[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
by Gideon Marcus
The Long Loud Silence, by Wilson Tucker
It's been a while since we've heard from Wilson Tucker, fan-turned-pro-but-still-very-much-a-fan. Hence, I was delighted to see that he had a new book out last month. Except, of course, it's not new at all, as I soon found out.
by John Boston
The Sublime Don’t Work Here No More
. . . Not that it showed up very often when it did. But the previous issue, which at last attained the status of “not bad,” raised hopes, now dashed again.
The theme of this August 1966 Amazing is plainly announced on the cover, a crude and silly-looking image by James B. Settles, from the back cover of the July 1942 Amazing, titled Radium Airship of Saturn. You might also think that it doesn’t make much sense, but you’d be wrong! What you see is actually the top two-thirds of the 1942 version; what you’re missing is the surface of Saturn, and a caption: “The motor in this air-ship is a disintegrating rocket-blast caused by the breaking down of a copper core by a stream of powerful radium rays concentrated on it. It acts like a giant fireworks rocket.” It’s science!
by James B. Settles
Inside, the theme is carried forward with the conclusion of the Murray Leinster serial begun in June, a new novelet by Philip K. Dick, and five reprinted stories, particulars below. The brightest spot in the issue is the absence of an editorial, though the usual brief and praiseful letter column is present.
While the editor misses no chance to bad-mouth the magazine’s prior regime, directly and through his selection of letters to publish, one thing has remained constant, and has seemingly intensified: the abominable proofreading. (“Strickly speaking,” indeed.)
There's also a different sort of difficulty facing Amazing and Fantastic now. It's been rumored for a while that they are not paying the authors for the reprinted material, which is now confirmed for those not plugged into the more authoritative gossip channels. Kris Vyas-Myall has helpfully flagged the new issue of the fanzine Riverside Quarterly, in which the editor mentions that he confirmed with Kris Neville that he did not get paid for his recently reprinted story, and confirmed with Damon Knight, president of the newly constituted Science Fiction Writers of America, that this is the general practice.
I suppose this may reflect the publishing practice prevalent in earlier years of buying "all rights" (sometimes simply by so noting on the author's check, with no more formal contract than that). So maybe it's legal, but it stinks. Knight has called on the members of SFWA to boycott the publisher until it changes its ways, and editor Leland Sapiro suggests that readers do the same with the magazines. I'd take that advice, but duty dictates otherwise.
Stopover in Space (Part 2 of 2), by Murray Leinster
Murray Leinster’s latest Western treads a familiar path. There’s a new sheriff, but he’s not really quite in town yet, because somebody doesn’t want him there, and it probably has to do with the stagecoach full of gold that is expected to arrive any day now. It seems like business as usual from the author of Kid Deputy, Outlaw Guns, and Son of the Flying ‘Y’.
Oh, wait. Sorry. Wrong rut. Trying again:
In Murray Leinster’s latest space opera, Lieutenant Scott of the Space Patrol is on his way to take over his first command, Checkpoint Lambda, a station orbiting the star Canis Lambda, whose system is of no special interest except that no fewer than six space lanes cross there. (Didn’t know space has lanes? People established them, I suppose so no one will get lost.) En route, Scott learns that several passengers had been supposed to leave Lambda on a ship recently, but didn’t, under peculiar circumstances—and one of them was “a girl.” This bears repetition, to the author and to Scott; a few pages later, Scott is reviewing the available facts, and notes that “passengers—including a girl—hadn’t left the checkpoint when they should.”
by Gray Morrow
Now, what could be happening? Scott doesn’t know, but he does know the Golconda Ship is expected to show up at Lambda in the near future. That ship is owned by a bunch of guys who went somewhere nobody knows and came back with a load of “treasure” which made them rich, and they go back for more every four years or so. What kind of treasure? Gold, platinum, radioactives, miracle cures from an unknown planet, the secret wisdom of an ancient civilization? Doesn’t say, now or at any other point until the end of the story. For the author’s purposes, you don’t need to know. It’s just a game piece.
So what seems to be going on here? Owlhoots! Er, sorry. Gangsters! Scott is strongly discouraged from debarking onto Checkpoint Lambda, but insists, and finds himself going through the motions of normality with some slovenly types pretending to be the station crew. He meets their nominal mastermind, one Chenery, who pretends to know Scott—and, before too long, he encounters the real power, whom Chenery recruited, and who is known as—Bugsy! He is there to provide and direct the muscle, er, blastermen.*
* No, Bugsy and the Blastermen did not play at last Saturday’s sock hop. That was somebody else.
So, here are the pieces in play: a good guy, some bad guys, treasure to be fought over, “a girl” to be protected. What else do we need? Oh yes, an external menace. How about the Five Comets? The Canis Lambda system has no planets—they all blew up eons ago, and the Checkpoint is attached to one of the bigger pieces—but it has some really fine comets, and they are all going to arrive at about the same time, right athwart the Checkpoint’s orbit—and there’s no astrogator, except for Scott! (One might ask why the powers that be wouldn’t put the Checkpoint in some other location than the entirely predictable convergence point of multiple comets, but one would be wasting time to do so.)
The “girl”—an adult woman, of course—does have a name, Janet, though no others are disclosed. Her full name would have to be (apologies to Alfred Hitchcock) Janet S. MacGuffin (“S” for Secondary), since she drives a part of the plot. One of Scott’s challenges is to keep her safe from . . . well, let her tell it. She says that Chenery “did keep the others from—harming me.” Such an eloquent dash!
But clearly, as in last year’s Killer Ship, women have no role in tough situations other than to create the need for men to protect them. At one point, Scott parks Janet for safekeeping in one of the Checkpoint’s lifeboats, gives her a snap course in operating it if necessary, and reassures her: “It’s not a very good chance. But there aren’t many women who could make it a chance at all. I think you can.” She doesn't have to try. Later, though, Scott gives her something to do—maneuver the station to avoid comet debris while he’s busy elsewhere—and she blows it. But he promises himself not even to hint at criticizing her, and at the end, after all is safely resolved, she is performing women’s other function in Leinster’s fiction as she and Scott get better acquainted.
This one is a little less vapid than Killer Ship, and considerably less irritating, since it lacks the constant reminders that interstellar travel will be just like the eighteenth century. It’s just as verbose as Killer Ship, but the padding is a little better connected to what is actually going on in the story, and there is a bit more cleverness to the plot. So, two stars for this played-out and left-behind author.
Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday, by Philip K. Dick
The other new story is Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday, by the more-prominent-every-day Philip K. Dick, which once more vindicates my warning: when big names show up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it. This is a story about time running backwards. It starts with a guy getting up in the morning (wait a minute—morning?), getting some dirty clothes to put on, and picking up a packet of whiskers to glue evenly onto his face, presumably to be absorbed over the course of the day. So where do these whiskers come from, and who puts them into packets, and how are they distributed? What happens if you run out? And why does anyone bother with them?
by Gray Morrow
It goes on. People begin conversations with “good-bye” and end with “hello,” but they don’t talk backwards in between. Et cetera. Sorry, it doesn’t work. PKD’s specialty is making preposterous ideas at least momentarily plausible, but this one is too long a stretch. It’s not enough for the reader to suspend disbelief; for this story you’d have to shoot it out of a cannon.
There’s more, of course, but not better. Dick does have enough knack as a storyteller to keep things readable as the reader fumes over the contradictions, so, two stars.
The Voice of the Void, by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Voice of the Void was John W. Campbell, Jr.’s fourth published story, from the Summer 1930 Amazing Stories Quarterly, and at first it’s sort of refreshing: the story of humanity’s quest for survival as the sun is burning out, first disassembling large parts of the solar system and moving pieces closer to the sun, then looking for a new home around a younger or longer-lived star.
by Hans Wessolowski
The story is about 98% character- and dialogue-free, though the astronomer Hal Jus has several cameos along the way. Instead, it chronicles a long course of human discovery and problem-solving, grandiose and grave in equal measure. It is a little reminiscent of Edmond Hamilton’s Intelligence Undying of a few issues back, if that story had been administered a mild sedative.
But things turn dark soon enough. Humanity wants Betelgeuse for its new home. But it turns out there’s no vacancy there—that system is inhabited by energy beings who don’t take kindly to human invasion. Allegedly they are not intelligent, but their facility at fatally repelling unwanted visitors suggests otherwise. Now, Betelgeuse is not necessary to human survival. There’s another star handy; it doesn’t have planets, but the human fleet is so large that humanity could hang out for a few years in orbit and build some suitable planets. But we want Betelgeuse! So the indigenes have to go, and are exterminated in a siege of human-devised energy rays.
Well, that puts a damper on things. Gratuitous genocide can ruin one’s whole reading experience. Two stars with clothespin on nose.
The Gone Dogs, by Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert’s The Gone Dogs (November 1954 issue) is a slightly more interesting bad story than many, rather crudely written—surprisingly so, since it appeared only a year before Herbert’s much more capable and ambitious Under Pressure a/k/a The Dragon in the Sea. On the other hand, it’s free of the turgidity of his current work, especially the characters’ internal monologues about the motives and intentions of one another. Pick your poison.
In the story, an artificially mutated virus is killing off all the world’s dogs, abetted by the fact that humans carry the virus; how to save the species? One solution, highly unauthorized, is to give the last few to the Vegans, who are trying to breed dogs, or something like them. Matters are enlivened along the way by a psychotic dog lover who’s determined to grab one of the last living dogs for herself (and will kill it with the virus she’s carrying). At the end there's a slightly silly and anticlimactic twist.
One thing that’s annoying here is the hyper-facile and acontextual (thoughtless, for short) deployment of standard components from the SF warehouse. At one point the main character needs to dodge a congressional subpoena. What better way than to flee to Vega? All by himself, with a forged pass to a faster-than-light spaceship which any idiot, or at least a biologist, can apparently navigate solo across interstellar distances, without notice and whenever the need arises. There’s no reason in the rest of the story to believe in this capability. This sort of thing was common in ‘50s SF but that doesn’t make it more palatable. Two stars.
The Pent House, by David H. Keller, M.D.
David H. Keller, M.D., is in the position, unusual for him, of providing the least ridiculous story in the issue, chiefly because he essays so little. The Pent House, from the February 1932 Amazing, is a minor exercise in benign crankiness. A rich guy who is also a doctor discovers that humanity is about to be wiped out by the spread of a cancer germ, so he sets up a nice sealed-off apartment on top of a tall building, makes arrangements for a generous supply of life’s necessities and amenities, and advertises for a couple who really like each other to take on a lucrative job for five years. The lucky winners persuade him to stay with them in the (large) apartment.
by Leo Morey
Blissful years pass. The woman of the couple is not feeling well, so the old rich doctor goes in to look at her and some hours later tells the husband, “It’s a girl.” He hadn’t noticed his wife’s pregnancy. Maybe this is not the least ridiculous story here after all.
More time passes, the five years are up, and the old guy goes downstairs to check things out. Turns out the cancer epidemic was thwarted by medical science. So things are the same? No—noisier, dirtier, generally less civilized (to summarize an extensive rant). “It seemed to me that the world has escaped the cancer death so it could die from neurasthenia,” pronounces the doctor. He’s ready to pay the couple the fortune they have earned and bid them adieu, but the wife says forget it, just order up some more supplies and let’s lock the door for another five years of "Heaven in a penthouse." Two stars for competent rendering discounted for triviality.
The Man Who Knew All the Answers, by Donald Bern
The Man Who Knew All the Answers, from the August 1940 Amazing, is bylined Donald Bern, who was actually Al Bernstein, who has half a dozen or so credits in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures in 1940-42, and nothing else in the SF magazines. Frankly, just as well. This is a silly story about a nasty guy named Scuttlebottom, who stumbles (literally) into Ye Village Book Stall, and encounters the proprietor (“He wore a pince-nez. He looked exactly like a person who wears a pince-nez.”), who sells him a book called The Dormant Brain. The book teaches him to become telepathic, so now he knows what everybody thinks of him, which is unpleasant, and he then comes to a contrived bad end as a result of his new talent. One star per the ground rules, despite this story’s utter lack of any reason for existing.
The Metal Martyr, by Robert Moore Williams
Robert Moore Williams’s The Metal Martyr, from the July 1950 Amazing, is a mildly clever but overall pretty silly story about a robot, named Two, who develops the delusion that he is a man—this in the far future, long after a rumored rebellion by robots against humans, and the fall of human civilization. Two flees the robot enclave to avoid having its brain dissolved and replaced, and comes across a couple of humans, named Bill and Ed, never mind the intervening millennia. Two visits them at their home cave, but some of the humans get scared and threaten it, so Two flees deeper into the cave. There it discovers the remains of an ancient mining site full of machinery, skeletons, and books explaining the past and how things got to their present metal-poor state—and showing no robots, revealing that humans once did just fine without them. Two recovers from its delusion of humanity. After giving the humans their past back (although they, unlike robots, can’t read), Two heads back to robotdom and its rendezvous with the acid vat.
by Edmond B. Swiatek
Williams was once a titanically prolific contributor to pulps of all genres, but most frequently SF and fantasy, and within them, most frequently to Ray Palmer’s Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, where he was part of the regular crew that filled those magazines with juvenilia. Palmer was gone before this one appeared, but it is true to the tradition. Two stars, charitably.
Summing Up
There’s not much to say. The last issue finally achieved consistent readability, a first for the Sol Cohen regime. Now, back into the murk and muck.
by David Levinson
Starting with a Bang
This month, we note with regret the passing of Monsignor Georges Lemaître on June 20th, at the age of 71. You are likely wondering who that was and what a Catholic priest has to do with the sort of things we usually discuss here at the Journey. Though not well known in America, Msgr. Lemaître was one of the most important theoretical astronomers of this century. After earning his PhD. in mathematics in his native Belgium, he spent a year at Cambridge under Arthur Eddington, who introduced him to modern cosmology, followed by a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Harlow Shapley. In 1927, he published a paper in a minor Belgian journal in which he proposed that the red shift of other galaxies could be explained by an expanding universe. That was two years before Edwin Hubble published his theory of a relationship between velocity and distance for extragalactic bodies. Lemaître also made a first estimation of the constant now called the Hubble constant.
Then in 1931, he suggested that the vectors of all the objects could be tracked backwards to a single point. He dubbed this the “primeval atom”. This is the beginning of the theory which Fred Hoyle called the “big bang” in contrast to his favored steady-state theory. The evidence in favor of Lemaître’s theory has mounted over the years, and it now looks to be the best explanation for the beginning of the universe. The Monsignor was also a mathematician and one of the first people to use computers for cosmological calculations. He was elected to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1946 and served as its president since 1960. Although a devout Catholic, he firmly believed that science and religion were not in conflict, but nevertheless should not be mixed.
Lemaître with Robert Millikan and Albert Einstein following a lecture at the California Institute of Technology in 1933.
Ending with a Whimper
They say an author should try to come up with a good opening line, or hook, to grab the reader’s attention. Things like “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” “It was a pleasure to burn,” or (one of my favorites) “If I had cared to live, I would have died.” It’s important to start with a bang, but all too often writers forget about a satisfying ending. Stories taper off into nothing, plot threads are never tied up, or ridiculous bits of action are introduced out of nowhere to get the author out of a corner they painted themselves into. Quite a few of the stories in this month’s IF start off promisingly, if not with a bang, and end not with a whimper, but a resounding thud.
No matter what the Table of Contents says, this outer space construction site has nothing to do with The Foundling Stars. Art by McKenna
Continue reading [July 2, 1966] The Big Thud (August 1966 IF)
Don't miss tomorrow's exciting Adventure-themed episode of The Journey Show, taking you to the highest peaks, the deepest wildernesses, the coldest extremes, the vacuum of space, and the depths of the sea. April 3 at 1PM — book your (free) ticket for adventure now!)
by David Levinson
They’re on our side (I believe)
There’s no question that French President Charles de Gaulle has a larger-than-life, albeit rather prickly, personality. It stood him in good stead through the War and in midwifing the Fifth Republic a few years ago. It’s also a big part of what underlies his “politics of grandeur”. Alas, it also makes him a sometimes troublesome partner on the world stage. As early as 1958, he was urging a greater role for France in NATO, kicking against the traces of the Anglo-American “special relationship”. In 1959, he pulled the French Mediterranean fleet and air defenses from NATO command and banned the United States from positioning nuclear weapons in France. A year later, he even tried to renegotiate the NATO treaty, but no other member nation supported him. He was fairly quiet during the Kennedy administration and showed great solidarity during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he’s up to his old tricks again.
French President Charles de Gaulle announcing that France will go her own way.
In February, de Gaulle declared that the changed world order has “stripped NATO of its justification” and demanded French control of all foreign troops and bases in France when the current NATO agreement ends in 1969. Apparently, he decided that was too far in the future. On March 7th, he ordered all foreign troops and equipment removed from France by next year. Two days later, France formally withdrew its officers from the NATO unified command, assumed full control of the 70,000 French troops in Germany and announced that they will close all allied bases that don’t surrender to French control. President Johnson appears to have taken all this with the poise of a matador performing a verónica, with the faith that de Gaulle can be brought around in a time of need, though there is a rumor he instructed Secretary of State Dean Rusk to ask if that withdrawal includes the thousands of American war dead in French cemeteries. “De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.”
Unearthing the past
Oftentimes, what we think we know about the past and how we got where we are is simply wrong. Learning the truth may make us change our course, shatter our identity or turn the whole world upside down. Quite a lot of this month’s IF features characters facing the consequences of just such a revelation.
Supposedly from Silkies in Space. Silkies don’t need spacesuits. Art by Schelling
Continue reading [April 2, 1966] Hidden Truths (May 1966 IF)
by David Levinson
Some people are objectively better at some things than everybody else. Sandy Koufax can pitch a baseball better than almost anybody, and Muhammad Ali is arguably the best boxer we’ve seen in his weight class in a long time.
The problem arises when that excellence in a specialized area leads to an assumption of excellence in other, unrelated areas. I certainly wouldn’t turn to either of the aforementioned men for suggestions on nuclear policy or to bring peace to South-east Asia. Worse still is when whole groups assume superiority over others based solely on an accident of birth.
Heart of Darkness
Last month, I discussed the difficulties faced by the United Kingdom in handing over power to the locals in Rhodesia due to an unwillingness on the part of the white government under Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front to share power with Black Rhodesians. Alas, the situation has now collapsed completely. On November 5th, the colonial governor declared a state of emergency, blaming Smith and two African nationalist organizations, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and the Zimbabwe African National Union.
Ian Smith signs the Unilateral Declaration of Independence
On the 11th, the Smith government unilaterally declared independence. Within hours, the United Nations Security Council condemned the action 10-0 with France abstaining. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson has been granted the authority to rule Rhodesia by decree, though what good that might do is hard to see. Wilson steadfastly refuses a military solution and expects economic embargoes to force Smith to capitulate. But with two neighboring nations, South Africa and the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, more than willing to ignore any embargoes, it is likely to be a long time before we see a resolution to this situation.
Conflicts Great and Small
Fittingly, there’s plenty of superiority, assumed and otherwise, in this month’s IF. Let’s get to it.
This art for “Cindy-Me” bears absolutely no relation to the story. Art by Morrow
Continue reading [December 2, 1965] Superiority Complex (January 1966 IF)
by David Levinson
War is something of a constant in human history, with nearly every generation facing at least one. Fifty years ago, the great powers of Europe – with a late assist from the United States – fought the “war to end war” (a phrase probably coined by H. G. Wells). Twenty years later, we got to do it all again. And ever since, brushfire wars have flared up around the globe almost continually. War permeates our language and culture even in times of peace. In his State of the Union address last year, President Johnson referred to his Great Society program as a “war on poverty”. It even shows up in our entertainment: war movies are popular; there must be half a dozen TV shows in the new fall line-up set during the War or with military themes (more if you count spy shows); and one of the current best selling novels is a barely fictional account of the U. S. Army’s special forces, The Green Berets. Sometimes it’s enough to make you believe we really are on the Eve of Destruction.
The rawness of the recording makes it that much more powerful
The War in Viet Nam
On August 5th, America got a rather shocking look at the war in Viet Nam. CBS reporter Morley Safer accompanied a Marine unit to the village of Cam Ne, where they came under sporadic fire from the Viet Cong. Communist forces soon withdrew as the Marines advanced. As they entered the village, the Americans found a number of entrenchments and a few booby traps. Their orders were to destroy any village from which they received fire, so the villagers were herded into the nearby fields, and the Marines set fire to the homes with flamethrowers and cigarette lighters. Despite the villagers’ pleas to be allowed to remove their personal belongings, everything, including all the rice stores, was destroyed. Four old men who couldn’t understand the soldiers’ English were arrested. The public is understandably outraged. Alas, most of the ire seems to be directed at CBS and Mr. Safer. President Johnson is also said to be livid.
A Marine uses his lighter to set fire to a peasant hut
War at the foot of the Roof of the World
On August 5th, several thousand Pakistani soldiers crossed into Indian-controlled Kashmir disguised as civilian locals. The belief was that the local Muslim population would rise up and welcome their coreligionists. Instead they reported the intruders to the Indian authorities. Ten days later, the Indian army crossed the ceasefire line. Thus far, both sides have made progress. As this is written, India has captured the Haji Pir pass, roughly 5 miles inside Pakistani territory, though there are also reports of a massive push by Pakistani forces. Hopefully, another ceasefire can be brought into effect and a long-term peaceful solution can be found.
Indian forces in the Haji Pir pass
War across time and space
War is also a prominent feature of this month’s IF. As one war ends, another begins, along with a couple more and a very uneasy peace negotiation.
There are three living being depicted here. Art by Gaughan
Continue reading [September 6, 1965] War and Peace (October 1965 IF)
For your reading pleasure, Galactic Journey presents a quintet of the newest books in this month's Galactoscope…
by Victoria Silverwolf
The Prodigal Sun, by Philip E. High
I'm sitting here sipping some Earl Grey tea, nibbling a Bendicks Bittermint, listening to the Beatles on the radio; am I still in Tennessee? I must be, because I'm holding Ace paperback F-255 in my hand, and that's an American publisher. Then I take a closer look, and notice that the author is British. I guess there's no way of getting around it; I'm a walking anglophile.
Philip E. High may not be very well known to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, but his stories have appeared in UK publications for about a decade. I've had a chance to read a handful of them in New Worlds, thanks to fellow Traveler Mark Yon, who is very generous with lending copies of the magazine to Yanks.
High also had the story Fallen Angel published in the June 1961 issue of Analog. Our host was not impressed by it. Overall, High seems to be a competent, if undistinguished, writer of science fiction. Will his first novel confirm that opinion? Is it worth forty cents? Let's find out, starting with the front cover.
Was he there to teach Earth – or to rule it?
Well, that's a fairly interesting teaser. The cover art is all right, I suppose, although it doesn't really grab me. Let's take a look inside.
They wanted his secrets, but feared his presents
That should say presence, I think.
Next we have a cast of characters. That's a nice touch, as it allows me to flip back to the front when I forget who somebody is. My only complaint is that it leaves out some important names. Anyway, let's move on to the text. Like most science fiction novels, it's well under two hundred pages long, so it's not a major investment in time.
The background is complex, requiring a lot of expository narration and dialogue. Long before the novel begins, Earthlings settled a few extra-solar planets. They ran into aliens, at about the same level of technology, who wanted one of these worlds for themselves, and a long and bloody interstellar war followed. Eventually the humans won, but only at the cost of turning Earth into a brutal dictatorship. Anyone suspected of disloyalty undergoes involuntary psychological conditioning, so that rebellious thoughts cause intense physical pain.
Into this dystopian world comes our hero, a young man named Peter Duncan. As an infant, he was the only survivor of an accident in space, and was rescued by highly advanced aliens. The rulers of Earth see him as a potential threat, but also as a possible source of technological secrets. He has plans of his own, which I won't describe here, as they are not fully revealed until the end of the book.
The complicated, fast-moving plot also involves a bodyguard, a reporter, and a businessman who undergo important changes in their relationship with Duncan. Thrown into the mix are enemy aliens, held as prisoners of war after hostilities end. There is also a secret underground civilization, a love interest for the hero, and yet another set of aliens. The novel shifts point of view often, sometimes several times within a single scene.
Near the end, developments come at a furious pace. The revelation of Duncan's scheme, and the explanation of the novel's punning title, go beyond the limits of credulity.
The book is full of interesting ideas; maybe too many. Its basic theme can be expressed as Love Conquers All, which is not what you expect from a science fiction adventure story. Many of the secondary characters are intriguing, although the protagonist is rather bland. Often a villain turns out to be more complex than first thought, and earns the reader's sympathy. The author's style is serviceable at best, with some clumsy phrasings. Overall, it's a mixed bag, worth reading once, if you can spare a quarter, dime, and nickel, but not destined to become a timeless classic.
Three stars.
The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber
by Jason Sacks
Cover by Bob Abbett
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber is an odd book, a combination of two disparate elements which never quite come together for me.
The core plot of the story is that a new planet, nicknamed the Wanderer, has appeared in our solar system — and in fact appears in almost exactly the same spot as our moon. At first nobody knows what to make of this new celestial body, but most people feel a combination of awe and confusion about what this new interstellar visitor might mean and what its impact might be on our world.
Quickly, though, a tragedy which once was unimaginable becomes inevitable. The moon begins to disintegrate under the gravity of The Wanderer, which unleashes a devastating level of natural destruction. Because The Wanderer has a higher gravity than the moon, ocean tides increase geometrically in power, terrible tidal waves hit all oceans, earthquakes strike in California, rising ocean currents open Lake Nicaragua to the ocean, and floods strike much of the United Kingdom.
In the midst of this utter destruction, Leiber shows us the hearty survivors who battle the effects of the devastation. We follow a band of travelers in Florida who encounter unexpected racism, a group of UFO enthusiasts in California who battle tsunamis, violence and some actual flying saucers, a lunar explorer who sees the crisis up front, and a panoply of other ordinary and extraordinary people, from South Africa to Vietnam to New York to a lone sailor piloting a ship across the Atlantic.
The scenes with these characters provide The Wanderer with much of its power and momentum, as readers are swept up in the terrifying and all-too-human adventures of these hearty and terrified people. In fact, if Leiber had focused exclusively on the people and left the reason for the destruction a mystery, this might have been an even more satisfying book.
Instead, Leiber shows us the reason for the Wanderer’s presence. In those sections, the book falters. The reason the Wanderer journeys to our solar system is that the Earth is one of the remaining backwaters in the universe that’s not yet settled by a group of extraterrestrial beings looking to civilize nearly all of known space. Those beings need to use our solar system as a kind of refueling station.
The Wanderer is actually an artificial planet, filled with hundreds of levels of civilizations inhabited by creatures and cultures nearly unimaginable to most humans. Piloting the ship is a super-brilliant catlike creature named Tigerishka who captures one of the lunar explorers and explains to him the background of the plot. A rebel against the civilizers, Tigerishka is soon captured and put on trial before she runs away from her fate — but not before she and the human have some extraterrestrial intercourse.
Leiber spins up an epic tale with some memorable characters and startling situations, but the work feels a bit undercooked to me. The two key elements of the plot never quite connect with each other and the space trial comes from out of nowhere. There is precious little foreshadowing of Tigerishka’s presence, and I found the idea and execution of her to be a bit pulpy. I kept imagining the cover being similar to a Gernsback pulp with an attractive human body attached to a mysterious feline face.
Still, this is the kind of epic novel which would make for a fine film and likely a nomination for the award named for Mr. Gernsback. While I won’t be voting for it in next year’s Hugos, it’s easy see Mr. Leiber’s entertaining though flawed creation taking home honors.
Rating: three stars
[you can purchase this book or check it out at the library]
Marooned, by Martin Caidin
by Gideon Marcus
Some science fiction propels us to the farthest futures and remotest settings. The latest book by Martin Caidin, better known by his aeronautical and space nonfiction, takes place on the very edge of tomorrow. When the Soviets stun the world early in 1964 with the launch and docking of a pair of multi-crew spacecraft, NASA is directed to fill the space between Gordo Cooper's last Mercury flight and the increasingly delayed Gemini program. Major Richard Pruett, a (fictional) member of the second cadre of astronauts, is tapped for a 49 orbit Mercury endurance mission, launched in July.
For three days, all goes perfectly, but at the moment of deceleration, Pruett's retrorockets refuse to fire, stranding the fellow in space. Now, with just enough oxygen to last two more days, the hapless astronaut must somehow find a way to last three days — until the drag of the upper atmosphere seizes Mercury 7 and sends it plunging toward the Earth.
There is no question but that Caidin did his homework for the book. Undoubtedly, the author has enough material for a lengthy reference on the Mercury program and the astronaut training process in general. But within the gears and hard science, Caidin manages to draw a compelling profile of Pruett, sort of an amalgam of the seven Mercury astronauts. From his first flight in a propeller plane, through a bloody stint in Korea, and past the rigorous astronaut indoctrination, Pruett gives the reader a first-person view of the experiences that make up the humans beneath the silver sheen of the spacesuit.
Marooned shines most brightly in the first and last thirds of the book. The solitude and hopelessness Pruett's plight is vividly portrayed, and the pages fly up through about page 100. The journey through astronaut training is more clinical, with few dramatizations to liven it up. It will be interesting to neophytes, but any of us who read the Time Life series on the Mercury 7 (or the compilation We Seven) will find it dry. Things pick up again when we learn of the daring rescue attempts being assembled to save Pruett from being America's first casualty in space.
With Marooned, Caidin accomplishes two goals in one book, delivering an exciting read and providing perhaps the most detailed summary of the Mercury program for the layman yet put to paper.
Four stars.
ace double F-261
The Lunar Eye, by Robert Moore Williams
Cover by Ed Valigursky
It is the year 1973, and Art Harper owns a service station on the freeway to the launch pad where soon a giant rocket will take the first twelve men to the moon. His life had hitherto been one of complete and deliberate normality. But then, a woman appears claiming to be one of the Tuantha, a society of humans that had gone to the moon millennia before and established a secret, highly advanced civilization. She insists that Art is Tuanthan, too, placed with a human family like a changeling, and that he must come home. Further complicating the mix is Art's brother, Gecko, who, while human, managed to sneak into the Tuanthan moon city during one of the frequent inter-planet teleport trips. Now he wants to live in their lovely settlement, too.
The fly in the ointment is the upcoming lunar shot. The Tuanthans are convinced that, should the two societies ever meet, the Earthers will dominate and ultimately exterminate them, just as the Europeans slaughtered the American Indians. And so, the Tuanthans plan to sabotage the American lunar effort before the moon city is discovered.
This latest book by Robert Moore Williams stands in stark contrast to Caidin's hyer-realistic Marooned. Moore has been producing adventure stories since the '30s, and it shows. Eye reads like something written in 1948, lacking any comprehension of technological improvements since then. But the real flaws of the book are in its execution. It starts out excitingly enough, and the first half reads quite quickly. But then Art, Gecko, and the Tuanthan, Lecia, end up on the moon, and the whole thing becomes a slog of speeches and redundant scenes as the three are put on trial for treason for wanting to stop the destruction of the American moon rocket.
In fact, Williams' fiction production consists almost exclusively of novellas. It's pretty clear he has no heart or endurance for longer works, and the padding required to cross the novel-length finish line is tiresome and obvious. Finally, Eye is riddled with plot holes and story threads that go nowhere.
A promising but ultimately sloppy piece: Two and a half stars.
The Towers of Toron, by Samuel R. Delany
Cover by Ed Emshwiller
On the other hand, Chip Delany's new work, a sequel to last year's Captives of the Flame, reflects an upward trend. In the first book of the series, he introduced us to Toromon, capital of an island empire situated on Earth long after an atomic cataclysm. The cast of characters was bewilderingly large: the decadent and young King Uske, his cousin; Prince Let, who was smuggled into the custody of the smarter, psionically gifted forest people; the capable and canny Duchess Petra; the noble and former prisoner, Jon, who along with Petra had been rendered invisible in dim light by the radiations that girdle Toron's imperial boundaries; the paternal forest person, Arkor; Tel, a poor fisherman's son; Alter, a thief and acrobat; Clea, a brilliant mathematician…
It was all a bit much, but now that I see the author is planning on doing more with the world, I can understand why he introduced so many players. Towers does a fine job of continuing their stories, and I feel like I have a good handle on them all now.
Towers is set three years after Flame. The empire has rediscovered the technology of matter transfer and is busy exploring the devastated planet. A war has already been fought and won against the mutant insectoid tranu, and another is in progress against the mysterious ketzis. It is a strange war, fought in nearly impenetrable mists thousands of miles from home. The enemy is never seen, and its combatants (who include Tel, the fisherman's son), seem almost in a daze, unable to dwell much upon their pasts or their futures. Meanwhile, Toromon is in increasing turmoil. Prime Minister Chargill is assassinated. The evil seed of the fiery enemy from the first book is discovered hidden in the mind of King Uske. And Clea, seeking refuge in arcane mathematics after the death of her fiancee (that occurred in Flame), discovers a secret that could tear the entire empire asunder.
Tower is a significant improvement on Flame: better paced, more skillfully written, exciting. It is no mean feat to juggle all of these viewpoints and still maintain a coherent whole. Moreover, I appreciate the sheer variety of characters, including the prominence of several women.
I did find both fascinating and a little disturbing Delany's depiction of the three races of people that inhabit future Earth, with greater divergence than the paltry skin tone differences humanity has today. They are practically different species, with the baseline humans being seeming to be more imaginative (though not necessarily smarter) than the "neo-neanderthals," and the forest people occupying a mental rung above the humans. The neo-neanderthals are referred to as 'apes', and though they don't ever object, I can only imagine that the author (who is Black) is making a point.
If there's a down-side to the book, it's that it is a clear bridge to the next novel in the series, which has not yet come out. All the threads do come to a satisfying resolution at the book's end, but the aftermath, and the coming (final?) battle with the cosmic Lord of the Flames is left for later.
Three and a half stars, and kinder disposition toward the first book.
[(this book and the others in the series can be purchased here)]
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by Gideon Marcus
It was only a few years ago that Drs. Watson and Crick discovered DNA, that magical double-helix of protein molecules that are the blueprints for our genetics. Now we know that our biology is coded, like so many punch cards, and that's why people are people, puppies are puppies, amebae are amebae. An embryo with human DNA cannot grow up to be a horse. A bear-coded blastula won't transform in utero into a giraffe.
There is a coding that runs almost as deeply as that in our chromosomes. It derives from the society in which we are raised and the circumstances under which we grew. Thus, a Dixiecrat is not wont to clamor for Civil Rights, and no one in my family is likely to abandon shul for Mass.
Science fiction authors have their own genetic code. While writers can be more flexible than politicians or religionists, they nevertheless tend to remain of a type, composing in a style forged early in their career by the prevailing trends and markets at the time.
As evidence of this, I submit to you two short novels by a pair of authors whose output couldn't be more different despite appearing bound together within the pages of the recent Ace Double, #F-177.
The Star Wasps, by Robert Moore Williams
The world of the 21st Century is a tidy, orderly place. Free will is an illusion. People live for their jobs and medicate for their moods. Commerce and society hum along smoothly under the control of one Erasmus Glock, a shadowy figure whose hold on the strings of power is absolute.
There is a fly in the ointment, however — John Derek is a man who would set society free. With his base on the Moon, a cadre of die-hard loyalists, and his little glass spheres that instill a yearning for freedom, he is poised to lead a revolution.
Unfortunately, the ointment also has a wasp in the form of an invasion of interstellar killers called "the viral." Incorporeal blue creatures, invisible to most humans, have been inadvertently teleported to our planet by the well-meaning scientist, Dr. Cotter. These shimmering aurorae bring death to anyone they touch, and their numbers grow by the day. This plague threatens both the stultifying profiteering of Glock and the freedom-fighting agenda of Derek. Glock and Derek must work together, along with Cotter and Derek's new recruit, Jennie Fargo, to defeat the alien foe.
Robert Moore Williams was first published in the pre-Campbell days of Analog. He has since written more than a hundred stories for a variety of magazines, but his DNA was baked in the Golden Age of science fiction. The future world of The Star Wasps is an archaic, mechanistic one. Society simplistically hinges on the activities of a half-dozen people. There is a Resilient Woman Character whose primary role is to be the Love Interest. After the intriguing set-up, Wasps degenerates into a figurative car chase, with people running around and pulling levers until the enemy is defeated.
Also, Williams writes like he's still getting a penny a word, writing in a redundant manner that only gets worse as the story drags. Gems like:
As Jennie watched, with terror tightening the band around the bottom of her heart, the circle changed and became a ball of tiny dancing blue lights.
Under other circumstances, she would have thought the lights and the changing form and the color were beautiful.
Now she knew they were death.
Was death beautiful? Not to her. She wanted life.
The Coelacanth fish, thought to be long-extinct until a specimen was hauled out of the Indian Ocean in 1938, is what's known as "a living fossil." The Star Wasps is a similar relic from a time long passed. I'd throw it back. Two stars.
Warlord of Kor, by Terry Carr
The flip-side of F-177 is an entirely different matter. Terry Carr is a new writer, as well as a Big Name in the fan community. He is one of a new wave of authors steeped in the more nuanced works of the Digest Era of science fiction that began in 1949.
Kor is set on a dusty world at the edge of Terran settlement, the site of humanity's first encounter with living sentient aliens. The Hirlaji are a dying race of telepathic saurians, their once burgeoning culture reduced to a mere handful of aged specimens due to an unknown catalytic event thousands of years prior.
Lee Rynason is the archaeologist tasked to discover the mystery of this societal sea change. Why did the shift happen so abruptly? Why is Horng, possessor of the Hirlaji's race memory, so reluctant to divulge this secret?
Rynason's efforts are hampered by the ambitions of his superior, Rice Manning. Manning has designs on the governorship of the planet and is willing to scapegoat the Hirlaji as a threat to do so — especially when it appears that the aged reptiles might somehow be related to The Outsiders, a long-vanished alien civilization that left its traces throughout the galaxy.
Sketched in thumbnail, I suppose the plot of Warlord of Kor doesn't sound much better than that of The Star Wasps. The lurid title doesn't help either (Ace loves its lurid titles). But Kor is no pulpy tale. It is the sensitive story of first contact, of discovery, of racial understanding, and of morality — of a piece with Bone's The Lani People and Piper's Little Fuzzy in illustrating the worth and importance of other, different cultures.
Plus, the characters are beautifully drawn with a spare efficiency that Williams would have done well to emulate. In 97 pages, we learn far more about Rynason and Manning, as well as the other pivotal characters — the quietly strong colony quartermaster Mara Stephens, and the cynical heretic Rene Malhomme — than we do about William's characters in 126 pages. It doesn't hurt that Kor has a very satisfying ending.
If there's any drawback to Kor, it's that Rynason and Stephens seem a little slow on the uptake. I was always a step or two ahead of them in solving the mystery, even when they had access to the same clues as the reader. That's a small quibble, though. Warlord of Kor is an excellent, quick read, and it's worth the 40 cent book price all by itself. Four stars.
Speaking of collections of old and new, this month's Galaxy is a collection of stories by veterans and novices alike. Come see how this amalgam of generations fares in the Journey's next article. Stay tuned!
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