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[June 16, 1969] The Voyage to Net a Dolphin (June 1969 Galactoscope)


by Victoria Silverwolf

Whodunit?

As far as I know, there aren't a lot of science fiction mystery novels out there. The most famous, of course, are Isaac Asimov's tales of police detective Elijah Bailey and his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw. The Caves of Steel (1953) and The Naked Sun (1956) are classics in this specific combination of genres.

A new book continues the tradition of a detective investigating a murder case in the far future. Will it be up to the level of the Good Doctor's predecessors? Let's find out.

Deathstar Voyage, by Ian Wallace


Cover art by Richard Powers

Murder On The Altair Express

The novel takes place aboard a luxury starship on its way from Earth to Altair. On board is police lieutenant/doctor of psychology Claudine St. Cyr. Her job is to make sure that the king of a planet orbiting Altair gets home safely. This seems like an easy assignment, as the king claims that everybody on his world loves him. It turns out this isn't quite true.

After foiling an assassination attempt on the king, things start to go very badly indeed. Somebody has sabotaged the gizmo that allows the starship to travel faster than light. This threatens to make the whole darn thing blow up, killing hundreds of passengers and crew.

As if that weren't enough, both the captain and the second in command die in mysterious ways. Can St. Cyr solve the crime and save the ship?

Suspects? We've got plenty of 'em. Just about everybody we meet has some kind of secret, from the king to a shopkeeper who sells St. Cyr a wristwatch with a second hand that runs backwards.

Notable among the possible killers are a wild-eyed religious fanatic and a guy with telekinetic powers. It takes a while for the plot to get going, but towards the end the author throws in a ton of twists and turns.

As a murder mystery, it generally plays fair with the reader. There are lots of clues scattered here and there, from a mysterious message left near the sabotaged gizmo to the aroma of a certain brand of cigar. My one quibble with the whodunit plot is that some of the twists depend on people concealing information from St. Cyr (and the reader) for pretty weak reasons.

As science fiction, well, that's a different matter. There's a long discussion of the way the starship gizmo works that is pure doubletalk. We also learn a lot about the way telekinetic powers work; more than I wanted to know, really. Despite the far future setting, it feels more like we're aboard the Queen Mary during the golden age of cruise ships.

A word about St. Cyr as a character. She's highly skilled as a detective and as a psychologist. She is also very beautiful, and just about every male character in the novel falls madly in love with her. She isn't afraid to use her feminine wiles to get information out of these besotted fellows, and this gets to be a bit much at times.

Overall, a light piece of entertainment that passes the time pleasantly, but will fade from memory as soon as you reach the last page.

Three stars.


photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

The Nets of Space, by Emil Petaja

I've only recently discovered Petaja, a Finnish-extraction author with a fantastical sense imbued in his writing and a penchant for incorporating themes from various mythologies. He's sort of a rip-roaring version of Thomas Burnett Swann, and I always enjoy (though not necessarily love) his work. His latest is no exception.


Cover art by Paul Lehr

The opening is a grabber: Don Quick is a technician bounced from the Alpha Centauri expedition at the last minute. The first scene of the book is a dream sequence in which he is in an enormous cocktail glass with dozens of other naked humans, glazed in brine, and they are one-by-one pulled out and dipped in sauce before being eaten by giant alien crabs.

When he awakens, Don finds himself back on Earth and recalls that he has been a mental patient for months. Is his dream a kind of clairvoyance? Or merely a kind of shell shock from the time he inhaled hyperspatial gas during a pre-launch accident involving the Centaur III? And why, when he falls asleep, does the dream continue sequentially and seem to portend an extraterrestrial invasion of the Earth?

Cervantes' classic Don Quixote figures strongly in this book; it is the external influence Petaja has chosen for his latest adventure. The whole thing is lighthearted enough that you're never too worried about Earth's possible impending disaster. Indeed, The Nets of Space is essentially a comic book in literary form—never mind the science or consistency. But it reads quickly: I finished it on a single flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka.

3.5 stars



by Jason Sacks

The Day of the Dolphin, by Robert Merle

The Day of the Dolphin is a work of fiction of great contradictions: it’s lighthearted and downbeat, escapist and embedded in the world; engaged in technological innovation and driven by characters; and written in manners both straightforward and elliptical.

If there ever was a book to drive a reader crazy, it’s this one.

At the heart of Robert Merle’s new novel is a fascinating concept. We all know that dolphins are smart animals. As this book reminds us, the brain size and complexity of the average dolphin is roughly analogous to those of a human brain. So what if a wise researcher was able to talk to dolphins in their language and teach dolphins to talk to us in ours? How would those dolphins navigate their learning, how would their approaches to the world be different from those of humans, and what would make those majestic creatures truly happy?

When Merle explores those ideas, The Day of the Dolphin leaps ecstatically like a dolphin leaping out of the water to shoot a basketball through a hoop. There’s a thrilling element of discovery as a secret government laboratory of scientists patiently work with a young dolphin to teach him a few words of English. When he starts to learn English, the scientists provide that dolphin a mate. And the courtship and love affair between the dolphin couple is fascinating and sweet and surprisingly moving. My favorite parts of the novel were the sections in which Merle shows the creatures change each other, drive their relationships and truly build a bond between themselves and the scientists who care for them.

But if a scientific agency is driving this research, you know there has to be some geopolitics involved, and of course there is. In fact, one character notes in a clever bit of metafictional dialogue the moment when the plot takes on Bond or Flint elements. There are human romances inside the research group. But there is also espionage, and secret taping, and a “dolphin gap” argument with the Soviets, and it is to sigh.

Mr. Merle

Because to me, all those moments of connection to the real world take away the most intriguing aspects of the book. The book pivots at its midpoint. At that point. The book swiftly changes from an intellectually absorbing exploration of science into an often dull, often by-the-numbers tale of espionage and intrigue. I predicted around page 20 that the dolphins would be sent on the mission they go on towards the end of this novel, and the impact of those actions were equally as obvious.

Merle writes much of this book in a kaleidoscopical style, full of long paragraphs with stream-of-consciousness approaches which kind of wander and meander from first person to third person, from grounded reality to revelations of emotion and often to outright gibberish. At first this style is thrilling or at least intriguing, but when Merle breaks up that approach with excerpts from letters or interviews conducted by government agencies, that break often feels like a necessary breath of fresh air. I kept finding my mind drifting as the characters’ minds drifted, ungrounded in reality or in this story but instead of my own thoughts about dolphins or work or the Miami Dolphins of the NFL.

It sounds like I hated this book but in truth I enjoyed The Day of the Dolphin for its brazen oddness and for Merle’s obvious passion for both the way he presents his story and the story itself. The more I read about them in this book, the more I wanted to read about our aquatic friends. I now have a nice stack of library books on my desk about Cetaceans because I find that species so interesting. I just wish The Day of the Dolphin had a bit more dolphin and a bit less human in its pages.

3.5 stars





[May 10, 1969] Youth (June 1969 Fantastic)


by Victoria Silverwolf

He's No Saint

Yesterday the Vatican announced that more than forty saints have been removed from the official liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.  How come?  Because there's some serious doubt that these holy folks ever existed.

The most famous of these former saints is Christopher, patron of travelers.  There are plenty of people with Saint Christopher medals hanging from the rear view mirrors of their cars, hoping for safe journeys.


A typical Saint Christopher medal.  Note the infant Jesus carried on his back.

The story goes that Christopher (whose name, appropriately, means Bearer of Christ) carried the baby Messiah across a river.  I guess we'll never know now how He made it.  Perhaps He crawled on water.

Long Hair Music

I'm sure that ex-Saint Christopher will continue to be associated with a divine youth.  In this modern age, what could be more associated with secular youth than the hippie movement?  The popularity of the musical Hair is proof of the cultural importance of these groovy young people.

Further evidence, if any be needed, is the fact that Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, a medley of two songs from Hair performed by The 5th Dimension, has been Number One in the USA since the middle of April, and shows no signs of leaving that position anytime soon.


Maybe I'm prejudiced in the song's favor because I'm an Aquarius.

Bildungsroman

Fittingly, the latest issue of Fantastic is dominated by the first half of a new novel in which we see the main character develop from a child to a young adult.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

The cover is, as usual, borrowed from an issue of the German magazine Perry Rhodan.


What happened to the green halo around the sphere in the upper right corner?

Editorial: Don't, by Laurence M. Janifer

The associate editor tells us why writing is a bad career choice.  Although the piece is intended to be humorous, I can't help feeling that there's a trace of true bitterness to it.

No rating.

Emphyrio (Part One of Two), by Jack Vance


Illustrations by Bruce Jones.

Taking up half the magazine, this initial segment begins with a bang.  We witness our protagonist, Ghyl Tarvoke, held prisoner in a tower.  His skull is cut open and his brain attached to a sinister device.  His captors manipulate his mind, bringing him from a vegetative state to one where he is able to answer questions, but lacks the imagination to lie.  The torturers want to know why he committed serious crimes before they kill him.

After this dramatic opening we go into a flashback.  Ghyl is the son of a woodworker.  They live on a planet that was colonized so long ago that Earth is just a legend.  Centuries ago, a war devastated the place where they live.  Wealthy and powerful people restored basic services and now rule as lords, collecting taxes from their underlings.


Ghyl and a friend sneak into the spaceport where the aristocrats keep their private starships.

Ghyl's father engages in the forbidden activity of duplication; that is, he builds his own device that allows him to make copies of old manuscripts.  (Other forms of duplication are also illegal; everything has to be made by hand.) He eventually pays a very heavy price for his crime.

In what starts as a joke, Ghyl runs for mayor (a purely symbolic office, but one that might offer the possibility of changing the oppressive laws of the lords) under the nom de guerre of Emphyrio.  This half of the novel ends just as the election is about to take place.

Vance is a master at describing exotic settings and strange cultures, and his latest work is a particularly shining example.  I have failed to give you any idea of the novel's complex and detailed background.  (Vance is the only SF author I know who can get away with the copious use of footnotes to explain the worlds he creates.) Ghyl and the other characters are very real, and their world seems like a place with millennia of history.

If I have to have a few minor quibbles, I might say that the novel (with the exception of the shocking opening scene) is very leisurely and episodic.  Readers expecting an action-packed plot may be a bit disappointed.  Personally, I found Ghyl's world fascinating.

Four stars (and maybe even leaning toward five.)

The Big Boy, by Bruce McAllister

The only other original work of fiction in this issue is a blend of science fiction and religious fantasy.  Space travelers, including clergy, discover a galaxy-size, vaguely humanoid being deep in the cosmos.  It manipulates stars and planets.  An attempt to communicate with it yields a garbled message that seems to indicate that it is God.  A clearer version of the message reveals something else.

I didn't really see the point of this story.  The second version of the message isn't some big, shocking twist, but rather a slight modification of the original.  (That's how I saw it, anyway, although the characters react wildly to it.)

Two stars.

On to the reprints!  They all come from old issues of Fantastic, instead of the usual yellowing copies of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures.

Time Bum, by C. M. Kornbluth

The January/February 1953 issue of the magazine supplies this comedy.


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.

A con artist rents a bungalow from a married couple.  He drops hints that he's from centuries in the future.  Revealing his identity as a time traveler would be a capital offense in his future world, or so he convinces them.  The plan is to have them bring him a fortune in diamonds that he can supposedly duplicate for them.


Illustration by David Stone.

This is an amusing little jape.  The author has a good time making fun of time travel stories and science fiction in general.  (The wife is a reader of SF magazines, tearing off the covers with their scantily clad space women.) It's a minor work, and you'll see the ending coming a mile away, but it's worth a chuckle or two.

Three stars.

The Opal Necklace, by Kris Neville

The very first issue of the magazine (Summer 1952) is the source of this horror story.


Cover art by Barye Phillips and Leo Summers.

The daughter of a witch living way back in the swamp marries a man from New York City.  The witch warns her that she will always be a part of the swamp.  She gives her daughter a string of opals, each one of which contains one of the husband's joys.


Illustration by Leo Summers.

When the marriage inevitably falls apart, the woman turning to booze and cheap affairs, she destroys the opals, one by one.  The first time, this causes the death of the man's pet dog.  It all leads up to a tragic ending.

Besides being an effective chiller, this is a very well-written story with a great deal of emotional power.  The woman is both victim and villain.  The reader is able to empathize with her, no matter how reprehensible her actions may be.

Four stars.

The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch, by Eric Frank Russell

This grimly comic tale comes from the Fall 1952 issue.


Cover art by Leo Summers.

A series of gruesome deaths occurs in a small town in France.  They all happen near a place where a meteorite fell.  Only the village idiot knows what is responsible.


Illustration by Leo Summers also.

Does that sound like a comedy to you?  Me neither.  The basic plot is a typical science fiction horror story, but the author treats it with dry humor.  Frankly, I found it in questionable taste, and not very funny.

Two stars.

Root of Evil, by Shirley Jackson

A tale from a truly great writer comes from the March/April issue.


Cover art by Richard Powers.

A man places an ad in the newspaper offering to send money to anybody who writes to him.  Sure enough, folks who send in a request get the cash.  We see several people react to this strange ad in different ways.  At last, we learn about the fellow giving away all this loot.


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

I was expecting a lot from the author of the superb short stories The Lottery and One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts as well as the excellent novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  I didn't get it.  The initial premise is interesting, but the story fizzles out at the end.

Two stars.

What If, by Isaac Asimov

The same premiere issue that gave us Kris Neville's dark story of an unhappy marriage offers this sentimental tale from the Good Doctor about a happy one.


Illustration by David Stone.

A lovey-dovey couple are on a train.  A strange little man sits across from them with a box that says WHAT IF in big letters.  He doesn't say a word, but he shows them a glass panel that allows them to see what would have happened if they had not met the way they did.

This isn't the most profound story ever written, but it makes for very pleasant reading.  The message seems to be that some people are truly meant for each other, and that things tend to work out for the best.  An optimistic point of view, to be sure, but it will probably appeal to the old softy inside all of us.

Three stars.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Hank Stine

Leiber has high praise for the dark fantasy novel Black Easter by James Blish (I agree; it's very good) and the story collection A Glass of Stars by Robert F. Young, particularly noting the latter's skill with love stories.  (I agree with that also.)

Although it's not a book, the column includes an appreciation of the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows by Hank Stine.

No rating.

Worth Spending Your Youth On?

This was a pretty good issue, despite a couple of disappointments.  The Jack Vance novel is clearly the highlight.  If you'd rather skip the rest of the magazine, you can always read an old literary classic.






[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)


by Fiona Moore

I was interested in reading this month’s Ace Double because I’d never read any Rackham, but had heard some good things about his writing. Ipomoea turned out to be a mixed bag, a pacy adventure story with some interesting themes that didn’t quite live up to its early promise.

Cover of the short novel Ipomoea
Cover of Ipomoea

The story takes place in a future society where interplanetary travel is as easy as taking an ocean liner is now, and a small number of people are making it rich on a trio of exoplanets which are within easy reach of Earth’s solar system. Our protagonist, Sam Hutten, is the son of one of those exoplanetary billionaires, but he has rejected his father and is now working as a sociologist on Earth. He receives, and obeys, a request to visit his father but clearly the request is more than social: assassination attempts, and contact with mysterious government agents investigating a new super-addictive drug going by the name of “Happy Sugar” (and derived from plants of the Ipomoea genus, hence the title), are to follow. When Hutten’s father turns up dead, Hutten investigates and finds a plot for universal domination by another of the billionaires, involving the drug and some gems capable of mentally conditioning their wearer.

There’s some very good and timely ideas here. The drug plot clearly draws on anxieties in the news about the possibility that the “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture of today might make people susceptible to influence by Communists or worse. There are also some good SFnal touches of imagined technology, with humanoid robots and a character who has, Frankenstein-like, been formed through melding three different people (meaning he lacks an ego and is therefore conveniently immune to psionic suggestion).

However, what I found most intriguing about the novella was the initial setup of a world where Japan has become the dominant economic and cultural power. Rackham’s argument is that the Japanese will come to this position through their production of cheap goods at low prices: “They made their stuff cheap not in competition, not to undercut anyone else, but because it could be made cheap.” Through pursuing excellence for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of conquest, they become top nation. While I’m not thoroughly convinced at the idea that the Japanese are non-competitive, the country’s recent technological and economic progress suggests that a Japanese-dominated twenty-first century might not be an outside possibility. This idea that success is achieved through non-competition and selflessness becomes a thematic link through the book, in that the villain enslaves his victims psionically through appealing to their subconscious desires, and it is only through sublimating the ego that one can resist.

Unfortunately, a lot of this early setup goes by the wayside. Apart from a few brief scenes, we don’t actually get much sense that this world is Japanese-influenced. Although this might be excused on the grounds that the villains, on the exoplanet, appear to be Europeans and into the idea of racial purity, one would expect a bit more comment on the distinction between their worlds and Earth from our protagonist.

Furthermore, we never get much exploration of why Hutten became estranged from his family, or why he became a sociologist beyond that this allows him long passages of exposition on the nature of society. Indeed, by about three-quarters of the way in Hutten’s profession appears to have been forgotten, as the story takes a sharp twist into James Bond territory. Hutten and his special agent friends must bring down a villain who is depressingly keen on making speeches explaining his plans for universal domination, and the resolution is telegraphed rather obviously to the reader.

It’s even more disappointing since, early in the story, Hutten argues, based on the rise of the Japanese, that “world domination will not work, either through force or persuasion… No government can long persist against the will of the governed,” which suggests that, if that theme were pursued, the villain would be defeated through collective action on the part of the people. Instead, we get superheroes with convenient powers saving the day, without any challenge to the economic status quo that, for all Hutten’s speechifying about the Japanese values of doing well by doing good simply for its own sake, has allowed eight billionaires to dominate its economy. A more self-aware novella might have made something of the cognitive dissonance between Hutten’s theories and the fact that the world he’s in doesn’t work that way at all (to say nothing of Hutten’s complete obliviousness of this problem), but not this one.

Two and a half stars, mostly for the setup.

Cover of the short novel The Brass Dragon
Cover of The Brass Dragon

I won’t say too much about the second half of the double, The Brass Dragon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It’s an oddly good fit with the Rackham but for the wrong reasons, namely that it also sets up an intriguing mystery only for the revelation to prove rather disappointing.

The story revolves around Barry Cowan, a young man who turns up in a Texas hospital with no memory of his past life other than a vague impression that he used to live in California, a few disconnected memories of some place that may or may not be Earth, and a little brass statue of a dragon in his pocket. The mystery builds as he is found by his (very normal) family and returned home, but is stalked by strange people apparently looking for something in his possession, and who threaten him and his family. Is he a time-traveler? An arrival from a parallel universe? An alien in human form?

About halfway through the narrative, his memory is restored, and everything falls into place for himself and for the reader. In case anyone here is planning on reading this, I won’t reveal too much other than to say that it becomes a fairly straightforward, even banal, space adventure. I’m also not quite sure who the intended audience is: the age of the protagonist (eighteen) suggests it’s supposed to be a juvenile, but there’s no real reason why he couldn’t be an adult.

Two stars, again mostly for the buildup.



By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Six Gates from Limbo, by J.T. McIntosh: A Comparison

Six Gates To Limbo Cover depicting Adam and Eve in a glass bowl full of sea creatures
Cover Design by Colin Andrews

A funny thing happened to me on the way to my magazines recently. I had already read my copy of Six Gates From Limbo, from Michael Joseph when I saw it was being serialized in If. I delayed my reading of these issues but I did look at my colleague David’s reviews of them. This is when a few odd things occurred to me.

Firstly, it took place over two issues which also contained many other stories, yet my issues of If were not particularly thick to make up for this. In addition, I noticed David’s reviews stated how rushed the story seemed, when no such point had occurred to me.

Now I know magazines do cut down stories, but this had no explanation as this was essentially a novella version. When New Worlds is forced to cut down, they have given summaries of what has been excised and have been the subject of attacks in fanzines for losing parts of the original content. I have not yet seen anyone had comment on this in the case of If.

So, in the obsessive way I like to do things, I performed a chapter-by-chapter wordcount comparison to see what was lost. By my estimation, the serialized form constitutes only around 40% of the novel length!

Covers of magazine and book versions of Drowned World and Flowers for Algernon

This is not as much of a change between the novelette and novel versions of Flowers For Algernon but not dissimilar to the different versions of Drowned World. As such I thought some in-depth investigating was in order.

To start with, where have the changes been made? The answer is, throughout. The only chapter which appeared to be in-tact is the final one. This makes some sense as the final discussion between Rex and Regina is necessary to accentuate the themes. In addition, it is the shortest so there is less to remove.

Jack Gaughan illustration from the magazine serial showing Rex in the cathedral in Mercury

The only other without much cut from it is the next shortest chapter, Rex’s return to Limbo from Mercury. From the rest, all have between 40 and 80% of their content removed.

As such, the central plot remains predominantly the same. Three people awake in an idyllic artificial environment with six portals to other planets. They investigate through them but find each flawed in some way. They have to work out what has happened and what they will do about it.

What changes between the novel and magazine versions are the details and emphasis. To take the “return to Limbo” chapter that I mentioned before, the start provides a good example of what is often removed:

Here are the first few paragraphs in its serialized form:

His awakening in Limbo was the worst of the three he had experienced, but there was one good thing about it. Regina was there. She was crying. Vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…

He went down in his pajamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

And in the book form:

Regina got him back to the house with some difficulty. She was crying – vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days. In Limbo it was night. She had rushed to the Gateway in her nightdress the moment she sensed his return.

This awakening was the worst of the three because he had no sleep and little food on Mercury. Only some twelve hours after the ordeal of transference, it had been repeated. The thirst was familiar, and the hunger, but this time there was also a desperate lassitude and weakness that put talking out of the question, other than the occasional gasped word.

Again he had his memory unimpaired and he wanted to restore himself the way that seemed natural to him, by crawling in the bushes, chewing fruit, drinking clear water and bathing in the lake. But the lake, Regina reminded him, was seven miles away, and the house less than one mile.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…It couldn’t be fresh killed meat, because Regina on her own would certainly not have killed a cow or a bull but it smelled far fresher than anything he had smelled in Mercury.

He went down in his pyjamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

As you can see the facts given are largely the same, but the serialized form lacks any reasoning or flavour. You do not need to know that Rex welcomes the return to the naturalness of life in Limbo compared to the artificiality of Mercury via his thoughts on food as a restorative, but it highlights the themes and makes him a more fleshed-out character.

But are there more substantive changes? Limbo is much more thoroughly explored in the novel, with details of the flora and fauna greatly expanded, along with the nature of their maintenance. With this it is also made explicit the parallels with Adam and Eve, with Regina believing the gateways are the serpent, along with many references to Greek mythology.

Another key element is that the magazine does not contain Rex’s vivid dreams. I can see that they could seem superfluous but I would argue they are, in fact, important for understanding the ending.

I do feel the book length version is more likely to appeal to the hippy crowd, with its rejection of society and the ecological themes.

As David noted, many of the planets get short shrift in the magazine version and that is definitely a notable difference. In addition to much more detail and complexity applied to the transfers, the six gateway worlds are expanded, even Mercury which had the longest section in the magazine. Along with the aforementioned discussions on the artificiality of food, there are also mentions of isolation, suicide kiosks, people overdosing on Pex and other such features of the city.

Possibly the most frustrating excision is almost an entire chapter laying the groundwork about the people on Cresta, why they are central to the final plan and then subsequent sections on what happened as a result. It is instead reduced to Rex making the gateway switch and saying he told someone on the planet about it. Which, even with the final chapter intact, likely makes it confusing for most readers.

So, would my opinion be that the book version is better? Unfortunately not, for there is another element that was expunged by Pohl and it is one I wish McIntosh had not included in his novel: the poor treatment of Regina. (Those of a sensitive disposition may be advised to skip the rest of this section).

Jack Gaughan illustation from the magazine of Regina dancing on stage in a skimpy outfit whilst people throw things at her
Regina in sexual slavery on Landfall. Not linked to her womanhood in magazine form.

McIntosh’s restrained descriptions of Regina in the serial brought praise from David. Unfortunately, this is definitely not the case in its book form. There Rex sees her as a “girl”, a young nineteen to his twenty-five, with regular descriptions of how pert her breasts are and “child-like” her body is. This is until she is almost raped and turned into a sex slave on Landfall. It is only at that point he can see her as a woman.

Unfortunately, this isn’t even the first rape scene. After his return from Mercury, Rex attempts to rape Regina declaring:

I waited, remember? But after a man and woman are wed, with or without ceremony, after they made love, he can’t rape her. You’re mine, Regina.

Mr. McIntosh is certainly not a devotee of Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir.

If you want my judgement each version succeeds and fails in different ways. Somewhere there is a full length-version which removes the questionable details but continues to expand on the more interesting themes and ideas McIntosh draws out.

Two Stars for both variations



by Brian Collins

Both of the novels I got for this month did not work out, sadly; but interestingly they're failures of different breeds, or rather they fail in different ways. I've read much of what Anne McCaffrey has written over the past few years while this is my first time reading Kenneth Bulmer. Both are pretty close in age, indeed being of the literary generation that preceded the New Wave. How have they adapted—or more importantly, how have they not?

Decision at Doona, by Anne McCaffrey

Cover by richard Powers depicting a psychedelic image of what seems to be a cat icon.
Cover art by Richard Powers.

Anne McCaffrey technically debuted over fifteen years ago, though she has only been writing consistently for the past few years. In those few years she has built quite the following. She became the first woman to win a Hugo in any of the fiction categories, and her Pern and "The Ship Who…" stories have undoubtedly been popular. I'm not a fan.

Decision at Doona is a new standalone novel from McCaffrey, with a premise that will sound familiar for those who remember the Good Old Days of science fiction—the early '50s, incidentally when McCaffrey sold her first story. It's the future, and humanity is scouting for habitable planets, mainly because there's no room left on Earth. Humans live in alcoves, like bees, and have basically depleted the planet's resources. Finding a planet fit for human colonization would already be difficult, but there's an extra criterion: the planet must be devoid of intelligent life comparable to mankind. Doona at first seems like the perfect candidate—until it isn't. The Hrrubans, a race of cat-like aliens, already live on Doona, keeping their existence secret from the first human scouts. The Hrrubans are about as "civilized" as the humans, but that's not going to help either party, as mankind finds itself at an impasse.

So, a first-contact narrative in which, by sheer coincidence, two advanced races meet on a planet which doesn't strictly belong to either of them. The humans are haunted by the collective memory of having encountered another intelligent race before, the Siwannese, which ended tragically. I will say, how the Siwannese became extinct is not what you would expect if you're familiar with colonialism in the Americas. Then again, I'm not sure McCaffrey did much research with regards to real-world colonialism. To give McCaffrey some credit she does delve into the subject, which is an inherently thorny one, with characters even referring to Christopher Columbus with some shame. The central question of the novel, though, that of whether the Hrrubans are indigenous to Doona (if they are then the humans must pull out, and if not then there's room for cooperation), is an odd one that assumes would-be colonizers have the best intentions with a would-be indigenous population.

The strangely tone-deaf optimism and belief in colonizers as basically good people (as opposed to people actively perpetuating a system of death and imprisonment) is a tune that will sound familiar to Analog subscribers. Indeed it's here where I think McCaffrey's key to success lies. While I'm not personally fond of McCaffrey's writing, it's not hard to see why she has become so popular in the past few years. Reading her must be a comfort for a lot of people. After all, in McCaffrey's world it's 1959 and not 1969. Ike is still in office, and Jack Kennedy is a strapping young senator—and alive. Vietnam is a country without any acreage in the minds of suburban Americans. Unfortunately Jack Kennedy is dead and so are we, in some metaphysical sense. We have cast the runes against our own souls. But for McCaffrey, and indeed for the humans within this novel, nothing much has changed since 1959. The distant future will not be too different from how it was in the Good Old Days. Now isn't that a comforting thought?

To make matters more worrying, McCaffrey is just not a very good writer. Even comparing her to some other conservatives (and I do believe McCaffrey is a conservative) in the field, like Poul Anderson and Larry Niven, her worlds and aliens are not as vibrant. Anderson, whose politics are very different from mine, can still be interesting because of his moodiness and at times surprising moral complexity, whereas McCaffrey might be living under a rock. The Hrrubans reminded me somewhat of Niven's Kzinti, but whereas the Kzinti can be easily distinguished from spacefaring humans, McCaffrey's aliens are more analogous to American indigenous peoples. And Doona itself is such a boring location, with barely any thought or writing given to description and mechanics. Surely we deserve better than this.

Two stars.

The Ulcer Culture, by Kenneth Bulmer

A rough drawing of a human with what appears to be seven breasts. Do I count seven breasts?
Cover artist not credited.

I got mailed this new Bulmer, a British import, because Kris Vyas-Myall is a Bulmer fan and I've not read any of his work before. This may have been a bad idea for a starting point. Firstly, what the hell is this cover? Who is responsible? The artist is uncredited so I'm actually not sure. The novel itself is evidently an attempt on Bulmer's part to get hip with the kids, so to speak. The Ulcer Culture is a dystopian SF novel all about drugs (especially drugs), sex, and violence; and yet I was still bored for much of it.

The plot doesn't really exist, and anyway it would be hard to summarize. The world of the novel is more the point, ya know. It's the future, in what I have to think is fish-and-chips merry goddamn England, and it's "the Age of Material Plenty." There are two groups of people, the Uppers (haha) and the workers, with the former keeping the latter in check with a hallucinogen called Joy Juice. The welfare state has gotten out of hand, with workers lounging around experiencing lifelike hallucinations, having a far-out time as it were. The real problem starts when, for no apparent reason, these hallucinations which normally would provide fantasies for the workers start turning nightmarish. Is the drug supply going bad? Are people's bodies adapting to the drug and having adverse effects? Who really killed Jack Kennedy? Why am I asking you?

Now, science fiction has had a storied history with drugs. When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World almost forty years ago, he theorized that drugs could be used to pacify the proletariat and reinforce subservience, through a Freudian understanding of pleasure. Baby wants nipple, baby cries until he gets nipple, baby acquires nipple, baby stops crying. Huxley would later change his mind profoundly on the subject of drug use, although it seems Bulmer has not gotten the memo. The problem for the reader is that The Ulcer Culture reads like a middle-aged conservative's attempt at trying to understand the hedonistic antics of the younger generation. This is a "New Wave" novel, but within limits. Sexuality plays a major role, yet women only appear in the margins and to a symbolic capacity; and despite the lack of female interest there's no mention of homosexuality. I thought the British were all about buggering each other. Is that the word? And there's basically no swearing either—no "cock," no "pussy," not even a token "fuck" thrown in as a treat.

At first I was led to believe Bulmer knew what he was doing, but then I realized he's merely puppeteering the corpse of some nonexistent New Wave writer with this outing—which, mind you, is a failure in writing that was not due to laziness or cowardice. I don't like it, but I at least respect the effort.

Two stars.



by Cora Buhlert

Conan with a Metafictional Gimmick: Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, by Gardner F. Fox

Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox

There has been an invasion at my trusty local import bookstore, an invasion of scantily clad, muscular Barbarians, sporting furry loincloths and horned helmets and brandishing gigantic swords and axes, while equally scantily clad maidens cling to their mighty thews.

The genre that Fritz Leiber dubbed "swords and sorcery" was born forty years ago almost to the day, when Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom" was published, instigating a veritable invasion of sword-wielding heroes and heroines into the pages of Weird Tales, Strange Tales and Unknown. The first Barbarian boom only lasted a little more than ten years, cut short by the death or defection of many of its authors as well as World War II paper shortages and changing reader tastes.

However, in the past ten years, Barbarian scouts have occasionally made forays into a landscape dominated by science fiction, making camp in the pages of Fantastic in the US and Science Fantasy in the UK, recruiting fans and authors penning new adventures for modern day Barbarians. Then, four years ago, the walls were breached with the runaway success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Barbarian hordes invaded the bookstore. Nowadays, there is more sword and sorcery on the shelves than there ever was during the genre's heyday in the thirties.

These days, whenever I go to my local import bookstore, half-naked Barbarians greet me from the paperback spinner rack, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, J. Jones or their lesser imitators. And I have to admit that I inevitably reach for the books with these striking covers to read the blurb on the back. For while not every scantily clad Barbarian can hold a candle to Robert E. Howard's Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser or even John Jakes' Brak, even the lesser entries into the genre are at the very least entertaining.

The latest Barbarian to invade the bookstore shelves is the aptly named Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, penned by pulp and comic book veteran Gardner F. Fox with a stunning cover by the talented J. Jones. The tagline promises that Kothar is "the mightiest fantasy hero of the enchanted, terrifying world before – or beyond – recorded time". With such hyperbole, how could I resist?

Two Distinguished Scholars – or are they?

However, the slim paperback does not open with Barbarian action. Instead, we get an introduction penned by one Donald MacIvers PhD. There are a lot of literary scholars in the world, but the number of academics who take pulp fiction and science fiction and fantasy seriously can be counted on both hands and Donald MacIvers PhD is not one of them. Fascinating…

MacIvers opens his introduction with a quote from Albert Kremnitz, whom he describes as "a German philosopher who is no longer widely read". Indeed, Albert Kremnitz is so little read that even my sixteen volume 1908 edition of the encyclopaedia Der Große Brockhaus has never heard of him. Hmm, the plot thickens…

MacIvers quotes Kremnitz stating that even though the Industrial Revolution would seem to have driven mysticism back, while science, technology and reason reign supreme, mysticism would rise again roughly in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing about a new Age of Heroes. For someone not even Der Große Brockhaus has heard of, Albert Kremnitz is certainly prescient.

MacIvers then informs us that this new Age of Heroes will lead to "the recreation of mythological supermen, or, as [Kremnitz] predicted with amazing insight, the invention of heroes so magnificent, so fantastically endowed with super-powers, that they exist only in the fantasy projections of man. Such a superhero is Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman."

At this point, I was beginning to suspect that Gardner F. Fox, who after all created the original Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and many other superheroes for National Comics, was pulling our collective leg here and that both Donald MacIvers PhD and Albert Kremnitz, a German philosopher so obscure that even Der Große Brockhaus has never of him, were in truth just alternate identities of Gardner F. Fox, who promptly describes himself as a "distinguished American writer".

But rather than begrudging Mr. Fox this little metafictional game, I was instead amused, especially since I have engaged in similar subterfuge, passing myself off as the American pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore on occasion.

Besides, Fox in the guise of Donald MacIvers PhD actually makes an interesting point here, namely that the disenchantment of modern life has given birth to our desire for larger than life heroes, be they the costumed superheroes of comic books, the square-jawed spacemen and brass-bra wearing maidens of golden age science fiction or the muscular and scantily clad Barbarians that have invaded our newsstands and bookstores of late. The reasons these stories are so popular, no matter how much literary scholars may decry them, is because we need them to escape our day to day reality for just a little while.

To quote MacIvers or rather Fox, "Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman is an epic hero for any age, but it would appear that our age needs him more than any other."

Bad Luck Barbarian

After this introduction, we get – no, not sword-swinging action, but a prologue informing us that "The Universe is old. Old!" just in case we didn't get it the first time. Fox sets the stage by telling us that Kothar's adventures take place eons after mankind has conquered the stars and "an empire of Man was spread throughout the universe. This empire died more than a billion years ago, after which man himself sank into a state of barbarism." So Kothar's world is closer to Jack Vance's Dying Earth than Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age.

Once this prologue, billed as a fragment of "The Lord Histories of Satoram Mandamor", is over, we at last meet our hero, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman. Though it seems that Kothar is not long for this world or any other, for at the beginning of the story "The Sword of the Sorcerer" (like the Conan, Kull or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, the novel is a fix-up of three novelettes) the sellsword Kothar is grievously wounded, having just lost a battle. On the run from enemy soldiers intent on capturing him and flaying him alive, Kothar stumbles into an ancient crypt, where he encounters the shrivelled corpse of the sorcerer Afgorkon. Raised from the dead by Queen Elfa, Afgorkon bestows upon Kothar the magical sword Frostfire, forged from a meteorite and able to cut through any substance, even steel. However, the blade comes with a curse, for as long as he wields Frostfire, Kothar must remain poor and possess nothing. Since Kothar is a mercenary, who fights strictly for gold and treasure, this is of course a problem.

However, before Kothar can figure out how to lift the curse upon his sword, he first has to defeat Lord Markoth, who has dethroned Queen Elfa. To no one's surprise, he succeeds, but not without picking up a second curse in the form of Red Lori, a beautiful witch in the employ of Markoth, whose spirit keeps haunting Kothar by day and night, appearing in a cup of ale and in his dreams, even though her body is imprisoned in a silver cage in Queen Elfa's castle.

The relationship between Kothar and the vengeful witch who haunts him is fascinating, especially since Red Lori is not above occasionally aiding Kothar, for none shall harm him until Red Lori has had her vengeance. It's almost a twisted love story.

After restoring Queen Elfa to her throne, Kothar, his devoted horse Greyling and the magical sword Frostfire, take off for more adventures and are hired to find "The Treasure in the Labyrinth", a treasure which happens to be guarded by all sorts of traps and monsters. After fighting his way through these traps and monsters – and rescuing a lovely and grateful maiden – Kothar faces the final guardian, a Minotaur straight out of Greek legend. Naturally, Kothar prevails and slays the Minotaur, but he is in for a surprise, for the Minotaur turns into a beautiful woman, the lover of a sorcerer who was cursed by his rival. Kothar has managed to lift this curse, though he still cannot lift his own and is promptly double-crossed by his employers, too, losing the treasure to them. However, Kothar's treacherous employers don't get to enjoy the treasure for long, before poetic justice strikes again…

In the final story, Kothar meets "The Woman in the Witch Wood", Lady Alaine of Shallone, who is forced to live alone in the woods, unable to leave due to a spell cast by the villainous Baron Gorfroi. Lady Alaine asks Kothar's help to free her and her people from this evil spell and sneak into the castle to slay the Baron and retrieve the means by which Lady Alaine is kept imprisoned, a lock of her white hair kept in a golden coffin. Unsurprisingly. Kothar succeeds, only to find himself double-crossed yet again by Lady Alaine who uses her magic to turn him into a dog. However, this time around, Kothar expected betrayal and in turn tricks the Lady Alaine…

Pure Barbarian Fun

Regardless of what Donald MacIvers PhD has to say, the adventures of Kothar are not as good as the works of past masters like Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith nor are they quite up to the standard set by the best of the modern practitioners of the genre such as Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny or Joanna Russ.

That said, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman, is a lot of fun. It's the sort of book you will devour in one sitting – I did, interrupted only by consulting Der Große Brockhaus about the mysterious Albert Kremnitz – and smile throughout. Kothar may not be the most original of heroes, though there is enough to distinguish him from the other Barbarians clogging up bookshelves, and his adventures may not be the most original either, though there is usually at least one or two surprising twists. And while "the distinguished American author Gardner F. Fox" may not be Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber – but then who is? – he is a skilled enough writer to weave thoroughly entertaining tales. He is certainly a better writer than Lin Carter who pens similar stories.

I was debating how to rate this book. It's not a masterpiece nor Hugo material, but is so much fun that I shall give it four stars anyway. And should Mr. Fox ever decide to revisit Kothar – who after all is still suffering from the dual curse of sword-induced poverty and a sexy witch haunting him – I will certainly pick up further adventures of the sellsword from Cumberia.

Pure entertainment. Four stars.






[April 12, 1968] Darkness (May 1968 Fantastic)


by Victoria Silverwolf

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

These are dark days.

I need not remind you of the recent shocking murder of a genuinely great man who dedicated his life to nonviolence. Nor is it necessary to mention the wholesale slaughter of soldiers and civilians in Southeast Asia, which shows no signs of abating.

As if the heavens wish to mourn for the horrors humanity unleashes upon itself, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon tonight, visible from almost all parts of the Western Hemisphere.


An visual depiction of the phenomenon.

It is tragically appropriate that light reflected from Earth makes the eclipsed Moon appear reddish; an event known as a Blood Moon.

Even in the frivolous world of popular music, we are reminded of tragedy. At the top of the American music charts is the melancholy ballad (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay by the late Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash last December. It holds the unhappy distinction of being the first posthumous single to reach Number One.


Recorded just three days before Redding's death.

Better to Light One Candle Than to Curse the Darkness

It is tempting to sink into silence and depression. Instead, let us take what comfort we can from small pleasures. One such anodyne, at least for me, is reading science fiction and fantasy. Let's take a look at the latest issue of Fantastic and see if we can draw any solace from it.


Cover art by Johnny Bruck.

As has happened a few times before, the image on the cover comes from an issue of the popular German magazine Perry Rhodan.


That seems to mean The Little Men from Siga, presumably a fictional planet.

High Road to the East, by Christopher Anvil


Illustration by Gray Morrow.

In this trivial bagatelle an Admiral (clearly supposed to be Christopher Columbus) has a scheme to sail west from Europe to the Indies without bumping into the new continent in the way. He uses gunpowder to send his ship into the air.

Can you guess this won't work out the way he thinks?

This is a weak joke, hardly the outstanding new story promised on the cover. At least it's short and inoffensive.

Two stars.

The Little Creeps, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

The December 1951 issue of Amazing Stories is the source of this tale of the Cold War turned Hot.


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

We start off with an odd scene in which a huge number of tiny glowing things invade the Tokyo home of an American General at night. Only light drives them away. They manage to talk to the officer by invading his phonograph and manipulating the needle. These are, of course, the Little Creeps.


Illustration by Leo Summers.

China and the USA are in a shooting war. The Soviet Union is supposedly neutral, but gives aid to its Red ally. The Little Creeps tell the General not to do three things.

1. Don't fire a Japanese servant.

2. Don't listen to a visiting General from the front lines.

3. Don't bomb Chinese installations along a river that serves as the border with the USSR.

You can probably predict that the General doesn't listen to the annoying Little Creeps, and things go from bad to worse.

This is a strange story, with a strong antiwar message mixed up with bizarre science fiction content. The latter never really made sense to me.

The visiting General is a loathsome character indeed. Not only does he love war, he also endlessly harasses a WAC Sergeant. I understand that he's the story's villain, but he really gives me the creeps (if you'll excuse the expression.)

Very mixed feelings about this one. The author has his heart in the right place, and the escalating tension of the situation creates a great deal of suspense, but the Little Creeps are kind of goofy.

Three Stars.

Dr. Immortelle, by Kathleen Ludwick

From the Fall 1930 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly we have the only story, as far as I can tell, this author ever published. I managed to take a look at a copy of the yellowing pages of the old magazine, and the table of contents lists her name as Luckwick. The introduction to the story refers to her as Miss Ludwick. I don't know which one is correct.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

Anyway, this is a horror story about a Mad Scientist who discovered a way to extend his life way back in the 18th century. (Did the title give you a clue?)


Illustration also by Morey.

He and his mulatto slave have kept themselves alive and young by transfusing the blood of children into their bodies. Even more improbable, and embarrassing for the modern reader, the transfusion of blood from white children has made the mulatto completely Caucasian!

Sometimes the children don't survive the sinister procedure. Justice finally catches up with the evil scientist and his servant (who developed a conscience about what they were doing over the decades) in the form of the grown sister of a little boy who died because of the transfusion.

It's easy to tell this yarn is nearly four decades old. Besides the stuff about the mulatto turning white, there's a lot of flowery language. The author uses a narrative technique I've seen in other antique works. We start with a narrator, who then quotes at length from another narrator. (In this case, the dying servant.)

Thirty-odd years ago, this could have been very loosely adapted into a cheap Boris Karloff movie, of the kind I eagerly seek out on Shock Theater. In print form, the years have not been kind to it. Whatever became of Miss Ludwick/Luckwick, she does not appear to have been a major loss to the literary world.

Two stars.

Spawn of Darkness, by Craig Browning

Never heard of Craig Browning? That's because he's really Rog Phillips, who gave us this story in the May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


Cover art by H. L. Blumenfeld.

Guess what? Gregg Conrad, whose name appears on the cover, is also Rog Phillips! The guy gets around!


Illustration by Edmond Swiatek.

In a future war, two death rays meet, causing an entity to appear out of nowhere. It takes the form imagined by a soldier; namely, a genie.

Forget the futuristic stuff. From this point on, we've just got a story about a guy and his genie. He might as well have found it in an old bottle in the desert.

Anyway, he wishes his way home. Things seem fine, but then the military sends his mother a telegram, stating that her son is missing in action and presumed dead. I guess the mother is pretty superstitious, because a self-proclaimed psychic convinces her the young man is a ghost. Complications ensue when the guy rather foolishly uses the genie to perform practical jokes that seem like the work of a poltergeist.

I don't know what to make of this thing. As I've indicated, the science fiction content is pointless. I guess the author is making fun of parapsychologists and such, but nothing particularly funny happens.

Two stars.

Spartan Planet (Part Two of Two), by A. Bertram Chandler


Illustration by Jeff Jones.

Let's recap. Chandler's series character John Grimes, a female ethologist, and a bunch of other folks have arrived on a planet without women, as far as the bulk of the population knows. The elite Doctors actually have a secret cache of women hidden away.

Our protagonist is a military police officer native to the planet. He becomes a secret agent for the head of Intelligence, assigned to keep an eye on the new arrivals while also investigating the Doctors.

In this installment, the officer finds himself strangely attracted to the ethologist, although he thinks of her as an alien. On a tour of the planet, they come across the place where girl babies (considered to be deformed) are left to be eaten by predators. Of course, the ethologist rescues the sole surviving infant.

Meanwhile, another woman from Grimes' spaceship is raped (blessedly, this is obliquely described) by a gang of locals. The implication is that men who have no idea that women exist, and who imagine the strange visitors to be bizarre creatures of another species, are irresistibly drawn to them.

Eventually, there's a huge mob of men trying to get at the women hidden by the Doctors. After the battle, Grimes offers a long speech explaining how the planet developed its unique society.

As you can see, this half of the novel is a lot darker in mood and a lot more violent than the first half. After plenty of action, Grimes' expository speech slows things down quite a bit. Overall, I didn't mind reading it once, though this segment is somewhat distasteful.

Three stars.

Something for the Woman, by Ivar Jorgensen

As you may know, Ivar Jorgensen is a name used by a whole bunch of different writers in various science fiction and fantasy books and magazines. In this case, my research tells me it's really Randall Garrett hiding behind the name, in the March/April 1953 issue of Fantastic.


Cover art by Richard Powers.

A family (Mom, Dad, and two little kids) go through the process of selling everything they own except the clothes on their backs and a few other small items. They're going on a long, long journey.


Illustration by Ed Emshwiller, often known as Emsh.

The story mostly deals with the woman's fear of leaving home for the unknown. A small gesture from her husband makes the impending voyage less terrifying.

I think I like this story more than it deserves. Yes, it supports the stereotype that women are timid creatures. (There's reference to a few rare women who are as eager for adventure as men.) But it's sensitively written, and it was a welcome novelty to read something that was unashamedly sentimental.

Four stars.

Brave Nude World, by Forrest J. Ackerman

A hint in the introduction to this reprinted article led me to track down the publication where it originally appeared. I hope you appreciate the effort and embarrassment it took to secure a copy of an old nudist magazine. Namely, the August 1961 issue of American Sunbather.


I have cut off the lower half of the cover, which features the young lady with the big smile completely unclad, in order to spare the delicate sensitivities of any Journeyers who might be offended.

Big Name Fan Ackerman chatters away about his experience of nudism, while also mentioning a few science fiction stories that deal with the topic. Notably, the original magazine featured drawings by another well-known fan, Betty JoAnne Trimble, universally known as Bjo.


Ackerman claims this is the title of a story by Spencer Strong (Ackerman himself), but I can find no reference to it. Maybe it appeared in a fanzine.


On the other hand, this is a famous story by Robert A. Heinlein. (Galaxy, March 1952.)

This tale appeared in the December 1956 issue of the girlie magazine Caper, attributed to Spencer Strong (Ackerman again) and Morgan Ives (Marion Zimmer Bradley.)

The author indulges his love of puns throughout. There's not really any point to this look at nudism in science fiction. It's kind of like Sam Moskowitz without the scholarship. Too bad Fantastic didn't reprint Bjo's cute cartoons, so I had to dig them out for you.

Two stars.

A Portfolio: H. G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, by Anonymous

The magazine fills up a few pages with illustrations from the Winter 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, which reprinted the famous novel in full.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

The drawings were themselves reprinted from the 1899 hardcover edition.


Cover art by . . . indulge me a while as I explain how I solved a mystery.


The introduction in Fantastic says the artist's identity was lost.


In fact, it says that even Amazing Stories Quarterly didn't know the artist's name.


I'm not sure I believe that. Maybe the magazine just didn't bother to give credit where credit was due.


Fantastic just attributes them to an English artist.


In fact, my research revealed that the artist was actually French, a fellow named Henri Lanos who often illustrated scientific romances.

Nice drawings, and the enigma of the artist's identity piqued my curiosity.

Three stars.

Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber

The master of sword and sorcery reviews books of that kind (Conan and King Kull) by Robert E. Howard, with much additional material by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. Leiber doesn't talk much about the two modern authors, and generally praises Howard while pointing out his poorest stories and offering an example of his worst prose.

No rating.

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

This issue offers only mild diversion from the terrors of the real world. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, with only Jorgensen/Garrett rising a bit above that level. Maybe that's enough for now.






[August 12, 1967] Planetary Adventures (August 1967 Galactoscope)


by Gideon Marcus

Five against Arlane, by Tom Purdom

As you may know, I am a big fan of Tom Purdom.  He's a very nice fellow, and his first book, I Want the Stars, was a stand-out.  Thus, I was quite excited to see that the new Ace Double at the local bookstore featured my writer friend.

The first two chapters do not disappoint.  We are thrown into the action as Migel Lassamba (explicitly of African descent; no lily-white casts in Tom's books) holds up a rich man and his personal doctor.  His goal: to get an artificial heart for his companion and love, Anata.  Why doesn't he just get one for free from the government hospitals?  Because Migel, Anata, and three others are rebels whose goal is to topple Jammett, dictator of the planet Arlane.  Five against Arlane, you see?

Thus ensues a ever-widening conflict between the outnumbered but canny rebel troops and Jammett, who resorts to increasingly draconian methods to retain control.  His biggest ace in the hole is his ability to slap mind-control devices onto citizens.  These "controllees" are fully conscious, but their bodies belong to the dictator, obeying his every whim.  As Migel's cadre begins to turn the tide against Arlane's leader, the abuse of the controllees gets pretty grim.

There's a lot to like about this book.  Arlane is a nicely drawn world, mostly tidally locked so its days last forever and only the pole is inhabitable.  The descriptions of technology and society are largely timeless.  Purdom is excellent at conveying material that will not be dated in a decade.  As in Tom's other stories, we have intimations of free love and even polygamy/andry, and there is no real distinction between sex or race.

Sadly, where the book falls down is the execution.  After those exciting first chapters, the chess-like contest between the rebels and Jammett feels perfunctorily written, as if Tom had to get from A to C, and he wasn't particularly interested in writing B.  It almost reads like a chronicle of a homebrew wargame (ah, what a wargame this novel would make!) If I'd been the editor, I'd have sent it back and asked for…more.  More emotion.  More characterization.  More reason to feel invested.  And a more fleshed out ending (but perhaps that was a fault of the editing, not the writing).

I noted that the weakest parts of I Want the Stars and Tom's latest short story, Reduction in Arms, were the curiously detached combat scenes.  Where Tom excels is the thinky bits.  I suggest he either work harder on the fighting pits, or stick to thinky bit stories (like his excellent Courting Time).

Three stars.

Lord of the Green Planet, by Emil Petaja

Emil Petaja is a new writer perhaps best known for his science fiction sagas based on the Karevala, the Finnish body of mythological work.  Now, Petaja plumbs Irish myth for this truly strange, but also rather conventional science fantasy.

Diarmid Patrick O'Dowd (a fine Jewish name) is a scout captain for X-Plor, Magellanic Division.  His flights of exploration frequently take him close to a mysterious, green-shrouded object.  Finally unable to resist, he becomes the first of his corps to pierce the viridian veil.  His ship crashes and disintegrates, leaving him stranded in a Celtic nightmare.  On one side, the towers of the islands, inhabited by Irish lords whose beautiful works are created on the backs and tears of countless generations of peasants.  On the other, the fetid swamps of the Snae–froglike magicians who seem to predate the human colonists.  And up in the tower of T'yeer-Na-N-Oge resides the Deel, Himself, who rules over the world with a song whose lyrics none can deviate from, enforced by a panoply of beasts, flying, swimming, and creeping.

Of course, there is a personal element as well.  The beautiful but utterly rotten-hearted Lord Flann plans to unite the islands and lead a crusade against the Nords.  But first, he would marry his fair and kind cousin, Fianna.  Fianna, on the other hand, has other designs.  After rescuing Diarmid upon his arrival, she falls for the fellow, teaches him swordplay, and helps him fulfill his geassa to save the planet from the domination of the Deel.  Along the way, there is plenty of swashbuckling, mellifluously articulate sentences, weird foes, and a twist.

It's pure fantasy, more akin to Three Hearts and Three Lions than anything else.  But it's fun.  And it has warcat steeds (Purdom's book has watchcats–I guess oversized felines are in this year).

Three and a half stars — and I'll wager Cora and/or Kris would give it four.


Triads


by Victoria Silverwolf

Two new science fiction novels deal with the relationships among three characters. As we'll see, in one of these the trio is very intimately connected. First of all, however, let's take a look at the latest book from an author known for prolificity.

Thorns, by Robert Silverberg


Cover art by Robert Foster.

The novel begins and ends with the same words, spoken by two very different characters and having different implications.

Pain is instructive.

In this way, the author announces his theme from the very start. Thorns is all about suffering. Physical pain, to some extent, but, more importantly, emotional pain.

Duncan Chalk is a grotesquely obese, incredibly rich man who controls just about all forms of entertainment throughout the solar system. Secretly, he is also a kind of psychic vampire, feeding off the misery of others.

Minner Burris is a space explorer who, against his will, was surgically transformed by aliens. His two companions died during the procedure and he barely survived, monstrously changed outside and in. As a result, he is a loner, seen as a freak by other people.

Lona Kelvin is a teenage girl who had a large number of her ova removed and fertilized outside her body. The resulting babies were developed inside other women, or in artificial wombs. Although her physical appearance remains unchanged, the resulting publicity made her as much of an outsider as Minner.

Duncan's plan is to bring these two miserable people together, both as a form of voyeuristic entertainment for an audience of millions and to feed on their suffering. To win their cooperation, he promises to give Minner a new body and to allow Lona to raise two of the infants produced from her eggs as her own children.

At first, the pair simply share their mutual pain, sympathizing with each other. As Duncan sends them on a luxurious vacation to all the pleasure spots in the solar system, they become lovers. As he predicted, however, their differences soon lead to ferocious arguments. Minner sees Lona as an ignorant child, and Lona comes to hate Minner's bitterness and anger. Can they escape from Duncan's scheme, and find some kind of peace?

Reading this book is an intense, almost overpowering experience. It is the most uncompromising work of science fiction dealing with human suffering since Harlan Ellison's story Paingod. Although set in a semi-utopian future, the settings — a cactus garden, Antarctica, the Moon, Saturn's satellite Titan — are almost all stark and bleak. There are other characters I have not mentioned — an idiot savant, abused by his family; the widow of one of Minner's fellow astronauts, obsessed with him in a masochistic way — who offer more examples of the varieties of pain.

In addition to offering a vividly described, detailed future, Silverberg writes in a highly polished style, full of metaphors and literary allusions. I believe this is his finest work since the outstanding story To See the Invisible Man. With this novel, and his highly praised novella Hawksbill Station, I think we're seeing a new Silverberg, adding greater sophistication and more serious themes to his inarguable ability to produce an unending stream of fiction.

Five stars.

The Werewolf Principle, by Clifford D. Simak


Cover art by Richard Powers.

Andrew Blake is a man with a problem. First of all, that's not even his real name. He picked it at random.

You see, Andrew (as we'll call him in this review) was discovered in deep space, after having been in suspended animation for a couple of centuries. He has no memory of his past, although he is familiar with Earth the way it was two hundred years ago.

In order to discuss this novel at all, I need to talk about something that the author reveals about one-third of the way into the book. I don't think that gives too much away, but if you'd rather dive into it without knowing anything about the plot you should stop reading here.

Still with me? Good.

Andrew is actually an android, an artificially grown human being with a mind taken from another person. He was designed to copy the mental and physical forms of aliens he encountered while exploring other star systems. The idea is that he would record this information, then revert to his previous condition. It didn't quite work out that way.

Andrew shares his mind with two other beings. One is a wolf-like alien, although it has arms that allow it to carry things and manipulate objects. The other is a sort of biological computer, a relentlessly logical entity that often takes the form of a pyramid.

Andrew's body changes shape, depending on which mind has control. After a brief period of confusion, during which these alterations happen at random, Andrew recovers some of his memory. The three minds and bodies work together, evading the folks who think he's some kind of monster.

There's a lot more to this book than the basic plot. Simak throws in a lot of futuristic details. Notable among these are talking, flying houses, and aliens who are essentially the same as the brownies of folklore.

Not all of these concepts mesh together smoothly, although they provide proof of a great deal of imagination. The overly solicitous robot house offers some comic relief, and the so-called brownies may seem too whimsical for some readers. Otherwise, the novel is quite serious, even offering a mystical vision of the unity of all life in the universe.

My major complaint is a plot twist late in the book, revealing the true nature of a character I haven't even mentioned. It comes out of nowhere, depends on a wild coincidence, and creates an artificial happy ending.

Despite these serious reservations, I actually liked the novel quite a bit. It's not a classic, but it's well worth reading.

Three and one-half stars.






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[April 16, 1967] The Generation Gap (May 1967 Fantastic)


by Victoria Silverwolf

Youth is Wasted on the Young

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
— attributed to Socrates

It's no secret that young people are rejecting many of the opinions of their elders these days. That's always been true to some extent, of course. However, with the hippie culture, the civil rights movement, and antiwar protests, all of which mostly involve young adults, the gap between the generations seems wider than ever.

In particular, once heavy bombing of North Vietnam began a couple of years ago (Operation Rolling Thunder, still going on intermittently), college students, led by such organizations as Students for a Democratic Society, started demonstrating against the war. On April 17, 1965, somewhere between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand people showed up at the nation's capital, in the largest protest to date.


SDS members and others during the March on Washington, almost exactly two years ago.

There have been many other protests since then, both in the United States and other nations. I don't mean to imply that these demonstrations consist entirely of young people, but they do seem to make up the majority of peace activists.

Just yesterday, thousands appeared at massive protests against the conflict in Vietnam in major cities across the United States. In New York City, well over one hundred young men burned their draft cards, followed by a speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., at the United Nations.


The crowd fills Kazar stadium in San Francisco.

What does the parallel escalation of America's involvement in the war and the rejection of it by many young adults and their elders mean for the immediate future of the United States?  It's hard to say, but things look dark.  Just as the struggle for civil rights sometimes looks like a second Civil War, complete with bloodshed, the battle between Hawks and Doves threatens to tear the country apart along political lines.  Let's hope the nation is never as divided as it seems to be now.

Music to Argue With Your Parents or Children By

The tension between generations shows up in popular culture as well. A fine example of this happened recently. From late March until the middle of April, a cheerful little tune from the young folks who call themselves The Turtles was at the top of the American music charts. Happy Together is a great favorite of teenagers, I believe.


I like the part near the end, when the frequently repeated title changes to How is the weather.

Mom and Dad are likely to prefer the song that replaced it as Number One this week. Veteran crooner Frank Sinatra, assisted by daughter Nancy, currently has the nation's biggest hit with the much more traditional number Somethin' Stupid.


I'll refrain from commenting on the propriety of having father and daughter sing a love song together.

Catch a Wave

Not even speculative fiction escapes the conflict between generations. The so-called New Wave movement within the field, primarily in the United Kingdom, offers experimental, controversial, and sometimes incomprehensible stories to readers. The latest issue of Fantastic, a magazine which has been rather stodgy since it went to a policy of containing mostly reprints, mixes a bit of New Wave with plenty of Old Wave stuff.


Cover art by Malcolm Smith.

As usual, the cover reprints art from an old magazine. In this case, it's from the back cover of the July 1943 issue of Fantastic Adventures.


The original looks a lot better.

The Ant with the Human Soul (Part One of Two), by Bob Olsen


Cover art by Leo Morey.

The whole of this Old Wave, pre-Campbell novella appeared in full in the Spring-Summer 1932 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly. I guess Fantastic didn't want to devote most of the magazine to it.


Illustrations by Morey also.

The narrator tries to kill himself by jumping into the ocean, but a scientist rescues him. The scientist suggests a bizarre scheme. He has a gizmo that can increase or decrease the size of anything, even living creatures. He combines that with neurosurgery in order to perform a weird experiment.

First, he'll increase an ant to the size of a human being. After that, he'll put a part of the narrator's brain into the ant's head. When he shrinks the ant back down to normal size, the narrator will experience everything the ant does, and will be able to control the ant's actions. In essence, he will become the ant.

After the strange transformation takes place, the narrator takes us on a guided tour of life in an ant colony. This first part ends with a cliffhanger, promising the reader that a violent event is about to occur.


Mad Science!

This is an odd story, not only because of the outrageous premise. The mood varies wildly. Some sections deal with the narrator's loss of religious faith, which drove him to attempt suicide. Others are very lighthearted, with playful banter between the two characters. The best part of it is the description of life as an ant, which is depicted in vivid, accurate detail.

Three stars, mostly for taking me into the ant colony.

The Thinking Seat, by Peter Tate


Cover art by Keith Roberts, better known to me as a writer.

The magazine calls this a new novelette, which is a half-truth. It's new to American readers, but it appeared in the November 1966 issue of the British publication New Worlds. My esteemed colleague Mark Yon reviewed it at that time, but let's take another look.


Illustration by Gray Morrow, which is the only truly new thing in the magazine.

The setting is the seacoast of California in the near future. The rugged shore has been replaced with artificial beaches of a tamer nature. The water is warmer, due to the discharge from a nuclear power plant. (I also got the impression that it made the water thicker, almost gelatinous, but I may be wrong about that. This New Wave story isn't always clear.)

A man and a woman with a strange relationship show up at a beatnik colony. She'd like to be more intimate with the fellow, but he doesn't seem interested. Instead, he becomes fascinated by a charismatic poet, who openly announces that he's going to take the woman away from the other man. Things come to a climax during an attempt to sabotage the nuclear power plant, as a way of protesting what it's done to the coast.

I have probably greatly simplified and distorted the plot, because this isn't the easiest story to understand. The narrative often stops to offer examples of obscure poetry, which adds more ambiguity. (Apparently the poet steals phrases from the Beat poets, but I don't know enough about their work to confirm that.)

I got the impression that this example of the Eternal Triangle, which ends badly, was really a case of repressed homosexuality. That's a theme you won't find in most Old Wave science fiction, to be sure. The whole thing works better as a study of the psychology of the three main characters rather than as science fiction.

Three stars, mostly for keeping me wondering about things.

A Way of Thinking, by Theodore Sturgeon


Cover art by Art Sussman.

The October-November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this supernatural chiller from the pen of one of the field's greatest stylists.


Illustration by Ernest Schroeder.

The narrator is a writer of science fiction and fantasy, who even mentions his work appearing in Amazing, so I assume it's a fictional version of the author. He tells us about an acquaintance who reacts to problems in unusual ways, often by thinking about things backwards. The fellow's brother is dying a slow, horrible death. The suggestion arises that it might have something to do a doll owned by the dying man's vengeful ex-girlfriend. The brother deals with the situation in his usual unorthodox manner.

This synopsis makes the story sound like a typical tale of voodoo, but that's misleading. I don't want to give too much away, but the plot goes in unexpected directions, and the climax is truly disturbing. Of course, given the author, it's very well written. It's not his most ambitious work, to be sure, but it succeeds as a horror story.

Three stars, mostly for the shocking conclusion.

The Pin, by Robert Bloch


Cover art by Mel Hunter.

From the December-January 1953-1954 issue of Amazing Stories comes another tale of terror.


Illustration by Lee Teaford.

An artist looking for a cheap studio comes across an abandoned loft. It's supposed to be empty, but there's a guy inside, surrounded by a huge pile of telephone books, directories, and so forth. The fellow stabs at random names in the books with a pin.

You may have already figured out that the pin causes the death of those whose names are selected. (The premise reminds me of Ray Bradbury's 1943 story The Scythe, as well as the 1958 movie I Bury the Living.) There aren't a lot of surprises in the plot, but it's an effective little thriller.

Three stars, mostly for creating an eerie mood.

Cold Green Eye, by Jack Williamson


Cover art by Richard Powers.

The March-April 1953 issue of the magazine offers yet another spooky tale. In its original appearance, it was called The Cold Green Eye. Don't ask me why they left out the first word.


Illustration by Ernie Barth.

The child of a pair of daring explorers is raised by Buddhist monks after his parents die in a mountaineering accident. He's adopted by an aunt back in the United States. She's a harsh disciplinarian, punishing the boy for what she thinks of as his heathenish ways. In particular, she hates flies and kills them whenever she can, while the child believes in reincarnation and that all living creatures should be protected. Things get strange when the kid uses the sacred scroll he has in his possession.

There's a good chance you'll see the ending coming, although it still raises goose bumps. What's more surprising is that the cruel aunt is a devout Christian, in contrast to the boy's gentle Buddhism. I didn't expect that from an American horror story from more than a decade ago. Maybe the author just thought it made for a good story, and wasn't really trying to say anything about the two faiths.

Three stars, mostly for aunt's comeuppance.

Hok Draws the Bow, by Manly Wade Wellman


Cover art by C. L. Hartman.

Here's a sequel to a story that was reprinted in the previous issue of Fantastic. It comes from the May 1940 issue of Amazing Stories.


Illustrations by Robert Fuqua.

Once again our hero is Hok, a Homo sapiens fighting a war of extermination against sinister, cannibalistic Neanderthals. (It's best to forget about this story's version of prehistory and just think of it as a sword-and-sorcery yarn.) A fellow shows up bragging about his ability to project a spear farther than anybody else. That's because he's got a leather strap that he winds around it, sending it spinning.

The boastful man also has plan to take over Hok's clan, and he's particularly interested in Hok's pretty mate. He's made himself a god-like ruler over the Neanderthals, even teaching them basic military tactics. It looks like Hok's people will be wiped out, but our hero combines the man's strap and a throwing stick used by the Neanderthals to create a secret weapon.


That doesn't keep him from being captured. Fortunately, his mate has a throwing arm Sandy Koufax might envy.

The title and the opening illustration give away the fact that this story is about Hok inventing the bow and arrow. Other than that, it's an efficient adventure story.

Three stars, mostly for keeping things moving quickly.

Beside Still Waters, by Robert Sheckley


Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

The same issue as the Sturgeon story is the source of this tale. A spaceman lives on an asteroid, turning rock into soil that can grow crops and extracting oxygen from minerals. His only companion is a robot. The machine starts off only able to speak a few phrases, but over time the man teaches it to converse more fully. The story ends with a scene that tries to touch the reader's emotions.

The fact that the man can live on the surface of an asteroid unprotected, even if he somehow produces oxygen and food, is ludicrous. (Not to mention the fact that the asteroid's tiny gravity is going to send the oxygen out into space quickly.) The ending takes the plot into pure fantasy. An author best known for his wit tries to be sentimental here, and the result is bathetic.

Two stars, mostly for the excellent illustration.

Bridging the Gap

That was mostly a middle-of-the-road issue, coming to a sudden halt at the end. Maybe there's something to be said for mediocrity. If nothing else, both young and old can agree that the Old Wave and the New Wave have their ups and downs.


The late President Kennedy closes the generation gap.





[April 14, 1967] Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (April 1967 Galactoscope)


by Victoria Silverwolf

Two new science fiction novels take readers from the dry land to the depths of the sea, and down from the sky in a burst of flames. Will they make proper use of the traditional four elements of ancient times, and reach the exalted level of the aether, that fabled quintessence that was of a more refined nature than the others? Let's find out.

Canada's Gift to American Science Fiction

Alberta-born writer Gordon Rupert Dickson, now living in the USA, has been publishing fiction since 1950. It's hard to say that there's a particular kind of Dickson story. He's written light comedy, such as the Hoka series with fellow Minnesotan Poul Anderson (currently a resident of the San Francisco region), all about aliens who look like teddy bears and cause trouble by imitating human beings. He's written entertaining adventure stories, some for a juvenile audience. In recent years, he's gained notice for more serious and thoughtful works.

His novella Soldier, Ask Not (Galaxy, October 1964), part of the Dorsai series, won the Hugo award, and the novelette Call Him Lord (Analog, May 1966) won the Nebula award less than a month ago. Will his latest novel add to his reputation?

The Past is Prologue


Cover art by Richard Powers.

It's something of a challenge to jump into The Space Swimmers without any preparation. The author throws a complex background at you in bits and pieces, and it's obvious that a lot has gone on before the novel begins. That's because it's a direct sequel to the novelette Home from the Shore (Galaxy, February 1963).


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Surf 'n' Turf

In brief, humanity has split into land dwellers and ocean dwellers. The sea people have developed abilities that make them valuable space explorers. Humans encounter the so-called space swimmers, beings that are gigantic in size but tiny in mass, beyond Mars. They die every time people try to capture them. This causes the sea folk to rebel, and withdraw their services from the space vessels of the land folk. The result is war, with the land dwellers destroying the underwater communities of the ocean dwellers.

This is where the novel begins. The war has cooled off slightly, although the land folk sometimes hunt the sea folk for sport, in the tradition of Richard Connell's famous story The Most Dangerous Game.

Our hero is Johnny Joya, who more-or-less instigated the rebellion of the sea folk in the novelette. He lives in isolation in the frigid waters of the Arctic with his young son Tomi after the death of his wife during the war. Tomi has even greater abilities than his father. The sea people can communicate with dolphins, but Tomi can also communicate with killer whales. Father and son become involved in an attempt to reconcile the two branches of humanity.

It seems the space swimmers can teleport instantaneously from one place in space to another. If Tomi can communicate with one of the mysterious creatures, he may be able to discover the secret of interstellar travel. Complicating matters is the fact that both sides have developed doomsday weapons that could wipe out the other.

I've only scratched the surface of a novel that has a heck of a lot going on in only one hundred and sixty pages. I haven't mentioned major characters or important subplots. Suffice to say that Dickson keeps things moving at a brisk pace.

There's a certain vagueness in some of the book's concepts that leads to confusion at times. We're told more than once that the ability of the sea people to communicate with dolphins is not telepathy, but this is left unexplained. Johnny works on problems by making use of so-called analogs (a nod to the magazine of the same name?) but I didn't understand how this was supposed to work.

It may seem unlikely that the sea people are willing to completely destroy life on land through a series of devastating earthquakes, and that the land people are willing to destroy all life in the ocean through modified disease organisms. The way each of these terrifying weapons is described, it seems as if either one would completely wipe out both sides. The fact that we live in an age of Mutually Assured Destruction (to make use of a term coined by Hudson Institute researcher Donald Brennan, appropriately known as MAD) may add some plausibility to this part of the book.

Worth reading, but I don't think it will win any awards. Three stars.

Sterling Silver

Native New Yorker Robert Silverberg has been an extremely prolific author in multiple fields since 1954. Not all of his work has been notable for its quality, it must be admitted, but he won a Hugo award in 1956 as the Most Promising New Author, beating out Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert, and Henry Still. (Who? He hasn't published anything since 1961. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

I won't mention the many sex novels he's published under multiple pseudonyms, except to say that eroticism plays an important role in Those Who Watch, his latest novel (unless another one comes out while I'm writing this, given his speed at the typewriter.)

Three Times Two Equals Six


Anonymous cover art.

Aliens have been monitoring Earth for centuries, cruising the skies in flying saucers hidden from human eyes by a screening device.  One of the hundreds of saucers filling the atmosphere has a disastrous failure, causing it to explode over New Mexico.  The three crewmembers bail out, landing in separate areas and sustaining serious injuries.

The trio consists of two males and a female, all part of a mating group.  (We'll find out later that such a triad is normal for the aliens, although sometimes it's two females and a male.) Although not described in any detail, the extraterrestrials are small beings, each one wearing an artificially created human body.  Their real bodies are intimately connected with their external disguises, so they experience the pain of their damaged human bodies and other sensations.

At this point, the narrative alternates among the three aliens and the human being each one encounters. 

One extraterrestrial appears to be an ordinary man of middle years.  A young American Indian boy, living in a pueblo that keeps its traditional ways only to attract tourist dollars, brings him food and water while he recovers from a spine injury that renders him paralyzed.  In exchange, the highly intelligent lad, who figures out very quickly that he's dealing with an alien, learns about the other's native world.  He also acquires a piece of advanced technology that could be deadly.

Another alien takes the form of an extraordinarily handsome young man.  He gets aid from a young widow with a small child.  The two fall in love, in the first of two human/alien couplings we'll see.

Paralleling this is the mating between the female alien, disguised as a voluptuous woman, and a military man, bitter because a medical problem kept him from becoming an astronaut.  He and the widow eventually come together, after their alien lovers leave Earth.

Meanwhile, rival aliens, who also have hundreds of unseen flying saucers orbiting the planet, try to track down the three, in order to charge them with violating an agreement not to land on Earth.  (There seems to be a sort of Cold War going on between the two species.  Neither one is supposed to be on the surface of the planet, but they both have secret agents on Earth.)

This is a leisurely novel, despite the attempt to create suspense in the form of the enemy aliens.  Much of it consists of conversations between each of the three aliens and the human being that renders aid.  The two sexual encounters between a lonely human being and a benign extraterrestrial may be too much of a good thing. 

The sections of the novel about the American Indian boy are probably the best.  The author avoids stereotyping Indians, and shows a great deal of empathy for their situation in modern society.  Silverberg displays a gift for characterization in his intimate portraits of the three humans; perhaps not quite so much for the aliens.

He's still a promising, if not quite so new, author.  Three stars.



by Gideon Marcus

Ring in the Old

If Silverberg is a new old hand (or an old new hand), and Dickson is a plain old hand, then Murray Leinster is the oldest of hands.  In fact, Will Jenkins (Leinster's real name) has been a pubished author of scientifiction since 1919–before the genre even had a name.  Suffusing his work with a patina of scientific accuracy, up through the '50s, his name was a welcome one on the masthead of any magazine.  I particularly enjoyed his Med Series tales of Dr. Lincoln Calhoun and his pet/assistant, Murgatroyd.

Those happy days are years in the past, and as John Boston and I can tell ya, his latest works have been phoned in…from a booth in Duluth that hasn't been serviced in decades.  Thus, it was with trepidation that I picked up Leinster's latest, Miners in the Sky.

It's actually not bad.

Set in the lawless rings of the planet Thutmose, a Saturn analog in a star system far from Earth, it details the perils faced by a space miner named Donne.  He's no sooner set foot on the trade asteroid of Outlook, a sizable rock within Thutmose's rings, when his little "donkeyship" explodes.  He quickly deduces that word has (mistakenly) gotten out that he has discovered the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a bonanza rock laden with the "abyssal crystals" that facilitate solar system travel.  Donne must get off Outlook as soon as possible: his partner, Keene, is stuck on the ringlet they are mining.  He may run out of air, or worse, already have also been the target of an assassination.  Complicating things is the arrival of Keene's sister, Nike, who insists on coming with Donne.  So begins a long chase through the rings of Thutmose, with a murder-inclined criminal on Donne and Nike's heels.

I had worried that the story would be simply a gussied up Western, but there's a bit of physics and a lot of pretty description of the Thutmosian locale that makes Miners reasonably SFNal.  To be sure, it is written in Leinster's current mode: all short sentences, lots of exclamation marks, and characterization as shallow as a kiddie pool.  Add to that the several times Leinster points out that, as a woman, Nike "instinctively" looks to a man for help. 

Miners in the Sky will definitely win no awards.  It is yet another in a long line of stories cranked out on autopilot to pay the bills.  Still, I don't regret the time I took reading the book.  Sometimes, all you need is a little adventure.

Three stars.






[December 22, 1966] Who's In Charge Here? (The Monitors by Keith Laumer and The Nevermore Affair by Kate Wilhelm)


by Victoria Silverwolf

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

— from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

There's a common tendency for people to want to take control in order to make the world a better place. A pair of new science fiction novels feature characters who want to run things the way they see fit, with the goal of improving the planet. In all other ways, these two books could not be more different.

The Monitors, by Keith Laumer


Cover art by Richard Powers.

There's no need for me to talk much about prolific author Keith Laumer, since I recently discussed his career while reviewing another of his novels. You know this latest work is going to be a fast-moving adventure; the only question to ask is if it's going to be serious or funny. It soon becomes clear that the latter possibility is the correct one.

Out of the blue, every television, radio, public address system, or other form of electronic communication broadcasts the same message.

Citizens of Earth. I am the Tersh Jetterax. It is my pleasure to announce to you that a new government has now taken over the conduct of all public affairs.

He's not kidding. A bunch of handsome, polite young men in yellow uniforms show up. If you refuse to follow their orders, they simply wave their hands and take over your body, making you do what they want.

Our hero is Ace Blondel, unemployed pilot. He manages to get away from the Monitors for a while, leading them on a wild chase. There's no real way to avoid them, so he becomes a guest of the Tersh Jetterax. This character appears to be an elderly gentleman, who doesn't understand why Ace would object to the Monitors creating a better society.

The Tersh Jetterax, in charge of this area, offers a number of very convincing arguments about why corrupt, inefficient human governments should be replaced by the benign, selfless Monitors. He makes a very good case, really, as Ace watches recorded scenes of ignorant teachers, hospitals refusing patients without insurance, overcrowded courtrooms, and other abuses. It's hard for readers not to think of the Monitors as the good guys.

Despite this, Ace escapes. (Not too difficult to do, when your hosts are so kindly, and never keep their doors closed.) He winds up working with an organization called SCRAG — Special Counter Retaliatory Action Group — created by a paranoid General for just such an emergency. It's privately funded, because the General thinks the military is full of subversives.

This turns out to be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, as the General suspects Ace of being a spy. He gets away with the help of Nelda Monroe, a woman who is also disillusioned with the organization. The rest of the book sends Ace bouncing back and forth like a silver sphere in a pinball machine, never sure who he's supposed to be helping and who's after him.

It's a wild rollercoaster ride of a book, to be sure. There's plenty of satire of human foibles, almost as if Laumer were collaborating with Robert Sheckley. Nelda is an outrageous character, spouting intellectual jargon one moment, gushing over a good-looking Monitor the next, never consistent in her beliefs for a second. She could be seen as a caricature of a scatterbrained female, but the author spares no one from his poison pen. Just about all the folks Ace runs into, other than the blandly beneficent Monitors, are lunatics, fools, and scoundrels.

This is quite an amusing book, almost cinematic in style. In addition to satire, you've got quite a bit of funny dialogue, some of its mad logic worthy of a Marx Brothers movie. There's plenty of action, of course, a lot of it verging on slapstick. The resolution is not what you might expect, and offers another wry look at humanity.

Four stars.

The Nevermore Affair, by Kate Wilhelm

Kate Wilhelm started publishing stories in the science fiction magazines about a decade ago. She divorced her first husband a few years ago (but kept his last name, at least professionally) and married fellow SF writer Damon Knight.


A photograph from about the time she changed husbands.

Her first (and, to date, only) collection of short fiction has the same title as the first story she sold (although it was the second one to appear in print.)


Cover art by Richard Powers.

At least, that's true for the American edition. The British edition, for some reason, uses the title of another story in the collection.


Cover art by Richard Weaver.

Besides the book we're going to talk about here, she's published a mystery novel on her own, and a science fiction novel in collaboration.


Cover art by Lawrence Ratzkin.

The paperback edition of her whodunit tries hard to convince me it's a Gothic Romance. A beautiful woman running away from a spooky house is always a strong clue that a book is being sold as part of that genre.


Anonymous, and generic, cover art.

Her first science fiction novel, written with Theodore L. Thomas, was an expansion of a story with the same title by Thomas alone. I haven't read it, but apparently the title creature is a monster something like the one that appears in The Blob, but created by science rather than coming from outer space. It was nominated for a Nebula (along with a dozen other novels by other folks) but lost to Frank Herbert's Dune.


Cover art by Hoot von Zitzewitz.

As I've indicated above, Wilhelm's first solo science fiction novel is completely different from Laumer's latest book, despite a common theme of controlling the world. Starting with the superficial stuff, it's a hardcover, priced at $4.50, instead of a sixty-cent paperback. I don't know the word count of either novel, but Wilhelm's is nearly two hundred and forty pages long, while Laumer's barely makes it to one hundred and sixty. As we'll see, the contents, styles, and moods of the two books do not resemble each other at all.


Cover art by Lynn Sweat.

In sharp contrast to Laumer's breakneck pace, Wilhelm takes her time, setting the scene and introducing the characters. Lucien Thayer seems, at first, to be nothing more than a lazy playboy, living on a North Carolina horse farm without a real job. His wife, Doctor Stella Thayer, on the other hand, is a career-driven biologist.

Their lives get turned upside down when military types show up at the university where she works. They tell Stella and her colleagues that their work is now top secret, and they are going to be transported to an island facility to continue the project confidentially. Stella lies to the authorities, telling them that her husband knows all about her work, so he has to go with them as well.

(There are a couple of interesting points here. For one thing, it's assumed none of the wives of the male scientists know anything about the project. For another, the fact that Stella has to pretend that she's spoken to Lucien about it is the first indication that they have a very unusual marriage.)

In reality, they're taken to a secret base in the Rocky Mountains. The folks who abducted them put out a cover story that their plane crashed, killing all aboard. They're allowed all the equipment they need to continue the project, but they can't leave or communicate with the outside world.

David Carson is an old friend of Lucien, and the junior Senator from North Carolina. He smells a rat when Lucien leaves him a clue that he didn't leave home of his own free will. Much of the book concerns Carson's investigation into what's going on, using his relationship with the senior Senator from the state, his mentor, and other connections.

The reader, although not David, finds out quickly that Stella and the others are working on a drug that eliminates errors in cell reproduction; in essence, it stops aging and thus extends life indefinitely. Along with politicians who want to live for a very long time, there's a fanatical army officer who feels that it's his duty to restore the country to its glorious past, and a scientist who plans to shape society through the use of chemicals that alter emotions.

This synopsis makes the book sound like a thriller, and there are certainly parts of the novel that fit that category. David's slow realization of the extent of the conspiracy, and Lucien's efforts to escape imprisonment, provide plenty of suspense. The climactic scene reads like something from a James Bond story.

But Wilhelm is interested in other things, I think. The characters are of paramount importance, rather than the plot. All the major persons in the novel have lengthy interior monologues and flashbacks that reveal their inner natures.

Lucien, for example, proves to be much more than just an idle millionaire. He is an example of a complete person, which means that he has a perfect balance between emotional intuition and rational logic. His wife, for reasons revealed later in the book, fears her emotions, and seeks to lose them in her work. The way in which she evolves from a severely neurotic woman into another complete person, and the way that her relationship with her husband changes from a marriage of convenience to a true love match, serves as the heart of the book.

This is a serious work, with a depth to its themes and characters not often found in science fiction. (That may be why it's just called a novel on the cover.) It requires patience and careful attention on the part of the reader, who will be well rewarded.

Four stars.






[August 16, 1966] All Shook Up (Catastrophe Planet by Keith Laumer)


by Victoria Silverwolf

With apologies to Elvis Presley.

Retief and Company

Prolific author Keith Laumer was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1925. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War Two, then in the renamed US Air Force from 1953 to 1956, and again from 1960 to 1965, reaching the rank of captain. Between those latter two hitches in the military, he was with the US Foreign Service, stationed in Burma.


Appropriately, this recent photograph makes the writer look both serious and playful.

Laumer's time spent as a diplomat shows up in his many stories about James Retief, an agent for the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, who tends to solve problems of interspecies relations with fists and trickery. These are comic tales, often venturing into slapstick. On a more serious note, his recent mainstream novel Embassy reflects his experiences in the Far East.


Cover art by Darrell Greene.

In addition to these works, he also writes fast-paced adventure stories, both serious and lighthearted. His new novel Catastrophe Planet is definitely one of the former.

Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On


Cover art by Richard Powers.

Our hero and narrator is Malcome (Mal) Irish. He lives in a near future of flying cars and other such technological wonders. More importantly, a shift in the Earth's crust has led to worldwide disaster. There are frequent earthquakes, a enormous increase in volcanic activity, and vast changes in the world's geography. The northern part of Florida, for example, is underwater, and the southern half is an island. (At this point, I'm reminded of the pretty good science fiction movie Crack in the World, although Laumer's apocalypse doesn't actually threaten to destroy the whole planet.)

His adventure begins in a small, deserted town in Georgia. (The US state, not the Soviet republic.) A dying man tells him a bizarre tale. During a secret operation in Antarctica, designed to stop the shifting of the crust, he and other military men discovered a frozen mastodon deep under the ice. That's unusual enough, but what makes it really weird is the fact that the ancient beast was wearing a harness. Add to that the body of a Neanderthal carrying what seemed to be a ray gun, along with other seemingly impossible relics, and they had a real mystery on their hands.

Before they could explore any further, however, strange men attacked and wiped them all out, except for the dying man, who managed to escape and make his way back to the United States. Mal has to battle similar men himself. They seem to be oddly emotionless, yet relentless in their attempts to kill him. Fortunately, they are also very poor fighters, and Mal manages to eliminate them, although he's never killed anyone before. (I'll warn you right now that a lot of people get killed in this book.)

Coin of the Realm

With his last, dying breath, the man tells Mal to take something out of his pocket. It turns out to be a gold coin, inscribed with writing in an unknown language. Mal travels to Miami, where he stays at the luxury hotel run by an old friend. (Although the city has undergone some damage from the disaster, it is fairly intact, and life goes on almost as it did before.) There's a convention of numismatists going on at the place, so he shows them the mysterious coin. It's pretty clear that this is more than just a meeting of coin collectors. They are all middle-aged men (likely enough), seem to have no interest in the partying at the convention (improbable), and are oddly emotionless (sounds familiar).

Damsel in Distress

Mal tails some of the men, and winds up saving a woman they try to attack. (She's a tough cookie herself, and manages to save him, too.) She speaks an unknown language, wears a strange metallic jumpsuit, and seems unacquainted with certain aspects of everyday life. (She doesn't recognize bread as food, for example.) Mal manages to figure out that her name is Ricia. They hide out in a cheap hotel for a while, where he also learns that she doesn't mind being completely naked in front of him.

While Mal is out on an errand, the bad guys kidnap Ricia. Desperate to track down her abductors, he heads to Crete, based on the solitary clue that the coin looks like something from that island. By good luck, he has already managed to find a seaworthy boat equipped with lots of supplies, including the guns that will come in handy in the book's battle scenes. (Mal finds the owner's corpse on the vessel, so he figures the dead guy won't mind.)

The City in the Sea

After sailing across the Atlantic, and crossing the new land bridge that now cuts the Mediterranean Sea in half, Mal meets an old buddy in Crete. With the help of a rather shifty fisherman, he finds out that some of the emotionless men paid the fellow to take them to a spot in the ocean, where they jumped in without diving suits.

Mal dons the proper scuba equipment and goes to the place, where he finds the entrance to an underwater building. Inside is a grotesquely huge man lying in a luxurious bed, protected by his slavish minions. It seems that Ricia was kidnapped for nefarious purposes, although perhaps not in the way you might expect. Mal and Ricia escape, but our story is far from over.

Out of the Wet Frying Pan and Into the Frozen Fire

Besides suffering from the bends after rising to the surface quickly, Mal gets captured by the bad guys, who have taken over the ship from which he dove. (They don't know that Ricia is hidden inside the decompression chamber of the vessel.) They take Mal to Antarctica, where he is to be subjected to questioning that he cannot resist, so they can find the woman. It all leads up to our two star-crossed lovers being reunited, and the discovery of the shocking secret of the immense ruler of the emotionless men.

Shaken, Not Stirred

Well! Our protagonists certainly go through enough dangers to shake anybody up. This rollercoaster of a thriller moves at a lightning-fast pace, with enough action to satisfy any fan of, say, James Bond. You won't have time to ponder the fact that the plot may not always make perfect sense, or that the whole thing is wildly implausible. The writing is vivid, and the hero, although highly competent, doesn't come across as unbelievably superhuman. You won't have any profound emotions stirred by the outrageous plot, but it's an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, maybe while you're sipping something to drink.

Three stars.


Shake it up, Baby!



For more exciting science fiction adventure, pick up a copy of Rosel George Brown's new hit novel, Sibyl Sue Blue, today!




[June 10, 1966] Summer Reruns (July 1966 Fantastic)


by Victoria Silverwolf

Old Series Never Die, They Just Fade Away

Summertime is right around the corner, here in the Northern Hemisphere, and all patriotic Americans know what that means; reruns on television. Not only does this save the production companies money, it allows defunct programs to continue to appear on TV screens long after they're gone, like ghosts haunting a house. (Of course, they're easier to exorcise than traditional specters; just pull the plug.)

Two popular, critically acclaimed, and long-running series recently cast off this mortal coil, ready to enter the monochromatic afterlife of reruns.

Late last month, the courtroom drama Perry Mason slammed down the gavel for the last time with The Case of the Final Fade-Out. The story involved a television studio, so a large number of crew members made cameo appearances, pretty much as themselves. There was also a very special guest star.


That's executive producer Gail Patrick Jackson on the left and Hollywood columnist Norma Lee Browning on the right. The fellow in the middle? That's bestselling author Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, dressed up for his role as a judge in the final episode.

At the start of this month, The Dick Van Dyke Show came to a conclusion with the appropriately titled episode The Last Chapter. Van Dyke's character, television writer Rob Petrie, finishes the book he's been working on for five years, and looks back on his life.


Because The Last Chapter was really just an excuse to reuse sequences from previous episodes, I'm offering you this scene from the penultimate episode, The Gunslinger. Surrounding Van Dyke in this Western parody are cast regulars Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Deacon.

I'm sure that both of these hit series will be reincarnated in American living rooms for quite a while.

Not all summer television programming consists of reruns, to be sure. There are so-called summer replacement series as well. In a week or so, we'll enjoy (or avoid) the first episode of The Dean Martin Summer Show (not to be confused with The Dean Martin Show, which has been going on since last year. Are you still with me?) It will be hosted by the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin.


Rowan on the left and Martin on the right, in a scene from their 1958 Western spoof Once Upon a Horse. I wonder if they'll have any success as TV hosts.

A Home Run The First Time At Bat

Although it's not unknown for popular songs of yesteryear to return to the charts — auditory reruns, if you will — listeners are usually searching for something original. Newcomer Percy Sledge offers an notable example with his smash hit When a Man Loves a Woman. This passionate, soulful ballad, currently Number One in the USA, is not only the first song recorded by Sledge, it is the first song recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a city famous for its music studios, to reach that position.


Your fans mean it, Mister Sledge.

I've Seen This All Before

The reason I've been talking about reruns, before I get to the contents of the latest issue of Fantastic, isn't just the fact that they've been filling up the magazine with reprints for some time now. As we'll see, many of the old stories in this issue have reappeared several times before. Reruns of reruns, so to speak. Whether fans of imaginative literature will be willing to spend four bits for fiction they may have already read in collections or anthologies remains to be seen.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

Predictably, the front cover is also a rerun.


The back cover of the June 1943 issue of Amazing Stories. It looks better in the original version.

Before I get to the reruns, however, let's start with something new.

Just Like a Man, by Chad Oliver


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Three men are in an aircraft, flying over the surface of an Earth-like planet. A sudden storm forces them to abandon the vehicle, stranding the trio in an area resembling an African savannah. Because the place is full of leonine predators, they hightail it to the relative safety of a nearby rainforest.


Climbing one of the planet's gigantic trees in order to get away from the hungry cats.

They wind up far above the ground, among an unsuspected community of highly intelligent primates. These mysterious creatures help them survive, and even offer the possibility of reaching their home base, located five hundred miles away across uncharted wilderness.


Among the primates, who are not as hostile as shown here.

This is a decent tale of adventure, and the enigmatic primates are interesting. The planet is so similar to Earth — the feline predators are pretty much just lions — that you might forget you're reading a science fiction story. Overall, it's worth reading, if not outstanding in any way.

Three stars.

The Trouble With Ants, by Clifford D. Simak


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

From the January 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures comes this final story in the author's famous City series. (By the way, the title of this work was changed to The Simple Way when it appeared in book form.)


Illustration by Rod Ruth. From this point on, all the illustrations are reruns from the original appearances of the stories.

In the far future, people are gone from Earth, with the exception of one fellow in suspended animation. Long ago, humans increased the intelligence of dogs, gave them the power of speech, and built robots to serve their needs. The canines, in turn, taught other animals to speak.

Complicating matters is the fact that a man caused ants to develop technology of their own, including robots the size of fleas. Now the ants are constructing a building, for an unknown purpose, which threatens to take over the planet.

An ancient robot returns from humanity's new home in a mysterious fashion. It seeks out the man in suspended animation as part of its quest to understand the ants.

Brought together as a fix-up novel in 1952, the City series won the International Fantasy Award the next year. It is usually considered a classic of science fiction, and has been reprinted many times.


One of the many editions of this work. Cover art by Ed Valigursky.

Highly imaginative, and with a sweeping vision of the immensity of time, Simak's tales also have a gentleness and intimacy that touches the reader's heart. The mood is one of quiet melancholy, and the acceptance of the fact that all things will pass away.

Although SF fans are likely to have read this story before, its quality makes it a welcome repeat. (One can rarely say the same thing about television reruns, or else viewers would stay glued to their screens.)

Five stars.

Where Is Roger Davis?, by David V. Reed


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

Let's take a break from stuff that has already been reprinted multiple times, and take a look at the first reappearance of this yarn, taken from the yellowing pages of the May 1939 issue of Amazing Stories. (The author is unknown to me, but I have discovered that he also writes for comics, particularly Batman. Apparently a couple of episodes of the new television series are based on his scripts for the comic book.)


Illustrations by Julian S. Krupa.

Two young men working for a New York City tour bus encounter an invisible, telepathic Martian. One of them is seduced by the alien's plot to take over the world, and soon becomes a megalomaniac.


The fact that the Martian makes robbing a bank as easy as pie is another factor in his decision.

The other fellow has to figure out a way to keep the Martians from conquering Earth.

The mood of the story changes drastically from light comedy at the start to grim tragedy by the conclusion. Given the year it was written, I wonder if the dictatorial intentions of the first man were influenced by the rise of Fascism.

The author claims that this story is a true account, sent to him by the second man. There are also bits of imaginary news articles scattered throughout, in an attempt at verisimilitude. These don't work very well, particularly the long one at the end. The only thing I found mildly intriguing, if implausible, was the way the hero manages to plot against beings who can read his mind.

Two stars.

Almost Human, by Tarleton Fiske


Cover art by Harold W. McCauley.

The introductory blurb makes it clear that the author of this story, reprinted from the June 1943 issue of Fantastic Adventures, is really Robert Bloch, using a rather absurd pseudonym. (As is common practice, this was done because he had another story in the same issue under his own name.)


Illustration by Rod Ruth.

A hoodlum makes his way into the secret laboratory of a brilliant scientist. His moll has been working for the guy, so the crook knows the genius has created a robot. The machine is being educated like a child. The gangster teaches it to be an invincible criminal, and to kill without mercy. As you'd expect, things don't work out very well.

This piece reads like hardboiled fiction from a crime pulp. The final scene is particularly gruesome, in typical Bloch style. The author shows a certain knack for the Hammett/Chandler mode, but that's about all I can say for it. Not that great a story, but somebody thought it was worth reviving for an anthology.


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Two stars.

Satisfaction Guaranteed, by Isaac Asimov


Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.

Speaking of robots, here's one of several stories about the robopsychologist Susan Calvin by the Good Doctor, from the April 1951 issue of Amazing Stories.


Illustration by Enoch Sharp.

Calvin only plays a minor part in this story, which focuses on a rather mousy, insecure housewife. Her husband works for the same robotics firm as Calvin, so he brings home a test model of a new machine. It looks like a handsome young man, and is designed to be helpful around the house in many different ways. The husband goes off on a business trip, leaving his wife alone with the robot.

The housewife is frightened of it at first, but soon learns to accept it. It even helps her with home decorating, clothing, and makeup, so she learns self-confidence. A final, unexpected gesture on the part of the machine, seemingly out of character for a robot, wins her the envy of her snobbish acquaintances. Susan Calvin explains why the machine's action was a perfectly logical way of obeying the famous First Law of Robotics.


Anonymous cover art for a British edition.

The author must be fond of this tale, because he has already included it in two different collections of his work. The one shown above, as the title indicates, includes stories that take place on Earth rather than in space, despite the misleading illustration and blurb. The story also appears in an omnibus that brings together his two robot novels as well as several shorter works.


Cover art by Thomas Chibbaro.

Besides that, it is also included in the same Roger Elwood anthology as Bloch's story. My sources in the television industry tell me that it is being adapted for the British series Out of the Unknown, and should appear late this year. (Will there be American reruns? One can only hope.)

Is it worth all this attention? Well, it's not a bad yarn, if not the greatest robot story Asimov ever wrote. The housewife is something of a stereotype of an overly emotional female, dependent on a man for her happiness. (This is in sharp contrast to the highly intelligent and independent Doctor Susan Calvin.) At some point you may think that the author is violating his own rules about robot behavior, but it's all explained at the end.

Three stars.

A Portfolio – Virgil Finlay

I'm not sure if I should even discuss this tiny collection of illustrations by the great artist, but at least I can share them with you.


For The New Adam (1939) by Stanley G. Weinbaum. The magazine calls it The New Atom, which is an egregious error.


For Mirrors of the Queen (1948) by Richard S. Shaver.


For The Silver Medusa (1948) by Alexander Blade (pseudonym for H. Hickey.)

What can I say? His work is stunning.

Five stars.

Satan Sends Flowers, by Henry Kuttner


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.

The January/February 1953 issue of Fantastic is the source of this variation on an old theme.


Illustrations by Tom Beecham.

A man sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for immortality. (The premise is similar to that of the Twilight Zone episode Escape Clause, but the twist ending is different.) He ensures that he will remain young, healthy, and all that, so Satan can't play any tricks on him. Obviously, he figures he'll never have to pay up.

The Devil demands surety in the form of certain subconscious memories the fellow possesses. After assuring him that he won't even know he's lost anything, the man agrees. Unafraid of either earthly punishment or damnation, he lives a life of total depravity.


His first crime is the murder of his mother.

Eventually, he persuades the Devil to give him back what he lost, even though Satan warns him that he won't like it. This turns out to be a bad idea.

Like most other stories in this issue, this one has already appeared in a book. (It acquired the new title By These Presents.)


Back and front cover art by Richard Powers.

I should mention that the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore almost always collaborated, even if the resulting story appeared under only one name. Whoever might have been responsible for whatever parts of this work, it's a reasonably engaging tale. I'm not sure I really accept the explanation for what the man's unconscious memories represent, but I was willing to go along with it.

Three stars.

The Way Home, by Theodore Sturgeon


Cover art by Barye Phillips.

This quiet story comes from the April/May 1953 issue of Amazing Stories.


Illustrations by David Stone.

A boy runs away from home. Along the way he meets a wealthy man and his glamourous female companion, in their fancy car; a man with an injured hand who has been all over the world; and a pilot in a beautiful airplane. Without giving too much away, it's clear from the start that these men represent possible future versions of himself.


Is this the road to the future, or to home?

Like Asimov's story, this piece has already appeared in two of the author's collections, but with a slight change in the title.


Cover art by Mel Hunter.

(I'm not sure if I should really count these as two different collections, because all the stories in Thunder and Roses already appeared, along with others, in A Way Home. Such are the vagaries of the publishing industry.)


Cover art by Peter Curl.

In any case, this is a beautifully written little story, subtle and evocative. To say much more would be to ruin the delicate mood it creates.

Five stars.

Worth Tuning In Again?


Cartoon by somebody called Frosty, from the same magazine as Satan Sends Flowers.

I wouldn't call this issue bad at all, although there were a couple of disappointing stories.  It's no big surprise that the Simak and the Sturgeon were excellent, and Finlay's art is always a delight.  It's enough to make you want to tear yourself away from all those reruns on television and turn to some literary reruns instead.


In the world of cuisine, reruns are known as leftovers.



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