[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
There ain't no Justice
It was only a few months that President Dicky tried to ram a conservative Supreme Court justice pick through the Senate to replace the seat left open by the retirement of the much laureled Chief Justice Earl Warren. Clement Haynworth's candidacy went down to defeat in the Senate on November 21 of last year.
Now up is G. Harrold Carswell, until last year, the Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida. He was elevated to the Fifth Circuit Appellate Court last June. To all accounts, he is no less conservative than his predecessor, and he's a (former?) segregationist to boot. His jurisprudence is also lacking: 40% of his rulings were overturned on appeal! As Senator McGovern observed, "I find his record to be distinguished largely by two qualities: racism and mediocrity." Nebraska's Senator Hruska damned with faint praise in his reply, to the effect saying, "Sure he's mediocre…but don't the mediocre warrant representation, too?"
G. Harrold Carswell
But as LIFE and other outlets are noting, Nixon's soothing rhetoric thinly veils a deeply conservative agenda, cutting social programs, withdrawing from world affairs, and trying to stack the Court with allies. Carswell's nomination passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 16 of this year. We'll see if the Senate as a whole can stomach him for the Court proper.
Plus ça change
Galaxy's editor Eljer Jakobsson is like Richard Nixon (well, perhaps this is a stretch, but indulge me—I need some sort of transition here!) He is trying all of the styles at his disposal in this new decade of the 1970s and seeing what sticks. The result remains inconsistent, but not unworthy.
This month's issue trumpets Silverbob's newest serial (sure to be novelized, perhaps as we speak) The Tower of Glass. Stephen Tall has the lead "breakthrough novelette", which I presumed meant this was his first work, but checking my index cards, I see it's not, since he first wrote a story for Worlds of Tomorrow four years ago. And then there's Ray Bradbury, undeservedly getting a third of the cover's masthead, presumably because of his pop culture stature.
The editor starts out the issue with an interesting piece, noting that even if there something to genetic races, it's meaningless anyway because none of us stick exclusively to our own (something folks of my persuasion blame on how lovely those shiksas always end up…) It's short and sweet. Then it's onto the "breakthrough novelette".
Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall, by Stephen Tall
illustration by Jack Gaughan
The three names in the title belong to a trio of compatible astronauts sent on the first expedition to the Jovian moon, Callisto. A biologist, a mathematician, and a computer engineer, the three have just barely settled in for the several month trip when the first of them, Tattershall, makes an interesing hypothesis: space is a near vacuum but not a complete one—what if the interplanetary cosmos harbors life? Incredibly diffuse, extremely voluminous life, to be sure. Unrecognizable at a passing glance, certainly. But there, nonetheless.
Seek, and ye shall find. As the Albratross sails for Jupiter, the ship sails by and inside a number of planetoid-sized creatures, sensed only by their abnormal particle densities. Unfortunately for the "Callistonauts", one of them take a fancy for their krypton-powered engine, and their fuel supply soon becomes dangerously depleted.
If this story appeared in Analog, it'd be a thrilling (or maybe just turgidly technical) SF action piece. In F&SF, maybe fantastically whimsical or horrific. Here, it's… pleasant. More inches are devoted to the genial interactions of the tic-tac-toe playing Allison and Carmichael, the blissful absorption in ant farms of Tattershall, and the dietary proclivities of all three. Plus, lots of discussion of biology.
Frankly, I suspect space life as posited by Tall is impossible. Things don't scale like that (and someone tell Irwin Allen…) Still, it's a nice story.
Three stars.
Discover a Latent Moses, by Michael G. Coney
illustration by Jack Gaughan
Here are the adventures of Jacko, Paladin, Switch, Cockade, and the Old Man, a band of humans surviving the Fifth Ice Age perhaps fifty years from now. They live under a dozen feet of snow in an entombed town, surviving on canned food and bottled booze. But they dream of land in the warmer West… if only they can outmaneuver the winged, snow skiing, Flesh Eaters. It reminds me of a bit of Michael Moorcock's series involving the ice schooner.
It's never explained what causes the big freeze. The general consensus of scientists is that industrial emissions will cause a global warming, but I've read at least one article lately that suggests smog particles will block the Sun and cause cooling. Maybe that's it. Or maybe, like in Robert Silverberg's Time of the Great Freeze, the next Ice Age will trump any artificial effects.
Anyway, the story is excitingly told and the characters vivid, if cardboard. It's enjoyable reading, but it brings little new to the table.
Robert Silverberg sure loves him some dark futures.
Over the next several decades, the world will undergo plague and war that mow down the Third World. Birth control and ennui take care of the rest. But the productivity of the race remains as high as ever, thanks to mechanization, computerization…and the development of androids. These perfect physical specimens range from moronic (the gammas) to brilliant (the rarefied alphas—someone's been reading Huxley), and they fill the role of technician, nanny, nurse, and (but only secretly) lover.
The much-reduced human population lives effete, rich, and pampered, interplanetary and even nearby interstellar, knit globally by a network of "transmats" that eliminate commutes and homogenize culture. This, then, is the world 250 years hence, contemporary with Star Trek, but oh so different.
For one thing, this is no utopia. The androids seem quiescent, but there is indication that they might be on the verge of insurrection, or perhaps being manipulated to do so by human interests. And then there are the women…
Silverberg seems to hate worlds in which women are anything but shallow playthings. There is no narrative reason for women to get such short shrift in this story, and they do in all of Bob's stories, so I suspect it's more tic, less deliberate intent.
Anyway, that's the background. The story involves billionaire Simeon Krug and the constellation of relatives, top staff, and associates who surround him. Krug is building a 600 meter transmission tower in the tundras of Ontario to reply to a message recently received from the stars: "2-4, 2-5, 1-3" repeated ad nauseum.
So far, the story seems to be about thwarted expectations: Krug is disappointed that the alien senders seem to hail from a bright O-class star, precluding anything akin to humanity. His son is dissatisfied with both his unexciting human wife and his vat-produced android paramour. The android foreman Thor Watchman is dissatisfied with a nameless something, probably attached to his inferior position in human society, even as one of the most powerful beings on Earth.
It's all written with Silverberg's usual, if somewhat overdramatic, brilliance and not a little emphasis on sex. There are some very nifty concepts here, from the eternal dawn or noon that teleportation affords, to the "jacking in" to vast computet networks (the ultimate evolution of ARPANET, perhaps).
So, bad taste in my mouth aside, I am interested to see where this goes. It's in the same vein as his blue fire stories, which I liked.
Four stars.
Darwin, the Curious, by Ray Bradbury, Darwin, in the Fields, by Ray Bradbury, and Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn, by Ray Bradbury
A trio of pointless poems from the master of mawk: what if Chas sat in a field all day, and on the way home, passed a fox?
Two stars—the illustrations illuminating them are nice.
The adventures of John Grimes, intrepid if cantankerous officer of the Space Scout Service, have been going on for more than a decade. Like Horatio Hornblower, we've now gotten most of his career, from Ensign through Commodore. There's not a lot of room left to fill. How then can Chandler keep this cash cow going?
Why, by returning to the mystical planet of Kinsolving, where dreams become reality. In this case, Grimes ends up in a nightmare parallel universe where, instead of meeting his lovely wife, Sonya, and advancing to flag rank, he instead marries a shrew and ends up in a dead-end job as commander of a fourth-rate backwater base.
And yet, even schlub Grimes has got a touch of that seadog magic…
I quite enjoyed this story, although it ends just a touch too abruptly. Four stars.
Sunpot (Part 3 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé
illustration by Vaughn Bodé
The adventures of the Sunpot continue to take turns for the worse—this time, the pages aren't even printed in the right order.
I said one star last time, but there's (a little) less sexism this time, and the pictures are pretty, even if the typeface is still illegible.
Two stars.
Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys
The magazine's book column is devoted solely to The Universal Baseball Association, Inc, by J. Henry Waugh. It is about a fellow who creates his own private universe, centered around a baseball team, using a self-devised chart and dice to randomly determine what happens next. It's a bit like how Philip K. Dick created The Man in the High Castle (he used bamboo sticks and the I Ching.
As Budrys puts it:
It does convey a convincing approximation of how a God might be infinitely creative and yet not in direct control of his creation, omnipotent and yet prey to events, omniscient and nevertheless blind to the future.
Though not technically SF or F, and thus perhaps not sold in the same outlets as our beloved regulars, Budrys recommends in no uncertain terms that we read it.
No Planet Like Home, by Robert Conquest
illustration by Jack Gaughan
A race of humanoid aliens, prone to frequent mutation, wrings their collective hands over what to do about a comically tragic pinhead nephew of a Senator. The aliens scour the galaxy until they find a race that constitutes a close physical match so they can deposit the hapless lad on their world.
Three guesses which world, and the first two don't count.
Two stars for being obvious.
Kindergarten, by James E. Gunn
illustration by Jack Gaughan
Speaking of, here's a (charmingly illustrated) tale about a precocious child who creates a planet for his amusement, but its inhabitants are too dangerous to be allowed to live. The world's genesis takes, of course, six days. The name of the planet is…
Well, you already know the answer.
Two stars.
Diverging courses
The Supreme Court's constitution has evolved since 1950, becoming for a time one of the most liberal Courts in the nation's history. The building remains the same, but the members change…and only time will tell if we'll be happy with the new direction.
The magazine that Gold launched in 1950 also continues its slow, insensible slide toward whatever lies ahead in the '70s. It still retains the same dimensions as when it started, the same tactile feel to its cover and pages. But its cover art, its typeface, its stable of authors, the literary style, all have evolved. Perhaps not always for the better, but generally still worthy.
Sure, I'll renew.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
We are only in the second month of the new decade, but one thing seems to be clear. Women are no longer willing to be silent.
In Leeds, hundreds of women textile workers have walked out on unofficial strike. They are opposing the pay deal struck between their union and employer, claiming it is unfair that women will be getting smaller pay increases than their male co-workers.
At the other end of the social scale, the hallowed halls of Oxford is set to host the “Women’s Weekend”. Tired of being ignored and shouted down by men at other meetings, this will be an all-women conference to discuss women’s history and their current position in the world.
In a more literal sense, a woman’s voice can now be heard on British Pop Radio. After hiring an all-male team from Pirate Radio and Radio Luxembourg to start Radio 1, the BBC have finally branched out and employed their first woman DJ. Annie Nightingale is only thirty but has already had an impressive career, including working as a journalist, presenting numerous music television programmes, having a modelling career and running her own fashion boutique.
Whether this will lead to changes in British science fiction publishing remains to be seen. The Current Issue of Vision of Tomorrow’s only female representation is in its review columnists. Maybe we need to organize our own flying pickets?
However, maybe some of this atmosphere is affecting our writers, as all these stories are, in one way or another, about people trying to break out of their social circumstances. So, let’s walk through the stench of cigar smoke in this gentleman’s club and check out the contents:
Vision of Tomorrow #6
Cover Art by David A. Hardy
Whither SF? by Rev. John Clay
I would like to thank Philip Harbottle for realizing that he has run out of things to say and inviting in guest writers to open the magazine. Take note American publishers!
I was quite taken with this first installment, with the Reverend John Clay discussing the theological underpinnings of recent SF, q.v. Sheckley & Leiber, and going on to talk about how imagination is undervalued in our modern society.
Full-Five by E.C. Tubb
Illustrated by Eddie Jones
In the 21st Century there exists an incredibly powerful illicit drug called full-five. This has the power to give a sense of perfection to all five senses, for a short period of time. It is not chemically addictive, but it makes the real world seem like a nightmare in comparison.
When a chemist secretly making the drug is murdered, we follow how this impacts four different groups of people: his criminal associates; a rich customer and his dealer; a prize fighter; and the police investigating the case.
Given how well received his other works in Vision have been (including by yours truly) it is perhaps unsurprising Tubb would be allowed to take up a large portion of this month’s magazine. And he puts it to great use. Even with 16 pages at his disposal, it is not easy to create a fully visualized world, populated with solid characters. A lot of writers cannot even manage it in a novel.
I was worried at times it was going to be a case of an old man yelling at the young kids, but it is actually quite measured. It does get a touch didactic at points but this is necessary to give the different perspectives on full-five’s effect on society.
Even though I imagine others will question if I am taking something myself. I am giving this story a Full-Five Stars.
The Impatient Dreamers: Blast-Off
Reproduction of Issue 1 of Tales of Wonder. Cover by Nick
As the title suggests we now get into the real meat of things. With the British market finally starting to get its own specialist magazine titles in the mid-30s, there were some willing to take a chance on SF. This piece primarily focuses on the publication of Gillings’ Tales of Wonder and publisher Newnes’ plans for Fantasy.
Once again full of great detail, even more enhanced by the fact that he is now directly involved behind the scenes of both magazines. Possibly the most interesting part for me was the original guidelines Newnes put out for soliciting stories for Fantasy:
– No implausible flights of fancy, no weird fiction, no spiritual or ghost stories, no gore or sex, no animals with human attributes, no interplanetary travel, no medical or biological themes, and no time travel
– Stories particularly welcome are those envisaging new developments of existing technology, such as flight and television, or on future developments in warfare.
As you can probably imagine, Gillings was unimpressed by these limitations.
Continuing to cruise high at Five Stars
Fifth Commandment by John Brunner
Illustrated by Eddie Jones
The prolific John Brunner seems to have generally moved away from short fiction to the more lucrative book market, this being only his second new short story in the last 12 months.
Grumman lives in Retirement, a self-contained community providing all the needs of the elderly. But why does that make him feel so dissatisfied? And why does no one in Retirement have any children?
Not the most original story but fulfills its purpose well.
Three Stars
The Phoenix People by Richard A. Gordon
Illustrated by Eddie Jones
An expedition comes to visit an ancient planet called by its inhabitants “Earth”. The sentient population represent the longest recorded continual chain of evolution in the known universe, yet they seem to lack technological progress and are unresponsive to any queries. Just as the expedition is close to giving up, they discover an ancient buried spaceship, more advanced than any they have seen anywhere. What is it doing here?
I found this a fairly obvious tale, padded out with a level of verbosity that puts even me to shame. It is not bad as such, just rather dull and pointless.
Two Stars
The Visitors by Frank Bryning
Illustrated by Eddie Jones
Alien visitors are watching a galley sail across an inland sea. When one of the passengers goes overboard, they pick him up to investigate the species further.
This comes with a special “Vision Vignette” logo. Unfortunately, the contents are lacking in any superlative qualities. It is the kind of tale that would have been considered old hat a decade ago. However, it is short and reasonably written, which saves it from the bottom rung of the ranking ladder.
Two Stars
The Star-Mutants by Damien Broderick
Illustrated by Eddie Jones, who I believe has excelled himself in this issue
The generation starship Man’s Dream set off from Earth a century ago. Fifteen years into the voyage, an outbreak of psychosis infected those born on Earth, whilst the children born on the ship were unaffected. With the help of the computer system, the space-born quarantine the Earth-born and try to provide them with help. However, space radiation mutates their children and a conflict between the two emerges.
Now, a hundred years later, the Space-Born are being slowly pushed back to a smaller section of the ship. The Space-Mutants live in a jungle (an outgrowth of untended hydroponics plants) where they raid into the Space-Born territory. Captain Van of the Space-Born realizes the time has come to make a decision that is contrary to their programming. Either forgo their mission and integrate into Space-Mutant society, or wipe out the mutants completely.
At first glance this may seem to be just another variation on Aldiss’ Non-Stop, but it possesses some elements that raise it up. Firstly, this is quite a dark, mature story where our narrator is faced with an unwinnable scenario, whatever he does something will be lost. Secondly, it is very fast paced and action-packed, making it a very easy read in spite of the heavy subject matter.
Whilst there may be more mention of breasts than is strictly necessary in the story, women are present throughout and have varied pivotal roles. Lady Violence in particular lives up to her name and I would willingly read a novel of her future adventures.
Four Stars
Fantasy Review
Katheryn Buckley reviews Barefoot in the Head by Brian W. Aldiss and has more praise for it than we had for the original short stories in New Worlds. Don Malcolm spends some time covering the innumerable flaws in Chariot of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken but still advises readers to try it and make up their own minds.
Finally, Robert Conquest writes another attempt to take down the new wave in his “review” of The New SF. The quote marks are mine as he barely mentions the stories inside, instead choosing to decry experimentation, get angry that the initials “SF” can mean something other than science fiction, and making rambling references to the 1920s.
The belated poll results for issue #2. Apart from the high positioning of Moonchip I don’t particularly disagree with these rankings.
A Great Escape
Marianne Faithful in Girl on a Motorcycle. Not quite as good a role as Steve McQueen got.
So, overall a pretty good selection of tales in this issue of Vision of Tomorrow, and a worthy diversion from your troubles for an hour or so. No stories are truly bad and a couple are very good indeed.
Just like the characters above, let us hope that society progresses enough that women can break out of their social confines and allow their voices to be heard just as loudly as men. Imagine if one day we could pick up a magazine to be surprised to find there are no women featured in an issue, rather than when one turns up.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month. Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production. Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff! Enjoy:
From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.
The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.
Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.
The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.
In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.
Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.
All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.
I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.
Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.
Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.
Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.
The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.
At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.
Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel
Cover by Albert Nuetzell
Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.
Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.
The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.
With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.
By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.
Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.
Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.
Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.
The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.
Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.
Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela
Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.
Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.
On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.
In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.
Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.
Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.
Dean Koontz
Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.
First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.
Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.
This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement. Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.
Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.
Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).
Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:
Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.
As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.
Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:
He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.
Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.
Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:
That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?
This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.
Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:
While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.
Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.
There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.
However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.
The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:
Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.
The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.
I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?
Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.
Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.
Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.
Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.
The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.
Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.
Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.
An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.
Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.
In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.
Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.
Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.
They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.
Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?
We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.
(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)
The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.
Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.
Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.
The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.
The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.
Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.
(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)
Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.
Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.
This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.
The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.
As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.
About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.
The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.
There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.
Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.
Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.
(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)
Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.
What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.
Three stars.
There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.
All Hallow's Eve is upon us, that annual moment when the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its weakest. The departed spirits of those with unfinished business return to fulfil their goals. And puckish souls, alive and passed, spread mischief.
And amidst all this, there is candy.
In this light, the November 1965 issue of Analog is the perfect companion for Halloween. There are familiar faces, a significant departed face, delicious trifles, and sad tricks.
If you read H. Beam Piper's Gunpowder God this time last year, you're familiar with Calvin Morrison, a Pennsylvania cop who got whisked to an alternate world where Aryan tribes settled the Americas and the precursors to our Amerinds stayed in Asia. Calvin encountered a feudal patchwork where the United States had been, and he quickly took advantage of his military prowess and knowledge to help break the gunpowder monopoly of the House of Styphon, becoming Lord Kalvan of the principality of Hostigo in the process.
If you haven't read Gunpowder God, you'll be rather lost reading Down Styphon!, which is a direct sequel. After winning its first battle against its neighbors, Hostigo now finds itself about to be attacked by neighboring Nostor and a host of Styphon-funded mercenaries. Only by developing a mobile force and the science of military cartography can Kalvan and Hostigo hope to repel the vastly superior forces of the invaders.
Down Styphon! is little more than a campaign log, chronicling the ebb and flow of the fight from the initial preparations, to the attempted Nostorian breakthrough, to their ultimate rout. It's clearly a middle third to a novel of Kalvan's story, started in Gunpowder God. Indeed, the tale ends on a cliffhanger: it is clear that Styphon has one more trick up their sleeve and will not go down without a fight.
The problem, of course, is that readers of Analog may never get a conclusion to this tale. Sadly, Mr. Piper took his own life last November, and Down Styphon! is touted as the author's last published story.
On the other hand, a novel of Lord Kalvan (Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen) came out recently, and it may well have the resolution to the story. It's also possible that editor John Campbell will license the last part of the book to finish the saga in Analog.
One hopes so. While Down Styphon! is clearly incomplete and focused primarily on a single battle, it is yet one of the best and most riveting recountings of a military campaign I've read. There is such rich detail that I could easily see Avalon Hill making a wargame out of it.
So I give this tale four stars for what it accomplishes and in appreciation for what it could have been (and perhaps might be — fingers crossed).
A young Kalang tribesman in the remote mountains of Java rushes to meet a party of foreign anthropologists. He bears a shard of a crashed vehicle, one he's certain will convince the expedition to regale him with gifts, as had happened during the War when a pilot had set down his crate and had to be nursed back to health.
But the fragment is highly radioactive, and the craft it comes from is not of Earthly construction.
That's a great setup for a story, but in (the oddly titled) Even Chance, the setup is the whole story. You know its outcome from the beginning, and the thing reads like something from the 1940s.
A high two — it's not offensive, but it could use finishing.
A Long Way to Go, by Robert Conquest
Kelly Freas
A Mr. Randall from modern day is transported 500 years into the future. Unlike other contemporaries who had made the trip, Randall is allowed to keep his memories of the 20th Century even if it means he'll have trouble adjusting to the 26th, the better for anthropologists to study him.
At the end, however, it is decided that it is better for Randall to be acclimatized after all. The time traveler takes the news philosophically, noting that the future seems to have solved all of today's problems. But, his future host sadly informs him, they have unique problems of their own.
Once more, we have a fine setup to a story that fails to go anywhere. Indeed, I'm not quite sure what the point of the tale was.
Another high two.
Some Preliminary Notes on FASEG, by Laurence M. Janifer and Frederick W. Kantor
Here's a cute quasi-scientific piece on the generation of fairy godmothers, done in the style of a short journal article.
Three stars.
Onward and Upward with Space Power, by J. Frank Coneybear
On the other hand, Coneybear's longwinded piece on steam power in space keenly suffers for want of an introduction, a conclusion, and subheadings. I suppose it's better than pseudoscience, but Analog really needs a dedicated science writer like F&SF's Asimov and Galaxy's Ley.
At last we come to something that does finish: Reynolds' latest serial. When last we left Ender Castriota (who had assumed the identity of Rog Bock to join the roster of the colony ship Titov on its way to complete a blood feud against the last of the Peshkopi clan, rumored to be on the vessel), the colony of New Arizona had been attacked by natives. As the first intelligent aliens encountered by humanity, their presence on the planet not only poses an existential threat to the new settlement, it also invalidates the colonial charter.
A war ensues, egged on by the Captain of the Titov, who, not wanting to see his lucrative opportunity fade away, insists the aliens are simple animals. That these "animals" wield crossbows and religious totems makes no difference to him.
Curiously, the "kogs" (as the indigenes are derogatorily called) are extremely humanoid in appearance. Stranger still, they appear to be confined to the island on which the Titov landed. I'm sure you can guess, as I did, the true origin of the "aliens."
Space Pioneer's third part is, like Down Styphon!, primarily a chronicle of battle and, like the Piper story, a deftly executed one. Reynolds is good at that kind of thing. The Peshkopi feud issue is resolved, and not as I expected it to be, and there is some good development of the relationship between Castriota and Zorilla, the one member of the colonial board who seems to be a decent man. I was disappointed that Cathy Bergman, advocate for the non-charter member colonists had a minimal role in the third segment, however.
All told, I'd give Part Three four stars, and the book as a whole three and a half. Good stuff, but it likely won't make the nomination for this year's Galactic Stars.
Assorted Sweets
With all of its ups and downs, Analog clocks in at exactly three stars. However, as with any Halloween grab bag, you can always skip the candy you don't like and concentrate on what you like. There's certainly much to enjoy in this month's first and last thirds.
Campbell's magazine is better than this month's largely reprint Fantastic (2.8) and the perennially lackluster IF (2.6).
Only one story out of the 30 new pieces was written by a woman, which makes Science Fantasy the winner of this month's SF equal opportunity award without trying very hard.
Sad as that statistic may be, there was far more worthy reading this month than usual. One could easily fill two big magazines with nothing but 4-star stuff.
So grab yourself this month's digests, stuff them in your trick or treat bag, and have a swell spooky holiday of haunting. I know I will!
Billions of years ago, the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pin. For an endless eternity, or perhaps just an instant, it remained in this state – and then it exploded outward with the force of creation, ultimately becoming all that we see today.
Until this year, this "Big Bang" theory was as yet unconfirmed. It had stiff competition in the "Steady State" hypothesis, which postulated that the universe is indeed expanding, but because of matter being constantly created. This was fundamental to the plot of Pohl and Williamson's recent novels set in the reefs of space at the edges of our solar system.
But last year, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey noticed an excess of radio noise in the receiver they were building, an excess that closely resembled the Cosmic Microwave Background predicted by physicists Ralph Alpherin, Robert Herman, and George Gamow. This extremely low level but pervasive energy is what's left of the heat of the primeval explosion, reduced to microwaves by the expansion of the universe.
The Murray Hill facility where the echoes of the Big Bang were discovered
Smaller Ones
Here on Earth, it seems our planet is anxious to imitate the violence of the universe at large. On September 28, the Taan Volcano off the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon exploded, killing hundreds of Filipinos.
And less of a bang and more of a blaaat, we've just finished ringing in the Jewish new year with the traditional blowing of a ram's horn.
The Littlest One
Meanwhile, editor John W. Campbell, Jr. seems content to not rock the boat, providing a mixed bag of diverting fare and stale garbage in the latest issue of Analog, a combination that is unlikely to knock anyone off their feet.
by John Schoenherr
Overproof, by Johnathan Blake MacKenzie
On a planet two hundred light years from home, a husband and wife pair of anthropologists come across a horrifying discovery. The native Darotha, an amphibian race resembling across between a cat and an octopus, are eating humans. At least, it seems that way – the Yahoos, apelike herd animals on their planet, bear a striking resemblance to homo sapiens. Are the Darothans really mass murderers? Or are looks deceiving?
by John Schoenherr
This is an interesting piece that Randall Garrett (under a pseudonym) has offered up. Unusually for an Analog story, the Darothans are a well-drawn alien race and not played for inferiority – indeed, they are treated with sensitivity not only by the author but by the Terran colonists on the planet, who see them as exciting as potential partners and as an example of non-human society. In the end, the story is essentially an inverse of Piper's Fuzzy stories, where the question is not whether the humanoid Yahoos possess the spark of humanity, but whether they don't.
It's not a perfect story. The conclusion is pretty obvious from the beginning, it meanders and repeats a bit, but it's more subtle than what I usually see in Analog, and it kept me interested.
Three stars.
The Veteran, by Robert Conquest
Humans from the future, who have forgotten the art of war, summon someone from the past to lead them in a war against alien nasties. Unfortunately for them, the person they've found is a devout pacifist. But luckily, the fellow discovers the battle lust within that he needs to fulfill his role.
Rather offensive, simplistic, and for some reason, the aliens conquer our solar system in reverse order of distance from the Sun even though it's unlikely that they'd all be lined up so obligingly.
Two stars.
Snakebite!, by Alexander W. Hulett, M.D. and William Hulett
For some reason, Campbell saw fit to include this high school science project discussing the use of snake venom to produce antivenom blood serum in rodents. As an actual article, it might have been mildly interesting, but in its current form, it's pretty pointless.
Two stars.
The Mischief Maker, by Richard Olin
by John Schoenherr
A story told in epistolary, Maker describes how a crackpot professor with a grudge stumbles across the great power of the Law of Analogy, which he uses to destroy the leaders of America through various bits of voodoo and witchcraft. Truth be told, my eyes glazed over when the author mentioned the Hieronymous Machine, that psychic amplifier requiring no power source that editor Campbell is so enamored of.
Last but not least, we have the continuation of Reynolds' serial that began last month. When last we'd seen the assassin impersonating Rog Bock, shareholder in the colonial venture on New Arizona, his masquerade had been discovered by at least one other shareholder.
Part 2 begins with the colony ship Titov landing on its virgin planet destination, so closely resembling Earth as to be a near twin. The rapaciousness of the shareholders' goal becomes clear as the 2000 colonists find they have virtually no rights, that the shareholders plan to sell the valuable resource rights to outside entities almost immediately, and that the crew of the ship largely comprise ex-military personnel to make them a ready police force to keep the settlers in line.
Unrest threatens to boil over as the colony teeters on the brink of collapse, reeling from colonist indolence and sabotage by unknown persons – but by the end of this installment, they all have bigger concerns to worry about…
Again, Pioneer has only the barest trappings of science fiction. Nevertheless, this is one of Reynolds' more deft tales, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
It did manage to beat out the disappointing Amazing (2.6), IF (2.3), and the truly awful Gamma (1.5), however.
There were just two and a half pieces written by women (one was co-written) out of 58: 4.3%. Surprisingly, the women-penned tales were all in the UK mags, which are usually all stag. No women authors were included in either of the "All Star" Galaxy and F&SF issues this month, which is a real shame. Where are Evelyn Smith and Margaret St. Clair?
Perhaps they are planning to return with a bang. I certainly expect to herald their next stories with fireworks!
![[March 8, 1970] They say that it's the institution… (April 1970 <i>Galaxy</i> and the incomplete Court)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700308galaxycover-412x372.jpg)
![[February 16, 1970] Unassailable Fortresses? A Full-Five pair of issues: (<i>Vision of Tomorrow #6</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/VOT6d-446x372.png)
![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers-672x372.jpg)
![[October 31, 1965] Finished and Unfinished Business (November 1965 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/651031cover-672x372.jpg)
![[September 30, 1965] Big and Little Bangs (October 1965 <i>Analog</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/650930cover-672x372.jpg)
