Antiwar protesting isn't just for civilians anymore.
About 25 junior officers, mostly Navy personnel based in Washington, have formed the "Concerned Officers Movement". Created in response to the growing disillusionment with the Indochina war, its purpose is (per the premiere issue of its newsletter) to "serve notice to the military and the nation that the officer corps is not part of the silent majority, that it is not going to let its thought be fashioned by the Pentagon."
Reportedly, C.O.M. came about because an officer participated as a marshal at the November 15, 1969 Moratorium anti-Vietnam War march, got featured in the Washington Post, and later received an unsatisfactory notation for loyalty in his fitness report. The newsletter and movement are how other officers rallied in his support.
Because C.O.M. work is being done off duty and uses non-government materials, it is a completely lawful dissent. According to Lt. j.g. Phil Lehman, one of the group's leaders, there has been no harassment from on high as yet.
We'll see how long this remains the case.
Really tired of it all
After reading this month's issue of Galaxy, I'm about ready to start my own Concerned Travelers Movement. Truly, what a stinker. Read on and see why:
Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is the mogul's mogul, controlling a vast financial empire. But he is at death's door, and you can't take it with you. So he contracts his lawyer to find a brilliant (but pariahed) neurosurgeon and a suitable donor so that he can be the subject of the first brain transplant. The brain-dead donor is found, the operation is made, and Smith wakes up—young and healthy, and with his memories intact.
But there's a twist…
So begins the first installment of what looks to be a very long serial, this installment alone taking up a good half of this month's issue. I've given you the synopsis, but how does this meager setup fill 80 pages?
Poorly. The first three chapters, comprising nearly half the run-time, are superfluous. Picture Robert Heinlein masturbating in a room filled with Robert Heinleins, each of them pontificating as they pleasure themselves, and you'll get the idea. It's as if Bob taped himself visualizing that scene as he delivered a stream-of-conscious solliloquy, and then made sure every word of it ended up in this story.
And so, we have Smith being an arrogant, prickly cuss. We have his attorney dogsbody Jackson being a slightly more circumspect prickly cuss. We have the secretary, Eunice, being a saucy minx, jiggling with every statement, her (lack of) clothing presented in excruciating detail.
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The story gets mildly interesting when Smith begins his post-operation recovery. It's clear from the beginning of this section that he's not in the kind of body he expected, and even the dimmest of readers will guess that he has switched sexes. What is not quite as obvious is the identity of the donor. The story gets really weird when it turns out the body's former occupant appears to still be a conscious entity, sharing a brain with Smith. Maybe the soul really is in the heart.
Presumably, this story takes place in the same universe as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just a bit earlier in the timeline. This draws unfortunate comparisons as Mistress is probably the best thing Bob ever wrote, and Evil…isn't. Aside from the overstuffed nature of this installment, there are some maddening moments, like when Smith decides to simper like a "typical" female to better suit his new gender. It's like Change of Mind with a sex rather than race change, but written by someone who had only gotten his knowledge of women from reading Playboy.
I have to wonder how this drek ended up in Galaxy. I have some ideas. For one, editor Ejler Jakobsson is spread pretty thin these days, between his flagship, sister mag IF, and the recently restarted Worlds of Tomorrow. A long serial, no matter the quality, fills a lot of space.
Perhaps, too, Ejler signed a contract with Bob promising no edits. This would be unusual, given that (per recent correspondence with Larry Niven), Ejler is an impossible editor who demands outrageous rewrites—like Galaxy's first boss, H. L. Gold, but with worse results. Nevertheless, I can see Heinlein's name being such a draw, especially since Mistress came out in IF, that Jakobsson was willing to take the risk.
Well, now he—and we—are stuck with it. God help me, this is going to be worse than Dune.
One star.
The Throwbacks, by Robert Silverberg
illustration by Jack Gaughan
Jason Quevedo is a resident of "Shanghai" in Urban Monad (Urbmon) 116, a metropolis-in-a-building sited somewhere between present-day Pittsburgh and Chicago. The self-contained skyscraper houses 800,000 citizens, each divided into a series of "cities" comprising several floors and numbering around 40,000 residents each.
A scholar, Jacob is researching 20th century morés in support of a thesis: that three centuries of living in high-density structures is breeding a new kind of human, one free from jealousy, proprietary feelings toward partners, and ambition. But Jason seems to be a kind of atavist, unhappy in his modern life, as if the pre-urbmon days are more his style. He engages in the urbmon tradition of "nightwalking", entering random apartments after midnight to have sex with the women he finds inside (women who apparently don't mind unplanned sleepless night—or the fact that it is taboo to refuse), but he does so far from his own city, as if he finds the act shameful. He resents his wife boldly doing her own nightwalking, normally the privilege of the male, as well as her constant nagging and desire to climb socially.
Eventually, things reach a boiling point between the pair. You'll have to finish the story to find out if the ending is a happy one.
Silverberg is so interesting. His writing is excellent, and he's pretty deft at drawing future settings. At the same time, his projections of relations between the sexes are downright reactionary. I might not have noticed this a decade ago, perhaps, but in these days of women's liberation, Silverberg's world of women fated to be wee-hours sexual receptacles for the quickest, most unimaginative rutting is not only depressing but unrealistic. This point was driven home recently for me: I caught a roundtable public television show where four women and three men were discussing the traditional roles of the sexes, and the women were chafing mightily. They noted the changes they wanted, which are already happening in our society. If 1970 is already different from 1960, one imagines 2370 should be even more so.
This story feels a bit like Silverbob's The Time Hoppers crossed with some Philip K. Dick domestic crisis. I know David Levinson didn't care for it, but I didn't find it too objectionable, noted objections notwithstanding.
Three stars.
Containers for the Condition of Man, by Laura Virta
The city-in-a-skyscraper has been a staple of science fiction for many years, but now the concept has a hip name: "arcology". It's a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", and architect Paolo Soleri believes they are the wave of the future. He's gone so far as to not only design enormous buildings to house a quarter million self-sufficiently, but even to break ground on a test settlement in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti. The latter will ultimately house 3,000 comfortably on just 10 acres.
It reminds me a bit of that Welsh city-in-a-mall community featured on Our World. I guess only time will tell if these giant edifices become reality or not. Personally, I think the initial cost of construction will keep them in the blueprint stage eternally—at least so long as we have space into which to sprawl our suburbs.
A man comes home to find a pile of quartered meat on his stoop, and his wife in tears. Turns out their daughter was shot by a drive-by sportsman. It's not the killing that's illegal—it's the fact that the hunter made his kill from a moving vehicle. The husband vows to take revenge, and he does so in the manner of the world set up by the author.
This is the second tale by Wilma Shore, and it's no better than the first one, published six years prior. There's no science-fictional content whatsoever. The extension of acceptable game to include humans isn't the result of overpopulation or societal change. In fact, the single question presented is "what if hunting of people was legal per the same rules as hunting animals?" Maybe it's a subtle dig at the sportsman hobby. Who knows?
John Penandrew is resolved to live forever, so he announces to his four friends, brilliant and classically trained, all (with the exception of the one dilettante, who turns out to be the author, himself). To achieve the ultimate longevity, he plans to combine all of the stages of his life into one present, ageless being.
And he succeeds! But when one's 3D soul includes the entirety of its 4D lifetime, including the moments after death, the result is not what anyone expected.
This is a fascinating tale, quirky in the way Lafferty delivers when he really commits himself. The subject matter is perhaps more suited to F&SF, and the style more in the vein of G. C. Edmondson's Mad Friend series (which also includes the author as a character), but I'm perfectly happy with how it goes and where it turned up.
Four stars.
The Hookup, by Dannie Plachta
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The first Yankee-Russkie link-up in space goes awry when an alien vessel beats the Communists to the docking. Somehow, the Americans don't think to look out their window to see what docked with them.
It's a story that makes zero sense, particularly in this age of in-depth space coverage. Maybe it would have flown in the '50s, before we became familiar with radars and real-life dockings and rendezvous.
One star.
Ask a Silly Question, by Andrew J. Offutt
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The Cudahy equations have revealed a chink in Einstein's relativity, and humanity has developed a fusion-driven vessel to accelerate its way through the previously considered inviolate speed of light barrier.
The question: where are you when you end up on the other side?
Offutt seems to understand science about as well as Plachta. If something could go faster than light, and disappear from human ken as a result of doing so, we'd have noticed long ago. It doesn't take a starship to accelerate to such speeds if relativity is no longer an issue: countless natural and artificial nuclear reactions would do the trick, too.
One star.
Sittik, by Anne McCaffrey
illustration by Jack Gaughan
A little boy is bullied by kids calling him "sittick." His parents ignore the issue until the child, despondent, takes his own life. Then the bullies turn on his mother with the same tactic.
Oh! You thought that was the setup? No, that's the whole story.
One star.
Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, July 1970), by Algis Budrys
Budrys calls The Ship Who Sang "a pretty good adventure story." He notes that, despite her handicap, "Helva is, in fact, Wonder Woman. She can do everything except get felt, and she doesn't have be very smart. Nor is she…She goes along shouting and singing and heaving great metallic sighs. She becomes famous throughout the galaxy of course, because unlike all the other ships like her, she does this peculiar thing—she sings. She's a kind of freak, you see." I take this to mean Budrys enjoyed the stories, but Helva is a broadly drawn, histrionic caricature. So stipulated.
The reviewer goes on to note that "Catherine Moore is probably the best lady poet we've ever had in the field…What she lacks as a plotter of commercial fiction can normally be seen only when one looks over the impressive array of really great commercial stories turned out by her and the late Henry Cuttner…But if you would like to see what can be done with superb storytelling ability and an as yet not fully developed sense of plot, then Jirel of Joiry is your girl."
Jirel of Joiry is, of course, the collection of Weird Tales stories about the eponymous sword-and-sorcery heroine. And even if Jirel represents solo, inexperienced Moore (Budrys suggests that mature Moore is not incapable of plots, as Now Woman Born and Judgement Night demonstrate), she still makes for compelling reading.
Time to sleep
Wow. I don't know that Galaxy has ever managed a two-star rating in its entire run. I could look through my statistics, but that would just be a depressing exercise. With the revival of Worlds of Tomorrow being such a flop, I've got real concerns for the Gold/Pohl/Jakobsson franchise.
Which is a shame, since Galaxy got me started in science fiction. Surely this can only be a blip in its proud twenty year legacy, right?
You're gonna have to do better than that if you want more of my lucre, Ejler!
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
There must be a growing demand for original anthologies of science fiction, because they keep coming—both standalone titles and series. Infinity One is, going by its title, the first in yet another series of these, although notably there is one reprint between its covers (really two reprints, as you'll see), a story that many readers will already be familiar with. Robert Hoskins is an occasional author-turned-agent-turned-editor, whose high position at Lancer Books has apparently resulted in Infinity One. Will there be future installments? Does it really matter? We shall see.
The tagline for Infinity One is “a magazine of speculative fiction in book form,” which strikes me as a sequence of words only fit to come from the mouth of a clinically insane person. This is a paperback anthology and nothing more nor less. I mentioned in my review of Nova 1 last month that Harry Harrison claimed that he simply wanted to put together an anthology of “good” SF, although I’m not sure if Hoskins had even such a basic goal in mind.
In 1889, Oscar Wilde wrote “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”. This month, London has proved that.
In the 1949 film Passport to Pimlico, a small area of London declares independence and it ends with the British government forced to negotiate to get them back. Actual negotiations for reintegration of the Isle of Dogs concluded on Monday.
Post-War Reconstruction taking place in Isle of Dogs
The Isle of Dogs is not a true island, but rather a low-lying peninsula that marks a massive bend in the Thames. As such in the Victorian era it became a part of the London Docklands. However, as ship size increased more ships were moved further down the river. The railway lines were closed and the area was devastated in the blitz.
In the last decade a large project of council flat building took place in the region, with 97% of the population in government housing. However, amenities did not keep up with the rise in the population Schools, hospitals and shopping areas were not included in the plans, yet only one bus route services the entire region.
Joint Prime Ministers of the new republic, Ray Padgett and John Westfallen
In order to bring awareness to their situation, on the 1st March around 1,000 residents of the Isle of Dogs, led by Fred Johns (their representative on the borough council), blocked the swing bridges to the rest of London. They announced that a Unilteral Declaration of Independence would be forthcoming if their demands were not met and taxes would not be paid.
Area map of the short-lived republic (orange are those buildings owned by Port of London Authority)
On the 9th March the official declaration of independence came with the setting up of a citizen’s council and two Prime Ministers to run each side of the island. They issued a demand to return taxes that they said belonged to the islanders, and started on plans to setup their own street market and turn a disused building into a school. This drove headlines all over the world, with even Pravda from the USSR sending in a reporter.
After meeting with the Prime Minister, a plan was announced by Tower Hamlets Council for resolving the issues raised by the Islanders with a full consultation. The council, however, denied that this protest had anything to do with the timing of this announcement. Whatever the cause, the Republic of the Isle of Dogs has achieved its goals, so it seems that entry permits will no longer be required to travel in and out of the region.
Back in the world of SF publishing, we have our own odd little affair. That of Orbit 6, which contains some good, some bad and many just plain confusing tales:
I’m no fan of golf (unless it involves little windmills), but a lot of people seem to like it. They show it on TV and not a week goes by without at least one golf joke in the funny pages. It also intersected with politics last month. February continues to be the month that gives me very little to talk about, so I guess this is it.
The Professional Golfers’ Association likes to start their tour early in the pleasant climes of Hawaii and California. One such event is the Bob Hope Desert Classic held on a variety of courses in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs. The highlight of the tournament for many is the pro-am event, where the pros competing in the tournament are matched with (celebrity) amateurs for one day’s round.
Pro Doug Sanders—best known for his odd swing and dapper dress—found himself in a foursome with Bob Hope, California Senator (and former song-and-dance man) George Murphy, and Vice President Spiro Agnew. On his very first shot, the Veep managed to hook the ball so far to the left it ended up on the path for an adjacent fairway. (Probably the farthest left he’s gone since being elected governor.) Trying to get back to the right fairway, he then sliced hard to the right. (This whole thing is starting to sound like a metaphor for Agnew’s political career.)
Bob Hope and Doug Sanders were standing in the path of the ball. Hope managed to duck out of the way, but Sanders was struck on the head. The blow drew blood, which Hope mopped up with a towel. Agnew was duly apologetic, and Sanders played gamely onward. At the nine-hole break, he was examined by a doctor, and the wound was sprayed with a pain-deadener.
Wire photo of the aftermath.
Agnew went on to have a terrible day. He frequently missed putts and took penalties for giving up on a hole. As the AP put it, “Agnew chatted amiably with the fans when his ball landed in or near them, which was often.” Sanders didn’t do much better, though he was already having a poor tournament. He won $200, far less than the top prize of $25,000. Agnew rather crassly quipped that it should just about cover his medical bills.
Am I picking on Spiro Agnew? Yes. Yes, I am. After his recent attack on the press, he deserves all the opprobrium he can get. He’s already being talked about as the clear front-runner for the Republicans in 1976. Let’s nip that idea in the bud right now.
Down the fairway
When he took over as editor, Ejler Jakobsson got off to a strong start. Since then, there’s been something of a return to form, although those C+ to B- issues have felt fresher than they did in recent years under Fred Pohl. Has he sent this issue cleanly down the fairway, hit a hole in one, or—worst of all—smacked the reader in the head with an errant shot? Let’s find out.
Arrival at Ocean-Deep. Art for “Waterclap” by Gaughan
[And now, for your reading pleasure, a clutch of books representing the science fiction and fantasy books that have crossed our desk for review this month!]
by Victoria Silverwolf
Ye Gods!
Two new fantasy novels, both with touches of science fiction, feature theological themes. One deals with deities that are now considered to be purely mythological, the other relates to one of the world's major living religions. Let's take a look.
Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty
Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.
The title of this strange novel comes from a book written by Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Christian mystic of the sixteenth century. This work, known as The Interior Castle or The Mansions in English, compares various stages in the soul's spiritual progress to mansions within a castle. From what I can tell from a little research, the Fourth Mansion is the stage at which the natural and the supernatural intersect.
(I'm sure I'm explaining this badly. Interested readers can seek out a copy of Saint Teresa's book for themselves.)
I understand that Lafferty is a devout Catholic, so this connection between his latest novel and what is considered to be a classic of Christian literature must be more than superficial. Be that as it may, let's see if we can make any sense out of a very weird book.
Our hero is Fred Foley, a reporter who is said to be not very bright, but who seems to have some kind of special insight or perception as to events beyond the mundane. (A sort of Holy Fool, perhaps.) He gets involved in multiple conspiracies of folks, who may be something other than just ordinary human beings, out to change the world.
There are four such groups, said to be not quite fit for either Heaven or Earth. Each one is symbolized by an animal.
The Snakes, also known as the Harvesters, are a group of seven people who blend their psychic powers to influence the minds of others. They are intent on bringing about a sort of hedonistic apocalypse. Their connection to Foley and other characters allows for telepathic communication, and sets the plot in motion.
The Toads are folks who are reincarnated, or somehow take over new bodies. (It's a little vague.) Foley's investigation into one such person starts the novel. They intend to release a plague, wiping out most of humanity and ruling over the survivors.
The Badgers are people who are something like spiritual rulers of a kind of parallel world that most ordinary people can't perceive. Foley pays a visit to a couple of these seemingly benign people for information. In one case, this involves a trip to a mountain in Texas that shouldn't be there.
The Unfledged Falcons are would-be fascists, military leaders trying to take over the world by force. Only one such person appears in the book, a Mexican fellow named Miguel Fuentes. He gets involved when the Snakes try to influence an American named Michael Fountain (see the connection in names?) and wind up entering his mind by mistake.
I would be hard pressed to try to describe all the bizarre things that happen. Lafferty has a way of describing extraordinary events in deadpan fashion. (We're very casually told, for example, that one character brought a dead man back to life when he was a boy. One very minor character is a demon, and another one is an alien.)
The book's combination of whimsey and allegory is unique, to say the least. There's a lot of dialogue that sounds like nothing anybody would ever say in real life. Did I understand it all? Certainly not. Did I enjoy the ride? Yep.
Four stars.
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
Cover art by James Starrett.
Zelazny's recent novel Lord of Light offered a futuristic twist on Buddhism and Hinduism. This one makes use of ancient Egyptian gods, as well as a bit of Greek mythology. There are also a lot of original concepts, making for a very mixed stew indeed.
The time is the far future, when humanity has settled multiple planets. Don't expect a space opera, however.
We begin in the House of the Dead, ruled by Anubis. He has a servant who has lost his memory and his name. Anubis gives him the name Wakim, and sends him to the Middle Worlds (the physical realm) to destroy the Prince Who Was A Thousand. Meanwhile, Osiris, who rules the House of Life, sends his son Horus on the same errand.
You see, Anubis and Osiris keep the population of the Middle Worlds in balance, bringing life and death in equal amounts. The Prince threatens this system with the possibility of immortality. Although the two gods have the same goal, they are also rivals, so their champions battle each other as well as the Prince.
This is a greatly oversimplified description of the basic plot. A lot more goes on, with many equally god-like characters. There's a sort of scavenger hunt for three sacred items, with the protagonists hopping around from planet to planet in search of them.
Zelazny experiments with narrative techniques, from poetry to a play. There's some humor, as demonstrated by a cult that worships a pair of shoes. (They actually play an important role in the plot.) The pace is frenzied, with plenty of purple prose.
Full understanding of what the heck is really going on doesn't happen until late in the book, when we learn the actual identities of Wakim and the Prince. Suffice to say that this requires a lengthy description of apocalyptic events that took place long before the story begins.
Some readers are going to find this novel disjointed and overwritten. Others are likely to be swept away by the richness of the author's imagination. I'm leaning in the latter direction.
Roger Zelazny’s been busy this month! His new novel Damnation Alley expands his novella of the same name into an action piece which is exciting enough but ultimately unsatisfying, a sort of postapocalyptic pony express with futuristic vehicles and implausible characters.
Cover of Damnation Alley by Jack Gaughan
The story is set in a relatively near-future USA after a nuclear war which has split it into isolated states within a radiation-ravaged wasteland, the only relatively safe passage through which is a corridor known as Damnation Alley. There are pockets of radiation, giant mutant animals and insects, tornadoes and killer dust storms. The descriptions of these is the book’s real strength, with some of them verging on the genuinely poetic. Our protagonist is Hell Tanner, a former Hell’s Angel who is offered a pardon for his crimes by the State of California, if he’ll deliver a shipment of vaccines to Boston, which has been hit by an outbreak of plague. Of course, this necessitates driving through Damnation Alley, but never fear, Tanner is also driving a super-tough vehicle bristling with weaponry.
The whole thing is almost laughably macho in places, and I say that as someone who really quite likes both cars and adventure stories. Tanner is that implausible archetype, the bad guy who nonetheless somehow has other people’s best interests at heart. However, there’s also some nice contrasts set up between Tanner and the criminal world he inhabits and the much more normal parts of society he encounters on his journey, where people seem to be on the whole generally decent and kind, making Tanner’s casual violence seem all the more out of place.
The book has a lot of problems. Some are clearly the result of padding it out to novel length, with several episodes which go nowhere and add little to the story. The characterisation of everyone aside from Tanner is weak to nonexistent. In particular, the main female character, Cordy, is a frustrating cipher: she is a woman who Tanner essentially abducts, and yet she shows none of the emotions one might expect under the circumstances, while Tanner seemingly comes to think of her as his girlfriend despite neither of them making any moves in that direction.
However, the biggest problem is that there are too many holes in the story for it to stay afloat. Despite the devastation of the land around it, the state of California somehow still has the resources to build giant armoured cars bristling with every kind of weapon from bullets to flamethrowers. Only two human beings are apparently capable of making the trip from California to Boston, which is surprising given the aforementioned level of technology and that there is clearly no shortage of young men with a death wish. Tanner makes it almost to Boston before encountering anyone who makes a serious effort to steal the vaccines, which I also find somewhat implausible. And so on, and so on.
Damnation Alley held my attention for the duration of a train journey and had nicely surreal, well-paced prose in places, but it was just too unbelievable for me to really enjoy it. Two and a half stars.
by Brian Collins
Since he returned to writing some half a dozen years ago, Robert Silverberg has tried to reintroduce himself as a more “serious” writer. This is not to say his rate of output has slowed down in favor of more refined work; if anything the past few years have been the busiest for him since the ‘50s. This year alone we have gotten enough novels from Silverberg that a bit of a catch-up is in order. The first on my plate, Across a Billion Years, hit store shelves a few months ago, from The Dial Press (I believe this is Silverberg’s first book with said publisher), and it seems to have flown under the radar—possibly because there’s no paperback edition, and also it might be aimed at younger readers. The second book we have here, To Live Again, is from Doubleday, and it too is a hardcover original; but unlike Across a Billion Years, To Live Again is a new release, fresh out of the oven.
It’s the 24th century, and humanity has not only spread to other worlds but encountered several intelligent alien races along the way. Tom Rice is a 22-year-old archaeologist on an expedition to find the ruins of a bygone race called the High Ones, who apparently lived a billion years ago (hence the title) but who have since vanished. Whether or not the High Ones have gone extinct is one of the novel’s core mysteries, although Silverberg takes his time raising this question. The novel is told as a series of diary entries, or rather messages Tom sends to his sister Lorie. In a curious but also frustrating move, Lorie is arguably the most interesting character in the novel, yet we never see or hear her, as she’s not only away from the action but stuck in a hospital bed for an indefinite period. Lorie is a telepath, and enough people are “TP” to make up their own faction, although telepathy only works one-way and Tom himself is not a telepath. The one positive surprise Silverberg includes here is finding a way to tie telepathy together with the mystery of the High Ones, but obviously I won’t say how he does it.
As for bad surprises, well…
Even taking into account that Tom is a young adult who also has personal hang-ups (his father wanted him to enter real estate), his treatment of his colleagues is abhorrent in the opening stretch. He dismisses the aliens on the team as mostly “diversity” hires and has a standoffish relationship with Kelly, the female android on the team, whom he more than once compares to a “voluptuous nineteen-year-old.” Why someone of Tom’s age would make such a comparison is befuddling…unless you were really a lecherous man approaching middle age and not a recent college graduate. There are a few other humans here, but the only human woman present is Jan, whom Tom gradually takes a liking to—just not enough to do anything when he sees Leroy, a male colleague, sexually assault Jan near enough that he could have intervened. This happens early in the novel, and I have to admit that Tom’s indifference regarding Jan’s wellbeing, a weakness in character he never really apologizes for, cast a cloud over my enjoyment of the rest of the novel. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop. That Tom and Jan’s relationship turns romantic despite the former’s callousness only serves to rub salt in the wound. The bright side of all this is that while some of Silverberg’s recent work has bordered on pornographic, Across a Billion Years is relatively tame, almost to the point of being old-fashioned.
Indeed, this feels like a throwback to an older era of SF, even back to those years when Silverberg (and I, for that matter) had not yet picked up a pen or used a typewriter. In broad strokes this is a planetary adventure of the sort that would have been serialized in Astounding circa 1945. We’re excavating alien ruins on Higby V, a distant planet where High Ones artifacts have been supposedly found. During a drunken escapade one of the alien diggers stumbles upon (or rather breaks into) a piece of High Ones technology, something akin to a movie projector, not only showing what the High Ones look like but revealing a clue as to the location of their homeworld. This should sound familiar to most of us, and I suspect Silverberg knows this too, because this novel’s biggest problem and biggest asset is how it uses perspective. We’re stuck with Tom as he sends messages to Lorie, recounting events in perhaps more detail than he has to, knowing in advance that his sister won’t receive these messages until after the fact. As with a disconcerting number of Silverberg protagonists, Tom can be annoying, and honestly quite bigoted; and since he is the perspective character we’re never relieved of his oh-so-interesting remarks. But, and I will give Silverberg this, he does put a twist on the epistolary format very late in the novel, which does the miraculous thing of making you reevaluate what you had been reading up to this point.
In other words, this is not an exceptional novel, but it does have its points of interest, and with the exception of an early scene and its ramifications (or lack thereof), nothing here made me want to throw my copy at a nearby wall. For the most part this is inoffensive—possibly even decent. Three stars.
Those who want a bit more sex with their science fiction can do worse than this one, which looks to be the fourth (or maybe fifth—I’ve lost count) Silverberg novel of 1969. It’s the near-ish future, and the good news is that for those with enough money, death is not necessarily the end. Courtesy of the Scheffing Institute, a person can have their memories stored periodically, making copies or “personae” of themselves, which can be transplanted to the brain of a living host. The host and the persona will cooperate, lest the latter erase the former’s personality and become a “dybbuk,” using the host’s body as a flesh puppet.
The infamous businessman Paul Kaufmann has recently died, with his persona waiting to be claimed. Paul’s nephew, Mark, and Mark’s 16-year-old daughter Risa each see themselves as ideal candidates for Paul’s persona, but one of the rules at the Institute is that close family members can’t host each other’s personae: the implications of, for example, a teen girl hosting her grandfather’s persona, would be…concerning.
While we’re on the lovely topic of incest, let’s talk more about Risa, who must be one of the thorniest of all Silverberg characters, which as you know is a tall order, not helped by the fact that Silverberg describes, in almost poetic detail, every curve of this teen girl’s nude body—and she does strut around naked a surprising amount of the time. Risa is such a depraved individual, despite her age, that she at one point tries seducing an older male cousin and rather openly has an Electra complex (they even mention it by name), which Mark is understandably disturbed by—with the implication being that Mark has lustful thoughts about his own daughter. This is the second Silverberg novel I’ve read in two months to involve incest, which worries me.
The only other major female character is Elena, Mark’s mistress, whom Risa sees as a rival for her father’s affections and who (predictably) starts conspiring against Mark. Not content to ogle at just 16-year-olds, Silverberg also takes to describing the nuances of Elena’s body in wearying fashion, which does lead me to wonder if he was working the typewriter one-handed for certain passages. It’s a shame, because there’s an intriguing subplot in which Risa acquires her first persona, a young woman named Tandy who had died in a skiing accident—or so the official record claims. Tandy, or rather the persona of Tandy, recorded a couple months prior to her death, suspects foul play. Of the women mentioned, Tandy is the least embarrassingly written, but then she is only tangentially related to the plot and, what with not having a physical body, Silverberg is only able to ogle at her so much.
I’ve not even mentioned John Roditis and his underling Charles Noyles, business rivals of Mark’s who are clamoring for Paul’s persona. You may notice that this novel has more moving parts than Across a Billion Years, and certainly it’s the more ambitious of the two, the problem being that its shortcomings are all the more disappointing for it. Silverberg raises questions that he can barely be bothered with answering, and he alludes to things that remain mostly unrevealed. Much of To Live Again is shrouded in speculation, which is to say it uses speculation as a night-black cloak to cover things we sadly never get to see.
Another rule at the Institute is that a persona has to be of the same gender as its host, a rule that characters mostly write off as bogus. And indeed why not? Why should a male host and female persona not be able to coexist? Or the other way around. The prohibition has to do with transsexualism, which is certainly uncharted water for the most part. There has been very little science fiction written about transsexualism or transvestism—the possibility of blurring and even crossing gender lines. Unfortunately the novel does little with the ideas it presents. There are multiple references to religion and mythology (the word “dybbuk” refers to an evil spirit in Jewish mythology), including lines taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a minor subplot about white Californians appropriating Buddhist practices, in connection with the Institute, but this is so tangential that the reader can easily forget about it.
Finally, I want to mention that I was reminded eerily of another novel that came out this year, Philip K. Dick’s masterful and deranged Ubik, which I have to think Silverberg could not have known about when he was writing To Live Again. Both take cues from the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, although in Dick’s novel people who have died are kept in a state of suspended animation called “half-life,” whereas Silverberg’s characters die the full death, or “discorporate,” only that their personalities (up to a point) are kept intact. Not to make comparisons, but given that Silverberg’s novel is longer than Dick’s I have to say he does a fair bit less with the shared material. Of course, these are both talented writers, who at their best do very fine work indeed. Silverberg has become a major writer, but sadly he is not firing on all cylinders with either of the novels I’ve covered.
This book made me think of a Bulwer-Lytton novel for the Space Age.
This book could make Damon Knight take back everything he said about van Vogt.
This book made me long for the complexity of Commander Cody shorts.
This book’s style is so out of date that I think it fell out of the TARDIS.
This book wishes it had the character depth of a Lin Carter work.
And yet, I can't hate it the way I hated Light A Last Candle. That book was one mass of forgettable hate, but The Glass Cage is not hateful. It's incompetent at every turn, from line editing to plot development (I really don't know how it got the hardcover copy I received), but the overall effect is an oral record of a children's game.
There's this guy, Stephen, he’s twenty! He's a neophyte to the priests of the computer, TAL! It keeps life going in the city beneath its glass dome! Stephen is a perfect physical specimen, and his only flaw is being too curious about things. But that's because he’s secretly a spy for the Rebellion outside the glass dome!
The sentences are short and rarely have the benefit of internal punctuation. The characters are, generally, exactly how they appear — wicked characters with their close-together eyes, good characters with their strong jaws, straightforward manner, and perfect blonde hair. If this is chosen for adaptation, Tommy Kirk is made for the lead part.
The treatment of nuclear power seems to come from another time, where the leaders of interstellar development are in the Baltimore Gun Club rather than NASA. The giant computer, TAL, is attached to a nuclear bomb, to go off at a certain date, destroying the whole glass dome and the people within! No need to worry, though, Stephen and his various Rebellion people get most everyone out in time, except for the bad guy head priest of TAL, who is determined to die with his machine. Stephen and the gangster leader of the in-Dome Rebellion try to get him out, but to no avail! The nuclear bomb is about to go off, so the two of them hop on their air-sled, turn it skyward, and smash through the glass dome, just as the nuclear bomb goes off! Luckily, the nuclear bomb just pushes them a few miles away from the blast, where they are safe and unharmed.
One point of the book that is surprisingly forward-thinking is its treatment of one of the main characters being severely disabled. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, he is a leader of the Rebellion, commanding through his immense psychic ability. But that cannot keep me from giving it…
Two stars
[A bit of a downer note to leave on, but at least there's some fine stuff upstream. See you next month, tiger!]
Having a teacher first as a mother, and now one for a wife, I think of the year as mirroring the school terms, with the new year beginning in September. But, looking at the newspapers, it doesn’t appear the world has changed much in the last twelve months.
On the home front, the troubles in Northern Ireland keep getting worse, with the presence of British troops now seeming to be resented by both sides. Meanwhile, The Conservative party base is pushing the party to take a harder anti-immigration line, and union chiefs clash with the Wilson government.
British Troops in Ulster, caught in the middle of escalating violence.
Peace talks over Vietnam are once again being held in Paris and apparently going nowhere, there are continued conflicts in the middle East and the Junta in Greece seems as unstable as ever. A harsh crackdown has just finished in Czechoslovakia and the Soviets are still making threatening noises at the rest of Eastern Europe.
Scenes from the streets of Prague, one year on from the Soviet Invasion.
But, whilst the depressing politics of our time continues, so does the regularity of publishing. As such another anthology arrived in the post for me to review.
We open with another tale from the ever-reliable Mrs. Damon Knight. Here Janet Matthews returns to her hometown of Somerset after working in medicine in New York, where she wishes to look after her disabled father. At the same time, a Dr. Staunton is in town to study dreams. Annoyed by his pomposity Janet decides to join in with the project.
This is beautifully described, albeit with some unusual turns of phrase, but it goes on far too long for my tastes, only really becoming more SFnal towards the end. There are also a lot of interesting concepts, but I am not convinced they are explored well enough here to justify their inclusion.
Three Stars
The Roads, the Roads, the Beautiful Road by Avram Davidson
Highway Chief Craig Burns loves his vast new road constructions and does not accept any argument to the contrary. However, one day he misses his turn-off and finds himself in a labyrinth of tunnels and cloverleaf interchanges.
This is the kind of joke story Davidson used to regularly publish when editing F&SF, a feature I have not missed. Add on to this my general dislike of vehicular tales and I was not well disposed to this at all.
Hector, A Jewish father is estranged from his daughter, Lorinda, because of her marrying a form of Martian plant-life named Mor. Months later, the parents receive a letter from her, saying she is pregnant and asking them to come visit her on Mars.
I believe this is the first story from a well-known fan (and wife of Terry Carr) and it marks a strong start. It follows the familiar routes you have likely seen on television programmes but they are not as common in the SF realm. In addition, this is told using a great tone of voice that makes it feel believable.
King Argaven XVII of Karhide is having a recurring visions of executing a crowd of protesters. This madness is attempted to be treated by physician Hoge, but what could be the real cause?
I was originally unsure if this planet is indeed meant to be Gethen from The Left Hand of Darkness, as it is only referred to as “Winter” and the gender changes in the book are not referenced here. However, its connections to the Ekumen seem to confirm that it does indeed take place on the same world.
I found this a confusing read. I started again four times and afterwards I was constantly jumping back and forth to try to get to grips with what was happening. It does not have the usual easy style of Le Guin, instead told through a series of “pictures”. Honestly, I am scratching my head over what to make of it.
Three Stars, I guess?
The Time Machine by Langdon Jones
Jones seems to be emerging as one of the great polymaths of English SF. He has been involved in editing New Worlds for a number of years now, writes prose and poetry, has produced photographic cover art, is helping the Peake estate put together new editions of the Gormenghast trilogy and has an original anthology coming out in a couple of months. Amazingly he still had time to sell this tale to Orbit.
In an unnamed prisoner’s cell sits a photo of Caroline Howard. We hear the story of his past relationship with her and the construction of a time machine to see her again.
This tale is told in a passive distanced voice with the connection of the four different situations not immediately obvious. As such, I imagine it will be alienating to some, but I found it quite beautiful and cleverly constructed.
The titular Time Machine is not a HG Wells type of mechanical construct but a strange device containing a Dali painting and creating a “concrete déjà vu”. This may actually mean that it does not really “work” as such but these are merely the memories and delusions of the prisoner. I believe the ambiguity is intentional on the part of the author and makes the tale all the stronger.
Some may find the conclusion and meaning of the tale a bit mawkish, but I liked it a lot.
John Miller goes to analyst Robert Rousse to resolve an obsession he has had for the last 25 years, to reach the mythical Northern Shore. In order to cure this desire, they sail there in dreams.
Whilst I am a fan of what Mr. Jones does, the same cannot be said of Mr. Lafferty. As such this may work better for other people, but I found it all a little silly.
Two Stars
Paul's Treehouse by Gene Wolfe
Sheila and Morris’ son has been in a treehouse since Thursday and is refusing to come down. As they work with their neighbour to try to get him out, disorder is spreading throughout the town.
This is probably the Gene Wolfe story that has impressed me most so far. Not that it is brilliant, but it is well told and has a solid theme. Hopefully the start of an upswing in his writing.
A high three stars
The Price by C. Davis Belcher
The millionaire John Phillpott Tanker is in a traffic accident that caves in his skull. Whilst his body is still alive, he is braindead. After several tests the doctors conclude he is medically dead and use his organs to save a number of people. Whilst this is controversial, journalist Sturbridge writes a number of articles to win the public around. However, in a surprising turn of events, the recipients of the organ donations sue the Tanker’s estate claiming they are still the living John Phillpott Tanker.
These organ transplant stories are becoming a subgenre in their own right, and, unfortunately, this is among the poorer examples. Lem told a better version of this story in three pages last month than Belcher told in 27.
A low two stars
The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis by Philip Latham
At a track-meet at the Rose Bowl, three athletes all ran 100 yards in less than 9 seconds. If this wasn’t surprising enough, a whole set of other new running records were set that afternoon. What could be happening?
This spends a lot of time doing pseudo-scientific explanations for something incredibly silly. I was annoyed at having read it.
One star
Winston by Kit Reed
The Wazikis buy the four-year-old child of geniuses as a status symbol. Whilst he has an IQ of 160 they soon grow frustrated he is not yet able to win crossword competitions or answer any trivia question they pose.
This story irritated me for a number of reasons. First off, there is more than a whiff of eugenics about the concept here, with the child of a college professor being inherently smarter than this family with a name we seem to be encouraged to read as Eastern European or North African. At the very least, the way the Wazikis are portrayed feels classist.
Secondly, the fact that smart people are selling children to less intelligent people seems to imply that earning potential and IQ are inversely related. But the Wazikis see Winston as an investment, so are they just meant to be stupid and bad with money?
And then the story is just unpleasant with the amount of child abuse taking place in it. Maybe I am overly sensitive, as I am from the gentler school of parenting, but I found it to be gratuitous instead of aiding the storytelling.
One Star
The History Makers by James Sallis
John writes to his brother Jim about his arrival on Ephemera, a planet where the inhabitants live on a separate time-plane to humanity.
Sallis gives us another epistolary tale which, as usual, is written in a literary style and full of artistic allusions (including, strangely, the second mention of the same Dali painting in this anthology. I blame Ballard). I am not sure this has the same depth as his other works but it is still a wonderfully atmospheric read.
The US military has a problem. Their war against a guerrilla insurgency in Asia is not going well and they want to use tactical nuclear weapons to sort it out. However, the public are squeamish about this sort of thing. The solution? Using a violence obsessed rock group The Four Horseman, to spread their message.
A biting critique of both the American military-industrial complex and the hippy groups selling out. Incredibly timely, clever and disturbing.
A high four stars, bordering on five. (I recently discussed this with some friends over at Young People Read SF if you want to see more of our thoughts.)
The Cycle Continues
Some of the same artists, still in UK charts a year on
And so we complete another Orbit anthology, with it feeling pretty similar to the last one.
The main difference is that there is more New Wave influence creeping in (having stories by two of the editors of New Worlds will do that) but many prior authors reappear, doing similar things. Some of it brilliant, some mediocre, the rest best forgotten.
Will either Orbit or our politics break out of this cycle by autumn 1970? Only time will tell.
A school for young wizards: What could possibly go wrong!
I wanted to like last year's City of Illusions, but the book fell flat. However, I saw the potential in Ursula K. Le Guin as a writer. Her ideas in the book were good, it was the execution that was lacking, so with her latest book out, A Wizard of Earthsea,I figured I’d give her another try.
Ged is an ambitious young wizard with a hunger for knowledge and power. The book follows his journey from childhood into adulthood, first starting when he attends a school for wizards. There he learns the basics of magic, makes friends and a rival. He also unleashes a dark being that wants him dead, but thanks to magic protection around the school, he is safe for the time being.
It isn’t until Ged graduates and becomes a practicing wizard for various villages that he really learns the hard lessons of magic. Now outside the protection of school, he is pursued by the dark being, eventually forced to turn and fight it, putting his skills to the ultimate test.
Fantasy as a genre doesn’t excite me as an adult, as it is often too whimsical and too escapist, too detached from our own world. A Wizard of Earthsea managed a careful balance, with an attention to the laws of magic and how it is able to be used. Wizards can only use so much magic at a time, and overexerting oneself or attempting a spell higher than one’s skill has physical consequences, causing wounds to appear on the body. Throughout the book, we see Ged test these limits, only to end up in lengthy recovery each time. Eventually, he does go too far and ends up permanently scarring himself.
I liked the concept of true names: learning the true name of a creature, plant, object or place is the key to all spells in this world. Even people have true names that they keep secret, instead using an alias in day to day life. While Ged is the main character’s true name, and the narrative refers to him as such, in dialogue he is called “Sparrowhawk” by other characters. I loved the intimate moments of friendship when true names were exchanged, showing a great amount of trust between characters.
Ged makes a compelling main character, with his distinctive flaw being his own hubris. Time and again, he tries magic that is way above his level only to be hurt. He attempts to raise the dead, despite knowing that it can’t be done, and suffers the consequences. It's because of his hubris that a dark creature is brought into the world who specifically hunts him, creating the main conflict of the book. But we’re shown that he has other values. He isn’t greedy. When he fights the dragon, his only motivation is duty to the town he serves. When the dragon offers him some of his treasure as a reward, he declines. Most of the time when Ged overexerts his magic, it isn’t in pursuit of fame. Ged truly wants to help people, even when it’s past his capabilities.
You know it's a good book when there's a map
With this book, I finally saw what I knew Le Guin was capable of as a writer. She's always created compelling unique worlds readers want to immerse themselves in, but now her writing can back up her ideas. Maybe because this is her first foray into juvenile fiction or perhaps she is simply growing as a writer.
I look forward to what she writes next.
Four stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Tomorrow and Yesterday
The latest Ace Double (H-95, two quarters and a dime at your local drug store paperback rack) contains one novel looking forward in time, and one collection glancing backwards at the author's recent career.
We begin with a brilliant mathematician from California sneaking around through a remote area of Wisconsin, ready to kill a man. We cut away from this scene to find a government agent from Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, preparing to assassinate the richest man in the world.
Why all this homicidal intent?
Flashbacks tell us what's going on. John Androki is a fellow who shows up out of nowhere. He convinces a rich guy that he can predict exactly how stocks will move up or down in the future. The millionaire sets him up with some cash in exchange for the information. Androki goes on to not only be the wealthiest person on Earth (yep, he's the intended target of the government assassin) but to wield immense political power all over the world.
Our protagonist is Bertram Kane, a brilliant mathematician (yep, he's the guy stalking a man in Wisconsin) who is working on a theory of multiple dimensions. He's a widower who's having an on-again off-again affair with Anita Weber, an art professor. His buddy is Gordon Maxon, a professor of psychology.
Maxon is convinced that Androki can perceive the future (hence the novel's title.) He calls him a downthrough, a word that's new to me. Kane isn't convinced, but when Weber dumps him for the incredibly rich and powerful Androki, he becomes suspicious.
Things get scarier when other mathematicians working on multiple dimensions are murdered. Coincidence, or is Androki arranging for their deaths? And is Kane next on the list?
You may figure out the main plot gimmick, which explains why Kane is out to kill a completely innocent man. (The government assassin's motive is less mysterious. Androki is changing America's relations with other nations in ways the United States government doesn't like.)
Basically a suspense novel with a science fiction gimmick, the plot creates a fair amount of tension, although parts of it are talky. There are quite a few murders along the way, and a pretty grim ending.
Three stars.
So Bright the Vision, by Clifford Simak
Cover art by Gray Morrow.
Four stories, dating from 1956 to 1960, by a noted author appear in this volume.
First printed in the June 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, this lighthearted yarn starts with a huge agate appearing in a guy's yard, along with the tiny critters mentioned in the title. Chaos ensues.
The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review when it first appeared, and that's fair. It's a pleasant enough bit of gentle comedy, but hardly profound.
The April 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction is the source of this oddly titled (and odd) story.
An elderly fellow collects stamps from alien worlds, piling them up in his rat's nest of a home. Some of the stamps are actually made up of living microorganisms. When mixed with broth made by an overly friendly neighbor, they jump into action and start organizing the guy's messy collection.
There's a strong resemblance to the previous story, which also had tiny creatures helping folks at first, but going a little too far. This one is a lot stranger than the other one, and a little more complex. (I haven't mentioned the role played by stuff that the old man receives from an alien pen pal, or what the weird title means.) Interesting for its eccentricity, if nothing else.
The August 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe supplies the story that gives the collection its title.
At a future time when Earth is in contact with several alien worlds, the only thing of value humans can supply is fiction. Other beings don't make up things that aren't true, and they're fascinated by the concept.
The fiction is created via programmed machines, with a little human input. Writing by hand (or pencil, pen, or typewriter) is considered old-fashioned, and even vulgar.
The plot follows the misadventures of a so-called writer who has fallen on hard times. His machine is on its last legs, and he can't afford a new one. A fellow writer's secret leads to a sudden decision.
Much of the story consists of discussions of the importance of fiction. The automated fiction machines seem intended as a dark satire of uninspired hackwork. It's clearly a heartfelt work, and the author manages to convey his passion.
This yarn comes from the pages of the September 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
A newspaper reporter investigates some odd events. There's the sudden, seemingly merciful death of someone suffering from a terminal illness. A scientist's papers are rearranged, giving him the clue he needs to complete his work. The reporter suggests, in a joking article, that these and other happenings might be the work of brownies. He's not too far off the mark.
Once again we have small beings helping humans. This time their efforts are entirely benign, unlike the golden bugs (who ignored people completely, and only worked for their own goals) and the microorganisms from the alien stamp (who went a little too far in their effort to organize things.) This is a sweet, simple little story, benefiting from the author's own experience as a newspaperman.
Three stars.
The title story is definitely the highlight of the collection. As a whole, that bumps the book up to three and one-half stars.
There's no question that Star Trek is a bona fide phenomenon. Now in its third season (and so far, quite a good season it is), it is a universe that has launched several dozen fan clubs, most with their own 'zines, many with Trek-fiction included. Professional tie-in merchandise is booming, too, from the AMT model kits of the ships in the show, to Stephen Whitfield's indispensable The Making of Star Trek, to Gold Key's dispensable comic book.
The latest release is the very first (that I'm aware of) professional original Trek story, Mission to Horatius by none other than SF veteran Mack Reynolds. That a familiar name should be tapped to write Trek tales is not a surprise. Episodes of the show have been written by SFnal talents Norman Spinrad, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby; and James Blish has written two collections of episode novelizations (well, noveletizations).
So how does Reynolds' effort rate? First, let's look at the story:
The Enterprise has been out on patrol so long that ship's stores are low and the crew is beginning to suffer from "cafard". This malady is a kind of isolation sickness that can lead to mass insanity. Before the ship can return to starbase, however, it receives a distress call from the Horatius system just beyond the Federation.
There are three Class M planets in the system, all inhabited by pioneers who don't want to be Federated. They are the primitive society of Neolithia, which operates in bands and clans; the theological autocracy of Mythria, controlled by a happy drug called "Anodyne" (a la "Return of the Archons"); and the Prussian military state of Bavarya. This world is the most dangerous, as they have designs on conquering the Federation, and they are building an army of clones ("Dopplegangers") toward that end.
Uncertain as to from which planet the distress signal originated, Kirk leads a landing party composed of his senior officers to each planet in turn. Meanwhile, the strings on Uhura's guitar break one by one, and Sulu's pet rat gets loose. Cafard causes 40 crew members to be put in stasis. It's not a happy trip. But in the end, it's a successful one when Kirk finds the that Anna, the daughter of "Nummer Ein" on Bavarya, summoned the Enterprise to thwart her father's nefarious scheme,
Well. There's quite a lot wrong with this book. Reynolds makes serving on the Enterprise feel like the worst duty in the galaxy. Maybe this is realistic, but from what we've seen, the crew isn't this unhappy. As for "cafard", if our nuclear submarine crews don't suffer from such issues, I can't imagine a crack Starfleet crew would.
Reynolds' characterizations are only cursorily accurate. Indeed, Mission feels more like a lesser story in his Analog-published United Planets series of stories, featuring a decentralized set of worlds with every kind of government imaginable. There's an undertone of smugness as Kirk destroys one society after another—first by beaming down an anodyne-antidote into the Mythran water supply (if Scotty can manufacture ten pounds of the stuff in ten minutes, why can't he synthesize new strings for Uhura?), and then by destroying all five million dopplegangers on Bavarya…who may well have been sentient beings.
And finally, McCoy staves off cafard by making the crew believe that Sulu's rat has Bubonic Plague, and that it must be killed to save the ship. The rat does not have a happy ending.
Most eyeroll inducing passage: "Anna, womanlike, had been inspecting Janice Rand's neat uniform. Now she responded to the bows of the men from the Enterprise. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, blond, and, save for a slight plumpness, attractive."
(emphasis added)
Even accepting that the target audience is on the younger side (given that the publisher is Whitman), this does not really excuse all the problems with Mission to Horatius. Moreover, the stirring introduction seems to have been written for an entirely different story!
There are pictures by Sparky Moore. They are adequate, but the characters don't look too much like our heroes.
Two stars.
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
In the run up to Christmas, I received a special treat through my letterbox: a second Orbit anthology for 1968. Will it do better than #3?
Orbit 4
Cover by Paul Lehr
Windsong by Kate Wilhelm
Starting with the series’ most regular contributor, Wilhelm’s story concerns Dan Thornton, an overworked executive. He is trying to solve the problem of an armored computer that should be able to act as a policeman. However, it cannot cope with the stress of unexpected situations. To get solutions he has been working with the psychologist Dr. Feldman to see if his dreams yield any ideas but, instead, he keeps dreaming about Paula. She was a free-spirited “windsong” from his teenage years, a person who could instantly analyse patterns to understand the world in ways others could not.
I have been noticing a pattern emerging with Wilhelm’s writing. She wants to experiment with form and content but rarely manages to deliver a strong balance between the two. In this case it is the style that works well, using the dream sessions in a way that would please the New Wave, but the actual plot leaves something to be desired, not really travelling anywhere fast and engaging in some obvious cliches.
Evens out at Three Stars
Probable Cause by Charles L. Harness
Harness recently returned from his parental leave and is back to writing, getting an even warmer reception this time around. Using his legal background, he brings us the discussion of a supreme court case, one where the constitutionality of a conviction depends on an interesting question. If a search warrant is granted based on a psychic reading, does this violate the fourth and\or fifth amendments?
Whilst some of the arguments here do not make much sense to me, I am neither a lawyer nor an American. As such, I am happy to bow to Harness’ knowledge of constitutional jurisprudence. What I question is the length of it all. At over 60 pages, this is the second longest story to yet grace the pages of Orbit. But it is just some justices sitting in a room discussing a piece of legal theory. This might be worth a vignette, but I needed more to justify a novella.
Two Stars
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison
Rudy has finally gotten out of the army on medical, only to find his fiancée Kris in a marijuana-drenched squat in downtown LA. Is he just not “with it” anymore? Or is something more sinister going on?
If this was from an older writer, I would assume it was a crass attempt to be relevant. With Ellison I am willing to assume he is in earnest in writing a hippy horror story. It is not entirely clear if what we see really happened or if it just a massive drug trip, but that actually makes it work better for me.
Four Stars
This Corruptible by Jacob Transue
This is an author of which no information is given, nor one I've heard of before. Is it perhaps a pseudonym?
Thirty-five years ago, scientists Paul and Andrew departed on bad terms. Whilst the former went into seclusion, the latter became vastly wealthy. Andrew now seeks out Paul after learning of his new discovery, the ability to renew a person’s life.
This reads like a middling story from 15 years ago. Whilst some horrifying imagery raises it up, it is pulled back down by lechery.
Two Stars
Animalby Carol Emshwiller
A strange animal is kept in the city by its keepers. What could it be?
This is a stylistic piece that will depend on your tolerance for this kind of prose:
It was said, on the second day, that he did not look too unhappy. A keeper of particular sensitivity brought him both a grilled cheese sandwich and a hamburger so it might be seen what his preferences were, but still he ate nothing.
This reader was unhappy, feeling nothing.
One Star
One at a Time by R. A. Lafferty
In Barnaby’s Barn, McSkee tells tall tales. But what if they are true?
I feel about Lafferty’s writing the way Superman does about Kryptonite. As such, I struggle with him at the best of times. This one I found it impossible to read. I don’t like bar-room frames or tall tales, I was confused by the style and was generally perplexed throughout.
A subjective One Star
Passengers by Robert Silverberg
In an interesting take on the Puppet Masters concept, Earth has encountered strange creatures called passengers. They can “ride” anyone, at any time, with no way to detect or stop them. Once a Passenger leaves a person, the memory goes. Our narrator wakes up to find he slept with a woman whilst he was ridden. However, upon exercising in Central Park he believes he has found her, even though she doesn’t remember him.
Anyone who has read Silverberg of late knows of his strange recurring writings about young women, so I will not belabour the point here. Your rating will probably result from how you balance the concept against this tendency. I come down in the middle.
Three Stars
Grimm's Story by Vernor Vinge
The planet Tu is a world that contains almost no metals. Whilst some technologies, such as pharmaceuticals, hydrofoils and optics, have been able to develop, others, such as heavier than air flight, have not.
It is on this world that Astronomy student Svir Hedrigs is approached by Tatja Grimm, the science editor of Fantasie magazine. She has a dangerous mission for Hedrigs, to stop the destruction of the last complete collection of Fantasie.
In less skilled hands this could easily have been contrived and fannish. Instead, Vinge spins a fascinating intricate plot and fully imagined world, touching on a number of interesting themes with complicated characters. It stumbles a little at the very end, stopping it from gaining a full five stars, but still very good.
A high four stars
A Few Last Words by James Sallis
Hoover is beset by bad dreams. He decides to head to Doug’s coffee shop where we learn from them why the cities are now so empty.
Well written and atmospheric, appealing to this sufferer of parasomnia.
Four Stars
Continuing a steady Orbit
Once again, Orbit contains some of the best and worst of SF for me. This issue more than most, though, is going to be a subjective one. So much is based on style that it cannot help but appeal to personal taste. I know others have considered Animal among the best and Grimm’s Story among the weakest. Whatever your tastes, I think there will be something in here for you to chew on.
This completely passed me by on first release but an ad for it from the Science Fiction Book Club in last month’s New Worlds was enough to convince me to get it. But was it worth me trialing a membership from them?
The so-called “end of the universe” is an area where physical laws as we know them break down. Sometimes this abstract nothingness recedes, sometimes it expands and swallows galaxies, leaving impossible creations in its wake. The Warden Corps have been set up at its current edge to monitor and explore the strange phenomena.
Among those who come to the current planetoid of the Warden Corps is Helena Kraag. Whilst the daughter of one of the richest men in the galaxy, she has become withdrawn from people since the loss of her mother. At first, she attempts to look straight into the nothingness and loses her sense of identity. In spite of this she still travels with the rest of the crew into this impossibility.
Unfortunately, their Heisenberg shields fail as they enter. As you can probably guess, things start to get strange.
Now, you might expect this to just then be a kind of surreal trip, a la Alice in Wonderland or Phantom Tollbooth. However, what Joseph produces is a kind of fractured character exploration. As we move through these different bizarre situations we learn more about each of the members of the crew and gain understanding of what motivates them.
There are so many delicious details. Initially this looks like it is going to be some kind of 19th Century comedy of manners, but we soon learn this has been carefully set up. Rather it is a kind of conditioning, one to allow the fliers to maintain a solid form of identity. Even when it feels like I am reading the lyrics to I Am The Walrus, there is clear intent and structure behind it.
Joseph is also a master of language and you feel yourself getting knowledge and beauty within the surreality. For example:
Everything and nothing had both happened and not happened; time was as broad as it was long; space was neither here nor there; the loop of eternity threaded itself through the eye of zero.
This kind of sentence could have been gibberish. But the way he phrases it and following the scenarios we have gone through, I absolutely understand what he is getting at.
I could go through all the characters and scenarios to explore the meaning behind it, but I think it is better to take the journey yourself. As Helena says, it is “like falling through the hole in the zero.” It may not be something that is at once fathomable but it is a new experience worth having.
Although primarily known as a poet, he clearly understands science fiction well and has an affinity for it (see, for example, the poem "Mars Ascending"). Here is hoping for more such forays.
Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann takes place in and around the ancient city of Jericho. Swann’s Jericho is a poverty-ridden city ruled by the Egyptians, its denizens apprehensive about the steady approach of the Wanderers, a flood of former slaves absconding from Egypt.
Bard ekes out a meager existence in this city with his mother and beautiful younger brother Ram. Ram is stolen one night and replaced by an unbecoming changeling. Bard accepts the fat, ugly Rahab and comes to think of her as a sister until years later when an elusive, feline creature known as a fennec arrives. Rahab then magically transforms into a beautiful woman with wings and disappears one night.
Determined to rescue Rahab, Bard enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb. Together they track Rahab down to the underground city, Honey Heart, where the fennecs rule as gods and Rahab’s kind, the People of the Sea along with beautiful human males–including the long lost Ram– are docile slaves to the fennecs. Bard and Zub must now find a way to wrest Rahab from the insidious control of the fennecs and make it out of Honey Heart alive.
Moondust is a highly imaginative and reasonably interesting story but I did not—could not bring myself to enjoy it. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me about this novel. Then it finally occurred to me. This book has no soul, no humanity. Moondust feels like a book written from the clinical lens of a white Westerner who thinks he’s better than the people he’s writing about.
Apparently, people living in poverty must always be dirty and have very little regard for personal hygiene. If humans own slaves, those slaves must be black. What else could they possibly be? Beautiful women are nothing but whores. Fat people are ugly, and the Israelites had very big, very ugly feet.
I believe these small details were meant to add color to the story’s world, but obviously originate from a place of thinly veiled disdain.
The main character, Bard, is not one with whom I could sympathize. His little brother is stolen—kidnapped in the dead of night. Even though Bard bemoans the loss, not once does it occur to the self-absorbed nincompoop to go looking for his five-year-old sibling. Instead, he magnanimously accepts the supposedly fat, ugly changeling named Rahab left in his brother’s place as a sister and simply carries on with his life as if that makes any sense.
Years later, when Rahab literally sheds her “ugly” skin and becomes a beautiful creature of a woman, she then becomes a harlot. What else could she possibly become?
When Rahab disappears, summoned back to the underground city of Honey Heart by the fennec, Chackal, Bard immediately enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb and races off in search of his beloved sister. This raises the question of why he was so desperate to save the sibling unrelated by blood–who left voluntarily–but had possessed no inclination to go off in search of his biological brother, Ram.
Once Bard and Zeb descend into Honey Heart, the story loses all coherence for me. The contrived mish-mash of magic, ancient Eastern culture, and biblical myth falls short of a finely woven tale. Moondust merely rankled.
If I’ve learned anything from Swann it’s that you can learn the history and possess infinite academic knowledge of a culture but your words aren’t going to touch anyone if you can’t actually feel the soul—the humanity of the people.
Three Stars
by Jason Sacks
One Before Bedtime by Richard Linkroum
What an odd novel. One Before Bedtime is part mad scientist novel, part social satire, part speculative fiction, and part self-centered character rationalization.
I'm not sure this is a good book, per se, but is certainly odd.
See, in a way, this book is all about the social satire. It's about Jeff Baxter, a kid just home from Vietnam, where he's seen some stuff, man, and who has gone back to work at his a pharmacy in his small midwestern town. Jeff just has one minor problem: his skin is in rough shape and he needs for it to clear up so his girlfriend can be happy. Thankfully (perhaps), the pharmacist turns out to be a tinkerer. Cortland Pedigrew has his own set of chemicals and other tools in the basement of the pharmacy. Pedigrew invents a pill which can clear Jeff's skin.
There's just one problem. The pill somehow turns Jeff's skin from White to Black.
And there the troubles begin.
Because Jeff's girlfriend, Peggy, is a bit of a militant and freedom fighter. She walks around everywhere barefoot and speaks at rallies for Black rights and sings folk songs and reminds one of someone like Joan Baez in her steadfast commitment to the hottest social issues of the day. (She probably wouldn't have cared about Jeff's skin, either, but the poor guy was too self-deluded to notice.)
As the story goes on, Jeff, Peggy and several other characters find themselves mixed up in campus protests, urban riots, and unreasonable hatred. Along the way they're forced to see their own prejudices – often reflexive and instinctive – and, well, pretty much stay the same people they were before the events in this book start.
On top of all the oddball problems I've just described, this 168-page quickie is written from different perspectives. We get no fewer than four different approaches to this character's story, each exceeding the previous one in its banality and strange affect. I kept wondering, over and over, how dumb these characters are, how stuck in their idiotic ways they are so they can't actually see the world differently than they did before their loved one was turned black?
Of course, that's also all part of author Linkroum's goal here, I'm sure. It's clear from his approach that he's interested in exploring the idea that racism is arbitrary and simple-minded, that mere skin color is not a diffentiator of the worth of a person, and that our present great national troubles are as absurd as his chracters all act here.
If only Mr. Linkroum had been more satirical, more biting in his humor. Instead the plot of One Before Bedtime all feels a bit undercooked, a bit bland and a bit too on-the-nose for it to really work for me.
I tried looking up Richard Linkroum in my collection of science fiction mags and found no other examples of his work. This is despite the fact that the book was published in hardcover by J.P. Lippincott, a reputable publisher. Finally I was tipped that there's a TV producer who goes by Dick Linkroum who might be our author here. That makes sense because One Before Bedtime reads like a bad episode of the old Twilight Zone: a bit undercooked and way too preachy.
Suspicions confirmed—this November Amazing names as Editor Barry N. Malzberg, who was listed last issue as Associate Editor. Sol Cohen is now merely the Publisher. Oddly, though, the editorial is by Harry Harrison, now listed as Associate Editor (though most likely gone). Go figure, or just say it’s more Sol Cohen chaos.
Johnny Bruck is back as the cover artist; this one (from Perry Rhodan #109, published in 1963) looks even more cliched and perfunctory than his earlier covers, making me wonder if they are really getting worse, or if I am just getting more tired of them.
by Johnny Bruck
“New” is sprinkled across the cover wherever possible to distract from the fact that once again, reprints dominate. Four new short stories take up 36 pages, just under 25% of the magazine. And the prize: “plus stories by: RAY BRADBURY (Winner of the Aviation Space Writers Association’s Top Award). . . .” Does Bradbury need that kind of boosting?
One of the new stories, interestingly, is a collaboration between Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. When Delany appeared with a novel excerpt in the issue before last, his name was misspelled about half the time; this issue, it’s misspelled “Delaney” everywhere—on the cover, on the contents page (twice), on the first page of the story, in the book review column. Well, small mercy, it’s spelled right in the blurb for the story.
There are worse production botches, discussed when I get to them.
Harrison’s editorial, Science Fiction and the Establishment, is superficial and banal: the Establishment doesn’t like SF, it’s a problem all over, but it’s starting to get better, someday it will be gone. The book review column continues interestingly but incestuously, with James Blish as William Atheling reviewing Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany reviewing Blish. Leon E. Stover contributes another in his “Science of Man” series, discussed below.
Despite all the above kvetching about the magazine’s presentation, the good news is that the new short stories are as interesting a batch as we’ve seen in Amazing for a while, and the reprints are all readable or better, unlike many of their predecessors.
Power of the Nail, by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany
Ellison and Delany’s Power of the Nail reads like what Ellison was publishing in the SF magazines around 1957, polished up by a smoother writer. Robert Zagaramendo and his wife Margret are Ecological Observers on the planet Saquetta, and boy howdy is Margret pissed: “You promised me better than this, somewhere.” Robert’s not too thrilled either, especially with Margret. Bickering is constant.
Saquetta features the Saquettes, mole-like aliens who are not at all cute, but have the interesting trait of being reincarnated when they die naturally, which is most of the time. But the vibrations of the “phase-antenna of the automatic ecology equipment” that the humans are burying in various locations draw the Saquettes away from their usual hideouts to places where they are vulnerable to attack by giant predatory birds, called molloks because that’s what the Saquettes scream when they’re being hunted.
by Dan Adkins
After further conflict with his wife, including a near-rape, Robert sets up “ecology equipment” near an especially large Saquette colony, complete with lurking molloks, and goes back later to find, as expected, hundreds of dead Saquettes. He builds little round coffins for them and nails them together, then goes back and tells Margret that they’re going home—and shortly, suffers a terrible and fatal punishment that is not clearly explained, though one may surmise it is related to the operation of the "automatic ecology equipment." (Compare David H. Keller's The Doorbell if you've ever read it.) In the moral universe of the story, it’s obviously because he decided to sacrifice hundreds of Saquettes in order to escape an emotionally intolerable situation.
It's a very vivid and readable story, which goes some way towards compensating for its ultimate obscurity. Three stars.
The Monsters, by David R. Bunch
The formerly prolific David R. Bunch, who has not appeared in Amazing since Sol Cohen took over, is back with The Monsters. It’s short as usual for Bunch, and on a familiar theme: the need to harden one’s small children against the brutalities of life by brutalizing them pre-emptively. (See Bunch’s earlier story A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins, Fantastic June 1961, and thence to Judith Merril’s annual “year’s best” volume.) Here, the threat the children are to be prepared for is a bit trite, but the writing is brisk and economical. Three stars.
Try Again, by Jack Wodhams
Jack Wodhams is new to me, though the Journeyer-in-Chief has not thought highly of his work in Analog. His Try Again is surprisingly good. Pyler, a psychiatrist, is having a session with the precocious five-year-old Tommy, who says he has lived before and remembers it. But this isn’t quite the same life as before, since with adult memories he acts differently the second time around. Tommy is much burdened by his knowledge of future events and the question whether he could do anything about them (it’s 1935, Mussolini has just invaded Ethiopia; and Tommy knows what comes later). Shortly he is kidnapped to Germany. An alternative history, even worse than the real one, is telegraphically unfolded. Tommy, who has disappeared from the plot after his interrogation, reappears at the terrible end. Four stars—maybe a bit crude, but powerful.
by Jeff Jones
The reading experience is undermined at the end by Amazing’s production values, or lack of them. The story stops on page 29 in the midst of a sentence with no “continued on” notice, and the reader is left to rummage through the magazine to find the rest of the text on page 138.
This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty
R.A. Lafferty’s This Grand Carcass is, typically, told in high Tall Tale mode, and it is also clearly a moral tale, though the precise moral may be a bit obscure. Mord comes to Juniper Tell offering to sell a device cheap that will allow Tell to “own the worlds.” So why is he selling it? He’s dying. Tell bites and is the new owner of Gahn, for Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus, which soon enough is outdoing and dominating all the other “general purpose machines.” Shortly, it is a full partner with Tell (in Tell and Gahn—get it?).
Before long, Tell, like Mord, is almost, er, gone, and Gahn (whose power inputs have been revealed as dummies) candidly admits: “I use you. I use human fuel. I establish symbiosis with you. I suck you out. I eat you up.” So Tell sells Gahn on to the next high-rolling sucker. Moral, did I say? Machines are the Devil? Anything that makes humans’ work too easy is damnation? Something along those lines, I’m sure. This is not one of Lafferty’s best; it is simultaneously obvious and vague and less deliciously absurd than Lafferty at his best. But it’s amusing enough, good for three stars.
In Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf (Fantastic, January/February 1954), Mr. Bigelow, a dwarf, visits the carnival daily, forks over his dime at the Mirror Maze, and heads straight for the mirror that makes him look large. Aimee, a carnival worker, hangs out in the booth with ticket-seller Ralph when her business is slow. She is sympathetic to Mr. Bigelow’s plight. Ralph isn’t, and makes fun of him, and of her. Aimee discovers that Mr. Bigelow makes a living writing detective stories, which reveal his inner torments. Ralph plays a nasty trick on him, proving that Ralph is nasty, which we already knew.
by Sanford Kossln
Rather abruptly, end of story. Or is it? There’s no “Continued on . . .” at the end. As with Try Again, I rummaged through the magazine, but found no loose piece of the story. So I checked the original 1954 Fantastic . . . and there’s an entire page of text at the end that is omitted from this reprinted version.
No rating, since the full text doesn’t actually appear in the magazine. It’s not one of Bradbury’s better stories to my taste, but it’s a whole lot better complete than truncated. Sheesh.
The Traveling Crag, from the July 1951 Fantastic Adventures, is a silly confection by Theodore Sturgeon—a non-trivial category of his ouevre. On the other hand, silliness by Sturgeon is more palatable than that from less accomplished hands.
Cris is a literary agent with an assistant, Naome, who is obviously in love with him, though he is oblivious. Cris has received a story, The Traveling Crag, from an unknown, Sig Weiss, which “grabs you by the throat, shakes your bones, puts a heartbeat into your lymph ducts and finally slams you down, gasping, weak, and oh so happy,” and incidentally makes a lot of money fast. But Weiss sends no more stories. Cris visits to find out why, and the local storekeeper warns him, “Meanest bastard ever lived,” a judgment Weiss lives up to in the flesh.
by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)
When Weiss finally submits another story at Cris’s urging, it begins: “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light-years from Sol.” This is the beginning of a notorious subscription ad that ran in Galaxy, headlined YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY!, designed to distinguish Galaxy’s policy from that of lowbrow pulp magazines like . . . Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. So to perpetrate this in-joke, Sturgeon must have convinced not only Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, but also Fantastic Adventures editor Howard Browne, to allow it.
But I digress. The point is that Weiss has turned in a bunch of crap, continuing his mean-bastard performance. Meanwhile, Cris meets Miss Tillie Moroney, who is offering a reward for an “authentic case of devil into saint,” and eventually tells him a story—“a science fiction plot”—about a humanoid race that has developed the ultimate weapon, one of which has apparently been lost on Earth for thousands of years. And she wants Cris to get Weiss to write another blockbuster story and then find out how and where he wrote it.
So Weiss produces another story that makes everyone cry, and Cris and Tillie head out to see him, but Naome the assistant contrives to get there first, and the ultimate weapon, a small object found after a rockslide, proves to have been the key to Weiss’s transformation, but it gets triggered, and one of Tillie’s blouse buttons emits communications from the humanoids, who explain to them all telepathically that the ultimate weapon was one that stops useless conflict, and now a reaction is propagating through the atmosphere to bring the weapon’s benefits to all the world (it’s science!), and by the way Naome has paired off with Weiss, and Nick with Tillie. “Outside, it was a greener world, and all over it the birds sang.”
It's all just Too Much, but rendered so smoothly as to disarm even the house misanthrope’s ire. Three stars for this feat of making fatuity charming.
He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse
“Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed, for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of whose who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!”
Yes! Rave on! Here is a fine specimen of the peak of cosmos-spanning rhetoric occasionally reached by early (pre-Campbell) SF, and what follows lives up to it in naïve grandeur. It is the first paragraph of He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, a novella from the August 1936 Amazing.
The plot is essentially that of The Man from the Atom run backwards. Atoms are solar systems and galaxies are molecules, and the Professor has devised a substance (called Shrinx!) that will reduce humans to subatomic dimensions so they can explore the sub-universes. When his unnamed assistant is unenthusiastic about making this one-way trip, the Prof stabs hin with the needle. As he shrinks, the Prof drops him onto a block of Rehyllium-X (sic!), where he descends into a microscopic scratch on its surface and is chased around by a germ, fearsomely portrayed by illustrator Morey.
by Leo Morey
Soon enough, our hero finds himself surrounded by luminous masses—nebulae!—and then, as he shrinks further, stars and planets. He alights on one occupied by gaseous intelligences, shrinks further to a planet of cave-dwellers, and then (in a powerful passage) to a planet of machines gone out of control. Their birdlike creators have fled to the world’s moon, as their mechanical heirs maniacally tear down the remains of their civilization and remake the world closer to their circuits’ desire.
Our hero continues downward, or smallward, through universes he cannot bring himself to recount except in the most summary form (“Suns dying . . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more years of sustenance . . . [etc.]”) But then . . . he is mysteriously attracted to a tiny, distant spark of yellow, which on approach proves to be circled by planets including a tiny blue one that twinkles invitingly, so he approaches, descends, and finds himself in . . . Cleveland!
Well, actually, he lands in Lake Erie, flooding much of Cleveland as well as nearby Toledo. Upon attaining dry land, he is accosted by aircraft shooting at him, which he finds annoying. He is bundled into a vehicle and taken to Cleveland, to a building where scientists assemble to interrogate him, but are unable to understand his thoughts, though he can read theirs. He is not impressed by them, or humanity. He escapes and flees into the countryside, where he is drawn to an isolated house occupied by a writer, of science fiction of course, who is sufficiently enlightened to be capable of receiving his thought, and to whom the shrinking man tells his tale before continuing his apparently endless and by now wearisome voyage.
In one sense this is an odd story for Amazing to reprint, since it appeared in the 1946 anthology Adventures and Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—one of the oldest stories in the book, and the only one from Amazing. That book is so well known that stories included in it are much more likely to be familiar to current Amazing readers than most of Sol Cohen’s other reprints. I read that anthology when I was a kid and wondered what this old-fashioned story based on scientific nonsense was doing in the company of Heinlein, Asimov, et al. But I’m younger than that now and can better appreciate its hokey majesty. Four stars, allowing for its age.
Henry Hasse (b. 1913) began publishing SF in 1933; this is his third published story. Aside from it, he is best known for collaborating with Ray Bradbury on a few minor early stories. None of his other work, which has appeared sporadically over the decades, has garnered the recognition that this story has.
One side note: This story presents a very early occurrence of what later was named Tuckerization, after its heavy use by Wilson Tucker: giving fictional characters the names of real members of the SF community. The Cleveland writer to whom the shrinking man tells his story is named Stanton Cobb Lentz, obviously a reference to Stanton A. Coblentz, a prolific SF writer mainly of the late ‘20s and ‘30s, whose work is nowadays most charitably described as quaint.
In Richard Matheson’s The Last Day (Amazing, April/May 1953), the Sun is about to destroy Earth (it’s swollen and red and much too hot). Protagonist wakes up after the last night, which he and friends have spent in drunken, lustful, and/or senselessly destructive pursuits. He decides this approach to the end is unsatisfactory, and after wrestling with his conscience reluctantly heads to his parents’ house (shooting an attacker en route). He has avoided this visit for years because of his mother’s excessive piety. But on this final hot day, she’s cool, and they hang out waiting for the end. The editor blurbs: “Waxing philosophical is like waxing a floor; it is powerful easy to fall on your face while trying it.” Matheson does not. Four stars, mainly for keeping just on the right side of bathos as he renders the conventional sentiments.
Science of Man: War Is Peace, by Leon E. Stover
Leon E. Stover is back with another of his “Science of Man” articles, War Is Peace, written in his usual dogmatic style. He takes on the likes of Konrad Lorenz (of On Aggression), arguing that aggression is not a mode of behavior that we must sublimate or otherwise redirect, but a goal-directed extension of human social organization. He says: “The ethologists have nothing to offer that can improve on what Karl von Clauswitz said of war in the 19th century: that it is an extension of politics carried on by different means.” And he concludes: “There is no magic solution to be found in animal behavior studies, psychology, or biology. Do not be misled. The only solution is better politics. But we have to know that to want it.” Well, maybe—he has no suggestions for how we get there in practice. But Stover recounts much entertaining anthropological lore along the way.
Three stars.
Summing Up
Well, that wasn’t bad at all. The new material is lively and interesting, and even the reprints are all readable or better, with nothing grossly stupid or incompetent. Admittedly, that shouldn’t be the standard, but in Sol Cohen-world it does make a difference. This issue is a magazine that one might actually purchase for enjoyment and not as a duty, a change not to be sneezed at. Can it continue?
[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]
Science fiction has a reputation for being a serious genre. In tone, that is–it's still mostly dismissed by "serious" literary aficionados. Whether it's gloomy doomsday predictions or thrilling stellar adventure, laughs are usually scarce.
There is, however, a distinct thread of whimsy within the field. Satire and farce can be found galore. For instance, Robert Sheckley was a master of light, comedic sf short stories in the '50s (he's less good at it these days). In moderation, fun/funny stories break up a turgid clutch of dour tales.
On the other hand, when you put a bunch together, particularly when only one of them is above average…
Before we get to the stories, in his editorial column Fred Pohl reminds Galaxy readers to submit proposals for the ending of the Vietnam War…in 100 words or fewer.
It makes me want to send something like this (with apologies to Laugh-In:
How I would end the War in Vietnam, by Henry Gibson.
"I would end the War in Vietnam by bombing the Vietnamese. I would bomb them a lot. When there are no more Vietnamese, we would win."
The lead piece is the beginning of a new serial by one of the old titans of science fiction. It tells of one Christopher Crockett de la Cruz, an actor from a space colony orbiting the moon. He has come down to Earth to ply his trade, a very risky endeavor as even lunar gravity is uncomfortable for him. De la Cruz requires an integrated exoskeleton to get around. That plus his emaciated, 8-foot frame makes him look like nothing so much as Death himself. A handsome, well-featured Death, but Death just the same. (Hmmm… a handsome, gaunt actor–I wonder on whom this character could be based!)
As strange as De la Cruz is, the situation on Earth is even stranger. He makes touchdown in Texas, now an independent nation again in the aftermath of an atomic catastrophe in the late '60s. Its inhabitants have all been modified to top eight feet as well (everything is bigger in Texas, by God's or human design), and they claim sovereignty of all North America, from the Guatemalan canal to the Northwest Territory. And over the Mexicans in particular, who not only are excluded from the height-enhancing hormone, but many of whom are forced to live as thralls, harnessed with electric cloaks that make them mindless slaves.
Quickly, De la Cruz is embroiled in local politics, unwittingly used to spearhead a coup against the current President of Texas. Along the way, the descriptions, the events, the setting are absurd to the extreme–from the reverence paid to "Lyndon the First", father of the nation, to the ridiculous courtships between De la Cruz and the two female characters.
It shouldn't work, and it almost doesn't, but underneath all the silliness, there is the skeleton of a plot and a fascinating world. It doesn't hurt that Leiber is such a veteran; I've read froth for froth's sake, and this isn't it. I'm willing to see where he goes with it.
Three stars.
McGruder's Marvels, by R. A. Lafferty
by Joe Wehrle, Jr.
The military needs a miniaturized component for its uber-weapon in two weeks, but the regular contractors can't guarantee delivery for two years. The colonels in charge of procuring reject out of hand a bid that will provide parts for virtually nothing and almost instantly. It is only when they start losing a global war that they grasp at the seemingly ludicrous straw.
Turns out the fellow who made the bid used to run a flea circus. Naturally, now he's into miniaturization. His parts really do work, and they really are cheap, but as can be expected, there's a catch.
If I hadn't known this story was written by Lafferty, I'd still have guessed it was written by Lafferty. After all, he and whimsy are old companions. It's more of an F&SF fantasy than SF, but it at least has the virtue of being memorable. Three stars.
The best piece of the issue is this one, featuring a new Niven character (the 180-year-old space prospector Louis Wu) in a familiar setting (Known Space). This is set later than the rest of the stories, past the Bey Schaeffer tales, contemporaneous with Safe at Any Speed somewhere close to the year 3000.
Wu has gotten tired of people, and so he has gone off in his one-man ship to explore the stars. His motive is fame–he wants to find himself a relic of the Slavers, the telepathic race of beings who ruled the galaxy and died in an interstellar war more than a billion years ago. In a far off system, his deep radar pings off an infinitely reflective object in orbit around an Earthlike world. Assuming it's a Slaver treasure box, kept in stasis these countless eons, he moves in for the salvage. But a new kind of alien has gotten there first…
Once again, Niven does a fine job of establishing a great deal with thumbnail, throwaway lines. In the end, Tide is a scientific gimmick story, the kind of which I'd expect to find in Analog (why doesn't Niven show up in Analog?), but the personal details elevate the story beyond its foundation.
It's funny; I read in a 'zine (fan or pro, I can't remember) that Niven writes hard SF that eschews characterization. I think Niven writes quite unique and memorable characters and hard SF. It's a welcome combination.
Four stars.
Bailey's Ark , by Burt K. Filer
by Brock
Now back to silliness. Atomic tests have caused the oceans to flood the land. After a few decades, only a few mountaintop communities are left, and soon they will be inundated. Fourteen humans have been chosen to be put into cold storage for 1500 years, to emerge when the waters have receded.
All the animals have died, except for a few caged specimens, and no effort has been made to preserve them through the impending apocalypse. It's up to one wily vet to save at least one species by sneaking it into the stasis Ark without anyone noticing.
Everything about this story is dumb, from the set up to the execution. Its only virtues are that it's vaguely readable and that it's short.
Two stars.
For Your Information: Interplanetary Communications, by Willy Ley
This is a strange article which never quite makes a point. The subject is sending messages from points around the solar system, but ultimately, Ley presents just two notable things:
1) A table of interplanetary distances (available in any decent astronomy book, and without even a convenient translation of kilometers to light-seconds/minutes/hours).
2) The assertion that satellites, artificial or natural, will be necessary as communications relays as direct sending of messages from planetary surface to planetary surface is prohibitively power-intensive. It is left to the reader's imagination as to why that would be.
Two captains of industry vie for control of a city. One offers a collaboration; the other takes advantage of the offer, double crosses the offerer, and leaves him penniless. When the double-crosser gets second thoughts, he subjects himself to a "play-out", a sort of mind trip where he gets to recreate and re-examine his decision in a fantasy world scenario. The double-crossed, coincidentally, engages in a "play-out" at the same time, for the same reason.
This concept was done much more effectively more than a decade ago in Ellison's The Silver Corridor. Two stars.
A callous capitalist comes across "Factsheet Five", a rudely typed circular that details all the horrible injuries caused by the defects in various companies' products. This and the prior Factsheets have had harmful impacts on the companies listed, from financial loss to outright bankruptcy. The capitalist, who has his own industrial empire (and attendant quality-control issues), wants to find the author of the Factsheets so he can get inside knowledge to make a killing in the investor market.
Of course, we know who will be featured in Factsheet Six…
This is the kind of corny, Twilight Zone-y piece that shows up in the odd issue of F&SF. I was sad to find it here.
Two stars.
Seconds' Chance, by Robin Scott Wilson
by Brand
Ever wonder who cleans up after the James Bonds and Kelly Robinsons of the world, settling insurance claims, smoothing diplomatic feathers, etc.? This is their story.
Their rather pointless, one-joke-spread-over-too-many-pages, story.
Two stars.
When I Was in the Zoo, by A. Bertram Chandler
by Vaughn Bodé
Here's a shaggy dog story, told White Hart style, about an Aussie fisherman who gets abducted by jellyfish aliens, exhibited in a zoo with a collection of terrestrial animals, and then seduced for professional reasons by one of the lady jellyfish.
Frankly, I'm not quite sure what else to say about it other than it's the sort of tale you'd expect from A. Bertram Chandler writing a White Hart story–competent, maritime, Australian, and forgettable.
Three stars.
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Lester del Rey
The issue ends with a review panning 2001 as New Wave nihilism, meaningless save for the vague suggestion that intelligence is always evil. This is a facile take. It's possible 2001 is what I call a "Rorschach film", like, say, Blow Up, where the director throws a bunch of crap on the screen and leaves it to the viewer to invent a coherent story. However, there are enough clues throughout the film to make the film reasonably comprehensible. Moreover, there is a book that explains everything in greater detail.
I'm not saying 2001 is perfect, and I imagine those who had to sit through the longer, uncut version enjoyed it less (save for Chip Delany, who apparently preferred it. I'll never know which I would have liked best, since the director not only trimmed down the film after release, but burned the cut footage!) But it is a brilliant film, extremely innovative, and it's worth a watch.
Starving for a bite
After eating all that cotton candy, with only the smallest morsel of meat to go with it, I am absolutely famished for something substantial. Thankfully, I'm about to hop a Boeing 707 for a trip to Japan, where not only the food will be exquisite, but I can catch up on all the 4 and 5 star stories recommended by my fellow Travelers in earlier months.
I recently read two new science fiction novels by British authors that are otherwise as different as they can be. One takes place in the very near future. The other is set centuries from now. One never leaves England. The other ventures into interstellar space. One uses an experimental narrative style. The other is told in a traditional manner. One is New Wave, the other Old Wave. Let's take a look at both.
Before the story starts, unmanned probes discovered a habitable planet orbiting Sigma Draconis. A team of four explorers went to check it out. Everything seemed hunky-dory, so three big starships carried a bunch of colonists there. They named the planet Asgard.
One ship was to be used for raw materials. Another was to be kept intact, in case the colonists needed to get out quick. The third was supposed to carry our hero, one of the original four explorers, back to Earth.
Disaster struck when an error in navigation caused one of the ships to crash into Asgard's moon. Our protagonist, a born wanderer, is stuck on Asgard, a reluctant colonist who doesn't fit in with the others. While off on his own, he is stung by a local critter and spends several days hallucinating.
Meanwhile, a microorganism native to the planet gets into the bodies of the colonists, leading to vitamin C deficiency and thus scurvy. For various reasons, the only permanent solution to this medical problem is for folks to start eating local foodstuffs, not yet known to be completely safe. Half a dozen colonists are selected at random to test native foods.
When our hero returns, he finds the six people locked up, apparently insane and guilty of sabotaging the colony. The other colonists are in a very bad state, barely able to take care of their basic needs and unwilling to make even very simple repairs. Can one man whip them into shape, solve the vitamin C problem, figure out what happened to the six insane folks, and save the colony?
I should mention that the hero's hallucinations, as well as those of the six colonists who eat local foods, take the form of folklore from their individual cultures. A Greek woman, for example, imagines scenes from Greek mythology. A detailed description of these hallucinations is probably the most interesting and original part of the book.
The explanation for what's going on didn't fully convince me; it got a bit mystical for my taste. What is otherwise a problem-solving SF story that wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Analog flirts with things like racial memory. I'll give the author credit for having major characters of both sexes and multiple ethnicities.
It's nearly impossible to provide you with a simple synopsis of this novel, because it's narrated in a nonlinear fashion. In addition to that, the narrator may be insane, spends most of the day in a sedated condition, and is subjected to a form of therapy/punishment that definitely messes up her mind.
The narrator is the wife of a obsessive scientist, now dead. With the help of a brilliant electronics engineer (later the wife's lover, and also dead), he came up with a way to record the sensations experienced by one person and to allow another to share them. Originally used as therapy, it becomes a form of entertainment as well.
We slowly learn that the narrator has been convicted of a crime, and that she is subjected to mental recordings designed to make her contrite. With multiple flashbacks, some going all the way to the narrator's childhood, we see how the device was invented, how it was used, and how it was corrupted. We also receive varying accounts of how the two men died.
Alternating with these memories, which may be distorted, the narrator also relates events happening to her in the present. Her relationship with the Nurse and the Doctor is a complex one, with hidden motives everywhere.
This is a difficult book. Besides jumping back and forth in time, often from one sentence to the next, the text frequently breaks off in the middle of a line. Events are not only narrated out of order, but also retold in a completely different way. It's impossible to discover the real truth.
Despite the effort required on the part of the reader, and the inherent ambiguity of the work, this is a fine novel. The author happens to be male, but he writes from the point of view of a woman in a completely convincing manner. If you're looking for light entertainment, seek elsewhere. If you want to discover that science fiction can be serious literature, you're in the right place.
H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds casts a long shadow over the science fictional world. Whether fans see it as using invasion literature as a satire on imperialism or just an atmospheric horror tale, know it from films, radio or magazines, it is one of the core works of SF.
But what if Wells’ Martians came not to exterminate but enslave?
Whilst not officially a sequel to War of the Worlds, it is hard not to read it as anything else. In this version, the Tripods came and conquered more than a century ago. After millions were killed in the war what remains of humanity lives in a feudal society under their tripod overlords. Once people reach the age of 13, a metal “cap” is put into their head which ensures their compliance with the alien commands.
Will Parker, from a Southern English village, meets a vagrant who tells him of the location of free humans. Together with his cousin Henry they journey to The White Mountains, to both learn more of The Tripods, and to fight against them.
At their heart these are juvenile adventure stories, a cross between Ian Serallier’s Silver Sword and Andre Norton’s SF tales. However, juvenile should not be taken to mean shallow or hollow. These are dark tales of children trying to survive in an oppressive society.
The highlight for me is the second book, where we get to see life in a Tripod city and Will is treated as a pet by one of the aliens. It is insightful, vivid and very disturbing.
These do have one flaw and that is found in the final book. Christopher wants to tie up the trilogy in these short books and the ending feels incredibly abrupt and light, given what we see in the others. However, there is still much to enjoy here and worth checking out.
I actually feel the limitations of having to write for a younger audience benefit Christopher. He is forced to remove his tendency for gratuitous shock scenes for the sake of it, nor did I notice any of his usual prejudices against the Celtic nations of the British Isles. If he sticks within this field, I will willingly pick up more of his books.
Pity About Earth introduces us to Shale, a callous, ambitious, often downright cruel man. He and Phrix, his alien assistant, work for the god-like Publisher, in advertising. His ship is automated, as is the rest of the universe. A mistress of his plots with a competitor, and Shale is forced to escape into a labyrinth. There he encounters cages inhabited by humans who have been conditioned to prove concepts in torturous and deadly ways. Shale feels no sympathy, up until a human-ape hybrid named Marylin catches his attention. He is strangely compelled by her. She helps him to escape the maze, and later, the planet.
Despite being a Groil, Phrix has been promoted to Shale's old position. In one of many instances where Marylin tries to redirect Shale from violence, she protects Phrix by setting Shale to go to Asgard, fabled home of the Publisher.
Upon reaching Asgard, they find the long dead remains of the Publisher. In his place is Limsola, a woman who has been gaining the secrets of Asgard executives just before their deaths. Shale is distracted by her allure, breaking Marylin's heart as he was the first being to show her a shred of care. Limsola encourages Marylin to Publish, to change the rules. Marylin confers with Phrix about how change could happen, and she takes up post as the new Publisher. On his homeworld, Phrix follows her lead, and together they begin to breathe life back into a world that had become frozen.
The world of the Publisher is automated to the point of inaction. Life is casually thrown aside even while there are means to prevent suffering. Advertising is a key function yet items only exist to *be* advertised. Phrix tasks himself with upending an entire universe. It is not a matter of ethics to him, only what is and what could be. Marylin has only abstract knowledge, no personal experiences, and yet she has more compassion and care than any other character.
Shale is hardly unique in his views, unwilling or unable to look beyond himself and care for others prior to meeting Marylin, and even after he begins to have some sense of shared "humanity" it is brief and confuses him. There is a special horror in his blasé approach to the labyrinth of experiments, food made of humans, and sexual violence. He doles out death and the dead are simply out of luck. He is a deeply unlikable protagonist; Marylin and Phrix provide far more engaging points of view.
I can't say I enjoyed it, but it left me with thoughts to chew on.
Captain Roadstrum plays the part of Odysseus in a loose adaptation of The Odyssey. Along with Captain Pucket, he and the crew of hornet-men visit planets that serve as analogs to the islands on the way home from Troy. Roadstrum is not some wise general, he survives via luck, sheer force of will, and the rare moment of inspiration. Margaret the houri and Deep John the "original hobo", myths in their own right, join the crew.
Roadstrum finds Valhalla, where his crew feast and fight and die, all to rise up ready to fight again the next morning. Upon leaving, the crew have their tongues cut out and grow themselves replacement organs- Roadstrum opts for a forked tongue, which grants him clever speech. They speed through twenty years while being sucked into a black hole, escaping via a recently installed button that reverses time.
Helios' cows are replaced by an asteroid belt orbiting a sun, though that doesn't stop the crew from capturing and *eating* one of these asteroids like a prize calf.
Roadstrum takes over for Atlas, not carrying the physical weight of the world but perceiving existence in its entirety, as anything he drops his attention from ceases to exist.
The crew complains about the size and quality of the hell planet they've been sentenced to for their crime against Aeaea, a version of the witch Circe, before breaking out.
Roadstrum is in no great hurry to get home, and we don't even get the name of his wife or son (Penny and Tele-Max) until the last 15 pages.
There is a degree of self-awareness to both the story and Roadstrum himself, moments when he recognizes that he is acting out a story that has happened before, or even actions he seems to remember. He makes a determined break from repeating actions at the close of the book, choosing not to settle peacefully with his wife and son as the former version of Odysseus did, but to fly off toward more adventure.
Although Space Chantey, like Pity, has characters eating other people, casual killing, and brutality, it's in the format of a tall-tale and with barely half the gritty detail as the first book of this Ace Double. Even the characters who are dying often take it as a bit of a joke. Indeed, this book reads more as a folk story with space-travel trappings than science fiction. Characters die and return with little or no explanation, survive impossibilities and contradict themselves and the narration. It is larger than life and at times quite silly. It also has plenty of dubious poetry in the form of verse interludes.
This would have been better suited as a series of stories around a campfire than a sci-fi novel.
If you've been following Dave Van Arnam's First Draft 'zine, you're probably rooting for this fan-turned-filthy-pro. I didn't get a chance to read his Star Gladiator, and this newest book is co-written. Still, Ted White's name is magic to me, and who could resist this lurid cover. Therefore, it was with no hesitation that I plunked down my four bits plus a dime to read Sideslip!
I was even more excited to see that the book starred Ronnie Archer, outsized private eye, who starred in the excellent short story, Wednesday, Noon. Turns out he's a false cognate, however. Per a letter Ted sent me:
Same name, different characters. Ron Archer was my penname as a cartoonist in the early '50s, and got applied to subsequent characters, usually private detectives. Ron was the protagonist in my never-written mystery novel, "The Stainless Steal."
Ah well. The rest of the book was similarly a disappointment. In brief, Ron Archer finds himself zapped into an alternate New York in a set-up quite close to that of White's Jewels of Elsewhen. But in this New York, alien invaders conquered the Earth in 1938, turning our world into a colonial source for raw materials. The "Angels", who look like tall, luminous humans, are protected by force fields and human collaborators known as Yellow-Jackets. This does not keep resistance groups from forming, which in the Untied States are represented by The Technocrats (led by Hugo Gernsback and employing Albert Einstein–these are the folks who warped Archer to this alternate world), the Communists, and the Nazis (led by none other than Hitler, himself).
The first half of the novel details Archer getting captured by and escaping from each of the various groups, ultimately ending up in the hands of the Angels. Well, one particular Angel. The one female Angel, who of course immediately falls in love with Archer. At this point, the story practically grinds to a halt as Archer is taken off-world to meet the Angels and argue for Earth's sovereignty. There are lots of pop-eyed descriptions of advanced technologies that feel better suited to SF from the 20s or 30s. Archer and Sharna, his Angel lover, have a fraught relationship written with the subtlety and skill of a teenager writing his first fanfiction. The end is a brief, action-filled segment. In between, there's a lot more sex and nudity than I've seen in an American SF novel. I found it a bit embarrassing.
In short, we have the bones of a Ted White novel, but none of the feel. Missing is the deft, sensual touch that White lends his pieces, as well as any semblance of good pacing. This actually makes perfect sense–in another letter, White explained that the story was largely executed by Van Arnam:
This was a book which started in a writer's group. I wrote an opening hook and passed it out to the others. Dave Van Arnam picked up on it and suggested we collaborate on a book. Which we did. I was not happy with Dave's writing early on, and heavily rewrote his first drafts, but as I fed these back to him he picked up on what was needed, and the last quarter of the book is mostly his. Pyramid liked the book well enough to ask us to write their Lost in Space book…
The real problem with the book, beyond the technical issues, is that Archer doesn't do anything. At every turn, he's simply along for the ride, noting his surroundings, occasionally running. Archer, himself, notes as much at the end of the book. I suppose that speaks to some authorial awareness, though it doesn't fix the problem.
Still, the book is readable, in a hackish sort of way, and the concepts are fine, if as hamfisted as the cover. Based on quality, I should give this thing two stars, but I did make it through Sideslip!, and I wanted to know what happened, so I'll give it three.
![[June 10, 1970] I will fear <i>I Will Fear No Evil</i> (July 1970 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/700610galaxycover-435x372.jpg)
![[April 8, 1970] All Too Finite (<em>Infinity One</em>, edited by Robert Hoskins)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ANCL00221-400x372.jpg)
![[March 12, 1970] It’s A Dog’s Life (<i>Orbit 6</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Orbit-F-672x372.jpg)
![[March 2, 1970] Par for the course (April 1970 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IF-1970-04-Cover-476x372.jpg)
Wire photo of the aftermath.
Arrival at Ocean-Deep. Art for “Waterclap” by Gaughan![[September 16, 1969] September 1969 Galactoscope](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690916covers-672x372.jpg)
![[September 8, 1969] Another Orbit around the sun (<i>Orbit 5</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/O5-3-312x372.png)
![[October 6, 1968] Snail on the Slope? (November 1968 <i>Amazing</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/amz-1168-cover.png)
![[June 10, 1968] Froth and Frippery (July 1968 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/680610cover-653x372.jpg)
![[April 16, 1968] Tripods and Others (April 1968 Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/680416covers-672x372.jpg)
