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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope)

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Tune in tomorrow morning (April 17) for FULL APOLLO 13 SPLASHDOWN COVERAGE!!!

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

Six-Gun Planet, by John Jakes

The author is better known around these parts for his sword-and-sorcery yarns about Brak the Barbarian, firmly in the tradition of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan. This new novel is a horse of a different color.

The cover of Six-Gun Planet.  The title is written in red block capitals across the top.  Beneath, the story summary reads: This is the story of the planet Missouri, whose revolutionary goals were to duplicate in the 23rd century the Terrafirman Old West, even if they had to use robot pintos for special effects.  Below the text, three images are superimposed over a background of psychedelic swirls in bright primary colors.  The first, at the top left, shows the planet Jupiter with its storm spot, encircled by a bright yellow aura.  In the center, a rope noose descends from the top of the image.  Inside the loop, an orange sunset sky surrounds a cowboy drawn in black and white in the foreground.  He is wearing a tall hat, gun belt, and cowboy boots.  His legs are bowed and his hands appear to be reaching for his gun as he stares malevolently at the viewer from under his hat brim.  In the background, two smaller cowboys, also black and white, appear far in the distance. On the right, three sandstone mountains in shades of yellow and orange appear to be blasting off into space supported by rockets shooting fire beneath them.
Cover art by Richard Powers

The planet Missouri had a revolution some time before the story begins. Advanced technology and a bureaucratic form of government were replaced by nineteenth century ways of doing things and fierce individualism.

In other words, the place now resembles Hollywood's fantasy of the Old West. There are some so-called savages who play the role of American Indians. Towns are full of outlaws and dance hall girls. There are sheriffs around, supposedly to maintain law and order, but they aren't very effective.

Our long-suffering hero is Zak Randolph, a minor government worker who ekes out a living by supplying souvenirs (such as miniature outhouses) to tourists and staging phony shootouts to entertain visitors from other worlds. He also arranges to have local badmen sent to more civilized planets to amuse those who hire them.

This latter function gets him in trouble. One of the leased gunfighters heads back to Missouri before his contract runs out. Zak has to track him down or risk losing his position. (What keeps him on the wild-and-wooly planet at all are his girlfriend and the presence of native plants that supply minerals that can be made into jewelry. Otherwise, he's a peaceable sort who hates the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the place.)

Along the way, he has to deal with ruffians who despise him as a coward. There's also the mystery of a legendary gunfighter called Buffalo Yung. Zak isn't sure this terrifying figure really exists. Then he gets reports from various places that he's been shot dead, apparently more than once. And what does this have to do with the disappearing bodies of lawmen killed by Yung?

Jakes makes use of typical characters and situations from Westerns, often with tongue firmly in cheek. You've got the town drunk, the traveling merchant, the local undertaker, and so forth. It's no surprise that it ends with a showdown between Zak and Yung.

The author also has something serious to say about pacifism versus the law of the gun. Zak changes personality drastically over the course of the novel, and not in a nice way.

The plot moves along briskly, even if some of the events seem arbitrary. You'll probably be able to figure out Yung's secret pretty quickly. Fans of horse operas should be able to appreciate this space opera.

Three stars.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Ice Crown, by Andre Norton

The book jacket for Ice Crown, by Andre Norton, shown unfolded so that both the back and front covers are visible.  The background is an abstract painting of intersecting lines and circles.  The shapes formed by these intersections are painted in different colors, all muted cool shades of green, blue, and purple with occasional soft golds.  The background extends from the back cover around to the front.  On the front, the middleground shows a man and a woman looking pensively off to the left. The man is wearing armor in shades of brown, painted in the same intersecting-line style as the background.  He wears a medieval-style helmet that extends down to his chin on the sides, with cheek guards but the rest of his face exposed.  He has a parted pencil mustache. His gauntleted hands are steepled in front of his chest.  The woman, standing slightly in front of him, appears to be wearing the titular ice crown, which is a white imperial-style closed crown with a cap above the coronet.  It has a star at the very top. She wears a purple cloth head covering under the crown and her body is enclosed by a long cloak, also painted linearly in shades of brown but with some purple and yellow accents.  In front of them is superimposed a smaller image of three soldiers fighting.  On the left, a white man with dark hair is wearing a white space suit with no helmet.  He is firing a blaster at the two men on the left, who are wearing tan medieval-style tunics and hoods, with hose and boots that lace up to the knee.  They are brandishing swords toward the first man.  The shot from the blaster extends past the first medieval man and over the head of the second man, who has fallen against the shield of the man behind him as if wounded.
Cover art by Lazlo Gal

Millennia ago, the human race's push for scientific and technological achievement culminated in a proud interstellar empire dominated by the Psychocrat regime. They settled human colonies on habitable planets and wiped completely all memory of their provenance for the purpose of observing the development of civilizations, but some unknown force toppled their hegemony before they could see their experiments come to fruition. The Psychocrats left behind primitive human colonies with no knowledge of their origins, and ancient artifacts that held knowledge of extraordinary technological achievements — invaluable bounty to the intrepid explorers who comb the galaxy in search of them.

Roane Hume has been selected by her uncle, one such explorer, to accompany him on an expedition to the planet Clio, where a seeded colony of humans has spread over thousands of years into several feudal kingdoms ruled by monarchs. Roane and her team are forbidden by interplanetary law to reveal themselves to the people of Clio, but Roane becomes swept up in the royal interests of the kingdom of Reveny when she intervenes to rescue a young girl being kidnapped, only to discover her to be the Princess Ludorica, heir to the throne. The princess is in a desperate search for the lost Ice Crown, a crown which supposedly holds mystical powers and is the only way to legitimize her rule, lest her kingdom fall to squabbling nobles and bandit lords. Despite Roane's oath to secrecy, she feels herself drawn to the Princess, and at every turn disregards her responsibility in order to help Ludorica restore her kingdom.

Norton continues to excel at intermingling elements of both sci-fi and high fantasy. The heady science fiction concepts introduced in the beginning — intergalactic treasure-hunters, technologically advanced weapons and survival gear, as well as a colony of brainwashed humans unwittingly transplanted onto another world in the service of a long-abandoned experiment — are vivid and imaginative. I especially enjoyed that the unfolding horror of a race realizing that their proud history and religion were the result of enslavement to technology indistinguishable from magic did not go understated.

But I also love an epic fantasy, and I do feel that Norton delivered with her courts and castles and enchanted crowns and a princess determined to save her people at any cost. The aesthetic of the story was reminiscent of a fairy-tale, with enough court intrigue and subterfuge to ensure that those fantasy elements did not feel hastily grafted onto a story about spaceships and astronauts, but rather that astronauts and spaceships had unintentionally landed in the middle of an epic. I would have thought that the magic of Clio turning out to be the lingering effects of a technology so advanced that it apparently did not even warrant explaining to the reader might disenchant the epic, but it had the opposite effect on me; high-tech science became enchanting in a way that very few hard sci-fi novels can achieve from meticulous technical explanation alone.

Lastly, the relationship between the two protagonists, Roane and Ludorica, was so unique to this sort of pulpy sci-fi that it can't go unmentioned. How sadly rare it is for an intelligent, resourceful, defiant leading duo to be two teenage girls. Their instant camaraderie was so strong that their duality, one an astronaut and one a princess, allowed each of them to step into the world of the other in a way that I feel contributed greatly to the seamless melding of the genres. It was a sweet moment for space-hardened Roane to know how it feels to wear a gown and have a lady-in-waiting, and after her endless ordeals Princess Ludorica absolutely deserved to get to shoot someone with a blaster.

Five stars out of five.

Recall Not Earth, by C.C. MacApp

The front cover of Recall Not Earth.  The title is written in yellow block capitals with red drop shadows.  Above the title, the book summary reads: The last survivors of mankind - fighting annihilation in a war between the galaxies.  The text is superimposed on a black sky with a series of planets or moons extending into the distance.  Below the title, a red spacecraft with many rods and circular attachments extending all around it sits on the surface of a planet, its lower half obscured by a cloud of dust.  A line of peaks appears in shadow behind it.  In front of the craft a group of people in white spacesuits with closed helmets is walking toward the viewer across a tan sandy expanse.
Cover art by Jerome Podwil

Recall Not Earth by C.C. MacApp was published in January, so I'm a little late to the party, but it intrigued me enough to want to include it this month. The people of Earth, in their hubris, decided to assert their interstellar superiority over the other races of their spiral arm in the Milky Way by picking an ill-advised fight with the Vulmoti Empire. Obviously, they lost.

The Vulmoti punished the earthlings by stamping out all life on Earth and leaving it an irradiated husk. The only living humans left were the cadre of spacemen led by Commodore John Brayson. But suddenly finding themselves the last survivors of their species, they scattered in despair across the galaxy to eke out a pathetic living as hired mercenaries for other alien races. Brayson himself retreated to the backwater planet Drongail to while away the rest of his life numbing himself with the highly addictive dron.

Brayson is coaxed out of his stupor and convinced to attempt one last mission when his old friend Bart Lange finds him to deliver news that seems too good to be true: that somewhere in the galaxy, a colony of living human women are in hiding. With this newfound glimmer of hope, Brayson and Lange reassemble their team and agree to hire themselves out to the leader of the Chelki, a race enslaved by the Vulmoti. The Omniarch of the Chelki promises Brayson knowledge of the location of the women in exchange for his help in the Chelki's struggle for freedom. Having nothing to lose, Brayson agrees to lead his men in battle one last time, all the while fighting the mind-addling effects of his drug addiction.

Going into this one I expected a sweeping space opera replete with different alien empires locked in battle for survival and dominance, and that's exactly what I got. Lots of spaceship dogfights, alien diplomacy, and pages upon pages of militaristic strategizing. I'll admit that last one is not my thing, but MacApp belabored the reasoning behind each maneuver and the minute differences between each imaginary weapons system so thoroughly that I have to commend the amount of thought that went into the details, even if it did make my head spin. Combine all that with the ever-present smaller human struggles like loneliness and addiction, and I think MacApp could have had enough material here to span a trilogy of novels.

The thing which most distinguished this book to me from others like it was the extent to which MacApp divorced himself entirely from the known laws of science, instead preferring to come up with laws of physics so profoundly unlike our own that I can only describe it as writing scientific fanfiction. Don't get me wrong, enough jargon and justification was given for his new laws of physics, such as the many pages dedicated to explaining how gravity is actually a force which repels matter, that in some places it felt as convincing as though I was reading a physics textbook dropped from some alternate dimension. I was fascinated by this brazen, meticulous rewriting of physics for little discernible reason. It’s a fun reminder to those of us who tend to get tangled up trying to understand how made-up technology fits into our understanding of science that it's not that serious, it's fiction and you can do whatever you want as much as you want to do it.

There were many parts of this book which did feel rushed, but that's unsurprising given how dense the story is and how much wonderful science nonsense we have to get through before the battles can commence and the damsels can be rescued. It was executed well, with almost no wasted space, and though all the militaristic babbling did hurt my brain a little, I'm going to give it…

Four stars.

A photo of Tonya R. Moore, a brown skinned woman with black hair, wearing a mondrian-styled dress in yellow, white, and black.
by Tonya R. Moore

Junk Day, by Arthur Sellings

The cover of Junk Day.  The word Junk is written in a bright blue psychedelic font with pale blue drop shadows.  The word Day is written smaller, in serifed capitals in the same shade of bright blue but no shadows.  The title is superimposed on a black and white image of the front window of a junk shop, where glass bottles, small statues, a baby doll, a trophy cup, and other objects are lined up haphazardly.
Cover art by Richard Weaver

Junk Day was my first encounter with the written works of Arthur Sellings. Published, thanks to the efforts of his widow, posthumously in 1970, following Sellings’ untimely death in 1968, there is some poignant irony in knowing the author’s final work portrays a world in ruins; the death of human civilization itself.

Junk Day begins with a man on a journey through the treacherous wilderness of post-apocalyptic London. At first, Douglas Bryan, a former painter, doesn’t seem to have a specific goal or destination in mind. He simply pushes forward, determined to defend himself from the grim realities of the violent hell-scape devoid of law, order, and morality the scorched earth has become.

When Bryan encounters a lone woman, the former nun-in-training, Vee, his initial reaction is suspicion. He cannot fathom that a woman could survive on her own following the collapse of human civilization, without a Man around to help her survive. Byran immediately shacks up with Vee. This relationship of convenience with Vee, who–it turns out– was formerly a man, leads to the pair setting off on a journey to find a more livable abode.

Homo-erotic tensions stir when Bryan brings Vee to his previous shelter where Eddie awaits the former painter’s return. While never said in so many words, one gets the distinct impression that Bryan’s relationship with the clingy , trauma-ridden younger man was more intimate than platonic. Though dismayed at having been replaced with Vee, Eddie swallows his anger, jealousy, and the last vestiges of his pride. He begs to join Bryan and Vee on their journey to find greener pastures. Bryan coldly rebuffs the desperate younger man, revealing the true callousness of his nature. Eddie gets left behind to spiral more deeply into murderous madness.

The protagonist, Douglas Bryan, is not likable. He is strangely dispassionate for a painter. Where are the high emotions, the romanticism, and thirst to pursue his craft? Where is his artistic passion, his sense of justice? He merely seems to go through the motions of being human and is far more concerned about the persona he is building up for himself than righteousness or caring about the fate of humanity.

The absence of growth in the main character is jarring. When Barney, a megalomaniac and dictator-in-the-making, attempts to engineer his own twisted version of society, Bryan pushes back, but his motivations seem more clinical than heroic. He refuses to bend to the machinations of the mysterious entities pulling the strings behind the scenes, but merely for the sake of being non-conformist. Junk Day ends with London gradually getting swallowed up by a new order, leaving the reader with more questions than answers. The ultimate fate of Douglas Bryan remains uncertain.

The faults in Bryan’s character may lead one to question Sellings’ skill in character development, but one can’t deny the possibility that this is deliberate. Douglas Bryan’s questionable character aside, Junk Day is a brilliantly written book; one I will happily revisit. Sellings was clearly a master of story craft. The images he painted of the dystopian remnants of civilization are vivid and arresting. It has made me quite eager to read his earlier works.

Five out of five stars.

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


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

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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.




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