Yesterday the Vatican announced that more than forty saints have been removed from the official liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. How come? Because there's some serious doubt that these holy folks ever existed.
The most famous of these former saints is Christopher, patron of travelers. There are plenty of people with Saint Christopher medals hanging from the rear view mirrors of their cars, hoping for safe journeys.
A typical Saint Christopher medal. Note the infant Jesus carried on his back.
The story goes that Christopher (whose name, appropriately, means Bearer of Christ) carried the baby Messiah across a river. I guess we'll never know now how He made it. Perhaps He crawled on water.
Long Hair Music
I'm sure that ex-Saint Christopher will continue to be associated with a divine youth. In this modern age, what could be more associated with secular youth than the hippie movement? The popularity of the musical Hair is proof of the cultural importance of these groovy young people.
Further evidence, if any be needed, is the fact that Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, a medley of two songs from Hair performed by The 5th Dimension, has been Number One in the USA since the middle of April, and shows no signs of leaving that position anytime soon.
Maybe I'm prejudiced in the song's favor because I'm an Aquarius.
Bildungsroman
Fittingly, the latest issue of Fantastic is dominated by the first half of a new novel in which we see the main character develop from a child to a young adult.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
The cover is, as usual, borrowed from an issue of the German magazine Perry Rhodan.
What happened to the green halo around the sphere in the upper right corner?
Editorial: Don't, by Laurence M. Janifer
The associate editor tells us why writing is a bad career choice. Although the piece is intended to be humorous, I can't help feeling that there's a trace of true bitterness to it.
No rating.
Emphyrio (Part One of Two), by Jack Vance
Illustrations by Bruce Jones.
Taking up half the magazine, this initial segment begins with a bang. We witness our protagonist, Ghyl Tarvoke, held prisoner in a tower. His skull is cut open and his brain attached to a sinister device. His captors manipulate his mind, bringing him from a vegetative state to one where he is able to answer questions, but lacks the imagination to lie. The torturers want to know why he committed serious crimes before they kill him.
After this dramatic opening we go into a flashback. Ghyl is the son of a woodworker. They live on a planet that was colonized so long ago that Earth is just a legend. Centuries ago, a war devastated the place where they live. Wealthy and powerful people restored basic services and now rule as lords, collecting taxes from their underlings.
Ghyl and a friend sneak into the spaceport where the aristocrats keep their private starships.
Ghyl's father engages in the forbidden activity of duplication; that is, he builds his own device that allows him to make copies of old manuscripts. (Other forms of duplication are also illegal; everything has to be made by hand.) He eventually pays a very heavy price for his crime.
In what starts as a joke, Ghyl runs for mayor (a purely symbolic office, but one that might offer the possibility of changing the oppressive laws of the lords) under the nom de guerre of Emphyrio. This half of the novel ends just as the election is about to take place.
Vance is a master at describing exotic settings and strange cultures, and his latest work is a particularly shining example. I have failed to give you any idea of the novel's complex and detailed background. (Vance is the only SF author I know who can get away with the copious use of footnotes to explain the worlds he creates.) Ghyl and the other characters are very real, and their world seems like a place with millennia of history.
If I have to have a few minor quibbles, I might say that the novel (with the exception of the shocking opening scene) is very leisurely and episodic. Readers expecting an action-packed plot may be a bit disappointed. Personally, I found Ghyl's world fascinating.
Four stars (and maybe even leaning toward five.)
The Big Boy, by Bruce McAllister
The only other original work of fiction in this issue is a blend of science fiction and religious fantasy. Space travelers, including clergy, discover a galaxy-size, vaguely humanoid being deep in the cosmos. It manipulates stars and planets. An attempt to communicate with it yields a garbled message that seems to indicate that it is God. A clearer version of the message reveals something else.
I didn't really see the point of this story. The second version of the message isn't some big, shocking twist, but rather a slight modification of the original. (That's how I saw it, anyway, although the characters react wildly to it.)
Two stars.
On to the reprints! They all come from old issues of Fantastic, instead of the usual yellowing copies of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures.
Time Bum, by C. M. Kornbluth
The January/February 1953 issue of the magazine supplies this comedy.
Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.
A con artist rents a bungalow from a married couple. He drops hints that he's from centuries in the future. Revealing his identity as a time traveler would be a capital offense in his future world, or so he convinces them. The plan is to have them bring him a fortune in diamonds that he can supposedly duplicate for them.
Illustration by David Stone.
This is an amusing little jape. The author has a good time making fun of time travel stories and science fiction in general. (The wife is a reader of SF magazines, tearing off the covers with their scantily clad space women.) It's a minor work, and you'll see the ending coming a mile away, but it's worth a chuckle or two.
Three stars.
The Opal Necklace, by Kris Neville
The very first issue of the magazine (Summer 1952) is the source of this horror story.
Cover art by Barye Phillips and Leo Summers.
The daughter of a witch living way back in the swamp marries a man from New York City. The witch warns her that she will always be a part of the swamp. She gives her daughter a string of opals, each one of which contains one of the husband's joys.
Illustration by Leo Summers.
When the marriage inevitably falls apart, the woman turning to booze and cheap affairs, she destroys the opals, one by one. The first time, this causes the death of the man's pet dog. It all leads up to a tragic ending.
Besides being an effective chiller, this is a very well-written story with a great deal of emotional power. The woman is both victim and villain. The reader is able to empathize with her, no matter how reprehensible her actions may be.
Four stars.
The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch, by Eric Frank Russell
This grimly comic tale comes from the Fall 1952 issue.
Cover art by Leo Summers.
A series of gruesome deaths occurs in a small town in France. They all happen near a place where a meteorite fell. Only the village idiot knows what is responsible.
Illustration by Leo Summers also.
Does that sound like a comedy to you? Me neither. The basic plot is a typical science fiction horror story, but the author treats it with dry humor. Frankly, I found it in questionable taste, and not very funny.
Two stars.
Root of Evil, by Shirley Jackson
A tale from a truly great writer comes from the March/April issue.
Cover art by Richard Powers.
A man places an ad in the newspaper offering to send money to anybody who writes to him. Sure enough, folks who send in a request get the cash. We see several people react to this strange ad in different ways. At last, we learn about the fellow giving away all this loot.
Illustration by Virgil Finlay.
I was expecting a lot from the author of the superb short stories The Lottery and One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts as well as the excellent novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I didn't get it. The initial premise is interesting, but the story fizzles out at the end.
Two stars.
What If, by Isaac Asimov
The same premiere issue that gave us Kris Neville's dark story of an unhappy marriage offers this sentimental tale from the Good Doctor about a happy one.
Illustration by David Stone.
A lovey-dovey couple are on a train. A strange little man sits across from them with a box that says WHAT IF in big letters. He doesn't say a word, but he shows them a glass panel that allows them to see what would have happened if they had not met the way they did.
This isn't the most profound story ever written, but it makes for very pleasant reading. The message seems to be that some people are truly meant for each other, and that things tend to work out for the best. An optimistic point of view, to be sure, but it will probably appeal to the old softy inside all of us.
Three stars.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Hank Stine
Leiber has high praise for the dark fantasy novel Black Easter by James Blish (I agree; it's very good) and the story collection A Glass of Stars by Robert F. Young, particularly noting the latter's skill with love stories. (I agree with that also.)
Although it's not a book, the column includes an appreciation of the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows by Hank Stine.
No rating.
Worth Spending Your Youth On?
This was a pretty good issue, despite a couple of disappointments. The Jack Vance novel is clearly the highlight. If you'd rather skip the rest of the magazine, you can always read an old literary classic.
Here’s the May Amazing, the latest installment of the dreary soap opera that this magazine has become. The well-qualified Ted White is the new editor, the fourth in ten issues. Though he’s listed as Managing Editor, and Sol Cohen as Editor and Publisher, White’s editorial makes it clear that he will be running the magazine—within the constraints of Cohen’s policies, of course, most notably the reprint policy.
by Johnny Bruck
As a debut issue, this one does not impress, but that’s probably not a fair judgment. Given the abrupt departure of White’s predecessor Barry Malzberg, it was likely a scramble to get any issue at all together from available parts. The fiction contents include an Edmond Hamilton story in a series that has run in Amazing and Fantastic for several years, publication no doubt foreordained; one very short new story; and the usual heavy load of reprints, all from the 1950s consistent with recent practice. The non-fiction includes, as usual of late, a Laurence Janifer movie review (Barbarella—he likes it!) and a Leon Stover “Science of Man” article. The only identifiable change is a letter column. The book review department is missing, one hopes temporarily, since it has been one of the magazine’s brighter aspects.
As for future plans, White provides a rather carefully argued editorial, which starts by analogizing the “New Thing” in science fiction to the ongoing innovations in popular music, noting that despite the “sudden flowering” of rock music, it isn’t forgetting its roots. After some commentary on the New Thing, sympathetic but cautionary (“One J.G. Ballard can be important, but ten little Ballards?”), White asserts that most of the “New Wave” writers have not neglected their predecessors, citing Zelazny and Delany, noting particularly that Delany has absorbed and transformed old Planet Stories-style space opera plots. “It is my conviction that the science fiction field needs a magazine in which the old and the new can exist side by side, each thriving from its proximity to the other. And that is what I intend for Amazing: Something of the old (the reprints) and of the new (the best of the new writers). . . .” And he concludes by adding that this issue’s “Star Kings” novelet by Edmond Hamilton exemplifies exploration of the genre’s roots—but next issue we can expect a “new and very different novel by Robert Silverberg.”
It’s all gracefully done, touching the necessary bases with plausible conviction, and starkly contrasting with Harry Harrison’s pandering editorial of February 1968, which made essentially the same substantive points but which struck me as “a disappointingly smarmy exercise in having it both ways.”
The letter column is divided among sober commentary on current SF, the pleasures of letter columns and fanzine reviews, and a quite long letter contesting Stover’s “Science of Man” article War and Peace, which White says he cut down from 14 pages. Shades of Brass Tacks! This feature will require some tightening up but White clearly takes it seriously. As for the reference to fanzine reviews, White promises “fan features” in both Amazing and Fantastic.
And up front—though looking backward—is another cliched cover illustration by Johnny Bruck. Last issue, fellow Journeyer Cora Buhlert wished that Amazing would use the good Bruck covers rather than the dull ones. Yes! If there are any.
The lead story is Edmond Hamilton’s “short novel” (33 pages), The Horror from the Magellanic, latest in his series of sequels to his 1947 novel The Star Kings. I won’t repeat my previous jaundiced comments on the whole enterprise, but will leave it at a couple of samples:
“ ‘Highness, they’ve come out of the Marches. The Counts’ fleet. They’re more than twice as strong as we expected . . . and they’re coming full speed toward Fomalhaut!’
“Chapter Two
“Gordon felt a chilling dismay. The Counts of the Marches were throwing everything they had into this. And whether their gamble succeeded or not, in the dark background brooded the unguessable purposes and menace of the H’harn.”
And:
“. . . Gordon sat for a long time looking past the moving lights and the uproar and clamorous confusion of the great city, toward the starry sky. A star kingdom might fall, Narath might realize his ambition and sit on the throne of Fomalhaut, and he, John Gordon, and Lianna might be sent to their deaths. And that would be a world tragedy as well as tragedy for them.
“But if the H’harn succeeded, that would be tragedy for the whole galaxy, a catastrophe of cosmic dimension. Thousands of years before they had come from the outer void, bent on conquest, and only the power of the Disruptor, unloosed by Brenn Bir, had driven them back . Out there in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud they had brooded all this time, never giving up their purpose, filtering back gradually in secret plotting with the Counts, plotting with Narath, making ready some new tremendous stroke.
“Doomsday had come again, after those thousands of years.”
by Dan Adkins
To my taste, this is all an idea whose time has passed. No disrespect to Hamilton—a working professional writing in a mode he virtually invented—especially since he has shown he can work quite capably in styles other than this bombastic costume drama (see his 1960 novel The Haunted Stars). Three stars, acknowledging the craft involved, even if I can’t get interested.
Yesterdays, by Ray Russell
The new short story (very short), Ray Russell’s Yesterdays, couples two ancient themes, time running backwards and mad scientists; it’s clever and facile, as one would expect from the long-time fiction editor of Playboy, but no more. Three stars.
The longest story in the issue is Murray Leinster’s The Invaders, from the April/May 1953 issue of Amazing, the first in its short-lived experiment in paying more in order to get better material from more well-known authors. Leinster shared the contents page with Heinlein, Sturgeon, and Bradbury. Unfortunately his story begins well but undermines itself, unusually for this professional of decades’ standing.
Uncredited
The scene is set in terms of purest Cold War paranoia. The protagonist, surveying in Greece, flees an unacknowledged incursion by Bulgarian soldiers, and the author observes:
“It was not the time for full-scale war. Bulgaria and the other countries in its satellite status were under orders to put a strain upon the outside world. They were building up border incidents and turmoil for the benefit of their masters. Turkey was on a war footing, after a number of incidents like this. Indo-China was at war. Korea was an old story. Now Greece. It always takes more men to guard against criminal actions than to commit them. . . This was cold war.”
In the midst of this covert crisis, the protagonist discovers powerful evidence of infiltration by extraterrestrials in human guise—but what to do? Who will believe him? Leinster builds an atmosphere of suspense and suspicion at first, but it is quickly dissipated by hints that something different and more benign is going on, and by the end there’s no suspense or surprise. Three stars, barely; it’s at least slickly readable, as usual for Leinster.
King of the Black Sunrise, by Milton Lesser
Milton Lesser’s King of the Black Sunrise is an entirely more rancid kettle of fish. It’s from Amazing, May 1955, in the midst of the Howard Browne/Paul Fairman era of calculated formulaic mediocrity, and shows it. It reads like the result of a barroom bet over how many egregious cliches the author could cram into a single story.
Kent Taggert, fugitive from justice on murder charges (but of course he’s innocent), is tracked down on the obscure planet Argiv by a woman who wants to hire him for a dangerous assignment. “I looked at her for the first time. She was beautiful. So damned beautiful and so damned sure of herself. I felt like poking her one.” A bit later: “I could smell her perfume, not the kind that slams two sexy fists into your nostrils but the subtle kind, like the girls can buy only on Earth.”
Uncredited
The woman (named Helen, we later learn) discloses that the World Bureau of Investigation is on his trail, and like clockwork, a guy “who was trying too hard not to look like law” shows up at the bar where this conversation is occurring. Taggert decides he’d better take Helen’s proposition—to guide her party to find and plunder the treasure of the Black Sunrise.
See, Argiv has three suns—per the natives, the Green God, the Yellow God, and (“greatest of all”) the Purple God. They all rise and set at different times, but occasionally they are all below the horizon at the same time. That’s the Black Sunrise, even though it’s really a sunset. During the Black Sunrise, the barrier to the natives’ treasure cave opens up, and new offerings are deposited to make sure the three Gods come back. No one who has sought to steal this treasure has emerged alive.
So our freebooters hire some native bearers (“big flabby purple-skinned Argivians”) and march into the jungle (“King Solomon’s Mines, a hundred parsecs out in deep space,” muses Cotton, the hotheaded jerk of the party). But soon enough the bearers become fearful and desert, and the humans must push on without much of their equipment.
It goes on in similar vein, but recounting it is even more tedious than reading it. One star.
Wish It Away, by Frank Freeman
Frank Freeman’s Wish It Away (Fantastic, January-February 1954) is a jokey vignette so inane it almost hurts to describe it. Protagonist Mervin sees a monster every night, psychiatrist tells him to “wish it away,” next night the psychiatrist sees the monster, who says, “Mervin sent me. I hope it’s all right.” Now nobody else has to read it. One star.
Race-Zoology and Politics, by Leon E. Stover
The “Science of Man” article by Leon E. Stover suffers the faults of its predecessors, magnified. Race-Zoology and Politics is an outright polemic, with Stover taking up the cause of Carleton S. Coon, author of The Origin of the Races, who was denounced as a racist a few years ago by the president of the American Anthropological Association. Stover says Coon “has simply become a ‘non-person’ to the profession,” but: “It is a dead certainty that Coon sometime in the future will be rehabilitated and recognized for the great work he has done, which has been to complete the uncompleted work of Darwin.”
Well, maybe. Stover proceeds to argue Coon’s case about the evolution of human physical types in his familiar assertively dogmatic fashion. This one-sided partisan presentation concerning what is apparently a hot ongoing argument in the profession is of little use to the lay reader trying to understand more about the underlying science. Not rated—it’s just out of place here.
Summing Up
This is the most discouraging issue of Amazing in recent memory. The magazine continues to limp along under the weight of the reprint policy, and this issue’s batch of them is the worst in some time. Notably, the original notion of reacquainting the current SF readership with forgotten classics of the field—or at least interesting period pieces—has largely been lost as the reprints have come more frequently from Amazing’s more recent periods of outright mediocrity, mostly ranging from routine to awful. Will yet another new editor be allowed to make it better?
Is ten books a record for the Galactoscope? Lucky we have so many folks reading furiously for the Journey. And it's a good thing, because amidst the dross and mediocrity, there's a couple of gems…
Kate Wilhelm is perhaps better known for her debut short story, "The Mile-Long Spaceship" (1963) and Clone (1965), the Hugo Award nominated novel written in collaboration with Theodore L. Thomas. Perhaps you've read her work in Orbit, edited by her husband, Damon Knight.
The ominous title of this book, Let the Fire Fall, promises fire, brimstone, and a violent alien invasion—but the bad guys in this story aren't the extraterrestrials. The plot: A spaceship inhabited by pregnant alien women lands in small town America. The aliens are friendly, and clearly hope to be welcome on this new planet they’ve discovered. One vile and opportunistic man named Obie Cox– under normal circumstances, a small-town philanderer of no account, blessed with uncommon charisma–manages to worm his way to the pulpit. One there, he takes advantage of humanity’s rampant xenophobia and the ineffectuality of Earth’s bureaucracy through flat-out lies, hate, and fear mongering. What he wants is control and he achieves that by weaponizing humanity’s worst traits and using them to brainwash the populace and plunging the world into dystopian chaos.
At first, Wilhelm’s strangely familiar-feeling and deliberately matter-of-fact writing style, peppered with many clever twists of phrase, seems to capture the spirit of Ray Bradbury or an episode of the Twilight Zone. What we get, instead, is a riveting and decidedly tragic tale of First Contact gone awry in a world populated by an almost irredeemable cast of humans.
Wilhelm’s courage and ambitiousness in attempting to capture the vile side of human nature is admirable. Still, even a forward thinking and imaginative author such as herself cannot seem to escape the discriminatory views of our time. Let the Fire Fall perpetuates the sexist view that women must be submissive to men and even the women important to the plot are given no initiative to steer their own destinies. While Wilhelm is progressive enough to acknowledge the existence of homosexuals, the way she characterizes homosexuality as one of the “vices” permitted by the villainous Obie Cox’s vaunted religion suggests a personal disapproval of such individuals. (To be fair, what her characters feel, even the "good" ones, doesn't necessarily reflect Wilhelm's feelings on a subject.)
In any wise, Let the Fire Fall is an excellently written novel. The author’s insight and ability to imagine a dark future, all too possible, are incredible. I love this book but I hated reading it. The way it mirrors our current reality where opportunistic charlatans have risen to political power by preying on the gullibility of the American populace fills me with trepidation. Let the Fire Fall is an insidiously horrifying and damning condemnation of the human race. This book will make you squirm and fret about the world as we know it, and the future of our species. You will not feel comfortable reading this book. You should not.
Daphne du Maurier has been a favourite of mine for a long while. I read Rebecca in my teens and have slowly been building up a collection of her writings. However, she has only had one truly SFnal release to date, the marvellous collection The Apple Tree, most notable for containing the original short story of The Birds.
That was until this year, when she followed in the footsteps of fellow literary darlings Naomi Mitchison and Virginia Woolf and put out a book on a mainstay of science fiction, time travel.
Dick Young goes down to visit his old university friend Professor Magnus Lane in Cornwall. Dick agrees to be the test subject of the Professor’s new alchemical invention and finds himself transported back in time to the era of Edward III’s infancy. The story follows Dick and Magnus’ trips back and forth between the 14th and 20th centuries.
What Du Maurier always does well is give a real sense of atmosphere to her tales. As is usual in her books Cornwall takes on the mysterious atmosphere of Bronte’s Yorkshire and Doyle’s Dartmoor: a strange wild place where anything can happen. She also illustrates well the sense of dislocation Dick feels moving between the periods, making him feel like an outsider in both.
Cover by Susan Einzig
And yet, I don’t feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting here. The children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden explores similar themes better for me. Also, in spite of the period being underserved in historical narratives, I didn’t feel like I gained much more insight or understanding of it than I would have done from an encyclopedia summary.
This almost reads like one of those historical stories that had a touch of added SFnal content to get into the magazines. Of course, that is not the case here (DuMaurier could release her shopping list and it would be a best seller) and this is still a good read, but I did not feel like it is doing anything exceptional nor is it destined to be one of my favourites.
As John Carnell has now edited as many editions of New Writings as Ian Flemming wrote James Bond novels, he is entitled to enjoy himself. As such, he says this volume is entirely composed of stories he personally loved, rather than mixing in some he knew were good but not to his taste. But how much do my feelings ally with his?
Blood Brother by James White
We start with the always reliable James White with another tale of Sector General.
Following on from Vertigo, a team is returning with Surreshun to “Meatball” to assess the species' medical needs and to locate the manufacturers of their responsive organic tools. Unfortunately, the native entities of the planet believe that Surreshun was kidnapped by the crew of the Descartes and are not keen to let this happen again.
This once again is a fascinating exercise from White, trying to imagine a wholly alien species from our understanding and the problems it could cause. The natives of “Meatball” have an inbuilt dislike of anything similar to themselves and have no central form of government but exist in a deep layer of animal life. How to communicate ideas like friendship to a species like that is a true challenge.
What White is always great at is giving us a sense of how diverse the species in the Galactic Federation are, whilst still making it seem like an everyday occurrence at the hospital. For example:
Despite the fact that one species was covered in thick silver fur and crawled like a giant caterpillar and the other resembled a six-legged elephant, they were fairly easy to deal with because they had the same atmosphere and gravity requirements as Conway. But he was also responsible for a small ward of Hudlars, beings with hide like flexible armour plate whose artificial gravity system was set at five Gs and whose atmosphere was a dense high-pressure fog – and the odd-ball TLTU classification entity hailing from he knew not where who breathed superheated steam. It took more than a few hours to tidy up such a collection of loose ends…
He continues to know what he does well and produces the most consistently strong series currently ongoing in Science Fiction.
Four Stars
If You're So Smart by Paul Corey
Ibby has a mental disability and suffers from regular seizures, so lives permanently at a mental hospital. He also helps out in the animal testing lab. However, he may be able to understand the animals better than the scientists.
A pedestrian tale, poorly told. Whilst I have heard that Corey is an American writer and journalist of some renown, I am only familiar with him from his awful appearance in New Worlds earlier in the decade. Apparently he has an SF novel out from Robert Hale but this isn’t inspiring me to pick it up.
A low Two Stars
The Ballad of Luna Lil by Sydney J. Bounds
Gerard The Rhymer wrote The Ballad of Luna Lil many centuries ago. This work analyses the historical accuracy of the tale to the real life of Captain Bartholomew “Black Bart” Sparrow, a space free trader, and Lily La Lune, singing star of the videos.
I am a great lover of analyses of fictional works and this one doesn’t disappoint. It turns what could be a standard pulpy adventure into an exploration of a fictional universe, containing fascinating ideas and raising questions about the power of art.
A high Four Stars
The Eternity Game by Vincent King
In a tale told from four perspectives (A, G, P & Z), two different species find themselves in the Place, attempting to survive in their collapsing galaxy.
We learn from the introduction that Vincent King is also a visual artist and Carnell describes this work as being like an abstract painting. I am not sure I agree with that, it is certainly not as obscure as some of the writings of Ballard, Burroughs, or Farmer. Rather, you have a puzzle that fits together by the end.
I don’t think it is quite as effective as his usual Medieval Futurism, but still a worthy piece.
Four Stars
Tilt Angle by R. W. Mackelworth
The Earth has entered a new Ice Age, and Tomas and Donna are sent on a mission from the City to find food stores. But is this parasitic existence right or sustainable?
Another one of these Frozen Earth tales that have been popping up a lot recently in the UK (we do like to moan about the weather). Whilst evocatively told, it feels abrupt and incomplete. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw further stories in this world.
Three Stars
The Song of Infinity by Domingo Santos
Once again we have a work in translation, this time from a Spanish author. He is apparently well known in his own country but I am not aware of any prior translations into English. This one was selected and translated by the late great Arthur Sellings.
We get the internal monologue of an astronaut who finds himself accidentally floating through space without any hope of rescue.
This is a well told and melancholic tale but one that nevertheless didn’t really affect me as much as I felt it was trying to.
Three Stars
Green Five Renegade by M. John Harrison
Astronaut of the Green 5, Chad Redeem, encounters alien life forms. Discovering them to be naïve and peaceful compared to the human race, he goes on the run rather than risk his knowledge of them becoming known to the authorities.
Oh dear, I am not sure what happened here. Even putting aside some weird printing errors, it is overwritten, cliché driven and full of creepy descriptions of women. I know Harrison can do a lot better so I am surprised to see this come from his pen.
One Star
So, the good ship New Writings continues steadily on its course. Some good works, some poorer, still generally very much in Carnell’s usual mode. Much the same crew manning the rigging with nary a woman in sight*. Whilst it may not always be the most exciting voyage, it shows little signs of leakage. Onward!
*I believe it has now been over 5 years since Carnell published a story by a woman, the last being Dial SCH 1828 by Gweneth Penn-Bull in December ‘63’s Science Fantasy.
by Gideon Marcus
Ace Double 72400
The High Hex, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Here is the sequel to Target: Terra that nobody asked for. In this one, the African space station has begun broadcasting a menacing message, all chants and tribal drums, that seems to presage a heating up of the White/Black cold war. The crew of Space Station 1 are recalled to duty and tasked with infiltrating the second station. The plot is thickened with robots and destructive aliens, and the Africans aren't the bad guys after all.
If you enjoyed the gaggish and frivolous tone of the first book, you'll like this one. Otherwise…you won't.
If you read and enjoyed the four stories of John Grimes, a space captain running the rim of galactic space, then this is an opportunity to get all of them in one convenient package. In this fix-up, they are unchanged, with only short concluding scenes added to each piece to link them together.
They all appeared in IF, where David gave them three stars apiece. I see no reason to change his assessment.
by Victoria Silverwolf
War And No Peace
Two new novels deal with armed conflict, international or domestic. One takes place in the very recent past, but not the one with which we're familiar. The other is set in the near future, one we'd like to avoid. Let's start with something that didn't happen less than two years ago.
If Israel Lost the War, by Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littell
Uncredited cover art.
In the tradition of Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore (the Confederacy wins the American Civil War) and The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick (the Axis wins the Second World War), this book reverses the result of a war.
The title makes that obvious, of course. We're talking about the so-called Six Day War (June 5 through 10, 1967), in which Israel triumphed over a coalition of Arab nations.
I know less about military stuff than almost anybody, so I won't try to analyze the war. However, there seems to be general agreement that Israel's preemptive strike, devastating the Egyptian Air Force and giving Israel complete control over the skies, was a key factor in the victory.
What if Israel didn't attack first? What if Arab forces destroyed most of Israel's air power instead?
That's the premise of the novel. The result is overwhelming victory for the Arab nations, with Israel's territory soon being divided up among them.
The book's map, showing the progress of the imagined conflict.
The occupying forces initiate a reign of terror. As in many wars, looting, rape, and murder follow the victory. The big winner is Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who dominates his allies and intends to create a new, bigger United Arab Republic.
(The UAR was the name given to the union of Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961. The United Arab Republic is still the official name of the nation better known as Egypt.)
As I said, I'm no expert on war, so I don't know how plausible this scenario might be. It assumes closely coordinated action among the Arab states, which is questionable. It also presumes that Arab aircraft would be able to bypass Israel's early warning defense system. (There are even some lines in the book that indicate that this is unlikely.)
So how is the book as a work of fiction? Well, given the fact that the three authors are journalists (all working for Newsweek), it's no surprise that it reads like nonfiction. There are a few minor fictional characters, but all the major ones are real people. We follow politicians and military leaders from Israel, the Arab nations, the USA, and the USSR.
The work is obviously very pro-Israel. (Richard Z. Chesnoff is married to an Israeli woman, and used to live on a kibbutz.) Whether one sees the book as reasoned justification for Israel's preemptive strike, or as anti-Arab propaganda, it is sure to stir up controversy. Judged strictly on its literary merits, I'd have to say that it's readable enough. The authors are definitely more interested in getting their message across than in creating a work of art.
Three stars.
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Let's turn from an imaginary past to a speculative future.
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillion.
The race problem in the United States is much worse in the year 2014 than it was in our own time. Some cities (Detroit, Washington, etc.) are under the control of kneeblanks, while others are still firmly dominated by blanks.
Oh, you're not familiar with those terms? Maybe it'll help if I point out that blank is derived from the Afrikaans word blanc (white) and that kneeblank (often just knee) comes from nieblanc (not white.)
This is a sample of the book's futuristic terminology, which takes some time to get used to. It's not as difficult as the slang in A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, but it requires a little effort.
Anyway, ordinary citizens are forced to defend themselves with serious weapons, supplied by arms dealers. The dominant supplier of deadly devices is a family-run corporation that resembles the Mafia.
That's the background. What about the story? Well, it's complicated. There are a lot of important characters and a lot of plot threads. Let me try to come up with a greatly oversimplified synopsis.
There's a psychiatric institute under the direction of a megalomaniac who treats his patients with extreme isolation from society. One of the inmates is a kneeblank soldier who suffered a breakdown in war, but who now seems perfectly sane. In fact, he's an electronics genius.
A woman who produces enigmatic prophecies while under the influence of drugs (as in ancient times, she's called a pythoness) performs at the institute. A fellow who exposes scandals on television (the book calls him a spoolpigeon) records her act. He also happens to be married to one of the patients.
Meanwhile, a kneeblank spoolpigeon gets kicked out of Detroit by the city's kneeblank mayor, at the instigation of a blank South African. (The tragic situation of apartheid is still going strong in 2014.)
In addition to that, a kneeblank revolutionary who put kneeblanks in control of much of the United Kingdom is on his way to the United States. Even though US officials are terrified of him, he easily gets through customs.
What does this all have to do with a secret project of the arms dealers? Suffice to say that the kneeblank soldier I mentioned above isn't what he seems to be.
I've only given you a vague hint of what the novel is like. In addition to the convoluted plot, there's the narrative style. The first two chapters, for example, consist of a single word split into two parts. Many of the chapter titles are very long and often satiric. In the middle of the book, Brunner provides quotes from real newspaper articles about the American race problem.
The climax involves science fiction themes that are more speculative than those found earlier in the book. These may strain the reader's suspension of disbelief.
This novel isn't as groundbreaking as the author's stunning masterwork Stand on Zanzibar, but it's pretty close in quality.
Four stars.
by David Levinson
A Familiar Refrain
In music, it’s common for artists to cover an old standard or just something someone else has already done. Usually, they have a different approach that may be about the same, worse, or better. Once in a while, they’ll take an old song and make entirely their own (Jimi Hendrix and Frank Sinatra have a singular talent for this).
There’s a similar phenomenon in science fiction. Someone comes up with an interesting idea—time travel, alien invasion, what have you—and eventually almost everybody tries to see what they can do with the concept. Harry Harrison’s latest novel is just such a work. How well did he do?
Two Aztec villages lie on either side of a river in a valley long isolated from the outside world. We soon learn that things are not as they seem. The serpent-headed goddess Coatlicue is a physical presence that stalks the river bank at night, and typical Aztec features include blonde hair and blue eyes.
Into this world is born Chimal, a young man with a penchant for asking uncomfortable questions. When he inadvertently causes the death of the high priest (and the sun fails to rise, because there is no one to say the necessary prayer), Chimal must flee the valley. The society he finds outside the valley is no less hidebound and no fonder of questions with uncomfortable answers.
Although I’ve talked around it for the benefit of those who would like to experience the surprise on their own, I suspect many of you have figured out what’s going on. Although Harrison adds one or two interesting flourishes, the novel follows the expected course to one of the standard endings. Indeed, the story follows such a predictable course, I found myself more interested in what happened centuries earlier to create the situation or what is going to happen a few decades after the end.
Is it worth your time? Maybe. Is it worth your money? Definitely not, especially not at hardback prices.
Dickson has been busy as of late, with his serial Wolfling currently running in Analog, and with a new paperback original alongside it. Spacepaw is a less serious novel and seems to be aimed at a younger readership, which is fine by me. It takes place on Dilbia, the same planet featured in Dickson's 1961 novel Special Delivery. Like that earlier novel it features the Dilbians, a race of nine-foot-tall bear-like aliens who are not exactly hostile but who certainly have a curious way of going about things.
Bill Waltham is an agriculture scientist sent to Dilbia, supposedly to meet up with Lafe Greentree, his on-site superior, and Anita Lyme, a "trainee assistant" working under Greentree. The problem (actually two problems) is that Greentree is not here: he had sustained an injury whose severity the off-planet hospital is strangely vague about disclosing, and Anita has been taken captive by a pack of Dilbian outlaws. The only possible help Waltham can get are the mischievous Dilbian the Hill Bluffer (that's his name, the Hill Bluffer) and a Hemnoid named Mula-ay (italics not mine). The Hill Bluffer is not terribly useful and Mula-ay seems to be working for a third party—in Waltham's favor or not remains to be seen.
This novel is basically a comedy of manners. To rescue Lyme and convince the Dilbians to pick up agricultural skills (the race is a rural lot that lives off the fat o' the land), Waltham will have to adapt to Dilbian customs. The black-furred giants are a comical lot, with silly names like More Jam, Perfectly Delightful, and Grandpa Squeaky; they even give Waltham a Dilbian name, "Pick-and-Shovel," which the serious-minded human does not appreciate. The leader of the outlaws, Bone Breaker, is pretty affable despite his name and occupation. The stakes are kept somewhat low, even when Waltham is duped into accepting a duel to the death, which is fitting for a comedy, even if doesn't leave the reader with much to think about.
Dickson's brand of humor is unlikely to spark laughter, but it's effective at often invoking a smirk. Waltham himself is a bit of a wet blanket, but the comedy mostly stems from this straight-laced hero type being forced to deal with some deeply unserious aliens. Lyme is a bit of a shrew, but Dickson does write her as competent and independent-minded, even if I suspect he does not think very highly of her.
A solid three out of five stars, possibly four for young readers.
A good deal less enjoyable is a new Gothic horror novel I picked up, by an author I've never heard of before. Despite having been published this year, The Tormented reads like a fossilized dinosaur, but not one of the interesting ones. It's a pastiche of late-19th century supernatural horror. I'm sure Daniels likes Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle, but unfortunately she is not remotely as good a wordsmith as James or even Doyle.
Sharon Aldrich lived on a New Orleans plantation called The Pillars until both her parents died, and it turns out all the money had dried up. After a stint or two abroad she returns to The Pillars as governess for a new family that's moved in, the Beaumonts. Craig Beaumont and his wife Emily are stuck in a loveless marriage while Emily's sister, Sarah, tags along as a third wheel. Cassie, Craig's daughter, is a reasonably well-adjusted child despite the fact that she had witnessed a horrific death in the family not long ago. And there seems to be a ghost problem on the plantation. The place is most certainly haunted (it takes all of about five minutes upon Sharon's arriving for a ghost to start whispering in her ear), and worse yet, Sharon must now deal with a dysfunctional upper-class family.
You would think that at only 160 pages this would be a densely packed narrative, but it's not. There's quite a bit of padding. Most of the wordage is dialogue, with characters often getting into arguments with each other and then almost immediately apologizing for causing a fuss. Emily and Sarah are major shrews, and Sharon is not much better. It soon becomes clear Sharon and Craig like each other but are hesitant to take action, what with the whole marriage thing. Even the ghost does not pose much of a threat. No wonder the Confederacy lost. The Tormented is probably a few thousand words longer than James's The Turn of the Screw, but feels shorter because it spins its wheels so often. Not much actually happens, and despite the New Orleans setting Daniels injects practically no atmosphere into her writing.
The most damning part is that this is 1969, not 1889. I kept thinking, "Why play such an old and tired genre straight? What point is Daniels trying to make by doing this?" After having read the whole thing, I still don't know.
Last issue, new editor Barry Malzberg declared that “the majority of modern magazine science-fiction is ill-written, ill-characterized, ill-conceived and so excruciatingly dull as to make me question the ability of the writers to stay awake during its composition,” and proposed to use Amazing and Fantastic to promote the “rebirth—one would rather call it transmutation—of the category.”
by Johnny Bruck
Now, in this March Amazing, Barry is gone. Sol Cohen, listed as Publisher last issue, is now Editor and Publisher. Laurence M. Janifer is listed as Associate Editor, and contributes a guest editorial and a movie review. Ted White, new to the masthead, is listed as Managing Editor. Most likely he will actually be editing the magazine, having been Assistant and then Associate Editor at Fantasy and Science Fiction until mid-1968.
But as a great philosopher said, you can predict anything but the future. What we have right now is the last issue of the Malzberg editorship, credited or not, which we know since the new stories are the ones he announced in the last issue.
So why his sudden departure? I had a conversation with Barry, and he reported that it had nothing to do with the direction he proposed for the magazine’s fiction or his jaundiced account of the state of the field. Rather, he bought a cover, which he understood he was authorized to do, and said he would quit if Cohen did not allow him to run it. Cohen responded, "I don't know anything about stories but I do know about art and I can't run this cover. [Pause] You're fired." Barry adds, on reflection, that Cohen was right, and there’s no resentment on his part.
But back to the issue before us. Overall, it’s business as usual: another tiresome cover by Johnny Bruck, four new short stories (mostly very short) and the conclusion of a new serialized novella, and three reprinted novelets. There is the usual "Science of Man" article by Leon E. Stover, and the usual book review column, credited as before to William Atheling, Jr., the not-at-all secret pseudonym of James Blish–though the review of The Making of Star Trek is bylined Blish (who is also the author of several Star Trek paperbacks). Janifer’s above-mentioned movie review is about Hot Millions, a scientific heist film in which Peter Ustinov, as an embezzler, goes up against a giant computer. (Before long, I am sure, there will need to be a name for such a villain. Computer . . . hijacker? Nah, too cumbersome.)
We All Died at Breakaway Station (Part 2 of 2), by Richard C. Meredith
Richard Meredith’s two-part serial novella, We All Died at Breakaway Station, concludes here. It may well be the most downbeat space opera ever published. Earth is at war with the Jillies. Protagonist Captain Absolom [sic] Bracer has been killed in battle and resurrected, and is now hideously disabled and disfigured and patched up with mechanical parts, since there are no replacements to allow him to return to Earth for more seemly regeneration. Also he is tormented by phantom pain from the missing parts, as well as the psychological impact of his mutilated condition. His fellow officers are all in similar shape.
by Dan Adkins
Bracer is charged with escorting a hospital ship full of other casualties back to Earth for better treatment. But he learns that the relief ships from Earth to Breakaway, a barren planet where the essential faster-than-light communications link to Earth is located, are days away from arriving. He decides to delay departure so he and his subordinates will be around to protect Breakaway from the expected Jillie attack. This set-up of course leads to a lot of slam-bang action, with continuing death, destruction, and angst (though a note of glee does creep in here and there), and then the probably obligatory tragic but uplifting ending.
The writing is amateurish in places but quite readable even as one is noting that Meredith is going on much too long about things that don’t advance the narrative, playing silly games with chapter divisions (there are 36 of these in 79 pages, one of which is four lines long), and writing dialogue some of which seems lifted from World War II B-movies. But there’s actually a story here, the author is clearly having a good time, and it’s infectious as long as you manage your expectations. Three stars.
The Invasion of the Giant Stupid Dinosaurs, by Thomas M. Disch
by Bruce Jones
Thomas M. Disch, whose career started in Amazing and Fantastic, makes his first appearance here of the Sol Cohen era. The Invasion of the Giant Stupid Dinosaurs is a short jokey First Contact story involving a spaceship landing on the property of a small town church. It is archly told in a fussily stilted style possibly meant to remind the reader of The War of the Worlds (though Wells was generally not arch, stilted, or fussy). It’s well turned, as always with Disch, but trivial. Three stars, mostly for style.
John T. Sladek’s The Aggressor is also short, highly surreal, and seemingly an exercise in dream logic or a satire on the very idea of a story. Or maybe—since the main character (loosely speaking) is the head of a large computer corporation—it’s supposed to be the output of a defective computer, or perhaps a very advanced one that is unexpectedly beginning to achieve consciousness. Sometimes Sladek’s humor escapes me entirely, and this is one of them. This dog is too damn shaggy! Two stars; at least the guy can write.
Prelude to Reconstruction, by Durant Imboden
Durant Imboden is an assistant fiction editor at Playboy, says the blurb to his story Prelude to Reconstruction, with one prior SF magazine appearance. The story is a slightly rambling farce about a future authoritarian USA in which the work is all done by robots, who are supervised by the Ministry of Slaves. The robots have to be kept in line lest they get funny ideas about slaving for humans; so Cerebra-1, a giant computer, is devised to monitor their loyalty quotients and reorient those needing it.
by Bruce Jones
But now Cerebra-1 is getting balky, spitting out ancient political slogans, and things only get worse fast for humans (and the story ceases to be so farcical). Problem is Imboden hasn’t quite caught on to “show, don’t tell,” so most of the story is the author recounting events after the fact without dialogue or even on-stage characters for stretches of it. There’s also very little background on exactly what the robots’ and Cerebra-1’s capabilities and limits are, so the analogy to American human slavery (which becomes explicit at the end) falls flat, and there’s not much to be interested in conceptually. Two stars.
In the Time of Disposal of Infants, by David R. Bunch
David R. Bunch, an avowed editorial favorite, is here again with In the Time of Disposal of Infants, listed among the new stories, but in fact new only to professional publication. It first appeared in the fanzine Inside #13 (January 1956) along with five other Bunch stories. It is much more sedate stylistically than his later work, but outrageous enough in content. The title says it; the story is narrated by a garbage collector whose team finds a four-year-old among the refuse—surprisingly, since if they last that long, the parents usually keep them. Three stars.
The first of the acknowledged reprints is Mack Reynolds’s The Man in the Moon (from Amazing, July 1950) , a very early story (his eighth, appearing three months after the first). It amounts to a tutorial about early space flight, now thoroughly outmoded and a bit boring. Protagonist Jeff Stevens and two of his fellow trainee astronauts are bundled off to the Moon in separate ships; their voyage was preceded by some unsuccessful (i.e., fatal) tries, and by a number of unmanned ships carrying supplies and materials.
by Leo Summers
Only Stevens makes it, and he proceeds (despite a broken arm) to assemble several of the unmanned ships into a base. Human, as opposed to mechanical, interest is provided by the repeated reminders that Stevens is sensitive about being short, and by the fact that his sometime girlfriend left him for one of the other astronauts, who died on an earlier expedition. But it’s all right, because he finds that astronaut’s body where he expired in his spacesuit in the line of duty. “’Last Brenschluss, spaceman,’ he whispered.” Hackneyed, maudlin, two stars, generously.
Ask a Foolish Question, by Milton Lesser
Milton Lesser’s Ask a Foolish Question (Fantastic Adventures, June 1952) is a slickly rendered dystopian story. In this world, most people work long hours for low pay, living in barracks, in order to support the space colony Utopia, where, it is said, everybody lives a lot better. That’s OK, since the Earth dwellers regularly get the chance to take examinations to see if they can qualify to space out, and some win and depart.
by Tom Beechem
But Citizen Gregory Jones has been notified by the Department of Prognostication that he is to die in five days. After some plot maneuvers not worth recounting, he winds up killing a government employee, faking his own death a day early, and then impersonating the government man. But in that fake role, he is given the choice of dying when Jones would have died, or going to Utopia with the lucky exam-winners, since the government can’t allow anyone to stick around who knows that a prognostication didn’t occur on schedule. Of course, he chooses Utopia, and the next events show that Lesser has clearly taken note of The Marching Morons. And there's another twist before the end. Derivative but well turned; three stars.
In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s Death of a Spaceman (Amazing, March 1954), Old Donegal is a retired spacer bedridden and dying of cancer, though nobody but him acknowledges it, and he goes along with the pretense that he’ll be well before long. Going to space is a pretty rotten blue-collar job (it killed his son-in-law), his pension and his daughter’s widow’s benefits are lousy, but Donegal can’t let go of it—he wants to stay alive long enough to hear the evening rocket blasting off from the nearby spaceport, demanding that his space boots be put on for the occasion after the priest has come by to administer the last rites.
by Ernest Schroeder
It’s well written and clearly heartfelt (though thankfully less febrile than the other early Miller stories Amazing has reprinted (like Secret of the Death Dome and The Space Witch), but thoroughly maudlin and hard to take too seriously, especially by comparison with the much better stories Miller was already known for (e.g., Conditionally Human and Dark Benediction). Three stars.
Science of Man: Apeman, Superman —Or, 2001's Answer to the World's Riddle, by Leon E. Stover
Leon E. Stover’s “Science of Man” article this issue is Apeman, Superman—or, 2001’s Answer to the World’s Riddle, which eschews the usual anthropology for a long synopsis of the film, superfluously I suspect to most readers. Stover’s interpretation: humans spreading into space will be good (contra C.S. Lewis), we’ll leave all the bad stuff behind along with our bodies, sort of like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin explains: “the gathering force of mind that has come to envelope the surface of the planet Earth must eventuate in a projection into space as a purely spiritual component that will converge ultimately at the Omega point in one single entity, the very stuff of God. But once all the consciousness of the universe has accumulated and merged in the Omega point, God will get lonely in his completeness, and the process of creation must begin again by way of arousing conscious creatures to reach out once more for closure in one collective identity.” Ohhh-kay, whatever you say, chief. Next, Stover quotes Nietzsche, and adds: “Now that the theologians tell us that God is dead, it appears that the burden of theology is upon SF.” Three stars, it’s amusing and probably harmless, but Stover should probably get back to writing what he knows.
Summing Up
At Amazing, the beat goes ever ever on, ever more wearily, with some worthwhile material, but burdened by the weight of mostly lackluster reprints. The ambitious new editor is gone. The apparent new editor is well qualified, but will he be allowed to give the magazine the makeover it needs? Yet again, wait and see.
[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]
Although only bi-annual, rather than quarterly, at the moment, Carnell continues to regularly release his anthology series, easily eclipsing Pohl’s Star series and Knight’s Orbit. Will it be lucky #13?
New Writings in S-F 13
Carnell notes there is an international flavour to this volume, with four Brits, Two Aussies, One American and One Belgian. Has any English Language SF publication series managed to have a male Belgian author before a woman author of any nationality? I think it may be a first! (International SF had both in its second issue.)
The Divided House by John Rackham
Leaving in 1984 on a ten-year voyage to look for intelligent life, Space-Farer IV now returns (due to time compression) in 2104. They find an Earth divided by genetics between the ruling Croms and their slaves, the Nandys, and the crew are split into the different camps.
I recently saw Judgement at Nuremburg on the BBC and this brought to my mind a scene where a witness on the sterilization procedure says:
My Mother…She was a hardworking woman, and it is not fair what you say. Here. I want to show you. I have here her picture. I would like you to look at it. I would like you to judge. I want that you tell me, was she feeble-minded? My mother! Was she feeble-minded? Was she?
This story addresses the question of eugenics, how we can judge one type of person to be inferior to another and how easy it is for science to be perverted. Important ideas.
And yet, I am not 100% sure I understand the conclusion he is meant to be reaching, nor the way in which it is delivered. I suspect this may be a story Rackham is planning to expand to novel length.
Three Stars for now.
Public Service by Sydney J. Bounds
On a densely populated island city, the fire service are reduced to a policy of containment instead of stopping fires. The poor are crying out for change, but what else can Fire Control do?
Reading this, I wondered if it was inspired by Kowloon Walled City, where the lack of access roads make it impossible for fire vehicles to enter. As such, it felt believable even in its exaggerated fashion, and Bounds put it together with great style. Dark, atmospheric but an all too realistic vision of the future.
Four Stars
The Ferryman on the River by David Kyle
The tower platform is a common site from which people throw themselves to their death. Hector is a salvager who takes away those who jump and offers them a new life. But is he salvation or slaver?
This is very much a stylistic piece, so your opinions will likely depend on how you feel about a regular switch between long run-on sentences full of descriptions and short clipped statements, in other words, how I write. I like it.
Four Stars
Testament by Vincent King
The Exploration Corps travel to 3m2t670, the last unexplored planetary system in the galaxy. Their mission, to determine if any other world has ever evolved life. We hear the record of Officer Dahndehr as his apparent discovery of the remnants of an ancient civilization turns to disaster.
King has tended to specialize in Vancian Medieval Futurism, but he manages to do well here in more common SFnal settings. It is a touch old fashioned, like a combination between Clarke and Ashton Smith, but he adds a unique style to it and has a twist in the tail I did not expect. Well done all round.
Four Stars
The Macbeth Expiation by M. John Harrison
On an unexplored planet an expedition shoots a group of alien beasts. When they return to the site, however, there is no sign of the encounter. Did they fail to hit them? Were they hallucinating in the first place? Or is something stranger going on?
This is described as a psychological thriller, and I would say that is accurate. It is a fairly atmospheric example, which makes us question what is real, albeit an unexceptional one.
A high three stars, probably a fourth for those who really enjoy the subgenre.
Representative by David Rome
Catton is an insurance salesman who is annoyed by his young neighbours, The Brownings. They laugh off his sales attempts and are convinced they will never need it. However, upon discovering a near identical couple have moved in next to his friends, he suspects something stranger is happening.
This is another example of what I term “Exurban Uncanny”, which often turns up in New Writings, unnerving stories about the sterileness of new towns. This is a pretty good story of this type, if rather obvious.
Three Stars
The Beach by John Baxter
People live in the warm embrace of the beach. Swimming, partying and in full contentment. One day Jael suddenly notices that buildings exist beyond the beach and leaves to investigate.
I am not sure what to make of this. Is it meant to be a mockery of surf bums? A stylistic experiment? An exploration of how people cope with trauma?
Whatever it is, Baxter writes it well enough to earn Three Stars.
The City, Dying by Eddy C. Bertin
In breathless and experimental style, Bertin tells of Wade’s attempts to find meaning whilst living in a police state. But, in such a place, what is reality and what is nightmare?
Apparently, this was originally written for a Belgian literary contest, then translated into Dutch and further into English, revised by the author each time. However, you wouldn’t know it. It reads incredibly well and makes use of the kind of typographical experiments en vogue in New Worlds.
Yet, it doesn’t feel like it is doing anything particularly new; rather it is what might happen if Kafka had submitted a piece to Michael Moorcock.
A high three stars
Keep Calm and Carry On
So, overall, this was a pretty solid volume of his series. Nothing that would rise to an all time classic but nothing I did not find interesting to read. Will the series continue its success? Given the British John C. has been editing SF publications for just as long as his American counterpart, I don’t see either of them putting down their red pens any time soon.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Laughing to Keep From Crying?
The latest Ace Double (H-91) contains two short novels (probably novellas, really) with plots that seem comic, at first glance, but are treated mostly in a serious manner. Let's take a look at them.
Murphy's Law
The shorter of the two presents a situation in which anything that could go wrong does go wrong.
Target: Terra, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
Some folks are inside a space station carrying nuclear weapons to be used against the Enemy should war break out. Our hapless hero, Intelligence Officer Angelo DiStefano, has to deal with artificial gravity that changes from zero to three times Earth normal, and everything in between, at random. His magnetic boots wander around on their own. The food machine produces inedible stuff that looks like weirdly colored snakes.
Bad enough, but when he finds out that the station's weapons are aimed at every major city on Earth, Good Guys or Bad Guys, he's got real problems.
So far, the story seems like a black comedy farce. I was taken by surprise, therefore, when an expository chapter reveals that the majority of Asians died in a plague that didn't harm non-Asians. Not exactly funny. Anyway, that's got something to do with the surviving Asians getting ready to attack the others, which will cause the station's missiles to launch.
(I should mention that the station has run out of sex suppressant, so the only woman aboard has a paranoid fear of being raped. Sorry, I'm not laughing.)
Angelo tries to figure out who's trying to wipe out all life on Earth. Aliens? A mad saboteur? And what can be done to prevent total Armageddon?
There's a lot of quirky characters, from a "midget" electronics genius to a captain who never leaves the bridge. Besides the distasteful content I mentioned above, there's also another armed space station containing Africans. The implication that there's a sort of racial Cold War going on doesn't fit very well with the silly slapstick that starts the story.
Two stars.
Far Out Music
The other, slightly longer, half of the book features a musical group set on going where no one has ever rocked and rolled before.
The Proxima Project, by John Rackham
Cover art by John Schoenherr.
Horace McCool is a rich guy who is obsessed with the band's female singer. The members of the Trippers call themselves Jim, Jem, Johnny, and Yum-Yum. Nobody knows their real names, or anything else about them.
Horace wants to marry Yum-Yum, even though he's never even met her. When he manages to make his way backstage during a concert, she's not interested at all. (Her utter disdain may be best demonstrated by the fact that she casually strips nude in front of him in order to take a shower.) Unable to take a very firm No! for an answer, Howard gives her a gift that has a tracking unit hidden in it. With his loyal secretary, who has her own crush on one of the male members of the group, Horace follows Yum-Yum and the others to a mansion on the Moon, and then much further.
Sounds like a romantic comedy, doesn't it? And yet there's a serious tone to much of the story. The four members of the Trippers are super-geniuses who only started the band so they could raise enough money for their secret project. They're cynical about the rest of the human species, and just want to get away from Earth forever, even if it means a seemingly suicidal one-way voyage.
Horace's mad passion seems way out of character for an otherwise sensible fellow. The climax of the story strained credibility to the breaking point. I suppose the author might be saying something about the worship of celebrities and the Generation Gap, but it's not a profound work in any way.
Two stars.
A is for Anywhere
Next on my reading list is a book that takes its two protagonists on another wild journey, but not into outer space.
Dimension A, by L. P. Davies
The narrator is a teenage boy who gets a message from a buddy of the same age. It seems that the other fellow's uncle disappeared, along with his mysterious helper. Enlisting the aid of a scientist, for whom the narrator works, they try to figure out what happened.
Not much of a mystery, really, because we find out right away that the uncle was working on a way to reach a parallel reality known as (you guessed it) Dimension A. (Does that mean our own universe is Dimension B?)
What with one thing and another, the two kids accidentally land in Dimension A, and don't see a way back. They have to deal with hallucinations created by an unseen entity behind a green mist, as well as primitive humans who somehow manage to have ray guns. Can they find the missing uncle and make their way home?
The novel seems intended for younger readers, mostly because of the age of the two main characters. The language isn't overly simple, and adults of any age can read it without feeling they're being talked down to. The book doesn't try to be anything but an imaginative science fiction adventure story, and it succeeds at that modest goal.
Three stars.
New and Improved?
Two well-known writers recently published expanded versions of earlier works.
This is a revision of one half of an Ace Double from 1960. (D-421, to be exact. The other half was Dr. Futurity by Philip K. Dick.)
Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.
I haven't read it, so I can't compare it with the new version.
Cover art by Kelly Freas.
At some time in the far future, Earth is a place of wealth and leisure. Robots and androids (artificially grown humans, with blue skin to identify them) do the work, while other folks enjoy themselves.
(There's a brief mention of people who have lost their wealth through foolish behavior. They're known as the Dispossessed. Otherwise, poverty doesn't exist.)
During a time of wild celebration, the protagonist stumbles across an android who has been severely beaten and maimed. Another android, knowing his fellow slave can't survive, puts him out of his misery with an injection. The protagonist is horrified by what happened to the dead android, but it's just considered destruction of property instead of murder.
(Given the different skin color of the android and their legal position in society, an analogy with American slavery prior to the Civil War seems likely.)
Adding to the mystery is the discovery of a dead man nearby with a knife in his chest. A police detective comes by, but doesn't seem very interested in solving the case.
The surviving android, noticing that our hero is sympathetic, slips him an item taken from the dead man. It reveals that he was a very important person everywhere but Earth. This sends the protagonist on a journey to several different colonized planets, where he learns the dark secret behind the manufacturing of the androids. Along the way, people keep trying to kill him.
(There's a plot twist that made me want to call the book Blue Like Me, but that seemed too frivolous.)
Not in the same league as the author's groundbreaking masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar, but a competent science fiction novel.
The novella Hawksbill Station appeared in the August 1967 issue of Galaxy.
Cover art by Sol Dember.
The Noble Editor gave it a positive review when it first appeared. Will the novel be better, worse, or about the same?
Cover art by Pat Steir.
In the twenty-first century, the United States is under a totalitarian (but superficially benign) government. Capital punishment is banned, but political prisoners are sent back in time about one billion years. Since travel to the future is impossible, this is equivalent to a life sentence.
The protagonist is the de facto leader of the exiles. (All male, by the way; there's another prison colony for women millions of years apart from the men. The novel never visits the female prisoners, and that might make for an interesting sequel.) He's more or less sane, unlike many of the other guys. One is trying to make a woman out of mud. Another is trying to use ESP to escape. Yet another attempts to contact aliens.
The situation changes when a new prisoner arrives. He's younger than usual, for one thing. More telling is the fact that he claims to be a economist, but doesn't known a darn thing about economics. What is he doing here?
If you've read the novella, you know that's the same plot. What's been added is a series of flashbacks, showing how the main character became a revolutionary and how he was betrayed and imprisoned. (These sections also feature the novel's only female character. She doesn't show up too much, but her fate adds a certain poignancy.)
The flashbacks make the character and the world in which he lives seem more real, but they're not absolutely necessary. Whether you prefer the leaner novella or the richer novel is a matter of taste. There isn't a big difference in quality, if any.
Ted White has done it again…in more ways than one.
Some of you may remember Rosemary Benton's stellar review of Android Avenger, in which she gave five stars to the tale of Bob Tanner, a cyborg and revolutionary in a staid, computer-run future.
In the luridly (but appropriately) titled Spawn of the Death machine, Bob Tanner is back, and so is Ted White in fine form.
First, a little background, from the horse's mouth:
SPAWN was sold originally to Paperback Library, but was not my first submission to them (through my agent). The first book I submitted to them (in outline) was BY FURIES POSSESSED. They said they were looking for an Ace-Book-type book, so I figured, wothell archy, how about the sequel to an Ace Book? Which SPAWN is, being the sequel to ANDROID AVENGER (original title, changed by Don Wollheim, was THE DEATH MACHINE). That they bought.
The cover of the original edition of SPAWN was by Jeff Jones, who showed me the painting before I'd finished the book. The protagonist is holding a knife and defending the girl. So I wrote that into the book as a scene. But the art director decided to "improve" the cover and had the knife repainted (crudely) as a sword, and had shackles added to the girl, twisting her body in an anatomically absurd position. Pissed Jeff off no end, and me too.
Per Ted, Jeff is working on rewriting the rules of conduct for cover artists (keeping original paintings, selling only one-time repro rights). If successful, it will be a boon for all artists.
Anyway, as for the story…
Bob Tanner is wakened inside some sort of vault, naked, amnesiac. The robot brain inside exhorts him to explore the outside world, to spend a year amongst the humans, then report back with what he finds.
It turns out that civilization is long passed. He first arrives at the ruins of New York, the outskirts of which are inhabited by the most primitive of survivors, generations removed from the civilization Tanner only remembers in fragments. He is captured but escapes, taking with him the young Rifka, a captive member of the tribe.
Thus begins a series of adventures including a tangle with a bear, a run-in with a more advanced town with a mayor who doesn't let newcomers leave, a widespread constellation of farming communities at a 19th Century level of technology, and even a super-advanced enclave run by a group of individuals who were once the underdogs of society.
Through it all, Tanner becomes increasingly aware of his non-human nature—his metal bones, his ability to breathe fire, the hyperspeed he is capable of in brief spurts. And, at last, he discovers who he really is and decides what destiny he will forge for himself.
As is typical for Ted's books, I tore through this novel in short order. The man can't write a dull sentence even with a gun to his head. He takes the most cliché of settings and turns it into something fresh, certainly a damnsight better than Zelazny's recent stab at postapocalypse with Damnation Alley.
This may sound silly, but what I really liked about the book is that it's a romance. And not a "superman claims grateful damsel as prize" romance, but a believable progression of a relationship. Rifka is a well-realized character, one imbued with passion and an independent nature and set of priorities. It's not surprising that Ted draws her with such care—she is named after his wife, Robin Postal (Rifka means Robin in Yiddish). But, in general, the author is good with his female characters, surprising not just for the genre, but for the pulpy subgenre and venue.
I also really appreciate that one gets a pretty full picture of Bob Tanner even without having read the first book (in fact, I haven't, though it's on my shelf—it's really tough to find the time to read everything; even stuff you know is good). Honestly, the only real demerit to the book is its structure, really a series of vignettes. In that way, it is reminiscent of Omha Abides, C.C. MacApp's recent After-The-Apocalypse novel. Sure, White writes it better than most anyone else, but it still suffers from the disjointed, episodic nature of it.
Still, 4.5 stars, and I'm sure it'll make the Galactic Stars or at least get honorable mention this year.
I have a new favorite science fiction writer whose work I’m going to track. His name is Alexei Panshin and he’s had a terrific 1968.
Several months ago I reviewed Panshin’s novel Rite of Passage and found it intriguing, with great atmospherics, complex characters and a clever attitude which seemed to tell the story in multiple dimensions. Panshin told his story with a slightly ironic reserve to it, an approach which gave a detached commentary on the events, as if the narrator of the tale was someone looking back fondly at the events which shaped her.
That element is on display again in his newest novel, Star Well, but this time that ironic detached commentary reads like wry takes on the world readers are experiencing in the novel. For instance:
The apparently frightening and hopeless situation may turn out to have a candy-cream interior. That has been the main premise of the happy ending since the return of Ulysses.
Or he brings in a cute, clever meta-commentary about plot elements which gives the reader an aha! kind of feeling:
When managers of illicit traffic meet, their biggest plaint is the employment problem. In a word, henchmen. There are all too few young crooks willing to take training service under older and more accomplished men.
… a commentary which then goes into a detailed explanation of why it’s so dang hard to get good help these days, especially in a star base many light years away from anything important.
In short, these excerpts read like a bit of postmodern commentary on the space opera of Robert Heinlein. And since Panshin has written a monograph about Heinlein (Heinlein in Dimension, available through your local library, I’m sure), that reference has to be intentional.
Mr. Panshin's analysis of Heinlein
The lead character here is one Anthony Villiers, a kind of lazy trust fund baby who’s spending his life just wandering the Nashurite Empire, occasionally drifting when he has cash, occasionally grifting when he doesn’t have cash. He’s aristocratic and hates getting his hands dirty, but he also has a gentlemanly aspect about him which makes Villiers feel charming and kind.
Villiers finds himself at the Star Well, a space port/gambling hall/shopping stopover which has been drilled into an asteroid in an area of space in which “the stars don’t grow”; in other words, a simple stopover for travelers who need a warm bed and maybe a touch of the illicit while on their way to their final destination. As such, it’s a perfect place for illegal smuggling and inept, corrupt bureaucrats who are striving to improve their social position or at least their bank accounts.
A photo of Mr. Panshin from last year.
As you might guess, Villiers can’t help but get involved in the events at the Star Well, becoming quite the reluctant hero as he finds himself in conflict with Godwin, a man of low birth who yearns to be aristocratic, and Godwin’s boss Hisan Bashir Shirabi, a man with a massive inferiority complex who yearns to be like Villiers. Our protagonist also becomes unexpectedly close friends with the fifteen-year-old Louisa Parini, who traveled to Star Well en route to a stuffy finishing school but who craves adventure.
This is all so lightweight and enjoyable, and this whole charming souffle of a novel comes in at a mere 154 very quick pages – just like a Heinlein juvenile. And just like one of the juvies, there’s plenty of hints we’ll see more of Anthony Villiers in the future as he continues his peripatetic wanderings. I hope to spend many years following our besotted aristocrat as he wanders through the Nashurite Empire.
My fellow Galactic Journeyers have reviewed a couple of Janifer's books (Slave Planet and The Wonder War) and found them lacking. Let's see if this one is any better.
The time is the second half of the 21st century. There are references to a devastating plague that happened a long time ago, travel to the planets in the solar system, and the replacement of all nations and governments with a single, worldwide authority.
Never mind all that, because these science fiction themes have nothing at all to do with the story. The novel could easily be set in the very near future, because there is only one important speculative element.
Technology allows people to enter the minds of others. This is used to treat mental illness when all other methods fail.
(The premise is somewhat similar to that of John Brunner's novel The Whole Man. In that book, however, the technique was used by a natural telepath, and did not require machines.)
Two nurses and two physicians enter the mind of a man in a catatonic state. In his imaginary universe, he is God. He has created angels and light, but nothing else. The medical professionals arrive in the form of angels as well.
Their motive is to convince the patient, through argument with the other angels, not to create anything else. Why? Because they believe a fully realized world would prevent him from ever escaping his solipsistic existence.
The process has its dangers for those who use it. We're told it can even be fatal, although there is no real evidence for this. One of the characters will suffer the consequences.
This synopsis is a lot more linear than the plot. The author frequently shifts point of view among the characters. (I haven't even mentioned the patient's mother and girlfriend, who also have important parts to play.)
The book reminds me, in some ways, of D. G. Compton's novel Synthajoy. Both works are introspective and deal with devices that allow one to share another's experiences. Both have depth of characterization, but Janifer's isn't quite as profound as Compton's.
A Piece of Martin Cann also lacks vividness. The scenes of debate among the angels are difficult to picture. Overall, the book fails to provide much emotional involvement.
I admire the author's ambition, even if I question his execution. This is definitely not an ordinary escapist adventure story. It has a touch of New Wave to it. (Although Janifer is American, the novel seems very British to me.) I might describe it as an interesting failure.
Apart from a few minor tweaks, the original novella makes up the first third of the book, renamed Priests for their Learning. In order to avoid repetition, feel free to reread the original synopsis.
The second part Soldiers for their Valor follows the now exiled Eric as he heads into Monster territory, here he meets others, people from further back in the burrows. They do not have experience in fighting monsters as the front burrow people do but have more complex organization and are willing to experiment with alien science in order to try to gain an advantage over the monsters (a subject verboten among the men of the front burrows). However, they end up captured and brought to an experimental laboratory of the monsters. Eric manages to survive being vivisected but is put into the cage of a strange woman.
The third part, Counselors for their Wisdom, finishes the narrative. The woman is named Rachel and she is from the far back burrows where they have retained much more knowledge from man’s time before the arrival of the monsters. After spending much time learning such varied subjects as the nature of the current Earth (the burrow is merely one of many in this particular monster’s house), astronomy and metaphysics. After they fall in love they escape and devise a plan to solve humanity's problems.
After the strong start in the first part, I found it less interesting as it went along. Firstly, moving the majority of action from burrows to the cages in the lab removes a lot of the atmosphere that made the prior segments so effective. In addition, the unveiling of the world moves away from exploration to explanation. For example, rather than encountering the “Wild Men”, who primarily live outside the monsters houses in the open, we are merely told by Rachel that Eric resembles one. This approach leans things away from excitement and more towards tedium.
Secondly, Tenn makes a lot of the points in a clumsy manner. One example is having Eric regard Rachel like a piece of cattle, assessing her viability for mating and thereby showing his lack of understanding of love. Having multi-paragraph descriptions of his thoughts on her naked body feel less poignant and more voyeuristic. Another would be where “little brown men” are put into the cage with men from the burrows we know and they end up fighting over customs.
And then for all of that, it doesn’t end up feeling very profound or unique. I think I can understand the points Tenn is making but it doesn’t feel that different from Micromegas, Giant Killer, Gulliver’s Travels, The Twilight Zone: The Invaders, or a hundred other tales of perspective and size based conflict. On top of that, the ending just felt perfunctory to me and a little silly.
That is not to say there are not good pieces to it. I agree with the initial review that the first section is very strong, Tenn has a great turn of phrase and at points there is a real sense of adventure to it. But it doesn’t really add up to much.
I would give the whole thing three stars, but not anything more.
by Blue Cathey-Thiele
The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, by Lloyd Biggle
Based on Still, Small Voice, a short story Biggle published in Analog, 1961. The initial work was met with optimism, but left our reviewer disappointed. Let's see how the novel fares.
"Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny."
This is the Interplanetary Relations Bureau's code, and a bold statement to make. IPR, tasked with guiding planets to qualify for membership in the Federation of Independent Worlds, has been working for over 400 years to unseat a monarchy in Kurr. Forzon, a member of the Cultural Survey, is called to the planet and met with no orders and no democracy – surely there has been a mistake. Something suspicious is happening in the IPR headquarters. He is taught the wrong language, dressed as an enemy, and sent into an ambush. What saves him then will save him later: beauty. The people of Kurr surround themselves with art and even the most mundane items receive decoration.
Kurr has bread and, crucially, circuses. The system is flawed, but the "ugliness" is mainly unseen. The official punishment for any offense (real or imagined) is amputation of the left forearm, the victims sent to "One-hand Villages". Out of sight is out of mind with so much beauty to observe instead. Beauty and morality are often equated, and the book falls into sexism. Artisans pass their craft from father to son in a caste system, and while women play a rounded harp, that is the only note of their artistic endeavors. IPR had attempted to foment dissatisfaction among the women of Kurr, but was met by indifference and a denial that they lacked equal treatment. (I would have liked a better explanation for this, or any explanation at all.) Later, Forzon marries an IPR agent whose most noted trait is a memorable nose.
IPR must work within the existing culture, motivating the people to take action as democracy needs to occur without apparent outside influence. The "Rule of One" allows an exception. A single technological advancement may be introduced… but no one has done it before. It sounds simple. Flintlocks, for example! But those require metalworking, trigger mechanisms, gunpowder. Technologies build on what came before, and progress may look different depending on need. This brings up questions about whether civilizations are actually "more" or "less" advanced… or just different.
Forzon has a trumpet made and given to a newly handicapped harpist, who rejoices in the ability to create music again. Not limited by caste, the One-Hand Villages take up the instrument. Kurr is enchanted, having only known string instruments. The king is as well… until he realizes that the players are one-handed and he bans them as the sight weighs on his conscience. Denied beauty, the people rise up.
Did the rebellion depend on this king having a conscience? Did Forzon play things close to his chest or did he make it up as he went? It's left muddy. Even the IPR agents, despite living so long in Kurr were confused by the cause of the rebellion- which I found hard to believe. The concepts behind the book held up better than the execution. The short story only received 2 stars, so this is still an improvement.
Once, unicorns filled the forests. They frolicked and played and rested their heads in giggling virgins' laps, indifferent to the passage of time. Then one day they all disappeared, and only one remained. "I am the last," she said. "I must find what happened to the others."
She traveled far and long in a new world that could only see her as a white mare. She found companionship in a uselessly powerful magician and a harlot with a soft heart, who followed her on her travels. And at the end of their journey they came to face a wicked king and his brutal, frightful weapon, the Red Bull. A tale of tragedy and hope, the Unicorn reunites with her kind, but can never dream to be one with them ever again.
I can't help but feel that something is missing.
That was my first thought after finishing The Last Unicorn. I was ready to cast it aside as just another well-written fantasy novel, nothing more, but then friends and family, one after another, came to tell me how wonderful the book was. How fantastic. How excellent. I felt the mystification and perhaps jealousy that Schmendrick felt when he could not touch the Unicorn, but Molly could. Why couldn't I see how wonderful the book was? What was I missing?
I can agree that Peter S. Beagle's writing has a magical quality. The way that his words twist and conceal, describe and suggest, it caters to the human imagination – creating the sense of mystery that fairytales were born from in the first place. His characters, too, run counter to expectation and yet fall into their roles beautifully. Perhaps that is the difference for me. No matter how much Beagle allows his words and characters to push at their boundaries, they are still just words and characters to me. This book is just a story, and painfully, so are the unicorns within it. I think this is the difference between me and others. Others can believe in the magic, even if only for a little while. I simply cannot.
That said, I found the unicorns fascinatingly science-fictional, and thinking about them in an SFnal way made me appreciate the book more.
What are the unicorns? They never die from old age, but they can be killed. They see through disguises and can heal with the touch of their horn. Most importantly, though, they exist outside of time. Here is the passage that struck me most of this fact:
"Often then, between the rush of one breath and the reach of another, it came to her that Schmendrick and Molly were long dead, and King Haggard as well, and the Red Bull met and mastered – so long ago that the grandchildren of the stars that had seen it all happen were withering now, turning to coal – that she was still the only unicorn left in the world" (92).
What is unique about this paragraph is the way the Unicorn foresees the long distant future as if she were already existing there, but lacking the foresight of how her journey will truly end. It viscerally describes her experiencing her inevitable immortality, and yet she has this vision only midway through her journey, long before that time will come. Her human companions live and breathe beside her and yet also, paradoxically, are long dead ancestors in her mind. In a way, she is a fourth dimensional being, capable of seeing the present and elements of the future at the same time.
The Unicorn's ageless immortality and her ability to preserve her home forest in a perpetual spring also support the idea that unicorns are creatures with some dominion over time. The unicorns exist outside of time, adding somewhat to their wonder, and they have the ability to extend some of their immortality to the world and creatures around which they dwell. Perhaps their ability to heal is also a kind of time travel, in which they revert the afflicted body or mind to a time when it was healthy.
As inter-dimensional beings, it would also follow that unicorns would be able to tell false truth. When trapped in Mommy Fortuna's midnight carnival, the Unicorn is not deceived by the overlays the witch puts on her poor display animals. She sees in multiple dimensions their true forms and their disguises, and it is only the soaking of time that make it more difficult for the Unicorn to tell the difference
I think this leads to one of the key themes of the novel: that time affects all things and over time we as living (and eventually dying) creatures affect our world back. The mortals (such as King Haggard) bend the world around them until the earth itself is transformed and bearing their legacy. Meanwhile, the unicorns cannot change, and thus their surroundings do not change either. Their forests remain green and un-hunted, but also never grow beyond their boundaries. The Red Bull, too, is an immortal constant, but it is constrained to always require a master, never ruling its own domain or leaving a visible impact.
So it is only the humans and other mortal creatures that, while constrained by time, also reside within it. They can saturate time with meaning, and that meaning can then permeate the ground, seeping into the three lower dimensions. The unicorns exist statically, outside of time, barred from ever feeling its touch or touching it. They get eternal beauty and life, but they do not love. I do not know which existence is superior, but at least looking at it through this SF lens, I feel that I understand the unicorns and their book a little better. The unicorns are the opposite of the human experience, and by extension I think that makes us aware of what the human experience is. Schmendrick and Molly and even King Haggard are all foils to the unicorn to exaggerate how alien she is. This then reflects back how human her companions are, and how human we the readers are. The last unicorn is a fairytale, but it contains truths so vivid and tied to reality, it seems to exist outside of itself. Therein lies the true magic. Through only the power of words, Beagle creates life.
![[May 10, 1969] Youth (June 1969 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/COVERSMALL.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[April 10, 1969] Low (May 1969 <i>Amazing</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/amz-0569-cover.png?resize=490%2C372&ssl=1)
![[February 18, 1969] (February Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690218covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Art by Paul Lehr
![[February 8, 1969] So Much for That (March 1969 <i>Amazing</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/amz-0369-cover.png?resize=492%2C372&ssl=1)
![[October 12, 1968] (October 1968 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681012covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[June 14, 1968] Men, Women, and Monsters (June 1968 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/680614covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
