Cast your memories back to the distant past — about four years. Remember when Bobby Vee exploded on the scene with his first hit, Rubber Ball.
It's a song about a fellow who should know better than to stick with an untrue love but, like a rubber ball, keeps coming back to her anyhow. The tune came to my mind more than once as I read this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction, a magazine that has plumbed depths often enough to tempt me to cancel my subscription, but on occasion (like this one) produces such an excellent issue that I remember the good times of the 1950s, and love is rekindled.
Is it the doing of new editor Joe Ferman? Statistical variation? Either way, it was a pleasure to read. Come join me and see why:
We begin with an ending of sorts, the conclusion to the exploits of Gunnar Heim, late of the Federation Navy, now a privateer savaging the Aleriona patch of stars known as The Phoenix. His goal, to prosecute an undeclared war to liberate the conquered human world of New Europe before its inhabitants run out of Vitamin C, is about to come to fruition. But how can one ship achieve victory against a starfaring empire? More personally, will an old flame of Heim's be waiting for him planetside when all is said and done?
Admiralty is Anderson near the top of his form, which, like a sine wave, has definite positive and negative amplitudes. What makes the piece frustrating is its incompleteness. This novella and the other two that have recently appeared in F&SF are about to be compiled into a book called The Star Fox, and I strongly suspect that there will be expansions above and beyond what has appeared in the magazines. Indeed, some of the most exciting episodes in Admiralty, like the capture of the Aleriona prize, Meroeth, are dispatched in a paragraph or two of exposition. What remains is something of a Readers Digest abridged version — entertaining but dissatisfying.
Also, I wish Anderson wouldn't assume that we all speak French; there are paragraphs and paragraphs of the stuff that go largely untranslated. I'm going to start sending him letters in Japanese…
Anyway, four stars, for this and the whole sequence, and I suspect the book will be even better. Certainly Hugo material.
Dooley Hanks, a clarinetist of modest talent but tremendous desire, scours the world looking (listening?) for The Sound. When he finds it, in an obscure town in Germany, the temptation to claim it for his own becomes overpowering…and hazardous.
A powerful story, evocative and beautifully told, it's the kind of reworked fable Robert F. Young wishes he could write.
Five stars.
by Gahan Wilson — better than his previous ones
Books, by Judith Merril
Normally, I don't give inches to the book column, but Ms. Merril is cutting and insightful in a way I can only hope to approximate. Don't miss her take on the latest SF to cross her desk (many of which have been covered by the Journey).
Rake, by Ron Goulart
Ben Jolson, shape-changing agent of the Chameleon Corps, is back for another adventure. This time, in the guise of a student, he's investigating the development of a super-weapon by an academic ensconced at a public college.
This tale is far more obviously slapstick than his previous one, which I had quite liked. Rake is just too silly, too random to be very good, and there's no reason for such a short piece to begin in medias res followed by a flashback to How It All Began.
Two stars.
Phoenix (the Science Springboard), by Theodore L. Thomas
Normally, Thomas' non-fiction vignettes, more story seed than article, aren't worth the two pages they're printed on. This time, I quite liked his postulation that at the center of every gas giant lies a terrestrial core. I don't know if it's accurate; I don't know how we could verify the accuracy, but it is an exciting idea that the planets of the solar system all started out as roughly similar planetoids that grew atmospheres as time went on. Only the inner ones lost theirs because it was too warm so close to the Sun.
Of course, it's easy to make models that fit the one set of data we have.
Four stars, anyway.
The Ancient Last, by Herb Lehrman
The first of two reader-submitted stories fulfilling the call for tales involving Univac and Unicorns. This is the more poetic of the pair. Interestingly, its poignant ending is somewhat marred by two additional paragraphs; because the offending superfluity occurs on a following page, I didn't originally see them, and I thought the ending was stronger than it ended up being.
Funny enough, I was recently rejected by F&SF, whose editor suggested I trim out my terminal line to give the ending more punch. I did. We'll see how it does.
Stand-In, by Greg Benford
Another first from a fellow San Diego native. This Univac/Unicorn story is more swinging and fun, but not particularly consequential.
I give three stars to both. I'm glad the authors got their breaks and I hope this sets them on their way to stardom.
Story of a Curse, by Doris Pitkin Buck
Earth spacers are forever restless in search of change, intolerant of stagnation. But when Earth, itself, has changed, the astronauts see the folly of their wanderlust.
Long on emotion, short on coherence, Story is more prose-poem than science fiction. I liked it well enough, though. Three stars.
Nabonidus, by L. Sprague de Camp
Archaeologist meets a ghostly colleague of ancient vintage. This poem has a strange meter, but again, it's appealing. Three stars.
Future? Tense!, by Isaac Asimov
In a surprise disappointment, the science column is probably my least favorite piece of the issue. The Good Doctor begins by relating how on-the-spot he feels when asked to predict the future, then says he'll do it anyway, and then doesn't really do it at all.
At a recent bookstore interview, I was asked if a science fiction story's value is based on its predictive accuracy. I felt that the answer I gave ("No — its value is in how well it entertains; science fiction can't predict the future; it can only extrapolate current trends.") was better and more succinct than the one Dr. A offers.
The Last Man of Earth meets the Last Man of Mars; unfortunately, time is not on the side of humanity.
Zelazny increasingly makes his stories more affectedly "literate." It may get his stories sold, but it's getting tedious. Two stars. (Your hue and cry tells me I'm a too-harsh boor. I do not disagree.)
Jabez O'Brien and Davy Jones' Locker, by Robert Arthur
Lastly, here is the tale of a young New England fisherman who seeks to win fame, fortune, wisdom and happiness through the capture of a mermaid. Instead, he winds up…well, best not to spoil this gem of a story.
It's an absolutely charming work, the best I've seen from Mr. Arthur, and made all the better for my imagining it being narrated by Fractured Fairy Tale's Edward Everett Horton (now you'll have his voice in your head, too!)
Five stars.
My heartstrings, they just snap
In the end, even this issue bounces around like a rubber ball, but the pages of quality far outnumber the momentary lapses. The June 1965 issue of F&SF is a stand-out…and my love is rekindled.
Don't break my heart, Joe!
Don't forget to register for our show on May 23 at 1PM DT! We really want to see you there and hear your questions.
Our last two Journey shows were a gas! You can watch the kinescope reruns here).
You don't want to miss the next episode of The Journey Show, April 25 (tomorrow) at 1PM PDT featuring professional flautist Acacia Weber as the special musical guest serving up some groovy period tunes.
Sports history was made this month, with the first major league baseball game played indoors. It took place inside the newly completed Harris County Domed Stadium, located in Houston, Texas. The exhibition game between the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees took place before nearly fifty thousand fans, including the President of the United States. Fortunately for LBJ and other native sons of the Lone Star State, the home team won, two to one, after an exciting game lasting twelve innings.
There's something futuristic about a baseball diamond under a dome, isn't there?
So what's the fly in this athletic ointment? Well, the game was played at night, which disguised a serious flaw in the design of the stadium. During daylight hours, if the sun isn't blocked by clouds, the transparent panels covering the dome cause a lot of glare. Fielders can't see fly balls, leading to a whole bunch of errors. Oops.
Is This Music Or Comedy?
In yet another invasion of the American music charts by a British band, a bunch of fellows calling themselves Freddie and the Dreamers reached Number One with a cheerful, if undistinguished, pop song called I'm Telling You Now.
If you think they look a little silly here, wait until you see their act.
This superficial ditty would quickly fade from the memory of anybody listening to it on AM radio, or on a 45, I think. However, if you happen to catch the Dreamers performing live or on TV, I doubt if you'll forget the antics of Freddie, doing a bizarre dance that looks like something they made you do in PE class. The combination of the sound of the Beatles and the look of Jerry Lewis is disconcerting, to say the least.
Situation Normal; All Fouled Up
Given these missteps in the worlds of sports and music, it seems appropriate that many of the stories in the latest issue of Fantastic features situations that go from bad to worse. One of the paradoxes of literature is that misfortune can often make for enjoyable fiction. That's not always true, of course, so let's take a look and judge each effort on its merits.
Cover art by Gray Morrow. I hope you like it, because there are no interior illustrations at all.
Speaking of foul-ups, the magazine starts off right away with a mistake. It's obvious that the last name of the creator of this gruesome horror story should be Pendragon, not Pendragan. How do I know? Well, for one thing, that version of the name appeared with a very similar tale in the April 1964 issue. For another, anyone familiar with the myths of Camelot knows that Pendragon is the correct spelling of King Arthur's surname. I don't know who's hiding behind this royal pseudonym, but he or she has more in common with H. P Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe than the Once and Future King.
New England, 1924. In the suggestively named town of Sabbathday, a doctor visits the mentally tortured inhabitant of an isolated mansion. (His role should be played by Vincent Price.) Since the death of his spinster sister, he's been charged with (dramatic pause) the Guardianship. It seems that his late father's second wife, named Ligea (an apparent allusion to Poe's short story Ligeia — another change in spelling!) was a witch. Just before her death, she gave birth to a deformed creature, kept locked up in the mansion. Ghastly events follow.
There aren't many surprises in this chiller. The reader is ready for the monster to appear long before it steps onto the stage. After a slow start, the action builds to a frenzied climax. The resemblance to a horror movie that I've hinted at above grows stronger at the ambiguous last scene, when there should be one of those The End (?) final credits that you get at the conclusion of some scare flicks.
We return to the dystopian world of Moderan, where things have gone badly many times before. In this disturbing future of endless automated warfare and people who have replaced most of their bodies with metal, a little girl receives a robot playmate. Her barely human father has other uses for it.
There's not really much plot to this grim little tale, other than the basic premise. The author's unique style, and what seems to be a sardonic look at the thin line between humans and machines, make up for this lack, to some extent.
Three stars.
The Other Side of Time (Part Two of Three), by Keith Laumer
It would be tedious for me to try to provide an accurate summary of the dizzying array of events that occurred in the first third of this novel. (Besides, I'm lazy.) Suffice to say that the narrator, after a ton of wild adventures in multiple alternate realities, is now in exile in yet another world, with much of his memory erased.
This is a place where Napoleon was triumphant, so the planet is dominated by the French Empire. Technology is at the level of steam engines and the early use of electricity, without the gizmo that allows folks to journey between different realities. Even though the narrator manages to regain his memory, with the help of a hypnotist who disguises herself as an old crone, it seems impossible for him to return to his home.
Or is it? In a desperate attempt to recreate the device he needs, the narrator and the hypnotist, now a loyal companion, travel to Rome, in search of this world's version of the scientist who invented it. After much effort, some of it on the comic side, he succeeds.
Or does he? It's out of the frying pan and into the fire, because now he's in a prehistoric world, full of dangerous beasts. Only the very end of this installment offers a hint as to how the narrator is going to get out of this mess.
After the breakneck pace of the first segment, this portion comes as something of a relief. A touch of comedy, when the narrator uses his wits rather his fists to get what he wants, is most welcome. The hypnotist is a very appealing character. She's intelligent, capable, and brave. There's a hint of romance between the two, but since the narrator is happily married in his own world, I assume this isn't going to continue. In any case, I liked this third a little better than the first one.
Four stars.
Terminal, by Ron Goulart
A writer better known for slapstick farce offers a much darker vision of the future than usual. A man finds himself in a home for the elderly run by robots. He's not old, so he knows he doesn't belong there, but parts of his memory are gone (just like in the Laumer.) The inefficient robots aren't any help at all, and things go very badly indeed.
Much of the story deals with the fellow's interactions with the other inhabitants of this hellish institution. These characters are sketched quickly, in effective and poignant ways. I was particularly taken with the man who just quotes poetry at random. The whole thing is a powerful, bitter satire of society's treatment of the elderly.
The time is the American Civil War. The place is Georgia, during Sherman's March to the Sea. A Union officer loses the rest of his outfit. Knocked unconscious when he falls from his horse, he wakes up in the plantation home of a woman whose husband was killed by the Yankees. She holds him prisoner, taunting him with the point of a saber and offering him poisoned wine. The officer sees strange, frightening apparitions, and learns the terrifying truth about the woman.
This is a fairly effective ghost story, with a convincing portrayal of the time and place. The author shows a gift for historical fiction, and he may not need supernatural elements to succeed in that genre.
Three stars.
Red Carpet Treatment, by Robert Lipsyte
There's not a lot to say about this two-page oddity. Passengers on an airplane hear an announcement that they're on their way to Heaven. The folks aboard the plane — a priest, a child and his mother, a young married couple, a rich man and his girlfriend, and so on — react in various ways. There's a slight, predictable twist at the end.
I suppose it's about the way we deal with the awareness of death. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a joke or not.
Two stars.
Junkman, by Harold Stevens
Things are also going very wrong in this story, but this time the intent is strictly humorous. A series of brief vignettes throughout time show stuff getting all mixed up. There's a bowling ball in prehistoric times, a typewriter in the Dark Ages, etc. Eventually we figure out that a super-genius invented a time machine, and caused all the chaos. Since this is a time travel story, we've got a paradox at the end. I found it overlong and not very amusing.
One star.
I Think They Love Me, by Walter F. Moudy
At first, this seems to be a war story, as we witness a scarred veteran, too old for active service at the advanced age of twenty-four, lecture young recruits on the dangers they face. Pretty soon we figure out that these guys are the members of a rock 'n' roll band, and that the enemy consists of hordes of screaming teenage girls. As in just about every other story in this issue, things don't work out well.
I like this mordant satire of Beatlemania more than it deserves, maybe. Sure, the premise is silly, and mocking teen idols isn't the most original thing in the world. Yet somehow I found its mad logic compelling enough to go along with it.
Three stars.
Light At The End Of The Tunnel?
After reading about all these fictional mishaps and disasters, it may be tempting to be a little fatalistic about the state of fantastic fiction these days. On the other hand, although this issue has a couple of losers, there's also some decent reading to be had. I suppose it all depends on how you look at it.
A recent ad for what may be one of the late JFK's most important legacies.
The news recently has been dominated by battles between the old-guard conservative and the new liberal voices in the matter of race relations.
In the USA President Johnson has urged passage of a Voting Rights Act at the same time as another Johnson (a judge this time) has agreed to let a civil rights march in Alabama continue, in spite of fierce opposition.
In the UK, Rhodesian ministers have been touring trying to drum up support for their declaration of independence under white minority rule to resolve the stalemate between Ian Smith and Harold Wilson. Given the Rhodesian argument seems to primarily be that they have real experience of governing and the black people of Rhodesia are uncivilized, I don’t think they are going to win too many friends.
At the same time we have continued debates over Commonwealth immigration into the UK. Firstly whether the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act is being circumvented illegally and how widely, secondly if those citizens should be deported and, thirdly, if further controls need to be placed on immigration. I am personally in agreement with the late leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, who stated that it was cruel and brutal, and as such I am not surprised there are some people trying to get around it.
Then there are the inflammatory statements made by Sir David Renton MP that certain communities do not wish to integrate and that we have too much of our farmland been taken up by urban sprawl. On my personal experience, Indian and Pakistani communities in the UK are doing a much better job of integration into British life than most British people living in India seemed to have done. Whilst most of the increasing land-use over the last ten years seems not to have come from immigration but from those formally in the cities moving out to areas with more space. If they are really worried about this I would contend wider availability of birth control, legalization of abortion and a proper investment into inner city renewal.
A Quiet Town
Closer to home in Bedford, however, we have long had a thriving immigrant population and I have yet to hear any complaint about it. In fact the biggest grumbling locally is the that TV signal continues to be poor and plans for a nearby relay station continue to be delayed.
Thankfully we have many other entertainments around here. We have a number of local picture houses, with The Empire continuing to show a range of excellent films for the SFF enthusiast. On Sunday they are having both Vincent Price and Boris Karloff films I hope to sync my teeth into.
As well as the national charts, we get local charts. I approve of the top 3 going into this weekend (which I definitely contributed to myself).
And, of course, plenty of reading material, including two long awaited pieces. The Fourth issue of Gamma, which is looking backwards, and City of A Thousand Suns, which has an eye on the future.
Gamma: A Long-Expected Magazine
by John Healey
First thing, we have to start with is the cover. Gone now are beautiful space pictures and instead is a lurid cover right out of the pulp era. I have to wonder if this is the influence of the new co-editor, Jack Matcha, who has made a career writing Pulp Sleaze novels for Kozy Books and has the forthcoming novel A Rogue’s Guide to Europe whose content, I have heard, is just what you would expect from the title.
An example of Matcha's work for Kozy
The editorial confirms we are now going straight back to the pulp era. I personally was not yearning for the days:
…when Jayne Mansfield who invariably wore a space suit apparently constructed by a bikini manufacturer and every Bug-Eyed Monster attacked her for reasons known (if at all) only to himself (itself)?
We are definitely a far cry from the literary attempts to include imaginative fiction of all types, and the issue feels much the lesser for it.
H. B. Fyfe was first published in Astounding back in 1940 and was prolific during the 50s although he has been appearing in print less often of late.
Neil Bryson and a dietician named Carole Leland (who acts as his secretary), are sent on a mission by the Galactic Federation to assess a recently admitted planet that has seen a marked population boom that is alarming the other members of the federation. They are to investigate what is being done to get this down. On this planet we meet different groups with different responses to this directive.
One reason why I like to return on occasion to pulpy space adventures is they are fun and easy to read. This, on the other hand, is like reading through treacle with over-description, pointless diversions and regular stating of Bryson’s own thought process.
And yet the actual story within is quite fascinating. At first it seems like it is going to be a colonialist parable about “stupid natives” overpopulating themselves and not accepting the tenants of “superior people”. However it quickly gets messy as the Galactic directive has completely changed the various societies on this planet in unprecedent ways and we are led to wonder if the federation itself was at fault to start with.
So a very interesting piece brought down by poor execution. Three stars.
The Towers of Kagasi, by William P. Miller
William P. Miller is apparently a well-known and respected mystery writer, but I believe this is his first foray into science fiction. In this story, a team of astronauts investigate the titular planet from where a ray was sent to Earth, killing the entire population of four major cities.
At times it felt like what you used to get in Thrilling Wonder Stories, but it lacks any of the enjoyment and is a story that comes across to me as meanspirited, misogynistic and gross.
One star
Food, by Ray Nelson
Our first story by Ray Nelson since he got Four- and Five-star reviews for his pieces at F&SF in 1963 and is apparently now working on a novel with Philip K. Dick. He continues to show here why he is one to watch.
Ben is the last crewman alive on a planet where numerous creatures seem to be trying to kill him. This does not feel like a pulp era story at all, rather like the kinds of atmospheric vignettes we get in New Worlds.
Four stars
Hans Off in Free Pfall to The Moon, by E. A. Poe
This is a significant abridgement of Edgar Allen Poe’s Hans Pfall (about one fifth of the original length) done by cutting out his verbosity and digressions and instead sticking to the core of the tale, one of a man attempting to travel to the moon in a balloon.
Though I am not a fan of the original full-length work and do think Poe will use ten words where one can suffice, it feels like a lot is lost by making such a change. For example a section observing the Earth from above and pondering its appearance becomes a note about checking altitude on a barometer.
One star for a rather pointless exercise.
The Gamma Interview: Forrest J. Ackerman
I am a bit disappointed overall not just by the brevity of this interview but also the shallowness of it. It starts off interestingly, talking about the early history of monster movies but quickly descends into Ackerman bemoaning how terrible they all are. Also I am surprised that no real attention is given to how Hammer and Toho have really revived the monster film in recent years. He claims he watches every monster film that comes out but you would think from his description everything today was like The Creature From The Haunted Sea. You are much better off checking out Fritz Lieber’s editorial in the recent Fantastic instead.
Two stars
Open Season, by John Tanner
John Tanner is not a medical student as claimed but another alias for new co-editor Jack Matcha (and his second story for Gamma). In this tale, Ditmar is travelling to Venus to try to find out what happened to his wife, who disappeared previously on the same route. While there, the ship gets boarded and crew taken to the asteroid Zara, this being the exclusive property of Cyrus Blake, one of the wealthiest men on Earth
The story seems to be trying to be a tense mystery but I was just getting impatient. The twist itself is pretty expected for anyone who has encountered The Most Dangerous Game (and given how widely reprinted, taught, filmed and copied it is, that is probably 90% of the readership) and the whole thing feels like a very tired exercise.
One star
The Woman Astronaut, by Robert Katz
Katz is another new writer to science fiction from outside the field; if this vignette is anything to go by I hope he never comes back!
A comedic (and I use the term very loosely), dramatic telling of the first American Woman in space, this anonymous Mrs. Smith spends her time worrying about her appearance, is confused that communist China isn’t actually red from space and is generally befuddled by the whole experience.
It has been over a year since the first woman went into space on Vostok 6 and these kind of prejudiced attitudes are insulting, disgusting and probably do continued damage to any hope for progress on this front from NASA.
Unfunny, uninteresting and insulting. One star, only because I cannot give anything lower.
Happily Ever After, by William F. Nolan
The former managing editor of Gamma returns to try to raise the magazine out of the doldrums with this little tale. Donald Spencer buys an asteroid to live on with his wife, on the basis that land value increases will mean it is a sound investment in the long term. It turns out not enough was known about the asteroid and they might be destined for a different kind of happily ever after.
Not that strong, but it hums along and is at least a slight improvement on the last few pieces. Two and a half stars
Don’t Touch Me I’m Sensitive, by James Stamers
Huckelberry Waterstone Smith arrives on a heavily populated Earth controlled by various corporations (the zone he is in being the City G.L.C. Services inc.) wanting to be a space warden, but he lacks the mathematical skill and is illiterate. However, he has the unusual ability to leave behind him images of himself wherever he goes.
I have forced myself to read through this story three times now and I have no idea what is meant to be about. It seems to be written as a joke or satire but I am not convinced it really works as being about anything. Add to that the terrible prose style and it only gets one star from me.
The Hand of Dr. Insidious, by Ron Goulart
With Dr. Fu Manchu set to be brought back to life in the cinema later this year, it seems appropriate that Goulart, a skilled writer of silly satires, would do his take on the famous villain. In this version Dr. Insidious is attempting to create a talent agency and take control of Hollywood. When the 00 agents have been killed in their attempts to stop him it is up to crack spy Ian Naismith and Hollywood’s top plastic surgeon Dr. Maxwell Phoebus Jr. to take him down.
A fun and silly piece as you would expect from Goulart but it doesn’t really get at or examine the myriad problems with the Fu Manchu stories. In fact reads more as another silly version of the Spy-Fi genre.
Two Stars and a recommendation to instead check out the Goon Show stories of Fred Fu-Manchu.
A Messy Melee
Overall, a really disappointing turn for the once great magazine. My subscription is paid up until issue 7 and with the new bi-monthly schedule (assuming this one actually sticks) I should be reading up until September. However, if this is the new direction I certainly will not be renewing.
Thankfully, the other work is a significant improvement:
And so we now come to the conclusion of Delany’s Toron trilogy, which (at least for myself) has been the most anticipated book for a decade. The first two books showed that Delany was a writer of immense skill and did an amazing job of setting up this fantastical future and the stakes of the conflict. Now he has a full length novel, rather than half of an Ace Double, to conclude this tale.
This book jumps between two main focuses. Firstly, we have agents from numerous different species in the city of the Triple Entity. Here we learn of the war with The Lord of The Flames and the previous efforts to combat him. The Lord of Flames cannot experience concepts like war or compassion as those in our universe can so he has been trying to understand them first hand. The final result of the war will depend on which side has ownership of three manuscripts of the most sensitive minds of Earth and it is up to the Triple Entity’s agents, without outside aid, to bring them.
Back on Earth, the focus is on Jon and Alter. Now back in Toron (the centre of the Toromon empire), they have discovered mysterious words scrawled on walls everywhere. Following this trail leads them to the final resolution to the many conflicts we have seen throughout the series.
This is one that I think is going to get sharp reactions from the science fiction community, this is probably the toughest novel in an incredibly experimental series. It is a philosophical work touching on religion, communication, the morality of war, class conflict, racism and free will. Through it all we have a wide range of characters and concepts across a massive scope.
To start with the positive, there is absolutely no faulting Delany’s imagination and ambition. What would take entire novellas for another writer constitute a passing reference for him. To take one example:
…one of the attendants was an attractive woman with wide hazel eyes. But a minute examination would have shown her slim almond-nailed fingers, her cream and honey skin to be a bizarre cosmic coincidence. Internal examination and genetic analysis would prove her a bisexual species of moss.
This character never becomes important to the narrative and this description could be entirely exorcised without any confusion. Yet what it does do is display the multiplicity of life in this universe and the vast difference in beings we will be encountering.
Also, in spite of how complex the story he is trying to tell is he handles the action beats and flow incredibly well. It is easy to get lost in the world Delany has created, the tribulation of the characters and feel the tension grow as the remaining pages count down.
Yet, as with the previous books, keeping all the characters and situations in my head can be a real struggle. I don’t think this is a personal thing; I like Tolkien and Tolstoy and find their enormous casts just fine to understand. What I think is the major issue with these books is that Delany is attempting to paint on such an enormous scale with an incredibly finite canvas. There is no reason these books could not be expanded to the length of The Lord of The Rings without the need for significant plot alterations.
That is not to say it is not a great work that shows a talent that seems destined to become one of the most important in the field. But I do wonder if this kind of writing might not be better off trying a mainstream publisher or a long magazine serialization than the slim paperbacks Ace produces.
Rating: Four and a half stars
By the way, Galactic Journey will be doing a special presentation of our "Come Time Travel with Me" panel, the one we normally do at conventions, on March 27 at 6PM PDT. Come register to join us! It's free and fun…and you might win a prize!
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 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.
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.
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Back when the Young Traveler and I were watching The Twilight Zone, we accidentally picked the wrong time to turn on the set and ended up getting introduced to Mr. Ed, Supercar, and The Andy Griffith Show, in that order. It made for an amusing night, and we learned a lot about the prime-time schedule for that season.
Recently, we once again fell down the rabbit hole, though not quite by accident.
It all started with an amazing new import form England. You may have seen the American rebroadcast of Danger Man back in the summer of '61. It was a smart spy show starring NATO agent, John Drake, played by Patrick McGoohan. Well, he's back, and this time his episodes are a full hour rather than just half. It's gripping stuff, albeit a bit heavier and more cynical than the first run. Realistic, idealistic, and respectful of women, it's a delightful contrast to the buffoonish Bond franchise.
So gripping was the show that we ended up somehow unable to change the channel when Password came on. This game show is sort of a verbal version of Charades where a contestant tries to get their partner to say a word using single-word clues. Play goes back and forth until one team gets it right.
It's kind of a dumb show for the viewer because we already know the answer. On the other hand, the contestants always include celebrities, and it's fun to watch them struggle through the rounds.
Gene Kelly looked like he wanted to kill his partner. The whole time!
Juliet Prowse, on the other hand, was adorable and funny.
After half an hour of that, we had summoned enough energy to reach toward the television remote…until we heard the bugle strains heralding the arrival of Rocky and Bullwinkle (and friends). It had been my understanding that the show had completed its five year run, but it has apparently gone into reruns without missing a beat. Since we had missed the first couple of years, well, we couldn't turn off the television now!
The only thing that saved us was the subsequent airing of Bonanza, a show I am only too happy to turn off. Who knows how long we'd have cruised The Vast Wasteland otherwise. Of course, now we're stuck watching all three shows every week (homework permitting).
Print Analog
Science fiction magazines are kind of like blocks of TV shows. They happen regularly, their quality is somewhat reliable, but their content varies with each new issue. This month's Worlds of IF Science Fiction defined the phrase "much of a muchness". Each (for the most part) was acceptable, even enjoyable, but either they were flawed jewels, or they simply never went beyond workmanlike. Read on, and you'll see what I mean:
This rather goofy cover courtesy of McKenna, illustrating Small One
Steve Maitlin is an ornery SOB, a Marine veteran of Korea who knows the world is all SNAFU, especially the moronic generals who run the show. Not only does this attitude make life miserable for those around him, but it also brings the Earth to the brink of interstellar war. It turns out that the alien BEM Maitlin shoots one day on the road to work is just one of an infinite number of bodies for an IT, and the replacement body ends up with Maitlin's cussedness as part of its basic personality.
Said IT also has the ability to replicate any weapon the humans throw against it, but magnified. Shoot at it? It builds a big-size rifle. Bomb it? It comes back with an extra-jumbo jet and a bigger nuke. In the end, Maitlin is the only one who can stop the thing, which makes karmic sense. But can the vet change his nature in time to meet minds with the alien?
by Gray Morrow
This story doesn't make a lot of sense, but Van Vogt is good at keeping you engaged with pulpish momentum. Three stars.
Reporter at Large, by Ron Goulart
In a future where mob bosses have replaced politicians (or perhaps the politicians have just more nakedly advertised their criminal nature!) power is entrenched and hereditary. Only an honest journalist can bring about a revolution, but when any person has his price, only an android editor's got the scruples to speak truth to power.
Ron Goulart writes good, funny stories. Unfortunately, while I see that he tried, he failed at accomplishing either this time out. Two stars, and the worst piece of the mag.
Small One, by E. Clayton McCarty
A young alien has exiled himself as part of its first stage of five on the journey toward maturity. Its isolation is disturbed when a tiny bipedal creature lands in a spaceship nearby and finds itself trapped in a cave. The child-being establishes telepathic contact with the intruder (obviously a human) and an eventual rapport is established. But everything falls apart when the Terran's rapacious teammates land and fall into conflict with the alien's infinitely more powerful family…
by Jack Gaughan
I am a sucker for first contact stories, especially when told from the alien viewpoint. This one is good, but it suffers from a certain lack of subtlety, a kind of hamfisted presentation of the kind I normally see from new writers. That makes sense; this is his (her?) first story.
Three stars, and my favorite piece of the magazine.
Blind Alley, by Basil Wells
A year after settling the planet of Croft, the human colonists and their livestock all become afflicted with blindness. Against the odds, they survive, shaping their lives around the change. But can their society take the shock when a new arrival, generations later, brings back the promise of sight?
Blind Alley treads much of the same ground as Daniel Galouye's excellent Dark Universe from a few years back. The question is worth asking: when is a "disability" simply a different way to be able? That said, Wells is not as skilled as Galouye, and the story merits three stars as a result.
Gree's Commandos, by C. C. MacApp
by Nodel
On a thick-atmosphered planet, Colonel Steve Duke assists a race of Stone Age flying elephants against the interstellar aggressors, the Gree, and their mercentary cohorts. It's a straight adventure piece with virtually no development, either of the characters or the larger setting. Somewhat similar to Keith Laumer's latest novel (The Hounds of Hell, also appearing in IF), it doesn't do anything to make you care. Sufficiently developed, it could have been good.
Two stars.
Zombie, by J. L. Frye
Here is the second story by a brand new author…and it shows. In the future, it becomes possible to transplant a personality in the short term to a physically perfect body. Said transfers are used almost exclusively for espionage and sabotage — it's not much fun living in a shell of a form that can't really feel or enjoy anything other than the satisfaction of a job well done. Indeed, the only people willing to endure the hell of personality transfer (back and forth) are the profoundly crippled.
This story of a particularly hairy mission has its moments of poignance, but again, Frye is not quite up to the challenge of a difficult topic. Plus, he needs more adjectives in his quiver; I count seven times he used "beautiful" to describe the sole female character. Even Homer varied between calling Athena "grey-eyed" and "owl-eyed".
Three stars.
Starchild (Part 2 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson
Last up is the second installment of three (that number again!) in this serialized sequel to The Reefs of Space. It's a short one, barely long enough to cover the harsh interrogation of Bowsie Gann. Gann was the loyal spy servant of The Plan, returned to Earth at the same time the star-reef-dwelling Starchild began to turn off the local suns to scare Earth's machine-run government.
by Nodel
It's a most unpleasant set of pages, with lots of torture and cruelty (something Fred Pohl does effectively; viz. A Plague of Pythons). That said, Pohl and Williamson can write, and I am looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up.
Three stars.
Stay Tuned
Like much of the Idiot Box's offerings, IF continues to deliver stuff that's just good enough to keep my subscription current. I'd like editor Fred Pohl to tip the magazine in one direction or another so I can either stop buying it or enjoy it more…
Until then, I guess my knob stays tuned to this channel!
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The guy on the right doesn't seem too happy about all this.
The long-anticipated movie version of the smash hit stage musical The Sound of Music had sneak previews in Minneapolis and Tulsa this month, and is scheduled to show up in theaters across the nation in March. This sugary-sweet confection, very loosely based on the true story of the Trapp Family Singers, isn't really my cup of tea, but I thought I would pay tribute to the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II by stealing the titles of some of the ditties that appear in it.
Just a couple of days ago, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States for his first full term.
Chief Justice Earl Warren administers the oath of office.
The inaugural address was a short one. In the space of twenty minutes or so, he raised the issues of poverty, health care, literacy, and much more. A phrase about American lives lost in countries we barely know is surely a reference to the conflict in Vietnam. He even threw in a nod to the space program, mentioning the rocket that is heading toward Mars.
Those are a lot of steep, difficult mountains to conquer for any politician, so let's wish the President well.
I've complained before about some of the syrupy ballads that reach the top, so I was pleased to see two tunes more to my liking jump to Number One this month. Both are courtesy of the UK, so pip pip and cheerio to our friends across the pond!
Earlier this month, the Beatles made a big comeback on the American charts with their upbeat rock 'n' roll number I Feel Fine.
The big advantage of buying a record instead of going to a Beatles concert is that you can actually hear the song instead of screaming.
Even as I type this, the news reaches me that British songbird Petula Clark is now Number One in the USA, belting out a nifty tribute to the pleasures of big city living called Downtown.
Like the rest of you, I'm a big fan of science fiction and fantasy stories, at least when they're done reasonably well. Let's take a look at the latest issue of Fantastic and hope for the best.
A magician, who is also handy with a quarterstaff, travels around with his familiar, a goblin. (In this world, that means an earth elemental.) They run into — literally! — a most unusual knight. Although he can talk and fight and do all kinds of knightly things, he's just an empty suit of armor. After a brief period of misunderstanding, the sorcerer and the goblin agree to help him find the wizard who put a curse on him.
Fortunately, all users of magic have to travel to a convention once per century or lose their powers, and it's going on right now. The knight also has to triumph at a jousting tournament, which is hard to do when you're just a suit of armor that doesn't weigh very much. Add in a lovesick wood nymph, the King of Faerie, and some Bad Guys, and you got a lighthearted fantasy adventure. It provides some amusement, although it's hardly profound.
If you studied Homer in school, you're familiar with the term in medias res. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, this brief tale begins in the middle of things.
Our hero, Dilvish the Damned, is riding his talking metal horse, for which he sold part of his soul, from the site of a lost battle, in order to carry the news to a city threatened by the advancing enemy. Along the way lots of foes try to stop him, but he escapes them all. A final encounter with a a knight wearing invulnerable armor tests the skills of Dilvish and his steed.
This lightning-paced tale is very well written, but it reads like a few pages torn out of a much longer story. I hope the author eventually tells us more about the Damned fellow.
As you may recall from the previous installment, the Corps Galactica finds evidence that the ruling class of the planet Cyclops is somehow restoring body parts for those lost by the wealthy; a thing which should be beyond their level of medical technology. As strongly hinted at last time, that's because they're buying them from some sinister folks who exploit the population of a planet unknown to the Corps.
The Bad Guys convince their victims that they're suffering from a terminal illness, take them away, and pay their families, pretending to be a sort of hospice. Of course, they really murder them in cold blood, and sell them to the physician on Cyclops who takes care of the elite.
In the concluding half of this short novel, the Corps figures out what's going on and tries to stop it. Complicating matters is the fact that the woman who is the de facto ruler of Cyclops orders the Corps to abandon their base on the planet, even though this will cause great economic hardship for her world. She has her own motive, which involves the physician and one of the innocent inhabitants of the secret planet. It all leads up to a daring raid on the evil doctor's lair by the heroine, a highly skilled and experienced agent of the Corps.
That makes the plot sound melodramatic, and, indeed, the climax resembles something from a James Bond novel. However, the characters are believable, the background is complex, and the combination of violent action and political intrigue always held my interest.
Four stars.
Winterness, by Ron Goulart
Also by George Schelling. I like the white-on-black effect.
Set in the early part of the Twentieth Century, this tongue-in-cheek yarn involves a spiritualist and a married couple, both of whom are novelists. The woman believes in the medium's powers, the man does not. At a seance for a newspaper editor and his mistress, the skeptic falls into danger, and dark secrets are revealed.
I've made the story sound a lot more serious than it is. Although the plot isn't a funny one, the characters, the dialogue, and the narrative style are all good for some laughs. I particularly liked a bit of satire on the writing game of years gone by, with the woman producing sentimental novels with titles like Venetia; or Led Where Love Compels and the man turning out muckraking works like Soil and Steam.
Three stars.
The Vamp, by Thomas M. Disch
The narrator is an old-time movie actor, going back to the silent days, who is now the host of a TV kiddie show. He sees his ex-wife on the street, acting like a flirtatious 1920's flapper to the men who pass by, who don't seem interested. That's not a big surprise, since she's more than sixty years old, with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, dead white skin, ruby lips, sharp teeth . . .
OK, you know where this is going, from the title if nothing else. The narrator never figures it out, so he invites her home for a very rare — in fact, bloody — steak. That leads to the story's joke ending.
The whole thing is just a trifle, but I liked it well enough. Maybe that's because the idea of turning a silent-screen star into a you-know-what tickled me. Or maybe because the story reminded me of the great old movie Sunset Boulevard. (I can definitely see a similarity between the Vamp and Norma Desmond.)
Before I say goodbye, let me sum up my thoughts on this issue. Overall, it was pretty decent. No bad stories, although many of them were definitely minor works. That's a lot better than a magazine full of lousy fiction, so I won't complain when I read something good.
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Science fiction writers often have to deal with things on a very large scale. Whether they take readers across vast reaches of space, or into unimaginably far futures, they frequently look at time and the universe through giant telescopes of imagination, enhancing their vision beyond ordinary concerns of here and now.
(This is not to say anything against more intimate kinds of imaginative fiction, in which the everyday world reveals something extraordinary. A microscope can be a useful tool for examining dreams as well.)
A fine example of the kind of tale that paints a portrait of an enormous universe, with a chronology reaching back for eons, appears in the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, from the pen of a new, young writer.
Our story begins about two billion years ago. The character shown above is a member of a telepathic species with the power to enslave other sentient beings with their minds.
An example of a slave species that doesn't play much part in the story.
This slave species, on the other hand, has a big impact on what happens to its masters.
Kzanol the Thrint has a problem. On his way to the homeworld in his starship, the engine that allows it to make long-distance voyages explodes. The rest of the ship is unharmed, but Kzanol is stranded. Fortunately, he has a suit that slows time down to a crawl for the wearer. He can't reach his native planet with the power his ship has left, but he can crash into an uninhabited planet, where yeast is grown to feed slaves, after a couple of centuries. He stashes some valuables into a spare suit, puts on the other one, programs the ship for the slow journey, and goes into stasis, expecting to be rescued once enough time has gone by.
Kzanol in the stasis suit.
Cut to Earth, in a future of flying cars and interstellar travel. Larry Greenberg (now where have I seen that first name before?) is a telepath. Compared to an average Thrint, he has hardly any ability at all; but it's enough to get him a job communicating mentally with dolphins. This is really just a stepping stone to a real career of reaching the minds of aliens discovered on the planet humans call Jinx.
Scientists who have just invented a time-slowing device — sound familiar? — realize that the so-called Sea Statue, an ancient object found at the bottom of the ocean, is really an alien inside a similar stasis field. By placing it inside their own gizmo, they can deactivate it. Larry is along to pick up the thoughts of the alien. This works much too well.
Kzanol's mind takes over Larry's body. Although he still has human memories, he thinks he is really a Thrint, lost on a world of ptavvs (beings without telepathic powers.) He also believes that he is trapped in the body of a ptavv himself, because he is unable to control the inhabitants of the planet with his mind.
One of several genetically engineered species Larry/Kzanol remembers, adding greatly to the feeling of a richly imagined background. These are giant plants that use solar power as a defense mechanism.
These are dinosaur-sized, single-celled animals the Thrint use for food, feeding them on yeast. There turns out to be much more to them than meets the eye.
Racing animals, like horses or greyhounds on Earth.
The interiors of these trees act as rocket fuel.
At the same time, the real Kzanol escapes from his stasis suit. This leads to a wild chase across the solar system, as both Kzanol and Larry/Kzanol race to find the other stasis suit, which contains a telepathy-enhancing device that would allow the wearer to control all the minds on Earth. Both Earth-dwellers and the colonists who inhabit the asteroid belt head out after the pair. There's an economic cold war going on between Earthers and Belters, adding to the tension.
Kzanol thinks the other suit is on Neptune, but it turns out to be on Pluto, which used to be a moon of Neptune a couple of billion years ago.
This is a fast-moving, complex story with a richly imagined background. The author clearly did a lot of work creating his fictional universe and populating it with a wide variety of organisms. There are so many concepts thrown out that some readers may feel overwhelmed. Certain elements are not fully explored. (The slave that Kzanol throws into his spare suit seems to have no relevance to the plot. And what's going to happen to the colonists on Jinx? Maybe a sequel?) Overall, however, it's a fine novella, indicative of an important new talent.
Four stars.
Undersea Weapons Tomorrow, by Joseph Wesley
The first of a pair of nonfiction articles in this issue imagines naval warfare two decades from now. The scenario is similar to the Cuban situation, heated up quite a bit. The Good Guys set up a blockade of an unfriendly island. The Bad Guys use submarines to attack Good Guy shipping. The author considers the balance of wins and losses in this aquatic battle. (For example, how many ships do you need to sink to make up for the number of submarines lost in the process?)
He also discusses locating the enemy via spy satellites, very slow seagoing bases for aircraft, and porpoises as allies. It's a rather dry piece, with some interesting aspects.
Two stars.
Scarfe's World, by Brian W. Aldiss
Illustration by Gray Morrow
This starts like one of those corny old movies where cave people and dinosaurs live at the same time. There are a couple of odd things about this primitive world, however. Sometimes people just dissolve, and the male protagonist doesn't really understand why he wants to be near the female protagonist.
We soon find out that the humans and dinosaurs are miniature forms of artificial life, created for study. The process sometimes breaks down, explaining the dissolving, and the organisms don't reproduce, explaining the caveman's confused feelings.
There really isn't much to this story other than its basic concept. The last third returns to the point of view of the caveman, which pretty much rehashes what went on in the first third.
Two stars.
Phobos: Moon or Artifact?, by R. S. Richardson
Our second science article answers the question posed in its title right away. The author considers a Russian article from 1959 that suggested that Phobos is hollow, rejects it, and tells us why. The reasoning is highly technical. If I understand things correctly, when a moon is slowed in its orbit by something or other, it approaches the planet. Thus, although its velocity was decreased at first, it actually increases later.
Apparently Phobos increased its velocity due to this effect, but Deimos did not. One explanation for the observed effect would be if Phobos had an extremely low mass for its size; as if it were a hollow artificial satellite, for example. The author points out that there are several other explanations for the phenomenon, and that it really isn't that well established anyway. The whole thing will probably be of more interest to experts in orbital mechanics than the general reader.
Two stars.
By Way of Mars, by Ron Goulart
A guy falls for a girl, but she keeps standing him up at their dates. The Government Lovelorn Bureau tells him to forget her, but he doesn't give up that easily. Things rapidly get way out of hand, as the fellow gets in trouble with the cops, is shanghaied to Venus, escapes to Mars, and becomes the leader of a rebellion on the red planet.
I found the author's satiric portrait of a near future Earth, with suicide clubs and sex book plotters, more effective than the protagonist's interplanetary misadventures. The intent seems to be comic, although nothing particularly funny happens.
Two stars.
Pariah Planet, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
Illustrations by John Giunta
A spaceman kills a man in a bar fight on a planet with an odd system of justice. Although it was self-defense, he is convicted of murder, and transported to a prison planet. The underground society of this world is ordinary enough, with a couple of exceptions.
There are two groups of citizens. Type A people wear all different kinds of clothing, but Type B people must wear black at all times. Type B citizens are also required to repeat the crimes for which they were convicted, with the Type A citizens as victims. The protagonist, for example, is told to murder one Type A person each week.
The Type A people aren't really bald, as shown here, but the illustration sort of clues the reader in on what's going on.
This leads to a crisis of conscience, as the unspecified consequences of failing to commit one's assigned crime are said to be very serious indeed. As time goes by, the main character grows more and more fearful of what fate awaits him, and finds himself tempted to kill one of the Type A people, who seem like perfect victims.
The protagonist in a brooding mood.
The contrived situation reminds me of the sort of thing that used to show up a lot in Galaxy in the old days, with some aspect of society reflected in a funhouse mirror. Here, of course, it's crime and punishment. You'll probably figure out the nature of the Type A people, and how this eccentric system of justice is supposed to work, long before the end.
Two stars.
That's About the Size of It
After a big start, the second half of the magazine shrinks into a collection of disappointing little stories and articles. Maybe it's just the contrast between Niven's wide-ranging imagination and much shorter, less ambitious pieces. In any case, the publication is large enough to accommodate losers as well as winners. What do you expect for half a buck, anyway?
A big coin for a big magazine.
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The United States is the richest country in the world. By any reckoning, we measure in superlatives: biggest economy, strongest military, most movies, coolest cars. But there is one outsized statistic we shouldn't bury in gloss — 19% of Americans live in poverty.
Several months back, newly installed President Johnson took an unscheduled trip through Appalachia, the poorest part of our country. This region, between the Eastern seaboard and the Plains states, north of the agrarian South and the Industrial North, has traditionally been an economic backwater. Shocked by what he found, LBJ promptly declared a War on Poverty, seeking to continue the efforts of President Roosevelt to bring up the nation and, in particular, Appalachia.
Yesterday saw a great step forward taken in that direction. President Johnson signed into law the Economic Opportunity Act, designed to help the poorest families find their way out of their economic quagmire. This will be achieved a number of ways, largely through the creation of new task forces and funding of groups whose goal is poverty relief.
For instance, the newly created Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth Corps will provide work and training for the underskilled and underemployed. Work Study college grants and Adult Basic Education will ensure that the poor are not barred from employment by illiteracy or lack of education. There are also loan and grant programs for individuals and agencies.
It's a smart system, not a simple redistribution of wealth but an investment in the next generation of Americans. I have a lot of confidence that it will be successful — provided, of course, that the money gets put to good use. Time will tell.
Big and small scale
Just as the White House has endeavored to improve the lot of Americans, so has Fantasy and Science Fiction's editor worked to address a disturbing trend. In fact, this month's issue is easily the best one of the magazine that I've read in a while, and it's not even an "All-Star Issue". It's just good.
So for those of you who came to hear me flog F&SF, you're going to be disappointed…
Mel Hunter's cover shows a post-Mariner 2Venus, a cloudy inferno. It's a beautiful piece, though it pertains to no story in this issue and is, perhaps, a better fit for Analog.
The stories, on the other hand, are pure F&SF:
Chameleon, by Ron Goulart
Ron Goulart writes these flip, droll little pieces, with deft skill (if not great consequence). This particular one stars Ben Jolson, member of a corps of secret agents whose special talent is shapeshifting. People, animals, furniture, these superspies transform instantly and apparently without regard for mass considerations. Jolson is a particularly adept, if eccentric, agent, grudgingly tasked with getting the prime minister of Barafunda to make a proclamation against the practice of using soulless, mass-produced people as slave labor. By any means necessary: becoming a trusted adviser, inciting violence, even becoming the PM herself.
Goulart keeps things real enough to avoid farce, light enough to avoid melodrama. If you like Laumer's Retief or Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stories, this will be right up your alley.
Four stars.
A Miracle Too Many, by Alan E. Nourse and Philip H. Smith
Dr. Stephen Olie discovers that being able to miraculously cure with a touch is a curse as well as a blessing. Both Nourse and Smith are physicians, so it's no surprise that this piece involves the medical profession. I liked everything but the ending, which felt a bit lazy.
Three stars.
Slips Take Over, by Miriam Allen deFord
Ms. deFord, who is 76 today (Many Happy Returns!) offers up a tale of a man who slips between parallel timelines as easily and inadvertently as we might get lost on the streets of an unfamiliar city. It's a neat idea, with the kind of great creepy atmosphere deFord is good at, but she doesn't do much with the story. Plus, there are inconsistencies regarding what items do and do not travel with the hapless universe-crosser.
Three stars.
Olsen and the Gull, by Eric St. Clair
Eric, the husband of famed author Margaret St. Clair, is an author in his own right. This is his first story not to be written for children and involving SFF elements. In this case, it's a shipwrecked lout of a sailor whose only entertainment is to crush the eggs of the multitudinous seagulls while chanting "tromp tromp tromp." One enterprising bird undertakes to distract Olsen the sailor by teaching him the art of summoning… with amusing and unfortunate results.
Four stars.
Carbonaceous Chondrites, by Theodore L. Thomas
Even Thomas' little column, usually sophomoric in the extreme, isn't bad this month. He posits that the carbon compounds being found in certain meteorites are evidence of extraterrestrial life — but not the way you think!
Three stars.
Four Brands of Impossible, by Norman Kagan
The longest piece of the issue is by a new writer, a student at New York City College. As befits a novice, the story, about a mathematician tapped to develop an illogical logic, is somewhat unfocused. Moreover, when it's all done, I'm not exactly sure that anything of importance has happened.
On the other hand, there are bits in the story that are quite compelling, about space research, the value of an automated presidency, the folly of racism, etc., and I will remember the novelette for these if nothing else.
Thus, three stars.
The New Encyclopaedist-II, by Stephen Becker
A mock encyclopaedia article, about Jacob Porphyry, who reversed the trend toward malaprop and literary inanity by making his books hard to read.
On the other hand, the second poem, a limerick, is barely worth a pained smirk.
Still, that's the appropriate reaction to a well-delivered pun. Three stars.
Elementary, by Laurence M. Janifer and Michael Kurland
Raise your hand if you want to murder your agent. Goodness, there are a lot of you! I shouldn't be surprised…I'm not even convinced that they're a necessary evil these days. Anyway, this story is about a pair of authors who decide to put paid to their 10% bloodsucker only to find their efforts repeatedly thwarted.
This is another piece with a great beginning and middle, but the ending didn't quite work for me. Perhaps you'll feel differently.
Three stars.
The Haste-Makers, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor's non-fiction article is on catalysts this time around. I learned a great deal, but then chemistry has never been my bag. The big revelation I got out of the piece was that catalysts aren't magic but merely a side effect of our living in an oxygen-filled environment (just like airplanes no longer boggle the brain when you realize that they don't fly on nothing — air just happens to be invisible).
Four stars.
The Deepest Blue in the World, by S. Dorman
When the stars become a battlefield, the men will go off to fight and die, and women will be brought to the Wedding Bench to conceive and rear the next batch of soldiers. If they resist their breeding lot in life, it's prison and the mines for them.
A chilling story by an author with an uncanny vision of female subjugation. A strong four stars.
Inconceivably Yours, by Willard Marsh
A bachelor worries that the failure of a contraceptive will end his bachelor days, but one God's curse is another man's blessing. A fair story with a delicious title.
Three stars.
The Star Party, by Robert Lory
The astrologers presume to know a lot about people. Unfortunately, master star-teller Isvara picked the wrong two Madison Avenue party attenders to cast readings on. It's a nice little tale, though the astronomical inaccuracy at the end was unfortunate.
Three stars.
A Crown of Rank Fumiter, by Vance Aandahl
Last up, we have young Vance Aandahl, who started out strong and has been delivering weak tea indeed for several years. This piece, about a recluse who, in the midst of death finds his humanity, is a refreshing change of direction — and thus a perfect capper for a surprisingly strong issue.
Four stars.
Summing up
I don't know that any of these stories hit it out of the park for me, but there were plenty of good pieces and no clunkers in the lot. Even Davidson's introductions were entertaining. This issue will certainly be a contender for best magazine this month.
More good news: F&SF has several foreign editions. They've just started a Spanish edition, Minotauro, the first issue of which arrived by mail the other day. My daughter, who is learning the language in high school, is currently working her way through Damon Knight's What Rough Beast and enjoying it, even translated. So, if you speak Spanish, and you want a "best-of" issue of the magazine, you could do worse than to pick up a copy!
[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…]
After four lovely days in the Japanese capital, we hopped the train for points southwest, toward the center of the country. Sadly, we were just a few months too early to take the new "bullet train" which will be debuted in October in time for the Olympics. The trip thus took many hours, but the scenery was nice (this year's "rainy season" hasn't been very) and I got a lot of reading done.
Nagoya is Japan's "fourth" city, after Tokyo/Yokohama, Osaka, and Fukuoka. A drab, gray and brown place, it nevertheless was a must-stay location for us given its proximity to so many of our friends: A husband-and-wife couple teach at the local university, our dear friend Hideko (now recently married!) lives in Osaka, and a friend I met when she visited America, Juuri, lives in nearby Shizuoka.
And, of course, there is the super-energetic Nanami, who teaches schoolchildren in Nagoya.
Dan and Jen, whose nieces were visiting at the time, took us up to old Inuyama castle. This is one of the few original castles still intact. It gave us a commanding view of the area.
We also explored the nearby town of Oobu, and we were welcomed into a local home. Here's the bedroom of a little boy who lived there.
The bustling, brash city of Osaka was as smoky and wild as ever. Western culture has thoroughly soaked the place: clothing, music, and food.
The Issue at Hand
Somehow in the midst of all this, I found time to read and review the latest Gamma, a new magazine whose first two issues had greatly impressed me. Sadly, it seems that the stock of great fiction the editors had accumulated prior to launch has been exhausted, and what's left is so much trunk work, the substandard stories by big names that hadn't sold elsewhere. Pity.
by Morris Scott Dollens
The Girl of Paradise Planet, by Robert Turner
The first story illustrates my point well. Here is a piece by a veteran, with a thousand stories to his credit, and it's just mediocre. A fellow on vacation on a pleasure planet goes SCUBA-diving and encounters a young girl under the waves. She's not a mermaid — she has a full complement of human limbs, yet she can breathe underwater. The vacationer quickly falls in love, to the annoyance of his shrewish wife, and spends endless hours with his newfound paramour.
Said romance feels solipsistic, like something a fourteen-year-old might come up with, including plenty of the protagonist's thoughts and precious few of the object of his intention. In fact, near the end, we are led to doubt that the encounter was real at all, which would have made a lot more sense given the sketchiness of the girl's character, who prefers not to talk but rather mostly perform aquatic acrobatics. And smooch.
Alas, it turns out the girl is real. Joy for our hero, disappointment for us. A weak three stars.
by Luan Meatheringham
(speaking of illustrations, Gamma has employed young Luan Meatheringham to produce drawings. While the pieces are nice, in a fanzine-ish way, they don't relate to any of the stories, and I'm not sure why they're here, taking space.)
The Feather Bed, by Shelly Lowenkopf
Shelly (a man, despite the name) Lowenkopf writes of a future where, upon the expiration of copyright after 56 years, literary works are destroyed to a copy, and replacements commissioned as a kind of artistic welfare. When a writer refuses to finish his assignment to rewrite King Lear he is fired, eventually becoming a plumber — an industry in which pipes are torn out and replaced every three years.
I like stories about a future with rampant unemployment and the need for makework, but this one doesn't make a lot of sense, even by its own rules (no good argument is made against creating new works) and the piece doesn't work as satire, either, because I'm not sure what it's supposed to be satirizing.
Two stars.
Angel Levine, by Bernard Malamud
A down-on-his-luck tailor is visited by a shabby, black Jewish angel, who (eventually) eases the man's pain.
Not much to say about this one. Three stars for atmosphere and dialect.
by Luan Meatheringham
The (In)visible Man, by Edward W. Ludwig
Here's a piece about a man who is such a nonentity that the world completely ignores him, and he is able to lead a life of crime. That is, until the fellow finds love and confidence, causing him to become visible again.
I might have enjoyed this story more had Ellison not done it so much better in The Forces that Crush six years ago.
Three stars.
Inside Story, by Miriam Allen deFord
From the pen of one of the genre's most venerable creators comes the tale of a sentient world and the tsuris of a cold given it by a four-being scount team from the Galactic Federation.
Cute, but this is the sort of thing Bob Sheckley used to do, and much better.
We've seen a lot of Johnson on TV, particularly us fans of The Twilight Zone. This forgettable piece, a first person account of the creation of Frankenstein's Monster, does not even have a Serlingesque twist to redeem it.
Three stars for competent writing.
by Luan Meatheringham
The Gamma Interview: Soviet Science Fiction
The most worthy piece of the issue is an interview with "Ivan Kirov", editor of a Moscow publishing house that produces science fiction. It is worth picking this issue up just for this piece, even though it has an unfortunate ediorial accident that omits a crucial line.
Five stars.
Buttons, by Raymond E. Banks
Along similar lines, Banks offers up the story of a dying spaceman who transfers his consciousness to a set of computerized buttons until such time as his persona might be restored to a human body. Said spaceman decides he likes being a disembodied being better.
It's well-written, but like the rest of the pieces in this magazine, it doesn't really go anywhere.
Three stars.
by Luan Meatheringham
Society for the Prevention, by Ron Goulart
Goulart is known for writing humorous pieces, so this light-hearted tale of the fortunate intersection of an interstellar merchant, his shipment of alien pots which are actually extraterrestrial invaders, and some rabid anti-capitalists is right up the author's alley.
Finally, mystery writer Highsmith presents the tale of a man whose love for snails ultimately proves his undoing. The moral: molluscs are for eating, not voyeuring.
Yet another atmospheric piece that doesn't do much. Three stars.
by Luan Meatheringham
Summing Up
Thus ends one of the most mediocre collections of digest-sized pages I've ever read. I have to wonder if this is a momentary blip, or if Gamma is doomed to be short-lived. Only time will tell.
And now, off to Hiroshima! See you in two days…
[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…]
President McKinley once famously observed around the Turn of the Century that everything that could be invented had been invented. He was not entirely correct, as it turned out. However, if one were to read the stultifying pages of F&SF these days, one might be convinced that all the SF that could be written had been written. The February 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction is a double-handful of cliches with a thin veneer of literary writing to make them "worthy." It's no wonder editor Avram Davidson has moved to Mexico; he is probably fleeing his outraged readers — whomever's left of them, anyway.
The House by the Crab Apple Tree, by S. S. Johnson
The bad ship S. S. Johnson leads the issue with possibly the most offensive piece I've read since Garrett's Queen Bee. It's an After The Bomb piece told from the point of view of one the world's last women, who is shacked up with her wretch of a husband and their fourteen year old daughter. Barely sentient, our protagonist spends most of the story wondering which of the marauding male savages who terrorize her home would make the best husband for her kid. After all, a woman needs a man.
Bad as it was, I read the whole story (for it it is passably well written) hoping to be pleasantly surprised. I wasn't. Mr. Johnson's protagonist shows no initiative at all (and, in fact, each of her episodes is characterized, even precipitated by her inaction), the daughter is violated in the end, and Davidson, in the height of tactlessness, chose to illustrate the gawdam cover of the magazine with a scene of the torture of said little girl.
One star and a new bottom for the magazine. Shame, Mr. Davidson. I hope the mail and telegrams stop service to your new home so you can do no more damage.
[And please see the letter sent in by Mr. Jonathan Edelstein, appended below. It expresses what's fundamentally wrong with this story. Thank you, Jonathan. (Ed.)]
The Shepherd of Esdon Pen, by P. M. Hubbard
Here's a stunner. After spending half the vignette telling us about a Scottish shepherd of legend, a modern shepherd departs into a freak snowstorm, searching for his lost flock, and stumbles across the tomb of none other than the aforementioned herder. When he gets back, his sheep are safe. WAS IT THE SHEPHERD OF EDSON PEN?!?
An ineptly told ghost story that earns two spectrally thin stars.
Ms Found in a Bottle Washed up on the Sands of Time, by Harry Harrison
A pointless bit of doggerel about a fellow intent on disproving the Grandfather's Paradox by doing away with his grandfather — only the old man has quicker draw.
A satirical piece (or something) about a dystopian future for whose denizens everything is hunky dory until they stop being useful to society. No one starves, in theory, but it's damned hard to get a bite to eat when you can't work for your supper.
There's probably a point or two buried under the glibness, but my eyes were too dizzy from rolling to find them. Two stars.
One Hundred Days from Home, by Dean McLaughlin
The first ship to return from Mars is met halfway by a new ship zipping around at a good percentage of light speed. The kid driving the speedster guffaws at the old men and their primitive junker, offering them a quick ride home. Indignant, they refuse.
Would NASA really send astronauts to Mars and back and not tell them about a huge breakthrough in space travel? Do these fellows not even have radios? Editor Davidson says he can't get any spaceship yarns these days, so he was happy to get this one. With "science fiction" like this, who needs fantasy?
Two stars.
The Slowly Moving Finger, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor has always done a decent job of making abstruse concepts accessible to the layperson. But this non-fiction piece, about the maximum ages of various animals, is too simple and could have been paraphrased as one sentence: Every mammal but humans lives for one billion heart beats; people get four times that.
Three stars.
Little Gregory, by Evelyn E. Smith
An odd, vaguely SF tale about a woman employed as a governess by a robot for an alien child who turns out to be the vanguard of an extraterrestrial invasion. It works insofar as it fulfills Smith's goal of telling a 21st Century story with 19th Century style, but I'm not sure why the thing was written at all.
Three stars, I guess.
Burning Spear, by Kit Denton
Pointless mood piece about a kid who can capture and wield sunlight, and the folks who die when they demand proof.
Two stars.
In the Bag, by Laurence M. Janifer
An obvious vignette probably inspired by a trip to the local laundry. Blink and you'll miss it. Three stars. Maybe two. Who cares?
The Fan: Myth and Reality, by Wilson Tucker
The first of a three-part series on fandom, this one is an historical essay (next month's by Robert Bloch will cover conventions). I'm a big fan of Bob Tucker, as readers well know, but this is a superficial, perfunctory piece. It's over quickly, though. Three stars? [Note: I forgot to cover this piece in the original printing — thanks to those who pointed out the omission! Ed.]
Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, by Doris Pitkin Buck
Welcome to the overpopulated world of 2061, where the national parks on the Moon have a long waiting list, the domes open to let the air in only on rare occasion, and citizens take hallucinogenic pills to stay sane. Still, despite the hoariness of the subject matter, it's not a bad read. Welcome to the ranks of the prose writers, Ms. Buck. Now go beyond the well-trodden path.
Three stars.
I'm sounding more and more like John Boston every day. My wife likes it when I write snippy, but boy am I tired of having things to be snippy about.
Could we please get Tony Boucher or Robert Mills back in the editorial saddle again?
![[May 18, 1965] Rubber Ball (or Skip the End) (June 1965 <i>Fantasy & Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/650518cover-664x372.jpg)
![[April 24, 1965] Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud (May 1965 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Fantastic_v14n05_1965-05_0000-2-672x340.jpg)
![[March 20, 1965] Clash of The Old & The New (February 1965 <i>Gamma</i> & <i>City of a Thousand Suns</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/650320covers-672x372.jpg)
![[February 12, 1965] Mirabile Dictu, Sotto Voce (March 1965 <i>Amazing</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/amz-0365-cover-524x372.png)
![[January 26, 1965] Down the Rabbit Hole…Again (February 1965 <i>IF</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/650126cover-672x372.jpg)
![[January 22, 1965] With Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein (February 1965 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FANTFEB1965-2-458x372.jpg)
![[January 14, 1965] The Big Picture (March 1965 <i>Worlds of Tomorrow</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Worlds_of_Tomorrow_v02n06_1965-03_0000-2-672x372.jpg)
![[August 21, 1964] The Good News (September 1964 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/640821cover-672x372.jpg)
![[June 30, 1964] A big Delta (June 1964 <i>Gamma</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/640630cover-453x372.jpg)
![[January 18, 1964] Pig's Lipstick (February 1964 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/640418cover-554x372.jpg)
