Less than two months ago, the Soviets sent Zond 5 on a trip around the Moon in a precursor to a manned flight. And on November 18, Zond 6 repeated the feat with, apparently, even more success. There was some suggestion that Zond 5's reentry and descent was fraught with issues. No such trouble (reported) on Zond 6.
A photo of the Earth from the vicinity of the Moon returned by Zond 6.
The USSR now says (or say, if you're British) that they might well have a manned flight to lunar orbit by early December. This is even as NASA prepares to send Apollo 8 on a circumlunar course on December 21. Yes, it sure seems like the breakneck Space Race is on again. May it claim no more lives in the process.
In the far future, Earth's one-world government has collapsed, leaving a plethora of princely states to war with indifferent ferocity. Further out, the settled asteroids, turned into giant space ships, placidly orbit the Sun, maintaining civilized culture as well as they can. And beyond lie the alien-settled "out planets".
After an unprofitable eight-year cruise, Jake Hiskey, commander of the Prideful Sue, has a jackpot plan. He is smuggling in a ship of Rilfs—humanoids with a deadly, natural weapon that kills all animals within a twenty-mile radiius—to serve as mercenaries on Earth. But to get them to Terra, he must first stage on an asteroid. The obvious choice is the one that the sister of Harold, the Sue's navigator, calls home.
The catch: the Rilf who goes by the name McNulty insists that no one know that the Rilfs are on the asteroid. That means all potential witnesses must be eliminated. This includes all of the asteroid's residents and, by extension, Harold, since he is afflicted with a conscience.
Well, Harold is no fool, and he susses out the plan just at its moment of murderous implementation. Can one unarmed man thwart his captain's evil scheme before the asteroid's population is slaughtered? And are the people on the giant rock as effete and defenseless as they seem?
by Kelly Freas
This is a riproaring piece, filled with well-executed action and interesting concepts. If anything, it's a bit too short, reading like two sections of a more fleshed-out novel. The concepts revealed at the end, when we learn the true purpose of the asteroid, are explained too quickly, and in retrospect.
I have to wonder if Schmitz needed to sell this before it was quite ready; I hope an expanded version makes its way to, say, an Ace Double.
Four stars.
A Learning Experience, by Theodore Litwell
by Leo Summers
A fellow signs up for a correspondence course and gets a Type III tutor robot trained at the Treblinka Institute for the sadistically inclined. While the mechanical's browbeatings do get the student to buckle down, he ultimately decides he will get more satisfaction from tearing the robot bolt from bolt.
Just as he is expected to…
Do you have a child who has trouble focusing? This may be just what the tyke needs. Just be ready to sweep the floor afterwards.
Three stars.
The Form Master, by Jack Wodhams
by Kelly Freas
The more complicated a bureaucracy, the better chance someone will find a way to take advantage of it. But he who lives by the forged form may ultimately die by the forged form.
At first, I thought this piece was going to be a celebration of the "rugged individualist" who comes up with a clever justification for stealing from his neighbors. It's not, but it's still kind of tedious.
Two stars.
The Reluctant Ambassadors, by Stanley Schmidt
by Kelly Freas
Humanity's first colony is on a marginal planet of Alpha Centauri. It has been failing for decades. Only one of the two sublight colony ships made it, and there just aren't enough people to make a go of things, especially since the planet's weird orbit takes it between the two bright stars of the trinary, resulting in massive swings of temperatures over the decades.
When FTL drive is invented, a follow-up ship is dispatched from Earth to check on the settlement. On the way, its crew note that hyperspace, which is supposed to be empty, appears to have inhabitants…or at least something is emitting a mysterious glow off the port bow. Once at Centauri, apart from the much bedraggled but doughty Terrans, the relief crew also find evidence of alien visitation, which apparently has been going on since the start of the colony. The colonists had been reluctant to investigate the aliens too deeply as the extraterrestrials had done their best not to be seen. Thus, the first faster-than-light reconnaissance turns into a kind of ambassadorial mission as the captain of the relief vessel heads off in search of the aliens not only to learn their secrets (and the reason for their secrecy) but also to find clues as to the disappearance of the other colony ship.
This is solid, SFnal entertainment, if a little dry and drawn out, and with aliens who are much too humanoid for anything but Star Trek. I like the setting, though.
Three stars.
Situation of Some Gravity, by Joseph F. Goodavage
Analog had been doing so well with its nonfiction articles of late that the appearance of this one is highly disappointing. It's a screed about how the magnetohydrodynamics of the planets affects physical phenomena and people as much as, if not more than, gravity, and that's why astrology works.
I think that's what Goodavage is trying to say. It's certainly what editor Campbell says (in a two-page preface) what Goodavage is trying to say. I found the thing incomprehensible and unreadable, not to mention offensive.
One star.
Pipeline, by Joe Poyer
by Leo Summers
The year is 1985, and the Earth is entering the next Ice Age. Its most immediate impact is a subtle shift in weather patterns, plunging America's industrial northeast into drought. Luckily, engineering has a solution: a great Canadian aqueduct to ship water from the frozen North to the thirsty Eastern Seaboard.
But there are folks not too happy about the project, and just before the pipeline's inaugural activation, saboteurs break the conduit, threatening forty miles of tubing. It is up to a small band of engineers to fix the breach and stop the terrorists before it's too late.
Poyer has written a competent "edge-of-tomorrow" thriller. We never find out just who was behind the sabotage. Strongly implicated is some combination of Japanese businessmen and right-wing Birch-alikes (my suspicions went with some left-wing group like a militant Sierra Club). Anyway, I think this is the first time I've seen Japan as the bogeyman in an SF story. It's a novel twist, and given how much is Made in Japan these days, perhaps a valid prognostication.
Three stars.
Once again with the computers
Here we are at the end of the year for magazines, and it's been a rather middle-of-the-road month. Analog finishes at a mediocre 2.7 star rating, beating out Orbit 4 (2.7), Fantastic (2.6), and IF (2.6)
Women wrote about 9% of the new fiction published this month, and you could fit all the 4/5 star stories in two magazines out of the seven publications (including one anthology). Really, that sums up the state of magazine SF in general—some excellent stuff, a lot of mediocrity, and attention now focused on television and novels.
That said, it's still clear that magazines contribute a lot to the genre, particularly in the area of short fiction. Certainly Michael Moorcock thinks so, as he is composing a book a week just to keep New Worlds afloat with his own money! That he manages to turn out pretty good stuff in a single tea-fueled draft is a feat that makes him the British Silverbob…with fewer descriptions of underaged bosoms.
So, bid a fond adieu to 1968, at least in cover dates, and let's see what 1969 has in store!
William Shatner waves to the crowd at the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade in New York…but he might also be saying goodbye to 1968
Some degree of normality this month. Yes, I actually got a copy of the new New Worlds (and if you’ve been following the drama of the last few issues, you’ll know that the regular arrival of an issue is no longer a given.)
But is it any good?
I thought that the last issue in November was a bit of an improvement, but as we’ve said before, that is no guarantee of the next issue being good – or even there being a next issue at all.
Nevertheless, I was hoping that this issue would at least match the previous.
Cover by Gabi Nasemann
Well, we can’t accuse editor Mike Moorcock and his team of resting on their laurels. The cover shows a new development straight away. We have what is rather expected – the generically meaningless picture of a young woman in strangely coloured tones – but then along the right-hand side we have the start of Brian Aldiss’ story …And the Stagnation of the Heart. I guess that this is an attempt to make you read more within.
Lead In by The Publishers
More about the contributors this month. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that Bill Butler, poet and proprietor of The Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, has recently been arrested on obscenity laws.
Other than that, the usual descriptions of the authors and their work to date.
Ah, the return of Brian Aldiss, with a story that (thank goodness) isn’t a Charteris story, that ongoing series of stories set in the Acid House Wars, but instead a continuation of an idea that Aldiss first began back in the March 1966 issue of Impulse (Remember that?) with The Circulation of the Blood. There Aldiss told of Clement Yale, a scientist who was involved in developing an immortality drug, which, unless there were accidents or murder, could extend human life to the point of near-immortality – for a price. The main consequences then as a result were that those who could afford the drug (mainly in Europe and North America) were developing a new social order. In "…And the Stagnation of the Heart" Yale and his wife go to India, where they see the other side of the coin.
In India and Pakistan, the immortality drug is banned, with appalling consequences. Yale discovers that Calcutta is a city overrun with people and has famine as a result. Yale basically sees the other side of the coin – what could happen in the world with uncontrolled population growth?
Brian does well to describe both the beauty and the squalor of a Third World country and examines what can happen if places are denied immortality. It also poses the question of whether it would be right for these people to have access to a drug which would make them near-immortal.
I’m not sure what the importance of shooting goats in the story means, other than to perhaps emphasise the difference in lifestyles between India and more developed countries.
Nevertheless, a thought-provoking story, tempered only by the fact that it feels incomplete. 4 out of 5.
The Apocalypse Machine by Leo Zorin
Zorin’s story is a satirical monologue, a speech detailing a new apocalypse machine to its prospective customers. In an understated way, this involves setting off a nuclear device in London’s Hyde Park and initiating earthquakes in various parts of the city. All die in the end. Interesting idea that is firmly anti-nuclear/anti-war, written in a satirical manner. 3 out of 5.
Article: Warhol Portraits, Still Lifes, Events by Andrew Lugg
A summary of the work to date of film-maker and artist, Andy Warhol. Fascinating – an article that had me applauding one minute and shaking my head in disbelief the next. Can’t say that Warhol’s a dull character, though. 4 out of 5.
The welcome return of Mike Moorcock’s Avengers-like super-agent Jerry Cornelius! Jerry goes to India (see also Aldiss’s story set in India – coincidence?) to assassinate someone with the help of Mata-Hari-like Sabitha. The attempt fails and so different time streams dominate.
This is one where different time streams seem to be tangled—somewhere (or rather somewhen, perhaps) Cornelius has a child, others not. As a result, this one is less fun than previous stories as Jerry shows a much more melancholic side to his persona here.
Generally though, The Delhi Division is still deliberately provocative and occasionally scurrilous. I’m interested by the point that, as this month’s Lead In says, there will be more Jerry Cornelius but written by other people next month. I wonder where they will go. 4 out of 5.
The Colours by Thomas M. Disch
Or as you Americans will say, “The Colors”. This is a piece about the effect on Raymond and the people around him by a machine that shows colours to create moods. Really, it’s about the effect of drugs on a listless society, although this may be a metaphor for TV. It may feel relevant to the drug-taking young people of society today, but to me it seems filled with meaning and yet meaning little. I’m not really sure what it is trying to say, although that may be the point. 3 out of 5.
The New Agent by Joel Zoss
We have mentioned in the past of New Worlds' determination to shock, and this is one of those stories.
It is about Nickolas Dugonie, a nurse who has a relationship with a paralysed patient, Phyllis Wexler. Nickolas’s obsession with the immobile patient leads to them having sex and Phyllis becoming pregnant, although this also seems to lead to a reawakening of Phyllis, something she keeps secret from all except Dugonie. Deeply unpleasant, and yet memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. You want a shockingly nasty story? You got one. This one is more deserving of the outrage Bug Jack Barron got, in my opinion. 2 out of 5.
Peace Talking by Bill Butler
Ah, poetry, this time of an anti-war nature. Move along, please. As with most of these attempts to raise my cultural experience, I try but find them short and unmemorable. 2 out of 5.
This may be the big seller of the issue, as Samuel is one of the big internationally recognised Science Fiction writers of the New Wave. It doesn’t disappoint. A real highlight in its complexity, style and sheer energy.
It is a story told in the first person by a individual with various aliases but generally with the initials HCE, a criminal who is attempting to sell some stolen goods in a New York bar. Before the delivery takes place, his buyer is found dead. HCE discovers that he is being followed by Special Services, who then disappears. HCE meets up with Hawk, a Singer (who to me sounded a little like a new version of Heinlein’s Rhysling from The Green Hills of Earth.) Hawk manages to get HCE into a grand mobster’s party in order for HCE to sell his stuff. There HCE sells his stuff to Arty the Hawk (whose similarity in name is a little confusing), a big-time gangster, but just afterwards the party is raided and there is a fire.
Picture by James Cawthorn
Using his new-found money, HCE makes a name for himself. He sets up an ice cream parlour on Triton, a moon of Neptune, to cover his other activities and becomes a rival to Arty the Hawk. The story ends with the Hawk and HCE meeting and agreeing to work together rather than kill each other. Afterwards HCE is left contemplating this new situation.
This story shows how much of a breath of fresh air Delany is to the science fiction genre, being both classic in content and “cutting-edge” at the same time. At its most basic level, it is a crime story set across different planets, but it is more than that. It made me think of it as something Heinlein would write if he was a New Wave writer and not the writer of Stranger in a Strange Land, taking old science-fictional elements and making them seem new. Lyrical but not baroque, Delany creates visual imagery without lengthy verbiage. I read the story more than once and found more details I had missed the first time around. Potentially Award-nomination stuff. 5 out of 5.
Book Review – Two Kinds of Opium
It may not be too much of a surprise to see the new New Worlds focus on non-genre books in its reviews of late. With that in mind, this month has a mixture of genre and non-genre publications. First off, “W.E.B.” (possibly ‘William Ewart Barclay’, a pseudonym for Mike Moorcock) reviews books that are about China (China Observed by Colin Mackeras and Neale Hunter, The Oriental World by Jeannine Auboyer and Roger Goepper and Peter Swann’s The Art of China, Korea and Japan ) as well as John Selby’s The Paper Dragon about the Opium Wars of the 19th century.
M. John Harrison in his new role as book reviewer deals with what we would see as more traditional science fictional fare , under his own name and as the pseudonym Joyce Churchill- The Final Programme by a certain Mike Moorcock, Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch, Jesus Christs by A. J. Langguth, Black Easter by James Blish, Nova by Samuel R. Delany (heard of him?) Picnic on Paradise by fellow New Wave writer Joanna Russ, The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle and The Reproductive System by John Sladek. With new hands to the wheel, it is good to see more science fiction reviewed, even if you may disagree with the reviews, as I often did.
There are then some Biology books reviewed by Caroline Smith and a very brief mention of some books reviewed by W.E.B. again, which range from a book on The Death of Hitler to The Making of Star Trek. Eclectic, eh?
Summing Up
With a new front cover style, this issue of New Worlds seems to have a new energy this month. As ever, the stories are eclectic and wide-ranging, from those I liked (Delany, Aldiss, Moorcock) to the pointless (Disch, Zorin) to the one I hated (Zoss) which seemed to just want to shock.
A better-than-typical New Worlds issue then, although recently they have not been bad, in my opinion. The Delany is really a potential award-winner, I think, and alone makes the issue worth buying.
(And where would New Worlds be without a provocative photo or a mention of J. G. Ballard? This is an advertisement on the back cover.)
A school for young wizards: What could possibly go wrong!
I wanted to like last year's City of Illusions, but the book fell flat. However, I saw the potential in Ursula K. Le Guin as a writer. Her ideas in the book were good, it was the execution that was lacking, so with her latest book out, A Wizard of Earthsea,I figured I’d give her another try.
Ged is an ambitious young wizard with a hunger for knowledge and power. The book follows his journey from childhood into adulthood, first starting when he attends a school for wizards. There he learns the basics of magic, makes friends and a rival. He also unleashes a dark being that wants him dead, but thanks to magic protection around the school, he is safe for the time being.
It isn’t until Ged graduates and becomes a practicing wizard for various villages that he really learns the hard lessons of magic. Now outside the protection of school, he is pursued by the dark being, eventually forced to turn and fight it, putting his skills to the ultimate test.
Fantasy as a genre doesn’t excite me as an adult, as it is often too whimsical and too escapist, too detached from our own world. A Wizard of Earthsea managed a careful balance, with an attention to the laws of magic and how it is able to be used. Wizards can only use so much magic at a time, and overexerting oneself or attempting a spell higher than one’s skill has physical consequences, causing wounds to appear on the body. Throughout the book, we see Ged test these limits, only to end up in lengthy recovery each time. Eventually, he does go too far and ends up permanently scarring himself.
I liked the concept of true names: learning the true name of a creature, plant, object or place is the key to all spells in this world. Even people have true names that they keep secret, instead using an alias in day to day life. While Ged is the main character’s true name, and the narrative refers to him as such, in dialogue he is called “Sparrowhawk” by other characters. I loved the intimate moments of friendship when true names were exchanged, showing a great amount of trust between characters.
Ged makes a compelling main character, with his distinctive flaw being his own hubris. Time and again, he tries magic that is way above his level only to be hurt. He attempts to raise the dead, despite knowing that it can’t be done, and suffers the consequences. It's because of his hubris that a dark creature is brought into the world who specifically hunts him, creating the main conflict of the book. But we’re shown that he has other values. He isn’t greedy. When he fights the dragon, his only motivation is duty to the town he serves. When the dragon offers him some of his treasure as a reward, he declines. Most of the time when Ged overexerts his magic, it isn’t in pursuit of fame. Ged truly wants to help people, even when it’s past his capabilities.
You know it's a good book when there's a map
With this book, I finally saw what I knew Le Guin was capable of as a writer. She's always created compelling unique worlds readers want to immerse themselves in, but now her writing can back up her ideas. Maybe because this is her first foray into juvenile fiction or perhaps she is simply growing as a writer.
I look forward to what she writes next.
Four stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Tomorrow and Yesterday
The latest Ace Double (H-95, two quarters and a dime at your local drug store paperback rack) contains one novel looking forward in time, and one collection glancing backwards at the author's recent career.
We begin with a brilliant mathematician from California sneaking around through a remote area of Wisconsin, ready to kill a man. We cut away from this scene to find a government agent from Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, preparing to assassinate the richest man in the world.
Why all this homicidal intent?
Flashbacks tell us what's going on. John Androki is a fellow who shows up out of nowhere. He convinces a rich guy that he can predict exactly how stocks will move up or down in the future. The millionaire sets him up with some cash in exchange for the information. Androki goes on to not only be the wealthiest person on Earth (yep, he's the intended target of the government assassin) but to wield immense political power all over the world.
Our protagonist is Bertram Kane, a brilliant mathematician (yep, he's the guy stalking a man in Wisconsin) who is working on a theory of multiple dimensions. He's a widower who's having an on-again off-again affair with Anita Weber, an art professor. His buddy is Gordon Maxon, a professor of psychology.
Maxon is convinced that Androki can perceive the future (hence the novel's title.) He calls him a downthrough, a word that's new to me. Kane isn't convinced, but when Weber dumps him for the incredibly rich and powerful Androki, he becomes suspicious.
Things get scarier when other mathematicians working on multiple dimensions are murdered. Coincidence, or is Androki arranging for their deaths? And is Kane next on the list?
You may figure out the main plot gimmick, which explains why Kane is out to kill a completely innocent man. (The government assassin's motive is less mysterious. Androki is changing America's relations with other nations in ways the United States government doesn't like.)
Basically a suspense novel with a science fiction gimmick, the plot creates a fair amount of tension, although parts of it are talky. There are quite a few murders along the way, and a pretty grim ending.
Three stars.
So Bright the Vision, by Clifford Simak
Cover art by Gray Morrow.
Four stories, dating from 1956 to 1960, by a noted author appear in this volume.
First printed in the June 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, this lighthearted yarn starts with a huge agate appearing in a guy's yard, along with the tiny critters mentioned in the title. Chaos ensues.
The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review when it first appeared, and that's fair. It's a pleasant enough bit of gentle comedy, but hardly profound.
The April 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction is the source of this oddly titled (and odd) story.
An elderly fellow collects stamps from alien worlds, piling them up in his rat's nest of a home. Some of the stamps are actually made up of living microorganisms. When mixed with broth made by an overly friendly neighbor, they jump into action and start organizing the guy's messy collection.
There's a strong resemblance to the previous story, which also had tiny creatures helping folks at first, but going a little too far. This one is a lot stranger than the other one, and a little more complex. (I haven't mentioned the role played by stuff that the old man receives from an alien pen pal, or what the weird title means.) Interesting for its eccentricity, if nothing else.
The August 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe supplies the story that gives the collection its title.
At a future time when Earth is in contact with several alien worlds, the only thing of value humans can supply is fiction. Other beings don't make up things that aren't true, and they're fascinated by the concept.
The fiction is created via programmed machines, with a little human input. Writing by hand (or pencil, pen, or typewriter) is considered old-fashioned, and even vulgar.
The plot follows the misadventures of a so-called writer who has fallen on hard times. His machine is on its last legs, and he can't afford a new one. A fellow writer's secret leads to a sudden decision.
Much of the story consists of discussions of the importance of fiction. The automated fiction machines seem intended as a dark satire of uninspired hackwork. It's clearly a heartfelt work, and the author manages to convey his passion.
This yarn comes from the pages of the September 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
A newspaper reporter investigates some odd events. There's the sudden, seemingly merciful death of someone suffering from a terminal illness. A scientist's papers are rearranged, giving him the clue he needs to complete his work. The reporter suggests, in a joking article, that these and other happenings might be the work of brownies. He's not too far off the mark.
Once again we have small beings helping humans. This time their efforts are entirely benign, unlike the golden bugs (who ignored people completely, and only worked for their own goals) and the microorganisms from the alien stamp (who went a little too far in their effort to organize things.) This is a sweet, simple little story, benefiting from the author's own experience as a newspaperman.
Three stars.
The title story is definitely the highlight of the collection. As a whole, that bumps the book up to three and one-half stars.
There's no question that Star Trek is a bona fide phenomenon. Now in its third season (and so far, quite a good season it is), it is a universe that has launched several dozen fan clubs, most with their own 'zines, many with Trek-fiction included. Professional tie-in merchandise is booming, too, from the AMT model kits of the ships in the show, to Stephen Whitfield's indispensable The Making of Star Trek, to Gold Key's dispensable comic book.
The latest release is the very first (that I'm aware of) professional original Trek story, Mission to Horatius by none other than SF veteran Mack Reynolds. That a familiar name should be tapped to write Trek tales is not a surprise. Episodes of the show have been written by SFnal talents Norman Spinrad, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby; and James Blish has written two collections of episode novelizations (well, noveletizations).
So how does Reynolds' effort rate? First, let's look at the story:
The Enterprise has been out on patrol so long that ship's stores are low and the crew is beginning to suffer from "cafard". This malady is a kind of isolation sickness that can lead to mass insanity. Before the ship can return to starbase, however, it receives a distress call from the Horatius system just beyond the Federation.
There are three Class M planets in the system, all inhabited by pioneers who don't want to be Federated. They are the primitive society of Neolithia, which operates in bands and clans; the theological autocracy of Mythria, controlled by a happy drug called "Anodyne" (a la "Return of the Archons"); and the Prussian military state of Bavarya. This world is the most dangerous, as they have designs on conquering the Federation, and they are building an army of clones ("Dopplegangers") toward that end.
Uncertain as to from which planet the distress signal originated, Kirk leads a landing party composed of his senior officers to each planet in turn. Meanwhile, the strings on Uhura's guitar break one by one, and Sulu's pet rat gets loose. Cafard causes 40 crew members to be put in stasis. It's not a happy trip. But in the end, it's a successful one when Kirk finds the that Anna, the daughter of "Nummer Ein" on Bavarya, summoned the Enterprise to thwart her father's nefarious scheme,
Well. There's quite a lot wrong with this book. Reynolds makes serving on the Enterprise feel like the worst duty in the galaxy. Maybe this is realistic, but from what we've seen, the crew isn't this unhappy. As for "cafard", if our nuclear submarine crews don't suffer from such issues, I can't imagine a crack Starfleet crew would.
Reynolds' characterizations are only cursorily accurate. Indeed, Mission feels more like a lesser story in his Analog-published United Planets series of stories, featuring a decentralized set of worlds with every kind of government imaginable. There's an undertone of smugness as Kirk destroys one society after another—first by beaming down an anodyne-antidote into the Mythran water supply (if Scotty can manufacture ten pounds of the stuff in ten minutes, why can't he synthesize new strings for Uhura?), and then by destroying all five million dopplegangers on Bavarya…who may well have been sentient beings.
And finally, McCoy staves off cafard by making the crew believe that Sulu's rat has Bubonic Plague, and that it must be killed to save the ship. The rat does not have a happy ending.
Most eyeroll inducing passage: "Anna, womanlike, had been inspecting Janice Rand's neat uniform. Now she responded to the bows of the men from the Enterprise. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, blond, and, save for a slight plumpness, attractive."
(emphasis added)
Even accepting that the target audience is on the younger side (given that the publisher is Whitman), this does not really excuse all the problems with Mission to Horatius. Moreover, the stirring introduction seems to have been written for an entirely different story!
There are pictures by Sparky Moore. They are adequate, but the characters don't look too much like our heroes.
Two stars.
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
In the run up to Christmas, I received a special treat through my letterbox: a second Orbit anthology for 1968. Will it do better than #3?
Orbit 4
Cover by Paul Lehr
Windsong by Kate Wilhelm
Starting with the series’ most regular contributor, Wilhelm’s story concerns Dan Thornton, an overworked executive. He is trying to solve the problem of an armored computer that should be able to act as a policeman. However, it cannot cope with the stress of unexpected situations. To get solutions he has been working with the psychologist Dr. Feldman to see if his dreams yield any ideas but, instead, he keeps dreaming about Paula. She was a free-spirited “windsong” from his teenage years, a person who could instantly analyse patterns to understand the world in ways others could not.
I have been noticing a pattern emerging with Wilhelm’s writing. She wants to experiment with form and content but rarely manages to deliver a strong balance between the two. In this case it is the style that works well, using the dream sessions in a way that would please the New Wave, but the actual plot leaves something to be desired, not really travelling anywhere fast and engaging in some obvious cliches.
Evens out at Three Stars
Probable Cause by Charles L. Harness
Harness recently returned from his parental leave and is back to writing, getting an even warmer reception this time around. Using his legal background, he brings us the discussion of a supreme court case, one where the constitutionality of a conviction depends on an interesting question. If a search warrant is granted based on a psychic reading, does this violate the fourth and\or fifth amendments?
Whilst some of the arguments here do not make much sense to me, I am neither a lawyer nor an American. As such, I am happy to bow to Harness’ knowledge of constitutional jurisprudence. What I question is the length of it all. At over 60 pages, this is the second longest story to yet grace the pages of Orbit. But it is just some justices sitting in a room discussing a piece of legal theory. This might be worth a vignette, but I needed more to justify a novella.
Two Stars
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison
Rudy has finally gotten out of the army on medical, only to find his fiancée Kris in a marijuana-drenched squat in downtown LA. Is he just not “with it” anymore? Or is something more sinister going on?
If this was from an older writer, I would assume it was a crass attempt to be relevant. With Ellison I am willing to assume he is in earnest in writing a hippy horror story. It is not entirely clear if what we see really happened or if it just a massive drug trip, but that actually makes it work better for me.
Four Stars
This Corruptible by Jacob Transue
This is an author of which no information is given, nor one I've heard of before. Is it perhaps a pseudonym?
Thirty-five years ago, scientists Paul and Andrew departed on bad terms. Whilst the former went into seclusion, the latter became vastly wealthy. Andrew now seeks out Paul after learning of his new discovery, the ability to renew a person’s life.
This reads like a middling story from 15 years ago. Whilst some horrifying imagery raises it up, it is pulled back down by lechery.
Two Stars
Animalby Carol Emshwiller
A strange animal is kept in the city by its keepers. What could it be?
This is a stylistic piece that will depend on your tolerance for this kind of prose:
It was said, on the second day, that he did not look too unhappy. A keeper of particular sensitivity brought him both a grilled cheese sandwich and a hamburger so it might be seen what his preferences were, but still he ate nothing.
This reader was unhappy, feeling nothing.
One Star
One at a Time by R. A. Lafferty
In Barnaby’s Barn, McSkee tells tall tales. But what if they are true?
I feel about Lafferty’s writing the way Superman does about Kryptonite. As such, I struggle with him at the best of times. This one I found it impossible to read. I don’t like bar-room frames or tall tales, I was confused by the style and was generally perplexed throughout.
A subjective One Star
Passengers by Robert Silverberg
In an interesting take on the Puppet Masters concept, Earth has encountered strange creatures called passengers. They can “ride” anyone, at any time, with no way to detect or stop them. Once a Passenger leaves a person, the memory goes. Our narrator wakes up to find he slept with a woman whilst he was ridden. However, upon exercising in Central Park he believes he has found her, even though she doesn’t remember him.
Anyone who has read Silverberg of late knows of his strange recurring writings about young women, so I will not belabour the point here. Your rating will probably result from how you balance the concept against this tendency. I come down in the middle.
Three Stars
Grimm's Story by Vernor Vinge
The planet Tu is a world that contains almost no metals. Whilst some technologies, such as pharmaceuticals, hydrofoils and optics, have been able to develop, others, such as heavier than air flight, have not.
It is on this world that Astronomy student Svir Hedrigs is approached by Tatja Grimm, the science editor of Fantasie magazine. She has a dangerous mission for Hedrigs, to stop the destruction of the last complete collection of Fantasie.
In less skilled hands this could easily have been contrived and fannish. Instead, Vinge spins a fascinating intricate plot and fully imagined world, touching on a number of interesting themes with complicated characters. It stumbles a little at the very end, stopping it from gaining a full five stars, but still very good.
A high four stars
A Few Last Words by James Sallis
Hoover is beset by bad dreams. He decides to head to Doug’s coffee shop where we learn from them why the cities are now so empty.
Well written and atmospheric, appealing to this sufferer of parasomnia.
Four Stars
Continuing a steady Orbit
Once again, Orbit contains some of the best and worst of SF for me. This issue more than most, though, is going to be a subjective one. So much is based on style that it cannot help but appeal to personal taste. I know others have considered Animal among the best and Grimm’s Story among the weakest. Whatever your tastes, I think there will be something in here for you to chew on.
This completely passed me by on first release but an ad for it from the Science Fiction Book Club in last month’s New Worlds was enough to convince me to get it. But was it worth me trialing a membership from them?
The so-called “end of the universe” is an area where physical laws as we know them break down. Sometimes this abstract nothingness recedes, sometimes it expands and swallows galaxies, leaving impossible creations in its wake. The Warden Corps have been set up at its current edge to monitor and explore the strange phenomena.
Among those who come to the current planetoid of the Warden Corps is Helena Kraag. Whilst the daughter of one of the richest men in the galaxy, she has become withdrawn from people since the loss of her mother. At first, she attempts to look straight into the nothingness and loses her sense of identity. In spite of this she still travels with the rest of the crew into this impossibility.
Unfortunately, their Heisenberg shields fail as they enter. As you can probably guess, things start to get strange.
Now, you might expect this to just then be a kind of surreal trip, a la Alice in Wonderland or Phantom Tollbooth. However, what Joseph produces is a kind of fractured character exploration. As we move through these different bizarre situations we learn more about each of the members of the crew and gain understanding of what motivates them.
There are so many delicious details. Initially this looks like it is going to be some kind of 19th Century comedy of manners, but we soon learn this has been carefully set up. Rather it is a kind of conditioning, one to allow the fliers to maintain a solid form of identity. Even when it feels like I am reading the lyrics to I Am The Walrus, there is clear intent and structure behind it.
Joseph is also a master of language and you feel yourself getting knowledge and beauty within the surreality. For example:
Everything and nothing had both happened and not happened; time was as broad as it was long; space was neither here nor there; the loop of eternity threaded itself through the eye of zero.
This kind of sentence could have been gibberish. But the way he phrases it and following the scenarios we have gone through, I absolutely understand what he is getting at.
I could go through all the characters and scenarios to explore the meaning behind it, but I think it is better to take the journey yourself. As Helena says, it is “like falling through the hole in the zero.” It may not be something that is at once fathomable but it is a new experience worth having.
Although primarily known as a poet, he clearly understands science fiction well and has an affinity for it (see, for example, the poem "Mars Ascending"). Here is hoping for more such forays.
Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann takes place in and around the ancient city of Jericho. Swann’s Jericho is a poverty-ridden city ruled by the Egyptians, its denizens apprehensive about the steady approach of the Wanderers, a flood of former slaves absconding from Egypt.
Bard ekes out a meager existence in this city with his mother and beautiful younger brother Ram. Ram is stolen one night and replaced by an unbecoming changeling. Bard accepts the fat, ugly Rahab and comes to think of her as a sister until years later when an elusive, feline creature known as a fennec arrives. Rahab then magically transforms into a beautiful woman with wings and disappears one night.
Determined to rescue Rahab, Bard enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb. Together they track Rahab down to the underground city, Honey Heart, where the fennecs rule as gods and Rahab’s kind, the People of the Sea along with beautiful human males–including the long lost Ram– are docile slaves to the fennecs. Bard and Zub must now find a way to wrest Rahab from the insidious control of the fennecs and make it out of Honey Heart alive.
Moondust is a highly imaginative and reasonably interesting story but I did not—could not bring myself to enjoy it. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me about this novel. Then it finally occurred to me. This book has no soul, no humanity. Moondust feels like a book written from the clinical lens of a white Westerner who thinks he’s better than the people he’s writing about.
Apparently, people living in poverty must always be dirty and have very little regard for personal hygiene. If humans own slaves, those slaves must be black. What else could they possibly be? Beautiful women are nothing but whores. Fat people are ugly, and the Israelites had very big, very ugly feet.
I believe these small details were meant to add color to the story’s world, but obviously originate from a place of thinly veiled disdain.
The main character, Bard, is not one with whom I could sympathize. His little brother is stolen—kidnapped in the dead of night. Even though Bard bemoans the loss, not once does it occur to the self-absorbed nincompoop to go looking for his five-year-old sibling. Instead, he magnanimously accepts the supposedly fat, ugly changeling named Rahab left in his brother’s place as a sister and simply carries on with his life as if that makes any sense.
Years later, when Rahab literally sheds her “ugly” skin and becomes a beautiful creature of a woman, she then becomes a harlot. What else could she possibly become?
When Rahab disappears, summoned back to the underground city of Honey Heart by the fennec, Chackal, Bard immediately enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb and races off in search of his beloved sister. This raises the question of why he was so desperate to save the sibling unrelated by blood–who left voluntarily–but had possessed no inclination to go off in search of his biological brother, Ram.
Once Bard and Zeb descend into Honey Heart, the story loses all coherence for me. The contrived mish-mash of magic, ancient Eastern culture, and biblical myth falls short of a finely woven tale. Moondust merely rankled.
If I’ve learned anything from Swann it’s that you can learn the history and possess infinite academic knowledge of a culture but your words aren’t going to touch anyone if you can’t actually feel the soul—the humanity of the people.
Three Stars
by Jason Sacks
One Before Bedtime by Richard Linkroum
What an odd novel. One Before Bedtime is part mad scientist novel, part social satire, part speculative fiction, and part self-centered character rationalization.
I'm not sure this is a good book, per se, but is certainly odd.
See, in a way, this book is all about the social satire. It's about Jeff Baxter, a kid just home from Vietnam, where he's seen some stuff, man, and who has gone back to work at his a pharmacy in his small midwestern town. Jeff just has one minor problem: his skin is in rough shape and he needs for it to clear up so his girlfriend can be happy. Thankfully (perhaps), the pharmacist turns out to be a tinkerer. Cortland Pedigrew has his own set of chemicals and other tools in the basement of the pharmacy. Pedigrew invents a pill which can clear Jeff's skin.
There's just one problem. The pill somehow turns Jeff's skin from White to Black.
And there the troubles begin.
Because Jeff's girlfriend, Peggy, is a bit of a militant and freedom fighter. She walks around everywhere barefoot and speaks at rallies for Black rights and sings folk songs and reminds one of someone like Joan Baez in her steadfast commitment to the hottest social issues of the day. (She probably wouldn't have cared about Jeff's skin, either, but the poor guy was too self-deluded to notice.)
As the story goes on, Jeff, Peggy and several other characters find themselves mixed up in campus protests, urban riots, and unreasonable hatred. Along the way they're forced to see their own prejudices – often reflexive and instinctive – and, well, pretty much stay the same people they were before the events in this book start.
On top of all the oddball problems I've just described, this 168-page quickie is written from different perspectives. We get no fewer than four different approaches to this character's story, each exceeding the previous one in its banality and strange affect. I kept wondering, over and over, how dumb these characters are, how stuck in their idiotic ways they are so they can't actually see the world differently than they did before their loved one was turned black?
Of course, that's also all part of author Linkroum's goal here, I'm sure. It's clear from his approach that he's interested in exploring the idea that racism is arbitrary and simple-minded, that mere skin color is not a diffentiator of the worth of a person, and that our present great national troubles are as absurd as his chracters all act here.
If only Mr. Linkroum had been more satirical, more biting in his humor. Instead the plot of One Before Bedtime all feels a bit undercooked, a bit bland and a bit too on-the-nose for it to really work for me.
I tried looking up Richard Linkroum in my collection of science fiction mags and found no other examples of his work. This is despite the fact that the book was published in hardcover by J.P. Lippincott, a reputable publisher. Finally I was tipped that there's a TV producer who goes by Dick Linkroum who might be our author here. That makes sense because One Before Bedtime reads like a bad episode of the old Twilight Zone: a bit undercooked and way too preachy.
On the first day of this month, a new movie rating system created by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) went into effect. Although the system is voluntary, filmgoers in the USA can expect to see a letter of the alphabet accompanying almost every movie.
This is very old news to those living in the United Kingdom, where a similar system has been in place since 1912. There have been some changes over the years, but currently the British ratings are:
U for Unrestricted (everybody admitted)
A for Adult content (children under 12 must be accompanied by adults)
X for Explicit content (no one under 16 admitted)
The new American system uses different letters, although they kept the scary X.
G for General audiences (everybody admitted, no advisory warnings)
M for Mature audiences (everybody admitted, but parental guidance is advised)
R for Restricted (persons under 16 not admitted without adult parent or guardian)
X for Explicit (no one under 16 admitted)
Gee, Magazines R Xciting!
In the spirit of the MPAA, let me experiment with offering my own similar ratings for the stories in the latest issue of Fantastic, in addition to the usual one-to-five star system of judging their quality.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
As with previous issues, the cover art for this one comes from the German magazine Perry Rhodan.
Hell Dance of the Giants, or something like that.
The fine print under the table of contents reveals that former editor Harry Harrison is now the associate editor, and former associate editor Barry N. Malzberg (maybe better known under the authorial pen name K. M. O'Donnell) is now the editor. I have no idea if this swapping of job titles really means anything.
As the cover states, this is a sequel to Hamilton's famous space opera novel The Star Kings, from 1949. (I believe there have been a couple of other yarns in the series, published in Amazing.) However, it's certainly not a short novel. By my reckoning, it's a novelette, not even a novella.
I haven't read The Star Kings (mea culpa!) so it took me a while to figure out what was going on. (The fact that several paragraphs near the start are printed in the wrong order doesn't help.)
Three guys escape from a planet in a starship stolen from aliens. One fellow is the main hero, a man of our own time who somehow wound up in a far future of galactic empires and such. Another is a man of that time. So is the third one, but apparently he used to be the Bad Guy in previous adventures. Now he's working with the two Good Guys for his own self interest.
It turns out there's an alien on the ship as well. It can control human minds, but only one at a time. The trio solves this problem by crashing into a planet.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The place is inhabited by nasty winged reptile aliens, who are part of an army of various extraterrestrials being collected by a Bad Guy to invade a planet ruled by the woman our time-traveling hero loves. Can he find a way to save her? Can he trust his former enemy? And what about those pesky mind-controlling aliens? Tune in next time!
This slam-bang action yarn reads like a chapter torn out at random from a novel. Besides starting in medias res, it stops before reaching a final resolution.
Hamilton is an old hand at writing this kind of space opera (they don't call him The World Wrecker for nothing!) so it's very readable. The former Bad Guy is the most interesting character (and he seems a lot smarter than the two Good Guys.) Too bad the story doesn't stand very well on its own.
Three stars.
Rated G for Good old scientifiction.
Ball of the Centuries, by Henry Slesar
Here's a brief tale about a guy who uses a crystal ball to see into the future. He warns a couple about to get married not to go through with it. Of course, they don't listen to him. Years later, they have the argument he predicted. The husband tracks down the guy and finds out the real reason he warned them.
That sounds like a serious story, but it's really an extended joke, with a double punchline. It's OK, I suppose, but nothing special, and a very minor work from a prolific and award-winning writer of fantasy, mystery, television, and movies.
Two stars.
Rated M for Matrimonial woes.
The Mental Assassins, by Gregg Conrad
Cover art by H J. Blumenfeld.
From the pages of the May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures, this story is the work of Rog Phillips under a pseudonym.
Illustration by Harold W. McCauley.
People who have been horribly maimed in accidents are kept alive and made to experience a shared dream world. The trouble begins when three of the twenty people develop evil alternate personalities. (As usual, the story thinks that schizophrenia literally means split personality.)
The physician in charge of the project asks the hero to enter the dream world and kill these doppelgängers. (This won't actually harm the real people, just eliminate their imaginary wicked doubles.) He gives it a try, but finds the experience so unpleasant he backs out of the deal.
The story then turns into a sort of hardboiled crime yarn, as the hero gets mixed up with a couple of mysterious women, a hulking bouncer, and two cab drivers who know more than they should. A wild back-and-forth chase ensues, partly on a spaceship, followed by a double twist ending.
You may be able to tell what's really happening as soon as the hero exits the dream world, but I don't think you'll guess the other plot twist, which is rather disturbing. This yarn reminds me of Philip K. Dick's games with reality, although it's not quite as adept.
Three stars.
Rated R for Really shocking ending.
The Disenchanted, by Wallace West and John Hillyard
Cover art by Vernon Kramer.
This fantasy farce comes from the January/February 1954 issue of the magazine.
Illustration by Sanford Kossin.
The ghost of Madame de Pompadour shows up at the apartment of a publisher. Present also is the author of a novel about the famed mistress of King Louis XV. The ghost objects to what the writer said about her in the book, and demands that it not be printed. When the publisher refuses, she has her ghostly buddies uninvent things, leading to chaos.
Strictly aiming for laughs, this featherweight tale ends suddenly. As a matter of fact, because the usual words THE END don't appear on the last page, I have a sneaking suspicion part of the story is missing. [Nope. It's that way in the original, too! (ed.)] Be that as it may, it provides a small amount of mildly bawdy amusement.
Two stars.
Rated R for Risqué content.
The Usurpers, by Geoff St. Reynard
Cover art by Raymon Naylor.
The January 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures is the source of this chiller by Robert W. Krepps, an American author hiding behind a very British pen name.
Illustration by Leo Summers.
The narrator is a one-armed veteran of the Second World War. An old comrade-in-arms shows up and tells him a bizarre story.
It seems the fellow recovered from a serious eye injury. When his vision was restored, he saw that about half the people around him were actually weird, horrifying monsters in human disguise. He reaches the conclusion that beings from another dimension are infiltrating our own, intent on displacing humanity.
Things go from bad to worse when some of the creatures realize the guy can perceive them. They try to kill him, while he destroys as many of them as he can, leading to the violent conclusion.
This shocker is most notable for the truly strange and creepy descriptions of the monsters, each one of which has a different form. As an ignorant American, I found it convincingly British, although somebody from the UK might disagree. Overall, a pretty effective horror story.
Three stars.
Rated R for Revolting creatures.
The Prophecy, by Bill Pronzini
Like Henry Slesar's piece, this is a miniscule bagatelle about a prediction. A prophet who is always right announces that the world will end at a certain time on a certain day. When the hour of doom arrives, the unexpected happens.
Even shorter than the other joke story, this tiny work depends entirely on its punch line. I can't say I was terribly impressed. I also wonder why the magazine printed two similar tales in the same issue.
Two stars.
Rated G for Goofy ending.
The Collectors, by Gordon Dewey
Cover art by Barye Phillips.
My research indicates that somebody named Peter Grainger is an uncredited co-author of this story from the June/July 1953 issue of Amazing Stories.
Illustration by Harry Rosenbaum.
A very methodical fellow, who keeps track of every penny, tries to figure out why a small amount of money disappears every day. He runs into a woman who experiences the same phenomenon. It seems to have something to do with a vending machine.
The editorial introduction dismissingly says this story is . . . no classic, to be sure, it isn't even a minor classic . . . which seems like an odd way to talk about something worth printing. I thought it was reasonably intriguing. In this case, the open ending seems appropriate.
Three stars.
Rated M for Mysterious conclusion.
Unrated
As I mentioned above, the MPAA rating system is voluntary. No doubt a few movies will be released without one of the four letters. In a similar way, the stuff in the magazine other than fiction isn't really appropriate for rating.
Editorial: The Magazines, The Way It Is, by A. L. Caramine
Brief discussion of the rise and fall of science fiction magazines, with an optimistic prediction that they're on the way up again. A note at the end states that A. L. Caramine is the pseudonym of a well-known science fiction author.
Digging through old magazines, the only reference I can find to A. L. Caramine is as the author of the story Weapon Master in the May 1959 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.
A glance at the magazine tells me that, in addition to a story by Robert Silverberg under his own name, there are book reviews by the same fellow under his pseudonym Calvin M. Knox. Given the way that single authors often filled up magazines with multiple pen names, I suspect that the mysterious A. L. Caramine is Silverberg as well, although I don't have definite proof of this.
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Laurence Janifer
One page article that praises the film named in the title, and says that Planet of the Apes is lousy. Just one person's opinion, take it or leave it.
The Rhyme of the SF Ancient Author or Conventions and Recollections, by J. R. Pierce
Parody of the famous Coleridge poem mocked in the title. It says that science fiction writers shouldn't go chasing money by writing other kinds of stuff. Pretty much an in-joke, I guess.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber
Mostly notable for a glowing review of Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. May be the best-written thing in the magazine!
Good? Mediocre? Rotten? Xcruciating?
All in all, this was a so-so issue. The two star stories weren't that bad, the three star stories weren't that good. Not a waste of time, but you might want to listen to the current smash hit Hey Jude by the Beatles instead.
David Frost introduces the Fab Four as they perform the song on his television program.
It really looked like it was going to be a happy Halloween. On October 31st, President Johnson made the stunning announcement that he was stopping all bombing in Vietnam. This was in service to the Paris peace talks, which subsequently got a huge shot in the arm: not only were the Soviets on board with the negotiations, but the South Vietnamese indicated that, as long as they had a seat at the table, they were in, too.
The holiday lasted all of five days. In yesterday's paper, even as folks went to the polls to choose between Herbert Humphrey and Tricky Dixon (or, I suppose, Wacky Wallace), the news was that South Vietnam had pulled out. They didn't like that the Viet Cong, the Communists in Vietnam (as distinguished from the North Vietnamese government), were going to get a representative at the talks. So they're out.
It's not clear how this will affect the election. As of this morning, it was still not certain who had won . Nevertheless, it is clear that Humphrey's chances weren't helped by the derailing of LBJ's peace plans. If a Republican victory is announced, it may well be this turn of events led to the sea change.
Well, don't blame me. My support has always been for that "common, ordinary, simple savior of America's destiny," Mr. Pat Paulsen. After all, he upped his standards—now up yours.
Respite
Once again, a tumultuous scene provided the backdrop to my SFnal reading. Did the latest issue of Galaxy prove to be balm or bother? Read on and find out:
by John Pederson Jr. illustrating One Station of the Way
Evalyth, military director of a mission to a human planet reverted to savagery after the fall of the Empire, watches with horror as her husband is murdered, then butchered by one of the planet's inhabitants. Cannibalism, it turns out, is a way of life here; indeed, it is considered essential to the rite of puberty for males.
The martial Evalyth vows to have her revenge, tracking down the murderer, Mora, and taking him and his family back to their base, where they are subjected to fearsome scientific examinations. But can she go through with executing the killer of her husband? And does Mora's motivation make any difference?
There' s so much to like about this story, from the exploration of the agony of love lost, to the examination of relative morality, to the development of the universe first introduced (to me, anyway) in last year's A Tragedy of Errors. It doesn't hurt that it stars a woman, and women are integral parts of this future society, with none of the denigrating weasel words that preface the introduction of female characters in Anderson's Analog stories (could those be editorial insertions?)
This is Anderson at his best, without his archaicisms, multi-faceted, astronomically interesting, emotionally savvy.
Five stars.
One Station of the Way by Fritz Leiber
by Holly
Three humaniforms watch on cameloids as the star descends in the east. Sure enough, at a home in the east, a divine being prepares to impregnate a local female so that she will bear a divine child.
Heard this story before? There's a reason. But the planet of Finiswar is not Earth, the aliens are not remotely human, and the white and dark duo who pilot the spaceship Inseminator are anything but gods.
A little girl is told a bedtime story about a big computer that stopped doing its job right. That's because the machine couldn't think of casualties and war statistics as simple numbers, battle strategies as abstract puzzles. The problem is its personality; if the computer's mind could be reconciled with its function, the machine could work again. But can any mind be at peace with such a frightful purpose?
A simple piece like this depends mostly on the telling. Luckily, Goldin is up to the task. Four stars.
Subway to the Stars by Raymond F. Jones
by Jack Gaughan
Harry Whiteman is a brilliant engineer with a problem: he's too much of a "free spirit" to keep a job, or a wife. Desperate, when the CIA approaches him about a singular opportunity, he takes it, though the resents being bullied into it.
In deepest, darkest Africa, the Smith Company is working on…something. Ostensibly a mining concern, it produces no gems. On the other hand, whatever it is is important enough that the Soviets have based missiles in a neighboring country—pointed right at the company site!
Whiteman is hired, for his irreverence more than his ability, and begins work as a double-agent. Once on location, he finds the true purpose of the site: it's a switching station of an intergalactic railroad station! But it turns out that the folks at the Smith Company also have multiple agendas…
A mix of Cliff Simak's Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) and Poul Anderson's Door to Anywhere, it is not as successful as either of them. It takes too long to get started, and then it wraps up all too quickly. It's genuinely thrilling as Whiteman peels back the multiple layers of the Smith operation and the factions within it, and when the missiles do find their target, the resultant chaos is compelling, indeed. But then it turns into a quick, SFnal gimmick story better suited to Analog than Galaxy.
I think I would have rather seen Simak takes this one on as a sequel to his novel. Jones just wasn't quite up to it.
Three stars.
For Your Information: The Discovery of the Solar System by Willy Ley
As it turns out, the science article in this month's issue addresses two issues on which I've had keen recent interest. The first is on the subject of solar systems, and if they can be observed around other stars. Ley discusses how the gravity of an unseen companion can cause a telltale wiggle as the star travels through space, since the two objects orbit a common center of gravity (rather than one strictly going around the other).
In the other half of the article, Ley explains how atomic rocket engines work: shooting heated hydrogen out a nozzle as opposed to burning it and shooting out the resultant water out the back end—it is apparently twice as strong a thrust.
What keeps this article from five stars is both pieces are too brief. For the first half, I'd like to know about the stellar companions discovered through astrometry. He mention's Sirius' white dwarf companion, but what about the planets Van de Kamp claims to have discovered around Barnard's Star and so on? As for the atomic article, I'd like to know what missions a nuclear engine can be used for that a conventional rocket cannot.
Four stars.
A Life Postponed by John Wyndham
by Gray Morrow
Girl falls in love with cynical jerk of a boy. Boy decides there's nothing in the world worth sticking around for, so he gets himself put in suspended animation for a century. Girl follows him there. He's still a cynical jerk, but she doesn't care because she loves him. They live happily ever after.
I'm really not sure of the point of this story, nor how it got in this month's issue other than the cachet of the author's name.
Two stars.
Jinn by Joseph Green
It is the year 2050, and aged Professor Morrison, stymied in his attempts to make food from sawdust, is approached by a brilliant young grad student. Said student is brilliant for a reason: he is a Genetically Evolved Newman or "Jinn", with a big brain and bigger ideas. The student has solved Morrison's problem. However, another Jinn wants humanity to go to the stars, and he fears if the race gets a full belly, they'll lose interest.
The conflict turns violent, the point even larger: is there room for baseline homo sapiens in a world of homo superior?
Green doesn't paint a particularly plausible future, but there are some nice touches, and the points raised are interesting ones. I'd say it's a failure as a story but a success as a thought-exercise, if that makes sense.
So, a low three stars.
Spying Season by Mack Reynolds
by Roger Brand
We return, once again, to Reynolds' world of People's Capitalism. It is the late 20th Century, and the Cold War adversaries have reached a more or less peaceful coexistence. The greater challenge is existential: ultramation has taken away most jobs, and the majority of the populace is on the dole. How, then, to avoid stagnation for humanity?
In this installment, Paul Kosloff is an American of Balkan ancestry, one of the few in the United States of the Americas who still has a steady job, in this case, that of teacher. He is tapped by the CIA to go on sabbatical in the Balkan sector of Common-Europe. Ostensibly, his job is not to spy for the USAs, but to sort of soak in the culture of the area over a twelve-month span.
Very quickly, Kosloff finds himself entagled with an underground revolutionary group, with law enforcement, and with several fellows who enjoy sapping him on the back of the head.
Suffice it to say that all questions are answered by the end, the major ones being: why an innocuous pseudo-spy should be a target, why the CIA would send him on a seemingly pointless mission in the first place. In the meantime, you get a bit more history of this world and some tourist-eye view of Yugoslavia. In other words, your typical, middle-of-the-road Reynolds story.
Three stars.
Counting the votes
While not as stellar as last month's issue, the December 1968 Galaxy still offers a more satisfying experience than, well, most anything going on in "the real world". It clocks in at a respectable 3.45, which brings the annual average to 3.23.
Compare that to the 2.81 it scored last year, and given that Galaxy is once again a monthly, I think it's safe to say that, at least in one way, "Happy days are here again."
As I sat down to write this article, I heard the news of the death of Lise Meitner. If that name isn’t familiar to you, it should be. Einstein once called her “the German Marie Curie,” which might be understating things. She is arguably the most important woman physicist of the 20th century and possibly one of the most important theoretical physicists, period.
Born in Vienna in 1878, she became only the second woman to earn a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1905. She later moved to Germany and worked at the University of Berlin. There, she and Otto Hahn discovered the most stable isotope of the element protactinium, which she dubbed protoactinium before dropping the second “o.” In 1939, she and Hahn, along with Otto Robert Frisch and Fritz Strassmann, discovered and explained nuclear fission. There are also at least two nuclear phenomena which bear her name.
Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner circa 1912.
Meitner was able to escape Nazi Germany in 1938 with the help of Niels Bohr. She settled in Sweden, where she spent the rest of her professional life. Her role in the discovery of nuclear fission garnered her a lot of celebrity after the end of the War; she was even interviewed by Eleanor Roosevelt on her radio show. She was a popular speaker and instructor and traveled extensively to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
She received numerous accolades throughout her career, and the institute that oversees Germany’s first research nuclear reactor bears her and Hahn’s names. But the Nobel eluded her. Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission (ignoring not only Meitner, but also Frisch and Strassmann). The Nobel committee plays things pretty close to the vest, but word is that Lise Meitner was nominated many times in the fields of physicist and chemistry. In 1966, President Johnson honored her with the Enrico Fermi Award.
After retiring in 1960, she moved to the United Kingdom to be closer to family and continued giving lectures. She was in poor health in recent years, unable to attend the Fermi Award ceremony. She died in her sleep at the age of 89.
Lise Meitner in 1963.
Stereotypes
As Lise Meitner’s life shows, women play an active and important role in science, and ought to do so in science fiction as well. Unfortunately, there seem to be fewer women writing SF than there were a decade ago, and there don’t seem to be all that many as key characters in stories either. Two of the stories in this month’s IF don’t have any, two offer mothers, two more femmes fatale, and as far as the first story goes, the less said the better.
A previously unknown piece by the late Hannes Bok, probably the last new Bok cover ever.
The Holmes-Ginsbook Device, by Isaac Asimov
This absurd story is ostensibly about coming up with a better way than microfiche to present printed information (no one has ever heard of putting words on a page and stacking those pages into a book). The "message" is that staring into a microfiche reader keeps you from staring at women. It's patently offensive. And not in a way that challenges our acceptance of societal norms like something in Dangerous Visions. Women are here only the be ogled and groped.
He looks familiar. Art by Gaughan
One star and a guaranteed winner of the Queen Bee Award.
The Starman of Pritchard’s Creek, by Julian F. Grow
Young Widder Poplowski has set her cap for Dr. Hiram Pertwee. He might be inclined to encourage her, but her nine-year-old son is a hellion, and her motherly love is excessively fierce. While picnicking along Pritchard’s Creek, the three of them encounter a talking, self-propelled steam engine and a living trash heap. Getting kicked in the head by his horse may be the least of Pertwee’s problems.
Whatever it is, it ain’t natural. Art by Wood
This is our third encounter with Dr. Pertwee, and it’s a good bit better than the last. This one is well-suited to the western theme, and the doctor’s voice is very well done. I’d say the tone aims to imitate Twain, but doesn’t come close. Of course, not coming close in an attempted imitation of Twain leaves a lot of room to still be good.
Three stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, del Rey looks at couple of areas where science and science fiction keep overtaking each other: there’s too much free oxygen on Venus, the steady-state theory might not be dead yet, and quantum particles that move faster than light.
Three stars.
The Canals of Santa Claus, by Bram Hall
Three wildcat miners are forced to put down on an uncharted planet. They dub the planet Santa Claus for its black growths that resemble Christmas trees (Yule was taken), but can’t explain the regularity of their spacing or the canals of salty water that flow without any change in elevation.
Hall is this month’s new author, and it’s not bad for a freshman effort. There’s nothing really new or groundbreaking, but it’s well handled, and there’s a bit of a sting in the tail.
Since 1948, the world has become aware of a boy genius roughly every other year. Invariably, they fade from public view after a year or two, never seeming to live up to the potential they showed. A television production team begins digging into the story, but are soon broken up and reassigned. What shadowy organization is pulling the strings?
I’ve never been a fan of Ballard’s work, which I generally find too avant-garde and over laden with allusion and symbolism. This story, however, has a beginning, a middle, and an end (in that order) and lacks the ennui and decadence of the Vermilion Sands stories. I enjoyed it, with two complaints. First, the boy genius discovered in 1965 is Robert Silverberg of Tampa, Florida. He would be a good deal younger than science fiction’s own Silverbob (who isn’t from Florida), and the name pulled me out of the story every time he’s mentioned. None of the others seem to have been given the name of someone else from the genre or elsewhere, so it struck me as odd. Secondly, the connection to comsats seems very strained. But otherwise an enjoyable story.
A high three stars from me; others might like it better.
Continuing his tour of the planets he once opened and charted, Commodore John Grimes has arrived on the water world of Melisse. Giant, unkillable starfish are attacking the huge oysters the natives use to grow pearls, the planet’s only export. Since both of the major Rim officials are incompetents he had posted to a place he thought they could do no harm, he figures it’s his duty to investigate.
Chief Wunnaara may be the only reliable person on the planet. Art by Virgil Finlay
This is a fairly standard Grimes story, with a bit of mystery and spy thriller thrown in. Entertaining enough if you like this sort of thing. I was a bit put off by the ease with which Grimes went to bed with the prime suspect, considering he’s spent the last several stories missing his wife very much. I guess mores and morals are different out on the Rim.
I’m not even going to try to describe this story by Harlan Ellison. It’s full of silly, made-up words like phlenged and thrillip’d to describe the use of alien senses and whatnot. I suspect that if it had been sent in by an unknown, it would have been sent back, maybe with an encouraging letter to keep trying.
Professor Paul Kosloff heads into Common Europe and Common Eur-Asia to try and find out who’s behind the plot to tamper with the computer records of the United States of the Americas. Somehow, the bad guys seem to know his every move.
More action exactly like the action in Part 1. Art by Gaughan
Part 1 of this serial was so heavy on (poorly delivered) exposition, I predicted this installment would have lots of story. I was wrong; there’s just as much exposition in this half. The action is also just as over detailed; I don’t know what an “Okinawa fist” is, nor does knowing what the protagonist shouts as he delivers a karate blow tell me anything. All in all, it winds up being a typical, if slightly subpar, Mack Reynolds adventure. But it might be worth revisiting in 50 years or so to see how well Mack did at prognosticating the effects of an increasingly interconnected world.
Three stars for this installment and the novel as a whole.
Summing up
Maybe the awful first story influenced my impression of the rest of the issue, and some of these stories deserve better ratings. On the other hand, this is the second issue in a row with a one-star story, and that’s a rating I very rarely give. With the two worst stories coming from the two biggest names in the issue, I’m starting to wonder at some of the editorial decisions being made. But Galaxy doesn’t seem to be doing quite this poorly. At least Fred has promised another Hugo winners issue next year, so we have something to look forward to.
There’s the Zelazny we were promised. This issue really needed it.
Just as America returned to space in a big way with this month's flight of Apollo 7, the Soviets have also recovered from their 1967 tragedy (Soyuz 1) with an impressive feat. Georgy Beregovoi, a rookie cosmonaut (ironically also the oldest man in space thus far, surpassing 45 year-old Wally Schirra by two years) has taken Soyuz 3 into orbit for a series of rendezvous and perhaps dockings (TASS is being vague on the issue) with the unmanned Soyuz 2.
Comrade Beregovoi in training
We've seen flights like this before, but this is the first time there has been a person involved. Many are calling this a harbinger of an impending lunar flight, though NASA is adamant that this particular flight won't go to the moon. Indeed, Dr. Ed Welsh, Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council says Soyuz and September's Zond 5, which went around the moon, are completely different craft and the Russians aren't even close to fielding a lunar mission.
We'll have more on this flight in a few days. Stay tuned.
On the ground
Like the flights of Soyuz 2 and 3, this month's Analog is outwardly impressive, but once you dig in, it's not so great.
Centuries from now, after the fall of the Age of Science, humanity is divided into two camps: the "Olsaparns", who dwell in isolated technological camps and retain a semblance of the original technology and society, and the Novos—psionically adept savages who live in conservative Packs. One of the Pack members is Starn, who possesses a brand new ability that allows him to best even the telepathically and premonitionally blessed. He runs afoul of Nagister Nont, a highly adept, highly disagreeable trader, who kidnaps his wife.
After a raid on the Olsaparns leaves Starn close to death, the technologists remake him into something more machine than man, like Ted White's Android Avenger. The Olsaparns want Nont out of the picture, so they help Starn in his quest to defeat the mutant and get back his wife.
I have no fault with the writing, which is brisk and engaging. I take some issue with the pages of discussion on whether or not psi powers be linked with primitiveness, or the concept that humanity could regress to Pithecanthropy in a scant few generations (or the idea that evolution must be a road that one goes forward and backward on; I thought we gave up teleology last century). But I blazed through the novella in short order, so… four stars.
The Ultimate Danger, by W. Macfarlane
by Kelly Freas
In which Captain Lew Frizel takes a shipload of eggheads to a hallucinogenic planet. He is the only one who, more or less, keeps his head. The message appears to be that LSD can be employed by aliens to judge our character. Or something.
Three stars?
The Shots Felt 'Round the World, by Edward C. Walterscheid
This piece, on atomic tests, was much easier reading than Walterscheid's last article. Do you realize that we have detonated half a billion TNT tons worth of nuclear explosives since 1945? It's a wonder there's anything left of Nevada.
Four stars.
The Rites of Man, by John T. Phillifent
by Rudolph Palais
A scientist is working on rationalizing the art of interpersonal relations (because in Phillifent's universe, no one has invented sociology). About twenty pages into that effort, humanoid (really, human) aliens show up and ask to be allowed to compete in the Olympics. They do, but they lose on purpose so we won't hate them. Then we interbreed.
Possibly the dullest, most pointless story I've ever read in this magazine. One star.
Humanity is a resilient creature, tough enough to tame any world. Except that planet Sibylla, with its poisonous soil, extreme axial tilt, thin atmosphere, temperature extremes, high gravity, and violent weather may actually be more than Terrans can handle. What does one do when a world is too minimal to sustain a colony? And what is the value of 10,000 settler lives against the teeming, impoverished billions of Earth?
This is a vividly written piece with some excellent astronomy. If I didn't know better, I'd say Poul Anderson is writing under a pseudonym. I felt the solution to the colonists' problem, though reasonable, was not sufficiently set up to be deduced. Also, I felt Karageorge missed the opportunity to make a more profound statement at the end than "well, humanity can lick almost all comers." I'd have preferred something on the point of colonization or the shifting of priorities on a racial scale.
Still, a high three stars.
Split Personality, by Jack Wodhams
by Kelly Freas
Mauger, a homicidal brute, agrees to be split in two for science instead of getting the chair. Instead of this resulting in two new individuals, it turns out that the two halves remain connected, the gestalt whole. Thus, Maugam can literally be in two places at once.
This is timely as the first interstellar drive has had teething troubles. Two test ships have gotten lost, unable to communicate with Earth. Now, half of Maugam can fly on the ship while the other stays home and reports, since telepathy, for some reason, is instant.
It's actually not a bad story, though it's really just a bunch of magic and coincidence. It works because Wodhams has set it up to work a certain way, not because this is any kind of realistic scientific extrapolation. Also, it's hard to work up any sympathy for a homicidal brute.
Three stars.
Doing the math
When everything is crunched together, we end up with Analog clocking in at exactly 3 stars—again, adequate, but vaguely disappointing. On the other hand, it's been something of a banner month in SF (provided you're not looking for female writers; they wrote less than 7% of the new fiction pieces published). Except for IF (2.6), every other outlet scored higher than 3. To wit:
This feels a little like one of those lonely messages out on the ether, post-apocalypse. I was last here for the July 1968 issue, whose publication, if you remember, was at a time of turmoil…. And then nothing for nearly four months.
Until now, when, like the proverbial British buses, two turn up (nearly) at once.
I can only assume that the late arrival of the October issue was in part because of the recent kerfuffle. Editor Mike Moorcock explains the situation in this issue (and which you can read about in more detail in my last review), that with the effective banning of sales in English newsagents New Worlds is to survive mainly on subscriptions in the future, with a dollop of cash from the Arts Council, admittedly.
To Moorcock’s credit, he doesn’t dwell on the matter. But this whole issue feels like a statement of intent and a possible return to what I would regard as ‘normal’ – for New Worlds, anyway. It’s now being published from a new address, for one thing.
Cover by Malcolm Dean
And that ‘return’ seems to be echoed in the cover, too. Thank God – a ‘proper’ cover illustration. You know, with a picture, and something that looks like it’s taken more than ten minutes to produce. Whilst I could argue that it’s not the most complex piece of artwork ever shown – and a tad on the gory side – at least it is what I would regard as art.
Lead In by The Publishers
Some changes here too. Editor Mike Moorcock has brought readers (those of us who are left, anyway) up to date with what has been happening in the Lead In, even if some kind of strange time warp has happened as the Editor claims that his comments were made “last month” and not actually in the April issue. Readers with a good memory and less impacted by this may remember when Moorcock promised more pages and pictures in colour – clearly now that isn’t going to happen.
Other than that, the usual descriptions of the authors and their explanations of their stories, for those of us too unintelligent to work it out for ourselves.
Disturbance of the Peace by Harvey Jacobs
Do you remember The Shout? in the last issue? (I know, but it’s been a while.) Disturbance of the Peace reminded me a little of that, as it is an observational piece about I’m not sure what.
The story is focused on Floyd Copman, set in a fairly contemporary Manhattan. Floyd has a pretty mundane job in a bank, where in amongst the dull details of a day we find that Floyd is being watched by a dishevelled customer, who spends all of his day staring at Floyd. It becomes a bit of an obsession, and despite multiple attempts to remove him the situation inevitably ends up with the man’s return. It is quite unnerving for Floyd, and eventually results in both the old man having a fit and Floyd fainting.
What’s the point of the story? There’s lots of description of the city Floyd travels in and the things he sees, not to mention things happening around Floyd – the descriptions of his co-workers are supremely awful – and yet it all seems to be of little purpose. It’s more of a mood piece to me, but at its best it reminded me a little of John Brunner’s work. 3 out of 5.
"Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum."
In which Ballard lists, in huge blocks of continuous text, people shot by other people.
I don’t know if all the names mentioned are real, although I have no evidence to suggest that they are not – there are some such as Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but the rest could easily be made up – but if the point is that lots of people have been shot in America, the point is made. Whilst the very, very long list makes the point that far too many people are shot, the purpose of the prose may also be to highlight the fact that many of the shootings that happen in the US are to people of whom we know nothing. They should be remembered, and it is perhaps an indictment of society that most of them are not.
The issue for me is that not only do I find reading long lists difficult, the block of text as presented is difficult to focus on – which I accept may be the purpose of the prose. It shows that Ballardian thing of repetition, after all – something he – repeats – often in his work.
But this feels like a Ballard clutching at straws, even if this is Ballard again riffing off American culture, and not in a good way. Is it fiction? I don’t know. It makes a good point, admittedly, but I think it is less exciting, less meaningful than his work from before, and weaker as a result. 3 out of 5.
Bubbles by James Sallis
If you’ve read my previous reviews, you may know that newly-appointed Associate Editor Sallis has been foisting much poetry upon us readers lately – something I’ve not appreciated. Happily then, this is a prose piece, and rather like Disturbance of the Peace it’s good on observational description, but this time about London. As we get all these lyrical sentences, the plot, such as it is, is about remembering someone – Kilroy – who is about to die. A story thus of a life lived and the places they frequented before showing us that life moves on. 3 out of 5.
Article: Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
An interesting article about how all media – audio, visual and print is interconnected like a spider’s web. Mike explains that future media will show an improvement in quality but at the same time have a lowering of standards in order to ensure mass appeal and remain commercial. How we manage a balance between all of this will be an important point in the future.
I can’t say I disagree.
Moorcock then manages to make his point using the analogy of Westerns and how they were important as printed stories, became less popular but have now been resurrected by returning to their core values through the medium of television. It shows the relative complexity of the interrelationships between media. Is this article inspired by the recent troubles here at New Worlds? Well, possibly, except that it is an extract from a longer article, and therefore possibly written before the furore. It can be said though that it is a reflection on the current state of play in the media, and it may not be coincidence that much of New Worlds' latest difficulties are in part due to Moorcock’s insistence on doing what this article says the media must do – setting new boundaries, of being different and not touting formulaic stuff. This article, like all good articles, was informative and also made me think. 4 out of 5.
Casablanca by Thomas M. Disch
No, nothing to do with the Humphrey Bogart movie. Disch’s story seems to be a satire on Americans abroad, showing us their insularity and pettiness. (We really are having a go at the US this month, aren’t we?) It all begins relatively normally before Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, our hapless Americans, find themselves in Casablanca in the middle of an anti-American demonstration and the unleashing of nuclear weapons, the once powerful now rendered impotent. It’s a compelling example of what happens when insular arrogance created by self-importance suddenly becomes redundant.
With its depiction of Americans lost in another country and befuddled by local customs, Disch's story reminded me of less of the movie Casablanca than the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Talking of Hitchcock, others must think highly of this one too, because I understand the story has recently appeared in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and is reprinted here. 4 out of 5.
Drawings by Malcolm Dean
by Malcolm Dean
I expected this section a little, as for the last few issues we’ve had graphic stories in various forms. This feels to me like it is the New Worlds version of Gahan Wilson’s efforts in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction – but as you might expect in a British magazine, darker, and perhaps odder. 2 out of 5.
Biographical Note on Ludwig van Beethoven II by Langdon Jones
The return of ex-Associate Editor Langdon Jones. Fresh from his publication of the Mervyn Peake Gormenghast material, this story begins like a typical biography (the clues in the title!) of a musician before the reader realises that it is satirical. It has many of the hallmarks expected in Langdon Jones’s usual material – florid language, poetry, musical scores, lyrics and so on. An inventive flight of fantasy, clearly meant to be a satirical musing on the music business and culture at large. I know some readers will like it more than me. For me, a middling 3 out of 5.
Photographs by Roy Cornwall
And again, something that’s been missing from recent issues, those pictures of strange artwork. This new version has buildings with patterns of light and shadow – and of course, a naked lady. No explanation – I guess we are just meant to be inspired – or aroused. 2 out of 5.
At last – the final part of this story. It has only taken ten months to get here. (sarcasm inserted – feel free to vent your own frustration here.) Despite taking five parts to get to this point, some of the story is condensed here in the summary, even though it has never been seen before!
Quick recap – In the last part, Henry George Franklin makes a drunken claim on Jack’s TV show that he had sold his daughter to a white man for $50 000. After the show, Benedict Howards, the owner of the Foundation for Human Immortality, demands that Franklin is kept off the air and threatens to kill Barron if he doesn’t. Barron’s response? He goes to visit Franklin in the Mississippi.
After being told the story by Franklin, the two are fired upon. Franklin is killed. Barron is convinced that Howards is behind the buying of the little girl – and more so other mysterious disappearances in the area. He becomes determined to test Howards in his next TV show.
He agrees to meet Howards in Colorado and records the meeting. When Howards admits to killing Franklin, he discovers Barron’s recording. The result is that Barron wakes up in hospital having being made immortal. The secret is out – it is the glands of these young children that create immortality, but they are killed in the process. And Sara has also been treated.
Barron is now part of the process – can he now incriminate Howards on air? On his return to New York, he tells Sara what has happened. They now have a decision to make – does Jack live forever or tell the world and die now?
Before the show goes live, Sara contacts Barron, and after taking LSD tells Jack that she thinks he is not making the decision to attack Howards because of the need to protect her. To solve this, she jumps off Barron’s apartment balcony.
The story then takes up the narrative from here.
With the suicide of media star Jack Barron’s ex-wife, things are now set for a final showdown between Jack and Howards. The death of Sara was in part caused by Howards in an attempt to free Jack from being tied down to Howards.
I don’t think I need to say too much here. Suffice it to say that things are tied up as justice is done and Sara is avenged. If you’ve read all that has gone before, you’ll understand what’s happening. Everyone else? Less so – and perhaps be less inclined to bother.
Perhaps the more important point is: was it all worth it? After all, a story stretching across six issues has to merit some value, surely? I started reading it myself way, way back in November 1967 with some degree of optimism at a new and exciting means of telling a story and by the end am exhausted, willing the story to have departed long before it did. I suspect that reading it as a novel may reduce this feeling a little, but for me after its initial signs of promise it was too much for too long. Let’s also not forget that its publication nearly brought down the magazine as well. It outstayed its welcome, for me. Time will tell if other readers look on it as wearily as I do. Hard to think that at the start I was thinking 4 and 5 out of 5, now it feels more like 3 out of 5.
Time for something new.
Book Review and Comment – Boris Vian and Friends by James Sallis, and the conclusion of Dr. Moreau and the Utopians by C. C. Shackleton
Firstly, James Sallis (remember him?) reviews Boris Vian’s novel Heartsnatcher, translated from the original French by Stanley Chapman. This allows Sallis to quote great chunks of Vian’s text. Unsurprisingly for such an obscure work, Sallis can’t recommend it highly enough. He relates it to work by authors such as Ballard and Thomas Pynchon but also more recent writers here such as Aldiss, Disch, Sladek and Langdon Jones, describing Vian’s book as a new logic of the imagination.
It might gain some interest as a result.
The only other book of note briefly mentioned here is the paperback publication of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which “has all of Clarke’s virtues well-displayed.” For what it’s worth, I agreed when I reviewed the hardback novel here back in July. There'll be more on this later.
Lastly, we have the conclusion of an article by C. C. Shackleton (aka Brian Aldiss) begun last issue about H. G. Wells’ ideas of utopia. It may be difficult to read without referring back to the earlier, and longer, part, but I followed it easily enough. Unsurprisingly, as Aldiss/Shackleton is a huge admirer of Wells, the article is positive, saying at the end that Wells pretty much started the idea in science fiction that the genre (and therefore much of Wells’ work) is “a study of man and his machines and society’s changing relationship to science and technology.” To which I would add, “Well, yes – him and Jules Verne.” I’m sure there’s others that could be mentioned too.
Summing up the October New Worlds
A big sigh of relief this month. Although the issue is somewhat of a mixed bag and with nothing too controversial, it does feels more like a normal issue of New Worlds, with the usual mixture of allegory and confusion usually engendered by its presence.
Interestingly, although it has always been there in the last few years, this was the first time that I did notice how American (Americentric?) the issue felt. Perhaps it was because it’s been a while since I read a copy, but I really noticed it this time. Is this a consequence of New Worlds now being sold where most of you are? Perhaps. However, with American writers throughout and the prose filled with American characters and places, the quaint old idea of New Worlds being a “British” magazine seems to have gone – even when most of the stories seem to be attacking America satirically or ideologically.
The return of stalwarts like Ballard, even if he has passed his prime, will be a reason to buy this one, although being mainly subscription-based, the magazine may only be preaching to the already-converted.
For me the most memorable item, unusually, was Moorcock’s article. It’s not common for me to be impressed by the non-fiction, but this one really made an impression. The fiction, by comparison, was rather pallid. Nice prose, nothing especially extraordinary. If I was pushed to make a choice, I would suggest that Disch’s Casablanca was the fiction piece I appreciated most.
Most importantly, this issue means the end of Jack Barron, which took a long, long time to get there but finally ended. It is due out in book form fairly soon, I gather – if they can find any bookshop willing to stock it, of course!
The November New Worlds
So just as I was writing up my thoughts on the October issue, the November issue arrived. Looks like Mike and the gang are trying to make up for lost time! The issue is here.
Cover by Gabi Nasemann
One of those images that I suspect only a recreational drug user will understand. A step back from the October issue, I think.
Lead In by The Publishers
The key point here is that Moorcock points out that all of the fiction in this issue is from new writers. I see this raising of potential talent as a good thing, but my more cynical self suspects lower rates were paid. I also suspect greater variability in quality. We will see!
Area Complex by Brian Vickers
To the first – the cover story. I liked this one. It’s an account compiled from writings by a number of teenage gang members living in a gang in a future Clockwork Orange kind of dystopia. As you might expect, it is a tough existence, living in decaying cities with lives filled with sex and violence. The group often kills others from rival groups, whilst trying to survive.
The big twist at the end is that the group are a religious sect living in a post-disaster world. This also gives the writer chance to have a pop at religion as is rather expected in New Worlds these days. It doesn’t end happily, but then that’s what we’ve come to expect in these British anti-utopian stories.
What impressed me most was how this story epitomised the New Wave stuff at the moment. If anyone remembers Charles Platt’s Lone Zone back in July 1965 it reminded me of that, but with lots of elements that could be from Aldiss, Ballard, Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange) and Langdon Jones in style and content, for example, but are instead from a new writer. Old ideas in new ways, perhaps. A good start to the issue, if typically depressing. 4 out of 5.
Pauper’s Plot by Robert Holdstock
A story of a future life in a factory where the protagonist spends his life as a factory slave pauper, wanting to kill his Overseer, Mister Joseph. Effective description of an awful life that is devoted to work – they have no free time, no chance to go outside. There’s an obvious analogy to the factory and the machine our protagonist is slaved to being life’s dreadful grind. Think of it as a Dickensian novel set in the future – rather like the musical film Oliver! I saw the other week, but without the music, which I kept thinking of whilst reading this. Again, not a bad effort, even if the ending is a bit of a let-down. 3 out of 5.
The Pieces of the Game by Gretchen Haapanen
Another story in poetic prose, that style so beloved by Associate Editor James Sallis. The plot, such as it is, tells us of Sarah, living in a smoggy Los Angeles from which she manages to escape the daily drudgery – in other words, similar to Holdstock’s story! The tale is OK but doesn’t really say a lot, other than creating pictures in your head.
But never mind a plot: be in awe of the pretty prose (though occasionally set out in that way of type in various directions across the page that I am starting to really dislike). 4 out of 5.
Black is the Colour by Barry Bowes
Another story determined to be controversial dealing with the issue of colour. A white man suddenly wakes up one morning to find that he is now black. Deliberately provocative prose – the ghost of Bug Jack Barron hasn’t quite gone away, has it? – but the story makes the point that people of different coloured skin are treated differently in society, and it’s not long before the storyteller’s life suffers as a result. Not a particularly original idea, but it makes its point pretty well. 3 out of 5.
How May I Serve You? by Stephen Dobyns
A story of consumer capitalist culture, it describes a future world where a man who loves the physicality of coinage goes on a spending spree at Schartz’s, using his own manufactured money. He is arrested and we discover that it is an unfortunate consequence of being reconditioned. A nice take on the influence of money and consumable goods in our lives. I’m surprised that “Coca-Cola” hasn’t had something to say on the story though – or do they see it as subliminal advertising? 3 out of 5.
Crim by Graham Charnock
A story that feels a bit Bug Barron in nature. CRIM is a story of future warfare combined with media saturation. Lots of violent imagery, separate characterisations and made up language. This feels similar to some of the other fiction in this issue and gets across the idea that war is bad in a Brian Aldiss Barefoot in the Head kind of way. The difference here is that CRIM feels like it is trying too hard. 3 out of 5.
Article: Graphics for Nova Express by Richard Wittern
Images for what is presumably a new edition of William Burroughs’s Nova Express that seem a bit pointless without context. 2 out of 5.
Sub-Synchronization by Chris Lockesley
Ah, the inevitable New Worlds sex story! Actually, after that initial attempt of using a discussion of sex to grab your attention, it soon becomes something about time, in that disjointed poetic manner that James Sallis seems to like. I didn’t understand it myself. 2 out of 5.
Baa Baa Blocksheep by M. John Harrison
Another disjointed story about grotesque characters doing something incomprehensible. Like most of the allegorical stories here, it is about impressions and poetic description rather than anything else.
It seems to be about this Arm, who with another person named Block go to work for Holloway Pauce, who for some bizarre reason is experimenting on sheep. Whilst this is going on, we get Ballard-ian extracts of stories that Arm is trying to get published, of characters named Gynt and Morven. Deliberately odd and unsettling, obtuse and simultaneously designed to provoke, it becomes memorable for vivid but fractured sections of prose. For example, the first line is: ”Arm scuttled the streets like a bubonic rat–furtive by nature, flaunting in the exigencies of pain."
Typical New Worlds material. I’m sure it all means something… somewhere, but after two readings, I’m still not sure what that is myself. Appreciate the lyrical imagery; don’t look for meaning. 3 out of 5.
Book Reviews: The Impotence of being Stagg by R. G. Meadley and M. John Harrison
Harrison reviews as well as writes in this issue – I suspect that this will become a regular thing.
Unsurprisingly, the reviewers do not like old-style SF, such as that published by Doubleday, and so give a thumbs-down to Joe Poyser’s Operation Malacca, Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s The Still Small Voice of Trumpets and Flesh by Philip Jose Farmer, although they grudgingly admit that Farmer’s more-sexual tales are more entertaining than the rest. I have tended to think of Farmer as a New Wave writer in the US – Harlan Ellison certainly did in Dangerous Visions, so my surprise is that they have anything bad to say about it at all.
Of the other reviews, R. A. Lafferty’s The Reefs of Earth is regarded as a “slight work… well worth a glance if you have nothing else to read”. The publication of Philip K. Dick’s first novel Solar Lottery shows “how far Dick has progressed in the thirteen years since its first publication, and little else.” Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “a book for all the family” and will “hardly offend anyone” being seen as “An inoffensive and mundane little piece of Establishment SF.” Lastly, Charles Harness’s third novel, The Ring of Ritornel is seen as “brash, fascinating, eclectic,fast and glossy” but is a less satisfying work when compared with his earlier novels.
Article: Phantom Limbs by Frances Johnston
A medical article that is a little reminiscent of those written by Dr. Christopher Evans back in the early Moorcock issues of New Worlds. It begins with the recent film The Charge of the Light Brigade before going on to discuss the need for artificial replacement limbs and the future of such devices. I guess that it is close to being a robot, but not quite. It’s interesting but feels oddly out of place in this magazine. 3 out of 5.
Summing up the November New Worlds
An issue pleasing in its variety, but rather expectedly more variable in its quality. What we have here is a number of new writers taking inspiration from previously published authors, but as a result we have a lot of techniques we’ve seen before repeated. I recognise Ballard, Aldiss and Langdon Jones in those. The content is more of the usual – strange, disjointed, atmospheric.
I enjoyed most Area Complex, but wasn’t too excited about the Lockesley and the Charnock. The Harrison may be the most bewildering, but Barry Bowes’s story is the one that might cause most outrage, although it isn’t really saying anything new, sadly.
Out of the two issues, I think that the November issue is stronger, simply by having more stories with more of a range, even when a number of them resort to techniques that seem a little familiar. The idea of having an issue with all new writers to this magazine is a good one and shows that there is new talent out there to encourage. The downside of this is that the magazine doesn’t have any big names like Aldiss, Ballard or Disch to encourage the faithful, which might be what the magazine needs to get those reader numbers up, even when some of these new writers seem to be similar in prose, tone and style. Nevertheless, a good issue with good intentions, and one that feels fairly strong, if not entirely successful. It’s a fresh start of sorts, and I look forward to the next issue – hopefully next month!
Until next time – I wish everyone a Happy Halloween.
The politics of race have been an actively displayed part of the Olympics as long as I can remember. Who can forget boxer Joe Louis defeating Max Schmelling at the 1936 Summer Games in Nazi Berlin? So it should come as no surprise that, at a time when the race crisis in America has reached a fever pitch, that there should be an expression of solidarity and protest at this year's quadrennial event in Mexico City.
The fellows with their hands "clenched in a fist, marching to the [Mexico City] War" (to paraphrase Ritchie Havens) are medal-winning sprinters Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) who had just won the 200-meter finals. Peter Norman of Australia (Silver), while making no physical gesture, is wearing the same "Olympics Project for Human Rights" medal as his fellow winners.
Why did the winners present this display? I'll let Carlos speak for himself with his comments at a post-race, press conference:
We both want you to print what I say the way I say it or not at all. When we arrived, there were boos. We want to make it clear that white people seem to think black people are animals doing a job. We want people to understand that we are not animals or rats. We want you to tell Americans and all the world that if they do not care what black people do, they should not go to see black people perform.
If you think we are bad, the 1972 Olympic Games are going to be mighty rough because Africans are winning all the medals."
Carlos added, responding to press references to "Negro athletes" said,
I prefer to be called 'black'…If I do something bad, they won't say American, they say Negro.
Smith and Carlos, described by the Los Angeles Times as "Negro Militants", have been expelled from the Games by International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage. This is the height of hypocrisy—how many times have we heard "we don't mind if Negroes protest; we just get upset when they riot and burn things"? Yet, here we have two men, American sports heroes, who peacefully highlight the plight of the Afro-American in our fraught country, and they're the bad guys?
With anti-Brundage feelings piqued and the U.S. expected to win today in the 400 and 1,600 meter relay finals (with nary a white man on competing on the teams), it is quite possible further displays of solidarity will be presented during the playing of our National Anthem.
Right on, brothers.
Speculative Power
It is with this as backdrop that I finished this month's issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which also leads with a powerful image. Does it deliver as striking a message? Let's read on and see:
by Gray Morrow
Once There Was a Giant, by Keith Laumer
Ulrik Baird is an interstellar merchant carrying a cargo of ten flash frozen miners in need of medical attention. In the vicinity of the low-gravity planet Vangard, his drive goes out, sending him hurtling toward the planet. But the planet is quarantined, off limits to outsiders. Nevertheless, Baird has no choice—a landing will happen one way or another; if it's a hard landing, the miners won't survive. Grudgingly, interstellar traffic control grants him clearance and coordinates to touch down softly. The approach is too fast for safety, and so Baird ejects, parachuting down, his frigid charges ejected safely in a separate, parachuting pod.
All according to Baird's plan.
Under the name of Carl Patton, Baird meets up with the last surviving man on Vangard, a 12 foot behemoth with the nickname 'Johnny Thunder'. Together with his 7' mastiff, the giant insists on accompanying Patton to where the pod of miners landed somewhere in the frozen wastes.
Again, all according to plan.
The plan is, in fact, quite clever, and this story marks a rare return to form for Laumer, who has been phoning it in of late. This is a story Poul Anderson would have woven liberally with archaicisms and mawkish sentiment. Laumer plays it straight, sounding more like E.C. Tubb in his first (the good) Dumarest story.
What keeps the tale from excellence is its resolution. Ultimately, Laumer provides the Hollywood ending, where everyone's a winner (more or less). His moral is roughly the same as Dickson's in this month's Building off the Line: some men are Real Men to be envied. The story even has a riveting travel sequence that takes up much of the story. An interesting bit of synchronicity.
I think I like this one better than Dickson's, but I still would have prefered something more downbeat, more nuanced. Four stars.
The Devil in Exile, by Brian Cleeve
Brother, here we go again.
Old Nick and his right-hand demon, Belphagor, were thrown out of the underworld by unionized hellions. An attempt to get Jack O'Hara, formerly a common drunk, lately a crime boss, to cross the union lines to bring the Devil back to power backfired when O'Hara took charge of The Pit.
Now, down to their last pence, Lucifer and friend pose as upper crust Britishers and miraculously (is that the word?) become heads of the Ministry of Broadcasting. Their debaucherous fare quickly wins over not just the terrestrial airwaves, but also those in Hell, and the Prince of Lies is restored to his rightful throne. Finis.
This installation is as tiresome and would-be-but-not-actually funny as the other two. Good riddance.
Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Coins, by Leo P. Kelley
In the time of Afterit, decades after The Bomb poisoned the world with its radioactive seed, humans have given up making decisions. After all, that's what brought about the Apocalypse, isn't it? Men making decisions? Instead, life is reduced to a series of 50/50 chances, each determined by the flip of a common coin.
Vividly written, but the premise (and the story's ending) are better suited to the comics. Anyone remember Batman's nemesis Two-Face from the '40s?
Three stars.
A Score for Timothy, by Joseph Harris
Timothy Porterfield is one of the world's greatest mystery writers. When he passes away after a long career, this seems to be the end—after all, does not death write the final chapter? Perhaps not, with the help of a medium with a flair for automatic writing. Nevertheless, there is still one final twist to the tale of Timothy…
Well wrought, atmospheric, and you're never quite sure how it will turn out. I liked it. Four stars.
Investigating the Curiosity Drive, by Tom Herzog
Curiosity killed the cat, but could it not also kill the human? And if one's goal is to test to determine whether or not curiosity be the salient feature of any sentient being, isn't it vital that one pick a being who isn't wise to your test?
This is a silly story, ultimately building to a joke that isn't worth the trip. Two stars.
The Planetary Eccentric , by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor discusses the discovery of Pluto and how it simply can't be the "Planet X" Percival Lowell was looking for. He does not quite so far as to say that it's not a planet at all, however, as some have opined.
Good article. Four stars.
Young Girl at an Open Half-Door, by Fred Saberhagen
The Museum of Art is haunted, it seems. Every night, an elusive prowler sets off the alarms in two of rooms housing prize exhibits. When a troubleshooter is dispatched, he finds the intruder is on something of a salvage mission, rescuing the art as insurance against an impending disaster. More importantly, said troubleshooter finds love…
It's a well-told story, and the ending is suitably chilling, though I found the romantic elements a bit too rushed for plausibility. Four stars.
In this, the second shaggy dog story of Brigadier Ffelowes, we return to 1938 Sweden for a brush with gods that make the Aesir look like Johnny-Come-Latelies. It's sort of Lovecraftian and not as compelling as the first tale Ffelowes recounted, which took place in the Caribbean. Not bad; just sort of pedestrian.
Three stars.
Stepping down from the podium
You know, it's nice to be able to step away from the real world for a while. There are important things going on that one must keep tabs on, causes to support, but everyone needs a break. Thankfully, this month's F&SF, while it presents no absolute stand-outs, nevertheless presents no real clunkers, and it finishes at 3.4 stars—well above the 3-star line.
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.
![[November 30, 1968] Up, Up, and Around! (December 1968 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/681130cover.jpg?resize=575%2C372&ssl=1)
![[November 26, 1968] Warhol, Delany, Cornelius and Perversity <i>New Worlds</i>, December 1968](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/new-worlds-december-1968.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Cover by Gabi Nasemann
Picture by James Cawthorn
(And where would New Worlds be without a provocative photo or a mention of J. G. Ballard? This is an advertisement on the back cover.)
![[November 10, 1968] Ratings (December 1968 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/COVERREDUCED.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[November 6, 1968] Who's the one? (December 1968 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/681106cover.jpg?resize=471%2C372&ssl=1)
![[November 2, 1968] Role Models (December 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IF-1968-12-Cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner circa 1912.
Lise Meitner in 1963.
A previously unknown piece by the late Hannes Bok, probably the last new Bok cover ever.
He looks familiar. Art by Gaughan
Whatever it is, it ain’t natural. Art by Wood
Chief Wunnaara may be the only reliable person on the planet. Art by Virgil Finlay
More action exactly like the action in Part 1. Art by Gaughan
There’s the Zelazny we were promised. This issue really needed it.
![[October 28, 1968] Impressive at first glance… (November 1968 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681028cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[October 22, 1968] Hello Again! <i>New Worlds</i>, October & November 1968](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NW-October-November1968-scaled.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Cover by Malcolm Dean
Disturbance of the Peace by Harvey Jacobs
Article: Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
by Malcolm Dean
Biographical Note on Ludwig van Beethoven II by Langdon Jones
And again, something that’s been missing from recent issues, those pictures of strange artwork. This new version has buildings with patterns of light and shadow – and of course, a naked lady. No explanation – I guess we are just meant to be inspired – or aroused. 2 out of 5.
Ah, poetry. 3 out of 5.
Cover by Gabi Nasemann
Area Complex by Brian Vickers
Pauper’s Plot by Robert Holdstock
Black is the Colour by Barry Bowes
How May I Serve You? by Stephen Dobyns
Crim by Graham Charnock
Article: Graphics for Nova Express by Richard Wittern
Sub-Synchronization by Chris Lockesley
Baa Baa Blocksheep by M. John Harrison
Book Reviews: The Impotence of being Stagg by R. G. Meadley and M. John Harrison 
![[October 20, 1968] Giants among Men (November 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/681020cover.jpg?resize=672%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)
