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[July 6, 1965] Same Difference (Dr. Who And The Daleks)

July 6, 2020 Jessica Holmes 3 Comments

By Jessica Holmes

Welcome to another round of my ramblings on Doctor Who, where this time I’ll be talking about something a bit different. I’ve had the opportunity to see the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan in full colour on the big screen, but not quite as you know them.

I’ve just previewed the new film (so new, in fact, that it doesn’t come out in the UK theaters until August) Dr. Who And The Daleks, Milton Subotsky’s adaptation of Terry Nation’s serial, The Daleks. Directed by Gordon Flemyng and starring Peter Cushing, this adaptation manages to be too much like the original and not enough, both to its detriment. How? Well, let me explain.

For anyone who didn’t see the original The Daleks, or missed my review back then, here’s a basic rundown of the plot. If you’re familiar with the original, you can skip this next bit. Aside from the setup, it is almost exactly the same.

A Quick Recap

Eccentric-but-kindly inventor Dr. Who lives (Peter Cushing) with his two granddaughters, Susan (Roberta Tovey) and Barbara (Jennie Linden). When Barbara’s friend Ian (Roy Castle) comes by the house one day, Dr. Who shows him his new invention, a time-and-space machine called Tardis, which is bigger on the inside. Ian accidentally activates the machine, sending the group to an alien world. They land in a petrified forest destroyed long ago in an atomic war, and spot a city in the distance.

Outside Tardis, Susan gets a fright when a stranger tries to approach her. Shortly after, the group finds a box of medicine left by the door of Tardis. Although the younger members of the group are keen to return home, Dr. Who lies and says there is a problem with a component of his ship, the fluid link, and insists they must go to the city to look for the materials to repair it. Once in the city, the group discover that the surface of this world is awash with radiation, and the symptoms of radiation sickness are beginning to set in. To make matters worse, they get captured by the Daleks, a race of creatures who get around in armoured personal vehicles to protect themselves from the radiation.

That central part of the computer revolves. It's a rather wonderful set piece.

The Daleks seize TARDIS’ fluid link from Dr. Who, and overhear the group discussing that the drugs they found could be their only hope to survive the radiation sickness. Coveting the drug for themselves, the Daleks order Susan to retrieve the medicine from Tardis, promising that the humans will be allowed to administer the treatment. Upon her arrival at Tardis, Susan meets Alydon (Barrie Ingham), the leader of the Thals, another group of people who live on this world. Unlike the Daleks, the Thals appear human. They went to war with the Daleks a long time ago and both their civilisations were destroyed. The Thals have come to the Dalek city because their crops have failed and they want to trade their medicine for food. Alydon gives Susan an extra box of medicine, and she returns to the city, where the Daleks allow the humans to use the spare box.

Perhaps they should have called this 'Planet of the Bad Haircuts'.

The Daleks get Susan to write a letter to the Thals inviting them to trade, but when she completes the letter the Daleks announce their intentions to betray the Thals and destroy them.

The humans manage to disable a Dalek by cutting off its power supply, and escape to warn the Thals of the ambush. Most manage to flee in time, and the humans regroup with the Thals at their camp, where after some goading from Dr. Who and Ian, the pacifistic Thals agree to strike back at the Daleks. However, the attack fails, and Dr. Who and Susan are recaptured.

Ian, Barbara and Alydon try a different way into the city, travelling through dangerous swampland and over a mountain to infiltrate the city from the rear, following the water pipes. Once inside, they regroup with the rest of the Thals, who launched an attack to rescue Dr. Who and Susan. The Daleks are about to detonate another atomic bomb to make the planet uninhabitable for the Thals, but the humans and Thals manage to stop them in time, with Ian tricking the Daleks into destroying their own machinery. Dr. Who recovers the fluid link, and with Tardis repaired and the Daleks defeated, the humans say their farewells and leave for Earth.

What’s The Difference?

So far so identical. There’s been a bit of a change in the setup, with Susan becoming much younger, and Ian and Barbara are no longer her teachers. I suppose it makes sense, given that otherwise the film would have to devote time to explaining why an old man and a young girl are dragging a couple of teachers around time and space. In addition I would imagine there would be additional legal hoops to jump through in order to adapt that aspect of An Unearthly Child.

It makes sense, yes, but do I like it? Not especially. In changing Ian and Barbara’s relationship to the Doctor and Susan, the dynamic of the group changes. There was a palpable divide between the teachers and the strange people with their blue box. It created an interesting internal tension because Ian and Barbara weren’t sure how much they could trust the Doctor, who at that point did not much care for them, either. This tension is absent here, with the gang being chummy from the outset. I think this could have been handled better as it’s far less interesting.

In the grand scheme of things though, it’s not that bad. It’s weaker than the original, but the dynamic still works in the context of its own film. What is bad, however, is what’s been done to the characters. I could have named this section ‘Who are you, and what have you done with Ian Chesterton’. Oh, Ian. Poor, poor Ian. It’s not merely that he is different from his television counterpart. That, I could cope with, if his character wasn’t a paper-thin lacklustre hammily-acted dim-witted sad attempt at comic relief.

The single dignified shot of him in the whole film.

This is not Ian Chesterton. He has the same name but that is literally all he has in common with his television counterpart. Well, unless you count having his legs paralysed by the Daleks. This Ian is just an absolute buffoon, and he stays that way the whole film, apart from one singular moment at the end when he tricks the Daleks. Even if I were to pretend the original didn’t exist, and judge the film purely on its own merits (which I am trying to do, up to a certain point), he would still be a flat, static character.

I swear her hair gets a little bigger every time she goes off-camera.

So, what of Barbara? Well, Barbara’s just sort of…there. She exists. You could cut her out of the film and I don’t believe anything would change. So that’s two strikes, one for bad adaptation, and another for just a bad character in general.

Which brings us to Susan. Or as she’s usually called in the film, Susie. Susie is an interesting case. When she was first introduced, I confess that I found her quite annoying, as she sounded like she’d swallowed a thesaurus every time she opened her mouth. However I did warm to her as the film went on, as she adapted to her situation and faced every challenge head-on. Despite being younger, she’s a good deal braver than her television counterpart, and that is a change I welcome.

And now for the biggie. Dr. Who. I’m going to be pedantic for a moment. Well, I’m always pedantic, but I’m going to be extra pedantic. I don’t like calling him Dr. Who. Yes, I know it’s the name of the television programme. Yes, I also know that that is the character’s name in the credits. But I think we can all agree that this man is not literally called Dr. Who. It just sounds wrong. Still, I admit there’s no actual concrete reason I can give to explain my disdain for this choice of nomenclature other than ‘I just don’t like it’.

Dr. Who and the Doctor are two markedly different characters. Even now, at his considerably softened state, Hartnell’s Doctor would look prickly as a porcupine next to Cushing’s Doctor Who. If we compare the version of the Doctor who appeared in The Daleks, it's like night and day.

There’s nothing wrong with Cushing’s performance. In fact, he’s very charming and Dr. Who has a likeable and warm personality which will no doubt be immediately endearing to viewers. In fact, I think that’s likely the reason for the change. The Doctor, in his earliest appearances, was not an easy character to like. Grumpy, often selfish, and just plain difficult all around, the original Doctor would not have translated well into his big-screen counterpart. At least, not without forcing through character development so fast it’d give you whiplash to keep the viewers on-side.

Not faithful enough, or too faithful?

My answer? It's both. Though there are numerous character changes, as noted above, the plot of the film is identical to the plot of the serial. One the one hand, I do appreciate when a film is faithful to the story of its source material. However, this becomes a problem when the entire plot is lifted beat-for-beat from a serial with a total runtime of about 175 minutes and crushing it down to fit an 81-minute film.

There’s no room for the plot to breathe. There’s no room for the thoughtful, meditative conversations on the philosophy of pacifism. The original serial took the time to examine the Thals’ dedication to pacifism, and the process to convince them of the need to challenge the Daleks was long and slow, as you would expect when trying to convince a whole society to cast aside their deepest and most dearly-held belief. Here, the Thals get over the whole pacifism thing in the course of a single scene. It completely flattens them and takes the thoughtfulness out of the conflict, a thoughtfulness which was one of my favourite parts of the original.

In addition, having less time to convey information, this film is heavy on the exposition. Very, very heavy. Daleks have a bad habit of explaining their plans to each other for no reason, but this takes it to a new level. Barely a scene goes by without a character practically grabbing the camera and delivering a lecture on the history of this conflict. It is very tiresome.

It’s Not All Bad, Though.

No, really. There’s something I can’t complain about and would dearly love to see on television: the production value. The sets for this film don’t require any generous suspension of disbelief to be believable – they just are. Well-designed lighting drenches the petrified forest in an eerie light, giving the area a sickly appearance that makes the Dalek city, by contrast, look warm and welcoming. However, the lighting in the city is stark and harsh, as are the Daleks. The sets are well-made and the colour choices are cohesive and visually pleasing, though I’m not certain that the Daleks would be terribly fond of the colour pink.

The Daleks themselves take full advantage of the upgrade to full-colour, with their shells appearing in a veritable rainbow of hues. Production photos and promotional materials reveal that the original Daleks are surprisingly colourful too, and it would genuinely delight me to see the programme in full colour, should the BBC begin broadcasting in colour within the programme’s lifetime.

I also approve of the much fuller soundtrack of the film, as opposed to the quite sparse use of music in the serials. That said it does veer a little James Bond-ish at times, and I’d rather Dr. Who stayed well away from that sort of thing, thank you very much.

I admire how the serials manage to stretch their budget, but I would love it if the BBC would give the production team more to work with, so that we might bring visual treats like this into our living rooms a bit more often.

It’s not very likely, but a girl can dream.

That said, what on Earth (or Skaro) did they do to the TARDIS?! The interior looks like more of a junkyard than the one from An Unearthly Child. They even did away with the round things on the walls!

They even got rid of the central console!

Final Thoughts

So, I’ve spent quite a bit of time comparing this film to the serial on which it is based. I had originally told myself, when I set out to write this, that I wouldn’t do that, that I would judge it purely on its own merits. However, having seen how identical it is to the original in many aspects, how could I not put the changes under a magnifying glass?

Adaptation is an inherently transformative process. On that I think we can all agree. The act of transplanting a story from one medium into another is always going to result in changes from the source material. Changes, in and of themselves, are not a bad thing. Take Sherlock Holmes. That’s been adapted to hell and back a thousand times since it was written and will be written to hell and back a thousand times more. Even take the legend of King Arthur. That’s been adapted so many times nobody knows what the original is. The aim with adaptation is not to avoid changes entirely. Changes can be good. They can add complexity to a character, depth to a plot. However, when changes flatten a character, then we have a problem. And additionally a reluctance to change can, as I described earlier, be to the detriment of an adaptation. It’s a delicate matter so perhaps you will forgive me my nitpicking. On the whole, do I think the changes made were justified? No. Dr. Who And The Daleks is a weak, rushed, flat story with flat characters and an abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion.

It might have higher production values and shinier sets, but there is something hollow at the heart of Dr. Who And The Daleks. Something was lost on the way to the big screen, and that’s enough for me to recommend that you steer clear of this film when it premieres. A far better use of your time would be to pick up David Whitaker’s novelisation of The Daleks, which comes out in paperback in October (though there is a hardback version already available, if you can get your hands on it).

As for me, I think I’m getting quite sick of Daleks, and I'm eager to turn my attention back to the Doctor Who we know and love.

1.5 out of 5 stars

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Magazine

[June 30, 1965] Every Day has its Dog (July 1965 Analog)

June 30, 2020 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Hail the Sun God

Summer has officially begun.

On June 21, 1965, the northern hemisphere of Earth enjoyed its longest period of daylight (while in Australia, poor fellow traveler, Kaye Dee suffered through the longest night). The Summer Solstice is an event that once had great religious significance, but as the Mosaic religions spread across the globe, celebration of the day waned.

Today, with the rise of neo-druidism (the North American version of it having been related in articles by Erica Frank), the Solstice has once again become a holy day. And 1965's was particularly special: as the Fraternal Order of Druids gathered around Stonehenge, they were treated to the first uncloudy sunrise in 13 years.

With such an auspicious sign, one might expect that June (July cover date) would be a good one for science fiction magazines. Instead, what we got was a dreary muchness that was more akin to the overcast skies of prior Solstices. And no magazine more exemplifies this drabness than this month's Analog:

Noonday Overcast

by John Schoenherr

Trader Team (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson

by John Schoenherr

Poul Anderson is the Cepheid variable of the science fiction genre: he pulses from brilliance to dullness with regularity. In the midpoints, he produces competent but longwinded stuff like the Van Rijn tales, which detail the exploits of a canny Terran trader trying to enhance his fortune in the Galactic "Polesotechnic League."

Trader Team features David Falkayn, a young cadet we last saw in the mediocre Three-Cornerned Wheel. Thanks to the ingenuity he displayed in that story, Falkayn has been tapped to be Van Rijn's apprentice, his first mission to open up trade on the backward planet of Ikrananka.

The story starts crackingly, introducing the four members of the crew of the Muddlin' Through: Falkayn, the young Captain; Chee, a furry, imprecation-throwing female from planet Cynthia; Adzel, the gentle saurian neo-Buddhist from Woden; and "Muddlehead", the ship's computer. The ship has been in virtual quarantine for several weeks as no representative of the planet's local feudal state will approach them.

Then, in the midst of an intense poker game, Falkayn espies a beautiful woman soldier fleeing from a troop of Ikranankan cavalry. He saves her and brings her aboard ship only to discover that he has given aid to a fugitive of the very polity he is trying to establish relations with!

So far so good, but the next thirty pages are a drag. There's some nice scientific worldbuilding, in which we learn Ikrananka is a one-face planet, that Stepha (the saved soldier) is one of the third generation of spacewrecked humans who now, as a race, hire themselves out as mercenaries, and that Ikrananka would make a nice planet for trade if only its disparate fiefdoms could be unified.

But the story itself meanders in that wordy, shaggy dog style that Poul defaults to when he's on autopilot. The scene in which Adzel gets roaringly drunk and then implicated in a human insurrection is played for laughs, but it's just tedious. When Chee is captured, too, the reaction it elicits is a yawn rather than concern.

And if I have to read another line about what Falkayn thinks of Stepha's physical form, I'll throw the book against the wall. It'd also be nice to see more non-romantic female characters in general (though I will concede that Chee being female is a step in the right direction).

A low three stars.

In the Light of Further Data, by Christopher Anvil

by Kelly Freas

Data is an Anvil story in a Campbell-edited mag, so caveat emptor.

And your caution is justified. Data is a story in newspaper article excerpts of two intersecting threads. The first is the development of a miracle tissue regrowth process that quickly recruits millions of patients seeking replacements for lost teeth. The second is the battle between a professor who asserts that science is the foundation of truth, and the religious community who pushes back on the assertion.

In the end, said professor cheerfully gets a new mouth of choppers, just as it's determined that there is a fatal flaw in the regrowth technique. The punchline is he quits science and becomes a missionary.

The moral, I assume, is that those eggheads don't know everything. It's certainly a philosophy Campbell has flogged to death.

Anyway, it's a dumb story. Two stars.

Hands Full of Space, by Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.

We get a respite of sorts in the nonfiction article. It's about the difficulties of engineering for the intense harshness of space. Kallis tells us what happens to electronic components when exposed to zero pressure — they weld to each other, their surfaces vaporize and then coat other surfaces — and then there's the wear of hellish radiation and the danger from whizzing micrometeoroids.

It's all very informative and accessible, if a bit long and occasionally disjointed. When Analog's science piece is better than Ley's in Galaxy and Asimov's in F&SF, you know the world is truly inconstant!

Four stars.

Soupstone, by Gordon R. Dickson

by John Schoenherr

Here's another ingenue spaceman saves the day story. Soupstone is the sequel to Sleight of Wit, in which a clever human defeats an alien adversary largely by virtue of said alien being implausibly dim.

This time, Major Hank Shallo is sent to Crown World as a special trouble-shooter. The problem he must solve involves a crop of alien oversized grapes that would produce a most exquisite brandy in tremendous quantities if only they could keep them from rotting in the warehouses. It's all a matter of timing in the picking process, you see.

Shallo, an inept buffoon, is unable to solve the problem himself, but he is able to gather all the folks together who can solve the problem, and in doing so, sets them on their way to effecting the solution. And if you know the fable about making soup from a stone (I did) then you get the reference. And if you don't, don't worry — Dickson explains it for you.

Dickson is capable of much better than these "funny" stories, and once again, the ladies are included just for leering.

Two stars.

The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial, by Mack Reynolds

by John Schoenherr

It is rare that the science fiction and mystery genres overlap. Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw tales and Garrett's Lord Darcy series pretty much round out the list. In Adventure, Reynolds crosses SF with The Detective, the one and only supersleuth of Baker Street (though neither Holmes nor Watson are ever mentioned by name).

An octogenarian Holmes is engaged by the spendthrift son of a rich gentleman. The son is putatively concerned for his father's mental health as he has engaged in a Fortean obsession with aliens, which have taken up residence in London, he maintains.

Reynolds is a good writer, and he executes a fair homage to the Doyle style. But while I enjoyed the story, I found Watson's constant and repetitive harping on Holmes to be offputting. And there are only so many times I need to be reminded of Holmes' age through note of his "senility," "chortling," "blathering," "dribbling," "inanity," etc. etc. Virtually every line includes a reference, and it's overmuch.

Also, and this is a small thing, Holmes' client talks of his father's obsession with "flying saucers." The story is indisputably set in the mid-to-late 1930s. Flying saucers did not become idiomatic vogue until after the war, in astonishing concert with the arrival of jet planes and rocketships. The anachronism vexed.

Still, it's the best story of the issue. A high three stars.

Though a Sparrow Fall, by Scott Nichols

One of those conversation pieces in which the story progresses in party dialogue. Turns out that the human genetic code has been written, or at least tampered with, such that a message has been buried within. By whom, and for whom, it is not known.

There's an interesting germ of a story here, almost something Theodore L. Thomas might address in his little column in F&SF. It doesn't really go anywhere, though.

Three stars.

Delivered with Feeling, by Lawrence A. Perkins

by Kelly Freas

At last, Mr. Perkins offers up another "lone man solves the problems of an alien world" story. This one deals with a planet whose disunion into dozens of profession-castes has made it easy prey for alien raiders. Because the invading planet and Earth are party to a mutual non-aggression pact, our protagonist can provide no material aid. Instead, he simply gives them a rallying slogan, which because of the unique qualities of the subjugated race, proves sufficient to throw off the alien onslaught.

The kicker, of course, is how the protagonist hatched his scheme. It's one of those technical puzzle stories that has been the stale bread and butter of the genre for decades. It's readable and forgettable.

Three stars.

A Dim Augury

Just one magazine cracked the three-star barrier this month: Fantasy and Science Fiction with 3.2 stars. IF and Science Fantasy were inoffensive three-star issues whilst (as Mark and Kris might say) New Worlds stumbled in at just 2.7. As this month's Analog scored a 2.8, it barely misses out on being the worst of the bunch.

And what a meager bunch it is! Without Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow (they're bimonthlies) and since the former Goldsmith mags, Amazing and Fantastic were on hiatus this month, there really wasn't much to read. Worse yet, there was just one woman-penned piece out of the 27 fiction stories published this month.

That the magazines were all fairly unremarkable, save perhaps for the unusually decent F&SF, just goes to show that even when the Sun God makes an appearance, it doesn't always herald good fortune.

Ah well. The Sun sets, but it also rises, and each day brings promise anew…

Sunrise, Roy Lichtenstein's latest masterpiece — see, this month wasn't all bad…

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[June 28, 1965] An Hour Of My Life I Will Never Get Back (Doctor Who: The Chase [parts 4-6])

June 28, 2020 Jessica Holmes 1 Comment

By Jessica Holmes

The title of this article says it all, really. This serial is… well, it’s really quite something, and I don’t mean that in a good way. So, to recap: the Daleks are chasing the TARDIS through time and space, taking them to exotic places like a desert world beset by monsters, a mysterious ghost ship, and… a New York tourism hot-spot. Let's see where they wind up next.

JOURNEY INTO TERROR

Well, here we go, I suppose. The TARDIS makes a landing in a dusty old mansion, and the Doctor drags Ian off to explore while the women make the much more sensible choice to stay near the TARDIS. The mansion is quite thoroughly spooky, infested with bats and goodness knows what else.

It doesn’t take long for things to take a creepy turn, as skeletons drop from the ceiling and ghosts rudely barge through people.

And then Frankenstein’s Monster shows up.

No, really.

The Doctor and Ian find a laboratory upstairs, and within, a familiar scene: the strange machinery, the lumpy shape under the tarp. And then the monster rises, giving the pair quite the fright.

Meanwhile, downstairs…

I cannot believe I’m typing this.

Downstairs, Barbara and Vicki meet Count Dracula.

He doesn’t do much other than introduce himself and then leave. In the time Barbara takes to see where he went, Vicki manages to disappear, and a woman appears on the balcony above to scream something unintelligible. Nope, I have no idea what her problem is.

Anyway.

Barbara leans into a moving wall because no haunted house is complete without a few secret passageways.

Upstairs, the men note that something feels strangely familiar about the house. Oh, like the numerous public domain characters running about the place?

I’ll bet you Walt Disney had something to do with this.

The Doctor comes up with a theory on this house being some sort of physical manifestation of the collective fears of humanity. I don’t know what the physical manifestation of existential dread would be, but perhaps that’s a bit too heavy for teatime telly.

If his theory is true, the Daleks shouldn’t be able to land here, seeing as it's all just a figment of the imagination.

And a couple of minutes after making his case, the Daleks land. So much for that, then.

Ian and the Doctor can't find the women downstairs, and beginning to worry they reluctantly venture back into the laboratory, where a Dalek politely asks Ian where the time travellers are.

Let’s just take a moment to process this. You mean to tell me that the Daleks have been chasing these humans across time and space for three and a half episodes, and don’t even know what they look like?

Ian and the Doctor scarper as Frankenstein’s Monster rises to do battle with the Dalek. Now, there’s a sentence I never imagined writing. Time to place your bets, folks. Who would win, the Monster or the Dalek?

You might be surprised.

The men make it back downstairs, where they manage to meet with the women again. Where did they go and how did they get back? Pssh, who cares? It’s time for the Hammer Horror showdown.

A Dalek arrives on scene to accost the gang, but before it gets the chance to blast them to kingdom come, Count Dracula pops out. The group make a run for it while the Dalek is distracted, Vicki stopping to warn the Count of the grave danger he’s in. Bless.

However, she needn’t worry, as the Dalek’s blast does nothing at all to him. Well, I say she needn't worry, but that's not quite true. The Count's fine, but the Doctor's neglected to do a headcount and the TARDIS just left without her.

Then things really descend into madness.

As the Count repeatedly informs the Daleks ‘III AAAM COOOUNT DRAAACULA’, Frankenstein’s Monster tosses the plunger-toting menace about like dustbins, and the woman on the balcony incessantly screams gibberish. Amidst the chaos, Vicki sneaks aboard the Dalek capsule.

The Daleks, realising they’re beaten, beat a hasty machine into their own capsule. So, that wild fever dream is over. What was really going on, though?

The Doctor stands by his theory, but Ian thinks a simpler explantation is more likely. Sure enough, he’s right, though he'll never know it.

The cameraman lets us in on the secret by panning the camera down to the the ticket stand for ‘Frankenstein’s House Of Horrors’, $10 entry, which further signs indicate was the highlight of the "1996 Festival of Ghana." Well, it would have been if the event hadn’t been "cancelled by Peking."

I only have more questions now.

So, anyway, aboard the TARDIS the adults eventually realise they’ve left their ward behind. Mr Chesterton and Miss Wright, I am very disappointed in you. You’re meant to be the responsible ones.

Aboard the Dalek ship, they’re in hot pursuit, and about to deploy their secret weapon: a ‘perfect’ robot copy of the Doctor.

I will get to this in a moment.

Vicki attempts to contact the TARDIS to no avail. The rest of her team are feeling tremendously guilty as well they should. However, they apparently can’t go back for her for important time-travel reasons, but if they could capture the Dalek ship, they could get her in that.

Let’s just go with it.

On the Dalek ship, the roboDoctor is almost ready. Or perhaps I should call him Roboctor? Let’s have a look at him.

A perfect copy, the Daleks insist. Sure, apart from the face, the height, the build, the general bearing, and, well, everything about him. Hartnell voices him in a very dodgy dub. I don't know why he couldn't just play the doppleganger fully.

You know what? I’m going to call it Doctor What.

The final shot rolls in as Doctor What affirms his orders to infiltrate and destroy and this time… he is played by Hartnell. I despair. Why? I just do not understand. It’s so jarring.

Stick around, we’re not done yet.

THE DEATH OF DOCTOR WHO

It might well be if things carry on like this.

The TARDIS lands in a swamp populated by walking mushrooms that are scared of bright lights. That’s neat, I suppose.

There’s a trail of lights overhead, which the companions decide to follow, reasoning that this might be a decent place to fight the Daleks. The Daleks arrive soon after and decide they should kill anything that moves, because of course they do.

Vicki creeps out from hiding and flees into the swamp, promptly running into a walking mushroom. It doesn’t kill her because ‘killed by a giant mushroom’ is too embarrassing a fate to foist upon any character. The universe won't abide it.

The rest of the group find a cave at the end of the trail of lights, and in it they find a sort of glowing wand which they can use to ward off the mushrooms. It’s more of a glorified torch than a weapon, but that doesn’t stop Barbara waving it about and making adorable shooty sounds.

Ian’s been toting the Doctor's device around since they left the TARDIS, but the Doctor warns everybody that they can't use it in an enclosed space. Honestly I’m not convinced that it isn’t just a transistor radio. You could do some damage if you threw it hard enough at someone’s head, I suppose.

Vicki manages to fight off the giant mushroom because, well. It’s a mushroom. She finds the TARDIS, but it’s locked, and the mushroom is still following her. Maybe it just wants to be her friend? Consider the mushroom’s feelings, Vicki.

Having tried absolutely nothing to get out of her situation such as, I don’t know, running away and looking for the others, Vicki is all out of ideas. And as you do when you run out of ideas, she starts screaming her head off.

Though they’re probably miles away, the rest of the gang hear her, and the men run out to see what’s making that dreadful racket. With them gone, Doctor What slips into the cave.

The Doctor and Ian find Vicki unconscious with a mushroom standing over her. Now, this looks bad for the mushroom, but I have to reiterate that it’s a mushroom and probably can’t hurt anyone, unless Vicki tried eating it, I suppose. I bet she just fainted.

Doctor What continues to frustrate me as the episode keeps flipping between having him played by Hartnell and Hartnell's double. It’s just so visually confusing.

Doctor What tells Barbara that Ian’s dead, and she could try acting a little sadder if you ask me. He lures her out of the cave to look for his body, and the real Doctor and Ian come back to find her gone. While Ian goes to look for her, the Doctor stays to look after Vicki.

However, upon awakening to find the Doctor leaning over her, Vicki panics and hits him, thinking that he’s Doctor What. It’s then that Ian returns, and they work out what must have happened to Barbara.

Ian manages to have an appropriately horrified reaction to Barbara being in mortal danger, and runs out to look for her.

Hearing Ian calling out for her, Barbara is overjoyed to realise he’s alive, but her joy turns to horror as Doctor What attacks her. Luckily Ian’s soon on the scene and Doctor What beats a hasty retreat.

They return to the cave, but the gang seems to have acquired an extra Doctor.

One tries to attack the other, but Ian intervenes, to which this Doctor threatens him too. Well, that was a clever idea, wasn’t it? The very-obviously-not-Hartnell Doctor watches from the sidelines, urging Ian to destroy the ‘fake’ Doctor with a rock.

However, before Ian gets the chance (he didn’t even pause to think!), Barbara realises the deception and stops him.

Now comes the one point in the serial where there’s any point to using the double: a Doctor fight!

Ah, but which Doctor won? Now, that would have been fun to play with, but nothing comes of it, so I’ll chalk this up as a missed opportunity.

The Daleks find the TARDIS, but come under attack by a mushroom and decide to call it a night. Meanwhile, the companions get some rest. Their presence hasn’t gone unnoticed, however. As they sleep, a camera descends from the ceiling and observes them.

Upon awakening, the companions spot a city suspended high above the canopy. It’s a nice design, very organic, so a thumbs up from me to the art department.

However, they might pay more attention to the sights at ground level, as the Daleks have found their cave.

Ian comes up with the bright idea for the Doctor to pretend to be the robot, and as the group argues over whether that’s a good idea (and decides that it’s not), the Doctor, listening in the background, heads outside to give it a go. I’m proud of him. He’d never have taken a risk like that back when he first met the Daleks, now here he goes putting himself in danger to help his friends.

Still, the companions weren’t wrong when they decided it was a bad idea, as it only takes a Dalek about ten seconds to realise that the Doctor isn’t a robot, and the Doctor flees back into the cave as the Dalek shoots at him, shaken up but unharmed. Ah, well. It was worth a try.

He’s about to use his device as a last resort when the rear wall of the cave opens up to reveal a massive Christmas tree ornament. This thing is called a Mechanoid, and it sounds like a Dalek that’s lost its voice from all the screaming. With no better options, the gang decide to follow it.

There’s one good thing I can say about this point of the serial: one more episode and it’s over!

THE PLANET OF DECISION

The group follow the Mechanoid into a lift, and it’s just as awkward as any time one shares a lift (or ‘elevator’ for the Americans) with a perfect stranger, with the Mechanoid ignoring any and all attempts at small talk.

The Daleks are momentarily confused to find the cave empty, but soon realise that the group must have escaped through a wall somehow.

The lift arrives at its destination on the elevated walkway, and the group begin to make their way to the city. The Mechanoid meets another Mechanoid and they perform a strange gesture which could be a greeting, but could just be a result of them being too bulbous to move past one another.

The Mechanoid takes them to a building and ushers them inside, where they find a bed, some scaffolding, and a man by the name of Steven Taylor. You might find him a little familiar, as his actor, Peter Purves, appeared a few episodes ago as the man from Alabama at the top of the Empire State Building.

Honestly, Steven might be the one new character in this whole serial I don’t loathe. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I really rather like him. He’s a little odd, as anyone would be after two years of isolation, but he’s a nice bloke and good-humoured.

Steven explains that Earth decided to colonise this world about fifty years ago and sent the Mechanoids on ahead to get started on the building, but then humanity got itself involved in another war and all plans for colonisation fell by the wayside. Cool, but I have to ask how do the Mechanoids build anything? Look at them! They’re less dextrous than Daleks, and that’s saying something.

He’s been their prisoner since he crash-landed two years ago, and it looks like the companions are the new exhibits in the Mechanoids’ human zoo. Why are the Mechanoids keeping people like zoo animals? Honestly no idea.

The Daleks manage to get at the lift shaft and head in, despite reservations about the potential firepower of the Mechanoids. I think the Daleks might have been humbled a little by their string of misadventures.

It turns out that the scaffolding in the human pen leads up to the roof, which is unguarded. That’s all well and good, but it’s 1500 feet up. Bit of a big jump.

The Doctor finally thinks to mention that he has a functioning spaceship, giving Steven hope that they might finally escape. Ian finds a coil of cable, and while he unravels it, the Doctor reports to the girls the plan to climb down. They aren’t terribly keen, to say the least.

However, they don’t get chance to protest too much, as the Daleks arrive at the city for a showdown with the Mechanoids. Everyone rushes onto the roof and prepares to get going, as the Doctor primes his device, leaving a little something for the Daleks to remember him by.

They have to blindfold Vicki and tie the cable around her waist to get her down, but otherwise that part of the plan goes without a hitch as the Doctor’s device explodes and incapacitates exactly one Dalek. However, Steven realises he left his lucky stuffed panda mascot behind and rushes back into the burning building to look for it.

Oh, and the Daleks and Mechanoids fight. Being as awkward and unwieldy as the pair are, it’s about as thrilling as you’d expect. The Mechanoids do have flamethrowers though, which I suppose is neat. Honestly I’m rooting for the Daleks in this fight, because I find the Mechanoids’ voices that annoying.

The companions make it down to the forest floor sans Steven, and moments later the city collapses in flames.

The group make it to the Dalek time capsule, and find it empty. They’ve won.

So, what do you do with a spare time-and-space-ship? You go home in it, that’s what.

Though it seems the programme forgot about it long ago, Ian and Barbara have been trying to get back home since they first came aboard the TARDIS, hindered by circumstance and the Doctor’s dodgy piloting skills. Here’s their chance to get home, and they’re going to take it.

I am deeply, deeply annoyed that this couldn’t have come at the end of a better serial.

At least Steven turns out to be alive after all.

The Doctor is apoplectic at the suggestion of the teachers piloting the Dalek ship home, citing the immense risks involved. And, well, I think he got rather used to having them around.

It gets quite heated as Ian complains that he’s tired of all this aimless drifting through space, which is basically the Doctor’s entire way of life. The Doctor insists he’s been trying to get them home all this time, seeing as he never wanted them aboard to begin with.

It’s only when Vicki intervenes and reassures the Doctor that she won’t leave him alone that he finally relents and shows the teachers how to work the machine.

The Doctor and Vicki leave them to it, the Doctor saying that it’s fifty-fifty whether they make it or not. The Dalek machine dematerialises. Did they make it?

Welcome to London, 1965. Newest arrivals: Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright.

Ian sets the machine to self-destruct and then the pair run off into a photo montage in which they’re attacked by pigeons, make silly faces and just generally lark about London like a couple of drunken students. It’s sweet seeing them being so overjoyed to get back home, and when they eventually flop onto a bus seat and ask for the wrong fare, Ian has the perfect answer when the conductor asks him if he’s been living on the moon: “No, but you’re getting warm.”

The Doctor and Vicki survey them on the Space Telly, and though Vicki is thrilled to see they made it safely, the Doctor is thoroughly down in the dumps. Tearfully he admits that he shall miss Ian and Barbara, and I think my heart just broke a little bit.

Final Thoughts

I think we can all agree that that ending deserved a better serial than The Chase. Ian and Barbara deserved a better final story than The Chase. William Russell and Jacqueline Hill certainly deserved a better serial to end on.

I think I’ve gone on for long enough about this serial’s many failings: the meandering plot, the frequent slow moments, the way it renders the Daleks as more of a joke than a menace, and that’s without mentioning the Dracula in the room. Oh, and the humour's pretty weak, too.

So, that said, let’s give Ian and Barbara some love. I noted earlier that I don’t think the Doctor would have pulled his stunt with the Dalek had this situation come up back when he first met them. What changed his character for the better? Ian and Barbara. Back in The Daleks, they’d barely met him, yet they’d already stopped him from acting on his worst impulses in the previous serial, steering him away from homicide. From the start they’ve been the moral backbone of the show, supporting the Doctor as he developed one of his own. The character we see in this serial is almost an entirely different person from the selfish, grouchy man in the junkyard.

For much of the show’s run, I’ve seen Ian and Barbara as the only real adults in the group. While they were introduced to the show to give it an educational component, I think we can agree the scholarly side of that has fallen by the wayside. What didn’t, however, was the moral education they gave both the audience and the other characters. They constantly challenged the Doctor and the people they met to rise to a better standard. And although we can’t say for certain the impact they left on all the people they left behind, the result with the Doctor speaks for itself.

It would have been easy for Ian and Barbara to have become irritating and sanctimonious, but they managed to remain thoroughly likable throughout their travels. Part of that must surely go to the talent and charm of Russell and Hill, who I’m sure have long, successful careers ahead of them. They made a fantastic pair. Though I’m sad to see them both go, I must admit that it makes sense, as having one without the other wouldn’t be the same.

So, thank you, Ian and Barbara. Thank you William and Jacqueline. And thank you all for your continued interest in all things Doctor Who.

2 out of 5 stars

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Book

[June 26, 1965] Disappointing Duo (June Galactoscope #2)

June 26, 2020 Rosemary Benton Leave a comment

by Rosemary Benton

Modern Man, Primitive Man (Robert Nathan's The Mallot Diaries)

The Mallot Diaries is a new science fiction drama from novelist Robert Nathan. The author, best known for his 1940 fantasy mystery novel Portrait of Jennie, is a highly prolific individual whose style primarily balances satirical allegories with poetic waxing on the transient nature of the world.

Given that he has some stories which have been categorized as supernatural/horror and generally fantastical, I was eager to pick up what I thought would be a merger of high literary talent exploring themes commonly found in popular literature. A story about modern man interacting with a species lost out of time? Now that’s a fruitful area for an author such as Nathan! What The Mallot Diaries turned out to be was far more unsettling.

First Contact

The book takes place in the present day within the remote regions of Arizona. It is written from the titular firsthand accounts of an Associate of Anthropology at Meriden College named Professor Mallot. He, along with his fellow academic Professor Osgood, Curator of the Archaeological Wing of the Museum of Natural History in Yuma, set out to look into rumors of an elusive tribe of indigenous peoples who have resisted contact with the outside world. Their inquiries with a local Apache man quickly lead them to the very people they seek. Having made contact with the tribe, they soon deduce that the people are actually the remnants of a Neanderthal group who are part of the Bear worshipers that Mallot is studying.

The elected leader of the tribe welcomes them after they provide reassurances that the purpose of their visit is neither to kill his people or "take away their god". This tribal leader, or "Jefe", declares that the two men may stay with them in order to act as historians who will document the history and culture of the People of the Bear. Things quickly get messy, however, when the internal power struggles of the tribe begin to draw the outside observers in – both due to their desire to document the People of the Bear, and because of their own weaknesses of the flesh.

The World Before Recorded History

The modern-day discovery of a lost tribe of Neanderthals is a solid enough base for a good story. Nathan does an admittedly decent job of working in the wonder and respect that his main characters feel as they begin to understand the world of their hosts. It’s refreshing to read a story in which the modern world explorers would be able to appreciate that the only real differences which separate modern humans from their primitive roots are as superficial as looks or clothing choices.

It’s pessimistic, but Nathan writes on page 73, "I often think of Professor Osgood's remark, that man has not changed in a hundred thousand years. He is still a scoundrel". To this point he again and again drives home the facts that things such as wealth, status, lust and ambition are as alive and well in the predecessors of homo sapiens as they are in modern man himself. At times these parallels come off as a little too trite, however.

The Youth Revolution

Perfect examples of this are the implications within the buildup to the children's revolution at the climax of the book. This plot thread is clearly a thinly veiled satire of today's youth culture. Under the current leadership of the tribe, children (meaning anyone under the age of 21) are not subjected to any forms of rules or consequences for their bad behavior.

The Jefe indulgently dismisses rude or violent acts as just youthful arrogance. Ultimately this lack of discipline for any crimes, from adultery to assault, results in the 109 children of the tribe taking up spears and killing the elders.

Heavy handed satire aside, by far the worst flaw of Nathan's book is the sensuality with which young girls are described and the societal sexualization of the youths in the tribe, some of whom are as young as eight years old.

As the story progresses and the anthropologists learn more about the internal politics and social structure of the tribe, both of Nathan's protagonists develop very disturbing feelings for two of the young girls, one of whom is twelve and the other is between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.

Highly Disturbing

This attraction is in part explained as being an effect of the two professors integrating into the tribe. Thirteen is the current age of consent amongst the Neanderthals and young girls and boys are not strictly forbidden from sexual exchanges, but it’s still a very disquieting turn in the story that comes into play over and over again.

The touting of pedophilia as romantic, cute and "basic human nature" frankly ruins the experience of reading The Mallot Diaries, and because of it I can’t recommend this book at all.

If Nathan was trying to write the next Lolita he has not succeeded. I have to give this book only a half star. Even with the pointed realizations about humanity which Nathan occasionally drops during the plot, the fetishization of young girls as well as the repeated attempts to write blatant pedophilia off as star crossed love makes The Mallot Diaries a book that is best avoided at all costs.

By Jason Sacks

On a much lighter note…

Sometimes it's exhilarating to read a book that seems to be positively overflowing with ideas, a book where the author seems thrilled to share a whole universe of concepts and drag an empathetic reader along in a journey that feels complex and rich, even if the book is short.

And sometimes it's just exhausting to read a book like that.

The Martian Sphinx, by Keith Woodcott

The Martian Sphinx, by journeyman science fiction author Keith Woodcott, is an exhausting book. It's full of clever moments, great excitement, and some intriguing alien races. Sadly, in this case, the whole of this brief 160-page Ace novel is not greater than the sum of its parts.

The Cork Floats to the Top

The protagonist of this novel is a graduate student named Jason Lombard, who is attending the finest college in Africa but who is ostracized due to his European birthplace. Lombard may be part of a miserable minority, but his brilliance wins the day. Despite his neurotic worries, Lombard is a genius level scientist who has thought through the deeply troubling problem of the Earth's decaying orbit around the sun.

Lombard comes across as a compelling character in the early chapters of this book, albeit in the Philip K. Dick tradition. Jason is a worrier, an outsider, a man who feels deeply ostracized from the university he's attending. It's hard not to see in Lombard echoes of the children integrating Southern elementary schools and college these days, though filtered through a different sort of personality.

I would happily have read a whole book exploring Lombard's world, with its overpopulated Europe and the advancement of the Red Chinese to the top of the world's most advanced societies. Sadly, Woodcott wanders elsewhere before exploring that theme enough to satisfy the reader's curiosity. I wish he had taken a stand to explore the problems of overpopulation, as that problem seems richly deserving of exploration in sci-fi.

The Power of Gravi

A second intriguing theme in The Martian Sphinx depicts how the world has moved beyond its dependence on fossil fuels and has learned to use a safe and endless source of power which is all around us. Gravipower sends a spaceship into space, provides all the energy the world needs, and essentially acts as a magic handwaving plot device to move the story along.

Again, the development of gravipower would alone have been enough for an entertaining book, because its effects on the book's characters is intriguing. But, again, we just don't get to spend much time considering what is essentially only a plot device.

First Contact

Instead, the heart of the book is a trip Lombard and a team of astronauts take to Mars to investigate a strange alien contraption dubbed "The Martian Sphinx." I'll get to the "Sphinx" in a paragraph or two, but first I should mention the aliens who are also questing after the object.

Two races swiftly land on Mars when the Terrans land there, and both alien races are bizarre, unique and totally fascinating in their vast differences from mankind. One race attacks the other, and the effects of the battle make up some of the most passionately written sections of the novel. Though these creatures are as different from people as insects are from us, readers are still made to feel the aliens' pain and fear. I was legitimately moved by a scene in which a number of the beings slowly die due to the battle.

In a way, their very alienness added to the pathos of those those scenes. Readers feel themselves in the boots of Lombard and his companions, struggling to make sense of the cryptic, unexplained war that lands on humanity's doorstep and the terrible toll that war takes on everyone involved. Again, this section alone might make for an intriguing novel of its own, maybe as a parable for our deepening conflict in Vietnam.

The Sphinx

Lastly, at the heart of the book but far from the center of its action is the "martian sphinx" of the book's title. An alien obelisk on our nearest planetary companion, the sphinx is a perplexing object which bespeaks of a long-lost alien civilization and seems to promise a fascinating future for humanity.

Woodcott makes the sphinx intriguing but it ultimately delivers mostly riddles rather than answers. Though that makes its name appropriate, the sphinx also deserves more than the space it receives here to begin to reveal its secrets. It's a rich enough idea for a whole series of novels, and I hope Woodcott can write those novels.

Few Riddles Answered

The Martian Sphinx is Woodcott's fourth published novel and it overflows with ideas. Sadly, perhaps due to the brevity of this book, none of those ideas pay off in fulfilling ways. It's easy to ponder how a writer like Philip K. Dick or John Brunner might explore these ideas which read similar to some of their best work. Sadly Woodcott is no Brunner and this novel just doesn't fulfill its considerable potential.

3 stars.

[I am looking forward to the interesting mail we receive in regard to Jason's last statement. I suppose Woodcott is no Brunner much like Winston P. Sanders is no Poul Anderson and Cordwainer Bird is definitely no Harlan Ellison…]

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[June 22, 1965] Standby for Action! (Gerry Anderson’s Stingray)

June 22, 2020 Kaye Dee 5 Comments

by Kaye Dee

“Standby for Action!” is the dramatic opening line of the opening titles for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s most recent marionette science fiction series, Stingray, which then go on to promise us “Anything can happen in the next half hour!” And with over 39 episodes of undersea adventure Stingray lives up to that promise.

World Aquanuat Security Patrol Commander Shore warns us that “Anything can happen in the next half hour” in the Stingray opening titles. Note the caption “in Videcolor” in the background, telling even viewers watching in in black and white that the show is made in colour

Stingray completed its first Australian screening run a few weeks ago on June 9, having commenced on the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), on September 16, 1964. As I’ve recently discovered from my friend at the ABC, this was, unusually, three weeks before the show commenced screening in Britain: as you might recall from my article about the long-delayed arrival of Doctor Who in Australia, we are more likely to be months, if not years, behind in screening television series from overseas. In fact, the Andersons’ earlier series, Fireball XL5, still hasn’t arrived on our shores, but I’ve heard that it will be shown on one of the commercial television channels later in the year.

The Stingray, series title. I’ve read that Gerry Anderson said an undersea show was the next logical step after the land and space exploits of his earlier series Supercar and Fireball XL5

Although I haven’t yet seen Fireball XL5, I discovered Stingray alongside the Andersons’ first Supermarionation puppet creation Supercar, which has been repeated this year on the ABC after first screening in 1963. While Supercar is good kiddie fun (thanks to my niece and nephew for introducing me to both these shows), Stingray shows an order of magnitude of improvement, technically and in the imaginativeness of its storyline.

Stingray, the most advanced submarine of 2065 and titular star of the show

Stingray is a science fiction undersea adventure series, set in the twenty first century (in 2065, as one episode informs us), following the exploits of the crew of Stingray, the most advanced submarine in the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (better known as WASP), one of the armed services of the World Government, charged with policing and protecting civil activities on and under the world’s oceans. However, in Stingray’s world, there are many peoples and civilisations under the sea and, although they have been largely unknown to the surface world previously, many of them have become angered by the “terrainean” exploitation of the resources of the oceans.

The Stingray crew, Troy Tempest, Phones and Marina, the mysterious woman from the sea.

In the first episode, the crew of Stingray, Captain Troy Tempest and his navigator/hydrophone operator, nicknamed “Phones” (apparently his full name is given in the promotional material for the series, but it never gets mentioned on screen), are captured by Titan, King of undersea city of Titanica. When his god (represented by a giant fish that looks like a cross between a grouper and a coelacanth!) rejects Troy and Phones, Titan condemns them to death, but they escape, aided by Marina, the mute daughter of the ruler of another undersea kingdom, whom Titan has been keeping as his slave. Marina returns with Troy and Phones to the WASP home-base of Marineville and becomes a member of the Stingray crew, using her knowledge of the undersea world to assist in their missions.

Titan, the evil King of Titanica, the arch-enemy of the Stingray crew, and his minions, the Aquaphibians.

This sets the stage for the series, with Titan and his creepy henchmen X-20 and the Aquaphibians, becoming the WASPs’ main undersea adversaries. While many stories involve battles with, or thwarting plots against, the WASP, or the surface world in general, by Titan and his allies, there is plenty of other action for the Stingray crew as well: we see them involved in exploration, participating in marine archaeology, undertaking rescue missions, investigating piracy and terrorism, assisting undersea peoples, becoming embroiled in international diplomacy and even discovering the truth about the Loch Ness Monster! Of course, being a children’s show, some of the stories are silly, and there are too many ‘dream episodes’, where strange things happen, for my taste – but many have a tongue-in-cheek humour that can be appealing to adults, and others touch on grown-up ideas such as whether or not we should exploit the mineral resources of the ocean floor.

Stingray in its pen under Marineville, awaiting the call to “Action Stations”

Unlike many kids’ adventure shows, the storyline is not completely static but has some developments over time, with Marina being initially somewhat under suspicion as a possible agent of Titan, but gradually becoming accepted, especially by Atlanta Shore, who was romantically involved with Tempest before Marina arrived on the scene. Troy finds himself enthralled by Marina but seems unable to make up his mind between the two women. It must be a first for a children’s television show that it not only portrays a ‘love triangle’ but also makes it the focus of its closing credits, which incorporate the love song “Aqua Marina”.

Atlanta Shore, Troy’s original love interest and her father WASP Commander Sam Shore in Marineville Control. A person with paraplegia in a hovering ‘wheelchair’ as a military commander has to be a role model for disabled children: in the future you can do anything!

I also find it interesting that Stingray includes two handicapped characters among its main cast, both of whom are shown to be vital members of the WASP. Marina may be mute – and episodes deal with her crewmates wanting to help her learn to speak, and the problem of Marineville Control communicating with Marina by radio – but she is intelligent and more than capable of rescuing Troy and Phones on more than one occasion. The Commander of the WASP, Sam Shore, is a paraplegic, who gets around using a hover chair – and an entire episode is devoted to the story of how he was crippled on active duty — but he is in overall charge of the organization. These have to be heartening role models for children afflicted by polio and other disabilities.

Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and some of the Stingray production team with one of the models of Stingray

Stingray is impressive technically. Those dramatic opening statements at the beginning of the title sequence introduce a series of action shots of Stingray, a lot of explosions, Stingray’s home base Marineville going to red alert (which means the entire base sinking underground and ICBM’s being deployed into launch positions), and an amazing scene of Stingray leaping out of the water, chased by one of Titan’s submarines in the shape of a gigantic mechanical fish. And it’s all accompanied by a staccato, jazzy theme that really works with the visuals.

I’d love to know how they created this dramatic scene of Stingray leaping out of the water, chased by one of Titan’s submarines

The models of futuristic submarines, aircraft and other technology of the twenty first century are beautifully detailed, and the finely crafted miniature sets perfectly match the size of the marionettes, which I understand are about 20 inches tall. I’ve read that the AP Films production team moved into a completely new studio to produce Stingray, which included two sound stages, so that they could shoot two episodes at a time, plus a special stage for filming special effects and huge indoor tanks for filming ocean surface scenes. The ‘underwater’ scenes are apparently shot on a dry set, but filmed through a special fish-filled aquarium in front of the camera, to create a forced perspective of an undersea environment: the kids certainly think it has actually been filmed underwater.

The beautifully detailed model of WASP Headquarters Marineville. The sequences of parts of the base sinking underground during an alert are really impressive

I like the Stingray marionettes, too: they are less caricatured than in Supercar, in fact some of them look like they’ve been modelled on real people. The Troy Tempest puppet reminds me of James Garner, and badguy X-20 looks – and sounds – a lot like Peter Lorre! The puppet faces are also given added realism by having glass eyes, unlike the painted eyes of the earlier puppets. Something I find really interesting is that the marionettes can apparently be fitted with different heads, sculpted so that the face is smiling or frowning, which allows them to express emotion in a way that wasn’t possible in the earlier puppets.

Tell me Troy Tempest isn’t modelled on James Garner!

Stingray also has another claim to fame, it seems, as the first television series in the UK to be filmed completely in colour, even though it will be some years yet before Britain gets colour television (and probably a decade yet before we see it in Australia). I understand has been done in order to improve the possibility of sales into the American market, so I hope it works, and the Andersons make enough profit from Stingray to embark upon a new series in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, I look forward to belatedly seeing Fireball XL5 and enjoy it as an interim step between Supercar and Stingray!

[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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Magazine

[June 18, 1965] Galactic Doppleganger (July 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

June 18, 2020 Gideon Marcus 3 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

Those of you who have been following the Journey over the past several years know that my appraisal of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has changed a few times. Back in the days when Anthony Boucher and then Robert Mills were editing F&SF, it was my favorite magazine, a dessert I saved for reviewing last.

Then Avram Davidson took over in 1962, and while there were still standout issues, Davidson's whimsical, somewhat obtuse preferences led to a pretty rough couple of years. Recently, Joe Ferman, son of the owner of the magazine, took over, and quality has been on a slow but perceptible rise.

One thing about F&SF is that it has always been unique amongst its SFF magazine brethren (which once numbered 40 and now less than ten). It was the literary sibling, the most highfalutin. Composed largely of vignettes and short stories, it contrasted sharply with the crunchier digests like Analog.

Which is why the current July 1965 issue is so unusual. It's not bad; indeed, it's pretty good. But it reads much like an issue of Galaxy or IF, one of the more mainstream mags. I'm not disappointed. It's just odd is all. Read on and see what I mean.

by Jack Gaughan (he likes dragons — he did the illos for Vance's The Dragon Masters too!

Rogue Dragon, by Avram Davidson

Last year, Davidson left editing to go back to writing full time, and Rogue Dragon is his first major work since his departure from the helm of F&SF. From the title, I expected a fantasy piece, or perhaps the dragon would even turn out to be metaphorical. Both suppositions were wrong: Rogue Dragon is pure science fiction set on a far future Earth, one that had been conquered and then abandoned by the merciless insectoid Kar-chee.

Now simply called Prime World, humanity's original home has devolved to a handful of city-states. The planet's economy is based on Hunts, wherein the dragons introduced by the Kar-chee are slain by off-world big game hunters. These dragons are nigh invulnerable things, their chest armor only pierceable in a weak spot identified with a painted white cross.

Enter Jan-Joras, the Private Man (representative) of the great off-world leader, Por Paulo. Sent to arrange a vacation for the elected king he serves, Jan-Joras quickly gets caught up in a political struggle between the aristocratic Gentlemen class, who raise the dragons, the base-born (known pejoratively as dogcatchers and potato-growers), and the outlaws, who have hatched a scheme that will strike at the very foundation of the Hunt system.

But Rogue Dragon is no political thriller. Rather, after a slightly difficult to read opening act (Davidson introduces many concepts and an abundance of idiomatic language in a short space), Rogue Dragon is an adventure story filled with derring-do, great escapes, and much traveling across increasingly hot frying pans — and we all know what destination lies at the end of that trail.

I found that I liked the story quite a bit, although it is perhaps less substantial than it might have been. I waver between giving it three stars (perfectly adequate entertainment) and four stars (there's creative worldbuilding here).

Generosity wins. Four stars it is, and welcome back to where you belong, Avram.

Computer Diagnosis, by Theodore L. Thomas

For his latest science fact vignette, Thomas discusses computer-assisted medical diagnosis — feed the data in, get a determination of malady and a life expectancy out. Expanded, this could have made a nice article. As is…

Three stars for being harmless.

The Expendables, by Miriam Allen deFord

In this odd bird of a story, the first astronauts sent to Mars are senior citizens. The logic is that the mission is so hazardous, with so remote a chance of returning, that it is kinder to send folks with fewer years remaining in their lives.

It doesn't make a great deal of sense, and the story is hampered by some clunky "as you know" dialogue. On the other hand, I thought the characters were pretty well drawn, and I appreciated the non-standard protagonists (two men, two women, all over 68).

Three stars.

The Eight Billion, by Richard Wilson

Many have made the dire prediction that Earth is heading toward massive overpopulation. Indeed, the tremendous-sounding number, "Eight Billion", may well be reached by the end of the century. Now imagine that crowding was such that eight thousand thousand thousands were crammed just into the island of Manhattan!

Wilson's story is mostly humorous fluff supporting a twist ending, but I enjoyed it.

Three stars.

Becalmed in Hell, by Larry Niven

Niven continues to impress with his fourth tale, sequel to The Coldest Place, which appeared in IF. In his hard as nails variation on McCaffrey's The Ship who Sang, Howie and Eric-the-cyborg-ship explore the boiling planet of Venus. There, floating twenty miles above the molten surface, Eric develops a fault and is unable to blast back into orbit. Is the problem mechanical or psychosomatic?

This is the first story set on post-Mariner 2 Venus, and what a delight it is to see what is probably a much more accurate representation of the Planet of Love. I do balk at the notion that it would be pitch black under Venus' clouds — it's not under an equivalent pressure of ocean, after all. On the other hand, perhaps they were exploring the night side.

In any event, it's a neat story (albeit one I might have expected to find in Analog). Four stars.

Exclamation Point!, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor continues his streak of turning his frivolous meanderings through mathematics into readable but not particularly momentous articles. In this latest, he expounds on the "Asimov series", a cute way he has developed to approximate the value of the special constant, e.

An enjoyable ride, I suppose. Three stars.

A Murkle For Jesse, by Gary Jennings

Gary Jennings last appeared in print in this very magazine, some three years ago, with the story Myrrha. It was nominated for the Hugo, though I didn't think it merited such acclaim.

In any event, I think I liked Murkle better. It stars an eight-year-old boy, a section of the rural Northeast, a little lost girl, and a 400-year old Irish fairy who is most certainly not lost.

If Clifford Simak and R.A. Lafferty were put in a blender, this piece might pour out. Three stars.

The Pterodactyl, by Philip José Farmer

The book concludes with a short poem about the wing-fingered flying reptiles of the Mesozoic. A difficult read, it also seems to suggest that pterodactyls were the evolutionary precursors of birds.

The weakest piece of the issue; two stars.

Wrapping up

And there you have it: a pleasant, above-average issue, but with stories that seem slightly odd fits for F&SF. I'm not really complaining, though.

Unless, of course, it means the other mags suffer…

[Don't miss the next episode of The Journey Show, featuring singer-songwriter Harry Seldon. He'll be playing a mix of Dylan, Simon, and some unique original compositions!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests

June 12, 2020 John Boston 3 Comments

by John Boston

The Collectors

SF anthologies are not neutral vessels. They are shaped by editors with agendas. Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be.

The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948. The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954. Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.

by Frank McCarthy

There was abortive competition along the way. Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again. The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy. The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it. There was no second volume.

But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it. Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years. The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication. After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books. We await the tenth, slated for December.

by Ed Emshwiller

Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF. Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable. She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.

The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline. As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years. Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published. Oh, and three cartoons. Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.

Merril’s agenda is clear. Let her tell you about it. In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:

“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy). Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too. Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well. The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”

English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field. That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.

You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to. I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity. I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be.

Yin and Yang

But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition. Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.

So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”? First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies. And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories. The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book. Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.

First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline. We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility. But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire. It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines. The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions. It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age. This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end. It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.

The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands. Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published. Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation. The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length. Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like. The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.

Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus. Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included. Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list. Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.

And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse. The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated. Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?).

This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another. At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.

There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea. And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”

But that’s the bad news. The good news is a number of worthwhile stories. Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea. William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction. John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way. Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less.

Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life. New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.

To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms. In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics. Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length. The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation. C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around. It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.

But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material. The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith. And there is too much overt dross.

So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test. Maybe the next one will be more startling. Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.

[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, TV

[June 6, 1965] The Dawdle, More Like (Doctor Who: The Chase [Parts 1-3])

June 6, 2020 Jessica Holmes 1 Comment

By Jessica Holmes

Well, it had to happen eventually. It’s impossible for a writer to knock it out of the park every time, and Terry Nation has batted his first foul ball. I think that’s the metaphor, anyway. But yes, his streak is over, giving us a rather tiresome story, The Chase, that I now bear the burden of talking about for a couple thousand words.

Let’s get on with it, shall we?

THE EXECUTIONERS

I was very excited going into this serial, as of course the Dalek stories we’ve had so far have also brought with them some societal commentary, and I am a big fan of that sort of thing. A bit of running around and zapping things is fun, but if you can give me food for thought at the same time I’ll fall madly in love.

This is not one of those stories.

The first half of the first episode is more or less dedicated to watching the companions watching television IN SPACE. Remember the Time And Space Visualiser the Doctor picked up from the museum? Yes, he gets it fixed so they all gather round to watch historical events across time and space. Because surely that’s much more fun than just using your time machine to visit these places in person. They snoop on the court of Queen Elizabeth I, watch Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, and at Vicki’s request, they tune in to Top Of The Pops to watch The Beatles. Don’t get me wrong, I like the lads from Liverpool, but this is just pure filler. It serves no purpose whatsoever and honestly it’s quite boring.

Didn't your mothers ever warn you not to sit so close to the telly?

So after all that, the plot finally starts to move, as the TARDIS lands on a desert planet, sand dunes stretching far as the eye can see. The Doctor and Barbara stay by the TARDIS to catch some sun, while Ian and Vicki go exploring. Vicki finds some strange, bad smelling substance on the ground, and she and Ian follow the trail, not knowing that there’s something alive in the sand.

Back at the TARDIS, Barbara hears an awful noise. No, it’s not the Doctor’s singing. The Time And Space Visualiser (gosh, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Let’s just call it a Space Telly) has picked up the Daleks in pursuit.

Cue a rather awkward scene in which the Dalek explain their plans for assassinating the TARDIS crew to one another, for nobody’s benefit but the audience. It’s a terribly clumsy way to deliver exposition, and the scene doesn’t get any better as we watch them silently file into their time capsule one by one. There are loads of them and I aged five years in the time it took.

So now that I’m pushing thirty and the Daleks have finally got into their time capsule, the Doctor and Barbara realise it’s time to get going, and fast. However, Ian and Vicki have wandered far away by now.

Vicki finds the end of the trail, and though at first glance nothing seems to be there, Ian finds some sort of ring in the sand, not unlike a door handle. After some deliberation over whether it’s a good idea to be pulling on things without knowing what they are, Ian goes ahead and tugs it, yanking the ring out of the ground, and opening up a hidden passageway.

There's a monster in the shot, honest.

Ever the responsible adult, Ian lets Vicki go in first, and they almost immediately run into a big ugly monster. I give it five minutes before Vicki gives it a name and tries to adopt it as a pet.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Barbara struggle through a sandstorm in a fruitless attempt to find the two, and once the storm has cleared, they realise to their horror that the landscape has changed entirely, and they can no longer find their way back to the TARDIS.

Worse, however, is the familiar shape rising from the sand…

Eh. It was a lot cooler when they had Daleks coming out of the Thames. So yes, that was a sequence of events. Calling it the beginning of a story feels a bit too generous. I call it a big load of nothing.

Let’s see where The Chase goes from here.

THE DEATH OF TIME

The music accompanying the episode titles in this serial is so ill-fitting it makes me cross. It’s just this weird jazzy sounding thing. I have no idea what tone it’s trying to set, but whatever it is it’s failing abysmally.

Spotting additional Daleks approaching over the dunes, the Doctor and Barbara flee, only to run into a bunch of humanoid fish people, because who else would you be expecting to find in a desert?

Ian and Vicki run away from the monster in the tunnels. I’m not sure it was really making much of an effort to get them.

The Daleks start murdering any local unfortunate enough to wander within shooting range, and identify the planet as Aridia (because it’s arid, get it?).

The Aridians, or fish people as I called them, seem to be a friendly sort (or at the very least not actively hostile), and they give the Doctor and Barbara the standard speech they get from just about every alien culture they come across. Or at least, that’s how it feels. You know the one, it’s about the world once being all lovely then something bad happened and now it’s rubbish so gee, it sure would be nice if someone were to drop in and help us right about now.

Also, they can’t act for toffee. You can’t argue that it’s some sort of artistic choice, like you could with the bee people who communicated through a mixture of weird sing-song voices and interpretive dance.

The Aridians are not like that. They are just plain bad. I’m talking drama-club-at-the-village-hall bad.

Through this haze of weird line delivery and overwrought emoting, the Aridians explain that this was once a watery world where they lived in cities beneath the sea, but the suns moved closer (oh, there are two suns) and the seas dried up, killing everything except the Aridians and the dreaded Mire Beasts.

The Aridians realise that Ian and Vicki must have found their way into one of the old airlocks leading to the city, which is very bad news as they’re about to blow up the tunnels to trap the Mire Beasts.

The group rushes to try to find them, but they’re too late. As a Mire Beast attacks Vicki, the charges go off, sending rubble crashing onto the Mire Beast, killing it stone dead, and knocking Ian unconscious. Vicki runs to look for help, as meanwhile the others arrive to the gates of the city. Though the Doctor is hesitant to involve the Aridians in his troubles with the Daleks, the friendly fish people assure him that they just want to help.

Daleks are keen detectorists.

Elsewhere, the Daleks find where the TARDIS is buried and continue to narrate their own actions. With this much padding, I have to ask if Nation originally wrote a three-or-four-episode serial and was asked by the BBC to stretch it out to six. It’s completely sucking all the tension out of the story.

In the city of the Aridians, the Doctor and Barbara get their first hot meal in a while, though Barbara is too anxious about the others to eat, and the Doctor notes that the food has an odd taste. Now, ordinarily I would take this as a hint that they’ve been given something horrific to eat and that the Aridians have some dark secret behind the friendly facade, but it appears to be a red herring, as nothing comes of it.

Still, I have to wonder what exactly the Aridians are eating if there’s no land suitable for farming and all the animals have died, and they said themselves that they can’t kill the Mire-Beasts, so they can’t be hunting them. So that just leaves…. Well, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

However, the Daleks learn that the Aridians are sheltering the Doctor, and issue an ultimatum: either they hand over the Doctor, or the Daleks will destroy the city. The Aridians have no choice but to hold the Doctor and Barbara as prisoners while they decide what to do.

Vicki manages to find her way back to the TARDIS, discovering that the Daleks have dug it out of the sand with the unwilling help of some Aridians, who they promptly murder once the work is finished. I’ve heard of bad bosses, but that takes the cake.

The Daleks start bombarding the TARDIS, but to their frustration the little wooden box is impervious to their weapons. Appearances, after all, can be deceiving.

The Aridians come to the decision that they have to hand the Doctor and Barbara over, even though I wouldn’t trust a Dalek as far as I could throw one.

Ian wakes up from his little nap (being unconscious for that long, that man needs his head checking out) and gets up to search for Vicki, who has just been snatched in the tunnels by an Aridian.

In the city, Barbara notices dust coming from a bricked-up doorway. It’s apparently blocking off a section of the city that was lost to the Mire Beasts. It’s rather shoddy work considering it’s meant to keep literal monsters at bay. The Aridians drag Vicki in, and she tells them what she saw. However, before they can discuss plans of escape any further, the Aridians come to collect them for the handover to the Daleks.

It’s at this point the Aridians’ shoddy brickwork comes back to bite them. A tentacle bursts through the wall, ensnaring Barbara. In the ensuing struggle, she manages to break free. The companions flee the scene, leaving the Aridians to their fate at the tentacles of the Mire Beast. See, this is why you check reviews before hiring your builder.

Hm, maybe it should have stayed in the shadows.

The Daleks issue the Aridians a further ultimatum upon learning of the companions’ escape. They have one hour to recapture them, or the Daleks will destroy the city. For a Dalek, that’s a surprising display of patience.

The Doctor, Barbara and Vicki run into Ian in the tunnels. Ian comes up with a plan to evade the Daleks and get back into the TARDIS. He asks for Barbara’s cardigan (nicely, this time) and the Doctor’s coat, and uses them to construct a simple pitfall trap.

While the women wait for their chance to make a break for it, the Doctor and Ian catch the attention of the Dalek on guard. The stupid thing blunders into the trap, and the companions make a break for it, their ship dematerialising as the Daleks open fire.

This is actually a decent and fun scene. I have to call attention to it, because those are so very rare in this serial.

Other than that, all I can really say about this episode is…nothing, really. Not particularly bad, not particularly good, mostly dull with a good bit or two. It garners a shrug and a ‘eh’. It exists.

FLIGHT THROUGH ETERNITY

The TARDIS flees through time and space, while the Daleks waste a lot of time talking about their plans to follow them at once rather than just doing it. It’s an absolute tension killer.

Inside the TARDIS, the companions’ celebration of their escape gets cut short when the Space Telly detects another time machine pursuing them again.

Also, there’s a really obvious cardboard cutout on the Dalek ship. Look, I don’t mind being creative to stay in budget, but if you’re going to use a cardboard cutout, stick it in the background of a shot.

The TARDIS needs to land for…some reason, and the Doctor plonks it in the land of stock footage. Gee, I wonder which city this is?

Oh, of course, it’s New Amsterdam.

Silly me.

To the people of the United States of America: I apologise for the travesty that is to follow. I’m talking about the accents. Oh, boy. The accents. They are absolutely atrocious.

Well, at least we’re now even for Mary Poppins.

There’s yet! More! Padding! As a tour guide shows a bunch of tourists the famous New York landmarks from the top of the Empire State Building, which is where the TARDIS has just materialised.

'Maybe if we ignore him long enough, he'll go away.'

Upon emerging from their ship, they meet a man from Alabama who embodies just about every stereotype about American southerners you can imagine. It’s honestly embarrassing. He’s a friendly enough chap though, telling Barbara that the current year is 1966. He's very curious about how they appeared seemingly from nowhere. The companions manage to brush him off and depart, but the Daleks arrive moments later, demanding to know where they went.

In the greatest display of patience I have ever seen, the Daleks don’t just shoot him for being annoying. He thinks this is all some Hollywood lark.

That's not a microphone, buddy.

Back in the TARDIS, the companions learn the Daleks are still hot on their heels. They need to find a way to fight back.

The next landing spot is a nineteenth-century sailing ship somewhere off the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Barbara can’t resist having a look around, leading her into trouble when an officer accosts her. Luckily for Barbara, Vicki soon comes to give the officer a good whack on the head. Hearing someone else coming, Barbara tells Vicki to hide. Vicki gives the newcomer a good whack, before realising it was just Ian. Poor Ian. It’s a wonder he has any functioning brain cells left.

The women manhandle a dazed Ian back onto the TARDIS, which vanishes as the officer wakes up. He informs the captain of what he found, and the captain rallies the crew to search the ship. However, it’s not long before the Daleks show up, terrifying the sailors so much that they leap overboard, which strikes me as a bit of a silly thing to do.

The Daleks search the now-abandoned ship, finding no sign of the TARDIS, and continue the chase. We then have a long, long series of shots of the abandoned ship. It's the Mary Celeste.

The TARDIS whizzes off into time and space, but they’re losing their lead on the Daleks. They’d better hope that the Doctor manages to finish his secret weapon before the Daleks catch up.

Final Thoughts

Here we are. That was the first half of The Chase. Suffice to say, I am underwhelmed. There’s no interesting philosophical or social angle. It’s not even an exciting prolonged chase sequence. There are far too many lulls in the action and too much obvious padding.

The Daleks feel completely ineffective. They spend too much time dithering to seem like an unstoppable force of death.

The Aridians were just rubbish. Although we haven’t seen any real conclusion of what happens to them, frankly I just don’t care.

Even as an adventure, a romp, this serial doesn’t work. Let’s compare it to The Keys Of Marinus, for example. Both serials involve the companions travelling in rapid succession from one place to another. However, The Chase is more of a whistle-stop tour than a real adventure. In The Keys Of Marinus, the companions had some sort of obstacle to overcome at each destination. After Aridia, they bounced from one location to the next. There’s no real reason for them to have got out of the TARDIS at all in New York or on the ship, other than to trot out a few new sets and some dodgy accents. Then they just get back in again and leave. That’s not an adventure, that’s tourism.

I do hope that the serial improves from here. However, past experience would indicate that a serial which starts poorly ends poorly. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

1 Comment Leave A Comment

Magazine

[May 28, 1965] Heavyweight's Burden (June 1965 Analog)

May 28, 2020 Gideon Marcus 6 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

How the Mighty have Fallen

Since 1953, Sonny Liston has been a big name in boxing. Liston's spectacular career, marred by a prison hitch and rumored connections with organized crime, reached its pinnacle when he defeated Floyd Patterson in 1962 to become the world heavyweight champ.

He kept the title for two years, losing it in an upset to newcomer Cassius Clay. In last week's rematch, Clay, now named Muhammad Ali, beat Liston even more handily. Ali looks like he'll be keeping his title for a long time.

John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding was the heavyweight champion of science fiction magazines in the late 1930s, standing head and shoulders above its pulp competition. It retained this title all through the Golden Age of SF, which lasted through the 1940s.

For the last fifteen years, Astounding (now called Analog) has maintained the highest circulation numbers, by far, of the science fiction digests. It survived the mass extinctions of the late 1950s. Campbell is still at the tiller.

But there are signs that the old champion could become easy pickings for a scrappy newcomer. A recent flirtation with the "slick" format and dimensions was a dismal failure. The contents of the once-proud magazine have been staid for a long time. Then, of course, there's Campbell's personal weirdness, his obsession with fringe sciences, his odious opinions on race relations.

That's not to say Analog is an unworthy magazine, but it's got its problems. Exhibit A of Analog's vulnerability: the latest issue.

Handicapping the Reigning Champion

Did Campbell forget his is a science fiction magazine?

If I were a gambling house, I'd want to give my champion a thorough vetting, analyzing all of its strengths and weaknesses, and coming up with odds of victory accordingly. Let's imagine the June 1965 issue as a kind of exhibition bout and see how it does.

The Muddle of the Woad, by Randall Garrett

by John Schoenherr

The bell rings, and our champion is looking good. Randall Garrett is back with his third Lord Darcy story, a magical mystery series set in an alternate 20th Century in which England and France are united, Poland is the big adversary, and sorcery exists alongside technology. The Lord Detective, along with his tubby Irish spell-casting sidekick, Sean, solve the murders of the Empire's most prestigious citizens.

In the deliciously pun-titled case, Lord Camberton of Kent is found dead in a coffin intended for someone else, his body dyed blue with woad. Suspicion immediately falls on the Albion Society, a group of druids who reject Christianity. But is this a red herring? As with any good mystery, the cast of suspects is limited, and the ending involves the classic summoning of all to a room for a final deduction of the culprit.

Good stuff, as always. A fine story and a rich universe. Four stars.

Glimpses of the Moon, by Wallace West

by John Schoenherr

Oh, but now the champion is faltering. Wallace West, who wrote the rather delightful River of Time offers up a clunker of a tale. It is the late 1960s, and a three-way race to the Moon between American, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain has ended in something of a tie. While the representative of the U.S.A. clearly landed first, the Soviets claim that the Moon is the property of whichever country whose skies it happens to be in at any given time. Thus, ownership cycles with every day. In the end, it turns out that a fourth power has a much earlier claim on the body.

It's all very silly, but not in a particularly fun way. Two stars.

Hydrogen Fusion Reactor, by Edward C. Walterscheid

Last month, there was an article on magnetohydrodynamics — the use of magnetic bottles to contain thermonuclear reactions. This month, the science fact article is exclusively on nuclear fusion. Indeed, so proud is Campbell of this piece that he gave it the cover.

I was eager to learn about the state of development of this promising power source. Sadly, Walterscheid has not yet learned how to subdivide his points. Or write interesting prose. The result is an impenetrable wall.

Hmmm. Perhaps the article could be repurposed to line the walls of tomorrow's fusion reactor…

Two stars. Folks, the champion is staggering!

The GM Effect, by Frank Herbert

by Robert Swanson

Oh boy. Dune author Frank Herbert is back, and with another talking head story. Unlike his last one, which involved a congressional hearing on a widely distributed superweapon, The GM Effect is about a drug that allows takes to experience former lives. When it is discovered that this reveals all sorts of unsavory and forgotten tidbits of history (including that a Southern senator is one-quarter black), the drug's developers decide to cancel production. Then the military comes in, shoots the drug creators, and appropriates their creation.

Not only is the story rather pointless, it's distasteful. Herbert seems to be gleeful that Lincoln was personally no great lover of black Americans, and when the murdering general describes the erstwhile scientists as "N*gg*r lovers," I get less the sense that the utterer is supposed to be the bad guy and more that the author was delighted to be able to squeeze the word into a story.

One star…and our champion is down, folks! He's down!

Duel to the Death, by Christopher Anvil

by John Schoenherr

Nearly 30 years ago, Analog's editor wrote Who Goes There. One of the genre's seminal stories, it details the infiltration of an Antarctic base by a body-snatching alien, one that spreads via touch. The result is that one cannot tell friend from foe anymore. It's a chilling premise that has since been used to great effect, for instance by Robert Heinlein in The Puppet Masters..

Duel is a fairly straight entry in the genre. A spacer on a new planet has his suit punctured by some sort of dart, and he quickly succumbs to alien control. The purloined body becomes Ground Zero of an alien invasion that quickly takes over a nearby space fleet. Thus ensues a race against time: can the Terran Navy defeat this scourge before it absorbs the whole of humanity?

Most of this story is quite good, with some very interesting story-telling, often from the point of view of inanimate objects: the space suit of the first victim, the ship's sensors of the investigating fleet, the communications devices employed by the humans.

But, to distinguish Duel from its predecessors, the author ends the piece with a twist that doesn't quite work. I understand it, I think, but I don't quite buy it.

Three stars — good enough to bring our champion back to his feet, but flawed enough that he leaves the ring dazed.

Summing Up

Running our champion's performance through the Star-O-Vac, we come up with a rating of just 2.5. That's pretty bad. In a head-to-head against the other magazines of this month (and there was a bumper crop), how would Analog have fared?

Not well, it turns out. Partly, it's because the competition was quite strong: Fantasy and Science Fiction ended up on top with an impressive 3.5 rating. Worlds of Tomorrow garnered 3.2 stars and Galaxy got 3.1. Both Amazing and New Worlds got three stars, while Fantastic and Science Fantasy finished at a sub-par 2.8.

Only If ranked lower than Analog, meriting just 2.2 stars (sorry David!)

So, a disappointing performance by Campbell's mag augurs poorly for it. Will there be a Muhammad Ali of science fiction publications?

(P.S. Women wrote six of the 55 fiction pieces this month; none appeared in Analog — connection?)

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[May 22, 1965] Goodbye and Hello (June 1965 Fantastic)

May 22, 2020 Victoria Silverwolf 5 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Departures and Arrivals

One of the more intriguing events this month was the death of a celebrity, although not one you're likely to see in the obituary column. A tortoise known as Tu'i Malila (meaning King Malila in the Tongan language, although she was female) died on the sixteenth of May. Why is this notable? Well, they say she was one hundred and eighty-eight years old, a ripe old age, even for a tortoise.

The story goes that Captain Cook gave her to the royal family of Tonga way back in 1777, making her nearly as old as the good old USA. Some dispute this story, although there is no doubt that she lived in Tonga for a very long time indeed. No stranger to royalty, she greeted the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II when that monarch visited Tonga, a British protectorate, in 1953.

That's Elizabeth on the left, Tu'i Malila on the ground. You knew that, right?

As we bid farewell to this extraordinary reptile, we greet a new British import at the top of the American popular music charts. Herman's Hermits, hailing from Manchester, England, hit Number One this month with their version of Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, a song first performed by actor Tom Courtenay in a British television play a couple of years ago.

Unlike many of the singers in British rock 'n' roll bands, lead man Peter Noone makes no attempt to disguise his accent. If anything, it sounds like he's exaggerating his Mancunian way of talking. (Yes, I just now learned the word Mancunian, and I'm showing off.)

Nobody in the band is named Herman. Go figure.

Exit Cele, Enter Joseph

My esteemed colleague John Boston has already reported, in fine detail, on the Ziff-Davis company selling Amazing and Fantastic to Sol Cohen. Editor Cele Goldsmith Lalli will remain with Ziff-Davis, working on their publication Modern Bride. Frankly, I think that's a step up for her, given the minimal interest that the publisher had in their fiction magazines.

Joseph Wrzos, using the more Anglo-Saxon name Joseph Ross, will be the editor, under the direction of Cohen. Fantastic will contain reprints from old issues of the two Ziff-Davis magazines, as will Amazing. The sister publications will alternate bimonthly publication. Of course, they will continue to publish new stories purchased by Lalli for a while, given the exceedingly slow way the publishing industry works. I hope that Wrzos will also offer previously unseen work once these run out.

As we lift a glass of champagne to Cele, and bid her a fond bon voyage as she sets sail for the world of wedding dresses and honeymoons, let's take a look at the last issue that will bear her name.

Cover art by Gray Morrow

Thelinde's Song, by Roger Zelazny

You may recall the story Passage to Dilfar in the February issue, which introduced the character Dilvish the Damned. He was a mysterious figure indeed, and that tale provided only hints as to his strange nature. This one gives us some of his background.

A young sorceress sings a ballad about Dilvish and the evil wizard Jelerak. Her mother warns her not to speak the name of the villain aloud, lest she draw the attention of one of his wicked minions. She then relates the encounter between the half-elf Dilvish and the sorcerer, as Jelerak was about to sacrifice a virgin in order to work his black magic.

Jelerak turned the heroic Dilvish into stone, and sent his soul to Hell. A couple of centuries later, Dilvish managed to return to life, this time with a talking steel horse as his mount. The rest of the story shows us why it's a bad idea to speak the name of Jelerak.

Although Dilvish only appears in flashback, he dominates the story, becoming a fascinating character. The author's style is poetic, creating a memorable sword-and-sorcery adventure. I hope we see more tales in this series.

Four stars.

This anonymous illustration appears at the end of the story. It has nothing to do with anything in the magazine.

The Destroyer, by Thomas N. Scortia

The setting is some time after a limited nuclear war, which apparently more-or-less destroyed Asia. The Western world, it seems, recovered nicely, leading to a society well on its way to a technological utopia. People travel by riding some kind of electromagnetic beams. For all intents and purposes, this is pretty much flying like Superman.

Anyway, the protagonist is the head of something called the Genetic Bank, which controls the manipulation of plant and animal genes. A government agent asks him to report any evidence of human genetic tampering, which is a crime so severe that it carries the only death penalty left on the book.

The hero investigates the case of a young boy named Julio. Although classified as severely mentally disabled, he has somehow managed to create a pair of magnetic blocks that produce a stream of energy between them.

Meanwhile, the main character's love interest, a woman just back from Titan, is dying from a fungus acquired on that moon of Saturn. When Julio removes a mole from the man's hand, just by thinking about it, you can predict what's going to happen at the end. Along the way the government agent gets involved in things, seeing Julio as a threat to the planet.

There are very few surprises in this tale of a kid with superhuman mental powers. The background is somewhat interesting, even if implausible. The premise that Earth folk have become timid and complacent, compared to those who explore the Solar System, was intriguing, but didn't lead to much. The notion that there is something inherently wrong with the accepted view of science, compared to the way the boy thinks, was unconvincing. Overall, I got the feeling that I've read this stuff before, as if it were a mediocre story from Analog.

Two stars.

The Penultimate Shore, by Stanley E. Aspittle, Jr.

A writer completely unknown to me spins a dream-like fantasy with hints of allegory. A man named Cipher winds up on a deserted shore after a shipwreck. Half-sunken into the ocean are the ruins of a city. He has visions of a boy and girl in the waves. A woman named Huitzlin, the Aztec word for hummingbird, emerges from the sea and becomes his lover. An old man called Thanatos shows up as well. It all leads up to Cipher's final fate.

I really don't know what to make of this story. It's full of beautiful and evocative descriptions, but the author's intention is opaque. The character's names are suggestive, but the symbolism is unclear, except for the way that Thanatos is explicitly connected with death. If nothing else, it made me think, which is a good thing, I suppose.

Three stars.

The Other Side of Time (Part Three of Three), by Keith Laumer

Our universe-hopping narrator escapes from the prehistoric world where he wound up last time with the help of his ape-man buddy from another reality. The hairy fellow explains that the evil folks from yet another parallel cosmos — another type of ape-men — destroyed the hero's home world.

All seems lost, until the buddy suggests that it might be possible to travel to that universe in such a way that the narrator arrives there before it's wiped out. In a nutshell, time travel.

The hero shows up just a short time before things are going to go very badly indeed. Not only does he face the menace of the invading ape-men, he has to convince the local authorities of his identity. Then there's the mysterious burning figure he encountered in the first installment; what does that have to do with anything?

After the relatively calm mood of the second part, the conclusion of the novel returns to the frenzied pace of the first part. There's also a lot of scientific double talk to try to justify the odd way that time travel operates in this story. It held my interest, even if I didn't believe in anything that was happening for a moment. Compared to the highly enjoyable middle section, the rest of the novel is merely a decent enough science fiction action yarn.

Three stars.

Another piece of filler art. I actually like this abstract image.

The Little Doors, by David R. Bunch

Two pages of pure surrealism from the the magazine's most controversial author. Some white egg-shaped things come out of the little doors of the title and onto an egg-shaped stage. Rectangular black things show up, open the lids of the egg-things, put pieces of themselves inside, and pull out small stones of multiple colors.

If the author is trying to make some kind of serious point, he doesn't help matters by called the stage ogg, the white things loolbools, and the black things guenchgrops. Maybe it's just my dirty mind, but I got the feeling that this was some kind of bizarre metaphor for human reproduction. I have to give it a little credit for sheer weirdness.

Two stars.

Has someone been doodling on the page?

Phog, by Piers Anthony

The inhabitants of a strange world face the menace of a seemingly sentient cloud of poisonous gas, as well as the deadly beast that lurks inside it. After losing his sister to the thing, a boy grows up to build an elaborate trap for it. Capturing and destroying the cloud and the creature is not at all easy, coming only at great cost.

The author certainly shows plenty of imagination. The way in which the young man uses sunlight, the cloud's only weakness, is interesting. Other than that, the plot proceeds just about the way you expect it to.

Three stars.

Silence, by J. Hunter Holly

Because the Noble Editor wishes to keep track of the number of female authors published in the genre magazines, allow me to point out the J stands for Joan. She's published half a dozen or so science fiction novels. I believe this is her first short story to see the light of day.

In an overpopulated future full of noisy gadgets, the level of sound increases to the point where people no longer hear. Their ears still work, you understand; it's just that their brains turn off the sensation of hearing. Music is just something that causes needles to move around on dials.

The protagonist is one such musician. He regains his hearing, in a society that has completely forgotten about sound, by blocking out all sources of noise, until his brain regains its lost function. His attempt to bring his rediscovery of real music to audiences leads to an ironic ending.

The premise is intriguing, if not the most believable one in the world. I found it hard to accept that music would survive in the way the story suggests among people who can't hear it. I'll admit that I liked the downbeat conclusion.

Three stars.

Before We Say Farewell

We have a typical issue of the magazine, with some high points, some low points, and a lot in the middle. I'd like to take a moment to look back on the editor's time with the publication. She introduced promising new writers like LeGuin, Disch, and Zelazny, who have already proved their worth. More questionably, she published the unique work of Bunch, which certainly tests the limits of fantastic literature. She also helped Leiber get back to the typewriter, which justifies her career all by itself. I'm sure we all wish her well in her new line of work.

Thanks, Cele!

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A Quick Recap

What’s The Difference?

Not faithful enough, or too faithful?

It’s Not All Bad, Though.

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction