it has stayed with me such that I think it earns a full five.

Dust Bowl's a comin'

With the exception of the standout final story, the October 1966 Galaxy is pretty mediocre stuff.  I think the lesson I've gotten is that fields can grow fallow, especially ones that weren't very fertile to begin with.

I think Pohl's writers would do themselves well to find some new land to plow.  And maybe Galaxy could use a more diverse set of farmers…

(If you're looking for something new, join us tomorrow at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings) for the next episode of Star Trek!)

Here's the invitation!

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 2, 1966] On the Edge (October 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

Big Trouble in China

Back in May, I wrote about the political maneuvering going on in China, and I predicted purges would follow. Rarely have I been so sorry to be right. On August 13th, Mao Tse-tung announced a purge of Party officials as part of the Cutural Revolution. And he has a frightening new tool to carry out his will.

At the end of May, a group of high school and university students calling themselves Red Guards embraced the principles of the Cultural Revolution and hung up posters criticizing university administrators. Originally condemned as counterrevolutionaries and radicals, they were officially endorsed by Mao early in August. On the 18th, a mass rally was held in T’ien-an-min Square in Peking. A reported one million students listened to speeches by various Party officials. Mao appeared in military fatigues for the first time in years, a look favored by the Red Guards.

On the 22nd, they began putting up posters “advising” people to abandon bourgeois habits such as Western clothing and warned shopkeepers against selling foreign goods. They gave people a week before they would “take action”. Since then, the Red Guards have run amok. On the 26th, they gave foreigners and bourgeois Chinese to the end of the day to leave Peking. They poured into the Tibetan capital Lhasa, destroying ancient relics, vandalizing shrines and abusing monks. Now, word has come out that they are beating and killing people in the Ta-hsing and Ch’ang-p’ing districts of Peking, and the police have been ordered to look the other way. This is likely to get worse before it gets better, and however it ends won’t be pretty.


Soong P’in-p’in, a Red Guard leader, pins an armband on Mao Tse-tung.

Life on the edge

This month’s IF features not one, but two stories set on the edge of the galaxy, and just about everyone else is on the edge in some way or another.


Amazingly well done for Dan Adkins. Art by Adkins

TV by the Numbers, by Fred Pohl

We rarely mention editorials, but this one’s interesting. A recent discussion with Murray Leinster about one of his patents that lets TV studios use a photograph of a set backdrop in place of the physical thing got Fred to thinking. A single line on a black-and-white TV screen consists of around 420 phosphor dots that are either on or off. With 525 lines to a frame, it would take a string of 220,000 ones and zeros to describe one frame. A 25 billion digit number would be enough for a one hour show; 600 billion for 24 hours. But you probably need a lot less. In the thirtieth of a second between frames, most of those dots don’t change, so it should be possible to find a way to tell the TV to only change certain spots from the last frame. Could there come a day when not only the stage sets, but even the actors aren’t real?

Neutron Star, by Larry Niven

Out-of-work space pilot Beowulf Shaeffer is facing debtor’s prison when an alien blackmails him into taking on a suicide mission. The puppeteers (something like a headless, three-legged centaur with Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets for arms) have a near-monopoly on spaceship hulls, which are supposed to be impervious to everything except visible light. But something reached through one of their hulls and reduced two scientists studying a neutron star to bloody smears. Now Shaeffer finds himself following the exact same course, and he has to figure things out before he meets the same end.


Beowulf Shaeffer aboard his invisible starship. Art by Adkins

A nice little problem story. While the answer may seem obvious to the reader, that answer is incomplete. There’s a subtle bit more to it that the puppeteers can’t see, and the reason they can’t see it means a sizeable bonus for Shaeffer. Another detail has Shaeffer recording everything happening, so there is some record if he’s killed. In an interesting coincidence, a voice recording is being analyzed for the first time in the investigation of a plane crash in Nebraska last month.

Three stars.

Your Soldier Unto Death, by Michael Walker

The centuries-long war with the Kreekal has ground to an end. With their hive-like society, the alien soldiers were specially bred to fight. Ultimately, humanity began raising soldiers from birth to do two things: to hate Kreekan soldiers and to be good at killing them. Now that the war is over, what do you do with 5 billion soldiers who are barely human?

While there’s some apparent skill in the writing, Walker is this month’s new writer — and you can tell. The pieces don’t quite fit together, and most of the story consists of people sitting around talking about things. The germ of a good story is here, but the author just isn’t up to it.

A high two stars.

Snow White and the Giants (Part 1 of 4), by J. T. McIntosh

In the quite English country town of Shuteley, sweltering under the hottest summer on record, Val Mathers wishes something would happen. His marriage to Sheila is in a rough situation, partly because of a difference over whether to have children, partly because of his mentally handicapped sister Dina, who lives with them, and partly because his old school friend Jota seems to have tried to force himself on Sheila three years earlier. Now Jota is on his way back from his job in Cologne, Dina is worried about the fairies in the garden, and a strange group of young tourists has appeared in town.

With one exception, these tourists are all very tall and very fit. The women wear dresses that seem to disappear occasionally, causing a commotion. The exception, whom Val dubs Snow White for her fair skin and dark hair, differs from the others only in her size. They all behave a bit oddly and when asked where they’re from, they reply “Here.” Even stranger, they all seem to know Val and are expecting Jota. After Jota arrives in town, he and Val decide to investigate where the strangers are camping. To be continued.


Val and Sheila investigate strange lights at the bottom of the garden. Art by Gaughan

It’s difficult to judge where this is going, since this installment is almost all McIntosh setting the scene. None of the characters are terribly appealing. Val is passive, Sheila short-tempered, and Jota obnoxious. Honestly, it feels like McIntosh could have moved the story forward a lot more quickly.

McIntosh tends to be hit or miss, and his biggest weakness is his female characters. That’s on display here with the childlike Dina and the mysterious Miranda (Snow White’s real name). Worst of all is Sheila, who is snappish and unpleasant toward Val and his sister – but the narrative ignores her reasons for being that way. The biggest would seem to be Jota’s assault, and Val’s attitude seems to be “he shouldn’t have done it, he’s promised not to do it again and he’s going away, so let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.” Awful.

Two stars for now.

Handy Phrase Book in Fannish, by Lin Carter

Any in-group tends to develop its own lingo. This month Our Man in Fandom takes a look at the slang commonly used by science fiction fans. He starts off with a look at various fanacs (fan activities) and the different types of fans, from the sercon (serious, conservative fan) to the faaan (the obnoxious kid in a propellor beanie). Then he looks at the various names given to and taken by prominent fans, such as Forrest J. Ackerman (4e, 4SJ, etc.) or OMF himself (LinC). He wraps things up with the fannish (or fenly) fondness for nonsense words that serve as catch-alls, like vombic and fout. LinC is clearly having fun, but it’s all a bit breathless and shallow.

A low three stars.

Tunnel Warrior, by Joseph P. Martino

World War III has somehow managed to keep the exchange of atomic weapons to East and West Germany. The fighting is still ongoing, but the front is now in tunnels deep underground. Sergeant Alvin Hodge has been ordered to accompany a group of military geologists to the front lines so they can test out a new method of determining where the Russians are digging.


Sgt. Hodge examines what’s left of the city of Kassel. Art by Gray Morrow

The military action bits are fair, but the overall premise is just ridiculous. Even if the nuclear exchange were confined to the German border, there’s just no way the fighting would be limited to such a small area. This story would be much better served by setting it on the Moon or some alien planet with a more believable reason for the combat to be underground.

A high two stars.

On the Edge of the Galaxy, by Ernest Hill

Colonel Geoff Carruthers and his exploratory team have spent 5 years on planet VX91/6 supposedly looking for titanium and zirconium, but achieving nothing. Now they face a military inspection.


The inspecting general meets Rastus. Art by Virgil Finlay

I have no idea what was going on in this story, and I’m not sure any of the characters do either. What a confused mess.

Barely two stars.

The Spy Game, by Rachel Cosgrove Payes

A letter of complaint from an angry parent to the makers of the Interstellar Secret Agent Kit.

Humor is subjective, but I doubt many people will find this funny. Much of it is clearly attempting to satirize aspects of modern society, but it rather fails at that, too.

Two stars.

Edge of Night, by A. Bertram Chandler

In the first installment, Commodore John Grimes led a volunteer group to a parallel universe to investigate the origins of a mysterious spaceship. There, they found humanity on the Rim of the galaxy enslaved by intelligent rats and vowed revenge. The rats are mobilizing against Grimes and his crew, but the one place they aren’t contacting is the planet Stree. In his universe, Grimes was the first human to land on that planet and make contact with the psychic philosopher lizards who live there, a peaceful and positive contact. Reaching Stree with subterfuge and a bit of luck, Grimes finds himself expected and recognized.

It seems that the Wise Ones of the Streen know their lives in every universe. They have also come up with a plan to stop the rats by “killing the egg before it hatches.” To do so, one of them will take Grimes and his ship centuries into the past to keep the ship bearing the mutated ancestors of the rat people from reaching Port Forlorn.


Serressor and Mayhew pilot the ship backwards in time. Art by Gaughan

One thing really stood out to me here. As they’re getting ready to stop the ancestors of the rats, Grimes contemplates the fact that he’s about to commit genocide, and it bothers him. Not a lot, but it’s far more than Dick Seaton can say. Once again, I thought it was a four-star story while I read it, but cooled on it later. It’s a big airy dessert, delicious but a bit lacking once it’s finished.

A high three stars for this installment and the novel as a whole.

In the Bone, by Gordon R. Dickson

Harry Brennan sets out on humanity’s first interstellar journey aboard the John Paul Jones, a ship so small it’s almost an extension of himself. On the fifth Earth-like world he finds, he enounters an intelligent alien. The alien strips him of his ship, telling him to go and be a beast. Harry goes mad and becomes little more than an animal, but gradually his humanness returns.


Still more beast than man, Harry makes his way into the alien’s ship. Art by Virgil Finlay

The plot is so Campbellian, I wonder what it’s doing here. Dickson can usually handle this sort of story, but he’s not at his best. He’s too direct in telling us the point at the beginning and end, and the style holds the reader at a distance.

A low three stars.

Summing up

Well, that was a mediocre issue. One exciting read that isn’t as good when you think about it, two fair works from authors who can do better, and a whole lot of filler, including a poor start to a long serial. Fingers crossed that next month turns out better.


Every one of those could go either way. All four are going to have to come up heads to counterbalance McIntosh.

And if you are in Cleveland (physically or in spirit) this weekend, be certain to join us for the showing of the first Star Trek pilot at 7pm Eastern (4pm Pacific!).




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Serial

[January 8, 1966] Seems like old times (February 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Nostalgia

Stop me if you've heard this one before ("Stop!  Stop!") but when I picked up that first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in October 1950, I was hooked.  I had encountered SF previously, as a kid with Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne.  I'd devoured L. Frank Baum's works.  And through the 30s and 40s, I leafed through the odd issue of Astounding.  But it wasn't until I read H. L. Gold's mag that SF really seduced me.  Here were mature stories for adults going beyond the "gimmick" story.

In 1954, I became voracious, buying every mag in sight.  Some were worthy, like Fantasy and Science Fiction, Satellite, Beyond and (often) Astounding and Fantastic Universe.  Others were…less than worthy: Amazing, Infinity, Imagination, Super Science, and on and on.  But I read them all.  I was hooked.

Gold left the editorship in 1961, and the esteemed Fred Pohl took over.  The magazine has been in a bit of a holding pattern since the turn of the decade, rarely being outright bad, but rarely evoking the heights of those first few years of publication, when virtually every story was a stunner.

The latest issue is a stunning return to form. 

The Issue at Hand


by Virgil Finlay

Under Old Earth, by Cordwainer Smith

The enigmatic Mr. Smith has been a staple of Galaxy from early days, and I understand he is one of the folks Mr. Pohl regularly visits to obtain new stories.  Under Old Earth is the latest installment in the Instrumentality series, portraying a happy, fatuous humanity atop a slave class of altered beasts and robots. 

In this particular story, Sto-Odin, a dying Lord of the Instrumentality heads to the Gebiet, the vast underworld separate from the laws and enforced happiness of the surface world.  There, he expects to find the vital spark of humanity that can restore the race.  He encounters a self-styled Sun-God who has purloined a piece of the congohelion, a vast structure that regulates the output of stars, to make inhumanly powerful music.  And tending his altar is Santuna, dismayed with what the Sun-God has become, and destined for a great role in the eventual Rediscovery of Man.

As always, it is lyrical and lovely, different from anything else you'll ever read.  Four stars.


by Virgil Finlay

Courting Time, by Tom Purdom

The excellence continues with this marvelous treatment of polygamy in the mid-21st century on the eve of a great world fair: A composer in love with a woman comprising one eighth of an 8-way marriage wishes to become the next spouse in the cluster.  But he has strong competition in the form of a ruthless and irresistable playboy.  What's a lovelorn fellow to do?

Tom happens to be a friend of mine, and here are his notes on the genesis of this tale:

I got the idea several years before I wrote the story, when one of the older women in the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society told me she thought every woman needed four husbands, each one good at a different specialty–making money, romance, companionship, parenting.  I felt that would work for men, too.

Most stories about group marriage that I'd read, it seemed to me, were stories about group sex.  Courting Time is about the sociology of marriage.  It owes something to Morton Hunt's The Natural History of Love, a book about the history of Western ideas about sex and marriage.  Hunt concludes that our modern vision of marriage essentially demands that a two person relationship fulfill all the needs people once satisfied with their relationships with larger groupings like the extended family.  You're supposed to find one person who can be your business partner, sexual partner, romantic partner, parent to your children, and lifelong companion.  No single individual can do a five star job in all those roles.

I really liked the idea of the global world's fair.  The world fair in New York was going on at that time and I asked myself what a world fair might look like in the future.

I called the story "Courting".  I like one word titles.  Fred Pohl changed it to "Courting Time", querying my approval, which has more of a lilt.

Other than Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Courting Time is the only SF story dealing with polygamy I've read in recent history.  It's a very good story, though it could use a little more development with the protagonist's falling in love with each of the spouses.  Tom agrees with my four star assessment.

Read it!

For Your Information: The Wreck of La Lutine, by Willy Ley

160 years ago, the gold ship, La Lutine, was capsized in a storm off the coast of Holland.  Since then, numerous attempts of increasing sophistication have been made to recover the lost bullion, with limited success.  Ley's account of these efforts is fascinating — maybe the Journey should put together a recovery mission of its own!

Four stars.

The Echo of Wrath , by Thomas M. Disch

Little Ilisveta, an eight year old Martian, is bored with her rough frontier life and yearns for something better, something like the Earth-trotting days her grandfather Dmitri and grandmother Sally enjoyed some sixty years prior.  But such a life can never be.

Echo is a relatively unremarkable story until the end, which struck me in the gut with the force of a train.  You've done it again, Mr. Disch.

Four stars.

Where the Changed Ones Go, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

Just last issue, Robert Silverberg gave us the second in a series one might call Blue Fire, a collection of loosely related novellas set in a future where the secular scientific religion of Vorsterianism has achieved currency across the Earth. 

But not across the planets.  The aloof Martians and the arrogant Venusians will have no truck with the Vorsterians.  However, for some reason, the heretical Harmonists have managed to get a foothold on the hostile second planet from the Sun.  So Nicholas Martell, a Vorsterian minister from Earth discovers when he runs across Brother Mondschein (who we met in the last story), who warns Martell that his errand is futile.

Martell, who has undergone a massive physical alteration just to live on Venus, will not be easily deterred — especially as he seems to have found his first potential convert, a young boy with the power of telekinesis.

Silverberg's Venus might as well be a random alien world, so little resemblance does it bear to the actual Venus.  Astronomical quibbles aside, however, it's a fine story.

Four stars.

Eye of an Octopus, by Larry Niven

The first expedition to Mars finds Martians, and they're far more like (and unlike!) humans than they could have imagined.  Is the well they discover for drinking or something else?

A well-drawn little puzzle story.  We've taken to reading Niven stories, when they come out, at bedtime.  Janice appreciated the wealth of detail briefly described and gave it four stars.  Lorelei was less thrilled, giving it a solid three.

I'd split the difference if I could, but it's not a novel, so I can't.  I'd say it's a worthy three star tale.

In the Imagicon, by George H. Smith

What do you give to the man who has everything?  Why, nothing of course.  A whole lot of it. 

And vice versa.

Smith is a fellow who used to write for the lesser mags back in the 50s.  He's been AWOL pretty much since I started the Journey so, until I did some digging, I thought he was a new author rather than a veteran.

Anyway, Imagicon is a pretty obvious tale.  Not bad, just primitive by Galaxy's standards.  I wavered between two and three stars, but just as suspots are pale in comparison to their surroundings despite their great heat, so Imagicon suffers for being in the company of so many good stories.

Two stars.

Mulligan, Come Home!, by Allen Kim Lang

Okay, Imagicon does have the virtue of being next to the only dud story in the issue.  Lang's tale is about a fix-it man dispatched by the government to find the elusive trickster and malcontent Mulligan Mondrian.  Along the way, we get Mondrian's full life history, detailing his start as a two-bit con man and womanizer and onward to his culmination as a larger-than-life, interplanetary con man and womanizer.

Some cute turns of phrase, but the story collapses under the weight of its own attempted cleverness.

Two stars.

The Age of the Pussyfoot (Part 3 of 3), by Frederik Pohl


by Wallace Wood

At last, we come to the thrilling conclusion of The Age of the Pussyfoot, the misadventures of a 20th Century man unfrozen after death in a 26th Century utopia.  When last we left Chuck Forrester, he had not only been fired by his alien employer, he had unwittingly been an accomplice to the alien's escape from Earth.  But when the Sirian left, presumably to return at the head of an invasion, he left the penniless Forrester nearly $100 million.

But profound wealth does little to assuage the guilt of the man out of time, especially when he is abandoned by all his newfound friends and his romantic partner.  Is he the lynchpin to humanity's salvation or its ruin?

A sparkling, farcical story, just serious enough to keep your attention, Pussycat reads like a Sheckley short story at novel length (Pohl succeeds here where Sheckley, himself, usually can't quite make long pieces work).

That said, it's a little too sketchy and silly to merit four stars.  Call it three and a half — worth reading, but probably not good enough to clinch a Galactic Star this year.

Summing Up

What a good issue this was!  3.4 stars is nothing to sneeze at.  In fact, it might well end up being the best mag of the month, though we still have five more titles to review.  If you're a long time Galaxy reader, enjoy this breath of fresh air.  And if you're new to Galaxy, perhaps this issue will tempt you into a subscription, just as that first issue did for me more than fifteen years ago…




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 4, 1966] Keep Watching the Skies (February 1966 IF)

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by David Levinson

I’m sure many of the Journey’s readers will remember the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, which featured Marshal Dillon himself, James Arness, as an alien super-carrot. Based loosely on John Campbell’s novella Who Goes There?, it’s a fine piece of Red Scare paranoia, though not quite as good as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Once the heroes have defeated the alien menace, reporter Ned “Scotty” Scott broadcasts a warning to the world to “Keep watching the skies!”

Great Balls of Fire

1965 has been a good year for watching the skies. From the return of American astronauts to space after a hiatus to the brilliant display of Comet Ikeya-Seki. The year wrapped up spectacularly in December. As my colleague Victoria Silverwolf reported, a brilliant fireball shot through the heavens over Ontario, Michigan and Ohio before crashing near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. Despite rumors, no sign has been found of Russian satellites or little green men. Then on Christmas Eve, a meteor exploded over the village of Barwell, England. This time numerous pieces made their way to Earth. No one was injured, but there was some property damage. Pieces have been found, confirming the object was a stony meteorite of the sort known as a chondrite.


Meteorite hunters descend on Barwell.

Death from above and below

There’s plenty of menace from the skies in this month’s IF. Actually, the threat is mostly humans attacking other humans, but not always. Sometimes it’s humans attacking aliens.


A triphib attacks. The story isn’t as Burroughs-esque as you might think. Art by Pederson.

Prisoners of the Sky, by C. C. MacApp

Six hundred years before the story begins, a colony ship from Earth reached the planet Durrent. The planet is low in metals and has a very dense atmosphere. Humans can live comfortably atop the numerous mesas, while the heavy air and vicious wildlife make the lower elevations dangerous. Mesa Mederlink is out to conquer the world, and Mesa Lowry is under siege, unable to get the guano they need for fertilizer.

Altern Raab Garan is under a cloud. The fleet led by his father several years ago was wiped out by Mederlink and there is suspicion of treason. Raab has proposed a lightning raid by a single airship out to the guano islands in the hopes of obtaining the fertilizer the mesa needs to continue holding out. He’s been given a chance, but the ship is old and poorly armed, the crew is largely civilian volunteers, one of his officers hates him and there may be a traitor on board.


This minor incident doesn’t cover even a full page, but it seems to have caught the imagination of both artists. Art by Morrow

This is actually a rather good story. MacApp has borrowed a lot from various submarine films and has done a good job of getting the tension of those films on the page. It’s nowhere near as pulpy as the art might make you think. My biggest complaint is that the author forgot about the extremely dense atmosphere and the climax mostly takes place at sea level. The story ends on a cliffhanger, so we can probably expect more. A solid three stars.

Build We Must, by Dannie Plachta

Inspired by the theory that the moons of Mars are actually space stations, the unnamed narrator became an astronaut. On the first mission to Mars, the crew is met by Martians and the narrator is chosen to make first contact.

Plachta’s sophomore effort is a joke story. In fact, it’s basically his first story retold with the shocker reframed as a punchline. At least it’s mercifully short. Plachta does seem to have some skill, but it’s time for him to put it to better use. Two stars.

The Kettle Black, by Steve Buchanan

Xenologist Stade is on his deathbed, waiting on a visit from Witten. As he waits, he reflects on the mission they were on together only a year earlier. Along with the third member of the team, Skinner – a cyborg whose only organic parts are his brain and spinal column – they discovered a planet with a civilization just short of space travel. Initially, things go well, and Stade makes excellent progress in establishing relations with the natives and learning their language. When he is invited to attend a ceremony, Skinner overrules him and goes in his place. The natives attempt to kill Skinner and the humans wage a three-man war to return to their ship.


Human-native relations take a turn for the worse. Art by Nodel

Buchanan is one of two first time authors in this issue. I’m not terribly impressed. The story plods, even during the action, and I had a very hard time keeping the characters straight. It is apparent from the ending that the author thinks he has made an important point about modern race relations, but I certainly can’t tell what it might be. Two stars.

Nine Hundred Grandmothers, by R. A. Lafferty

Ceran Swicegood is a Special Aspects Man. Unlike his fellows, he refuses to take on a manly name like Manbreaker Crag or George Blood. The expedition he’s on is investigating the large asteroid Proavitus. Ceran is interested in the native claim that they never die and is eager to meet some of the eldest of the race to find out how they came to be.

Lafferty is Lafferty, and you either like his stuff or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. This isn’t really one of his better pieces, lacking a lot of that quality of oddness which is his trademark. Even Homer nods, and mediocre Lafferty is still worth a read. Three stars.

Not by Sea, by Howard L. Morris

In an alternate timeline, Sir Hubert Wulf-Leigh is a decadent drunkard who works a few hours a day as a Confidential Clerk to the Board of Lord High Admirals. Through a rather brilliant bit of intelligence work, he determines that Naflon the Usurper, King Elective of Fraunce, is planning to invade England using hot air balloons. Not believed at first, when he’s proven right Hubert is put in charge of the defense of Plymness, where the Freunch do indeed attempt their landing.


I’m not even going to try to come up with a better caption. Art by Gaughan

Morris is the second newcomer this month. The story is light and largely comedic. Its greatest flaw is that the author goes far too often to the well of the English tendency to pronounce names oddly. Wulf-Leigh is pronounced Wilfly, Mountcourtenay is Munkertny and so on. The joke gets old fast and there’s a tendency to repeat it several times for the same character. It’s also a little long. That said, it does read easily. A low three stars.

The Peak Lords, by Miriam Allen deFord

A young man claiming to be the son of a Peak Lord who was kidnapped and left Below among the mutants is making his statement in court. From him, we learn how a few powerful individuals fled growing pollution by retreating to ever higher altitudes, eventually warring over the limited space and taking on retainers, while the rest of humanity was slowly mutated by the foul air and water. Eventually, we learn the truth of his kidnapping.

The best thing I can say for this story, is that deFord has perfectly captured the voice of an arrogant, entitled young man. Unfortunately, that makes for a very unpleasant narrator. On top of that, most of his statement is the worst sort of “As you know, Bob” rehashing the history of his people with no point other than to inform the reader. Worst of all, the story relies on a typographical trick at the end to achieve its impact. If only it were as simple as some screaming italics and an excess of exclamation points. Two stars.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Part 3 of 5), by Robert A. Heinlein

In the previous installment, preparations for the Lunar revolution were proceeding apace. Companies created by computer intelligence Mike were financing recruitment and the construction of a secret orbital launcher for throwing rocks at Earth if necessary. As we left our heroes. Mannie dropped in to visit a friend who works as a judge. An event which would have a great effect on the course of the revolution.

A group of youngsters have dragged in a tourist who got a little too friendly with the girl at the core of their group. They want to stuff him out an airlock, but feel the need to go through proper procedures first. Since the judge is off drinking his lunch, Mannie agrees to hear the case. He succeeds in resolving the situation peacefully, teaching a lesson to both the tourist and the stilyagi who dragged him to court. Said tourist proves to be one Stuart Rene LaJoie, Poet – Traveler – Soldier of Fortune, a wealthy Earthman who will become the revolution’s chief lobbyist and advocate back home.

Stu gives Mannie a chance to expound on the role of women in Lunar society, the economics of the Moon and much more. At long last, we finally find out the meaning of TAANSTAFL, seen on the cover of the issue with the first installment: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. There is always a hidden cost to something claimed to be free.

Before the revolutionaries are really ready, the balloon goes up. A group of Peace Guards rape and kill a young woman, and the Loonies explode. Mannie, Mike and the Prof are able to direct the flood of rage, and Lunar Authority goes down easily. The hard part is yet to come when Earth responds. They attempt to keep the lid on, with Mike faking normal communications Earthside, but a group of Earth scientists manage to get a message back home. Meanwhile, Prof gets a sort of ad hoc congress to issue a declaration of independence, largely cribbed from the American Declaration, on July 4th, 2076. Finally, Mannie and Prof are preparing to be smuggled down to Earth in a grain shipment, and the night before they leave Wyoh is brought into Mannie’s family.


This won’t actually happen until next time, but the other illustrations aren’t very good. Art by Morrow

Once again, Heinlein take what should be a dry recitation of people sitting around talking about politics and sociology and grabs readers’ attention and keeps them turning the page. It’s a remarkable skill and one he’s shown too little of in recent works. The events of the revolution are exciting, too, but we see them at a bit of remove. Our protagonists are too important to be involved in the fighting, though Mannie does see some of it from the sidelines. The only real complaint for me is that Wyoh largely moves into the background. Four stars.

The Warriors, by Larry Niven

In deep space, a kzinti warship has discovered a strange vessel. Alien Technologies can detect no weapons, and Telepath reports the beings aboard are peaceful. Captain is delighted, sensing the opportunity to bring in a new slave world and earn himself a name. He orders the use of inductors to raise temperatures on the alien ship to kill everyone aboard, so that the kzinti can learn as much as possible about their prey.

Aboard the Angel’s Pencil, the human crew are puzzled by their inability to communicate with the alien ship. They assume it must be a question of technology. There hasn’t been a war among humans in over three centuries, and there hasn’t been a murder in well over a century and a half. In fact, most people never even learn about war and the less pleasant aspects of history. Hostility is the furthest thing from the crew’s minds.

Another solid outing by Niven. His kzinti are a pretty good answer to John Campbell’s challenge to write aliens who think as well as a man, but not like a man. These catlike people are predators through and through, and Niven does a good job of telling us things about their society without excess exposition or characters talking about things they all know. He’s a little less successful at that when telling us about the peaceful human society. It’s a good story that could, perhaps, have used a final bit of polish to really make it shine. A solid three stars.

Summing Up

There we have it. Another base of not very good stuff with a smattering of decent, if nothing special, stories. Only the Heinlein really stands out. That alone might be worth your 50¢. I recently heard a rumor that Fred Pohl uses IF for stories from name authors they can’t sell elsewhere in the hope they’ll also sell him their good stuff. I’m not sure that’s the way to run a successful magazine.


Hope springs eternal.




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Magazine

[June 18, 1965] Galactic Doppleganger (July 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Those of you who have been following the Journey over the past several years know that my appraisal of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has changed a few times.  Back in the days when Anthony Boucher and then Robert Mills were editing F&SF, it was my favorite magazine, a dessert I saved for reviewing last.

Then Avram Davidson took over in 1962, and while there were still standout issues, Davidson's whimsical, somewhat obtuse preferences led to a pretty rough couple of years.  Recently, Joe Ferman, son of the owner of the magazine, took over, and quality has been on a slow but perceptible rise.

One thing about F&SF is that it has always been unique amongst its SFF magazine brethren (which once numbered 40 and now less than ten).  It was the literary sibling, the most highfalutin.  Composed largely of vignettes and short stories, it contrasted sharply with the crunchier digests like Analog.

Which is why the current July 1965 issue is so unusual.  It's not bad; indeed, it's pretty good.  But it reads much like an issue of Galaxy or IF, one of the more mainstream mags.  I'm not disappointed.  It's just odd is all.  Read on and see what I mean.


by Jack Gaughan (he likes dragons — he did the illos for Vance's The Dragon Masters too!

Rogue Dragon, by Avram Davidson

Last year, Davidson left editing to go back to writing full time, and Rogue Dragon is his first major work since his departure from the helm of F&SF.  From the title, I expected a fantasy piece, or perhaps the dragon would even turn out to be metaphorical.  Both suppositions were wrong: Rogue Dragon is pure science fiction set on a far future Earth, one that had been conquered and then abandoned by the merciless insectoid Kar-chee.

Now simply called Prime World, humanity's original home has devolved to a handful of city-states. The planet's economy is based on Hunts, wherein the dragons introduced by the Kar-chee are slain by off-world big game hunters.  These dragons are nigh invulnerable things, their chest armor only pierceable in a weak spot identified with a painted white cross.

Enter Jan-Joras, the Private Man (representative) of the great off-world leader, Por Paulo.  Sent to arrange a vacation for the elected king he serves, Jan-Joras quickly gets caught up in a political struggle between the aristocratic Gentlemen class, who raise the dragons, the base-born (known pejoratively as dogcatchers and potato-growers), and the outlaws, who have hatched a scheme that will strike at the very foundation of the Hunt system.

But Rogue Dragon is no political thriller.  Rather, after a slightly difficult to read opening act (Davidson introduces many concepts and an abundance of idiomatic language in a short space), Rogue Dragon is an adventure story filled with derring-do, great escapes, and much traveling across increasingly hot frying pans — and we all know what destination lies at the end of that trail.

I found that I liked the story quite a bit, although it is perhaps less substantial than it might have been.  I waver between giving it three stars (perfectly adequate entertainment) and four stars (there's creative worldbuilding here).

Generosity wins.  Four stars it is, and welcome back to where you belong, Avram.

Computer Diagnosis, by Theodore L. Thomas

For his latest science fact vignette, Thomas discusses computer-assisted medical diagnosis — feed the data in, get a determination of malady and a life expectancy out.  Expanded, this could have made a nice article.  As is…

Three stars for being harmless.

The Expendables, by Miriam Allen deFord

In this odd bird of a story, the first astronauts sent to Mars are senior citizens.  The logic is that the mission is so hazardous, with so remote a chance of returning, that it is kinder to send folks with fewer years remaining in their lives.

It doesn't make a great deal of sense, and the story is hampered by some clunky "as you know" dialogue.  On the other hand, I thought the characters were pretty well drawn, and I appreciated the non-standard protagonists (two men, two women, all over 68).

Three stars.

The Eight Billion, by Richard Wilson

Many have made the dire prediction that Earth is heading toward massive overpopulation.  Indeed, the tremendous-sounding number, "Eight Billion", may well be reached by the end of the century.  Now imagine that crowding was such that eight thousand thousand thousands were crammed just into the island of Manhattan!

Wilson's story is mostly humorous fluff supporting a twist ending, but I enjoyed it.

Three stars.

Becalmed in Hell, by Larry Niven

Niven continues to impress with his fourth tale, sequel to The Coldest Place, which appeared in IF.  In his hard as nails variation on McCaffrey's The Ship who Sang, Howie and Eric-the-cyborg-ship explore the boiling planet of Venus.  There, floating twenty miles above the molten surface, Eric develops a fault and is unable to blast back into orbit.  Is the problem mechanical or psychosomatic?

This is the first story set on post-Mariner 2 Venus, and what a delight it is to see what is probably a much more accurate representation of the Planet of Love.  I do balk at the notion that it would be pitch black under Venus' clouds — it's not under an equivalent pressure of ocean, after all.  On the other hand, perhaps they were exploring the night side.

In any event, it's a neat story (albeit one I might have expected to find in Analog).  Four stars.

Exclamation Point!, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor continues his streak of turning his frivolous meanderings through mathematics into readable but not particularly momentous articles.  In this latest, he expounds on the "Asimov series", a cute way he has developed to approximate the value of the special constant, e.

An enjoyable ride, I suppose.  Three stars.

A Murkle For Jesse, by Gary Jennings

Gary Jennings last appeared in print in this very magazine, some three years ago, with the story Myrrha.  It was nominated for the Hugo, though I didn't think it merited such acclaim.

In any event, I think I liked Murkle better.  It stars an eight-year-old boy, a section of the rural Northeast, a little lost girl, and a 400-year old Irish fairy who is most certainly not lost.

If Clifford Simak and R.A. Lafferty were put in a blender, this piece might pour out.  Three stars.

The Pterodactyl, by Philip José Farmer

The book concludes with a short poem about the wing-fingered flying reptiles of the Mesozoic.  A difficult read, it also seems to suggest that pterodactyls were the evolutionary precursors of birds.

The weakest piece of the issue; two stars.

Wrapping up

And there you have it: a pleasant, above-average issue, but with stories that seem slightly odd fits for F&SF.  I'm not really complaining, though. 

Unless, of course, it means the other mags suffer…

[Don't miss the next episode of The Journey Show, featuring singer-songwriter Harry Seldon.  He'll be playing a mix of Dylan, Simon, and some unique original compositions!]




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