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[March 4, 1970] Harry's Heroes (Nova 1, edited by Harry Harrison)

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A white man with dark short hair and a dark van dyke beard sits on a yellow couch reading a fantasy periodical.  A window in the background shows an empty suburban street.
by Brian Collins

It seems that between Harlan Ellison’s massive (that is, quite bloated) Dangerous Visions and Damon Knight’s Orbit series, original anthologies are here to stay; not only that, but we’re starting to see more of them, albeit thankfully not on the same scale as Ellison’s book. Harry Harrison is nothing if not knowledgeable of the field we share, and he’s also been involved in nearly every aspect of SF publishing that I can think of. It helps, too, that he’s already released an original anthology, just last month actually, titled The Year 2000. I have to admit that calling this new anthology Nova 1 is a bit presumptuous, since it implies a guarantee of future entries in this new series; but time will tell if the number is unfortunate or not.

Nova 1, edited by Harry Harrison

The cover of Nova 1.  The title is written vertically in a 3-dimensional font.  The fronts of the letters are white and the sides are blue with white clouds. The title descends at a slant from top left to bottom right over a black background with many white stars.  At the bottom behind the number 1 is part of a large red circle, probably representing a nearby star or planet.  Next to the title is written in a blue plain font: An Anthology of original science fiction stories by Robin Scott, Robert Silverberg, Ray Bradbury, Gordon R. Dickson, James Sallis, Donald E Westlake, Piers Anthony, Brian W. Aldiss, and others.  Edited by Harry Harrison
Cover art by Johannes Regn.

Introduction, by Harry Harrison

Harrison quickly goes over what he sees as the history of SF, something I think each of us has heard a hundred times before at this point; but he just as quickly goes into justifying the existence of Nova 1. This is not a themed anthology, but simply what Harrison considers good fiction, which with a couple exceptions he had commissioned specifically for book publication. He puts aside fears held by me and others who have become jaded with New Wave excesses, saying, “Not that the stories [in this book] are overly nasty or overly sexy—or overly anything. They are just—if just is the word—excellent stories by the best science fiction writers around.” We’ll see about that.

No rating.

The Big Connection, by Robin Scott Wilson

On 42nd Street, in New York, two guys, only known as the Hairy One and the Maha, have been toying with and selling “modern” art. The Hairy One is an artist, you know. One day the Hairy One tries to make art out of some odd scrap machinery, “some experimental failure from the Naval Underwater Sound Observatory.” The results are SFnal, really “outasight,” and I guess they’re supposed to be funny. The dialogue is so filled with ridiculous hippy lingo that I have to think Wilson meant it as parody, but if so, it’s a little too much for my taste. There is also some light commentary on the relationship between the artist (the Hairy One) and the capitalist (the Maha), but it’s too slight and deliberately goofy. This whole thing will age like milk in a few years.

Did not make me laugh or even chuckle, but it didn’t offend me. Two stars.

A Happy Day in 2381, by Robert Silverberg

Overpopulation has been a popular subject as of late, and Silverberg gives us a take on it here. Charles Matterns is a “sociocomputator” who gives a visiting (from Venus) colleague a tour of Shanghai—not the city we now know, but a series of floors in a thousand-story building. The “sanctity of life” that conservatives whine so much about has apparently been taken to its logical (or maybe illogical) conclusion, with Earth’s population now estimating 75 billion. Abortion and even birth control are strictly taboo. But, of course, Mattern insists the people who live in these city-buildings are very happy—except for a few “flippos,” those who do not conform. The dialogue is mostly expositional, and the plot is almost nonexistent. There are a few, I guess you could say Silverberg trademarks present, such as his concerning interest in teenagers having sex with full-grown adults, but these are not to the story’s benefit.

I sort of hated it. One star.

Terminus Est, by Barry N. Malzberg

Call it a hunch, but I think Malzberg is unenthusiastic about NASA. “Terminus Est” takes place after a semi-aborted colonization effort, “the Moon boondoggle,” with only about a hundred so-called bohemians staying. The narrator is an astronaut who travels between Earth and the Moon, and all too happy to be retiring in a few months. A certain incident, involving murder, darkened his view of the whole affair. Malzberg actually appears twice in this book, the other being under his not-so-secret pen name K. M. O’Donnell. Reading his first story here, I got the sense that somehow I had read this sort of thing before, but also it’s such a little (only half a dozen pages) fireball of hatred that I have to say I was almost impressed with it. Almost.

Three stars.

Hexamnium, by Chan Davis

Davis has not been around for about a decade, but those who are old enough or have good memories may remember the occasional Davis story in the ‘40s and ‘50s. “Hexamnium” starts as if it’s about to give us something hard-boiled, like Malzberg’s (first) story, but it ends up being much more bittersweet, about a teen boy from Earth being introduced to a team of fellow teens who have been raised from infancy to live in zero gravity. The mode of narration here, in which Emilio, one of the zero-gravity kids, narrates directly to the reader, takes some getting used to, but I think I understand the rationale behind it. This is a reasonably effective coming-of-age story, about a bunch of kids crossing the shadow-line into maturity, with some precious things being gained and other things, no less precious, being forever lost.

Four stars, and I hope this signals Davis’s return to writing SF.

And This Did Dante Do, by Ray Bradbury

This is a poem that was originally published in some magazine a few years ago, making it a reprint. Harrison, in his introduction, makes excuses for why Bradbury has barely written any fiction in the past several years, although he neglects to mention that he couldn’t even procure an original piece from the much overpraised writer. It strikes me as painfully obvious that the Bradbury who wrote The Martian Chronicles and The October Country has long since skipped town. Anyway, this poem, taken strictly as poetry, is bad, in that when read aloud it often grates on the ear. At least the punchline is cute and almost got a chuckle from me.

Two stars.

The Higher Things, J. R. Pierce

Stanley G. Weinbaum would be celebrating his 68th birthday next month, had cancer not taken him back in 1935. A recurring character of Weinbaum’s, the mad scientist Professor Manderpootz, emerges from hibernation thanks to Pierce’s story, which functions on the one hand as an exercise in mimicry, but also as an ode to the late Weinbaum. It’s effective—honestly, it works a lot better than it should. Manderpootz relates a story of how he traveled into the far future and encountered a humanity that had given up physical reality in favor of highly advanced psi powers, and I have to admit the whole thing sparked my own imagination. Pierce’s style here is “pulpy” and a bit stilted, but that is indeed the point.

Four stars.

Swastika!, by Brian W. Aldiss

Hitler is not only alive but enjoying “retirement” in Belgium, his suicide in 1945 having been faked. The narrator is a fellow named Brian (this detail took me out of the story for a bit), who is apparently a Nazi sympathizer and someone with connections. This is less a story and more of a Socratic dialogue, in which Aldiss uses Hitler to take pot shots at politicians and regimes he deems to have at least a touch of the Nazi in them. “President Nixon also has his better side,” says Hitler. Very funny, Aldiss. We also get shots at Reagan and Wallace, and the Soviets, the Cubans under Castro, and even the Israelis. The idea is that the Nazis may have lost World War II, but fascist militarism is alive and well. I’m sure Aldiss wrote “Swastika!” in an afternoon and hardly bothered to revise it, but it gets the job done.

Three stars.

The Horars of War, by Gene Wolfe

Harrison says in his introduction that Wolfe is a Korean War veteran, which I certainly find both believable and relevant to this story. Androids, or robots that both look like and think like (although not exactly like) humans, have mostly replaced soldiers in the future. There’s even a robot tank called Pinocchio. Despite the pun of the title (it’s military jargon or something) and the fairy tale connections, this is a rather serious and philosophical story, about the blurry dividing line between “us” and “the Enemy,” along with the line between humans and robots. While the last few pages, in which Wolfe finally lays all his cards on the table, are splendid, I do wish it was overall a more engrossing reading experience. Wolfe has the right ideas, but he needs to work on narrative pacing and really building up his characters. This is one of those stories that becomes fonder in one’s memory than when one is in the midst of reading it.

I would say three stars, but the premise and ending are strong enough that I feel compelled to bump it up. So, barely four stars.

Love Story in Three Acts, by David Gerrold

You may recall that Gerrold wrote arguably the funniest episode in the dearly departed Star Trek, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” He certainly has an ear for humor, but “Love Story in Three Acts” also sees him turn more to romantic sentiment. A middle-aged man’s wife orders a newfangled piece of computer machinery that would, get this, guide them in their sex life, because apparently the wife has been sorely disappointed with her man’s performance as of late. It’s not nearly as funny as the aforementioned Trek episode, and it also becomes a little too saccharine for my taste; but it certainly has its charm, and it’s that rare “modern” SF story that posits that maybe technology really can do good for the human spirit in some way.

Three stars, you could say one for each “act.”

Jean Duprès, by Gordon R. Dickson

French-Canadian settlers have become farmers and soldiers on the planet Utword, which has its own dominant sentient race, with their own customs and concerns about the intruders. The titular character is a human boy who was born on Utword, alongside the aliens, and thus is most understanding of their ways. Ah, but tragedy and battle ensue! I can’t think of titles off the top of my head, but I feel like Dickson has written just this sort of story before elsewhere—probably more than once. Colonizers bumping heads with alien (read: indigenous) populations is clearly a topic that strikes a chord with him, and while his assumptions about colonizers (that they’re basically good people who are simply tragically misguided, rather than people working within a framework that by its nature damages both mankind and the natural world) strike me as overly generous, even romantic, I understand the appeal. Still, it doesn’t help that this is the longest story in the book, and Dickson doesn’t really venture outside his wheelhouse.

Three stars.

In the Pocket, by K. M. O’Donnell

This is Barry Malzberg’s other story, under the not-so-secret pen name of K. M. O’Donnell. Anyway, as with “Terminus Est,” this one is brief but bleak. The narrator is a “messenger” who works to excise cancer from patients he’s been assigned to, so that he functions as a kind of orderly. He tells the story of when he cared for one elderly man, named Yancey, whom the narrator came to despise. In part this strikes me as a retelling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but it does ask a few tough questions regarding a future in which cancer really can be removed via the touch of human hands. It’s a mood piece, one so dark and on-edge with so little really to latch onto that I could not bring myself to care about what was happening in-story, even as I was considering its philosophical weight.

Barely three stars.

Mary and Joe, by Naomi Mitchison

This is the other reprint to be included, except it’s even older than the Bradbury poem. The idea is that the titular characters are a married couple working to save their daughter’s life via an unlikely solution, which somehow works; how it worked out is thus saved for the final reveal, as opposed to whether the daughter lives or not. One positive thing I can say is that the science is believable, to the point where I’m convinced we’ll see something like Mitchison’s “solution” here in, say, the next 25 years or so. The problem is that “Mary and Joe” barely functions as a short story, and by the end I got the feeling that it’s incomplete somehow, as if ripped violently from a larger narrative. It’s a shame, because Mitchison is the only woman included here.

Frankly I don’t see much of a point to it. Two stars.

Faces & Hands, by James Sallis

As with the Wolfe story, this is about a war in the future, although this time it’s an interplanetary war, between Earth and Venus. There’s even an alien race of feathered humanoids, and that, combined with the melancholy tone of the whole thing, make me wonder if Sallis had already read the Margaret St. Clair 1951 story “Brightness Falls from the Air.” Sallis’s story unfortunately lacks the conciseness and grace of St. Clair’s, despite working with similar material. “Faces & Hands” is split into sections, taking place both before and after the war, and despite not being the longest story in Nova 1, it certainly feels the longest. Sallis is a very young writer, I think only 25, and he does show ambition, the problem thus being that his reach, at least for now, far exceeds his grasp.

A strong two stars, for what that's worth.

The Winner, by Donald E. Westlake

Revell is an anti-social man being held in a futuristic prison, a place that is supposed to be inescapable. We then follow his battle of wills with his overseer, Wordman, who’s set up traps so that Revell will have to give in and become a good obedient prisoner. This sounds a bit like that show The Prisoner, right? Granted, Westlake’s story is a lot less surreal and much smaller in scope than that series, but both are allegories about the institution versus the individual. In both cases, the author (or creator, in Patrick McGoohan’s case) very much sides with the individual. Only nominally SFnal, but it’s fine for what it is.

Three stars.

The Whole Truth, by Piers Anthony

Just last year, Anthony came in with Macroscope, which I still think is one of the best and most fascinating SF novels in recent memory. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re back to business as usual, because “The Whole Truth” is quite bad. Leo MacHenry is a space ranger who picks up a woman named Nevada, who may or may not be a spy working for a hostile alien race. Harrison’s introduction mentions the lady-and-the-tiger routine, but I was also thinking of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.” Leo is a pervert whose dilemma with how to handle Nevada mostly comes from whether he wants to kill her, take her prisoner, or have sex with her. I really could not stand either of these characters or their situation.

I loathed it, especially the ending. One star.

Conclusion

Harrison's idea was to start a new series of original anthologies, not based on a theme but simply to publish what he feels are some of the best short SF money can buy. Of course, all anthology editors want to collect only what they think is the best, unless they happen to be lazy; or you might have Damon Knight with the Orbit books, where he seems to think experimentation matters more than literary value. Harrison seems to have sympathies for both the New Wave and the "old guard," but if this Nova series is to be successful I think he should narrow his criteria for "good" SF a fair amount. Both of the reprints here being weak doesn't help either. If original anthologies are to have their own seat at the table that is the market, I think those in charge (and Harrison and Knight are very bright, talented fellows) should try to be more discerning.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 10, 1970] Time On My Hands (February 1970 Fantastic)

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photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

What Time Is It?

That's a question that you can answer with more confidence than before, if you're willing to shell out a whole bunch of bucks.  On Christmas Day the Japanese company Seiko introduced the world's first quartz wristwatch.  (There have been clocks using quartz crystals, but not anything this small.)

As I understand it, quartz crystals vibrate in a precise manner when voltage is applied to them.  Thus, the tiny bit of quartz inside the watch, powered by an itty-bitty battery, provides an unvarying pulse that supplies extraordinary accuracy.

The Quartz Astro 35SQ keeps time to within five seconds per month, which is said to be about one hundred times better than a mechanical watch of good quality. 

The catch?  You have to pay 450,000 yen for it.  That's well over one thousand dollars.  You can buy a nice new car for the price of two watches.

photograph of a gold watch with a brown leather strap. In the center of the face, letters spell out Seiko-Astro
Quite a stocking stuffer.

If you like, you can use your fancy new timepiece to measure how long it takes to peruse the latest issue of Fantastic.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

Or maybe the publishers can measure how much time they saved by copying the cover art from yet another issue of Perry Rhodan instead of waiting for an artist to create a new one.

Cover of Fantastic: illustration of a spacesuited man on a pink lunar surface grappling with a blue robotic, treaded tank with a big eye stalk and two grasping tentacles.
The title translates to The Cannons of Everblack.  Note the use of English for what I presume is the name of a planet.

Editorial, by Ted White

This wordy introduction wanders all over the place.  The editor states that the magazine is getting a lot more mail from readers.  (See the letter column below.) He says that he doesn't like the name of the magazine, and suggests changing it to Fantastic Adventures, the name of the old pulp magazine from which reprints are often drawn.  (The sound you hear is me screaming No!)

He discusses the old problem of defining science fiction as distinguished from fantasy.  The essay winds up complaining about an article by Norman Spinrad that appeared in the girlie magazine Knight.  Apparently Spinrad griped about SF fans and pros being hostile to the New Wave.  Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me.

No rating.

Double Whammy, by Robert Bloch

The author of Psycho leads off the issue with another shocker.


Illustration by Michael Hinger.

A guy who works at a sleazy carnival is afraid of the geek.  If you don't know what a geek is, you haven't read William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, or seen the movie adapted from it the next year.

A geek is an alcoholic who has fallen so low that the only work he can get is pretending to be a so-called wild man and biting the heads off live chickens. 

Our slimy protagonist seduces a teenager.  When she tells him she's pregnant, he refuses to marry her, leading to tragic results.  The girl is the granddaughter of a Gypsy fortuneteller, who has a reputation for supernatural revenge.

This is an out-and-out horror story that may remind you of the 1932 film Freaks. (Like that controversial film, it features a man without arms or legs.) The author saves his final punch to the reader's gut until the last sentence.  If you don't like gruesome terror tales, it may be too much for you.  I thought it accomplished what it set out to do very effectively.

Four stars.

The Good Ship Lookoutworld, by Dean R. Koontz

This space opera begins with a fight to the death between a human and a weird alien, apparently just as a sporting event.


Illustration by Ralph Reese.

This violent scene is just a prelude to a yarn in which the triumphant human recruits the narrator (another human) to join him in a mission to salvage a derelict alien starship.  The vessel was operated by an extinct species of extraterrestrials who seem to have been nice folks.  They just traveled around the universe bringing entertainment.  Too bad a disease wiped them out.

The starship turns out to contain the headless skeletons of its crew.  That's mysterious and scary enough, but when our heroes journey back to their homebase in it, parts of the ship disappear, one by one.  Can they survive the long voyage before the whole thing vanishes?

This is a fast-paced adventure story with a twist in its tail.  Given a few clues, you might be able to figure out the surprise ending.  It's a little too frenzied for me, but short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Three stars.

Learning It at Miss Rejoyy's, by David R. Bunch

The narrator has dreamed about visiting the place named in the title since childhood, when his dad told him about it.  The stunningly desirable Miss Rejoyy promises him an intimate encounter with her if he can meet the requirements.  He has to pay to enter a room where his reactions to pain and pleasure will be measured.

The narrative style is less eccentric than usual for this author.  The content, however, is just as strange.  There are some really disturbing images.  The point of this weird allegory is a very pessimistic one, which is likely to turn off many readers.  Still, it has an undeniable power.

Three stars.

Hasan (Part Two of Two), by Piers Anthony

Here's the conclusion of this Arabian Nights fantasy.


Illustrations by Jeff Jones.

Summing things up as simply as I can, the title hero went through many adventures before stealing away with a woman who could turn herself into a bird, hiding the bird skin that gave her this power.  More or less forced to marry him, she had two sons with him.  She eventually found the skin and flew off to her native land with the children.

In this installment, he sets off on an odyssey to find her.  This involves a whole lot of encounters with strange people and supernatural beings.  In brief, he gets involved with a magician, rides a horse that can run over water, rides on the back of a flying ifrit, meets a group of Amazon warriors, faces an evil Queen, takes part in a huge battle, and witnesses an explosive climax.


Some of the many characters in the story.

A wild ride, indeed.  This half of the novel has a fair amount of humor.  The magician and the ifrit are particularly amusing.  The plot turns into a travelogue of sorts, as Hasan journeys from Arabia to China, then to Indochina and Malaysia, winding up in Sumatra.


A helpful map allows you to follow the hero's travels.

A lengthy afterword from the author explains how he changed the original story from One Thousand and One Nights.  He also offers several references.  One can admire his scholarship. 

The resulting story is entertaining enough.  I'm still a little disconcerted by the fact that Hasan kidnaps the bird woman, and that she eventually decides that she loves him anyway.  A product of the original, I suppose.

Three stars. 

Creation, by L. Sprague de Camp

This is a very short poem about various legends concerning the creation of humanity by an assortment of deities.  It leads up to a wry punchline.  Not bad for what it is.

Three stars.

Secret of the Stone Doll, by Don Wilcox

The March 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this tale of the South Seas.


Cover art by J. Allen St. John.

The narrator winds up on a paradisical Pacific island.  He falls in love with a local beauty after rescuing her from drowning. 


Illustrations by Jay Jackson.

Everything seems to be hunky-dory, but his new bride insists that she must make a journey to a part of the island kept separate from the rest by a stone wall.  Because the islanders have a strong taboo against discussing fear or danger, she can't tell him what it's all about.  Along the way, they meet a madman with a sword and the object mentioned in the title.


Apparently, he's a visitor to the island, just like the narrator.

I found this exotic, mysterious tale quite intriguing.  The revelation about the woman's journey surprised me.  (There's an editor's footnote — I assume it's from the original publication — that tries to offer a scientific explanation.  This is just silly, and the story works much better as pure fantasy.  The new editor's suggestion that it relates to something in Frank Herbert's Dune also stretches things to the breaking point.)

Maybe I'm rating this story higher than it might otherwise deserve because I wasn't expecting much from this issue's reprint.  Unlike a lot of yarns from the pulps, it isn't padded at all, with a fairly complex plot told in a moderate number of pages.  Anyway, I liked it.

Four stars.

According to You, by Various Readers

As the editorial said, there are a lot of letters.  Bill Pronzini offers an amusing response to a reader who didn't like his story How Now Purple Cow in a previous issue.  I didn't care for it either, so I'm glad he's a good sport about criticism.

The other letters deal with all kinds of stuff, besides talking about what kind of stories they want to see (offering proof that you can't please everybody.) One speculates about a combination of Communism and Christianity.  (The editor dismisses this as unlikely.) Many react to an editorial in a previous issue about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers TV show.

No rating.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Alexander Temple

Just like Fred Lerner did in the last issue, Leiber praises Lin Carter's Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings for its history of fantasy fiction, and condemns Understanding Tolkien by William Ready, while admitting that it has a few good insights.  He praises The Quest For Arthur's Britain by Geoffrey Ashe and Isaac Asimov's The Near East: 10,000 Years of History as fine nonfiction books with subjects relating to fantasy fiction.

Temple very briefly discusses The Demons of the Upper Air, a slim little book of poems by Leiber.  It's a lukewarm review, talking about his occasional careless choice of words . . . hardly to be compared with his prose and recommends it for Leiber fans only.

Worth Your Time?

This was a pretty good issue, with nothing below average in it.  I imagine others will dislike some of the stories, but I was satisfied.

While admiring your new thousand dollar watch, don't forget to get a new calendar as well.  I wonder how long I'll be writing 1969 on checks.


Did you make it to either of these groovy concerts?

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 8, 1969] Arabesques (December 1969 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

From Arabia to Japan

The collection of Middle Eastern folktales known in English as Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights is familiar to folks all over the world.  Case in point, as Rod Serling might say, is the recent Japanese animated film Senya Ichiya Monogatari, which is loosely based on the collection.


Japanese poster for the film.  I don't know if it will ever show up elsewhere.

I should point out that this is not a cartoon intended for children.  Like the work which inspired it, it contains considerable erotic material.  If it ever gets released in the USA, it might get the infamous X rating.

I bring this up because the latest issue of Fantastic contains the first part of a new novel inspired by the same source as the film.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck

As is often the case lately, the cover is (ahem) borrowed from a German publication.


Die Herrscher der Nacht (The Ruler of the Night) is the title of the German translation of Jack Williamson's 1948 novel Darker Than You Think.

Editorial, by Ted White

The editor begins by telling us how the magazine's lead serial (see below) fell into his hands.  Long story short, it failed to find a publisher, got reviewed in a fanzine, Ted White read it and liked it.  He then goes on to relate the big changes in Fantastic and its sister publication Amazing.  My esteemed colleague John Boston has already discussed this in detail, so let me give you the Reader's Digest version.  Higher price, more words, only one reprint per issue.  Nuff said.

No rating.

Hasan (Part One of Two), by Piers Anthony


Illustrations by Jeff Jones.

More than half the magazine consists of the first installment of this Arabian Nights fantasy adventure. 

Hasan is a rather naive and foolish young man, living in Arabia around the year 800 or so.  He meets a Persian alchemist who demonstrates how to turn copper into gold.  His mother warns him not to trust this fire-worshipping infidel, but Hasan's greed overcomes what little common sense he possesses.

The wicked Persian kidnaps him and takes him on an ocean journey to the island of Serendip. (We call it Ceylon nowadays—the magazine provides a helpful map).

Despite this, Hasan still trusts the alchemist enough to perform the dangerous task of being carried to the top of a mountain by a roc, in order to gather the stuff needed to transform copper into gold.  The poor sap doesn't realize that the Persian intends to leave him stranded on the peak, where he'll starve to death.

Suffice to say that, with a lot of dumb luck, Hasan makes his way to an isolated palace inhabited by seven beautiful sisters, who adopt him as their brother.  He goes on to witness birds change into even more beautiful women, one of whom he is determined to have for his bride.  (She has little say in the matter.)


Seeing her naked while she is bathing makes him fall madly in love.

Without giving away too much, let's just say that the further adventures of Hasan and the bird woman will appear in the next issue.

The author appears to be well acquainted with One Thousand and One Nights, given his accompanying article on the subject (see below.) As far as I can tell, he captures the flavor of this kind of Arabian folktale in a convincing way.  Despite the fact that the hero is kind of a dope, and that the female characters (except Hasan's long-suffering mother) mostly exist to be alluringly beautiful, this half of the novel makes for light, entertaining reading.

Three stars.

Morality, by Thomas N. Scortia


Illustration by Bruce Jones.

It's obvious from the start that this is a science fiction version of the myth of the Minotaur, although the author doesn't make this explicit until the end.  The legendary monster is an alien stranded on Earth, forced to serve an ambitious king while trying to contact his own kind.

There's not much more to this story than its retelling of the old tale.  It plays out just as you'd expect.

Two stars.

Would You? by James H. Schmitz

A wealthy fellow invites an equally rich acquaintance to make use of a magic chair.  It seems that it has the ability to allow the person seated in it to change the past. 

I hope I'm not revealing too much to state that neither man chooses to alter his past, preferring to leave well enough alone.  That seems to be the point of the story.  A tale of fantasy in which an enchanted object is not used is unusual, I suppose, if not fully satisfying.

Two stars.

Magic Show, by Alan E. Nourse

A couple of guys watch a magic show at a cheap carnival.  One of them heckles the magician, who invites him to take part in his greatest feat.

You can probably see where this is going.  No surprises in the plot.  I have to wonder why a real, powerful magician works at a lousy little carnival.

Two stars.

X: Yes, by Thomas M. Disch

An unspecified referendum always appears on the ballot in every election.  Everybody knows that the proper thing to do is vote No.  A woman chooses to vote Yes, just as children vote Yes during their mock elections.

Can you tell that this is an odd little story?  I'm not sure what the author is getting at, unless it's something about conformity and rebellion.  At least it's not a simple, predictable plot.  Food for thought, I guess.

Three stars.

Big Man, by Ross Rocklynne

The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this wild yarn.


Cover art by J. Allen St. John.

I can't argue with the accuracy of the title.  A gigantic man — he's said to be one or two miles tall — walks through the Atlantic Ocean to Washington, D. C.  The behemoth is under the control of a Mad Scientist, who intends to take over the United States government and run things the way he thinks they should be run.


Illustration by Robert Fuqua.

It's up to a heroic pilot and his girlfriend (who, in an incredible coincidence, turns out to be the sister of the young fellow who was transformed into the giant) to defeat the Mad Scientist and end the reign of terror of the Big Man.

Boy, this is a goofy story.  I think the author saw King Kong too many times.  The premise is, of course, absurd, and it's treated in the corniest pulp fiction manner imaginable.

One star.

Alf Laylah Wa Laylah — A Essay on The Arabian Nights, by Piers Anthony

As part of the magazine's Fantasy Fandom column, this article is reprinted from the fanzine Niekas.  It discusses One Thousand and One Nights in detail, comparing English translations and offering examples of the kinds of tales it contains.  Copious footnotes, some serious and some playful.  The author clearly knows his subject.

Three stars.

Fantasy Books by Fritz Leiber and Fred Lerner

Leiber quickly gives a positive review of Captive Universe by Harry Harrison, praises Walker and Company for reprinting science fiction classics in handsome hardcover editions, defends the use of strong language in Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, gives thumbs up to A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle, and talks about Eric R. Eddison's fantasy novels.  He ends this rapid-fire essay by comparing the way that Heinlein, Spinrad, and Eddison describe a woman's breasts.  (The latter excerpt is a really wild bit of outrageously purple prose.)

Lerner, in an article reprinted from the fanzine Akos, talks about two nonfiction books about J. R. R. Tolkien.  He dismisses Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings by William Ready as poorly written and overly interpretive, and praises Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter for its discussion of epic fantasy in general.

No rating.

… According to You, by various

The letters from readers offer both praise and criticism.  One of the editor's replies reveals that sales of the magazine went down when Cele Goldsmith was in charge, even though the quality of fiction improved.  I hope that's not a bad omen for the way Ted White is taking the publication.

No rating.

Worthy of Scheherazade?

Not a great issue, although Anthony's novel and related essay are well worth reading.  The new stuff is so-so and the reprint is laughably poor.  It might be better to watch an old movie instead.




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 6, 1969] I Can See For Miles (Piers Anthony's Macroscope)

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by Brian Collins

No, this is not Galactoscope, which is still a week-and-a-half off, but a review (I suppose in keeping with the subject's rather large girth) presented on its own.

Last year, I believe almost to the day, we got Piers Anthony’s previous novel, Omnivore, which I reviewed a few months later. (There are so many paperbacks out now…) I didn’t like it, but it was, at the very least, a step up from Chthon and Sos the Rope—mind you that the bar was basically on the floor. I was not looking forward to Macroscope, his latest novel, and yet I have to admit, when I weighed this new paperback in my hands (480 meaty pages, courtesy of Avon), I was… morbidly curious. Macroscope is longer than Anthony’s previous two novels combined, and while it certainly feels that way, it also shows Anthony putting a very different level of effort in his writing craft. For better or worse, it will no doubt be one of the most memorable SF releases of 1969.

Macroscope, by Piers Anthony

Cover art by Charles Santore.

Ivo Archer is a 25-year-old wanderer who has been struggling to make it in life, on account of being visibly of mixed racial features (taboo today and apparently still the case in the 1980 of the novel’s world), but he’s about to be given some direction when he reunites with an old friend, Brad Carpenter. Ivo and Brad were classmates of a sort, in what is only called “the project,” an ambitious eugenics program in which, over the course of two generations, people were carefully bred to have mixed racial heritages, in the hopes that such a program would produce geniuses. It did not—for the most part. Ivo has a pretty decent IQ of 125, but Brad is a genius, with an IQ of over 200, the only problem being he hides his intelligence (as well as the fact that he isn’t completely white) around his current girlfriend, Afra Glynn Summerfield. Afra is a Georgia girl with (by her own admission) prejudiced views on race, as well as a strange preoccupation with intelligence: people less intelligent than her bore her, but then she also resents people who are too smart, hence Brad’s secrecy. For Ivo it’s love at first sight with Afra, which is hopeless given that Afra is already taken, is a racist, and would find Ivo’s intelligence unimpressive.

This brings us to the macroscope, which itself ends up being rather tangential to the plot, but the idea is that it serves the exact opposite function of a microscope: rather than give detailed images of extremely small objects it gives detailed images of extremely large objects that are also extremely far away. It also serves as a kind of time viewer. The macroscope doesn’t use light, but rather a particle Anthony made up called macrons, which provide both efficiency and clarity, allowing people on the macroscope station to not only view life on other worlds vividly but to view these worlds as they were thousands or millions of years in the past. The good news is that there is (or at least was) intelligent life on other planets; the bad news is that these alien races have invariably gone downhill, even resorting to cannibalism on a mass scale. Why? The answer seems to be a one-way signal coming from an unknown distant planet, no doubt an intelligent race, called “the destroyer,” which if intercepted would turn any intelligent being with an IQ of over 150’s brain to jelly. The higher one’s IQ, the harsher the effect. Brad finds this out, quite tragically, although Ivo suspects his friend wanted to commit mental suicide. But with the loss of one of the station’s top minds, and perhaps more importantly a visiting US senator with a similarly high intelligence, the UN looks to dismantle the station, and so the macroscope will be lost.

Unless it can be hijacked, somehow.

The barrier to entry with Macroscope is a bit high, because if what I just said regarding its plot sounds like gibberish, it is gibberish to some extent. This is the kind of mind-melting and yet far-ranging pseudo-science that A. E. van Vogt excelled at two decades ago, which sadly he no longer seems capable of delivering; but that doesn’t stop Anthony (truly an unexpected successor to van Vogt) from picking up that torch with grace. Nearly every type of science fiction you can think of worms its way into this (admittedly loose) narrative, from time travel (of a sort), to contact with aliens, to robotics (a helpful non-sentient robot named Joseph), to space opera, and even beyond all of those. Astrology, a total non-science which Anthony treats with a kind of disarming (or annoying, depending on who you are) reverence, is discussed extensively through Harold Groton, who spends much of his time lecturing Ivo and Afra (not to mention his wife Beatryx) on horoscopes and the intricate symbolic implications of star signs. Despite the monstrous length of the thing, we’re mostly stuck with four characters (Brad being written out after the opening quarter), although there is a fifth, named Schön, whom Brad hopes can act as a workaround for the destroyer. Schön is a “primitive genius,” which is to say he is unspeakably intelligent but with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old, acting as the Kurtz to Ivo’s Charles Marlow, or as the mischievous god Pan lurking in the woods. There are so many twists and turns in how character relationships change over the course of the novel that I would be writing a dissertation in trying to describe them; and anyway, seeing Anthony get a surprising amount of mileage out of such a small cast of characters is part of the fun.

In terms of scale, Macroscope is easily the grandest SF novel I have read this year, to the point where it becomes dizzying. The closest I can think of as a comparison, aside from van Vogt’s glory days, would be John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar; but whereas that novel is a panorama, Macroscope is much more like a sandbox, in which Anthony has given himself some very fine toys to play with. This is by no means a perfect novel, of course. For one, its jack-of-all-trades approach to subject matter means that aside from maybe astrology, nothing is dwelt on for too long or too thoroughly. A recurring issue I’ve had with Anthony also rears its ugly head, if only for a relatively short time here, in the form of his ogling at women. There’s a protracted and rather wince-inducing scene in which, for plot-related reasons, Ivo is “forced” (by that I mean the author is forcing his character’s hand) to feel all over Afra’s body, in great detail. Thankfully nothing quite like this happens again, but I suppose Anthony had to do such a thing to remind us that it was indeed he who wrote this novel. On the positive side, while Afra starts out as a pretty thorny piece of work, she ends up being by far the most psychologically complicated of Anthony’s female characters (I understand that, again, the bar was low), to the point where she becomes as much a protagonist as Ivo. The length can also border on terminal, with the final chapter alone being over a hundred pages long(!), and this last stretch being (excuse my French) such a "clusterfuck" that the reader may become worried about whether there is a light at the end of that tunnel.

As you can see, this is a lot of science fiction for $1.25. Anthony had enough ideas for a few short novels but decided to weave them together in a way that borders on masterful. It is, if nothing else, deeply intriguing and intoxicating, even taking the bogus science into account. It’s a novel that somehow tackles both inner and outer space, being a space opera that’s also a voyage to the center of one man’s psyche. It is like 2001: A Space Odyssey if written by someone who is much more enthusiastic about “free love” and astrology than Arthur C. Clarke can ever muster, being basically a fable about mankind’s maturity and finding a place in the known universe. Macroscope is such a deeply strange and ambitious novel that even its flaws mostly retain a certain nobility, as if those flaws were reasons for buying a copy in the first place. I didn’t think Anthony had such a work in him, and there’s a decent chance he may never write another novel of this caliber.

It almost pains me to say this, but four stars. I see it getting a Hugo nomination, and possibly a Galactic Star nomination as well.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 4, 1969] Plus ça change (October 1969 IF)

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by David Levinson

Silly season

It’s considered a truism in journalism that nothing happens in August, so the papers run filler stories about silly things to make up their page count. Sure, Hurricane Camille killed hundreds as it raged from Mississippi to Virginia, and China and the Soviet Union are on the brink of war, but that doesn’t sell papers. Madison Avenue also has a truism: sex sells. Now, the two have come together.

Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was disgusted by the schlocky, sex-obsessed books that regularly make the best-seller lists, so he recruited a bunch of fellow journalists (19 men and five women, by one count) to write a deliberately bad, oversexed book. The result is Naked Came the Stranger, in which the editors worked hard to remove any literary value from the tale of a New York woman’s sexual escapades.

When the book sold 20,000 copies, McGrady and his co-conspirators decided they’d better come clean. Nineteen of them appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, being introduced as Penelope Ashe (the book’s purported author) and walking out to the strains of A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody. As a result of their confession and discussion of their motives, the book has become even more popular. And as of last Sunday, it’s on the New York Times list of best-sellers. You have to laugh to keep from crying.

Penelope Ashe, in part, with the cover model superimposed.

This puts me in mind of a similar literary hoax with a more sfnal connection. Back in 1956, radio host Jean Shepherd was unhappy with the way best-seller lists were being compiled and urged his listeners to ask their local bookstores to order I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. He offered some vague hints about the plot, and many listeners who were in on the joke created references to the book elsewhere. Demand was so high, publisher Ian Ballantine convinced Theodore Sturgeon to knock out a quick novel based on an outline from Shepherd. Betty Ballantine wrote the last chapter as Sturgeon lay in exhausted sleep on the Ballantines’ couch after trying to write the whole thing in one sitting. The cover by Frank Kelly Freas is full of visual jokes and puns. The book is rumored to have gone to number one, but it doesn’t seem to have been on any lists, probably out of pique on the part of the list makers.


The pub sign features a shepherd’s crook and a sturgeon. Art by Frank Kelly Freas

New and old

I think we’re starting to see some of the influence of new editor Ejler Jakobsson. Editor Emeritus Fred Pohl doesn’t seem have ever had anything nice to say about the New Wave, while there is at least one story in this month’s IF with a nod in that direction. There’s a new printer, with a crisper typeface (though it seems better suited to a news magazine than fiction). No one’s mixed up their e’s and o’s, but instead of lines being printed out of order, some lines are just missing. Hopefully, that will be corrected in future issues.

Supposedly for Seeds of Gonyl. If so, it’s from later in the novel. Art by Gaughan

The Mind Bomb, by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert appears to have tried to write a Philip K. Dick story. There’s a computer that keeps changing the world in an attempt to carry out its function, an unhappy marriage, and an old man who gets a glimpse of why the world he lives in is the way it is.

Art uncredited, maybe by Gaughan

Unfortunately, none of it works. The lines of reality aren’t blurred; people know the computer is changing things, just not why. And the marriage isn’t as unrelievedly grim as in a Dick story (thank goodness). We’re left with none of the good things that either author brings, and the flaws of both.

Two stars.

By Right of Succession, by Barry Malzberg

A man named Carson shoots the occupant of a motorcade. As he leaves the building he fired from, he’s met by a policeman who escorts him to his next destination on a strict timetable. Eventually, all is explained. Sort of.

Is that Nixon? Art uncredited

Here’s our New Wave—or New Wave-ish—story. It’s fine for what it is, but I don’t quite see the connection between the events and the explanation.

Three stars.

None But I, by Piers Anthony

When last we saw him, interstellar dentist Dr. Dillingham had been accepted as an instructor at the galaxy’s top dental school. Now he’s off to cure the oral ills of a long-buried robot that has vowed to kill the person that frees it from 10,000 years of imprisonment.

Dr. Dillingham meets his patient. Art by Gaughan

Anthony is developing a reputation at the Journey, and not a good one. That’s largely down to the way he writes women. Fortunately, none of that is on display here, possibly because the only female character is a highly efficient secretary who looks like a giant spider. We’re left with an inoffensive and mildly entertaining story, whose only flaw is that it specifically makes note of the old tale it is clearly modeled on of a genie with a similar vow.

Three stars.

Survival, by Steven Guy Oliver

A day in the life of an old man living in the irradiated ruins of a city.

Ignore the blurb. These aren’t the last people on Earth. Art by Gaughan

This month’s new author offers us a grim tale of life after World War Three. It’s very well written, but also very depressing, what I believe kids these days call “a real downer.” I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more from Oliver. But did I mention that the story is grim?

Three grim stars.

Down on the Farm, by W. Macfarlane

Three agricultural salespeople were brought from Earth to a distant planet. Now their contract is up, and the local autocrat who hired them struggles to find a way to pay what they’re due. Unbeknownst to him, they have ulterior motives.

Erasmus Ballod is having a bad day. Art by Gaughan

A bit old-fashioned, but otherwise an enjoyable enough story. Ask me what it was about a month from now, and I won’t be able to tell you, but it didn’t waste my time. For some reason, Macfarlane’s name was left off the first page; fortunately he was credited in the table of contents.

Three stars.

The Story of Our Earth: 2. The First Traces of Life, by Will Ley

The second part of Willy Ley’s sadly incomplete final book looks at the latest theories as to how life began. He discusses the idea of the “primordial ooze” and how and why it has fallen out of favor. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of continental drift.

While still very good, this chapter didn’t engage me quite as much as the previous did. I can’t say if that’s down to my interest in the subject matter or the quality of Ley’s treatment of it.

A very high three stars.

The Seeds of Gonyl (Part 1 of 3), by Keith Laumer

Jeff Mallory wakes up to discover that three months are missing, the house shows little sign of cleaning and maintenance, and his wife and two younger children are frightened and worn down. Worst of all, no one remembers his oldest daughter, and her room doesn’t even exist. He soon learns that the town has been taken over by things that are barely human, which force everyone to work on a mysterious project.

Remembering that his daughter was planning to stay with a friend who lives well outside of town, Jeff makes his escape. At the friend’s house, he finds only the friend and several unpleasant occupiers, who tell him that the United States has fallen to Russian forces and that his town is a bombed-out, plague-ridden ruin.

He and Sally, his daughter’s friend, move on and are arrested by Russian military. But the Russians are working together with Americans led by a Colonel Strang, who tells him that the Russians were called in to fight the real occupiers, the Chinese. As the installment ends, Jeff finds himself drafted into Strang’s army. To be continued.

Tonight, the role of Colonel Strang will be played by Ronald Reagan. Art by Gaughan

So far, so Laumer. He may be influenced by some of his work on those books he wrote based on The Invaders, what with people not believing in the invading aliens. Honestly, the main thing that stands out to me in this part is the way young Sally abruptly and quickly throws herself at our hero. Jeff put up at least a token resistance so far, though there is a vague paragraph that suggests things could be otherwise. It plays uncomfortably.

Three stars so far, if you like this sort of Laumer story.

To the Last Rite!, by Perry Chapdelaine

One-Girk-Two is undergoing a field test to see if he will be promoted to One-Girk-One. If he passes, he will become the thinking portion of a composite creature called a Unit.

Our hero. Art by Gaughan

This is probably the Chapdelaine story I’ve enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, like all of Chapdelaine’s work, it’s too long. On the other hand, it didn’t go where I thought it was going. Best of all, it has nothing to do with Spork.

Three stars.

Machines That Teach, by Frederik Pohl

Fred took a trip to Tennessee A. & I. In Nashville, where Perry Chapdelaine is a professor of mathematics and is running a lab researching computer aided instruction. There, through a computer in the lab, a computer at Stanford in California administered a test to measure competence in mathematics. Neat stuff, even if the headline is misleading. Maybe even more interesting is the simple fact that he was able to use a computer in Tennessee to interact with another computer a couple thousand miles away

Three stars.

Summing up

We’re starting to see some of the new editor’s influence, though things aren’t really that different. I’m wondering if Jakobsson is going to continue the IF first program, running a story from a new author every month. The issues he’s been in charge of have had such a story, but he hasn’t called attention to it the way Fred did.

The other thing that stands out to me is that the interior art is all uncredited. Where I’ve indicated it’s by Gaughan, it’s because his signature is visible either on the piece reproduced here or a different piece for the same story. I’m not too keen on all the art coming from just one artist (although if the alternative is “art” by Dan Adkins…). More importantly, they give out Hugos for art. If we don’t know who did it, how do we know who to nominate and vote for?

Tiptree is the only name that means anything to me. A bit of a coin flip as an author, but definitely improving with every story.




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[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)

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by Gideon Marcus

We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month.  Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production.  Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff!  Enjoy:

Double, Double, by John Brunner

From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.

The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.

Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.

The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.

In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.

Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.

All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.

Three stars.


by Brian Collins

For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.

Omnivore, by Piers Anthony

I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.

Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.

Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.

Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.

The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.

At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.

Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel


Cover by Albert Nuetzell

Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.

Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.

The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.

With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.

By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.

Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.


by Jason Sacks

The Star Venturers by Kenneth Bulmer

Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.

Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.

The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.

Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.

Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela

Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.

Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.

2.5 stars

The Fall of the Dream Machine by Dean Koontz

On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.

In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.

Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.

Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.

Dean Koontz

Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.

First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.

Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.

This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement.  Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.

Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.

3.5 stars.


by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Frontier of Going: An Anthology of Space Poetry, ed. By John Fairfax

Frontier of Going 1969 Cover

Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).

Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:

Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.

As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.

Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:

He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.

Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.

Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:

That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?

This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.

Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:

While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.

Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.

There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.

However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.

The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:

Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.

The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.

I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?

Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.

Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.


by Victoria Silverwolf

The Four Seasons

Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.

Springtime of Life

Spring is associated with youth. Our first novel is narrated by a teenager, and is obviously intended for readers of that age.

The Whistling Boy, by Ruth M. Arthur


Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.

The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.


Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.

Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.

An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.

Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.

In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.

Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.

Three stars (maybe four for teenyboppers.)

The Long, Hot Summer

Our next book takes its characters into a place of tropical heat.

Genesis Two, by L. P. Davies


Cover art by Kenneth Farnhill.

Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.

They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.

Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?

We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.

(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)

The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.

Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.

Three stars.

Autumn Memories

Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.

Isle of the Dead, by Roger Zelazny


Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon.

The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.


The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.

Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.

(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)

Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.

Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.

This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.

The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.

As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.

Four stars.

The Winter of Our Discontent

Winter has its own special beauty, but it is often seen as a dismal time. The characters in our final book face a bleak future indeed.

S.T.A.R. Flight, by E. C. Tubb


Uncredited cover art.

About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.

The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.

There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.

Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.

Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.

(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)

Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.

What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.

Three stars.

There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 8, 1969] Young Punks and Old Fogies (February 1969 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

I trust that singer Martin Gaye will forgive me for stealing the title of his current smash hit, which has been at the top of the American pop music charts since last month, and shows no signs of disappearing soon. (Gladys Knight and the Pips had a big hit with it not much more than a year ago, too.)


He's what's happening.

The reason for my musical theft is that certain information about the authors of the stories in the latest issue of Fantastic reached me through informal channels.

Open your ears, for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?
— Henry IV, Part 2

I'll explain when the time comes. Meanwhile, let's take a look at a very mixed bag indeed.

Catch A Wave

(OK, I'll apologize to the Beach Boys as well.)


Cover art by William Baker.

Wow! A new piece of art on the cover. The grapevine tells me editor Barry N. Malzberg is shaking things up at Fantastic.

The editorial by Robert Silverberg, the magazine's new associate editor (so long, former-editor-turned-associate-editor Harry Harrison), makes the case that there's plenty of room in the world of imaginative fiction for both Old Wave and New Wave. Hear, hear.

This issue, which contains ten new stories as well as four reprints, should prove an excellent test case for his thesis. We've got old-fashioned yarns as well as experimental works.

First of all is a new tale from an author who bridges the gap between the opposing Waves. (Don't try to tell me his 1950 story Coming Attraction isn't a Dangerous Vision!)

Richmond, Late September, by Fritz Leiber


Illustration by Bill Baker.

Near the end of his life, Edgar Allan Poe encounters a mysterious, beautiful woman with whom he becomes obsessed. Their conversation suggests that Poe has a premonition of the coming American Civil War. The conclusion hints at the woman's true identity.

As you'd expect, this is elegantly written. Leiber obviously knows and loves the works of fellow fantasist Poe. The story is full of references to Poe's tales and poems. (Some might say too many.) The denouement is nicely subtle.

It's not a major piece (calling it Fritz Leiber's Greatest Short Story in the table of contents is hardly accurate) but well worth reading. High three stars or low four stars? I'm prejudiced in favor of both Poe and Leiber, so let's go on the high end.

Four stars.

Any Heads at Home?, by David R. Bunch

Hollywood used to call actor/director Erich von Stroheim The Man You Love To Hate, because of his many villainous screen roles. The controversial works of David R. Bunch, back when the magazine was edited by Cele Goldsmith (later Cele Lalli), made him The Writer You Love To Hate in the eyes of many conservative readers. He's back in form here.

The insane narrator (shades of Poe!) relates how he took the head of his dead, filthy rich boss out of his grave so he could kick it around. A visit from the police isn't the only thing he should worry about.

The bare bones (pun intended) of the plot make it sound like an ordinary horror story. What makes it unusual is the author's unique style. His familiar quirks are here. Certain words are printed in ALL CAPITALS, often with EXCLAMATION POINTS! Bunch uses hyphens to create new words like leather-cloppy and stone-feather. The whole thing seems to be written in a frenzy.

Whether you like this stuff or not is a matter of taste. I think it's fairly effective.

Three stars.

Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!, by Clifford D. Simak

After that bit of New Wave, we go back to the Old. This story from one of the greats comes from the December 1950 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by James B. Settles.

A newspaper man finds out his alarm clock and watch are both an hour fast. Just an odd coincidence? Maybe, but then there's the guy who calls the newspaper to report a sewing machine moving down the street by itself. Not to mention the rat-like machines hiding in the newspaper office, and the fact that the protagonist's typewriter prints out messages to him.


Illustration by Leo Summers.

The grapevine tells me this story has already been reprinted quite a few times, under the less melodramatic title Skirmish. The premise may remind you of the Twilight Zone episode A Thing About Machines. It's not bad, but it stops right at a dramatic moment, leaving things unresolved.

Three stars.

Back we go to new stuff; no less than half a dozen brief yarns before it's reprint time again. (Note that these six stories lack any illustrations. Maybe most of the art budget was blown on the cover.)

All in the Game, by Edward Y. Breese

An unscrupulous fellow finds himself in an extremely luxurious afterlife. His every desire is satisfied. There's a twist.

Sound familiar? Then you've seen another episode of Twilight Zone, namely A Nice Place to Visit. At least Simak has the excuse that he came first!

Two stars.

The Castle on the Crag, by P. G. Wyal

The previous story was new, but very traditionally narrated. This one is not. It starts like a satiric fairy tale (we're told that a princess is a White Liberal, and thus values poverty above all else) but then it jumps forward multiple centuries at a time, in several brief sections of text. A tree grows out of the dead body of the princess, an abbey is built on the ruins of her castle, etc. It builds up to a modern horror.

The point seems to be that nothing is permanent. This is a strange, dark story with a couple of remarks about religion that may raise some eyebrows. Not exactly pleasant reading, but interesting.

Three stars.

The Major Incitement to Riot, by K. M. O'Donnell

The grapevine tells me K. M. O'Donnell is actually editor Barry N. Malzberg. This surreal yarn consists of multiple conflicting versions of what caused violence to break out during the display of the gigantic death mask of a deceased official.

Weird stuff. Don't ask me what it means. The image of the huge mask is haunting, if nothing else.

Two stars.

The Life of the Stripe, by Piers Anthony

The army is running out of the stripes they use to designate rank. A sergeant is busted down to buck private so his can be reused. After his death, everybody who wears the stripe comes to a bad end. Is there a way to end the curse?

Not much to this beyond the premise. As military satire, it's not exactly Catch-22.

Two stars.

Slice of Universe, by James R. Sallis

As far as I can tell, this story involves a couple of aliens who speak in a complicated, song-like manner because they have multiple tongues. Their starship is operated, in some manner or other, by self-pitying, homesick birds. They explore the universe to its very end.

That's a very poor synopsis, because this piece is more of a dream-like prose poem than anything else. As such, I found it intriguing, if a little confusing. The aliens are really alien, that's for sure.

Three stars.

Reason for Honor, by Robert Hoskins

After World War Three, a couple of soldiers are the only ones left out of their unit. They see enemy troops approach. The encounter leads to an ironic conclusion.

Pretty grim stuff. Effective enough for what it is.

Three stars.

The Closed Door, by Kendall Foster Crossen

Back to reprints. This one comes from the August/September issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Gaylord Walker.

The grapevine tells me that the author's first name, despite the way it is spelled in the original magazine and in this reprint, is actually supposed to be Kendell. Gotta watch those vowels.


Illustrations uncredited.

Anyway, what we have here is a futuristic locked room mystery. The detective even mentions Gideon Fell, a fictional solver of such mysteries created by author John Dickson Carr.


Whodunit?

A humanoid alien is murdered in his hotel room, despite the fact that the door can only be locked or unlocked by his hand. Does a torn piece of paper bearing the letters COO hold the key to the crime?

Boy, this is a lousy story. It fails as science fiction and as a mystery. The solution depends on things the reader can't possibly know. Give me Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw any day in the week.

One star.

The Origin of Species, by Jody Scott Wood

We interrupt our reprints for a couple of new pieces. (Again, no illustrations.)

Less than a page long, this one takes the form of a tirade by a tree-dwelling ape against those radicals who are walking on the ground and doing other outrageous stuff.

A satire about the previous generation (Old Wave?) complaining about those darn kids nowadays (New Wave?), I suppose. Whatever.

Two stars.

Grounds for Divorce, by Robert S. Phillips

A man goes to a lawyer asking to divorce his wife. It seems the fellow isn't satisfied with his sex life, compared to the images he sees of the old days.

You'll probably see the twist coming a mile away. A mildly Dangerous Vision.

Two stars.

This Planet for Sale, by Ralph Sholto

The pages of the July 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures supply this space opera.


Cover art by Walter Popp.

A couple of guys are in their spaceship, smuggling valuable cargo. Meanwhile, a father and daughter are in another spaceship. The two vessels run into an invisible planet that made its way into the solar system.


Illustration by Ernie Barth.

The daughter (in true science fiction fashion, this young adult woman is always called a girl) gets captured by the bad guy. The smuggler-turned-hero rescues her.

It all has something to do with the bad guy's plan to wipe out the indigenous population of the invisible planet and transport it somewhere else, in order to sell it to aliens. The bad guy also wants to do the same thing to Earth.

Pretty bad stuff. Nonsensical science, thud-and-blunder action. The nature of the smuggled cargo (kept concealed from the reader) solves everybody's problems (expect the bad guy, of course.)

One star.

The Day After Eternity, by Lawrence Chandler.

Another action/adventure yarn, this time from the February 1955 issue of the magazine.


Cover art by Henry Sharp.

The grapevine tells me that Lawrence Chandler was a house name (pseudonym shared by more than one writer.) Might be Howard Browne, might be Henry Slesar, might be somebody else. The grapevine doesn't know everything.


Illustration by Paul Lundy.

Another wandering planet comes into the solar system. This one seems to be stealing Earth's water. (Forget that. It has nothing to do with the plot.) Our manly hero and his manly buddies, plus a whole bunch of cannon fodder from other planets, set out to defeat the thing.

A telepathic psychiatrist comes along, because she's figured out that the planet is actually stealing minds. The cover illustration, for which the story was probably written, depicts a scene in which one of the buddies, who loves old cars, gets tricked by an illusion and blown up.

(At this point, I was reminded of Ray Bradbury's 1948 story Mars is Heaven!, which is much better.)

Everybody gets killed except the hero and the (ahem) girl. They bicker at first, but of course they wind up in love.

Two rotten old stories in a row. This one adds insult to injury by emphasizing the fact that the psychiatrist is old-fashioned because she doesn't expose her breasts.

One star.

Sour Grapes

There were some real stinkers in this issue, particularly the reprints from lesser known writers. Not all the new stuff was worthy either.

The grapevine tells me that Malzberg isn't happy with the magazine's reprint policy. Did he deliberately choose losers to make his point? The rumor mill also suggests that he won't be around long.

There were some decent stories here — it's hard to throw fourteen darts and not hit the target sometimes — but you might want to spend some time watching an old movie on TV instead.


This one is pretty good.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 20, 1968] A tale of two issues (September 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Split Personality

There's an interesting piece by Ted White in May's Science Fiction Review.  He talks about how the magazines are on a slow, inexorable decline due to a number of factors.  The biggest is that SF mags used to be just one subgenre of the myriad pulps, all of which had their lurid covers prominently displayed at every corner newsstand.  Sure, the SF pulps weren't exactly of a piece with their mystery, Western, and thriller brethren, but Joe Palooka didn't care, grabbing the most attractive issues.  So, SF thrived, making a profit even if it sold just 25% of a print run.


Note Astounding (now Analog) in the upper left and Amazing in the upper right

Then the pulps died in the 50s, partly due to changing tastes, mostly due to the collapse of American News Company, the main distributor for monthly mags (and comics).  The remaining SF mags were consigned to lesser shelves, all by themselves.  The average schmo got his entertainment from TV.

The profit mark has now risen to 50%–in other words, at least half of the issues printed must sell for the run to break even.  This makes it very risky for the mags to try to expand their market by printing more issues.  If they, say, print 50K and sell 35K, well and good.  But if they then print 200K and sell 96K…they've lost money on the run.

Add to that even SF people are losing interest in mags, lured by paperbacks and the new paperback anthologies, and dismayed (as I have been) by the declining quality of stories over the last ten years.  The only thing that keeps us subscribing is inertia and brand loyalty.  That'll wear off unless the magazines manage to turn the ship.

The magazines have been around for almost half a century.  Assuming they are around in the 21st Century, and if this trend continues, they will service an increasingly small fraction of the SF-interested community.  They will be like the horseshoe crab: living fossils, unchanged for 300 million years, clinging to life in a wildly different environment.

But that's all speculation.  For now, enough good stuff still comes out in the mags to keep me buying.  Though the high variability of the latest issue of F&SF may cause me to revisit that policy…

Over Hill and Dale


by Chesley Bonestell—this is the same nebula featured repeatedly in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor"

Ogre!, by Ed Jesby

It's been four years since Ed Jesby offered up his first tale, Sea Wrack, which was so-so.  His sophomore tale, Ogre!, is an improvement.

Knut the Ogre takes a nap sometime in the Middle Ages.  When he awakes, covered in loam and with mushrooms growing in his ears, he finds he has slept clear through to the 20th Century.  There (then), the seven-foot beast befriends a timid bookie on the run from the Mob.  You see, Ogres are actually misunderstood creatures, quite nice and mild despite the calumny heaped upon them by humans.

Together, Knut and the bookie (and the bookie's seamstress pal) hatch a scheme to get the bookie off the hook and out of the business.  And of course, it involves horses:

To Harry the plan seemed to be basically sound: after all the way to make money was on the races; there was no better way. You took bets or you made them, all other ways of earning a living were mysterious, square, or the result of inheritance.

It's really a charming tale, and it put me in a charitable mood for the rest of the issue.  More fool me…

Four stars.

Butterfly Was 15, by Gilbert Thomas

A scurrilous German scientist has learned how to manipulate others with the judicious use of electrodes and remote transmitters.  He meets his match when he locks horns with a traditional psychologist with methods of his own.

This is supposed to be a funny piece.  I found its themes of mind control and Ephebophilia to be thoroughly repellent.

One star.

Sos the Rope (Part 3 of 3), by Piers Anthony

Once again, we turn to our friend, Brian, who will likely never volunteer for anything ever again…


by Brian Collins

We now find ourselves in the final installment of the latest F&SF serial, but unfortunately it’s so long as to encompass nearly half the novel. We run into trouble before we’ve even jumped into the story proper, as the recap section commits the grievous sin of telling us about things that we have not been able to read for ourselves. At the end of the previous installment you may recall that Sos and Sol are about to fight in the battle circle to see who takes custody of Sola and Soli, Sol’s wife and adopted daughter respectively. Apparently, between installments, Sos lost the fight, and is now journeying up “the mountain” to commit ritual suicide.

I do not understand how this happened. It could be that Anthony had turned in an early draft of the novel and had intended to write the fight scene between Sos and Sol, but all the same, this is such a glaring oversight as to show incompetence. I was confused at first because I thought I had somehow missed the ending of the previous installment, but no, I had not missed anything; it’s just that the fight and its immediate aftermath were kept “offscreen.”

Now up to date, we find Sos who, naturally, does not die on his way up this freezing mountain, but falls unconscious and is rescued by a small society of people who are somewhere between the crazies (the civilized people) and the nomads who roam the wasteland. We come across the second major female character of the novel (foreboding music plays), who, as you would expect, goes unnamed at first. She’s a short athletic girl whom Anthony repeatedly calls childlike and “Elfen,” but also attractive, which makes me wonder if Anthony might be appealing to a certain subspecies of male reader here. The girl steals Sos’s bracelet and makes him work for it, all but forcing him into taking her as his wife. As if the institution of marriage were not already filled with holes, the system presented in this novel may be fit for ants, spiders, and other small invertebrates, but not actual humans.

Since this is at least theoretically the last stretch of the narrative, in which we find our hero at his lowest point before he rises from the darkness, I need not go into great detail as to what happens next—except for one thing: Sosa (for that is her name now) reveals that she’s been desperate to find a husband, having gone through several men already, because she feels great angst at not being able to produce a child. Infertility is often sad news, to be sure, but in a world where contraception is presumably hard to acquire, I can’t imagine this strikes Sos’s ears as too sad; after all, he’s still committed to Sola in his heart.

Piers Anthony seems to understand women about as much as I understand the inner workings of a submarine.

Having given up his rope in his fight with Sol (another major detail we are not told about until after the fact), Sos has not only regained his confidence but taken up fists as his new weapon. I don't recall if we get his new full name (as men in the novel’s world have a monosyllable followed by their weapon of choice), but Sos the Fist sounds…….

Anyway, there is an inevitable rematch, and this time Sos is victorious. The ending here implies that there may be a sequel in the works, but I’m not waiting to see what Anthony does next. 1 out of 5 stars for this installment, and barely 2 out of 5 stars for the novel.


by Gideon Marcus

Faunas, by L. Sprague de Camp

Someone in the zines was complaining that magazines never run worthy poetry anymore, that back in the golden days of the 50s, most of the pieces were memorable.

Keeping up the trend, De Camp offers up a snatch of doggerel comparing the titanic beasts of yore with the primate beasts of now.  Pretty pat stuff.

Two stars.

Harry's Golden Years, by Gahan Wilson

It is amazing the lengths to which people will go to maintain a sinecure.  Harry Van Deventer is the richest man in the world, senile and filled with infantile rage and a teen's hormones.  His hangers-on can only manage him by keeping his surroundings perfectly controlled—a willing nurse here, an emergency surgery to fix a day's incaution there.  But even a 24/7 watch can slip up…

It's hard to imagine a man both so utterly terrible and yet so rich and powerful that so many would endure so much to keep him alive.  But I suppose venality trumps all.

Three stars.

The Evaporation of Jugby, by Stephen Barr

Wadsworth Jugby is a big zero, a department store Vice President-without-portfolio, mediocre in every way.  He finally gets the opportunity to live life from a different perspective when his friend, Dan Byron, invents a psyche-swapping machine.  Intoxicated by his exchange, he eagerly agrees to expand the scope of the experiment, round-robining with six other folks.  The end is…well, given away by the title.

Fluff, with one funny line:

"Jugby could suggest a puzzled frown without lowering his eyebrows-some monkeys can do this."

Two stars.

The Dying Lizards, by Isaac Asimov

Last month, the Good Doctor had a terrific article on the dinosaurs.  This month, unfortunately, he indulges in speculation, which never works out well.

The topic this time 'round is the sudden death of the dinosaurs.  He advances various climatic and medical hypotheses, discarding each one in turn.  He poopoos the idea of mammals being "superior" as we existed alongside dinosaurs for most, if not all, of their tenure on Earth.  Asimov leaves off with the suggestion that an external event caused it, specifically a nearby supernova that spiked radiation-induced mutations.

Again, I have trouble seeing how the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and icthyosaurs and pleisiosaurs could all have destructive mutations but not the birds and mammals.  I think Ike's cute idea that dinosaurs evolved intelligence and killed themselves with powerful weapons, which would have occurred in the blink of an paleontological eye and thus escape excavation, is more plausible.

Three stars.

A Scare in Time, by David R. Bunch

The demarkations of time, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and centuries, have met in their onion dome.  Tired of being measured and metered by humanity, they plot their ultimate revenge…only to have it foiled by human ingenuity.

A cute modern fairy tale.  Three stars.

The Moving Finger Types, by Henry Slesar

Twilight Zone department: Legget couldn't figure out what was wrong with his life.  It was like his every move was laid down in a script, and he'd lost the page.  Little did he know, that's exactly what had happened.

A fun bit on predestination told in Slesar's competent screenwriter fashon.

Four stars.


by Gahan Wilson

Mixed feelings

You can see my problem.  If you read from either end of this issue, you've got a good 30 pages of material (and you can count Merril's book column, too, though I rarely agree with her assessments, and her tastes are drifting far afield of SF these days).  But if you read through the middle, that's a lot of one-star territory to slog through.  A lot.

Is half a loaf better than none?  More importantly, is it worth fifty cents a month?

Only you can decide…




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[July 22, 1968] Shades and Shadows (August 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Hail to the Chief

I mentioned a few months back that Tony Boucher, one of the original editors for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had passed away.  Because of the vagaries of publication, it took this long for F&SF to solicit eulogies for Tony and get them in print.  But a finer tribute, I can't imagine.

Some of SF's greatest luminaries pay their respects: Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Randall Garrett, Philip K. Dick, Avram Davidson…but what impressed me even more was how many prominent women authors appear, too–Judith Merril, Mildred Clingerman, Margaret St. Clair, Miriam Allen DeFord.  It is fitting that so many of the fond rememberers are women; F&SF, particularly in the Boucher years, was by far the biggest SF publisher of woman-penned SFF.

Those were great days, the Boucher reign, when virtually every issue was a winner (sort of like the Gold days at Galaxy).  And half the stories we picked for our anthology of SF by women from 1953-57, some of the very best science fiction of the time, came from the pages of F&SF.

It is a shame that the appearance of these names from yesteryear evoke a pang of loss perhaps greater than the passing of Mr. Boucher.  Except for a few notable rallies, F&SF has been on a slow, inexorable downward trend since 1959, it's last superlative year.  This issue is no exception.  While it is not crammed with wholly unworthy material, nor is it anywhere near the standards it used to maintain.

Let me show you…


by Gahan Wilson

The House that Tony Built

The Devil and Jake O'Hara, by Brian Cleeve

I was less than enthusiastic about Brian's last story about Old Nick, in which Satan is cast out of hell along with a lowly sidekick when the souls of Hell unionize and go on strike.  This one is a step downward.

All Lucifer needs to break the strike is one measly member of the damned who will cross the picket lines and turn the power back on in the underworld.  He sets his eyes on an Irish lush who sells his soul for a bottle of quality whiskey.  His daughter adds a few amendments to the deal, but it doesn't really matter.  Ultimately, the sot goes to Hell, though the result is not what the Prince of Darkness wants.

There's just too much affected dialect, meandering, and oh-so-cleverisms.  What could be a workable premise is, instead, tedious.  And this is from someone who likes Deal-with-the-Devil stories.

Two stars.

Sos the Rope (Part 2 of 3), by Piers Anthony

[As with last time, Brian has graciously offered to stand in so I don't have to suffer through Anthony's latest "masterpiece"…]


by Brian Collins

To show once again that democracy is a flawed system, Piers Anthony is now a Hugo nominee! I can scarcely fathom some people’s enthusiasm for his debut novel Chthon getting nominated for Best Novel. His second novel, Sos the Rope, may redeem itself by the final installment, but the chances of it recovering are not high. There is one positive that can be said of this middle installment immediately: it’s short.

Not much happens here, and at only about 25 pages there isn’t much opportunity for Anthony to bless us with his worst habits, all involving women. To recap, it’s America a good century after a nuclear catastrophe, and two rogues, Sos and Sol, agree to a one-year partnership while the latter builds a tribe, one combatant at a time. The two are good friends and respect each other as warriors, but Sos is weaponless while Sol is unable to beget children of his own. Their friendship is complicated when Sol’s wife in name only, Sola, takes a strong liking to Sos and the two eventually have sex behind Sol’s back, leaving Sola pregnant with Sos’s child. This is unfortunate for everyone, including the reader. But by now the one-year contract has run out and Sos and Sol agree to part ways, with Sos returning to a crazy-run hospital where he grew up and where he learned to read.

Another positive thing I can say is that since Sola is virtually absent in this installment, and since Sol only appears at the beginning and end, we’re taken away from the plot to be given more of an explanation as to the workings of this post-apocalyptic world. It’s during his time away from Sol’s tribe that Sos finally decides to take on another weapon—this one the long heavy rope of the title. It’s about halfway through the novel that we finally get the weapon that would become part of the hero’s name. I still cannot properly describe how much I object to the naming system Anthony concocted here. It only gets more aggravating when Sos eventually returns to the tribe and finds that Sol now has a daughter named—wait for it—Soli. Sos and Sola still want each other but the latter refuses to give up Sol’s name and Sol himself refuses to give up his adoptive daughter. A fight in the battle circle, possibly to the death, ensues!

Anthony still cannot write compelling action scenes, and he still cannot write women above the level of depicting them as instigators of doom. A recurring implication here is that Sos and Sol would turn out fine, at worst going down different paths amicably, if not for Sola’s meddling. At the same time I was not offended so much this time.

If I turn my head on its side I might be able to stretch this installment to 3 stars, because it is a relatively painless experience and even mildly enjoyable in a few places, but that implies a tepid recommendation and I can’t lie to readers like that. Strong 2 out of 5 stars.


by Gideon Marcus

The Twelfth Bed, by Dean R. Koontz


by Gahan Wilson

This one takes place in a futuristic rest home, where the aged are confined in their last years under the beneficent but iron care of robot wards.  One day, a young accountant is checked into the home by mistake.  Try as he might, he can't get out…until he brews a revolt.

Koontz is a writer with a lot of promise, and he did manage a 4-star tale last month, but most of his stories have some kind of issue.  For this one, it's that the setup is a bit too contrived to really engage sympathy.  Maybe it's supposed to be satire, but again, it plays things to straight if that's the case.  Moreover, I read a similar (and better) story in Fantastic three years ago (Terminal, by Ron Goulart).

Anyway, three stars, and keep trying Dean!

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Samuel R. Delany and Ed Emshwiller

Two of my more favorite people provide reviews of Kubrick/Clarke's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  They are interesting perspectives, one from a vivid fictioneer, and one from a gifted illustrator and artist. 

Chip (Delany) actually favored the original three-hour version that was cut within a week of its premiere, asserting that the irony of the HAL segment is sharper, and the disorientation of the weightlessness scenes settle in more viscerally.  I don't know if that kind of glacial pacing would have been an improvement, but on the other hand, the only time I felt even slightly restless when I watched the film was during the transit scene near the end, so maybe I missed out.

Emsh praises the effects and spends most of his time discussing them rather than the story, which he seems to find serviceable, if not stellar.

It's a better pair of reviews than, say, Robert Bloch's blistering affair (in which Bob calls the monolith a "cylinder" for some reason–sadly, I can't remember where I saw it.  A fanzine, I think.)

Four stars.

Death to the Keeper, by K.M. O'Donnell

This piece is book-ended by the protestations of a producer of a television program, disclaiming all responsibility for what ensued on his show, Investigations.  It seems he hired a has-been actor to re-enact the recent assassination of a public figure (presumably, echoing the murder of JFK).  The actor went meshuginnah and actually assured that he actually got killed in a sort of expiation of public sins.  We know this from the interminable, raving diary the actor left behind explaining his motivations.

I really don't know what to make of this story.  While I'm not the biggest fan of J.G. Ballard, I found his utlization of the Kennedy assassination (and other cultural touchstones) to be more effective.  Certainly more readable, despite the outré nature of his composition.  O'Donnell just seems like he's trying too hard.

And as with his earlier story satirizing war, it's clear he believes in writing ten words when two would suffice.

One star. 

A Sense of Beauty, by Robert Taylor

It is the last night of a short-lived affair, for the male half is leaving.  And not just away from his lover, but from Earth.  You see, he is an alien, sort of, a member of an extraterrestrial race of humans, and Earth is doomed to soon be consumed in a natural nova.  He was sent to our world to gather our finest art treasures, these to form a legacy of our lost race.

The tale is reasonably well executed, but its effectiveness is reduced both by the mawkishness of the scenario and that of its participants (the woman is hysterical, the man poor at communicating), as well as the fact that, again, this feels like a story I've read before, one that was done better.  I just can't remember which one it was…

Maybe Taylor, who is a novice, will realize his potential with a more original story next time out.  For now, three stars.

The Terrible Lizards, by Isaac Asimov

I was just thinking that I wanted a nice survey on what we know about dinosaurs in 1968, and the good Doctor has presented one.  As a bonus, he tell us some horrible things about Sir Richard Owens, a preeminent dino-hunter in the last century.

I enjoyed learning the greek roots of the various dinosaur names as well as the relationship between dinosaurs, mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles.

Four stars.

Soldier Key, by Sterling E. Lanier

Lanier is another newcomer, but this is his second story, and he seems to have found his footing very quickly.  This is the tale of a British Brigadier, the sort with decades of experiences and a knack for storytelling.  Apparently, Lanier has a whole treasure chest of stories that the Brigadier will tell, which we'll get to see as F&SF publishes them.

This particular piece involves the time the Brigadier went Caribbean island-hopping in a small boat with his friend, Joe, and two local seamen, Maxton and Oswald.  They learn of Soldier Key, a little spit of land inhabited by the queerest of ex-Britishers, dedicated to an unholy church and with an unhealthy adoration for giant hermit crabs.

The plot is Lovecraftian, but without the undercurrent of racism (indeed, the story is quite anti-racist).  I found it engaging, thrilling, and also satisfying.  Not just horror for horror's sake, but threaded with light–the light provided by decent human beings remaining human in the face of inhumanity.

Four stars.

Urban blight

Well, that wasn't all bad, thankfully.  Still, 2.4 is a pretty dismal aggregate.  Compare that to the 3.3 average for 1959.  Also, for all the female participation in the eulogizing, there are no fiction stories from women this issue.  In fact, there have been only six stories by women this entire year.

We could stand to go back to the '50s in more ways than one…


Tony Boucher, with friend, in 1954




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[July 2, 1968] What’s the Point? (August 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

The appearance of doing something

One of the German Empire’s colonies before the First World War was German South West Africa, nestled between what are today South Africa, Angola, and Botswana. After the war, South Africa was granted a mandate over the colony by the League of Nations, similar to Britain’s control over Palestine or France’s over Lebanon and Syria. The League was dissolved in 1946 and replaced by the United Nations. In general, mandates were intended to be replaced by United Nations Trusteeship, and the General Assembly recommended that South West Africa be one of those, however South Africa refused. In 1949, South Africa declared that it was no longer subject to U.N. oversight where South West Africa was concerned, as they began to extend their apartheid system into the former colony. The following year, the International Court ruled that the U.N. should exercise supervision in the administration of the territory in place of the League, but South Africa rejected the Court’s opinion and has refused any involvement by the U.N.

A political cartoon from after the First World War.

Independence movements have swept through Africa over the last decade, and as I noted in January of last year, South West Africa is not immune. The predominant organization is the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and they have been lobbying the U.N. for several years. In 1966, the General Assembly terminated the mandate, giving the U.N. direct supervision of the territory. Last year, they established the United Nations Council for South West Africa to administer the territory until independence. South Africa remains recalcitrant. And so, on June 12th, the Assembly approved Resolution 2372, which, in accordance with the wishes of the people as represented by SWAPO, changed the name to Namibia. Well, that, some finger-wagging at South Africa and the nations supporting the illegal occupation of Namibia, and a request that the Security Council do something to get South Africa out. Don’t hold your breath.

Sam Nujoma (r.), President of SWAPO, shakes hands with Mostafa Rateb Abdel-Wahab, President of the Council for Namibia

Noir, nonsense, and the blatantly obvious

The stories in this month’s IF range from the patently obvious to those that leave the reader wondering why the author bothered. There are a couple of mildly entertaining stops along the way, and the high point may surprise you (even if it is more molehill than mountain).

Supposedly for Rogue Star, which doesn’t have a starship crash. Or this many characters. Art by Chaffee

Whaddya Read?, by H.L. Gold

The founding editor of both IF and Galaxy offers a defense of modern science fiction. Maybe the new stuff isn’t as different as most people seem to think. It’s just better written.

Three stars.

Getting Through University, by Piers Anthony

A few stories ago, dentist Dr. Dillingham was kidnapped by aliens and has since bumbled around the galaxy, from one emergency patient to the next. Now, he’s been given the opportunity to attend dental school and gain proper accreditation. All he needs to do is pass the entrance exam.

The doctor deals with a difficult case instead of prepping for his exam. Art by Vaughn Bodé

Surprisingly, given the previous stories and the author’s general output, I rather liked this one. A lot of what happens is ridiculously obvious, but it doesn’t lead to quite where you might suspect. This is almost the quality that Cele Lalli used to get out of Anthony. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.

A somewhat above average three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, del Rey looks at Project Orion, the idea of using nuclear bombs to propel a starship. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, but he’s not shy about discussing some of the problems connected with a successful launch of the project (including the hundred billion dollar price tag). This is a clear-headed look at an interesting idea full of possibilities for science fiction authors.

Three stars.

In Another Land, by Mary Urhausen

Seeking to escape a regimented society and a failed love affair, the narrator attempts suicide only to find himself in a utopia. That utopia feels like the sort often imagined 50 or 60 years ago, but this month’s first time author does what she can with it. The shift from first person perspective to third person is slightly jarring, but gives the story what little bite it has. New author Urhausen shows definite skill. Here’s hoping she can hone it into something a little meatier.

Three stars.

Last Dreamer, by A. Bertram Chandler

Commodore John Grimes just wants to go home, but the strangeness at the Rim of the galaxy keeps throwing adventures in his way. This time, it’s a habitable planet with no sun, where everything is out of a bad fairy tale, and everyone speaks in rhymed couplets.

It comes as no surprise that Dan Adkins can’t draw a fire-breathing dragon. Art by Adkins

I generally enjoy the Grimes stories, but this is just silly – and that in a series that has had intelligent rats and an appearance by the Olympian gods. Of course, Chandler knows it’s silly and does get some humor out of the Commodore’s grumpiness about the situation. (He really should have ended a sentence with the word “orange,” though. Let’s see them rhyme that.) Overall, a disappointment; the more so because Chandler teased us with a story from the very beginning of Grimes’s career, but has since stuck with the older man near the end of his service. Let’s see some more of the younger man, whether wet behind the ears or just coming into his prime.

A low three stars.

Merlin Planet, by E.G. Von Wald

Sticking with fantasy pretending it’s science fiction, we have the story of the new man on a Terran trading team on a world where the locals can do magic (thanks to some psychic handwaving; what hath Campbell wrought?). Fortunately, the wizards can be stopped for a time by doing complicated math in your head. Unfortunately, instead of the requested mathematician, headquarters has sent a business law expert.

That’s not how you use a magic staff. Art by Wehrle

If you can get past the magic, the story isn’t terrible. However, it is twice as long as it needs to be. I saw the solution as soon as the new guy revealed he couldn’t do high order math. The rest was just an interminable wait until he figured it out. Right on the line between two and three stars, but the length drags it down for me.

A high two stars.

Song of the Blue Baboon, by Roger Zelazny

Zelazny takes us into the mind of a man who either betrayed Earth to alien invaders or carried out a clever stratagem to defeat them. The problem is that he never engages with his theme. The ambiguity of the ending could be read a couple of ways. Pretty, but shallow.

A low three stars.

What the Old Aliens Left, by D.M. Melton

Here’s our first tale with strong noir elements: an honest cop, a corrupt system, a dangerous dame. The lure of great wealth? The technology left behind by a dead alien civilization.

Most of the action takes place in a bar, too. Art by Brand

Melton continues to improve. He’s never going to get to the point where I’m excited to see his name on the cover, but at least it’s a sign of a probably-entertaining read. He might be getting a handle on writing women, but he’s working from a strong template here, one that’s not necessarily great, but at least gives them their own motives. On the whole, the story probably could have been tightened up here and there. Less going back and forth from the bar, for instance. Still an entertaining read.

Three stars.

West Is West, by Larry Tritten

The inhabitants of the planet West wallow in the cliches of old-school westerns and have names like Randolph Scott Cartwheel, even if many of them are duck-billed saurians. Sheriff Matt Cooper has to bring in Cartwheel for the unprovoked killing of another saurian. Then things go a bit noir, with a femme fatale and the Maltese Longhorn Steer.

A shootout is about the only thing missing from this story. Art by Wehrle

Tritten appears to be another newcomer, though he’s not acknowledged as an IF First. The parody here is laid on with a dumptruck and feels dated. The cliches are familiar, but the western genre has largely moved on from them. There’s no room for Clint Eastwood’s man with no name (though Rowdy Yates would likely feel at home). Ron Goulart could have pulled this off.

A low three stars.

Rogue Star (Part 3 of 3), by Fredrik Pohl and Jack Williamson

This thing doesn’t deserve a recap. I’ll merely note that the climax features actual stars battling each other. The flaws are many, but I’ll limit myself to just two. For starters, “protagonist” Andy Quam should have just stayed home. Everything would have turned out exactly the same, and he wouldn’t have had to deal with all the stress. There are also a number of unresolved subplots, most notably the strange behavior of Earth’s sun. We’re told why it’s happening, but nothing is done about it.

Two stars for this installment and barely two stars for the novel as a whole.

Edmond Hamilton just smashed planets together. What a piker. Art by Gaughan

Summing up

If you told me that, in an issue with stories by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jack Williamson, the one I would like best was by Piers Anthony, I’d have laughed at you. Look, it’s not a great story; it’s just the one that annoyed me the least. Maybe the summer heat is making me cranky.

That’s a promising lineup.




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