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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 14, 1965] The New Dispensation (August 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Continuity and Change

Yeah, yeah, I know that’s the most boring headline since the last time Hubert Humphrey made a speech.  But that’s what everybody (well, somebody) wants to know: how is the new Amazing different, or not, from the old one?

Some things we already knew.  It’s still digest size, now bimonthly, with 32 more pages for a total of 162.  On the cover there is a piece of retro-continuity; the new regime has dropped the old title logo for the older title logo, the one used from October 1960 to December 1963, with very minor variations—an improvement, to my taste.  There’s a fairly generic cover by Alex Schomburg (I am certain the departed editor Lalli had a closet full of these) portraying, as you see, a guy in a loincloth brandishing a spear at a giant computer: Progress vs. Savagery, or Regimentation vs. Natural Freedom, as you prefer.  It is said on the contents page to illustrate Keith Laumer’s Time Bomb.  It does not.  There are a number of interior illustrations.  Coming Next Month has not returned.


by Alex Schomburg

And on the contents page . . . oh no.  The blazing insignia of continuity are . . . Ensign De Ruyter and Robert F. Young.  Forty-six pages of Robert F. Young.  Well, let us keep an open mind; here, brace it with this two-by-four.  Anyway, it’s a mistake to infer too much from this month’s fiction contents, since the new management will likely be burning off the inherited Ziff-Davis inventory for some months.

The non-fiction includes another of Robert Silverberg’s articles on scientific hoaxes, and Silverberg’s book review column—good signs if they are signs, but they too may just be what Lalli left behind.  Ironically, the review column is devoted entirely to reprints, ranging from Wells to Sturgeon.  There is also an editorial, in which Sol Cohen—listed on the contents page as Editor and Publisher—first demonstrates that he can be just as boring as his predecessor in editorializing Norman Lobsenz, and then offers a lame explanation of his plans regularly to publish reprints from old issues of the magazine. 

As for the reprints themselves, Cohen has gone for big names, with early short stories from Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury: respectively, The Weapon Too Dreadful To Use from the May 1939 issue, and Final Victim (with Henry Hasse), from February 1946.  Each is accompanied by an unsigned introduction, shorter and less bombastic than those by Sam Moskowitz for the “SF Classic” selections of the Ziff-Davis years.  The original illustrations are reprinted along with the stories.

Time Bomb, by Keith Laumer

Keith Laumer’s novelet Time Bomb begins with Yondor, the son of the chief, going over the mountain to look around.  And he sees—danger!  Wounded on the way back, he makes his way home and reports to the chief that their way of life is at risk and they must act!  But the chief doesn’t want to hear it—hey!  Wake up back there!  If you’re bored, do something useful, like listing all the stories you’ve read that begin with this particular cliche.


by Nodel

Anyway, these primitive characters are the descendants of a human outpost, now menaced by the evil alien Tewk, and Yondor gets away from their attack and into a machine with a transportation system requiring only that he sit in a chair and pull a lever and he’ll be somewhere else.  This is a convenient substitute for a plot, as Yondor blunders his way from place to place before learning enough to get back, rescue his people, and smite the bad guys.  As generic melodrama goes, it’s smooth and clever enough that it might be mildly entertaining, say, if one were stuck in an airport waiting for a late plane.  Two stars.

The City of Brass, by Robert F. Young


by Gray Morrow

On the other hand, remarkably, Robert F. Young’s The City of Brass is actually fairly amusing, and not offensively stupid like most of his other rehashes of myths, legends, testaments, etc.  Billings of Animannikins, Inc., has flown in his time sled back to the days of the Arabian Nights in order to kidnap Scheherazade, here rendered Shahrazad, bring her back to the present so his employers can work up a facsimile for public performance, and then return her to her fate.  But Billings kicks some wires in the sled out of place and they wind up stranded in the age of the Jinn (which proves to be about 100,000 years in the future), not far from the Jinn’s brazen city of the title.

Shahrazad is undaunted.  She doesn’t much like Jinn, and is in possession of a Seal of Solomon (here rendered Suleyman) with which she proposes to force all the Jinn into bottles and seal them up.  Billings considers this a reckless plan, and goes out to reconnoiter, setting in train a ridiculous plot involving ridiculous revelations about the Jinn, their origin, and what has happened to humanity in the intervening millennia.  This actually might have made it into John W. Campbell’s fantasy magazine Unknown if he had run short of material one month.  Young’s familiar sentimentality about beautiful women and the men who are captivated by them threatens to take over, but the story ends quickly enough not to ruin the comic mood.

Three stars.  I’ll put that two-by-four back in the shed.

The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use, by Isaac Asimov


by Julian Krupa

The reprints from Amazing’s past nicely illustrate the problems with reprinting from Amazing’s past.  Asimov’s The Weapon Too Dreadful To Use is his second published story and shows it, with stilted writing, cliched characters and dialogue, and a muddled point.  Humans have occupied Venus and are oppressing the natives, though supposedly racial discrimination and hostility have been eliminated on Earth.  (Not too plausible.) The protagonist and his Venusian friend Antil trek to the ruins of a Venusian city and visit the science museum, which is largely intact, but no one has looked at it in living memory.  (Even less plausible.) In a formerly sealed room, Antil finds the eponymous weapon, which can destroy people’s mental functions at interplanetary distances.  (Plausibility meter breaks.) Venus rebels, Earth sends troops, Venus destroys the minds of a lot of them, Earth backs down and grants independence.  It’s clear there’s a smart guy here trying to figure out how to write stories, but he’s not there yet.  Two stars.

Final Victim, by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse


by Hadden

Bradbury and Hasse’s Final Victim is much worse.  It is essentially a Bat Durston—a transplanted Western—about a bad deputy, excuse me, Patrolman, Skeel, who always kills the fugitives he is supposed to apprehend.  His superior Anders knows his excuses are no good but can’t do anything, until Miss Miller, the sister of Skeel’s most recent kill, who has proven to be innocent of the accusation against him, decides to go after Patrolman Skeel.  Anders, noting “the firm line of her chin, the trimness of her space uniform, the hard bold blueness of her eyes which he imagined could easily be soft on less drastic occasions than this,” decides to set her up to ambush Skeel herself out on the plains, I mean asteroids, and take revenge.  But when things get really tough, Miss Miller faints.  I stopped there.  Forget stars.  One mud pie.

The Good Seed, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges’s The Good Seed, as mentioned, is another in the series about Ensign De Ruyter.  As usual it has some Earth guys at the mercy of treacherous primitive aliens, and they solve their problem with a scientific gimmick that you might find in the Fun with Science column of a kids’ magazine.  One star.

John Keely’s Perpetual Motion Machine, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg comes to the rescue in his article about a guy who managed to make a pretty good career out of the perpetual motion con, but ironically might have had a better one developing the means of his fraud in the light of day.  This is by far the best story in the issue, despite the fact that it is apparently true.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Well, that was dismal, wasn’t it?  Except for the Mitigation of Robert F. Young (can someone make a ballad out of that?) and Silverberg’s matter-of-fact competence at storytelling and -finding, nothing to see here, move on, move on.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Book, Magazine

[May 8, 1965] Skip to the end (June 1965 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Impatience

Normally, I'd open up with a discussion at length of the news of the day.  Like how the United States is still knee-deep in the Dominican Republic, losing soldiers to snipers every day despite the ceasefire between the current military-civilian junta government and the supporters of ousted President Bosch.

Or that Collie Wilkins Jr. was acquitted by a 10-2 hung jury in a trial for the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, shot in her car after the Selma rallies.  Wilkins' defense attorney's statements included language so profane and racist that I cannot transcribe them here.

Or that the comedy/news show, That was the Week that Was, had its final show on May 4th.

And then, having given my report, I'd tie it pithily to the subject at hand, namely the June 1965 Galaxy science fiction digest.  But the fact is, there's lots to cover and I'm anxious to get it all down while it's still fresh in my mind.  So, you'll just have to pretend that I was clever and comprehensive in my introduction.  On to the important stuff:

Bob Sheckley and friends


by George Schelling

As is happening more and more often, the king-sized bi-monthly, Galaxy, is dominated by a short novel this month.  This time, it's by a fellow who probably was the best SF short story writer of the 1950s.  Bob Sheckley has turned to novels of late with something less than (to my mind) great success. The Journey of Joenes, The Status Civilization, Time Killer — none of them were triumphs, though some disagree.  Will this time be different?

Mindswap, by Robert Sheckley

Young Marvin Flynn is bored to death of living in the bucolic New York town of Stanhope, desperate enough to risk "mindswap."  And so, Marvin exchanges minds with the Martian, Aigeler Thrus.  Unfortunately, Thrus' body was currently occupied by the unscrupulous Ze Kraggash, who had taken residency to elude the police after a crime.  Thrus is entitled to his body; Kraggash has Flynn's.  This leaves Flynn six hours to find a body, any body, or be extinguished forever.


by George Schelling

An increasingly frantic Flynn ends up bopping across the galaxy, first as a collector of sentient ganzer-eggs on Melde, somewhere near Aldeberan; then on to Celsus for a stint as a professional victim wearing a ticking time bomb gift; and ultimately to a reality-bending place called The Twisted World.

It's complete fluff, vaguely satirical and fun-pointing, but for the most part, pointless.  I went along with it, mildly amused for about 60 pages, before my tolerance ran out and I skimmed the rest.  Unlike Harrison's brilliant and cutting Starsloggers, Mindswap is just self-indulgent…and far too long. 

Two stars.

Servant Problem, by Otis Kidwell Burger

On the dreary, sandstorm-plagued planet of Dexter, there's little for the married couples to do but drink and kvetch about their house-servants, a race of off-putting aliens that only look like middle-aged spinsters.  After an endless seven pages of this stuff, we learn that the servants are actually the masters, and the humans are being evaluated for their level of social development.  Turns out they're in the emotional equivalent of kindergarten.

Yeah, I didn't get it either.  Two stars.

Blue Fire, by Robert Silverberg

Nat Weiner, visitor from newly terraformed Mars, the "Sparta of space," arrives on Earth to sample the luxuries of an overcrowded, decadent world.  Assigned to escort him is Reynolds Kirby, a "major bureacrat who gets paid like a minor one."  Together, they attend a spiritual gathering of the devotees of Vorster, a pseudo-scientific cult that preaches the unity of humanity and worships at the altar of the cobalt reactor. 

Vorsterism is just one of many avenues of relief against the physical and mental crush of living amongst 10 billions; hallucinogens are also popular, and the upperclassmen, like Kirby, favor the sensory deprivation "Nothing Chambers".  Cosmetic replacement of external features with metal and plastic substitutes is popular. 


by Jack Gaughan

As the tour of the once-proud homeworld progresses, Weiner becomes increasingly belligerent, resolved to steal a Vorster nuke and put it to "worthwhile use" as an energy-generating reactor on Mars.  Through Kirby's interactions with Weiner, and with the Vanna, a Vorsterian with a face modifed to inhuman grotesqueness, Kirby comes to see his own life as a hollow shell of an existence and reconsiders all of his carefully created precepts.

Blue Fire is a day-in-the-life of a fellow on the edge of a midlife crisis in a tired world.  With deft writing and vivid imagery, Silverberg accomplishes in 25 pages what usually takes Philip K. Dick a full novel.

Five stars.

Think of a Man, by Karen Anderson

Poetess Anderson offers up a latter-day space shanty.  It might make a decent filk, but it will likely leave no great impression on you.

Three stars.

For Your Information: The Observatory on the Moon, by Willy Ley

Observatory on the Moon, by Donald H. Menzel

An Eye For Selene, by R. S. Richardson

The idea that astronomy is better conducted on the Moon than Earth is an old one.  Not only is Earth's celestial neighbor airless, but its slow rotation makes it much easier to do long film exposures.

This should be a fascinating topic; instead, this is probably the least interesting article Ley's ever written.  A truly disappointing development for a column that was a major selling point when I first began my subscription to Galaxy 15 years ago. 

The short counterpoint following the main article is equally undistinguished.  Richardson's comments, on the other hand, are interesting. 

Barely three stars for the lot.

Devil Car, by Roger Zelazny

Sam Murdock speeds across the Great Central Plain of a post-apocalyptic United States in his sentient car, name of Jenny.  His monomaniacal mission: to destroy the black Devil Car and his minions, who have been savaging the continent.  Though Murdock's conviction never wavers, Jenny is torn between her programmed loyalty to her driver, and to the Devil Car's sirensong call to join his pack.

Plausible?  Not for a second.  Slick and enjoyable?  Absolutely.  Four stars, and I'll bet this gets optioned for a movie or episode of a Twilight Zone revival.

One Face, by Larry Niven


by Nodel

Last up is the third short story from this promising new writer, which may or may not take place in the same universe as his recent short novel, World of Ptavvs.  The passenger liner, Hogan's Goat, has an accident in hyperspace on the way to Earth.  It ends up at the right place but billions of years in the future.  The Sun is a burned out husk, and humanity's home is an airless world with one face permanently locked toward its star.  With no way home and nowhere to go, Verd Spacercaptain, his crew and passengers, and their increasingly debilitated computer Brain must find a way to survive.

I'm not entirely sold on the science of this piece, but Niven has a way of creating a very rich world in just a few pages.  It's also obvious that Niven is a new writer: his cohort has no problem with presenting women as equal partners and in roughly equal numbers to men; moreover, he displays no preference in terms of skin tone or ethnicity.

Four stars.

Satisfaction

How to judge the latest Galaxy?  It contains a full issue's worth of slag, but then again, it contains almost a full issue's worth of gold.  Perhaps it needs to be a regular length bi-monthly?

Especially since editor Pohl is crowing about how next month's novel will be even longer, and by Frank Herbert.

God help us all…

Our last three Journey shows were a gas!  You can watch the kinescope reruns here).  You don't want to miss the next episode, May 9 at 1PM PDT, a special Arts and Entertainment edition featuring Arel Lucas, Cora Buhlert, Erica Frank…and Dr. Who producer, Verity Lambert! Register today and we'll make sure you don't forget.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 22, 1965] Theory of Relativity (March 1965 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

(More Than) One Big Happy Family

A lot of dramatic events happened this month, many of them violent and tragic, from a huge earthquake in the Aleutian Islands (fortunately, far away from inhabited areas) to, just today, the murder of civil rights activist Malcolm X.

Although not as world-shattering as other news stories, one incident that caught my eye was the bizarre story of Lawrence Joseph Bader/John Francis "Fritz" Johnson. Why two different names? Thereby hangs a tale.

It seems that Mister Bader, a salesman from Akron, Ohio, vanished during a storm while on a fishing trip on Lake Erie, back in 1957. His wife had him declared legally dead in 1960. Meanwhile, Mister Johnson showed up as a local TV personality in Omaha, Nebraska.


Broadcasting from an ABC affiliate

A guy who knew Bader ran into Johnson, and knew something was fishy (pun intended.) He brought Bader's niece to take a look at him. Sure enough, Johnson was really Bader, now married to another woman. Fingerprints proved the case.

Amnesia or a hoax? The authorities aren't sure. Johnson claims that he has no memory his life as Bader, but other folks point out that he had some problems with the IRS and may have wanted to start his life over. Sounds like a soap opera plot to me. Anybody remember the old radio drama John's Other Wife? Stay tuned!

Two Brothers and One Son

The man with two families came to mind again when I took a look at the American music charts recently. Earlier this month, the Righteous Brothers reached Number One with You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.


They're not really brothers, so I may be stretching a point until it breaks.

Later, Gary Lewis and the Playboys hit the top with This Diamond Ring. Gary is the son of comedian Jerry Lewis.


I wonder if any of Dean Martin's seven children will have hit records.

Family Affairs

Fittingly, some of the stories in the latest issue of Fantastic involve close relatives, and others feature characters without families of their own.


Cover art by Gray Morrow.

Monsters & Monster-Lovers, by Fritz Leiber

Before we get to the fiction, let's take a look at an article from one of our greatest writers of imaginative tales. The title tells you what he's talking about; the current popularity of all things monstrous. It's a wide-ranging piece, listing many of the notable frightening creations of literature, pondering their appeal, noting that they flourish during relatively peaceful times, and dismissing the possibility that the discoveries of science will eliminate them from our minds. Perhaps the author tries to cover too much ground, but his essay is enlightening, elegantly written, and gave me the names of some classics I need to track down.

Four stars.

The Pillars of Chambalor, by John Jakes


The magazine's only interior illustration is also by Morrow.

Our old pal Conan Junior — excuse me, I mean Brak the Barbarian — shows up again in this issue's lead story. This time he's lost in a desert wasteland, near the ruins of an ancient city. In the time-honored tradition of sword-and-sorcery yarns, a huge monster attacks him, leaving him dying from its venom.

A wicked old man and his sweet young daughter show up. It seems the greedy fellow is after a fabulous treasure within the abandoned city, and needs Brak's mighty strength to open the doors behind which it lies. He'll provide an antidote for the poison if the barbarian swears to perform this service. (It amused me that the plot depends on Brak never breaking his word once he makes a promise, but then feeling free to turn against the old guy once he's opened the doors.)

Complicating matters is the fact that the ruins consist of about one hundred gigantic pillars, each one containing the bodies of the inhabitants of the vanished city, frozen in stone by a wizard. It won't surprise you to learn that they don't stay that way, or that we haven't seen the last of the critter that attacked Brak.

Predictable, but written with vivid imagination, this swashbuckling adventure is a decent way to pass the time. I find Brak a lot more tolerable in short stories than in longer pieces, although I wouldn't want to read a bunch of them at once.

Three stars.

Mary, Mary, by John Baldwinson

Here's a science fiction story that reads like fantasy, from an author completely unknown to me. In the future, folks usually work for fifteen years, saving little or none of their pay, then retire to lives of leisure, supported by a rich and benevolent government. The protagonist has a different plan.

She scrimps and saves, finally leaving her job with enough money to create a garden full of exotic plants from far-flung worlds. Many of these are as intelligent as animals, and some can even move around, acting as servants and watchdogs.

Although she's a loner, spending nearly all her time in the garden, the woman yearns for human company as well. She falls in love with a retired spaceman, and everything seems just fine. Too bad she doesn't realize her floral friends can feel jealousy.

Although the resulting tragedy comes as no surprise, there are some striking images and poetic writing to be found here. Despite the futuristic trappings, this is really a dark fairy tale, full of beings both beautiful and frightening. It reminds me of some of the romantic fables of Robert F. Young, which is OK in my book.

Four stars.

102 H-Bombs, by Thomas M. Disch

There's a lot going on here, so hold on to your hat and I'll try to walk you through it. In a future of constant armed conflict — don't call it war! — all male orphans in the USA begin military training at the age of ten. Our hero is named Charlie C-Company. (He got that last name due to a bureaucratic mix-up when he was inducted into the Army.) At this point, the story's satiric look at the armed forces made me think of Catch-22, a novel by Joseph Heller that came out a few years ago.

Anyway, Charlie is one of the winners of a contest to write an essay entitled "What I Would Do If I Owned the Empire State Building." You see, that famous structure is just about the only thing that survived an attack during this conflict that isn't officially a war. He and one hundred and one other winners — notice the title of the story — are flown to New York New (sic) and, well, things get complicated.

Not only does he make telepathic contact with a girl his own age who is one of the winners, he also finds out the real purpose behind the contest, learns something about himself, and becomes part of a larger, closely related group. The outcome has serious consequences for the whole world.

You get the feeling that Disch knows exactly how clever he is, so this is a story to admire rather than love. It's a real roller coaster of a tale, throwing all kinds of concepts at you left and right, always keeping your attention but making you feel a bit dizzy when it's over. It's worth the ride, anyway.

Three stars.

Look Out Below, by Jack Sharkey

This surreal tale features a main character without family or close companions.  He lives alone, on the top floor of a tall building, in a suite where everything is pure white.   Happy, but a bit lonely, he rides an elevator to the floor just below his own.

The things here are white, but with pale gray pinstripes.  He moves into a suite on this level that isn't quite as luxurious as the one he left.  The coffee, for example — like his food, clothing, and other belongings, it apparently appears from nowhere — is just slightly bitter.

Shortly after returning to the top level, uneasy dreams and yearnings draw him down two floors, where an alluring woman leads him to a crimson-lit place of music, drinking, smoking, and violence.  He soon descends even lower, leading to an enigmatic ending.

This is a very strange story, and not one I expected from the pen of a writer I associate with comedy and adventure.  I expect that I'll be pondering its meaning for a long time.  The author's intent seems to be allegorical, although I can't decipher all the symbols he uses.  The overall effect of reading it is intriguing, but frustrating.

Three stars.

The Headsman, by Irvin Ashkenazy

Like the lead story, this backwoods fantasy features a protagonist who meets an unusual father and daughter. The author isn't exactly new — digging into a pile of old pulp magazines reveals that he had a story published in Weird Tales nearly three decades ago — but he isn't exactly a household name, either.

The main character is an art dealer who goes deep into the wilds of Appalachia in search of priceless antiques. You see, a uranium prospector's journal indicates that the remains of a very old community exist way back in the hills. Did I mention that the prospector's headless body was found with his journal? That little fact, plus the title, should give you a clue that this is a horror story.

Anyway, the dealer locates the only two people who live in a ghost town in the mountains, a self-proclaimed preacher (and moonshiner) and his attractive but simple-minded daughter. After a lot of arguing and negotiation, the hillbilly tells the dealer how to get to the lost community. It was settled by supporters of Cromwell who fled to America at the time of the Restoration. (If nothing else, I learned something about English history from this story.)

The dealer finds the place and has a lot of spooky experiences. At the end, we discover the true nature of the hillbilly's daughter, and you can probably guess what happens to the dealer.

The plot involves many kinds of supernatural events, not all of which make sense. I also have to question the fact that there's apparently active volcanic activity in the Appalachians. The hillbilly and his daughter are old-fashioned stereotypes, and there's an unpleasant touch of racism in the suggestion that there's something weird about them because they're of mixed ancestry.

(As an inhabitant of Tennessee, where this story takes place, I have to mention another implausibility. The hillbilly and his daughter consistently address the dealer as y'all. Anyone who has lived in the American South for a length of time knows that this very useful word is the second person plural, and would never be used to refer to a single individual.)

As a parting note, let me contrast the weaknesses of this tale with the excellent backwoods fantasies of Manly Wade Wellman, found in his collection Who Fears the Devil?, which happens to win a glowing review from Robert Silverberg in this issue's book column.

Two stars.

The Man Who Painted Tomorrow, by Kate Wilhelm

This writer has appeared in genre magazines for nearly a decade — her first story was also in Fantastic — but is probably better known for being married to Damon Knight.   That may change some day, because she brings us an interesting and unusual tale that displays a great deal of imagination.

The main character's mind is pulled into the far future now and then, where he inhabits one of the four-armed bodies of the people of that time.  They bring him there to paint pictures of his present, with the help of a robot.

His main qualification for this task is the fact that he can draw very accurately, but without artistic creativity, which would distort the reality of his renditions.  His paintings become part of a museum, where other works depict humanity's history from the prehistoric past to what would be the protagonist's future, but the distant past of his hosts.

Eventually the man learns something about the world of the future, and a mysterious door that holds a secret his hosts try to keep hidden from him.  The ending brings present and future together, with both tragedy and hope.

The author has a gift for creating believable characters, which adds realism to the speculative aspects of the plot.  The conclusion may not be a total surprise, but it brings the sense of a fitting resolution.

Four stars.

It's All Relative

For the most part, this was an enjoyable issue. One of the stories wasn't very good, but I suppose every family has a black sheep.


The woman on the far right is Marilyn Munster. As you can see, she doesn't quite fit with the rest of her family, poor thing.

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Magazine

[February 12, 1965] Mirabile Dictu, Sotto Voce (March 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s an age of minor miracles.  Nothing to shout about, but last month’s pretty good issue of Amazing is followed by another one that’s not bad either. 

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

Greenslaves, by Frank Herbert

This March issue opens with Frank Herbert’s novelet Greenslaves, a rather startling, if not entirely amazing, performance.  In the future, Brazil and other countries are making war against insect life, since it’s a disgusting reservoir of disease and a source of damage to crops.  (The U.S. is an exception, owing to the influence of the radical Carsonists; the reference is presumably to Rachel, not Kit or Johnny.) But the campaign seems to be backfiring, with insects mutating, and epidemics.  The events of the plot are cheerfully bizarre, but the message is similar to that of the more ponderous Dune epic: attend to ecology.  Things work together and if you mess with the balance, you may harm yourselves.


by Gray Morrow

Unlike the more dense and turgid Dune serials, though, this story is crisply told and moves along quickly and vividly to its point.  It also recalls Wells’s story The Empire of the Ants—not a follow-up or a rejoinder, but a very different angle on the premise of that classic story.  Four stars for this striking departure both from Herbert’s and from Amazing’s ordinary course.

The Plateau, by Christopher Anvil

The ground gained by Herbert is quickly given up by Christopher Anvil’s The Plateau, which if it were an LP would have to be called Chris Anvil’s Greatest Dull Thuds.  Actually, my first thought was that it should be retitled The Abyss, but then I realized it is over 50 pages long.  Maybe—following our host’s example in discussing Analog—it should instead be called The Endless Desert.  It’s yet another story about stupid and comically rigid aliens bested by clever humans, which no doubt came back from Analog with a rejection slip reading “You’ve sold me this story six times already and it gets worse every time!”


by Robert Adragna

The premise: “Earth was conquered. . . .  At no place on the globe was there a well-equipped body of human combat troops larger than a platoon.” Except these platoons seem to have an ample supply of mini-hydrogen bombs and reliable communications among numerous redoubts at least around the US, as they bamboozle the aliens in multiple ways, including a cover of one of Eric Frank Russell’s greatest hits: making the aliens believe the humans have powerful unseen allies on their side.  The whole is rambling, hackneyed, and sloppy (late in the story there are several references to the aliens as “Bugs,” though they are apparently humanoid, and then that usage disappears for the rest of the story).  Towards the end, a sort-of-interesting idea about the nature of the aliens’ stupidity emerges, leading to a moderately clever end, though it’s hardly worth the slog to get there: it’s the same sort of schematic thinking that Anvil typically accomplishes in Analog at a fifth the length or less.  So, barely, two stars.

Be Yourself, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s Be Yourself is a little hackneyed, too, but at six pages is much more neatly turned and much less exasperating and wearying than the Anvil story.  Alien invaders have figured out how to duplicate us precisely; how do we know which Joe Blow is the real one?  No one who has read SF for more than a week will be surprised by the twists, but one can admire their execution.  Three stars.

Calling Dr. Clockwork, by Ron Goulart

Ron Goulart’s Calling Dr. Clockwork is business as usual for him, an outrageous lampoon, this time of hospitals and the medical profession.  The protagonist goes to visit someone in the hospital, faints when he sees a patient in bad condition, and wakes up in a hospital bed, attended by various caricatures including the eponymous and dysfunctional robot doctor, and it looks like he’s never going to get out.  Three stars for an amusing farce, no longer than it needs to be.

Wheeler Dealer, by Arthur Porges

The difference between an amusing farce and a tedious one is limned to perfection by Arthur Porges’s Wheeler Dealer, in which his series character Ensign De Ruyter and company are stranded on a nearly airless planet inhabited by quasi-Buddhist humanoids with giant lungs who can’t spare time to help the Earthfolk mine the beryllium they need to repair their ship before they run out of air.  Why no help?  Because the locals are too busy spinning their prayer wheels.  So De Ruyter shows them how to make the wheels spin on their own and thereby gets the mining labor they need.  Porges, unlike Goulart, is, tragically, not funny.  The story (like the previous De Ruyter item, Urned Reprieve in last October’s issue) is essentially a jumped-up version of a squib on Fascinating Scientific Facts that you might find as filler at the bottom of a column in another sort of magazine.  It does not help that the plot amounts to the simple-minded offspring of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.  Two stars.

The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg provides another smoothly readable and informative entry in his Scientific Hoaxes series, The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, about Paul Schliemann, grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the buried city (cities) of Troy.  The younger Schliemann wasn’t able to accomplish much on his own, so he exploited the fame of his grandfather to perpetrate a hoax about the discovery of Atlantis, or at least of its location and confirmation of its existence.  Silverberg succinctly recounts the origin and history of the Atlantis myth as well as the charlatanry over it that preceded Paul Schliemann’s, and suggests that had Plato known what would come of his references to Atlantis, he probably wouldn’t have brought it up.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So . . . two pretty decent issues of this magazine in a row!  One very good story, two acceptable ones, and quite a good article, and the other contents are merely inadequate and not affirmatively noxious.  Do we have a trend?  One hopes so, but . . . promised for next month is another of Edmond Hamilton’s nostalgia operas about the Star Kings.  We shall see.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 6, 1965] Plus C'est La Même Chose (February 1965 Galaxy)

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[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine!  We work for egoboo…]


by Gideon Marcus

Things in Flux

I read an article yesterday about how America was retiring all of its first-generation nuclear missiles, the hundreds of Thors, Jupiters, Atlas Ds, Es, Fs, and Titan Is.  It's astonishing when you think how short their operational lifespan was.  The first Atlas D base came online in 1959; the first Titans were activated in 1962!  Yet there they go, replaced by just two types: the solid-fueled Minutemen and the liquid-fueled Titan IIs, both of which can be launched straight from atom-proof silos. 

It reminds me of the big science fiction magazine boom at the end of the 1940s.  After the War, Amazing and Astounding were among the few genre mags remaining in publication after the big pulp bust.  But around the turn of the decade, Fantasy and Science Fiction came about, and New Worlds and Galaxy…and the floodgates were opened.  By 1953, there were some forty magazines in more-or-less regular production.

Well, there wasn't enough talent to fill those pages, and probably not enough readers either (I remember struggling to keep up with seven mags in 1957), and by the end of the '50s, we were back down to six.  That number has grown a bit since then, but it's nothing like the old "glory days".

Even the magazines that still exist have changed substantially.  Astounding changed its name to Analog and went "slick".  F&SF is now on its fourth editor, and the quality of its contents is markedly diminished since last decade.  Amazing and its '50s born sister, Fantastic, not only got new management under Cele Goldsmith, but she recently got married and changed her name to Cele Lalli!

But Galaxy, my favorite since its establishment in October 1950, seems virtually unchanged.  Sure, it went to bimonthly in 1959, it's a little thicker, a little more expensive.  Fred Pohl, one of the magazine's primary contributors, now runs the show.

Nevertheless, Willy Ley still does the science column, the contents are still more thoughtful than technical (though less toward the extreme than F&SF), and the names remain familiar: Cordwainer Smith.  J.T. McIntosh.  James H. Schmitz.  Robert Silverberg (though he was in short-pants when the magazine first started.)

And quality-wise, I think it's still, pound-for-pound, the best sf mag on the market.  Is it perfect?  Hardly, but always worth a subscription.  Check out the February 1965 edition, and tell me if you don't agree.

An Island of Stability


A fascinating cover by newcomer "Wright" — it's not connected with any of the stories, as is common for Galaxy.

On the Storm Planet, by Cordwainer Smith

The neat thing about Smith's Instrumentality series, detailing an odd far future, is that it has been around long enough to have a near infinite number of plot threads.  In Storm Planet, we are reintroduced to Casher O'Neill, an exile from the planet Mizzer, who had previously searched for aid and arms on a planet of jewels.  Now, he has come to Henriada, a tempest of a world where cyclones run amok, and where once 600 million lived, just 40,000 remain — deterred by economic failure in the distant past. 


by Virgil Finlay

Upon arriving, Casher is offered a powerful cruiser by the planet's Administrator.  The price?  Casher must kill a girl.

Not just any girl.  She is an underperson, a rightsless animal shaped into human guise to be a servant.  Yet, somehow she is the most powerful person on the planet, someone who has resisted countless assassination attempts.

Who T'ruth really is, and why she holds such sway, are the central mysteries of this excellent novella, to which I find I must award five stars.

A Flask of Fine Arcturan, by C. C. MacApp

An interstellar whiskey company has a rather spectacular failure when the aliens responsible for the bottling go on an unplanned jag.  A cautionary tale against poor interdepartmental company communications, this epistolary is something of a throwaway.  Barely three stars.

Forerunners of the Planetarium, by Willy Ley

If you're of my generation, you grew up during the great planetarium boom, when every educational facility of merit was getting its own interior star chamber.  And over the last two decades, they've gotten cheap and portable enough that they're practically everywhere now.

Willy Ley does his usual competent job of explaining the origin of the planetarium and its ancestors, the orrery, the armilla, and the astronomical clock.

Four stars.

The Sixth Palace, by Robert Silverberg

The greatest treasure in the galaxy is guarded by a clever robot who, sphinxlike, demands correct answers to its questions.  Two men believe they have an ace up their sleeve that will let them prevail where others have failed: a little computer that knows everything.

Can it be that simple?

There's not much to this tale, but it's told very well.  Four stars, I think.

The Man Who Killed Immortals, by J. T. McIntosh


by Gary Morrow

McIntosh has already written about immortality, in his excellent Immortality for Some from five years ago.  This time, he adds an interesting twist.

Several hundred years from now, a costly operation enables those who undergo it to live forever — unaging, unchanging.  But the downside is enormous: they are unable to heal from any wounds.  These "elsies" (for LC or Living Corpse) accumulate great wealth, but they mostly use it to cocoon themselves in exquisite safety.

But someone who calls himself The Avenger, wants to change the status quo.  He's begun demanding millions of dollars of elsies lest he slice their vulnerable skin.

A fairly unremarkable whodunnit, it lacks the deep interest of his last story of immortals.  Three stars.

Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer, by Richard Wilson

Mr. Protagonist sells mental taps on four astronauts so that the American population can vicariously experience the first Mars Landing.  Unforseen events interfere.

This joke tale falls pretty flat, though I did appreciate this line:

The Marsbound astronauts…each had an I.Q. no lower than 130 and no higher than 146 (the NASA director's I.Q. was 147).

Two stars.

Fin's Funeral, by Donald H. Menzel

Frederick I. "Fin" Nolan is a brilliant physicist who passes away at the age of 68, just after coming up with a theoretical way to reverse the passage of time (something to do with Steady State expansion of the universe).  His will includes the curious request that his coffin be left sealed, and that, at his funeral, the dials on it be set just so.

I'm pretty sure you can guess what happens.  It's a pretty prosaic story, the sort of thing I'd expect of a first-timer who hasn't been reading our genre for decades.

(Interestingly, I understand the fellow is actually a brilliant theoretical astronomer — his nonfiction is probably pretty good; Funeral isn't badly written, just novice plot material.  Also, I'll put good money down that that the Steady Staters are going to lose to the Big Bangers.  Any takers?

Two stars.

Planet of Forgetting, by James H. Schmitz


by Jack Gaughan

Last up is a piece by an old pro.  Schmitz is inclined to storytell through exposition, which suits this first-person thriller.  It starts intriguingly enough, with a special agent awakening on a wilderness planet with only gradually returning memory of how he got there.  The novelette then meanders through a workmanlike adventure story of no particular interest, but the interesting ending brings things back into three-star territory. 

All's Right in the Galaxy

As you can see, Galaxy is amazingly consistent.  Any of these stories would have been suited to any of the issues over the last 15 years of publication.  I'd worry about stagnation, but with a 3.5 star aggregate rating, I don't mind things remaining as they are for a while.

Analog and F&SF, however…they could afford a little change!




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Book, Magazine, Serial

[December 23, 1964] Odds and Ends (January 1965 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

A Hodgepodge of Happenings

It's the season for clearing out all that stuff you've got piling up in the closet, ready to greet the new year with a fresh start. With that in mind, and given the fact that no one news item dominated the headlines this month, allow me to throw out a few observations about what's been going on lately.

Italy joined the Space Age this month, with the launching of that nation's first satellite, as recently discussed in great detail by our own Kaye Dee.  Named the San Marco, the spacecraft rode on top of an American Scout rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Although this is primarily just a test flight, the satellite does carry a couple of instruments designed to study the ionosphere.


The San Marco is the striped, spherical object, shown here being loaded into the Scout rocket. It seems fitting that an object intended to soar into the heavens is named after a saint.

After months of surprisingly passionate debate over its design, a new flag will now symbolize the nation of Canada. Some English-speaking Canadians wanted to retain the Union Jack found in the old, unofficial flag, while many French-speaking Canadians objected. The current flag looks like a good compromise.


The old design, known as the Red Ensign. Besides everything else, it just looks messy.


The new design, which seems much more aesthetically pleasing to me.

The late Ian Fleming's master spy continues to draw moviegoers to the box office like flies to honey, as his latest cinematic adventure arrived in the USA this month.


I think that woman in the middle has been sunbathing too long.

A Miscellany of Music

Unlike some months earlier this year, December offered no overwhelmingly popular song at the top of the American charts. There were no less than four hits that reached Number One this month, and maybe we'll even hear from a fifth contender before 1965 arrives.

Spilling over from late November was Leader of the Pack by the girl group the Shangri-Las. I can't decide if this tragic tale of a romance ended by a fatal motorcycle accident is an example of a Teenage Death Song, or a tongue-in-cheek spoof of that macabre little genre.


These smiling ladies aren't saying one way or the other.

It would be hard to find a starker contrast with that bit of feminine adolescent angst than Lorne Greene's rendition of the cowboy saga Ringo. Obviously, the record is cashing in on the popularity of his hit television series Bonanza. Greene doesn't really sing so much as narrate this tale of the final confrontation between an outlaw and a lawman.


I wonder how many young people think this song is about the drummer for the Beatles.

It wasn't much later that Greene was outgunned by crooner Bobby Vinton, returning to the top of the charts with the tearjerking ballad Mr. Lonely.


The singer kindly provides the address of his official fan club right on the record sleeve.

Not to be outdone, the Supremes gave us their third smash Motown hit with the catchy little number Come See About Me.


And they're classy dressers, too.

A Smorgasbord of Stories

In a similarly generous fashion, the latest issue of Fantastic supplies a wide variety of short stories, as well as the first half of a novel.


Cover art by Emsh

The Girl in the Gem, by John Jakes


Interior illustrations also by Emsh

Here's another swashbuckling adventure of the mighty barbarian Brak, whom we've met many times before.

In unheroic fashion, our protagonist is passed out drunk in a seaside inn. A bunch of dwarfs rush in, armed with knives, but deliberately avoid hurting him. It's all part of a plot to frame him for robbery. You see, an earthquake tumbled the old palace into the ocean. Another one raised it up again. Meanwhile, the local king is dying. His daughter blackmails Brak with the threat of death for thievery if he doesn't undertake the dangerous task of rescuing her sister, who was imprisoned in a gigantic jewel, from the recently revealed palace. Of course, this means he has to defeat a hideous creature.


The mandatory monster

The author writes vividly and definitely keeps the action moving. This is the shortest tale of Brak yet, and it's got plenty of plot for its length. The characters are standard for the sword-and-sorcery genre, and a few incidents seem arbitrary. (Why are the royal servants who invade the inn all dwarfs?) Despite a lack of originality in some aspects, it's worth reading.

Three stars.

Journal of a Leisured Man, by Bryce Walton


Illustration by George Schelling

In a technologically advanced future, an accountant loses his job to a computer. Like many other people, he is forced to remain unemployed for the rest of his life. To add to his troubles, his faithless wife leaves him for another man.

The company that formerly employed the fellow makes automatons, in the form of animals, children, and adults. We witness some gruesome ways customers use these simulacra. In what seems to be at first an act of kindness, an employee of the company offers the man a synthetic duplicate of his wife, to do with as he pleases. You may predict the twist ending.

Although there are few surprises, the story has a certain grim power. It's not always pleasant to read, but is likely to remain in the memory.

Three stars.

On the River, by Robert F. Young

A man finds himself on a raft, floating down a river by day, staying at deserted inns on shore by night. He meets a woman in the same situation, and romance blooms. It soon becomes obvious that both of them attempted suicide, and that the river leads to death.

(The idea of an afterlife on a world dominated by a river also appears in the most recent issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. Given the delays in the publishing industry between writing a story and seeing it in print, this must be nothing more than a coincidence.)

I'm a sucker for this author's bittersweet love stories, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The conclusion may be obvious, but any other ending would have been inappropriate for a writer who wears his heart on his sleeve.

Four stars.

The Repairmen of Cyclops (Part One of Two), by John Brunner


Illustrations by George Schelling

A little research reveals that this novel is set in the same universe as two previous works, each published as one-half of an Ace Double. The series as a whole deals with what are known as Zarathustra Refugee Planets. Many centuries ago, the star which the colony planet Zarathustra orbited went nova. The inhabitants, fleeing the disaster, wound up populating a large number of planets. The Galactic Corps watches over these worlds, making sure that outsiders don't interfere with their development, while refraining from becoming overly involved themselves.


Cover art by Emsh


Also by Emsh

In the style of Philip K. Dick, the author uses many different viewpoint characters, so it takes a while before the main thrust of the plot becomes clear. The story mostly takes place on Cyclops, a relatively poor planet, although there is a wealthy upper class. An agent of the Galactic Corps, who was, I believe, the protagonist of Secret Agent of Terra, reviewed by our own Rosemary Benton some time ago, arrives after twenty years of service. Her reward for two decades of unpleasant, thankless work is considerable. She will have her youth restored, and her life extended for two centuries.

The extremely advanced medical technology of the Galactic Corps is one reason why the ruler of the planet resents them. (Although the government of Cyclops is, in theory, representative, she wields the real power.) There is also the fact that many natives of Cyclops were killed by the inhabitants of another world when they tried to make slaves of them. (I think these events also appeared in Secret Agent of Terra. Castaways' World does not seem to be as closely related to this new novel.)

The ruler's lover is an ex-spaceman who lost a leg in an accident. Although it was replaced, he is no longer allowed to serve on spaceships. While hunting the gigantic shark-like creatures who live in the oceans of Cyclops, he loses the same leg. After a brief stay in the local Galactic Corps hospital, he is whisked back to the care of his lover and her doctor. This creates a mystery for the Galactic Corps; how was the man's leg replaced, given the limited medical technology of Cyclops, and how do they expect to do it again? The author soon reveals the answer in scenes that take place on another world, where a sinister conspiracy takes advantage of unsuspecting victims.

Although a bit melodramatic in parts, this is an intriguing novel, full of richly defined characters, many of whom I have not even mentioned.


I haven't talked about these people.


I also haven't brought up these folks.

The author balances scenes of violent action with necessary exposition. It's interesting to note that the characters who are, I assume, the main protagonist and the primary antagonist are both powerful women. The complex background is fully developed, without becoming overwhelming.

Four stars.

Make Mine Trees, by David R. Bunch

The magazine's most controversial writer returns with another dark and strange story. This one is more comprehensible than most, and the title definitely helps you understand what's going on. The narrator, who is clearly as mad as a hatter, used some kind of formula to change his wife and her lover into trees. Now his young son is undergoing the same transformation. Typical for the author, the plot is much less important than the eerie mood and the eccentric style.

Three stars.

Multiple Choice, by John Douglas

A trio of young men, who have undergone a series of tests to become part of the elite, wait in a room for their final examination. They hear gunshots and screams from outside. Each one has a different theory about what's happening. Is it a hoax, designed to test their nerves? Are those who fail the last exam shot to death? Is it even possible that everyone is killed? The story's ending is inconclusive, which may be the point. Many readers will find the lack of a full resolution frustrating.

Two stars.

Something For Everyone?

Although the overall mood of the issue is on the dark side, there are all kinds of imaginative fiction to be found between its covers. From a heroic fantasy set in a distant past that never existed, to an adventure in deep space in the far future, and from a romantic parable of love and death, to a cynical portrait of tomorrow's dystopian society, there is enough variety to please just about every reader of speculative literature. You won't enjoy every story, but I don't think you'll dislike all of them. (If you do, turn to Robert Silverberg's book review column for more recommendations.)


He mostly reviews anthologies and collections in this particular column, so you've got lots to choose from.

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Magazine, Serial

[December 13, 1964] Save us from Yourselves (January 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

That Low

The uproar at the University of California at Berkeley continues, with student leader Mario Savio becoming instantly famous for his cri de couer: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Ever see that corny old silent movie Metropolis, with its oppressed workers desperately struggling against the gigantic levers of a future civilization’s industry?  Do you think Mr. Savio might have had those scenes in mind?  Is our culture now to be dominated by the imagery of old science fiction, recycled through late-night TV?  It can’t come soon enough for me.

The Issue at Hand


by Michael Arndt

Speaking of retrograde imagery, the January Amazing leads off with what seems a striking misjudgment.  Though it features the first installment of a serial by the up-and-coming Roger Zelazny, his longest work to date, the cover is a cartoony though well-executed depiction, by newcomer Michael Arndt, of an extraterrestrial boxer being knocked out of the ring, with a Damon Runyonesque audience looking on, clearly illustrating Blue Boy by the determinedly mediocre Jack Sharkey.  Zelazny’s story is relegated to smaller type above the magazine title, with his name hard to read against a bright background.  Amazing is clearly leading from the wrong side.  (Can’t anybody here play this game?)

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


by George Schelling

Promising as it seems, I will withhold reading and commenting on Zelazny’s serial He Who Shapes until the concluding installment is at hand, as is my practice.  A look at the first few pages indicates that the story involves psychiatric treatment by mental projection—not exactly a new idea (see Peter Phillips’s Dreams Are Sacred from 1948 and John Brunner’s more recent The Whole Man), but not overly familiar either.  Zelazny also seems to be making the most of his theatrical background in this one.  We will see the results next month.

Blue Boy, by Jack Sharkey

Blue Boy is even worse than I expected.  The protagonist, formerly involved in the boxing world, has been drafted, and is sent with a large crew on a mission to Pluto, where they encounter blue-skinned humanoids, whom they clap into the brig, and hastily head back towards Earth.  The Plutonians are quite muscular and have a knack for footwork, so our protagonist gets the idea of sneaking onto Earth with one and turning him into a boxer. 


by Michael Arndt

That’s about as far as I got (halfway) in this offensively stupid and also interminable screed (34 pages but seems like much more), which is written, and padded, in a stilted and circumlocutory style which seems pretty clearly intended as a pastiche of the above-mentioned Damon Runyon.  “Why?” one might cry, but the wind only whispers . . . “one cent a word.” One star.  No stars.  Heat death of the universe.  Cessation of all brain activity.  Bring back Robert F. Young!

A Child of Mind, by Norman Spinrad


by Virgil Finlay

We return at least to the semblance of sentience with Norman Spinrad’s A Child of Mind, a clever variation on a stock SF plot.  Three guys from Survey land on a planet which seems idyllic, but of course there’s something wrong; there always is.  This time, the majority of the females of the various local fauna have cell structures indicating they are really different organisms under the skin. 

Turns out they spring from “teleplasm,” an inchoate life form whose modus vivendi is, whenever a male of any species passes by, to discern and produce his ideal mate.  Why this all-female survival strategy?  As the hero, ecologist Kelton, Socratically explains to one of the other guys:

“Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

“Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

Er . . . that’s not always how it works.  If a lioness could speak, she would have a rather different account of things, as would many other females of other species.  But never mind, because, of course, very shortly, all three crew members have their own cocoon-grown dream girls: the thuggish one has an adoring slave, the mama’s boy has a sexy mama figure, and well-balanced Kelton has a merely supernaturally beautiful mate who understands his every desire.

This road leads nowhere, of course—to species extinction, since teleplasm doesn’t breed in the usual fashion, and not even to short-term satisfaction for Kelton, to whom

“. . . Woman had always been Mystery.

“And a creature of his own mind could hold no mystery for him, only the unsatisfying illusion of it.”

So Kelton does the only sensible thing, which you can probably guess.  While Kelton’s devotion to the autonomy of Woman may be creditable, there are hints of some pretty strange attitudes drifting through the story.  At one point, as Kelton is musing about how the teleplasm women are custom-made for their men, he thinks, “Swapping them would be like swapping toothbrushes.” Earlier, Spinrad quotes a “saying among Survey men: ‘Planets are like women.  It’s not the ugly ones that are dangerous.’”

Well, let’s reserve the psychoanalysis and give the author credit for a reasonably well-turned story—but meanwhile, Mr. Spinrad, you might think about putting some women on your space crews.  Three stars.

The Hard Way, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s growing competence suffers a setback in The Hard Way, a one-set psychodrama starring the sadistic Lieutenant Percy, who is delivering several prisoners from a penitentiary on Earth to one on Mercury.  Unfortunately they missed the turn towards Mercury and are heading towards the Sun, to die of heat on the way.  May as well have some fun with it! thinks the Lieutenant, and offers the prisoners a choice between slowly roasting to death and opening the airlock for a faster and cleaner exit.  Contrived, cliched, scenery-chewing.  Two stars, barely, and mainly to distinguish it from the abysmal Sharkey story.

The Handyman, by Leo P. Kelley


by George Schelling

Leo P. Kelley’s The Handyman is a pleasantly inconsequential dystopia about a small town where everything seems pretty nice except for the medical facility, the Hive, which spirits sick people away to its sterile and overlit premises and forbids any medical practice but its own.  Old Doc Larkin must ply his profession covertly, masquerading as a handyman and carrying his instruments concealed in a loaf of bread newly baked by his wife.  Three stars, also barely.

The Men in the Moon, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

The second of Robert Silverberg’s “Scientific Hoaxes” articles is The Men in the Moon, concerning the hoax perpetrated by journalist Richard Adams Locke, who published a series of articles in the New York Sun concerning the observations of profuse flora, fauna, and people on the Moon, supposedly made by famed astronomer William Herschel from his observatory at Cape Town, South Africa.  Herschel was indeed in Cape Town but of course made no such observations and didn’t know Locke was making these claims until years later.  Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting story capably told.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: another dose of mediocrity from this historic magazine that hasn’t done much of anything for us lately, and owes us big time, at least those of us putting down good money for it each month.  Maybe the Zelazny serial will be its redemption.  Hope springs eternal, but it’s getting tired.

[Holiday season is upon us, and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), on the other hand, contains some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  And it makes a great present! Think of it as a gift to friends…and the Journey!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 11, 1964] Unloading (December 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The festivities continue, albeit muted, at the University of California at Berkeley, where the administration continues its clumsy and tone-deaf standoff with students and some faculty who are demanding rather ordinary political rights in the public places of what amounts to their home town.  From this distance, it seems the administration is unable to let go of its usual habits of exercising authority in order to deal with the rather concrete issues raised by the students (whose cause now has a name, the Free Speech Movement), practical resolution of which really should not be difficult.  The FSM’s view of its own righteousness creates another sort of rigidity, no doubt strengthened by the American Civil Liberties Union’s announcement that the disputed restrictions violate the First Amendment and that the ACLU would intervene on behalf of the students who were suspended. 

For example, last month’s demonstration around and on top of the police car was resolved with an agreement to establish a committee to discuss and make recommendations about campus political behavior and its control.  So the administration proceeded to name the members of the committee without consulting with the FSM, which responded that the committee was illegitimate and should be disbanded.  The committee went forward anyway and heard a procession of witnesses telling it that shouldn’t exist.  This argument was settled within a couple of weeks with an agreement on the membership of an expanded committee.  One wonders why that conversation couldn’t have been had in the first place, avoiding the antagonism and waste of time.

Meanwhile, University president Clark Kerr made a speech at the Chamber of Commerce in which he said “Students are encouraged, as never before, by elements external to the University.” A few days later, he said at a news conference that he believed some of the demonstrators “had Communist sympathies.” Where have we heard that before?  It’s the standard line of the southern segregationists: we didn’t have any problems until the Communist-inspired outside agitators came, and just the thing to say about people with whom you are supposedly trying to make peace—some of whom just returned from contending with the southern segregationists.

On the substance of the dispute, the university’s explanations for its positions sometimes read like self-parody, like this statement by the Dean of Students: “A speaker may say, for instance, that there is going to be a picket line at such-and-such a place, and it is a worthy cause and he hopes people will go. But, he cannot say, `I'll meet you there and we'll picket’.”

The FSM, for its part, has continued to threaten a return to civil disobedience if it didn’t get some concrete results from its demands, and held a rally on November 9.  Some students resumed staffing tables to solicit funds and members for their causes, the practice that started this controversy.  The University then dissolved the agreed-upon joint committee, an action denounced by FSM.  And there, more or less, things stand.

The best judgment on the management of this dispute is probably the one pronounced by Casey Stengel to the 1962 New York Mets: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

The Issue at Hand


By Robert Adragna

One might seek refuge from this tedious stalemate in the December Amazing, but one would be disappointed.  The issue features a “complete short novel” which exemplifies the literary philosophy “Got no ideas today, but I’ll throw some random crap together and make it move fast enough and nobody will know the difference.”

The Further Sky, by Keith Laumer


By Robert Adragna

The featured story is Keith Laumer’s The Further Sky, in which the disgusting and ill-tempered reptilian Niss are the honored guests (actually, the secret conquerors) of the pusillanimous Syndarch dictatorship of Earth.  Our hero Ame, after being treated contemptuously by a Niss, is visited by a very old guy talking about their Navy days together (which didn’t happen).  The old guy is also the one who just stole a scout spaceship from Pluto, and he boasts about killing Niss.  Ame helps him sneak away when some Niss and Syndarch types come looking, and later finds him dead.  But very much alive is Jimper, a foot-high character adept with a tiny crossbow who says he’s an ambassador from the King of Galliale—er, where?—and he is, or was, with Jason, the deceased senior citizen.

Ame and Jimper have to flee, since Syndarch and Niss are after them, so Ame befuddles a few functionaries, swipes a Syndarch spaceship, and they head for Pluto by way of Mars.  On Pluto they crash-land and struggle across the mountain ice, just ahead of Niss pursuers, and there it is, the portal to Galliale, a sunny and bucolic land of more little people—but whose king, the ample Tweeple, the Eater of One Hundred Tarts, does not know Jimper despite his being an ambassador. 

The king says Ame has to go into the nearby tower to slay the dragon, and Jimper comes with him, and there’s no dragon but there is a glowing cube which proves to be a portal to yet another world, and when the dragon (more like a giant centipede) shows up, they flee through the portal, where godlike four-dimensional beings, one of whom calls them fleas and wants to dispose of them, inform them that they are in the Andromeda galaxy three million years in their past, and explain the time travel gimmick that has been obviously in the wings all along, as well as the relationship among all the various species of beings involved (some of whom I have not bothered to name), and they materialize a spaceship for Ame and Jimper that will get them home at the right time, and don’t the Brits have a phrase for this sort of thing?  Oh, right—“load of old bollocks.” One star for tiresome and unconcealed cynicism in the service of a word count.

The Quest of the Holy Grille, by Robert F. Young


By Robert Adragna

Speaking of tiresome loads, Robert F. Young is back with The Quest of the Holy Grille, one of a series, or cluster, or infestation, of stories about sentient automobiles.  This one begins, “Housing had never been one to go chasing after girlhicles,” and there’s much more about girlhicles and boyhicles, who collectively make up manmobilekind, and towards the end there is some discussion of whether one of the characters is a virginhicle.  This goes on for 31 pages.  Pffft!  Begone!  One star.

The Last of the Great Tradition, by James R. Horstman

The short stories are by no-names, or worse.  James R. Horstman has no prior genre appearances, and his The Last of the Great Tradition is a well enough written but rather obvious satire of a snake-oil salesman who switches to the Wisdom of the Flying Saucers line, and receives poetic justice.  He is assisted by his servant (sic) George Washington Carver-Spokes, who speaks in cliched dialect of the sort that I hoped had gone out with Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944, and good riddance).  Two stars and a bad taste in the mouth. 

The Day They Found Out, by Les Dennis

Les Dennis, another newcomer, contributes The Day They Found Out, a vignette about Recognition Day, on which all the kids are supposed to bring their pets to school so they can receive a lesson in what real life is about.  It would be shocking if it weren’t so obvious. This guy probably read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and thought, “Hey, I can do that too.” Well, not really.  It’s capably enough done for what it is, so two grudging stars.

The Moths, by Arthur Porges


By George Schelling

The above-mentioned “worse” is Arthur Porges, who could justly be said to have extinguished himself in his prior appearances.  Porges is back with The Moths, which attempts to carry a little more weight than his previous trivialities, not very successfully.  A disgraced and alcoholic entomologist who is dying of cancer in his hovel encounters a rare moth which proves to be a mutant, absorbing energy from a flame rather than being destroyed.  Fade to not very interesting symbolism.  Two stars, being generous.

Philip Jose Farmer: Sex and Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz’s new “SF Profile” is a departure.  Titled Philip Jose Farmer: Sex and Science Fiction, it features a writer with no work from the ‘30s and ‘40s for Moskowitz to dwell excessively on, and purports to be a subject matter survey as well as an author profile.  It starts off by dismissing the observations on the subject by scholar G. Legman (no sex in SF except in the chambers of mad scientists) as accurate enough but dated, since he stopped looking in 1949.  But now here’s Farmer!  Whose first published SF was the 1952 novella The Lovers, featuring an affair between a human male and an alien female with an insectile life cycle (book version not published until 1961 by the reasonably intrepid Ballantine Books).  Moskowitz notes a modest bump of sexual subject matter immediately after The Lovers, but then says maybe things were going that way anyway (citing earlier examples), but before that the genre magazines were pretty puritanical (but here are the exceptions, some quite amusing), and what there was of sex in SF appeared in hardcover books. 

Why this reticence?  “The answer most probably is that science fiction is a literature of ideas.  The people who read it are entertained and even find escape through mental stimulation.” Oh . . . kay.  Moskowitz then moves on to a brief account of Farmer’s somewhat ill-starred life (he had to stop writing and take a job at a dairy, publishing next to nothing during the late 1950s), ending with an unusually sharp summation of his strengths and weaknesses as a writer.  Surprisingly, this turned out to be one of Moskowitz’s better articles.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Well, that was pointless, wasn’t it?  The fiction is all well below the waterline, with the longer stories by bigger names half-buried in the muck.  The only thing worth reading is the Moskowitz article (except for Robert Silverberg’s book reviews, which roll along in unassuming excellence).  Next month we are promised a “powerful” novel by Roger Zelazny, which might be worth waiting for, and a “rollicking” Jack Sharkey story, which—oh, never mind.

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Book, Magazine

[October 12, 1964] Slow Cruising (November 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s a cliche that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  What can one say about those who don’t learn even from what they see around them?  At the University of California at Berkeley, a city within a city in which many thousands of people study, work, and in many cases live, the administration recently decided it will strictly enforce rules prohibiting political advocacy and speech, appearances by political candidates, and recruitment and fundraising by student organizations at a heavily-travelled area (an intersection of the city’s main street!) where such activities were routinely conducted.

Let’s pause for station identification.  This is 1964.  All over the United States, people are standing up for the rights and freedom of individuals, including political rights, most notably the right to vote.  Most of them are Negroes, but you’d think people in responsible positions would realize that a few white people (as apparently are most of Berkeley’s students) might get some funny ideas too—like the ideas of direct action and civil disobedience that they have been seeing on TV, and in some cases in person, for several years. 

You’d also think they would be aware that a significant number of their own students and some faculty members just got back from the Freedom Summer activities in the segregated South, where they lived daily with the risk of physical assault and even death, and are unlikely to be too fearful of university administrators.

So on October 1, the campus police arrested a guy named Jack Weinberg—one of those who went south this past summer—who was sitting at an information table for the Congress of Racial Equality and refused to show his identification.  A crowd formed around the police car, preventing it from moving, and the car became a speaker’s podium for a crowd said to have swelled to three thousand people.  This went on for 32 hours until the university agreed not to press charges against Weinberg, and also agreed to . . . what else? . . . form a committee!  This is to be a student/faculty/administration committee to discuss “all aspects of political behavior on campus and its control, and to make recommendations to the administration.”

What next? Nobody knows.  But one thing seems to be clear: increasingly, infringement on the rights that politically active Americans have come to expect to exercise will be challenged using the tools we all see on TV every week from the civil rights movement.  Authority is no longer its own justification, and those in positions of power, some of whom seem to look to Louis XVI as their role model, will need to change their approach to survive.  As that folksinger put it—I forget his name, the one with the frizzy hair and nasal voice—“you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”

The Issue at Hand


by Alex Schomburg

More prosaically—back to science fiction.  The November 1964 Amazing is distinguished by being the second consecutive issue with a cover depicting a guy in a flying chair, calling to mind the observation of the Hon. Jimmy Walker, erstwhile Mayor of New York City, before fleeing the country to avoid a corruption prosecution: “Never follow a banjo act with another banjo act.” Alex Schomburg’s rather static and solemn depiction of the device contrasts amusingly with Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration, which attempts to imbue the same gadget with all the energy and drama that the cover picture lacks.  Can we say Apollonian versus Dionysian?  I thought not.  Forget I mentioned it.

Rider in the Sky, by Raymond F. Jones


by Virgil Finlay

The story itself, Raymond F. Jones’s long novelet Rider in the Sky, is unfortunately pretty inane, a hardware opera that reads as if it had been dumbed down for prime-time TV.  In the near future, private enterprise is starting to get into the act in space, and Space Products, Inc., has developed the Moon Hopper, essentially a rocket-propelled chair in which a space-suited person can sit and fly over the lunar surface, untroubled by the quantities of fine dust covering it.  But how to market this device?

The Space Products boys (usage highly intentional) decide on a publicity stunt—they’ll get somebody to fly the Moon Hopper from Earth orbit to the moon.  Who?  They’ll ask for volunteers from within the company!  They get one—Sam Burnham, a company accountant and secret space buff, who knows he doesn’t have the right stuff but has indulged his fantasies to the point of installing a centrifuge and an imitation space capsule in his basement. 

Sam’s wife Edna, who spends her copious spare time supporting the cause of the orphans of Afghanistan, is appalled, and leverages her Afghan-symp connections to start a national movement to keep Sam Earthbound.  This, and Edna, are presented in a spirit of condescending sexual oppression of the sort one finds in, say, True: The Man’s Magazine.  I forget if the author refers to “the little woman,” and I’m not going back to look, but that’s the attitude.

After much machination, with the President getting into the act, Sam goes, and his trip takes an unexpected turn, plot mechanics unwind reasonably cleverly, and he and the story are brought to a soft landing.  But the treatment of women, and the smarmy faux-folksy style in which a lot of the story is told, make it difficult to appreciate the admittedly limited virtues of the story.  Two stars, barely.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner


by Ed Emshwiller

John Brunner’s two-part serial Enigma from Tantalus concludes in this issue.  While it’s not the pretentious mess that his previous effort The Bridge to Azrael was, Brunner has not regained the form of (as I keep saying) his sequence of smart and well turned novellas in the UK magazines. 

Here, humans have discovered Tantalus, a planet inhabited by a singular intelligent life-form with separate units linked telepathically and capable of being molded into a variety of forms and functions.  The crisis that drives the plot is that the Tantalan is believed to have made a fake human (presumably disposing of the real one) and dispatched it on a spaceship to Earth; we can’t let it loose on our planet!  (There is an acknowledgement along the way that the Tantalan appears to be studying humanity just as humanity is studying it.)

So, there’s a bunch of people confined in a small space, and we must learn which is the alien!  This is not exactly an original plot, but Brunner plays it more in the style of a country-house mystery than that of its distinguished and horrific predecessor, Campbell’s Who Goes There?, spiced up by the fact that the passengers are as eccentric a bunch of freaks and neurotics as one could wish for.

Brunner manages the latter parts of the plot capably and trickily enough, but overall the story has two sore-thumb-level problems.  One is that by far the most interesting part is the discovery and opening of communication with the Tantalan, all of which happens off-stage—in fact, before the story opens—and we learn about it only in fragments.  In that sense the story is much too short. 

In another sense, it’s too long.  The other big problem is that here as in The Bridge to Azrael, Brunner wants to wrestle with Big Thinks, in this case chiefly that technological development and affluence have left the run of humanity with a sense of helplessness and lack of purpose.  But his attempts to integrate this notion into the story are perfunctory, or worse; for example, he invokes it to explain the manipulative and nymphomaniacal female journalist who is confined in the spaceship and chewing the furniture.  (This is a conspicuous sour note from a writer whose prior work is notable for strong and relatively cliche-free female characters.) So this exercise in speculative social psychology in the end contributes nothing to the story but verbiage.

Another problem, at least to my mind, is that when something comes up that the machines can’t handle in the ordinary course, Earth is essentially governed by a tiny elite called the “Powers of Earth” (a particularly arrogant and irascible specimen of which conducts the inquiry of the spaceship passengers).  These “Powers” apparently exercise unchecked authority based on their extraordinary powers of deducing correct conclusions from limited information. 

This seems to me a sort of magical thinking, no better than (not much different from, in fact) the recurring notion in another magazine that the future will be dominated by a psionic elite, and about as plausible and useful for thinking about the future as the depiction by Edmond Hamilton and others of galactic empires ruled by hereditary nobles with pompous titles.

One might ask if this criticism is too big a demand to make of popular fiction in newsstand magazines, but Brunner invites it by posing the questions himself.  I don’t want to be hard on the guy for essaying too much, but his ambition is outrunning the format he is writing in, and he will have to find better ways to integrate them, or move on to a different kind of writing.  Anyway, three stars for a nice but flawed try.

Your Name Shall Be … Darkness, by Norman Spinrad


by George Schelling

Norman Spinrad displays his own brand of ambition with Your Name Shall Be . . . Darkness, about an Army psychiatrist captured and subjected to sophisticated brainwashing in the Korean War. He is repatriated, seemingly intact, but . . . .  This is essentially The Manchurian Candidate as applied social psychology, and pretty clever, though done in an overly bombastic style for my taste.  Still, it’s effective: three stars verging on four.

The Seminarian, by Jack Sharkey


by Virgil Finlay

And, last of the fiction, Jack Sharkey . . . is Jack Sharkey, with The Seminarian, about a guy, the son of missionaries, reared on a South Sea island without significant technology who comes to the States to conduct his own missionary work.  It’s a tribute to Sharkey’s superficial skills that his facility distracts one from the story’s complete implausibility.  Two stars.  Sure you don’t want to go into advertising, Jack?

The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

There’s a new byline on this month’s non-fiction: Robert Silverberg (also now the regular book reviewer) contributes The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, apparently the first of a series—it’s labelled “Scientific Hoaxes #1.” It’s about a 16th-Century German scholar who was taken in by a large aggregation of fake fossils, an interesting story in itself (especially in the hands of Silverberg, a much more capable writer than the usual suspect Ben Bova) and one which contributed to a shift in understanding of what fossils actually are.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So, business as usual at Amazing: a couple of nice tries, one dreary failure, one lighter-than-air piece of trivia, plus a better article than usual.  Steady as she goes.

[Join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Magazine

[July 16, 1964] Un-Conventional (August 1964 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

All Together Now

Out in San Francisco, in the humorously named "Cow Palace", the GOP are having a convention.  Their goal is to pick the fellow they feel most adequately represents the convictions of the party of Lincoln, of Roosevelt, of Eisenhower. 

To all accounts, they have settled on Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a nativist, opponent of the Civil Rights Act, and advocate for expanded use of nuclear weaponry.  Despite a last-ditch attempt by Republican moderates Scranton, Rockefeller, and Romney, nothing can stop General Goldwater from tilting against LBJ in November.

Whether or not Barry wins the general election (I don't believe he can), his candidacy has reshaped the Republican Party into something regressive, "Primitive".  God help us if someone with his platform actually ascends to the Presidency…

Politics takes center stage in the latest issue of Galaxy, too, and like the Cow Palace convention, most of the names between the covers of this magazine are heavy hitters, known to all.  Let's see if we get a better result from Mr. Pohl (editor of Galaxy) than we did from Mr. Morton, Chair of the GOP convention:

The Issue at Hand


by John Pederson, Jr.

The Dead Lady of Clown Town, by Cordwainer Smith


by Gray Morrow\

Over the past decade and a half, Cordwainer Smith has woven a tapestry of tales, telling the thousands year history of The Instrumentality, technocratic oligarchy spanning much of the galaxy (except for the longevity-drug-growing Norstrilia, the wealthy and proud remnant of the British Commonwealth).  This domain is run by true humans and maintained by underpeople, animals cast in the rough images of people but with no inherent rights.  In recent tales, we learned of the revolt of the underpeople that tore down the Instrumentality.  This latest story tells of the first abortive attempt that set the seeds for the successful rebellion.

At the center of Lady is Elaine, an embryo germinated and dispatched, by accident, from Earth to Fomalhaut III to serve as a physician.  The problem is that none of the humans there needed medical attention, thus rendering Elaine's life fruitless and frustrating.  But her coming was prophesied by Lady Panc Ashash, long deceased but imprinted on a Fomalhautian computer.  The Dead Lady introduces Elaine to D'Joan, a young dog person, who is to be the martyr who gives life, love, and hope to the underpeople.  Together, Joan and Elaine lead the first movement against the Instrumentality.  The measure of its success depends entirely upon the time frame in which its effects are gauged.

Lady presents a quandary for me.  On the one hand, I adore Cordwainer Smith, and his fairytale, off-center approach to science fiction is usually far more effective than it has any right to be.  This time around, however, I felt the format had gotten stale.  The story is laden with portentous language, like a tale from a religious text, but events are presented as overdetermined, inevitable, and none of the characters makes a conscious decision.  In particular, the "love scene" between Elaine and 'The Hunter', a telepathic human with mind control powers who sides with the underpeople is not only perfunctory but disturbing (smacking of rape).

In the end, this is a redundant story, one that did not need to be told.  And Smith's poetic style is more grating than compelling this time 'round.

2.5 stars (half stars being permissible for novellas and novels).

For Your Information: A Century of Fossil Man, by Willy Ley

This month's non-fiction is about the historical and current state of physical anthropology — the study of human fossils.  Willy is back to his recent mode: informative but brief and dry.  I miss Ley of the early '50s, the one who convinced me to subscribe to Galaxy in the first place.

Still, not bad.  Three stars.

Jungle Substitute, by Brian W. Aldiss


by Jack Gaughan

Deep in the heart of a decaying city, robots and humans live a symbiotic relationship of despair.  People no longer have meaningful jobs, their lives guided by endless superstition and taboo; the machines are slowly breaking down.  One young man, Robin, discovers a government project to declare him and his family obsolete — but is the Government Investigation Bureau what it seems to be?  And what can he make of the resourceful GIB agent, Gina, who seems to know far more about the city and its condition than anyone else?

With Jungle, Aldiss paints as good a dystopian vision of the man/machine world as I've ever seen, as exciting and evocative as the first stages of his Hothouse series.  This is the kind of quality that won him the Best Promising Author Honorable Mention in 1959.

Five stars.

The Watchers in the Glade, by Richard Wilson


by Jack Gaughan

Somewhat less effective (but no less vivid) is this story by pulp-veteran Richard Wilson.  In Watchers, four journalists and two medics are banished to an uncharted world after a ship's mutiny.  To survive, they must murder and feed upon the only edible matter on the planet — sentient, telepathic beings.

All six of them go mad in their own ways, living with their daily crime while they wait on the slender hope that rescue will someday come for them. 

A solid three stars.

Neighbor, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

Silverberg pens another intimate piece, on the most local of politics: the rivalry between two neighbors.  On a planet of vast holdings, old McDermott builds an enormous tower in full view of the Holt estate.  For decades, Holt amasses a huge arsenal, waiting for the chance to get even.  But when the opportunity finally presents itself, can he take it?

The author described it to me as "a pretty good character study."  It's told with a certain degree of style, anyway.  Three stars.

The Delegate from Guapanga, by Wyman Guin


by Virgil Finlay

Lastly, we have Wyman Guin's first piece in eight years.  It's really been too long — this is a wonderful piece.  Guin presents us an alien culture (if not an alien race) on the eve of election time.  Only the telepathically capable, the elite and the "cupra" half-breeds, are franchised; the two dominant parties are the conservative Mentalists, favoring peace, polygamy, and interbreeding of the telepathically gifted and ungifted, and the Matterists, who value work, monogamy, moral purity, and the invasion of Earth.

It's a most appropriate story for our politically fraught year of 1964, and the storytelling and worldbuilding are quite good.

Four stars.

Summing Up

All told, even with the inferior Cordwainer (and it's not horrible), I imagine you could get a lot more pleasure out of the latest Galaxy than a trip to San Francisco's convention.  It's cheaper, too. 

Anyone want to lay odds on the next issue versus the DNC convention?

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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