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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Identical cousins

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

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

Also, Lou hates science fiction.

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

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

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

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

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


by Paul E. Wenzel

The issue at hand


by Virgil Finlay

Door to Anywhere, by Poul Anderson

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

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

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

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

Children in Hiding, by John Brunner

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

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

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

The Modern Penitentiary, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

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

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

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

Two stars.

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

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

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

At the Bottom of a Hole, by Larry Niven


by Hector Castellon

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

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

Four stars.

Decoy System, by Robin Scott

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

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

Two stars.

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


by Gray Morrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two stars.

Summing up

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

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

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



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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 20, 1966] Looking forward, looking back (September 1966 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Journeys to Come

We're now just a couple of weeks out from Tricon, the Cleveland-hosted Worldcon!  We'll get to mingle with our fellow fen, meet our favorite authors, drink lots of bheer, and figure out who gets to go home with a rocketship in their luggage.


Modern Cleveland

The much-ballyhooed new science fiction anthology, Star Trek, debuts on September 15.  However, all the fans are abuzz that they'll be privately showing the show's pilot at Tricon.  I hope you all will join us at Tricon to watch it!

Journeys we Have

As exciting as the things to come might be, we still have plenty of exciting stuff to enjoy right now.  To wit, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction is quite a solid mag.


by Jack Gaughan

Luana, Gilbert Thomas

A mycologist (a real fun-gi) with a yen for sculpture combines both vocation and avocation when the latest Gemini brings home a space spore.  The resulting fruiting body proves warm, delicate, and eager to be carved.  The scientist does so, in the form that has occupied the efforts of sculptors since the Neolithic…with less than savory results.

A decade ago, this minor bit of titillation would have been fodder for Venture.  Cute but utterly forgettable.  Three stars.


by Gahan Wilson

The Productions of Time (Part 2 of 2), John Brunner

Last month, the author had left us on a tremendous cliffhanger.  Murray Douglas, a washed out but on the wagon film star (viz. Kirk Douglas in Two Weeks in Another Town) has been increasingly unsettled by the goings on at his latest production.  The writer, Delgado, seems deadset on sabotaging the play before it can gel, setting each of the actors and production crew at each other's throats.  The country retreat at which they are staying is equipped with the oddest of surveillance equipment, from two-way TVs to mysterious tape recorders placed just under a sleeper's pillows.  When Douglas calls Delgado on his actions, he wakes up the next morning with a severe headache and surrounded by half empty bottles of gin…

He quickly realizes it's all a set-up, and he heads to a local doctor to certify his utter sobriety.  Bolstering his sanity is the arrival of an unexpected ally: Heather, a member of the cast whose only purpose seems to be to sate the Lesbian tastes of another of the actresses, has also determined something odd is going on.  Douglas makes up his mind.  They will leave the retreat on the morrow.  But Delgado, and the unusually assertive valet, Valentine, have other plans.

Thus ensues the climax and rather satisfactory (though somewhat given away by the title) ending of this exciting novel.  It's rather short, so I'll be surprised if it gets turned into a full-length story.  Maybe one half of an Ace Double.  Nevertheless, it's a nice departure for the oft-brilliant author, notable for being told largely in dialogue (as befits a piece about play!)

Four stars.

Mr. Wilde's Second Chance, Joanna Russ

When the great playwright/poet arrives in the hereafter, he is offered the chance to rearrange the events of his luminous life into a more pleasing order.  The reward is, perhaps, another life.  Mr. Wilde is at once successful and unsuccessful.

I suspect I would have gotten more out of this story had I been more acquainted with the subject's work.  It's a four-star story regardless.

Municipal Dump, Max Gunther

R.J. Schroon, a rapacious hotelier with designs to bend the would-be paradise world of Cooltropic to his whim.  If it only weren't for the omnipresent, ever-irksome Bounders!  Fed up with these meddling puffballs, Schroon calls for their extermination.  He manages to eliminate one, frightening off the rest. 

Out of the frying pan…

This one feels like a lesser (though competent) tale from the early days of Galaxy.  Three stars.

Narrow Valley, R. A. Lafferty

The Wizard of Whimsy offers up this tale of a Pawnee, who protects his 160-acre reparation grant with a mighty spell.  It's not that others can't find the plot to poach — they just can't seem to get in!

A fun if rather trivial piece.  Three stars.

I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover, Isaac Asimov

In the conclusion to his articles on particles and cosmology, The Good Doctor offers up his own ideas on the origin of the universe.  In a nutshell, just as every subatomic particle seems to have both an opposite charged counterpart and a opposite baryon/lepton number, so the universe must have three counterparts so that the net value of energy and mass equals zero.  Add to this an 80 billion year boom and bust cycle, and one has a cosmos that requires no beginning or end, utterly symmetrical.

It's cute if nothing else.  And I'm banking on the nothing else.

Three stars.

Troubling of the Water, Zenna Henderson

Ms. Henderson has seemingly exhausted the modern day as a setting for her stories of The People.  The author is now recounting their first coming to Earth in the late 19th Century.  Water is a not-quite sequel to her last story.  A family in a Western territory (probably Henderson's native Arizona) finds their water supply dwindling below the sufficiency required for their crops.  On the eve of dessication, a member of The People, a race of gentle humanoid espers, literally falls from the sky in a ball of flame.

Zenna has told this story several times before: strange, gifted person (usually a child) is encountered/adopted by a human or group of humans.  Said alien eventually displays great powers to the benefit of the humans, and a bond of love is forged.

It's a testament to the author that the tale has not yet gotten old.  I do wonder if a collection of such stories (as is advertised as forthcoming) might be a bit much to take in one sitting, though.

Four stars.

Looking Back

In the end, the newest issue of F&SF breaks no new ground.  Indeed, had it been published in 1956 rather than 1966, I don't know that we'd have noticed (save for Asimov's piece, which relies on cutting edge science).  Still, it would have been one of the better issues of August 1956, just as it is one of the better amalgamations of SF in this month.

No complaints here!




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Serial

[July 8, 1966] South Pohl (August 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

The Big Bang

The Americans and Soviets have signed onto a Partial Test Ban Treaty, restricting nuclear tests to deep underground. The Chinese and French are under no such obligation, however.  Not only have the Chinese detonated two (or was it three?) atomic devices in the open air, but now the French have begun their own series of above-grown tests.

These big bombs are being burst on the French Polynesian atoll of Moruroa.  I don't know what the indigenous South Seas population thinks of the blasts, but I imagine their opinions will sour as quickly as their strontium-90 laced milk.

The Big Fizzle


by Gray Morrow

The French may be making a big noise in the Southern Hemisphere, but Fred Pohl, editor of IF, Worlds of Tomorrow, and the formerly august Galaxy, has barely been squeaking by.  Indeed, the August 1966 issue of Galaxy is the most feeble outing I've read in a long time.

The Body Builders, by Keith Laumer


by Nodel

Opening things up, Keith Laumer extrapolates a future that is a straight-line evolution of our current boob tube culture.  Since so many of us are content to live vicariously, eyes plastered to the small screen, why not take things a few steps further?  And so a large portion of humanity lives flat on their backs, plugged into life support machines.  Their senses are hooked into humanoid surrogates of plastic and metal, optimized for task, emphasized for beauty. 

Our protagonist is a prize fighter, or at least, he remote controls a synthetic boxer.  Another artificial being provokes our hero into a duel while he's inhabiting his sport model body rather than his brawler suit.  So he goes on the lam.  Troubles, high jinks, and happy endings ensue.

Elements remind me of Robert F. Young's Romance in a Twenty-First Century Used-Car Lot (shuttling around in personally molded chassis) and Steel (human boxer steps into the ring against a robotic opponent), but this is a nice new spin.

Three stars.

Heresies of the Huge God by Brian W. Aldiss

A giant creature, thousands of miles long, crashes into the Earth.  Its bulk causes tremendous damage, alters our seasons, and thoroughly discombobulates our society.  This after-the-fact chronicle of the millennium following the alien's arrival is both unsettling and rather funny.

Four stars.

For Your Information: Scheherazade's Island by Willy Ley

This month's science column details the unusual creatures that inhabited Madagascar until quite recently: Big birds, giant lemurs, and other exotics.  They may, indeed, yet live there in remote areas of the enormous island.

Interesting topic but bland presentation.  Three stars.

The Piper of Dis by James Blish and Norman L. Knight


by Gray Morrow

Authors Blish and Knight return us to the overcrowded world of 2794 on which ten trillion humans live.  In this installment, the asteroid Flavia is headed toward Earth, where it will cause tremendous damage.  Millions of North Americans must be evacuated to the spare town of Gitler.  There are two wrinkles: 1) a convention of the Jones family is currently occupying the city, and they must be evacuated out before refugees can be evacuated in; 2) an insane criminal member of the Jones family, Fongavaro, doesn't want anyone in the city lest he be extradited back to his home in Madagascar.

Actually, there's another wrinkle: it's a dreary potboiler of a story in an implausible world.  I hope this is the last piece in the series.

Two stars.

Among the Hairy Earthmen by R. A. Lafferty

What if the Renaissance was really the work of bored aliens?  In this typically whimsical piece, a band of seven humanoid cousins arrive at medieval Europe and make history their plaything. 

This one of those tales that's all in the telling, and the telling is pretty charming.  Three stars.

The Look, by George Henry Smith

Women, hare-brained slaves to fashion that they all are, succumb to trends so horrendous that no man can bear to look at them.  It's the plot of a pair of homosexual fashion designers to ensure they have all of mankind to themselves.  Or so we're meant to think.  The "twist" is that it's actually a ploy of Alpha Centaurians to depopulate the Earth.

If we had a negative counterpart to the Galactic Stars, this would win the prize. One star.

Heisenberg's Eyes (Part 2 of 2) by Frank Herbert


by Dan Atkins

Last issue, we were treated to the first half of Frank Hebert's latest short novel.  It takes place in a far (like tens of thousands of years from now far) future in which the human race has completely stagnated in technology, society, and biology.  The "Optimen", sterile ubermenschen who are essentially immortal, rule over the mostly sterile humans whose offspring are all produced out of womb and with scrupulous surgical control.

Last installment, the Durant couple had stolen their embryo from under the noses of the Optimen with the help of the Cyborgs, a competing sub-race of humanity that has traded their emotions for computerized sturdiness.  The Durant embryo, due to some unexplained quirk, is the first bog-standard human to be spawned in millennia.  Able to reproduce, it may hold the key to toppling the static society of humanity.

This installment begins with the Durants stealthily escaping the megalopolis of Seatac. This takes up most of the part, and is ultimately pointless as the triumvirate of rulers is aware of their attempt the entire way.  The Durants, their assisting Cyborgs, as well as Svengaard, the surgeon they had taken hostage, are summoned before a full council of the Optimen for punishment.  Violence breaks out.  Two of the triumvirate are killed.  Calapine, the impulsive, simpering woman of the ruling trio, is both outraged and excited by the new feeling of mortality.  Nevertheless, she is committed to destroying her captives before they destroy the current order.

Until it is pointed out that the order is just its own kind of death, a sentence of eternal boredom.  In any event, it's doomed to failure since even the immortals need increasing doses of enzymes to stay alive, a situation that is quickly becoming untenable.

There is a solution!  It turns out that being implanted with an embryo produces all the enzymes one needs to stay alive indefinitely.  So women (and men) can be installed with pre-tykes that are made to gestate for thousands of years, and that will keep them alive forever.  Thus, humanity can return to some sort of natural (if prolonged) rhythm.

Never minding the utter implausibility of, well, everything about this book, all of the above could probably have been written in about 20 pages.  But when you're paid by the word, and you're one of the hottest authors in the genre (I can imagine a half century from now that Dune will replace The Bible as the most-read book in the world; there ain't no justice), I suppose sentences must flow.

Two stars for this part, two and half for the whole book.

Who Is Human? by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Starting in medias res, we have the latest story of the Esks: people who look like Eskimos, but are actually born in a month and raised to adulthood in five years.  In this installment, which really does not stand alone as a separate story, we learn that the Esks have been artificially created by alien visitors.  We are meant to believe that 1) the Esks pose an intolerable risk to the human race as we will soon be outbred and replaced by them, and 2) no one will actually believe our protagonist, Dr. West, when he explains the true nature of the Esks.  Everyone maintains they're just plain ol' Eskimos.

This is the silliest, most contrived set of premises.  The Esks are already starving due to overpopulation, and thus applying for relief.  Once free food starts being doled out, the unnatural increase in population will be known.  This may spell adversity for the real Inuit (and the Canadian budget) but it hardly threatens world domination.  And it's not like we have a Puppet Masters situation here; the Esks don't possess other humans.  They just live alongside them. 

Maybe there will be a better explanation down the road.  Two stars.

Summer Slump

It's a pretty sad affair when Galaxy clocks in at a bare 2.5 stars.  On the other hand, as Michael Moorcock informed us last month, it is not uncommon for magazines to save their weakest material for the summer, when readership is at its lowest.  Let us hope that's what is going on here!

Ah well.  At least the summer music is good:

Tune in to KGJ, our radio station!




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 24, 1966] Increments: World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr

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by John Boston

Donald A. Wollheim’s and Terry Carr’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966—second in this series—is here, so it’s time for the usual pontificating, hand-wringing, viewing with alarm, etc., as one prefers.  This one comes with not one but two blurbs from Judith Merril, their competitor, though the editors say nothing about her anthology series, the next volume of which is due at the end of the year.

The editors have regrettably pulled in their horns a little on the “World” front.  There are no translated stories in this volume, unlike the first; the editors claim that they read plenty of them, but them furriners just don’t cut the mustard.  More precisely, if not more plausibly, “what they have lacked is the advanced sophistication now to be found in the American and British s-f magazines.” Suffice it to say that there are virtues other than “advanced sophistication” and they may often be found outside one’s own culture. 


by Cosimo Scianna

Nor is there anything here from any of the non-specialist markets that have been publishing progressively more SF in recent years.  The only item here that did not originate in the US or UK SF magazines is Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer, originally in Boys’ Life but quickly reprinted last year by New Worlds, and then by Amazing early this year.

So it’s a rather insular party.  But my main complaint last year was that too much of the material was too pedestrian, and the book excluded writers who are pushing the envelope of the genre, like Lafferty, Zelazny, Ellison, and Cordwainer Smith.  The editors seem to have been listening.  This year they’ve got Ellison and Lafferty, though they seem to have missed their chance at Smith, and Zelazny is still among the missing.  More importantly, the book as a whole is livelier than its predecessor.

This is not to say the pedestrian has been entirely banished.  Witness Christopher Anvil’s The Captive Djinn, the only selection from that rotten borough Analog, yet another story about the clever Earthman outwitting cartoonishly stupid aliens.  Anvil has written this story so often he could do it in his sleep, and most likely that is exactly what happened. 

There is a lot more of the standard used furniture of the genre here, but at least it’s mostly done more cleverly and skillfully than dreamed of by Anvil.  In Joseph Green’s The Decision Makers (from Galaxy), Terrestrials covet the watery world Capella G Eight, but it’s already occupied by seal-like amphibians with group intelligence though not much material culture.  Is this the sort of intelligence that should ordinarily bar colonization outright? The “Conscience”—a bureaucrat in charge of making these decisions—thinks so, but proposes to split the baby, allowing colonization but providing that the humans will alter the climate to provide more dry land for the amphibians.  Of course, behind the bien-pensant speechifying, a still small voice says, “We’re just now starting to get rid of colonialism here, and you want to start it up again?” And another: “Ask the American Indians about the promises of colonists.”

Less weighty thoughts are on offer in James H. Schmitz’s Planet of Forgetting (from Galaxy), involving a fairly standard space war scenario with chase on unknown planet, with the wrinkle that some of the local fauna seem to be able to make people briefly forget where they are and what they are doing.  At the end of this smoothly rendered entertainment, suddenly the wrinkle becomes a mountain range. 

Similar cleverness-as-usual is displayed in Fred Saberhagen’s Masque of the Red Shift (from If), one of his popular Berserker series, in which a disguised Berserker robot appears and wreaks havoc on a spaceship occupied by the Emperor of the galaxy and his celebrating sycophants.  But it is promptly outsmarted and done in by the Emperor’s brother, who is resurrected from suspended animation and lures the Berserker into the clutches of a “hypermass,” which seems to be what scientists are starting to call a “black hole.” (Though on second thought, I’m not sure that “cleverness” is quite le mot juste for a story that falls back on the dreary cliche that a galaxy-spanning human civilization will find no better way to govern itself than an Emperor.) Jonathan Brand’s Vanishing Point (If) is an alien semi-contact story, in which the functionaries of the Galactic Federation have created an artificial habitat, a sort of Earth-like theme park complete with human curator, for the human emissaries to wait in and wonder what is really going on.

Engineering fiction is represented by Clarke’s slightly pedantic Sunjammer (as noted, Boys’ Life by way of New Worlds), concerning a yacht race in space, and by Larry Niven’s livelier Becalmed in Hell (F&SF), whose characters—one of them a brain and spinal column in a box, with vehicle controlled by his nervous system—get stuck on the surface of Venus (updated with current science) and have to improvise a primitive solution to get home.

There are a couple of near-future satires representing very different styles and targets of the sardonic.  Ron Goulart’s Calling Dr. Clockwork (Amazing) is a lampoon of the medical system; protagonist visits someone in the hospital, faints at something he sees there, wakes up in a hospital bed himself attended by the eponymous robot doctor, and can’t get out as his diagnosis shifts and things seem to be falling apart in the institution.  Fritz Leiber’s The Good New Days (Galaxy) is a more densely populated slice-of-slapstick extrapolating the welfare state, with a family living in futuristic but cheaply made housing (“They don’t build slums like they used to,” complains one character), with the TV on every minute, and Ma trying to avoid the demands of the medical statistician who wants her vitals, and everyone struggling to get and keep multiple make-work jobs (the protagonist just lost his job as a street-smiler), and things are all falling apart here, too, and a lot of the sentences are almost as long as this one.  The two stories are about equally amusing, which means above standard for Goulart and a little below standard for Leiber.

So that’s the ordinary, and a higher quality of ordinary than last year. 

A few items are unusual if not extraordinary.  R.A. Lafferty’s In Our Block (If) is an amusing tall tale about various odd characters with unusual talents residing in the shacks on a neglected dead-end block, like the woman who will type your letters but doesn’t need a typewriter (she makes the sound effects orally), and the man who ships tons of merchandise out of a seven-foot shack without benefit of warehouse.  It has lots of slapstick but not much edge, unlike the best by this idiosyncratic writer.  Newish writer Lin Carter (two prior appearances in the SF magazines, a lot in the higher reaches of amateur publications), in Uncollected Works (F&SF), extrapolates the old saw about monkeys on typewriters reproducing the works of Shakespeare, in the direction of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God, leading to an unexpected and subtle conclusion.

In Vernor Vinge’s Apartness, from the UK’s New Worlds, the Northern War has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere, and generations later, an expedition from Argentina discovers people encamped in Antarctica, living in primitive conditions, who prove to be the descendants of white South Africans who fled from the uprising that followed the war and eliminated whites from the continent.  (Interesting that this American writer didn’t find a market for it at home.) They are not pleased to be discovered by darker-skinned explorers and try to drive them off.  The well-sketched background makes this more than an exercise in irony or just revenge.

On to the extraordinary—three of them, not a bad showing.  Traveler’s Rest, by David I. Masson, also from New Worlds, depicts a world where time varies with latitude, passing slowly at the North Pole (though subjectively very fast), where a furious—and possibly futile—high-tech war is in progress with an unknown and unseeable enemy.  Life proceeds more mundanely in the southern latitudes.  Protagonist H is relieved from duty, travels south, reorients himself to current society, establishes a career, marries and procreates over the years. He's known now as Hadolarisondamo, since names are longer in the slower latitudes.  Then, middle-aged, he is called back to duty, and arrives 22 minutes after he left.  This world’s nightmarish quality is highlighted by the dense mundane detail of the normal life of the lower latitudes; the result is a tour de force of strangeness.

Harlan Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman (from Galaxy) is a sort of dystopian unreduced fraction.  In outline, it’s a simple story of a future world where punctuality is all; if you’re late, your life can be docked.  One man can’t take it any more and dresses up in a clown suit and goes around disrupting things until he gets caught by the Master Timekeeper (the Ticktockman), brainwashed, and forced to recant publicly—though the end hints that his legacy lives on.  In substance, it’s business as usual; in style, it’s a sort of garrulous stand-up routine, and quite a good one.  It’s best read as a purposeful affront to the usual plain functional (or worse) prose of the genre (a reading consistent with the story’s theme) and a persuasive argument for opening up the field a bit stylistically.

The other outstanding item here—best in the book to my taste—is Clifford D. Simak’s Over the River and Through the Woods (Amazing), in which a couple of strange kids appear at a farmhouse in 1896 and address the older woman working in the kitchen as their grandma.  The gist: Ordinary decent person confronted with the extraordinary responds with ordinary decency.  It’s plainly written without a wasted word, deftly developed, asserting its homely credo with quiet restraint—a small masterpiece amounting to a summary of Simak’s career.  Simak is one writer who should ignore Ellison’s advice—and vice versa, no doubt.

The upshot: Not bad.  Better than not bad.  The field is taking small steps away from business as usual, and the usual seems to be getting a little better.  The kid may amount to something some day.

[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…]




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 2, 1966] Hidden Truths (May 1966 IF)

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Don't miss tomorrow's exciting Adventure-themed episode of The Journey Show, taking you to the highest peaks, the deepest wildernesses, the coldest extremes, the vacuum of space, and the depths of the sea.  April 3 at 1PM — book your (free) ticket for adventure now!)


by David Levinson

They’re on our side (I believe)

There’s no question that French President Charles de Gaulle has a larger-than-life, albeit rather prickly, personality. It stood him in good stead through the War and in midwifing the Fifth Republic a few years ago. It’s also a big part of what underlies his “politics of grandeur”. Alas, it also makes him a sometimes troublesome partner on the world stage. As early as 1958, he was urging a greater role for France in NATO, kicking against the traces of the Anglo-American “special relationship”. In 1959, he pulled the French Mediterranean fleet and air defenses from NATO command and banned the United States from positioning nuclear weapons in France. A year later, he even tried to renegotiate the NATO treaty, but no other member nation supported him. He was fairly quiet during the Kennedy administration and showed great solidarity during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he’s up to his old tricks again.


French President Charles de Gaulle announcing that France will go her own way.

In February, de Gaulle declared that the changed world order has “stripped NATO of its justification” and demanded French control of all foreign troops and bases in France when the current NATO agreement ends in 1969. Apparently, he decided that was too far in the future. On March 7th, he ordered all foreign troops and equipment removed from France by next year. Two days later, France formally withdrew its officers from the NATO unified command, assumed full control of the 70,000 French troops in Germany and announced that they will close all allied bases that don’t surrender to French control. President Johnson appears to have taken all this with the poise of a matador performing a verónica, with the faith that de Gaulle can be brought around in a time of need, though there is a rumor he instructed Secretary of State Dean Rusk to ask if that withdrawal includes the thousands of American war dead in French cemeteries. “De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.”

Unearthing the past

Oftentimes, what we think we know about the past and how we got where we are is simply wrong. Learning the truth may make us change our course, shatter our identity or turn the whole world upside down. Quite a lot of this month’s IF features characters facing the consequences of just such a revelation.


Supposedly from Silkies in Space. Silkies don’t need spacesuits. Art by Schelling

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

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by David Levinson

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

Great Balls of Fire

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


Meteorite hunters descend on Barwell.

Death from above and below

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


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

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[August 20, 1965] Look both ways (September 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Quo vadis

Science fiction is changing, with no clearer evidence than the fact that our current era has been dubbed "The New Wave."  Indeed, there are those within fandom who assert that only what's coming out today has any relevance, and that there is little to enjoy in (and less to learn from) the "classics" of a half century or more ago.

Having grown up on Burroughs, Wells, Verne, and Baum, I can't agree with this position.  On the other hand, the role of the Journey, covering the newest SF as it comes out, means we tend to focus on the newer.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction makes no bones about having it both ways.  Not only will they occasionally reprint worthy material, they are also most often the clearing house for British New Wavers like Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard.  The
latest issue is particularly interesting in that the lead novella, by Brian Aldiss, is deliberately written in a Wellsean style (and, in fact, features the author of War of the Worlds to some degree).

Who says you can't learn from the classics?

There…


by Bert Tanner

The Saliva Tree, by Brian W. Aldiss

A flash in the sky followed by a splash, and a pond on a rural farm in East Mercia is now home to an extraterrestrial spaceship.  Young polymath Gregory Rolles is a Romantic in all senses of the word, and upon hearing the news, visits the fields owned by the Grendon family (which includes, of course, a fetching farmer's daughter).

At first, the alien visitors, who are completely invisible, seem harmless – even beneficial.  As Spring arrives, all of the animals in the area, from tadpoles to cattle, reproduce with prodigious fecundity.  Such bounty even extends to the human residents, Mrs. Grendon giving birth to some nine children at once.

But it is quickly ascertained that the newborn animals have an odd flavor to them rendering them inedible.  To humans, that is; the aliens take great delight in raiding their makeshift larder, biting into their prey with venomous fangs, liquefying the animal's insides, and slurping it out.  Only a dessicated skin is left.

And when the milk from the tainted cows starts to taste good to the Grendon family, Gregory realizes with horror that the humans are next on the menu…

It's all very evocative of the late Victorian age in style and subject, and in the end, is explicitly supposed to influence the work of young Wells, who is a penpal of Gregory's.  Aldiss carries it off well, this fun, occasionally horrific homage to yesteryear.

Four stars.


the latest comic piece from Gahan Wilson

Kearny's Last Case, by Ron Goulart

Less successful is Goulart's latest (last?) entry in the Max Kearny, Occult Detective, stories.  It's facile enough, this case of a secretary suffering an abusive workplace run by two sorcerers.  But while the setup is fun, the actual action of the story lasts about a page and a half and is resolved with little ado.  Most dissatisfying.

So, a low three stars.

The Great Cosmic Donut of Life, by Ray Nelson

Things slide further down in this Beat piece about a futuristic musician/computerist who unsuccessfuly tries to resurrect Charlie Parker's music electronically.  Things happen, there's a Martian terrier called a Globly, the story ends happily, but it's all inconsequential, unengaging fluff.

Two stars.

Lunar Landing, by Theodore L. Thomas

Thomas' "article" puts forward the desirability of sending pilots to the Moon on a one-way trip to truly determine the survivability of soft-landing.  This might have made sense (as a joke) thirty years ago.  The state of science has advanced since World War 2.

One star.

Hog-Belly Honey, by R. A. Lafferty

Joe Spade, rough and gutteral self-described intellectual, teams up with the more refined Maurice Maltrevers to produce a self-guiding Nullifier.  Said computer-brained machine can disintegrate anything it deeps as unnecessary.  What a great boon for society!  Garbage, useless files, out-of-date clothing, insincere love letters, all go POOF with a single request.  Of course, one person's trash is another person's treasure…and sometimes their spouse.

If this sounds whimsical, well, what did you expect given the author?  The most engaging part of Honey is the characterization of Joe, whose absolute doltishness is expressed to great comic effect in the unaware 1st person perspective.  This isn't a great story, but it is kind of fun.

Three stars.

Turning Point, by Arthur Porges

After The Bomb, rats take over the Earth.  Humanity is enslaved and our population kept at 10,000 to prevent a resurgence.  Malcontents in this new order are not destroyed; rather, we are merely sterilized and sent to the Amazon, a place the rats find uninhabitable.

All of this is offered up in exposition, like a mildly interesting encyclopedia article.  The "story" involves a few pages of dialogue, and the way in which a human couple heading into exile outsmarts the rats, transporting a fertile child to South America.

The solution is more "shocking" than clever, and the whole thing has the feel of a "ha ha; aliens are stoopud, humans r smart!" story of the kind Campbell enjoys at Analog.

Two stars.

Death in the Laboratory, by Isaac Asimov

For the first time in a while, Dr. A offers up a truly interesting and technical article about the discovery and isolation of fluorine.  After reading this, you may include scientists in the same derring-do category of folk as Doc Savage and Tarzan.

Five stars.

Sea Bright, by Hal R. Moore

Kellie is an 11-year old girl in love with the sea.  But her world is shattered when an acquaintance brings a sinister shell to the beach one day, and a sense of dread causes her to steal said conch before it can harm her friend.  The remainder of the story deals with her attempts to keep it out of the hands of others.

Sea, the first piece by Moore, starts promisingly and has some vivid writing.  I also appreciate the nonstandard protagonist.  However, it bogs down in repetition; if the second act had been a little different from the first, it would have helped.

Still, three stars.

…and back again

So, does this brew of past, present, and (cutting edge of) future mix well or does it resolve into an immiscible layer cake cocktail?  I'd say the former.  There are several pieces which don't quite work, and some besides that fail further, but I still found the issue satisfying.  In particular, Aldiss shows he can turn an antiquated style into an asset. 

Does the future hold more visions inspired by the past?  Only time will tell…

[Don't miss the next episode of The Journey Show, featuring a panel of amazing artists who will be doodling to YOUR specification!]




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Magazine/Anthology, Serial

[June 2, 1965] Heck in a Handbasket (July 1965 IF)

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You don't want to miss this week's episode of The Journey Show, with a panel of professional space historians while Gemini 4 orbits overhead! Register now!


by David Levinson

May has been a chaotic month. War – and not just in the places you might be aware of – unrest, political ups and downs. I’ve frequently found myself thinking of the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s marvelous The Second Coming. Hopefully, no rough beasts are slouching anywhere.

Signs of War

The month got off to a bad start in the wee hours of the first when Communist and Nationalist Chinese naval forces clashed off the coast of Tungyin Island. The next day, President Johnson went on television to explain the American invasion of the Dominican Republic. There, at least, American troops have since begun to be replaced by OAS forces.

Less well-known to American readers, though perhaps known to our British audience and certainly to those in Australia, is the ongoing conflict on the island of Borneo. For the last couple of years as part of granting former colonies their independence, the United Kingdom has been working to establish the nation of Malaysia on the Malay Peninsula and nearby islands which have been under British control. Some of those areas are in northern Borneo, and President Sukarno of Indonesia would prefer that all of Borneo, at the very least, go to his country. There have been several skirmishes between British and Malaysian forces on the one side and the Indonesian army on the other. Australian forces have borne the brunt of much of the fighting. Just last week, units of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment crossed into Indonesian territory and clashed with Indonesian troops along the Sungei Koemba river. This looks to be the first move in a larger effort, and we can expect further fighting through the summer.


Private Neville Ferguson of the 3RAR patrols near the Sarawak-Kalimantan border

Signs of Unrest

On May 5th, several hundred people carried a black coffin to the draft board in Berkeley, California in a protest march against U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic. Once there, 40 young men, mostly students at the university, burned their draft cards. On May 22nd, another protest march descended on the Berkeley draft board. This time, 19 men burned their draft cards, and LBJ was hanged in effigy. This second march was likely protesting American involvement in Viet Nam.

Another form of protest has been sweeping American university campuses: the teach-in. Back in March, some 50 professors at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor planned a one day strike to protest the war in Viet Nam. Facing opposition from Governor George Romney and the legislature, they turned it into an all-night event featuring debates, lectures, films and music. It was dubbed a “teach-in,” the name being modeled on the sit-ins of the civil rights movement.

Several more of these events have taken place on college campuses around the country since then. A teach-in at the University of California at Berkeley on May 21st-22nd drew a crowd estimated at 30,000 people. (Honestly, if they’re not careful, that town’s going to get a reputation.) Speakers included Dr. Benjamin Spock, Norman Mailer, comedian Dick Gregory, several members of the California Assembly, journalist I. F. Stone, Mario Saavio of the Free Speech Movement (as you might expect), and many others. Expect to see more of these when people go back to university in the fall.


Folk singer Phil Ochs performs at the Berkeley teach-in

Signs of Peace?

Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan once said, “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” As ineffective as the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne might be, even Retief would probably agree with the sentiment. There has been good and bad news on the diplomatic front in the last month. West Germany formally established diplomatic relations with Israel on May 12th. Of course, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq promptly broke off relations with West Germany in retaliation. Cambodia also broke off diplomatic relations with the United States on May 3rd. Detractors say it was because Newsweek ran an article accusing Prince Sihanouk’s mother of engaging in various money-making schemes. It probably had more to do with American bombing raids on North Vietnamese supply lines running through Cambodian territory. Hmmm, I guess that’s mostly bad news.

Signs of Improvement

And in the realm of science fiction, particularly my little corner of the Journey, I have good news: while the quality of IF had shown a noticeable decline of late, there’s quite an uptick with this month's issue.


Abe Lincoln goes spearfishing in “The Last Earthman”. Art by McKenna

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[April 2, 1965] SPEAKING A COMMON LANGUAGE (May 1965 IF)

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by David Levinson

The Common Tongue

March 7th was the first Sunday of Lent. It's a particularly special event this year as Catholics can now hear mass in their local language, rather than Latin. Pope Paul VI marked the occasion by conducting services in Italian at a small church near the Vatican. Mass in the vernacular is not required, but it is encouraged. This is one of the reforms instituted last year as a way to get parishioners more involved in the Catholic faith.

In Living Color

Color television appears to be moving beyond the fad phase. And for that to happen the broadcasters and receivers need to “speak the same language.” The signal the antenna on your roof receives carries a lot of different information. Most of it tells the TV set how bright to make each phosphor dot, some of it tells the speaker what sound to make. The color information is a subset of the brightness information.

In the United States, a standard was developed about a decade ago by the National Television System Committee, commonly known by the committee’s initials, NTSC. It works pretty well, but under poor transmission conditions the colors can shift. (The joke among signal engineers is that NTSC stands for “Never the same color.”) Europe is subject to geographic and weather conditions which are bad for NTSC and so the governments of Western Europe have been looking for a new system better suited to Europe. Two have been developed: the French SECAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire or sequential color with memory) and the German PAL (Phased Alternating Line).


Rectangular screens. That’s a big improvement.

On March 22nd, the France announced that they had signed an agreement with the Soviet Union under which the Russians will use a slightly modified form of SECAM. Two days later, a conference opened in Vienna to discuss a common system for Western Europe. Ultimately, the conference chose PAL. The French however are sticking to their guns, so while most of Europe will be using PAL, France and the East Bloc will be going with SECAM. So much for commonality.

Speaking of Common

This month’s IF certainly delivers a heap of the familiar, from old, familiar faces to old, familiar themes.


Art by Schelling

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[March 8, 1965] An Alien Perspective (April 1965 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Understanding the Other

Civilization is about building a society out of disparate units.  It has to go beyond the family and clan.  The key to organizing a civilization is empathy, recognizing that we are all different yet we share common values and rights.  Once we understand each other, even if we don't agree on everything, then we can truly create "from many, one."

Science fiction allows the exploration of cutting edge sociological subjects, one of them being the understanding of the "other".  That's because the genre has a ready-made stand-in for the concept: the alien.  Indeed, many science fiction stories are allegorical; they address colonialism, the Cold War, societal taboos, in ways that might currently be too touchy or on-the-nose for conventional fiction.  We can hope that, with the bottle uncorked, less allegorical stories will be required in the future. 

Of all the science fiction magazines that come out every month, I think Fred Pohl's trio of Galaxy, IF, and Worlds of Tomorrow has the strongest tradition of incorporating aliens (Analog also has aliens, but thanks to its editor's sensibilities, they are almost invariably both more evil and inferior to human beings; Campbell likes a certain kind of allegory…)

Meeting the Minds


by George Schelling (it says it illustates War Against the Yukks, but it doesn't)

This month's Galaxy is a case in point, with six of its nine tales involving aliens of one kind or another.  There's some good stuff in here, as well as a number of slog stories.  Let's look, shall we?

Committee of the Whole, by Frank Herbert


by Nodel

Watch your step — there's a rough patch right at the start. 

Whole is a meandering preach piece about an inventor who appears before a Congressional committee with news of a new, revolutionary invention.  I'll just tell you about it because the first two thirds of the story are less suspenseful than obtusely annoying: it's a ray gun.  Its applications are infinite, but the one most of the Congressmen are worried about is that every owner has a weapon more powerful than the atom bomb at their disposal.  And, because of the way the invention has been disseminated, everyone in the world has access to them.

The result, the inventor opines, is going to be a world of true libertarian equality.  "An armed society is a polite society" is how the expression goes.  It's the kind of naive sentiment that would go over well at Analog, but for adults, it's just ridiculous.  In equalizing humanity through armed neutrality, the inventor has made aliens of us all.  I'll wager that Earth's population of humans will be dead inside a week…and probably most of the animals. 

One star, and yet more disdain for the Herbert byline.

Wrong-Way Street, by Larry Niven

Ah, but then our fortunes truly turn around.  Wrong Way Street gives us the unplanned adventure of Mike Capoferri, a scientist stationed on the Moon late this century to investigate an alien base and space ship.  They have lain on the lunar plain for countless millions of years, and their provenance and function are completely unknown.  That is, until Mike unwittingly not only discerns the motive force for the space ship, but also activates it.  Here, understanding the alien way of thinking proved hazardous to Mike's health.  Can he get home?  Will the human race survive his journey?

This is author Niven's third story, and he continues with the same deftness he displayed with his recent short novel, World of Ptavvs.  I guarantee that the ending of Street will stay with you.

Four stars.

Death and Birth of the Angakok, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Peterluk is a young Eskimo out hunting when a horrifying bunch of one-eyed Seal People arrive.  He panics and entreats his powerful Grandfather, holed up in Peterluk's igloo, to aid him with his mystical powers.  But Grandfather is too weak to assist and, in the end, Peterluk is left to defeat one of the aliens with a conventional rifle.

When the Seal People ship surfaces from beneath the ice, much to Peterluk's surprise, it disgorges not aliens but white people in uniform.  And Peterluk begins to doubt the power, and even the human nature, of his strangely humped, ever demanding Grandfather.

Confusing at first, Angakok is actually a pretty neat tale of two types of aliens (human and truly extraterrestrial) as seen from the point of view of one completely naive to other cultures.  While the bones of the plot are fairly conventional, I appreciated the novel viewpoint.

Three stars.

Symbolically Speaking, by Willy Ley

Any meeting of the minds between human and alien will require a common symbology to convey ideas.  A science fiction writer looking for inspiration for such a symbol set could do worse than to read Willy Ley's latest science article for Galaxy, in which he discusses the evolution of symbols for the planets, alchemical substances, numbers, etc.

Fairly dry, but there's interesting information here.  Three stars.

A Wobble in Wockii Futures, by Gordon R. Dickson


by Gray Morrow, channeling Bill Gaines

Tom and Lucy Reasoner are a recurring pair in a series of stories, this being the fourth.  Sort of a "Nick and Nora" meets Retief, the stories of the Reasoners began charmingly enough, with Tom an interstellar diplomat with a mystery to solve, and Lucy his sometimes discerning assistant.

Last time around, Tom had not only gotten inducted into the interstellar assassin's guild, but he'd also catapulted Earth onto the galactic scene, dramatically increasing his home planet's clout.  Now the humans have gotten themselves hip-deep in a planetary investment that made turn out to be completely worthless.  Tom must find out who hoodwinked the Terrans and why before humanity is bankrupted.

This installation has the same problem as the last one — Lucy is sidelined and played for stupid, and the humor of the tale just isn't funny.  Dickson can, and usually does, do better.

Two stars.

Wasted on the Young, by John Brunner

The concept of the "teenager" is a fairly recent one.  It used to be that kids enjoyed a relatively short childhood before transitioning to the labor force and/or marriage.  Now there is an intermediate phase before adulthood during which a youngster can learn the ropes of grown-up society.

Brunner's latest story posits an even longer period of immaturity, one in which kids are given free credit until age thirty to do whatever they want.  The catch: once they reach their fourth decade, they have to pay back what they've spent by being productive members of society.  Thus, the wastrels find themselves indebted indefinitely, while those who lived a spartan life get to be free agents.

Hal Page, age 32, believes he knows a way to cheat the system…but in the end, society has use for people who have spent it all, even their life.

There's a great idea here, but I feel it was somewhat wasted on the gimmick (and not particularly logical) ending.  Still, three stars.

The Decision Makers, by Joseph Green


by Jack Gaughan

Allan Odegaard is a Practical Philosopher, a kind of emissary for humanity to other worlds.  His job is to judge whether a planet is inhabited by intelligent life or not; if so, Terran policy is to keep hands off.  As one would expect, such a determination is often strongly opposed by financial interests.

Capella G Eight is an ocean planet, though during times of Ice Age, three continents emerge from the sea as the water level drops.  Its dominant life form is a seal-like creature.  Though it possesses a relatively tiny brain pan, somehow it lives in a communal society and can use tools.  Is it intelligent?  Does the fact that these creatures live near a rich uranium deposit factor into Odegaard's decision?

We've seen this kind of story before — H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy series is probably the purest example, though J.F. Bone's The Lani People should also be noted.  It's a worthy subject, and Green does a pretty good job, though the ending is abrupt and not quite as momentous as I would have liked.

All in all, it's the best story I've seen from Green in an American publication (he tends to stick to the English side of the Atlantic.) Three stars.

Slow Tuesday Night, by R. A. Lafferty

We're back to Earth for this one.  We all know that the pace of life has only quickened over the generations.  Lafferty, whose middle name would be "whimsy" if the initial were a W. and not an A., writes of a future society in which society is speeded up a hundred-fold compared to now.  Fortunes are made and lost in minutes.  Marriages last an hour on a good night.  And a lifetime can be lived in a week.

It's cute, but the satire wears thin about halfway through.  Also, there are only two female characters, and their sole goal appears to be competing for the earliest wedding of the evening.

A low three, I guess.

Sculptor, by C. C. MacApp

Eight years ago, a disgraced spaceman abandoned his crewmates on an alien world, rushing home with a set of invaluable statues — and a hole in his memory about the affair.  Now he has been shanghaied by a criminal bent on returning to this world and plundering it for more of the exquisite figurines.

What race made these wrought-diamond minatures?  And why does the amnesiac spaceman feel such dread on the planet's surface?

This is another "they looked like us" yarn that has been around since Campbell kick-started the genre with Who Goes There (and Heinlein made it popular with The Puppet Masters).  It's so prevalent, in fact, that there's another example of it in this very issue! (Angakok) Despite not really treading on new ground, it may well be the best work I've seen from C. C. MacApp, a fairly recent author who never fails to never quite succeed.

Three stars.

War Against the Yukks, by Keith Laumer


by Gray Morrow

Six years ago, the Journey had the (dubious) pleasure of reviewing Missile to the Moon.  It was one of a long line of movies involving a man-less society, run by a bunch of sex-starved female beauties just waiting for a hunk to tip the order on its ear.

Laumer's latest is the same old story: this time, the men are an anthropologist and his stereotypically British assistant, who are whisked to Callisto where they encounter the last remnants of an ante-diluvian war between the sexes.  High Jinks ensue(s?)

Only the author's puissance at writing elevates this story above the level of dreck.  Even then, it's a disappointment.  I understand that satirizing a hoary cliche can be fun, but the whole point of Galaxy is that the magazine doesn't even acknowledge the existence of said cliches, much less indulge in them.

It really deserves two stars.  I'll probably give it three anyway.

Summit's End

This month's Galaxy was as alien-heavy as usual, and there was a broad variety of stories.  On the other hand, with the exception of the Niven, there were no stand-outs.  Indeed, the issue read more like an overlong issue of IF (which has also dipped in quality) than Galaxy of old.

Nevertheless, Ad Astra per Aspera.  What goes down must come up again, and when humanity finally does meet the alien denizens of the stars, should they exist, our starship crews will doubtless have been inculcated with the lessons learned in SF, particularly in magazines like Galaxy.




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