Tag Archives: robert silverberg

Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 6, 1968] The Stalemate Continues (July 1968 Amazing)

4 Comments


by John Boston

This July Amazing—wait, what?  You thought Amazing appeared in even-numbered months?  No more.  The mis-dating of the April issue as June means that what was to be the June issue has been pushed back—or at least the cover date has been—to avoid the confusion and likely loss of display time and sales had the publisher released a second issue dated June.  And Fantastic is pushed from July to August to keep these bimonthly magazines in alternate months rather than in direct competition. 

This issue looks a little better than the last.  There’s a new and seemingly higher grade of paper; the pages look less pulpy and the magazine is a bit thinner.  The cover, by Johnny Bruck, is lighter and more attractive than his usual; even though there’s a line of guys waving ray guns, for the foreground he’s borrowed another sort of cliché from Ed Emshwiller—guy with firm jaw, determined expression, and clenched fist staring out towards the viewer, like he just stepped off an Ace Double.  Relatively speaking, it’s a relief.


by Johnny Bruck

Once more, all but one item of fiction are reprints, though this issue’s exception is more considerable than some: House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany, described as a short novel (at 33 pages!) on the cover and contents page, though editor Harrison acknowledges in the letter column that it is actually an excerpt from Delany’s new novel Nova, forthcoming from Doubleday.  Delany’s name is misspelled on the cover and contents page and in Harrison’s editorial, spelled correctly on the story’s title page and in the letter column.  Are you getting tired of all this nit-picking?  So am I.  But the persistent sloppiness of this magazine continues to irritate.

Editor Harrison, clearly chafing under the reprint regime, continues to tout the non-fiction contents (seemingly the only part of the magazine that he actually controls) on the cover—“New Feature by HARRY HARRISON” (an editorial) and “New Article by ROBERT SILVERBERG POUL ANDERSON and LEROY TANNER” (the book review column).” There are also a new “Science of Man” article by Leon Stover (see below) and a London and Oslo Letter by Brian Aldiss, recounting his travels in Scandinavia.  The book review column includes Robert Silverberg’s thoughtful review of Brunner’s new novel Quicksand, Poul Anderson’s slightly celebrity-struck review of Asimov’s Mysteries, and two reviews by “Leroy Tanner,” a Harrison pseudonym.  One is a perfectly reasonable review of James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s A Torrent of Faces.  The other, of Algis Budrys’s The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn, spends more space (about a page!) denouncing Budrys for his review in another magazine of a book Harrison co-edited than it does on Budrys’s book.  This is distasteful to read and represents notably bad judgment on the editor’s part.

Harrison’s editorial, titled The Future of the Future, picks up where last issue’s mistakenly truncated editorial left off, reiterating his division of the world into SF-1, SF-2, and SF-3, and proceeding mostly to a series of platitudes.  (“SF-3.  This is wide open now and there are no rules. No one school is SF-3 and no one particular style or clique is any more important than the others.”) He does amusingly recount that he asked J.G. Ballard to tell him what inner space is, and he was about to answer, but just then someone interrupted them and the answer never came.  The letter column, with its traditional title Or So You Say, is back as well, for those who care.

House A-Fire, by Samuel R. Delany

Delany’s excerpt House A-Fire is about a bunch of overprivileged kids who are seemingly able to gallivant around the galaxy at whim.  We first meet Lorq von Ray, son of a mining magnate in the Pleaides Federation (Earth is in Draco), as a child.  Lorq’s parents are big shots in local politics.  They vacation (or something) on an off-the-map world called Brazillia where things are a little primitive; one of the local amusements is a variation on cockfighting.  There, he meets two other children, Prince Red and his sister Ruby Red; their father, Aaron Red, is a hyper-wealthy spaceship mogul from Earth, proprietor of Red-shift Ltd. (I guess Acme was taken.) Prince has an artificial right arm and is belligerently sensitive about it. 


by Gray Morrow

Young Lorq is of course brilliant and among other things, when he’s a little older, has his own spaceship, which he races in the New Ark regatta, coming in second, before heading off to a party thrown by Prince on Earth—in Paris, at the Ile St. Louis.  (“Caliban can make Earth in three days.”) He and his crew arrive and Prince immediately recruits them to rescue Che-ong, “the psychodrama star,” and her hangers-on, who have gotten stuck in a snowstorm in the Himalayas and upon rescue, prove to be a bunch of stereotypically air-headed teenagers.

At the party, everyone must have masks, and Prince has prepared an elaborate pirate mask for Lorq.  Delany has hinted to the reader, but kept Lorq in the dark, about Lorq’s father being involved in piracy.  A bit later, Lorq encounters Ruby Red, who has gotten pretty grown up since last seen, and who lets him in on the joke.  Prince shows up and tells Lorq to get away from his sister, they have a fight, and Prince lays Lorq out and messes up his face with his prosthetic fist.  Lorq’s crew carries him away and Ruby shows up on the river in her skimmer-boat and takes them all to the spaceport.  Later, in a final scene, we see Lorq, now back home, rich, and scarred, and contemplating his future.

This all sounds in summary like an overripe pulp space opera, but it is framed in some striking visualization and writing, as one would expect from Delany.  Like Lorq’s first glimpse of the mature Ruby Red:

“Then there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheek bones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face.  Her chin was wide, her mouth thin, red, and wider.  Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind—and watching her, he became aware of the river’s odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of a young woman.  But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away.  Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful sick with jealousy.”

Yeah, a bit hokey, but it’s good hokum, suitable to our modern age.  And keep in mind that this is obviously all stage-setting for what one can hope are more substantial doings in the novel it is mined from.  Four stars, optimistically.

Locked Worlds, by Edmond Hamilton

Next up, straight from the September 1929 Amazing Stories Quarterly, is Edmond Hamilton’s Locked Worlds, all 50 pages of it.  It’s a sort of mad scientist story.  Dr. Adams, head of Physics at Northeastern University (a real place!), brilliant but widely disliked, discovers that the seemingly loose electrons sometimes found in atoms are really evidence that matter partakes of two worlds; our world’s electrons going around in one direction, the other world’s going in opposite directions.  Room for everybody! 

The rest of the profession isn’t having it and mocks Adams, who is determined to show them and get his own back.  Shortly he disappears, leaving his apparatus and a pile of bluish clay behind.  His assistant Rawlins comes to narrator Harker with an awful suspicion—and the newspaper clippings to prove it, sort of—that Adams has fled to the other world and that he’s planning his revenge there (the clippings refer to large and small piles of blue clay found at various places around the Earth).  So what to do for Rawlins and Harker but reconstruct Adams’s apparatus, follow him into whatever world he’s gone to, and thwart him?

And so they do, finding themselves on a mostly barren world with a blazing white sun overhead and blue clay under their feet.  And then—the giant spiders attack! 


by Frank R. Paul

Now Hamilton does not seem just to be trading on arachnophobia here.  Going forward, he refers to these giant spiders as spider-men, and shows them with a fairly advanced civilization.  But still, they signify that a cliched plot is about to take off, featuring captivity, aerial escape, pursuit, return in force with Earth’s new allies the bird-men (the birds and spiders engage in a dogfight), confrontation with the mad Dr. Adams, some literal cliff-hanging, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

Well, that was tedious.  It’s not for lack of enthusiasm on Hamilton’s part.  A sample, as our heroes escape the spiders with Nor-Kan, the bird-man, in the latter’s aircraft:

“He whirled to the craft’s controls, opened its speed lever to the last notch, and sent the air-boat racing on toward the south in a burst of added speed.  The great flying-platforms swiftly leapt after us, hurtling through the air at immense speed and slowly drawing ever closer toward us moving obliquely toward our own course.  Closer they came, and closer, air-boat and flying-platforms cleaving the air at a velocity unthinkable; now we saw from the foremost of the platforms behind us a shaft of brilliant orange light that burned toward us at the same moment.  Nor-Kan swerved the air-boat to avoid it.  He turned toward us, motioned swiftly toward the long tube-like projector mounted on a swivel at the stern of our own air-boat, and which I had already noticed.

“ ‘The static-gun!’ he cried.  ‘There are a few charges left in it—try to stop them with it!’ ”

Back in 1929 that would have been enough to get everyone’s blood up.  But in this decadent age, hot pursuit by ray-bearing airborne spiders just doesn’t seem to make it any more.  Or maybe it would take Delany to bring the spider-men to life.  Two stars.

The Genius, by Ivar Jorgensen


Uncredited

The other reprints in this issue are all from the 1950s, which is not necessarily good news.  Ivar Jorgensen is present with The Genius, from the September 1955 Amazing, except that Mr. Jorgensen is not really present because he doesn’t exist, being a house name used variously by Howard Browne, Harlan Ellison, Paul W. Fairman, Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg, and Henry Slesar.  It is alleged in some circles that Randall Garrett is the mystery guest this time.  The story is a caveman epic, about old Zalu, who is trying to prove he’s still worth feeding so his grandson Cabo won’t bash his head in to get rid of him.  His plan doesn’t work, but Zalu does something rather significant en route to getting his head bashed in.  It’s short, readable, and mildly amusing.  Three stars.

The Impossible Weapon, by Milton Lesser


by Julian S. Krupa

None of the above can be said about Milton Lesser’s The Impossible Weapon (Amazing, January 1952), which is the kind of silly finger-exercise fluff that filled the back pages of the lower-level SF magazines in the 1950s.  Earth is losing a war to the League (League of what?  I forget), and our hero Stokes has figured out how to counter their super-weapon, but no one will listen to him, so in cahoots with a spaceman he meets in the wake of a barroom brawl, he commandeers a spaceship and takes off and proves he can do it.  Yeah, that oversimplifies a bit, but mercifully.  Stokes’s invention is silly, as is the supposed scientific rationale for it, as are all the other events from the beginning of the story to the end, so much so that I can’t bear to recount them.  Read the damn thing yourself if you must.  One star, too generously.

This Is My Son, by Paul W. Fairman


by Tom Beecham

Paul W. Fairman’s This Is My Son is from Fantastic for October 1955, during his two-year absence from the editorial masthead of that magazine.  It too is pretty dreadful.  Protagonist Temple, a young physicist with a fixation on getting a son, and his new wife are trying to reproduce, without success.  Temple has a great career opportunity and signs a contract taking him to South America for five years.  Jill is not pleased.  She wires him four months later that his son is due in five months.  But he can’t go back under his contract and if he breaks it he’ll be blacklisted.  After the five years he heads home to meet his son, and everybody’s happy, until he finds the manufacturer’s receipt for the android child, and reacts xenophobically.  Jill slaps him across the chops and then leaves after telling him, double-edgedly, that the child is as human as he is.  So he’s miserable for years, finally begins to see the error of his ways and sends the kid a gift.  Then the kid lands in the hospital after saving a couple of other kids from a fire.  Temple beats it to the hospital, the kid’s on the brink, so he offers an “old-fashioned blood transfusion” instead of the bottled plasma the nurse is about to give him.  Curtain, music swells, everything’s going to be fine.  It’s ridiculously contrived, sentimental, and manipulative, but at least demonstrates a little more craft than The Impossible Weapon.  Grading on the curve, barely two stars. 

Killer Apes—Not Guilty! , by Leon E. Stover

After the last two I am definitely in the mood for the contentious Dr. Stover, whose “Science of Man” article, Killer Apes—Not Guilty!, is suitably abrasive.  He takes on Robert Ardrey’s best-selling African Genesis from a few years ago, and he clearly has been waiting for his chance.  Ardrey attributed the bloody-minded and -handed character of homo sapiens to the apes from whom we descended.  Not so, says Stover; the apes were peaceful vegetarians (though not averse to the occasional grub or worm mixed in with their roughage), and the next step up (homo erectus) were carnivorous browsers, not carnivorous hunters.  We sapiens achieved our predatory status all on our own. 

Along the way Stover asserts with confidence a great deal about such subjects as the effect of domesticating fire on prehistoric social life, though without much explanation of how the dots were connected.  But he is also happy to patronize those of a different view, such as Ardrey’s favorite, the distinguished Professor Raymond Dart, late of the University of Witwatersrand: “Everybody is more than willing to let the old gentleman play with his pet theory that Australopithecus stood up to adult baboons and clouted them with humerus bones taken from antelopes.  Few take it seriously.” Good times!  Three stars.

Summing Up

Once more, business as usual at Amazing: signs of editorial vitality struggling to be seen beneath the clammy wet blanket of the publisher’s reprint policy, against the backdrop of negligent or indifferent production.  The stalemate continues.




4 Comments Leave A Comment
Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 18, 1968] Four Out of Six Ain't Bad (May 1968 Galactoscope)

8 Comments


by Victoria Silverwolf

Stranger in a Strange Time

I was greatly impressed by Robert Silverberg's recent novel Thorns. It seemed to mark a new direction for a prolific author of competent, if undistinguished, science fiction. Will his new book reach the same level of quality? Let's find out.

The Masks of Time, by Robert Silverberg


Cover art by Robert Foster.

Christmas Day, 1998. A naked man appears out of nowhere, floating down from the sky. This fellow calls himself Vornan-19, and he claims to come from the year 2999.

With the year 2000 approaching, members of a worldwide apocalyptic cult fill the streets with wild orgies of sex and destruction. As you'd expect, the arrival of Vornan-19 changes things. Is he a fraud? A sign of the impending end of the world? Or proof that Earth will survive for many years to come?

Let's slow down a bit, in the same way the novel does at this point, and introduce some important characters.

The narrator is Leo, a physicist. He's working on time reversal. So far, all he's been able to do is transform a particle into an antiparticle, sending it backwards in time, but also causing it to be instantly destroyed. He's convinced that honest-to-gosh time travel is impossible, and therefore he thinks Vornan-19 is a phony.

Jack is a brilliant graduate student. He's been working on the theory of obtaining all energy from an atom (without the pesky side effect of a nuclear explosion), but he's not interested in any practical applications. For unclear reasons, he drops out and goes to live with his stunningly beautiful wife Shirley in a remote part of the Arizona desert.

The United States government sends Leo and a few other scientists to act as tour guides for Vornan-19, of a sort. They really want these geniuses to figure out if he's truly from the future. (Even if he isn't, he could be useful in convincing the cultists that the world isn't going to end in the year 2000.)

What follows is an episodic account of Vornan-19's encounters with people of the twentieth century. He causes chaos at a billionaire's party, in a mansion that keeps changing shape. He seduces men and women. Vornan-19 remains a mystery, revealing very little about himself or the world one thousand years from now. He becomes an object of religious devotion, leading to the book's dramatic but enigmatic conclusion.

After the intensity of Thorns, this is a surprisingly leisurely book. (I believe it is also the author's longest novel, at about two hundred and fifty pages.) We spend a lot of time with Leo, Jack, and Shirley before the narrator goes off with Vornan-19.

There's also quite a bit of sex. Jack and Shirley are nudists, and pretty soon Leo joins in. The group of scientists following Vornan-19 around includes both women and men, and we get to learn who's sleeping with whom, and who wants to sleep with whom, and who isn't sleeping with whom. Leo spends time with two prostitutes, one supplied by a grateful U.S. government, the other working at a legal, automated brothel.

(I've heard that Silverberg writes a lot of so-called adult novels under various pseudonyms, so maybe he's gotten into the habit of including this sort of thing.)

There's even a sex scene that serves as the book's climax. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the obvious pun.) We also find out why Jack ended his research, and what that has to do with Vornan-19.

This is an elegantly written novel that held my attention throughout. As I've indicated, it's hardly a thriller; the reader needs to be patient to fully appreciate it. There's a touch of satire and some interesting speculation about the technology of the near future.

Four stars.


by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

The Programmed Man by Jeff and Jean Sutton

Programmed Man 1968 book cover

I sometimes like to read books by authors I know nothing about, in the hope of getting a nice surprise. Well, this one certainly is not nice!

What is there to like about this?
The plot? No, dull plodding sub-Reynolds spy nonsense.
The characters? Paper-thin, laden with racist stereotypes.
The style? Long run-on sentences and expository dialogue which are about as exciting as drying paint.

Feel free to miss out on such writing as:

"Are you talking about the Alphans or spacemen in general?"

"Spacemen in general." The Doctor lifted his eyes. "I'll have to admit, I often think the Alphans are more complicated than others."

"In what way?" asked York.

"They're rather inscrutable," Bendbow explained. "As a psychomedician, I realize they don't wear their emotions or thoughts as transparently as most of us. But that's a racial characteristic."

Don’t buy it. Don’t read it. Don’t even acknowledge it. See it coming down the street, run the other way.

Save yourself!

Indeed, so bad, so offensive is this book, with enough off-handed bigotry to make even John Campbell blush to publish it, that with the blessing of the Journey staff, we've inaugurated a brand new award for badness. If the Queen Bee is bestowed for conspicuous sexism (thank goodness we have a word for the phenomenon now!) then there is only one name for the "honor" The Programmed Man deserves:

The Grand Wizard.

Close up face from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
You have been warned.


by Robin Rose Graves

The Reproductive System by John Sladek


Is it an anatomical textbook? No, it's the debut novel of John Sladek.

Scientists want to create a self-replicating machine. Why? To get a government funded grant of course.

Quickly this invention gets out of hand, with robots consuming large quantities of metal and electricity, multiplying and converting other machines into robots, displacing humans from their homes, and even killing them.

The story follows a large cast of characters, ranging from scientists to soldiers, love interests, foreign spies, reporters, et cetera. At times, it’s difficult to follow, particularly in one fast paced section of the book where nearly every paragraph hops to another character’s perspective. With a number of names to follow, characters are best distinguished by their quirks, and while sometimes they feel more like caricatures than characters, it makes for a funny read.

The tone of this book reminds me of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Speaking of the latter, I can’t help but think this is a also response to the creation of the atomic bomb. The plot revolves around the negligent nature of scientific discovery without consideration of the consequences. Much like the atomic bomb, the reproductive system might solve a more immediate problem, but the lasting effects continue to hurt civilians who had nothing to do with the creation or any say in whether something like that should exist.

Possibly this is a response to Karel Capek’s play "R.U.R." a work that is referenced in the story. To spoil a forty year old play, the fatal flaw in the robot’s revolution is their dependency on humans to make more robots. I can see this being the inspiration for Sladek’s main conflict.

Author John Sladek

Though an American writer, Mr. Sladek is currently publishing overseas, and were it not for the hilarious title, my sister probably would not have bought this book as joke on her latest trip abroad. Hopefully it will come to the states soon.

I enjoyed reading this and it earned quite a few laughs from me. While lighter on the science side, The Reproductive System clearly comes from a love of science fiction, referencing many works that came before it. The ending is perhaps appropriately happy, though a bit too convenient for my taste, but I think that was intentional on Sladek’s part, ending on one last humorous critique of the genre.

I look forward to what Sladek will write next.

4 stars.


by Gideon Marcus

After Some Tomorrow, by Mack Reynolds

Are you a Mack Reynolds fan? Then you'll like this book because it is the essence of Mack Reynolds from top to bottom, incorporating all of his strengths and few of his weaknesses.

In brief: The time is the late 20th Century. The setting is the United American States. If you've read Reynolds' Joe Mauser stories, then you know this future Earth is both a utopia and a dead end. The Cold War still simmers, but the People's Capitalism of the UAS and the Communism of the SovWorld are now two sides of the same coin: automation has put most people out of work, and wealth is concentrated with the elite while everyone else is stuck in fairly rigid castes, most living on the dole and watching telly while tranked up on free drugs. Common Europe and the few neutral countries aren't much better off.

Mick Grant and Anna Enesco are scholarship students, awarded their grant from the Joshua Porsenna endowment for a very specific reason–both seem to have the talent of precognition. The plot thickens when the mysterious and (in most places) illegal Monad Foundation also offers both of them exorbitant grants. All the Monads want is for the two to study socio-economic texts, from Anarchism to Zapata, Communism to Technocracy. Throw in the involvement of both military and government intelligence, and you've got the makings for quite an exciting time! But Reynolds manages to throw in yet another twist before finishing this slim novel, revealing the identity of the mysterious Porsenna.

The pacing for this book is excellent. Not a single chapter concluded that didn't tempt me to move on to the next. The setting is fascinating and also disturbingly plausible, and the motivation of the Monadians makes a depressing amount of sense. Of course, this being Reynolds, the book is peppered with historical essays with subjects like the anarchist Bakunin and the Greek colony of Cumae. Somehow, Reynolds makes it work. Maybe it's because the subject material was germane or simply well-presented, but it never turned me off.

The only real disappointment I had was the Anna Enesco's evolution into a caricature. She is at first played for frigid but independent. Over time, she falls for Mick, but there's never really a pay-off scene that sells the attraction. It's just accepted as having happened. By the end, her dialogue is stilted in the extreme.

I think dialogue has always been Reynolds' weak point. The man has traveled the world and has a broad knowledge of things. He knows how to plot, how to pace, how to build a world, but his characters are simply pieces in that world (though Mick isn't badly drawn, if a bit dense).

Unfortunately, this book came out November of last year; I only got to it now. As a result, though I'm giving it four stars, it's too late to make last year's Galactic Stars. Still, I recommend it.


by Blue Cathey-Thiele

Ace Double H-59

The Time Mercenaries, by Phillip E. High

Captain Randall and his crew have been preserved inside their submarine for over a thousand years. When an alien species refuses all compromise and sets out to destroy human life to make space for their own ever-growing population, these men are revived. They find humanity has genetically suppressed aggression and can't fight back, even in self defense against the Nerne.

Randall is physically outmatched, but future technology defends against future threats, and using old tricks and weapons they are able to sneak attacks under the radar. He is assigned eager robots who join his crew. After one of his men accidentally discovers how to unlock aggression – in one of my least favorite segments, when he hits a woman who insults him after they have sex, after which they… fall in love immediately and decide to get married – Randall recruits more humans. An unanticipated ally comes in the Revain, who have been fending off the Nerne for centuries. These alien allies bring their advanced tech, ships, and pills that work just as well to unlock aggression.

In the end, what ends the war isn't overwhelming force or superior firepower – it's social disruption. Using the computing of the robots, and the methods of the past, they undermine the highest ranking Nerne and cause the population to question the waves of existing lives sacrificed for potential future life.

The Nerne aren't alone in upheaval. Humans have also had a shift. With aggression, passion was also suppressed. Visible violence was removed, but other insidious forms remained – the crew had been used as a sort of nearly-alive wax museum for years before revival as a grim reminder, the government overruled the people's say, sent political opponents to become aggressive "deviants", and tasked robots – who were capable of feeling – with fighting and "dying" for them. Randall is disgusted by modern humanity's hands-off approach that still puts others in the line of fire and at the callous disregard of life by the Nerne. He doesn't delight in war, but recognizes when violence is called for to stop more death.

High makes clever use of the change in times and thinking. They didn't swoop in and do more damage, they were simply unexpected. How did they make humans violent again? Punching them in the face! It sounds absurd, and it is! But in a society without aggression, no one would be able to take that first swing.

While the whole book is set in a theater of war it explores what it means to be peaceable and how that can, and can't be achieved. It also makes a compelling case for contraceptives, and against eugenics.

4 1/2 stars

Anthropol, by Louis Trimble

Anthropol member Vernay is sent on an undercover assignment to a planet that his organization recently made and lost contact with when their scout team was killed. He is conditioned to fit in with the people, once from Earth, who live on Ujvila. It's a society strictly ordered by sex and rank, with men as subservient. He joins up with resistance fighters, helping facilitate change through the planet's own people and systems. Vernay must work around the Galactic Military (Gal-Mil) who have the same end goal but use force. He is captured and tortured, then meets the political and spiritual leader, the Kalauz. She confirms the existence of an alien presence that Anthropol had previously thought only metaphorical. These small aliens operated replicated human-forms but are no longer a threat as planetary defense scans for them.

Lori, the Captain of the Gal-Mil presence, is captured and sent to a "joy-labor camp" where prisoners rarely live past two years. Vernay volunteers himself to the camp to break her out or die trying. They escape with rebel help.

Vernay puts together odd hints he has noticed through his time on the planet, and brings it to a head when he calls to see Rosid, a resistance leader. Many of the rebels are, in fact, Ngign aliens posing as Ujvilans. Trisk, an Ujvilan rebel and cousin to the Kalauz, is horrified to discover that her people's minds were destroyed to create duplicates for the aliens. Vernay finds the one weak spot on the constructed body, the Ngignians dying in moments without a means to filter the atmosphere. They reach the Kalauz, but she too has been replaced. Trisk destroys her body, and takes over as Kalauz, starting social reform.

The epilogue calls Vernay and Lori back to the planet, as Trisk had spent four years improving the world, only to regress it to the original state, spurring new revolutionaries.

Anthropol went from a political revolution plot to an alien takeover in the last moments of the book. Although clues lead up to it, the plot turned so many times in the final chapters that it seemed there was another book's worth of material that hadn't been fully incorporated. Since so much time was spent exploring alternative methods, having the ultimate defeat come by physically attacking and killing the aliens instead of using Anthropol tactics was a let down. Also, Trimble recreated a female/male style system among the women, with feminine, "pretty" women as leaders, and masculine women given the roles usually assigned to men. As a commentary on the treatment of the sexes, it fell short.

3 stars




</small

8 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 2, 1968] Asking the big questions (May 1968 IF)

1 Comment


by David Levinson

A spring thaw?

Change appears to be coming to Czechoslovakia. Faced with growing dissatisfaction last year, First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party Antonín Novatný invited Leonid Brezhnev to visit Prague last December in the hope of shoring up his position. Instead, Brezhnev was shocked by Novatný’s unpopularity and pushed him to resign as Party Secretary (he remained President).

Alexander Dubček was elected as the new First Secretary on January 5th and soon began on a course of reforms. On February 22nd, in the presence of Brezhnev, Dubček announced that steps would be taken to bring about “the widest possible democratization of the entire socio-political system.” A few days later, the Party adopted the first draft of an action program which allows greater freedom of speech (much of the resistance to Novatný came from the Writer’s Union) and more autonomy for Slovakia (the Czech Novatný had tried to curb Slovakian culture and language; Dubček is Slovakian). February ended with the release of the first uncensored magazine by the Writer’s Union.

Alexander Dubček addresses the nation after taking office.

On March 4th, the Party Presidium voted to dismantle press censorship, and by the end of the week the papers were calling for Novatný to step down as President. On the 14th, the Party voted to politically rehabilitate party members who had been purged in the 1950s. By the 22nd, the pressure was too much for Novatný and he reluctantly resigned as President. He will be replaced by Ludvík Svoboda, who had been purged, but rehabilitated at the request of Khrushchev.

The reaction in the East Bloc has been as might be expected. A Warsaw Pact meeting was hastily called for the 23rd in Dresden. The Poles, in particular, seemed unhappy with Dubček’s reforms. They may be nervous due to the student protests in Warsaw and elsewhere in the country. The word “counterrevolution” was mentioned and the specter of Hungary was raised. Dubček seems to have calmed fears for now.

Can Dubček keep the Soviets at arm’s length and bring about his reforms? Tito managed it, but Yugoslavia isn’t in the Warsaw Pact and doesn’t have a border with the Soviet Union. Only time will tell.

Seeking answers

The stories in this month’s IF grapple with deep questions. Some are big, such as expedience versus morality or the meaning of bravery and sacrifice; others are more personal. And Poul Anderson calls everything we think about the future into question.

Supposedly for Dismal Light, which doesn’t even have two male characters. Generic art by Pederson

Continue reading [April 2, 1968] Asking the big questions (May 1968 IF) →

1 Comment Leave A Comment
Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 2, 1968] Rules and Regulations (April 1968 IF)

2 Comments


by David Levinson

New rules

Readers don’t need to be reminded that the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France came to a close just two weeks ago. Of course, most of the attention has gone to French skier Jean-Claude Killy, who took all three gold medals in the Men’s Alpine events, and American Peggy Fleming’s absolutely dominating performance in the Ladies’ Figure Skating competition. But the Games also saw many firsts. Norway took the most medals with 14, taking the top spot from the Soviet Union for the first time since the latter began participating. Morocco fielded a team for the first time (believe it or not, there’s decent skiing in the Atlas Mountains), and East and West Germany participated as separate countries for the first time. This was also the first time the Winter Games were broadcast in color.

There were also some new rules. There has been growing concern over the last few years about athletes taking various drugs to improve their performance, commonly called doping. In 1967, the International Olympic Committee finally joined most other sport associations in instituting a ban on the practice. A total of 86 athletes were tested for various substances, and all tests came back negative. The IOC also began performing sex tests on female athletes this year in order to prevent intersex persons from competing in women’s competition. None were found, but after the policy was announced last year, several Eastern European athletes announced their retirement, which prompted a great deal of speculation.

The stars of the show. (l.) Jean-Claude Killy sporting his medals. (r.) Peggy Fleming in her spectacular performance.

Rules that bend, rules that break

Sometimes rules may be onerous, wrong, or perhaps just inconvenient. Maybe you need to bend them a little, maybe you need to break them and replace them with something better. The stories in this month’s IF offer several cases in point.

The Advanced Guard prepare to study the fauna of Chryseis. Art by Vaughn Bodé

Continue reading [March 2, 1968] Rules and Regulations (April 1968 IF) →

2 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 8, 1967] Four to go (December 1967 Galaxy)

6 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

The New Frontier

Tomorrow, history will be made: the first Saturn V, largest rocket in the history of the world, will take off.  If successful, Project Apollo's launch vehicle will be "man-rated", and one hurdle between humanity and the moon will have been cleared.

Of course, we'll have full coverage of the event after it happens, but this sneak preview makes a dandy segue.  For today's article is on a literary type of explorer: Galaxy magazine.  Unlike Apollo, Galaxy, which started in 1950, is a tried, tested, and even somewhat tired entity.  Back in 1959, Galaxy moved to a larger, but bimonthly, format.  This has not been an entirely successful endeavor, and in few issues are the problems more glaring than in this one.  For if an editor needs to fill up 196 pages every other month (not to mention the 164 pages of one or two sister magazines), that editor's standards must sometimes slip…

The Old Frontier


by Gray Morrow

Outpost of Empire, by Poul Anderson

Out on the edge of space lies the mineral-poor planet of Freehold. Thinly settled by humans, and then also by the alien Arulians, it lies just outside the Empire.  A growing insurgency threatens to topple the existing order, and Ridenour, an imperial troubleshooter, is sent in to monitor the situation.


by Gray Morrow

Sounds pretty nifty, but it's not.  The first twenty pages of this seventy-page piece are nothing but characters explaining the story to each other.  Skimming the rest of the tale, I determined that it's all more of the same.  Moreover, Poul doesn't even try to disguise what he's doing.  He spotlights it by having his endlessly explaining protagonist marvel at what a pedant he's being–and when other characters do the same thing, he inwardly notes how much a pedant they're being.

As Kris notes:

Rule 1 of writing: If your characters are finding what you are doing contrived, so will the reader.

The whole thing is written in that archaic style Poul reverts to when given the chance, though there's no reason to do so in this book.  He also can't resist being a bit sexist, even in a story that takes place thousands of years from now.  Dig this gem:

"But in the parks, roses and Jasmine were abloom; and elsewhere the taverns brawled with merriment.  The male citizens were happily acquiring the money that the Imperialists brought with them; the females were still more happily helping spend it."

Because in the future, women don't work; they are parasites on the real producers–the men.

Feh.  One star.

That already gets us nearly halfway through the book.  Things do not immediately improve…

The South Waterford Rumple Club, by Richard Wilson


by Jack Gaughan

Aliens drop bags of counterfeit money on a small American town.  Economic collapse ensues, facilitating an extraterrestrial takeover.

I was about to write that Wilson was an unknown name to me, but looking through the archives, I see he's made several appearances in science fiction magazines over the past two years.  He's just eminently forgettable.  This story does not change the trend.  For one, he spends a couple of pages giving a history lesson as to why an influx of fake currency is such a deadly weapon–akin to anthrax and mustard gas.  And then we get a tedious demonstration of such an attack, followed by a couple of pages of (not well thought out) aftermath.

This is the sort of inferior stuff that filled the lesser mags of the '50s.  It doesn't belong here.

Two stars.

Thank goodness for Silverbob.  From here on, out, the issue is quite good.  But you have to make it to page 96!  (or simply skip the dross)

King of the Golden World, by Robert Silverberg

Elena, a human, has married Haugan, chief of a tribe of aliens that lives on an island dominated by twin volcanic mounts.  Theirs is a genuine love, despite their divergent evolutions, but full understanding still eludes the Earth woman.  Though the mountain on which the village is sited is clearly about to erupt, Haugan seems in no hurry to evacuate his people.  It is only on the eve of disaster that Elena learns the true, alien nature of Haugan's people.  Will she embrace it or be repelled?

This is really quite a sensitive story, timeless and nuanced.  I suspect it was influenced by Silverberg's recent nonfiction histories of the original American inhabitants (collectively referred to as "Indians").

Four stars.

For Your Information: Astronautics International, by Willy Ley

Ten years ago, it was enough to keep up with the Soviets and the Americans if you wanted to know what was up in space.  These days, Earth's orbit has become a truly international province, and this month's article focuses on the efforts of the non-superpowers, of which there are many.

As a space buff, articles on satellites always score extra marks with me, so I hope our tastes are aligned.  Four stars.

Black Corridor, by Fritz Leiber

A man awakens, naked, without memories, inside a featureless corridor.  Ahead of him lie two doors: one is labeled "Water", the other "Air".  Behind him a wall moves toward him implacably.  Choose…or die.

But beyond the first pair of doors is another, and another.  Is this a test?  Will the test end?  And what is its purpose?

Less a science fiction story and more a metaphor for life itself, this piece's worth depends solely on the execution.  Thankfully, Leiber is up to the task.

Four stars.

The Red Euphoric Bands, by Philip Latham

A comet is heading straight for an Earth on the brink of atomic war.  Is it our doom…or our salvation?

On the one hand, the storytelling and the science are quite excellent.  On the other, the conclusion is silly.  Moreover, there is a fundamental fault in this otherwise accurate piece: a comet with a two light year orbit would have a period of around six billion years–too high to serve the purposes of the story.

Thus, three stars.

Galactic Consumer Report No. 3: A Survey of the Membership, by John Brunner

The first galactic survey, conducted by Good Buy magazine, turned out to be something of a fiasco–too many beings responded, and they were just too variegated to provide anything like a profile of "an average consumer".  Yet, you couldn't call the exercise less than successful…

This series tends to be silly and throw-away, but this installment I liked a lot.  Why?  Because it's almost like a Theodore Thomas article from his F&SF column–a couple dozen story seeds all in one piece.  So many stories feature aliens that are little more than humans in costume.  This one presents some real aliens.  It also made me laugh a few times.

So, four stars.

Handicap, by Larry Niven


by Jack Gaughan

On the former Kzin world of Down, orbiting a feeble red dwarf, humans have established an agricultural colony.  In addition to its colorful history, Down offers another attraction: the Grogs.  These are comical-looking, human-sized creatures that have two phases in life.  At first, they are four-legged creatures with a dog-like intelligence.  In this form, they rove the deserts of Down, hunting and mating.  Eventually, the females anchor themselves to a rock, where they stay the rest of their lives.

And yet, these creatures have enormous brains, suggesting a great intelligence.  Why did they evolve them, and what can they do with them?  Garvey, an entrepreneur whose line is making prosthetics for "Handicapped" species, ones without manipulative organs of their own (e.g. dolphins, the enormous Bandersnatchi of planet Jinx), smells an opportunity.

Handicap, like last year's A Relic of Empire, expands what is becoming a sweeping common universe, tying in the Kzinti of The Warriors, the Thrintun of World of Ptavvs, and the hyperdrive era of Beowulf Shaeffer.  What I really like about Niven is that he isn't in a hurry to tell his story.  There are asides and subplots, weaving a meandering course through entertaining vignettes, before tying everything together at the end.  Niven's universe feels lived in, and all of its facets are interesting.  That there's a nifty story at the heart of Handicap is a bonus…though my eyebrows were raised a bit by this exchange:

Garvey: "For as long as we expand to other stars we're going to meet more and more handless, toolless, helpless civilizations.  Sometimes we won't even recognize them.  What are we going to do about them?"

Jilson (a guide): "Build Dolphin's Hands for them."

Garvey: "Well, yes, but we can't just give them away.  Once one species starts depending on another, they become parasites."

This feels a bit like an indictment of welfare, foreign aid…or assistance to the handicapped.  I would not jump to concluding that Garvey's views necessarily represent Niven's views, but I also would not be surprised, as he is a hereditary millionaire, and the plutocracy often thinks ill of public demands on their wealth.  I will simply note that I think Garvey is being short-sighted.  Isn't it worth the investment of a little charity to create an entirely new potential market of both imports and exports?  If you give away limbs to the crippled, schools to the poor, food to the starving, will they really just sit on their duffs?  Or will they simply now be unencumbered members of society, ready to participate fully?  I submit that equalization of opportunity through government assistance and charity actually serves capitalism rather than subverts it.

Well, that's a tiny quibble, and again, just because Garvey thinks this way doesn't mean the author does.  If anything, I'm glad he gave me something to think about–along with a good story!

Four stars.

The Fairly Civil Service, by Harry Harrison


by Jack Gaughan

A day in the life of the postal clerk of the future.  A particularly bad, seemingly endless day.  The kind that tries a person's soul…or tests one's abilities.

Harrison is reliably good.  He does not disappoint here.  Four stars.

To the Black Beyond

Having trudged through a barren literary landscape for half the span of a magazine, it was comforting to have solid ground to trod for the latter half.  But now that the Galaxy is done, I am once again adrift.  Who knows what lies in store within the covers of the next magazine or paperback that will cross my desk?  Like the expanses of space, it's all an unknown adventure.

Luckily, there are still enough treasures waiting to be found to make the journey worth it!



6 Comments Leave A Comment
Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 10, 1967] Jack the Ripper and Company (Dangerous Visions,Part One)

5 Comments


by Victoria Silverwolf

There's a new anthology of original science fiction and fantasy stories in bookstores this month. It's certain to be the topic of a lot of discussion among SF buffs, and maybe even some arguments.

It's also big; more than five hundred pages, and it'll set you back a whopping seven bucks. It's so big, in fact, that Galactic Journey is going to slice it into three pieces and discuss it in a trio of articles. (Why three? Because it's got thirty-three stories in it, and eleven articles would be silly.)

Let's dig into the first part of this mammoth collection and see if it's destined to be the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band of speculative fiction, or just another dud.

Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison


Wraparound cover art by the husband-and-wife team of Leo and Diane Dillon, who also provide an interior illustration for each story.

Before we get to the nitty-gritty of fiction, we've got no less than two forewords by Isaac Asimov and a lengthy introduction by the editor.

In The Second Revolution, the Good Doctor outlines the history of modern science fiction from Gernsback through Campbell, and into the New Wave. Astounding was the first revolution, you see, and now we're in the second one. That may be a little simplistic, but it gets the point across.

Harlan and I, on the other hand, is a personal essay about Asimov's relationship with the editor, ending with a teasing anecdote. Ellison adds a long footnote offering a different version of their first encounter.

More substantial is Thirty-Two Soothsayers, the editor's longwinded but endlessly entertaining and informative account of what this book is supposed to accomplish, and how it came to be. Ellison wanders all over the place in this piece, and it's a fun ride. In brief, the stories he chose are supposed to be both enjoyable and provocative, with new ideas that might not appear in the usual SF markets. We'll see.

(If you're wondering why thirty-two and not thirty-three, it's because one writer supplies two stories; but that's for another time.)

I should mention that each story comes with an introduction by the editor and an afterword by the author, except for the one case when those roles are reversed. You'll see what I mean in a while.

I'm going to do something a little different here. I'll rate the quality of each story with the usual one to five stars, but I'll also add an indication for how dangerous each one is. This will be determined by sexual content, violence, profanity, experimental narrative style, taboo subject matter, etc. GREEN = safe to proceed, YELLOW = caution indicated, RED = hazardous conditions.

Let's begin.

Evensong, by Lester del Rey

An unnamed character flees through the universe in an attempt to escape those who have overthrown his reign. To say anything else would give away the point of the story, which is an allegory.

Three stars. YELLOW for questioning the deeply held beliefs of some readers.

Flies, by Robert Silverberg

In a premise similar to his excellent novel Thorns, the author presents a severely injured astronaut who has been put back together by aliens. In this case, however, his body has been restored to normal, but his mind has been made more sensitive to the emotions of others. That doesn't work out well.

Silverberg has become a fine writer, one of the best now working. Like Thorns, this is an uncompromising look at human suffering.

Five stars. YELLOW for scenes of extreme cruelty.

The Day After the Day the Martians Came, by Frederik Pohl

Set in the very near future, this tale deals with humanity's reaction to the discovery of ugly, semi-intelligent lifeforms on the red planet. Mostly, people make nasty jokes about them. The intent of the story is to expose human prejudices, in a way that's about as subtle as a brick thrown through a window.

Three stars. YELLOW for dealing with a major social problem in the USA today.

Riders of the Purple Wage, by Philip Jose Farmer

This is, by far, the longest story in the book. It is also incredibly dense and fast-paced, so any attempt to describe the plot would be a miserable failure. That said, I'll just mention that it takes place in a very strange future, involves an artist and his tax-dodging ancestor, and contains a ton of wordplay. There are scenes of slapstick violence that are simultaneously hilarious and offensive. It's a wild rollercoaster ride, so keep your seatbelt tightly secured.

Five stars. RED for a Joycean narrative style and Rabelaisian humor.

The Malley System, by Miriam Allen deFord

In the future, the worst criminals receive a very unusual punishment. This is a grim story, that doesn't shy away from the horrors perpetuated by human monsters.

Three stars. YELLOW for violence.

A Toy for Juliette, by Robert Bloch

In a decadent future, a man uses the only time machine in existence to kidnap people from the past, in order to satisfy the whims of his sadistic granddaughter. He picks the wrong potential victim. This is a spine-chilling little science fiction horror story with a twist in its tail.

Three stars. YELLOW for sex, torture, and murder.

The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World, by Harlan Ellison

This is a direct sequel to the previous story, with an introduction by Bloch and an afterword by Ellison. An infamous murderer finds himself in the far future, where the inhabitants enter his mind in order to enjoy his sensations as he kills.

Written in an experimental, almost cinematic style, this is an unrelenting look at the evil that lurks inside all of us. Not for weak stomachs.

Four stars. RED for explicit violence.

The Night That All Time Broke Out, by Brian W. Aldiss

People get so-called time gas supplied to their homes through pipes. It allows them to enjoy better times in the past. As with any form of technology, things can go wrong. This is a light comedy with a unique premise.

Three stars. GREEN for whimsy.

The Man Who Went to the Moon – Twice, by Howard Rodman

A young boy takes a trip to the Moon by holding on to a balloon, becoming a local celebrity. Many years later, as a very old man, his only claim to fame is not as valued as it once was. Reminiscent of Ray Bradbury, this is a gentle, quietly melancholy tale.

Three stars. GREEN for wistful nostalgia.

Faith of Our Fathers, by Philip K. Dick

The Communist East has won a hot war with the Capitalist West. The protagonist is a bureaucrat given the task to determine which of two term papers truly represents the Party line. Meanwhile, a seemingly harmless substance allows him to perceive what appear to be multiple and contradictory truths about the Mao-like Party leader.

That's a vague synopsis, because this is one of the author's stories in which you've never quite sure what is real and what is illusory. Ellison strongly hints that it was written under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. Be that as it may, it's a provocative and disturbing look at the possible nature of reality.

Four stars. YELLOW for politics, drug use, and existential terror.

The Jigsaw Man, by Larry Niven

A man is sentenced to death for his crime. His organs will be harvested for transplant. Through a series of unusual circumstances, he manages to escape from prison, but his troubles aren't over yet.

The full impact of this story doesn't hit the reader until the very end, when we find out the nature of the man's offense.  Other than that, it's an ordinary enough science fiction action/suspense story.

Three stars.  GREEN for futuristic adventure.

One Down, Two To Go

So far, this is a fine collection of stories, without a bad one in the bunch.  Sensitive readers might want to stay away from the more dangerous ones, but most mature SF fans will enjoy it.




</small

5 Comments Leave A Comment
Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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

1 Comment


by Gideon Marcus

Five against Arlane, by Tom Purdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three stars.

Lord of the Green Planet, by Emil Petaja

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

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

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

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

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

Triads


by Victoria Silverwolf

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

Thorns, by Robert Silverberg


Cover art by Robert Foster.

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

Pain is instructive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five stars.

The Werewolf Principle, by Clifford D. Simak


Cover art by Richard Powers.

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

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

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

Still with me? Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three and one-half stars.




</small

1 Comment Leave A Comment
Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 2, 1967] The Bounds of Good Taste (September 1967 IF)

3 Comments


by David Levinson

A diplomatic incident

In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years War, France abandoned her claims to territory in what is today Canada (among others) in order to keep richer colonies in the Caribbean. Britain allowed her new subjects in Quebec to keep their language and religion, likely to keep them from making common cause with the fractious colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Since then, there has been a strong undercurrent of nationalism among the French-speaking Québécois. Enter French President Charles de Gaulle.

Canada has extended an open invitation to representatives of countries exhibiting at the Expo 67 world’s fair. Last month, de Gaulle came to visit. The Canadian government was a little concerned. France hadn’t sent a representative to the funeral of Governor General Georges Vanier, who had been a personal friend of de Gaulle, or to the 50th anniversary ceremonies commemorating the Canadian victory at Vimy in the Great War. Rather than flying in to the Canadian capital Ottawa, de Gaulle arrived directly in Quebec City aboard a French naval vessel and went on to Montreal from there, with crowds cheering him along the way. He arrived on July 24th, and delivered an unscheduled speech from the balcony of the Montreal City Hall. He concluded by shouting “Vive le Québec libre!” (“Long live free Québec!”) and the crowd roared in approval.

President de Gaulle with foot firmly in mouth.

The next day, Prime Minister Lester Pearson issued an official rebuke, declaring that “Canadians do not need to be liberated” and pointing out that many Canadians died in the liberation of France. Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau wondered what the French reaction would be to the Canadian Prime Minister shouting “Brittany to the Bretons!” Even the French papers were critical. Meanwhile, de Gaulle visited the Expo and hosted a banquet at the French pavilion. The following day, he boarded a French military jet and flew home rather than making his scheduled visit to Ottawa. Whether this was deliberate interference in another country’s domestic affairs or just de Gaulle being de Gaulle, we’ll have to wait to see what the fallout may be.

Walking the line

Apropos of today's lede, at least one story in this month’s IF is about crossing or challenging the lines of what is in good taste. A couple more do that themselves.

This alien dude ranch has become a popular honeymoon spot. Art by Gray Morrow

Continue reading [August 2, 1967] The Bounds of Good Taste (September 1967 IF) →

3 Comments Leave A Comment
Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial, Uncategorized

[July 8, 1967] Family lines (August 1967 Galaxy)

8 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

Royal Families

The news always likes to focus on heads of state, especially when they are flashy or glamorous in some way.  From Princess Grace of Monaco to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, these leaders are instant idols, somehow more compelling for having the reins (and reigns) of nations even though they presumably put their pants/skirts/obis on the same way as the common folk.

This week scored a triplet of spotlights.  For instance, in the island nation of Tonga, Taufaʻahau Tupou IV was crowned monarch in a ceremony that included a feast of 71,000 suckling pigs!  And that, by itself, tells you all you need to know about the current Jewish/Moslem population of Tonga…

Closer to home, El BJ, chief of the United States, has got his first grandson.  Patrick Lyndon Nugent is the newborn child of First Daughter Luci Nugent (neé Johnson).  There is no word, as yet, whether his toddler status will grant him deferment in the lastest draft lottery.

Finally, junta chairman General Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant leader of South Vietnam since 1965, has decided not to run for President in the upcoming democratic (perhaps) September elections.  Premier Thiệu has been backed by the junta for the top role, instead, with Ky getting the Vice Presidential nod.  It's all a lot of musical chairs, anyway. After all, Ky has asserted that the only politician he admires is Hitler, which tells you all you need to know about the state of democracy in that country (and its current Jewish population…)

Watching Big Brother

Fred Pohl, one of the original Futurians and a pillar of the SF community, has had his hands full for nearly a decade.  After he took over the reins of Galaxy and the newly acquired IF from H. L. Gold, rather than sit on his laurels, he looked for new worlds to conquer.  Thus, Worlds of Tomorrow was launched in 1963.  But juggling three mags (plus a few reprint-only titles) was a challenging job, often resulting in uneven quality and occasionally right-out flubs.  For instance, last year's issue of Worlds of Tomorrow where the pages got all mixed up.

One would think, with WoT going out of publication, that things might be less hectic over at the Guinn Co. mags.  But, in fact, this month's issue of Galaxy is even more higgledy-piggledy, making reading a real challenge.


by Sol Dember

Which is a shame, because there's some quite good stuff in here (mixed with some mediocre stuff, to be sure).  Thankfully, you've got me to be your guide.  Just grab your compass, or you might get lost.

Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

One-way time travel is developed in the early 21st Century.  Since humanity is deathly afraid of creating paradoxes, the new portals are used by the totalitarian regime for just one purpose: shipping undesirables into the far past, a sort of Paleozoic Botany Bay.

Hawksbill Station is the one reserved for male subversives, established sometime in the late Cambrian (Silverberg repeatedly gives a date of two billion years ago, but of course, the Cambrian went from about 600-500 million B.C.) Our perspective is that of Barrett, the de facto head of the more than 100 settler/prisoners on the coast of what will one day be the Atlantic Ocean.  It is a community slowly decaying as its denizens age along with no greater purpose in life.  That is, until a new young convict arrives from the future, one who appears to be a government spy…

This is more of a travelogue than a story, and the ending comes on a bit abruptly.  But the characterization, the details, the setting are all so gripping that I tore through the novella in no time, despite the labyrinthine page distribution.

Four stars, and if it ever gets expanded into a novel, it could make five.

Angel, Dark Angel, by Roger Zelazny

In another future-set tale, society is maintained by a sort of corporate Angel of Death who, with the help of ten thousand teleporting assistants, brings death to citizens after they have made sufficient contribution to humanity (and are, perhaps, on the verge of being detrimental).

One noteworthy woman has cultivated the aesthetic race of spirules (depicted on the cover) as an antidote to the cold, mechanistic technology of her time.  A subordinate angel is sent to dispatch her, but things prove more complicated.

This is a middlin' Zelazny story, not an empty poetic suit like some, but not a near masterpiece like some of his other works.  Three stars.

We're Coming Through the Window, by K. M. O'donnell

Throwaway vignette about a fellow who keeps duplicating himself due to time travel and needs Fred Pohl's help to get out of it.

Cute.  Three stars.

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun, by R. A. Lafferty

Ginny seems to be a precocious four year old, but in fact, is actually just a baseline human, maturing at age 4 and going on as an upright monkey.  It's the rest of us who are evolutionary aberrations, having five times as many heartbeats that a creature our mass should have.  Inevitably, Lafferty suggests, we'll all go ape.

This tale doesn't really work, and it's a bit more impenetrable than Lafferty's usual fare.  Two stars.

For Your Information: A Pangolin Is a Pangolin, by Willy Ley

Ley's article on the strange mammal that is neither aardvark nor anteater nor armadillo is interesting, but not much more than you might get from a rather good encyclopedia entry.

Three stars.

9-9-99, by Richard Wilson

Two wizened old characters are determined to settle an old score since both have outlived their wagered death dates, the bet having been made back in the 30s.

Whether it is even possible for them to collect given the state of the Earth in the late '90s is another matter…

Good enough, I guess.  Three stars.


by Wally Wood

Travelers Guide to Megahouston, by H. H. Hollis


by Wally Wood

This is a very long, somewhat farcical account of a 21st Century evolution of the Astrodome, in which domes enclose whole cities.

Pretty dull stuff.  Two stars.

The Being in the Tank, by Theodore L. Thomas

An alien being materializes in the heart of a hellish hydrazine factory and demands to speak to the President.  But is he the real deal?

Forgettable, but inoffensive.  A low three stars.

Hide and Seek, by Linda Marlowe

A childhood game is adapted into a method of population control.  It has shock value, but little else.

Two stars.

The Great Stupids, by Miriam Allen deFord

Mad scientist makes everyone under 50 a mental moron, all in service of a rather lame joke at the end.  DeFord was once one of the stars of the genre, but her light has waned over the years.  Here's hoping she's a Cepheid variable and not a dying dwarf.

To Outlive Eternity (Part 2 of 2), by Poul Anderson


by Jack Gaughan

It is fitting that the final long piece of the issue is a sort of mirror image of Silverberg's novella in terms of strengths and weaknesses.  As we read in last month's installment, the ramscoop colony ship Leonora Christine suffered damage to its decelerators while traveling at near light speed on the way to Beta Virginis.  The solution: to accelerate to terrific velocities instead, plunging through the heart of the galaxy and out into the comparative emptiness of intergalactic space where repairs might be effected.

In this half, event after event conspires to force the Christine to travel ever faster and faster, ultimately spanning the lifespan of the universe and beyond in a matter of months.  The story is told as a series of problem-solving conversations spread out over the weeks, and each character largely exists solely to have these conversations.  Except for the women, of course, who are almost universally hysterics or hangers-on…except for the First Officer who ultimately whores herself out for the good of the crew.

In short, the setup and ideas are really neat, but its a plot outline, not a novel.  And where Poul Anderson does try to characterize, it's with quick stereotypes, and usually not agreeable ones.  As for setting, there really isn't one.  The crew of the Christine might as well be floating heads in blank spaces for all we really get to experience the ship.

Readable, but badly flawed.  Three stars.

Matrix Goose, by Jack Sharkey

Last up, some very familiar nursery rhymes as they might be rendered by robots–after the demise of humanity.  It's cute.  Three stars.


Perhaps my favorite example, art by Gray Morrow

Cross-eyed Kin

And so, Galaxy ends up a largely enjoyable, but unremarkable read — just under 3 stars in ranking.  Perhaps, with the demise of Worlds of Tomorrow further in the rear-view mirror, Pohl will be able to concentrate on (and concentrate the best stories into) his remaining mags.

On the other hand, perhaps he hasn't learned his lesson.  He's got a new magazine is coming out next month…



8 Comments Leave A Comment
Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[May 16, 1967] From the Sea to the Stars (May 1967 Galactoscope)

Leave a comment


by Victoria Silverwolf

A trio of new works, two of them inside the same book, take readers from the far reaches of the galaxy to the depths of the ocean. (Sounds like last month's Galactoscope, doesn't it?) Let's start with the latest Ace Double, containing two short novels (or long novellas) set in interstellar space.

Gedankenexperiment


Cover art by Peter Michael.

The Rival Rigelians, by Mack Reynolds

This is an expansion of the novella Adaptation, which appeared in the August 1960 issue of Astounding/Analog. (That's during the brief period when both titles appeared on the cover of the magazine. Confusing, isn't it?)


Cover art by John Schoenherr.

The Noble Editor thought it was so-so at the time. Let's see if it's any better, like fine wine, after seven years.

Cold War Two

Long before the story begins, Earth colonized a large number of planets with about one hundred people per world. Over several generations, the colonies degenerated from scientifically advanced to primitive, due to the lack of support from the home world. Then each slowly made their way back up to a particular level of technological sophistication.

(If this sounds like a really lousy way to populate the galaxy, I agree. The author is clearly more interested in setting up a thought experiment than in ensuring plausibility.)

It seems that two inhabited worlds orbit the star Rigel. One is similar to Italy during the time of feudalism. The people on the other are similar to the Aztecs.


Rigel is part of the constellation Orion; one of his feet, to be exact.

Earth sends a team of folks to Rigel to bring the colonies up to a modern level of technology. They argue a bit about what to do, then finally agree to split up. One group will bring the free market to the feudalists, and the other will impose a state-controlled economy on the Aztecs. It's capitalism versus communism all over again! Long story short, things don't work out very well for either bunch.

The main difference between the original novella and this expanded version is the addition of two female members to the visiting Earthlings. Both are physicians. Unfortunately, they are pure stereotypes.

One is the Good Girl, doing the best she can to help the colonists while remaining loyal to the man she loves. (To add a little romantic tension to the plot, the author has him choose to go to the Aztec planet while she opts to work on the Italian planet.)

The other is the Bad Girl, teasing the men by exchanging the standard uniform for a sexy gown before they even reach Rigel. On the Aztec planet, she sets herself up as the mistress of whichever fellow happens to be in power at the time, and rules over the locals like a wicked queen.

The author's point seems to be that both pure capitalism and pure communism are seriously flawed. I've seen this theme come up in his work before, most recently in his spy yarn The Throwaway Age in the final issue of Worlds of Tomorrow.

This story isn't quite as blatant a fictionalized essay as that one was, but it comes close. Besides the two-dimensional female characters, we have male characters that are mostly either fools or scoundrels. It's readable, certainly, and you may appreciate its satiric look at humanity's attempts to create workable socioeconomic systems.

Three stars.

Naval Maneuvers

Born in England but living in Australia since 1956, A. Bertram Chandler has been working on merchant ships since 1928. It's no wonder, then, that the space-going vessels in his stories often seem like sailing ships. One can almost smell the salt air and hear the wind rippling in the sails.

Many of his semi-nautical tales feature the character of John Grimes, sort of a Horatio Hornblower of the galaxy. My esteemed colleague David Levinson recently reviewed a pair of these yarns that appeared in If. Why do I bring this up? You'll see.


Cover art by Kelly Freas.

Nebula Alert, by A. Bertram Chandler

This latest work once again makes space seem like the ocean, and those who journey through it like seadogs. (It also serves as a nice bridge between Reynold's interstellar allegory and the sea story I'll discuss later.)

All Hands On Deck!

The starship Wanderer is under the command of a husband-and-wife team. She's the owner and he's the captain. Among the crew are another married couple and a couple of bachelors. They accept the challenge of transporting several Iralians back to their home world.

Iralians are very human-like aliens. So similar to people, in fact, that romance blooms between one of the bachelors and one of the passengers. (They're both telepaths, which must help.) There are some important differences, however.

The Iralians have a very short gestation period, and multiply rapidly. Their offspring inherit the learned skills of their parents, in a kind of mental Lamarckism. Unfortunately, the combination of these traits makes them valuable slaves; the owners have a steady supply of fully trained workers.

During the voyage, a trio of pirate ships threatens the Wanderer. (The identity of the would-be slavers on these vessels is an interesting plot twist, which I won't reveal here.) In order to evade the attackers, our heroes take the very dangerous gamble of entering the Horsehead Nebula.


The real Horsehead Nebula, which is aptly named.

It seems that no starship has ever returned from the nebula, and there are indications that it does something weird to time and space. In fact, the Wanderer enters a parallel universe, where they encounter a ship under the command of none other than John Grimes! Suffice to say that the meeting leads to a way to exit the nebula safely and defeat the pirates.

Unlike Reynolds, Chandler doesn't seem to have any particular axe to grind. This is strictly an adventure story, meant to entertain the reader for a couple of hours. It succeeds at that modest goal reasonably well. It's not the most plausible story ever written, and you won't find anything profound in it, but it's not a waste of time.

Three stars.

The Patron Saint of Science Fiction

Margaret St. Clair (no relation to actress Jill St. John, who recently appeared in the big budget flop The Oscar, co-written by none other than Harlan Ellison) has been publishing fiction since the late 1940's. Much of her short fiction is strikingly original, with a haunting, dream-like mood. (I particularly like her stories for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which appear under the pseudonym Idris Seabright.)

She's offered readers a few short novels as halves of Ace Doubles, as well as the full-length novel Sign of the Labrys. Both the Noble Editor and I agreed that this was a unique, very interesting mixture of apocalyptic science fiction and mysticism, if not fully satisfying. The book featured quite a lot of lore from the neo-pagan religion Wicca, and I understand that St. Clair was initiated into that faith last year.


Cover art by Paul Lehr.

The Dolphins of Altair, by Margaret St. Clair

Dolphins have appeared in science fiction for a while now, from Clarke's 1963 work mentioned below to this year's French novel Un animal doué raison by Robert Merle. Some of this seems to be inspired by recent attempts to communicate with dolphins by the controversial researcher John C. Lilly. Or maybe they've just been watching reruns of Flipper, which was cancelled last month. In any case, let's see how this new book handles the theme.

People of the Sea

(Apologies to Arthur C. Clarke for stealing the title of his Worlds of Tomorrow serial, now available in book form as Dolphin Island. I hope he's too busy scuba diving off the coast of Ceylon to notice.)

Appropriately, the novel is narrated by a dolphin. He relates how three human beings came to the aid of his kind.

The first is Madelaine. She is particularly sensitive to telepathic messages sent by the dolphins. So much so, in fact, that she suffers from amnesia when they call her. Nonetheless, she answers their distress signal by journeying to a small, rocky, uninhabited island off the coast of Northern California.

Next is Swen. The dolphins don't directly contact him, the way they do Madelaine, but he overhears the message and shows up at the same place.

Last is Doctor Lawrence. He becomes involved with Madelaine when he treats her amnesia. Although he has no ability at all to receive psychic messages from the dolphins, he follows her to the island.

The dolphins, some of whom have learned to speak English, are fed up with the way that human beings pollute their sea and keep their kind captive. They seek help from the unlikely trio.

At first, this involves rescuing several dolphins from a military facility. The plan is to use a powerful explosive device (which Swen has to steal) to trigger an earthquake that will break open the seawall that keeps them in captivity. Although the three agree to take this action, which will inevitably cause great destruction and is likely to cost human lives, they try to minimize the harm done to their own kind by timing the quake when the fewest number of people will be around.

If this all seems to strain your willingness to suspend your belief, wait until you see what we find out next.

It seems that both dolphins and humans are the descendants of beings who came from a planet orbiting the star Altair (hence the title.) They showed up on Earth about one million years ago. Some chose to remain on land, others went to the ocean. Over many thousands of years, they diverged into the two species.


Altair, located near a very appropriate constellation.

The dolphins remember the covenant made so long ago, that the two groups would remain on friendly terms. Betrayed by the forgetful humans, they are ready to use any means possible to end the abuse of their kind. The next step is to use ancient technology from Altair to melt the ice caps.  As you might imagine, this leads to an apocalyptic conclusion.

Unsurprisingly, given the author, this is an unusual book. It combines a science fiction thriller with a great deal of mysticism. The author is obviously incensed by the way people enslave dolphins and dump poison into the ocean. The reader is definitely supposed to root for the dolphins in their war against humanity.

The three human characters are quite different from each other. Swen is probably the most normal, and serves as the novel's action/adventure hero, at least to some extent. Madelaine is an ethereal creature, almost like some kind of mythic being. Doctor Lawrence is an enigma. He informs the military about the dolphins, leading to an attack on the island, but he is also a misanthrope, the most eager to wreak destruction on humanity.

Like Sign of the Labrys, The Dolphins of Altair is a fascinating novel with disparate elements that don't always quite mesh, and an odd combination of science fiction themes with the purely mystical. I can definitely say that I'm glad I read it, and that it is likely to stay in my memory for some time to come.

Four stars.

To Outrun Doomsday, by Kenneth Bulmer


by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

4 Kenneth Bulmer Works

Bulmer is very much a mixed author for me. He has produced great works, like The Contraption or City Under the Sea. But also, less interesting pieces, such as Behold the Stars or his Terran Space Navy series.

Which Bulmer do we get in To Outrun Doomsday? Luckily for me, it is definitely the former, as I think this is his best work to date.

Balance of Imagination

To Outrun Doomsday by Kenneth Bulmer

I think it is worth quickly addressing the issue some readers have with Bulmer’s work. Much of his writing hew very close to real world scenarios, such as war novels. For some people this presents the same issue I have seen discussed in the recent Star Trek episode Balance of Terror.

They ask, “if you have the limitless possibilities of science fiction, why would you do submarine warfare in space?” I say, “if you have the limitless possibilities of science fiction, why wouldn’t you do submarine warfare in space!”

As such, it is with the scenario To Outrun Doomsday. Jack Waley is a gadabout on a starship which seems to be acting as a cruise liner. He sees himself as a kind of old-fashioned rake, seducing women and generally pleasure seeking across the galaxy.

This life falls apart when an accident befalls the ship he is on and his lifeboat crashes on a planet that has, apparently, never encountered people from Earth. There he lives with the tribe of “The Homeless Ones” learning their ways whilst also facing the hostile “The Whispering Wizards”.

This all seems like it could be an old-fashioned castaway story in a boy’s adventure magazine from the 30s, and I am sure his critics will say as such. But there are a number of elements that raise it up.

To Outrun Cliches

Firstly, when Bulmer’s writing is good, it is so good it fully takes me away into his world in a way I am in awe of. For example:

The ship blew.
How then describe the opening to nothingness of the warmth and light and air of human habitation?
From the fetus of womblike comfort to space-savaged death-the ship blew. Metal shivered and sundered. Air frothed and vanished. Heat dissipated and was cold. Light struggled weakly and was lost in the multiplicity of the stellar spectra. The ship blew.
Here and there in the mightily-puny bulk, pockets of air and light and warmth yet remained for a heartbeat, for the torturing time to scream in the face of death. Some, a pitiful few persisted for a longer time.

But then is also at other times willing to bring in silliness when the scene requires it:

“I’m sorry that-“ Waley began.
A hand shook. “Quiet!”
Waley stopped being sorry that.

These are merely a couple of examples. Bulmer uses a full literary toolbox to make an exciting and engaging adventure.

Then you have Waley’s character. He is the kind of fellow you expect to hang around in bars until the wee small hours and take Playboy articles as his guide to life. But as we are not meant to see this as something to admire, he is at different times referred to as “a walking lecherous horrid heap of contagion” and ends getting chained up as a galley slave for following his licentious urges. Throughout we follow the journey of him learning there are more valuable things in life than carnal pleasures and forging real friendships with people.

At the same time this is balanced by the abundance of different women throughout the story. Their journeys are independent of Waley’s adventures and often are quite dismissive of him. They are simply well-rounded inhabitants of the world.

Further, this surface story is slowly revealed to be covering up something deeper. There are intriguing breadcrumbs laid out for you. For example, Waley never sees any children, buildings collapse and no one takes any notice, and, strangest of all, praying for any item (assuming it is not or has not been living) results in it appearing instantly. I will not reveal the mystery, but it adds strangeness to what could be a middling space fantasy tale like Norton’s Witch World saga.

The story is not without flaws. Whilst the emotional conclusion is very strong, tying up the main plot mystery made me put my head into my hands at how silly it is (if also reminding me how important it is I get it to the weeding).

It also occasionally goes into racist language when describing enemies. For example:

Small wiry yellow men with spindly legs and bulbous bodies, with Aztec lips and grinning idiot faces

These are very rare occurrences and not a core part of the story, but still wish they had been excised.

I also wished that the book was longer. Whilst I noted there were a number of interesting characters, particularly among the women, we do not have as much time with them as I would have liked. If it could have been allowed another 40 or so pages, it would just have allowed the extra space needed to flesh them out.

But I am happy to give it a very high four stars.


by Gideon Marcus

The Time Hoppers

The jacket for Silverbob's latest novel notes that he "and his wife live in Riverdale, New York, in a large house also occupied by a family of cats (currently four permanent ones), a fluctuating number of kittens, and thousands of books, some of which he has not written."  This only slightly overstates the prodigiousness with which Mr. Silverberg cranks out the prose.  Sometimes, Bob gives it his all and turns out something rather profound like his recent Blue Fire series, which was serialized in Galaxy and came out in book form this month as To Open the Sky.

Other times, we get books like The Time Hoppers, clearly produced in a pressured week, perhaps between passion projects.  The short novel takes place in the 25th Century, but this is no Buck Rogers future.  Rather, we have an overpopulated dystopia where almost everyone is on the dole, society is calcified into numbered levels of privilege, and most live in enormous buildings that soar into the sky as well as plunge deep in the ground.  Within this crowded world, we follow the viewpoint of Quellen, a Level Seven local police boss, hot on the trail of the time hoppers.  These are folks who are leaving the future for the spaciousness of the past.  They know these temporal refugees exist because they are already recorded in the history books.  Can Quellen stop them before the trickle becomes a flood?  Should he?

There are a lot of problems with this book.  Quellen is a fairly unlikeable person, a sort of Winston Smith-type at the outer levels of the party, enjoying a few illicit pleasures like a second home in Africa (conveniently depopulated by a century-old plague).  Society in the future makes no sense–it seems an extrapolation of a 1950s view of American society, where the men work and the women are shrieking housewives or grasping adventuresses.  Never mind that, in a world where everyone is unemployed, why there should be a sharp dichotomy between male and female roles goes unexplained.  Just "Chicks, am I right, folks?"

There a sort of shallowness to the book, and the time travel bit is almost incidental.  Particularly since, as the hoppers have already been recorded in the past, any efforts to stop them in the future must inevitably be thwarted.  Also, the idea that these hoppers wouldn't be of prime concern to the powers-that-be (or in the case of this book, actually just one power-that-is) far earlier than four years into the hopping seems ludicrous.

But, I have a perverse penchant for books with the word "Time" in the title, however misleading, as well as stories that have explicit social ranks for people.  And Silverberg, even on a bad day, has a minimum threshold of competence.

So, three stars.

And that's that!  While you're waiting for the next Galactoscope, come join us in Portal 55 to chat about these and other great titles:



No comments Leave A Comment