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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[November 8, 1968] A Diplomatic Tiger by the Tail ("Day of the Dove")

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by Amber Dubin

As a Captain, James T. Kirk has always been known more as a soldier than a diplomat. In the same way that Captain Kirk was forced to move past his initial, violent, problem-solving instincts in "Spectre of a Gun," here, yet another great and powerful alien species drops the crew of the Enterprise into direct contact with a combative, unreasonable opponent, making him take a "diplomatic tiger by the tail" that Captain Kirk must use every tool in his skill set to tame.

The setup is masterfully crafted from the very beginning by what appears to be a solitary alien made of pure energy that presents as a wheel of twinkling lights. Twinkling alien energy, who I will refer to from now on as TAE, is not invisible, but takes pains to silently hover just out of direct line of sight from every group of combatants it takes interest in. The Enterprise does not notice TAE on its first appearance when they beam down to an uninhabited planet, searching for what was supposed to be the ruins of a recently destroyed colony described in a distress signal. Chekov remarks, in confusion, that his readings indicate that there was no evidence of a colony nor an attack. Before the crew has time to process this information, Sulu chimes in over the communicator, warning him that a Klingon ship is approaching. Said ship immediately starts showing signs of distress, quickly becoming disabled by internal explosions to which the Enterprise made no contribution.

Commander Kang, the Klingon starship captain, makes no attempt to understand his situation; he beams down and decks Captain Kirk, yelling that since the federation has committed an act of war against the Klingons by killing 400 of his crew and disabling his ship, he is owed command of the Enterprise. TAE glows a menacing red color, apparently delighted with the increase in hostility. Thus the stage is set before the first credits roll of this episode.


The episode's opening salvo

Captain Kirk displays his newfound diplomatic skills, engaging in dialogue with someone whose assault just knocked him flat on his back. When Kang again demands that Kirk cede control of the Enterprise, our captain calmly replies, “go to the Devil.” Kang smoothly retorts “We have no Devil, Kirk, but we understand the habits of yours,“ whom he intends to emulate by torturing crewmen until Kirk hands over control of his ship.

Suddenly, a strange look comes over Chekov’s face and he jumps at the Klingon commander, practically volunteering to be first on the torture block, incoherently yelling about needing revenge for his brother, Pyotr, who had been killed on the colony they never found. In another clever manipulation, Captain Kirk gets Kang to agree to cease torturing Chekov by promising to beam the Klingons aboard the Enterprise, assuring him that there will be no tricks once they are on the ship. Of course, phrasing it like this left a loophole where he wouldn’t be lying if beaming the Klingons up was the trick—they are stuck in stasis until guards can round them up. Back on the Enterprise, Kirk quarantines the angry Klingon landing party with their distressed ship's remaining crewmen stranded.


A gaggle of steaming-mad Klingons

Before our heroes can figure out what’s going, the Enterprise crewmen start falling one by one under the same spell of violent madness that seized Chekov down on the colony site. Unlike with the Klingon crewmen, this wave of violence is very out of character for the Enterprise crew, and they turn on each other using racist, species-ist and otherwise highly offensive rhetoric against each other, the likes of which hasn’t been used on earth in centuries at this point. Chekov even goes on a slathering rampage where he outright defies Captain Kirk and goes to attack the Klingons to avenge his slain brother. This strangeness becomes particularly significant when Sulu declares that Chekov doesn’t even have a brother, as he's an only child.


Chekov disobeys a direct order.

Captain Kirk does the best job of fighting through the madness in order to refocus each crewman one by one towards finding out the root of the issue at hand. It is eventually surmised that TAE is on board, spurring the crewmen to fight and feeding off the negative emotions when its manipulations work and they get at each other’s throats. It is soon discovered that TAE is even more dangerous than originally feared, as it not only can influence the memories and emotions of its victims, but it also has the ability to warp reality itself, healing the scars of the wounded and turning nearly every object at everyone’s disposal into swords, deliberately making every weapon just inefficient enough to prolong conflict and minimize potential fatalities.


Bread and circuses, redux.

In typical Kirk fashion, the seriousness of TAE’s threat doesn’t fully hit him until a female is affected; Kang’s wife, his ship's Science Officer, gets separated from the rest of the group and is set-upon by a completely rabid Chekov. He rips her clothes, but thankfully is interrupted by Kirk and the bridge crew before he can go further. Kirk is justifiably horrified that TAE would be more than willing to push his crew towards that kind of violence. After incapacitating Chekov, Kirk entreats Kang’s wife to join him in uniting her husband and the rest of the Klingons against the real enemy; and it is with great difficulty that he does finally change Kang’s mind and get him to call the rest of the Klingons to a truce. In the end, it’s Kang’s words that finally eject TAE from the ship, as he taunts ”we need no urging to hate humans… only a fool fights in a burning house”


United in defiance.

While it is obvious to see that this episode is once again making a political commentary of our time, this one doesn't rub me the wrong way because the character foils have been fleshed out enough to be likable. Straw men have a tendency to be hollow and weak, but Kang and his wife Mara are anything but that. The Klingons may be violent and aggressive on their face, but they justify their actions with a strong moral backbone and end up proving themselves capable of being reasoned with. Michael Ansara's tremendous presence of voice and body does a phenomenal job of making Commander Kang a formidable yet worthy foe. No slouch herself, Mara shows that she is a leader in her own right, making Kirk work almost as hard to change her mind as her husband's, along the way making some very solid points about Klingon foreign policy. If anything, the Klingons are made to be anti-heroes rather than villains, and in constantly having to take their side against his own men, Kirk shows us the value of humanizing one's enemy, even when that enemy is not human at all.

5 stars.


by Janice L. Newman

When entertainment takes a stance on politics or morality, it’s often a recipe for a bad story. There are plenty of classic parables and fables, of course, but when popular television gets involved in such things sometimes the lesson feels shoehorned in or the plot feels warped around the ‘message’ the writer wanted to send. For example, The Omega Glory and A Private Little War were both attempts to make a point about current political situations, and both were subpar episodes.

“Day of the Dove”, on the other hand, does it right.

This is not a subtle story, yet it maintains a clever mystery plot and dramatic tension right up to the end. The denouement carries a powerful message that I found both shocking and welcome. Shocking, because I didn’t expect to see such blatant anti-war sentiments expressed on prime-time TV. [Janice doesn't watch the Smothers Bros. (ed)] Welcome, because I feel the same way.

There are plenty of intense moments throughout the episode, but the message can be summed up in a few lines of dialogue:

KIRK: All right. All right. In the heart. In the head. I won't stay dead. Next time I'll do the same to you. I'll kill you. And it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys. While somewhere, something sits back and laughs and starts it all over again.
MCCOY: Let's jump him.
SPOCK: Those who hate and fight must stop themselves, Doctor. Otherwise, it is not stopped.
MARA: Kang, I am your wife. I'm a Klingon. Would I lie for them? Listen to Kirk. He is telling the truth.
KIRK: Be a pawn, be a toy, be a good soldier that never questions orders.
(Kang looks at the weird light, then throws down his sword.)
KANG: Klingons kill for their own purposes.

(Transcript courtesey of chakoteya.)

There is so much conveyed within these few lines. In the context of the rest of the episode, they inspire all sorts of thoughts and questions:

“Question orders.” “Is it wrong to participate in unjust wars?” “Who is benefitting from our wars?” “Who stands to profit and has a vested interest in keeping a war going?” “Are the people with a vested interest also in authority? Do they have control over those in authority?” “Refuse to fight if a war is wrong.” “War may always be wrong.” “Total pacifism may be a possible path.” “If we do not stop hating and fighting, the hating and fighting will not stop.”

These are messages which, if spelled out clearly in almost any other kind of television show, would be unlikely to be allowed on the air. At a time when young men who choose to flee the country rather than accept being drafted are being convicted of treason, telling people to question orders and refuse to fight is risky. Yet the futuristic setting provided by science fiction makes it possible to convey these ideas without the hidebound network pulling the plug or insisting that it be changed. I’m just stunned that Gene Roddenberry let it through, especially after his reputed heavy influence on the script for A Private Little War. I’m not saying I want Star Trek to turn into a ‘message’ show, but I wouldn’t mind a few more episodes like this.

Five stars.

A Third Party


by Lorelei Marcus

As Janice put it, “Day of the Dove” is a ‘message episode’. It’s there to tell you something about life today under the guise of the possible future. Yet unlike my compatriots who saw a cautionary tale of ceaseless fighting in Vietnam and the larger Cold War behind it, I saw a different war entirely.

Star Trek has rarely shown racial tensions between humans and aliens of the Federation. When it is done, it’s for a very specific purpose, like Kirk aggravating Spock in This Side of Paradise. Even the Federation’s disdain for the Romulans and Klingons has less to do with xenophobia and more the fact that neither will agree to reasonable peace terms. Hence why the blatant hatred between not only human and Klingon, but also human and Vulcan, is so jarringly effective in this episode.

Star Trek is the ideal, bigotry-free future—Uhura and Sulu and even Chekov on the bridge are proof of that—but “Day of the Dove” is the closest it gets to reflecting the ugliness of racial tensions in our own world. Cloaked in the veneer of alien and human terms, I saw the hostility and lack of compromise inherent to the Democratic Convention this year, the hatred from man to man over superficial traits.


A scene from the Democratic convention—taken from the Nixon ad that aired during the episode.

Most of all, I saw small prejudices being stoked and inflamed by an outside force, turning anger boiling hot until it nearly exploded into bloody violence. I know that too well. Every step towards peace and equality we take gets slid back when another Wallace or Nixon comes along. Every injustice we commit against the Black man is another reason for him to take a rifle to the streets. Every school that fails to integrate is a generation of Whites who can’t see past the color of skin. And yet, that’s just how Wallace and his ilk want it. They benefit from it.


Wallace preaching hatred from the pulpit.

Perhaps that’s the scariest part: at least in the show, the alien seems to be fomenting hatred out of a need to feed, a necessity. Our politicians do it in the complete service of self-interest. And with the results of the election, tragically, we seem to be dancing right in the palms of their hands.

I often see shades of our world reflected in Star Trek, but never so viscerally. 4 stars.

Go to the Devil


by Joe Reid

“Day of the Dove” was this week’s episode of Star Trek.  On first reading that title it evoked religious themes in my mind.  I wondered if Star Trek was getting preachy again, the dove being the Christian representation of the Holy Spirit.  Like in “Bread and Circuses” where the crew was jubilant that the people of the planet worshiped the son of God.  When TV shows try to pass on spiritual virtues, they tend to do it in a ham-fisted way.  “Day of the Dove”, although not perfect, does a decent job passing on two themes that I learned in my own religious training.  One from the book of Ephesians, chapter 6, verse 12.  The other from First Peter, chapter 5, verse 8.  So permit me to put on my chaplain's robes as I explore the religious themes I saw in “Day of the Dove”.

Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The crew of the Enterprise and that of the Klingon ship were made to think that they were enemies.  Expertly manipulated and set upon by another, with the intent to have them fight.  The real enemy was the outside force.  A powerful alien entity that understood the fears, thoughts, emotions, and technology of each side to create opportunities for conflict.  This scripture I quoted explains that no flesh and blood human is your enemy; we are all victims of outside forces that use us against one another.  As hard as it was for Kirk and Kang to see that they were being used, it is so much harder for all of us to see that we are literally killing ourselves when we raise arms to harm others.  All that does is satisfy the real enemy, that of our very souls.

The second verse that came to mind in this episode, 1 Peter 5:8 says, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”.  At the start of the episode, Kirk told Kang to “Go to the devil!” when Kang slapped Kirk, accusing him of crimes, claiming the Enterprise.  As they left that planet, we saw that Kang didn’t have to go to the devil, because a space devil went back to the ship with them.  The alien, always near the action, remained just out of sight.  It stalked the crew, looking for minds to twist to meet its ends.  Kirk displayed powerful sobriety, breaking free from the influence of the alien.  Although he could not see the alien, he was able to know of its presence and resist its influence.  The message for us is that it takes sober vigilance to prevent wrong actions that may damage other’s lives.  It was awareness of the enemy that helped Kirk stay disaster; it may be awareness that people are not the enemy that may help us.


Kirk prepares to preach to the choir.

This episode read like a sermon.  One that encouraged brotherhood over bitterness.  Which brings us to the close of the episode and yet another verse that came to my mind watching it.  That was James 4:7. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” This was the method Kirk and Kang used to get rid of the unwanted alien influence.  They stopped giving it what it wanted, stopped seeing each other as the enemy and told their dancehall mirror ball devil to leave the ship.  With both Kirk and Kang saying GO to their devil.

In conclusion, “Day of the Dove” was well acted.  It had great costumes and good characterizations of all characters.  Sadly, the dialogue at one point was filled with exposition, explaining to the audience what the alien was even though no one explained it to them, which I never love.  It caused me to knock the score down a couple of points, but that is to be expected when TV shows—and reviewers—get preachy.

Three stars

Only in the movies


by Gideon Marcus

Despite being a show set in the far future of the 22nd Century, Star Trek has always employed themes from our current era.  This has never been truer than in episodes involving the Klingons, the chief adversary of the Federation for which Kirk's Enterprise is employed.

In Errand of Mercy, we saw Commander Kor and Captain Kirk stand shoulder to shoulder, united in their defiance of the superpowerful Organians, who had the temerity to deprive them of their "right" to fight.  The threat of the Organians to demolish both adversaries should they escalate their conflict to a general war, was very much a metaphor for the atomic bomb—specifically the newly minted concept of "Mutual Assured Destruction."

Thus, "The Trouble with Tribbles", "Friday's Child", and "A Private Little War"—the Klingons and Federation now fight proxy wars, engage in cloak and dagger exploits, and occasionally skirmish one-on-one.  That last title was very much a product of last year, when it looked like we might "win" in Vietnam.  Kirk asserted that the only way to prosecute the conflict on the planet of Neural was to arm the hill people so they remain at parity with the Klingon-aided townsfolks.

Contrast that to "Day of the Dove".  Kirk and the Klingon commander (beautifully portrayed by "Mr. Barbara Eden", Michael Ansara) once more stand back to back, but they are resisting the urge to fight.  It is a beautiful bit of synchronicity that LBJ the night before airdate announced a full bombing pause on Vietnam after three years of incessance.  I watched the episode with tears in my eyes: for once, the hope matched the reality.  Maybe we were going to stop the cycle of violence after all.


Would that it could always be this easy.

But Trek is science fiction, and we still live in the real world.  Dick Nixon won the election this week, South Vietnam has retracted its willingness to participate in the Paris peace talks, and the beat goes on.

This is the second episode in a row (the first being "Spectre of the Gun") that has featured a new Kirk, a diplomat first and a soldier second.  I like this new Kirk.  I worry that he will run afoul of his superiors, increasingly conflicted, as John Drake was when working for MI6, ultimately becoming The Prisoner.  But at least he's fighting for peace, a fight I can 100% get behind.

It's not a perfect episode, a little heavy-handed in parts, but boy did it resonate.

Four stars. 

[Come join us tonight (November 8th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek!  KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific.  You won't want to miss it…]




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 6, 1968] Who's the one? (December 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Dashed hopes

It really looked like it was going to be a happy Halloween.  On October 31st, President Johnson made the stunning announcement that he was stopping all bombing in Vietnam.  This was in service to the Paris peace talks, which subsequently got a huge shot in the arm: not only were the Soviets on board with the negotiations, but the South Vietnamese indicated that, as long as they had a seat at the table, they were in, too.

The holiday lasted all of five days.  In yesterday's paper, even as folks went to the polls to choose between Herbert Humphrey and Tricky Dixon (or, I suppose, Wacky Wallace), the news was that South Vietnam had pulled out.  They didn't like that the Viet Cong, the Communists in Vietnam (as distinguished from the North Vietnamese government), were going to get a representative at the talks.  So they're out.

It's not clear how this will affect the election.  As of this morning, it was still not certain who had won .  Nevertheless, it is clear that Humphrey's chances weren't helped by the derailing of LBJ's peace plans.  If a Republican victory is announced, it may well be this turn of events led to the sea change.

Well, don't blame me.  My support has always been for that "common, ordinary, simple savior of America's destiny," Mr. Pat Paulsen.  After all, he upped his standards—now up yours.

Respite

Once again, a tumultuous scene provided the backdrop to my SFnal reading.  Did the latest issue of Galaxy prove to be balm or bother?  Read on and find out:


by John Pederson Jr. illustrating One Station of the Way

The Sharing of Flesh, by Poul Anderson


by Reese

Evalyth, military director of a mission to a human planet reverted to savagery after the fall of the Empire, watches with horror as her husband is murdered, then butchered by one of the planet's inhabitants.  Cannibalism, it turns out, is a way of life here; indeed, it is considered essential to the rite of puberty for males.

The martial Evalyth vows to have her revenge, tracking down the murderer, Mora, and taking him and his family back to their base, where they are subjected to fearsome scientific examinations.  But can she go through with executing the killer of her husband?  And does Mora's motivation make any difference?

There' s so much to like about this story, from the exploration of the agony of love lost, to the examination of relative morality, to the development of the universe first introduced (to me, anyway) in last year's A Tragedy of Errors.  It doesn't hurt that it stars a woman, and women are integral parts of this future society, with none of the denigrating weasel words that preface the introduction of female characters in Anderson's Analog stories (could those be editorial insertions?)

This is Anderson at his best, without his archaicisms, multi-faceted, astronomically interesting, emotionally savvy.

Five stars.

One Station of the Way by Fritz Leiber


by Holly

Three humaniforms watch on cameloids as the star descends in the east.  Sure enough, at a home in the east, a divine being prepares to impregnate a local female so that she will bear a divine child.

Heard this story before?  There's a reason.  But the planet of Finiswar is not Earth, the aliens are not remotely human, and the white and dark duo who pilot the spaceship Inseminator are anything but gods.

An excellent, satirical story.  Four stars.

Sweet Dreams, Melissa by Stephen Goldin

A little girl is told a bedtime story about a big computer that stopped doing its job right.  That's because the machine couldn't think of casualties and war statistics as simple numbers, battle strategies as abstract puzzles.  The problem is its personality; if the computer's mind could be reconciled with its function, the machine could work again.  But can any mind be at peace with such a frightful purpose?

A simple piece like this depends mostly on the telling.  Luckily, Goldin is up to the task.  Four stars.

Subway to the Stars by Raymond F. Jones


by Jack Gaughan

Harry Whiteman is a brilliant engineer with a problem: he's too much of a "free spirit" to keep a job, or a wife.  Desperate, when the CIA approaches him about a singular opportunity, he takes it, though the resents being bullied into it.

In deepest, darkest Africa, the Smith Company is working on…something.  Ostensibly a mining concern, it produces no gems.  On the other hand, whatever it is is important enough that the Soviets have based missiles in a neighboring country—pointed right at the company site!

Whiteman is hired, for his irreverence more than his ability, and begins work as a double-agent.  Once on location, he finds the true purpose of the site: it's a switching station of an intergalactic railroad station!  But it turns out that the folks at the Smith Company also have multiple agendas…

A mix of Cliff Simak's Here Gather the Stars (Way Station) and Poul Anderson's Door to Anywhere, it is not as successful as either of them.  It takes too long to get started, and then it wraps up all too quickly.  It's genuinely thrilling as Whiteman peels back the multiple layers of the Smith operation and the factions within it, and when the missiles do find their target, the resultant chaos is compelling, indeed.  But then it turns into a quick, SFnal gimmick story better suited to Analog than Galaxy.

I think I would have rather seen Simak takes this one on as a sequel to his novel.  Jones just wasn't quite up to it.

Three stars.

For Your Information: The Discovery of the Solar System by Willy Ley

As it turns out, the science article in this month's issue addresses two issues on which I've had keen recent interest.  The first is on the subject of solar systems, and if they can be observed around other stars.  Ley discusses how the gravity of an unseen companion can cause a telltale wiggle as the star travels through space, since the two objects orbit a common center of gravity (rather than one strictly going around the other).

In the other half of the article, Ley explains how atomic rocket engines work: shooting heated hydrogen out a nozzle as opposed to burning it and shooting out the resultant water out the back end—it is apparently twice as strong a thrust.

What keeps this article from five stars is both pieces are too brief.  For the first half, I'd like to know about the stellar companions discovered through astrometry.  He mention's Sirius' white dwarf companion, but what about the planets Van de Kamp claims to have discovered around Barnard's Star and so on?  As for the atomic article, I'd like to know what missions a nuclear engine can be used for that a conventional rocket cannot.

Four stars.

A Life Postponed by John Wyndham


by Gray Morrow

Girl falls in love with cynical jerk of a boy.  Boy decides there's nothing in the world worth sticking around for, so he gets himself put in suspended animation for a century.  Girl follows him there.  He's still a cynical jerk, but she doesn't care because she loves him.  They live happily ever after.

I'm really not sure of the point of this story, nor how it got in this month's issue other than the cachet of the author's name.

Two stars.

Jinn by Joseph Green

It is the year 2050, and aged Professor Morrison, stymied in his attempts to make food from sawdust, is approached by a brilliant young grad student.  Said student is brilliant for a reason: he is a Genetically Evolved Newman or "Jinn", with a big brain and bigger ideas.  The student has solved Morrison's problem.  However, another Jinn wants humanity to go to the stars, and he fears if the race gets a full belly, they'll lose interest.

The conflict turns violent, the point even larger: is there room for baseline homo sapiens in a world of homo superior?

Green doesn't paint a particularly plausible future, but there are some nice touches, and the points raised are interesting ones.  I'd say it's a failure as a story but a success as a thought-exercise, if that makes sense.

So, a low three stars.

Spying Season by Mack Reynolds


by Roger Brand

We return, once again, to Reynolds' world of People's Capitalism.  It is the late 20th Century, and the Cold War adversaries have reached a more or less peaceful coexistence.  The greater challenge is existential: ultramation has taken away most jobs, and the majority of the populace is on the dole.  How, then, to avoid stagnation for humanity?

In this installment, Paul Kosloff is an American of Balkan ancestry, one of the few in the United States of the Americas who still has a steady job, in this case, that of teacher.  He is tapped by the CIA to go on sabbatical in the Balkan sector of Common-Europe.  Ostensibly, his job is not to spy for the USAs, but to sort of soak in the culture of the area over a twelve-month span.

Very quickly, Kosloff finds himself entagled with an underground revolutionary group, with law enforcement, and with several fellows who enjoy sapping him on the back of the head.

Suffice it to say that all questions are answered by the end, the major ones being: why an innocuous pseudo-spy should be a target, why the CIA would send him on a seemingly pointless mission in the first place.  In the meantime, you get a bit more history of this world and some tourist-eye view of Yugoslavia.  In other words, your typical, middle-of-the-road Reynolds story.

Three stars.

Counting the votes

While not as stellar as last month's issue, the December 1968 Galaxy still offers a more satisfying experience than, well, most anything going on in "the real world".  It clocks in at a respectable 3.45, which brings the annual average to 3.23.

Compare that to the 2.81 it scored last year, and given that Galaxy is once again a monthly, I think it's safe to say that, at least in one way, "Happy days are here again."




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 31, 1968] How the Western was won (Star Trek: "Spectre of the Gun")

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by Janice L. Newman

This is Not a Test

Star Trek continues to surf the New Wave in this week’s episode, Spectre of the Gun. While the plot incorporated many things we’ve seen before (both in and outside of Star Trek) it combined and presented these elements in new and innovative ways.

The story opens with the ship encountering a strange object floating in space. All of the crew receive a message, ‘hearing’ it in the language they are most familiar with: Vulcan for Spock, Russian for Chekov, and in a nice call back to earlier episodes, Swahili for Uhura. The message warns them to stay away from the area. The crew, under orders to make contact with the Melkotians (the race who left the warning) choose to disregard it and beam down to the planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Chekov make up the team.


The Melkotian buoy—to Trek's credit, they didn't simply reuse the music from The Corbomite Maneuver

Shortly after they arrive on the planet, a threatening figure appears. It’s one of the aliens, a Melkot. It tells them that they will be punished for disregarding their warning. Since Captain Kirk is in charge, their deaths will be ‘patterned’ on him.

Aliens can be difficult to render convincingly on television, but I was impressed at how effective the Melkot is. The image is of two glowing eyes piercing through a surrounding haze and the suggestion of a bulbous, hairless head on a stalk-like, armless body. Since it’s surrounded by mist and weird lighting, we don’t get a close look at it, which adds to the menacing quality and keeps it from feeling fake or cheesy.

No sooner does the Melkot pronounce judgment, than the five men find themselves in the middle of a western town. Except, it’s not a fully-realized town. It’s made up of pieces of scenery, just enough to suggest a town in broad strokes. It puts one in mind of a theatrical production, where a facade is used to represent a building and one can see inside a shop or house. It’s unsettling in this context: signs and clocks hang on empty air, and unlike the actors in a musical, the crew are well-aware that the buildings are unfinished.


Open air bar

It takes a few minutes and an interaction with one of the ‘locals’ to jog his memory, but Captain Kirk puts the pieces together to deduce that the setup represents the shootout at the O.K. Corral. He and his men are the Clanton brothers, destined to die to bullets shot by the Earps and Doc Holiday. Bullets that will kill them, as they discover when Chekov is shot down in the street.

Our heroes try to avoid their fate through diplomacy, trickery, and ‘the better part of valor’. Nothing works, not even the sleeping gas bomb that McCoy and Spock build together. But the fact that it doesn’t work when it should have worked convinces Spock that none of what they are experiencing is real. The bullets cannot hurt them, he tells the others, unless they believe they will.

In order to make sure the humans are all as convinced that the bullets are harmless as Spock is, he mind melds with each of them in turn. Then they stand, unworried, as they’re shot at. The fence behind them is filled with holes, but they, as Spock promised, are unharmed. Afterward Kirk has the opportunity to kill the Earps and Holiday, but chooses not to, even though he badly wants revenge for Chekov. The Melkotians, surprised at Kirk’s choice, agree to open diplomatic relations with the Federation.


A touching moment

We’ve seen a lot of these bits and pieces before. Westerns are ubiquitous, and the story of the shootout at Tombstone is an oft-visited well for modern-day storytellers. But how many of them cast the Clantons as the good guys? We’ve seen the Vulcan mind meld before, but never on multiple people in turn, and never to convince them of the unreality of their senses. We’ve seen powerful, telepathic aliens before. But unlike many of the others, the Melkotians aren’t messing around with the humans for their own amusement, or to protect us from ourselves, or to ‘test’ us. It’s clear that they don’t expect the humans to survive the punishment, and that they’re shocked that Kirk chooses not to kill the aggressors in the end. Whether the form of punishment was meant to be humane, giving the humans a familiar setting to die in, or whether it was supposed to remove the weight of responsibility from the Melkotians by forcing the humans into a ‘kill or be killed’ situation, or whether it was for some other reason entirely, we cannot know.

What we do know is that these familiar pieces fit together to make an entirely new kind of story, one that’s clever, compelling, and up there with the best of the Star Trek episodes we’ve seen.

Five stars.

Best Western


by Amber Dubin

I was pleasantly surprised that this episode marked another in the inspiring trend of season 3 episodes that absolutely knocked my socks off. The overarching premise is nothing special on its face: a shadowy, menacing entity issues an ominous warning a-la-Dante's-Inferno "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Kirk promptly ignores the warning buoy, charging head-first into danger like the reckless adventurer we know him to be, and at first we appear to be treated to another "Catspaw"-like simulation with a western twist. This is where the similarities end between the season 2 and season 3 Halloween episodes, because this time around, the simulated world is much more intricate, meaningful and all around well-crafted.

Starting with the aliens' motivation for submerging the crew in this simulation, they explain that "you bring violence like a disease." This is a very valid threat and makes a lot of sense that the Melkotians would want to have this simulation in place to protect their planet from approaching unknown cultural contaminants.The crewmen have already refused to heed the initial warning, so it could hardly be called an escalation to issue this execution edict as judgment for their trespass. They prove themselves to be much more fair judges than some of the other alien species we've encountered, because they essentially allow a loophole in their trial, wherein the participants have one final chance to prove themselves worthy of access to their planet. It is fair too, that they design the interactive tribunal from details found within Kirk's mind, as it was Kirk that chose to disobey their warning and therefore Kirk should bear the bulk of the responsibility for their punishment.


Here come the Judge(s)

This is the first time, in my opinion, that they have found a valid reason to recreate ancient American history, as Captain Kirk has always been a stand-in for the audience's 1960's perspective, and one of the points in our history that Americans enjoy recreating most in film and fiction at this time is the Wild West. This time, incorporating our perspective is neatly explained by saying that Kirk has both the genetic memories of ancient North Americans from this era, and memories from his fan-crazed obsession with all things historical and fictional from American History. I even found it radically creative that the director manages to elegantly justify the half-finished western set pieces, as it was not only necessary that the crew know that the simulation was false, but also it was encouraged that they use that to their advantage to beat the system.

I also love that the trial that the crew endures this time is branded not as a trial but as an execution, further setting up the crew to fail as they would be inclined to see it as an inescapable punishment rather than an simulation whose outcome they could influence. The Melkotians may well have hoped the humans would fail. Certainly, they were surprised when they didn't.

I'm particularly impressed that this episode got me to do something I previously thought unthinkable: enjoy western-themed television.

5 stars

Unexpected Diplomacy


by Lorelei Marcus

Captain Kirk took an unexpectedly persistent talk-before-phasers approach to interacting with the Melkotians and their executioner puppets.  At the beginning of the episode, he mentions the importance of contacting the Melkotians and implies the goal of peacefully adding them to the Federation.  Given the importance of the mission, and our Enterprise captain's previous track record handling aliens, I can only imagine the training exercise Star Fleet put Kirk through to prepare him for his task:

"Alright, Captain.  On the table, you will see a phaser and a communicator.  The scenario is you are attempting to make contact with a peaceful alien species.  Please choose the object you feel is best suited for this situation."

(Kirk reaches for the phaser and is shocked with an electric buzzer.)

"Ouch!"

"Please choose again."

(Rubbing at his wrist, Kirk reaches for the communicator this time.  A green light turns on and a pleasant song starts playing.)

"Very good, Captain.  Onto the next task…"


"I can't just kill them!  I won't get any candy!"

In any case, I found this episode to be quite fun, particularly our new, diplomatic captain.  Four stars.

We Come in Peace


by Erica Frank

"We come in peace," said Kirk… as he raised his phaser. No wonder the Melkot didn't believe him.

The Melkotians were clear that they wanted no part of the Federation. When the Enterprise decided to visit anyway –"establish contact at all costs"–the Melkotians were ready for them. (Kirk, you did establish contact; you met and conversed, and their response was No. If you meant "establish regular communications and diplomatic negotiations," well, that dance takes two willing partners.)

Kirk and his team wound up somewhere that looked more like a movie set or a stage play than an actual town. They thought this was "the Melkotians' idea of a town" rather than "a construct taking place in our own minds," despite having substantial experience with powerful telepaths who can make them experience entire landscapes that don't actually exist.


Why did it take them half the episode to attempt to leave town and discover the force field blocking their exit?

They spent most of their time trying to figure out how to get out of the impending gunfight, instead of looking for loopholes in the "reality" that they should recognize as false. However, even as they accepted the storyline they're stuck in, Kirk looked for ways to avoid the ending.

I don't know if he insisted on not fighting the Earps because he honestly believes it's wrong, or because he recognized that, in this story, once the shooting starts, his entire team will be killed.

They passed the Melkotians' test by refusing to shoot. (…Spock's getting awfully free with the mind-melds, recently.) I'm not sure I'd accept the results: Kirk knew that there was no way to win a shoot-out. Perhaps that was the point–not, "prove you are a non-violent species" (obviously not true), but "prove to us that you can find other ways to solve problems."

I like the Melkotians. They're only the third near-omnipotent aliens we've met that aren't petty tyrants. The Metron had a similar test, making Kirk fight the Gorn–they, too, were pleasantly surprised that Kirk found a way around killing. And we never learned the name of the race that built the Shore Leave planet.

Four stars.


I suppose he is the "Spectre of the Guns."

A Near-Shakespearean Paen for Nonviolence


by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

With death served up on the doorstep with the morning paper, I needed this episode this week. Bracketed by political campaign ads crowing about violence in various cities and jungles, I found Kirk's passionate nonviolence struck a powerful chord. The episode's overall contrast with the morning death toll was satisfying but somehow it was Commander Spock's cool lines that I loved the most.


"A radical alteration of our thought patterns must be in order."

In that moment, the episode twists reality to reach the profound fantasies of those of us whose loved ones are – or tomorrow will – lay in the grave, or in the mud, waiting for a G.I. sniper or Viet Cong fighter to take what life they have lived and in all their future lives. To restate it, Spock's idea is that in the constructed world of this week's impossibly powerful alien, if you know you cannot be killed by bullets, you cannot. "Know" because "believe" requires the acknowledgment of the potential for doubt, but knowing requires a perfect certainty. In Spock's psychic certainty there is physical safety and real, true resurrection for the marooned crew.

This is what I love about science fiction, the fantasies that science fiction allows us, fantasies that give us enough breathing room to imagine a better world. Sometimes that world has to be far simpler for the conceit to play out. The world of this episode is much simpler than our own, which is why this trick of Commander Spock's is so intuitively effective. It felt in many moments like a stage play, and made me wonder how the Bard would have set the prologue:

Two families, both alike in indignity,
in fair Tombstone Arizona is where we lay our scene,
from lukewarm grudge break to new mutiny,
where uncivil blood makes uncivil hands unclean. 

There is a little bit of a sweet Romeo and Juliet going on with Chekov in this episode, though it doesn’t entirely play out, ending up more of a joke than driving the narrative.

It really is our dynamic trio who make the episode, in their debates as to how to avoid furthering the cycle of violence the alien of the week has thrown them into. Kirk's attempt to explain was so satisfying to watch as he shouted and fought not to fight. His framing of his own family's history added a depth of character for me, as many of the passing references in this season do.

While we can understand that his ancestors were part of the genocide against the Native Americans of the American West, I like to think if Kirk was alive right now and his draft number came due, he would hike over the border to Canada. Draft dodging in this way would be a key way to keep his hands and mind and blood from being complicit in killing, whether of one man or entire families, entire communities. If no one fought, there would be no wars, and we see how that can start with someone like Kirk refusing to fight. In this case, there are no deadly consequences for the draft dodgers, as Spock's science fictional defense is perfectly effective.

In our more complicated reality, it is not so easy. There is no curtain call on the battlefield, and no alien to blame for the violence that engulfs us. So many occupied graves may make draftees feel obligated to fill in a few more before they punch their final ticket. But I do fervently hope that those who are conscripts or reservists or draftees called to slaughter can watch this episode before they board their planes and tanks, before they load up their all-too-lethal guns with human-killing bullets. I hope it inspires them as only science fiction can to consider another path, the all-too-human journey of nonviolence.

5 stars.

The Greatest Show off Earth!


by Gideon Marcus

Most of my colleagues were impressed by the story, the message, and so forth.  Those are all laudable topics, and I'm glad they've covered them more eloquently than I would have.  However, I just want to comment on how much I've been enjoying the third season of Star Trek, how far this show has come.

1968 is an interesting moment.  Laugh-In has infected all other media.  Psychedelia is de rigeur It's a time of experimentation and irreverence.  As I noted in my last review, the New Wave has made it to Trek.  Indeed, my friend, part-time Journeyer Brian Collins said that, if he didn't know better, he'd have thought Phillip K. Dick wrote this episode!

So it's no surprise we get all sorts of neat stuff, visually, aurally, literarily.  According to my friend Maurice, the partial "limbo" that comprises the setting actually borrows a lot from the 1953 musical comedy Red Garters.  However, "Spectre" uses the setting to unsettle, to connote things unfinished, and also because it's just cool and weird!

The score is once again brand new.  That makes it the fourth or fifth new score we've had this season, and as usual, it is excellent and fitting.  Trek has the best music this side of Hollywood Palace.

Vince McEevety's direction is, once again, excellent.  I don't think it's a coincidence that his episodes ("Balance of Terror", "Miri", to some degree "Patterns of Force") have not only been innovative in their execution, but have also wrung out good performances from its actors.  Shatner, in particular, has had a tendency to ham things up (very unkosher!) since the end of the 1st season.  There's none of that in this episode.  His encounter with Sheriff Behan, when he plaintively yells that he can't kill the Earps, his mourning over Chekov's death, his subtle reactions to his crew, particularly in the gas testing scene…all terrific.  Chekov finally gets a role he can chew on, and he's great.  Scotty as well.  The Big Three are thoroughly in character, up to and including McCoy arguing both sides of the fence—"Cheer up, Jim!" followed by "Shut up, Spock!  We're grieving!")


"I am not someone you can marry, although marriage was inwented in Russia."

And the guest stars, particularly the Earps/Doc Holliday, turn in performances that are nearly robotic, but highly emotive nevertheless.  It's a hard needle to thread, but they manage it.

I find my esteem for this episode rising in the glow of the morning after, and in the conversations it has sparked with my comrades.  I was going to give it 4 stars, but I think it moves up to 4.5 now.




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Magazine, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 28, 1968] Impressive at first glance… (November 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Up and over

Just as America returned to space in a big way with this month's flight of Apollo 7, the Soviets have also recovered from their 1967 tragedy (Soyuz 1) with an impressive feat.  Georgy Beregovoi, a rookie cosmonaut (ironically also the oldest man in space thus far, surpassing 45 year-old Wally Schirra by two years) has taken Soyuz 3 into orbit for a series of rendezvous and perhaps dockings (TASS is being vague on the issue) with the unmanned Soyuz 2.


Comrade Beregovoi in training

We've seen flights like this before, but this is the first time there has been a person involved.  Many are calling this a harbinger of an impending lunar flight, though NASA is adamant that this particular flight won't go to the moon.  Indeed, Dr. Ed Welsh, Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council says Soyuz and September's Zond 5, which went around the moon, are completely different craft and the Russians aren't even close to fielding a lunar mission.

We'll have more on this flight in a few days.  Stay tuned.

On the ground

Like the flights of Soyuz 2 and 3, this month's Analog is outwardly impressive, but once you dig in, it's not so great.


by Kelly Freas

The Infinity Sense, by Verge Foray


by Kelly Freas

Centuries from now, after the fall of the Age of Science, humanity is divided into two camps: the "Olsaparns", who dwell in isolated technological camps and retain a semblance of the original technology and society, and the Novos—psionically adept savages who live in conservative Packs.  One of the Pack members is Starn, who possesses a brand new ability that allows him to best even the telepathically and premonitionally blessed.  He runs afoul of Nagister Nont, a highly adept, highly disagreeable trader, who kidnaps his wife.

After a raid on the Olsaparns leaves Starn close to death, the technologists remake him into something more machine than man, like Ted White's Android Avenger.  The Olsaparns want Nont out of the picture, so they help Starn in his quest to defeat the mutant and get back his wife.

I have no fault with the writing, which is brisk and engaging.  I take some issue with the pages of discussion on whether or not psi powers be linked with primitiveness, or the concept that humanity could regress to Pithecanthropy in a scant few generations (or the idea that evolution must be a road that one goes forward and backward on; I thought we gave up teleology last century).  But I blazed through the novella in short order, so… four stars.

The Ultimate Danger, by W. Macfarlane


by Kelly Freas

In which Captain Lew Frizel takes a shipload of eggheads to a hallucinogenic planet.  He is the only one who, more or less, keeps his head.  The message appears to be that LSD can be employed by aliens to judge our character.  Or something.

Three stars?

The Shots Felt 'Round the World, by Edward C. Walterscheid

This piece, on atomic tests, was much easier reading than Walterscheid's last article.  Do you realize that we have detonated half a billion TNT tons worth of nuclear explosives since 1945?  It's a wonder there's anything left of Nevada.

Four stars.

The Rites of Man, by John T. Phillifent


by Rudolph Palais

A scientist is working on rationalizing the art of interpersonal relations (because in Phillifent's universe, no one has invented sociology).  About twenty pages into that effort, humanoid (really, human) aliens show up and ask to be allowed to compete in the Olympics.  They do, but they lose on purpose so we won't hate them.  Then we interbreed.

Possibly the dullest, most pointless story I've ever read in this magazine.  One star.

The Alien Enemy, by Michael Karageorge


by Leo Summers

Humanity is a resilient creature, tough enough to tame any world.  Except that planet Sibylla, with its poisonous soil, extreme axial tilt, thin atmosphere, temperature extremes, high gravity, and violent weather may actually be more than Terrans can handle.  What does one do when a world is too minimal to sustain a colony?  And what is the value of 10,000 settler lives against the teeming, impoverished billions of Earth?

This is a vividly written piece with some excellent astronomy.  If I didn't know better, I'd say Poul Anderson is writing under a pseudonym.  I felt the solution to the colonists' problem, though reasonable, was not sufficiently set up to be deduced.  Also, I felt Karageorge missed the opportunity to make a more profound statement at the end than "well, humanity can lick almost all comers."  I'd have preferred something on the point of colonization or the shifting of priorities on a racial scale.

Still, a high three stars.

Split Personality, by Jack Wodhams


by Kelly Freas

Mauger, a homicidal brute, agrees to be split in two for science instead of getting the chair.  Instead of this resulting in two new individuals, it turns out that the two halves remain connected, the gestalt whole.  Thus, Maugam can literally be in two places at once.

This is timely as the first interstellar drive has had teething troubles.  Two test ships have gotten lost, unable to communicate with Earth.  Now, half of Maugam can fly on the ship while the other stays home and reports, since telepathy, for some reason, is instant.

It's actually not a bad story, though it's really just a bunch of magic and coincidence.  It works because Wodhams has set it up to work a certain way, not because this is any kind of realistic scientific extrapolation.  Also, it's hard to work up any sympathy for a homicidal brute.

Three stars.

Doing the math

When everything is crunched together, we end up with Analog clocking in at exactly 3 stars—again, adequate, but vaguely disappointing.  On the other hand, it's been something of a banner month in SF (provided you're not looking for female writers; they wrote less than 7% of the new fiction pieces published).  Except for IF (2.6), every other outlet scored higher than 3.  To wit:

New Worlds (3.1), Amazing (3.2), New Writings 13 (3.3), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.4), and Galaxy (3.9).

The stuff worth reading (4/5 stars) would fill a whopping three magazines.  Who says the science fiction magazine age is over?




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 24, 1968] The New Wave comes to TV (Star Trek: "Is There in Truth No Beauty?")

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by Gideon Marcus

Star Trek is usually defined as an "action-adventure show" or maybe just a "science fiction program".  While it is the first truly SFnal production on television (The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits had their moments, but for the most part, their science fiction was primitive), for its first two seasons, it tended to hew close to its '40s era Astounding Science Fiction roots.

With last week's episode, that all changed.  The 1960s, and the experimental New Wave movement, has arrived on television.

Diana Muldaur returns to Trek as Dr. Miranda Jones, a human telepath who has never seen Earth, but who spent four years on Vulcan learning to master and tame her profound powers.  She has been tapped to serve as ambassador to the Medusans, a race of inchoate aliens of sublime thoughts and profound navigational abilities, but whose appearance is so hideous as to render all humans who see them insane.  Jones is accompanied by the Medusan ambassador to the Federation, Kollos, who spends most of his time in a box for the safety of the crew.


Ambassador Kollos is brought to his quarters by Mr. Spock and Dr. Jones

Jones is a meaty role, much more interesting than when Muldaur played Dr. Ann Mulhall in "Return to Tomorrow", and Muldaur plays it perfectly.  Her demeanor is largely arch and cool, as befits Vulcan stoicism, but there are flashes of the human, too: jealousy regarding her unique relationship with Kollos, which she feels is threatened by Spock, who can both look at Kollos and communicate with him; irritation at the parochial behavior of the Enterprise's senior officers, who can't believe she'd give up on men to live with a monster; resentment when things do not go her way.


"Gentlemen, surely we can patronize Dr. Jones a little more intensely. Perhaps if we tower over her!"

The fly in this episode's ointment is another kind of emotion: one-sided love.  Accompanying Jones is Lawrence Marvick, an illustrious engineer who is ostensibly there to contemplate how a Medusan might integrate into the crew of a starship.  His real aim, however, is to convince Jones to abandon her mission to stay with him.  To attain this goal, he is willing to resort to murder.  Unfortunately for him, when he confronts Kollos, phaser in hand, all the alien has to do is open his protective box.  Marvick is violently repelled by Kollos' appearance and, insane, takes control of engineering just long enough to drive the Enterprise into the barrier that surrounds the galaxy.  The ship becomes lost in the zone, and none of the crew can navigate the ship out.



Where 430 men (and women) have gone twice before.

But Kollos can.  Spock, with his telepathic abilities and his Starfleet training, volunteers to fuse minds with the Medusan, resulting in an astonishing hybrid, which successfully navigates the ship out of the zone with no difficulty.  I cannot adequately express how marvelous Nimoy is in this role, subtly uniting the sober Spock with the somewhat whimsical, profound Kollos in an absolutely unique performance.


Sp/ollos makes an excellent navigator.  I'd love to see a Medusan/Vulcan gestalt in a future episode!

The crew is not out of the woods, however.  Upon returning Kollos to his box, Spock inadvertently catches a glimpse of the Medusan and goes insane.  Only Jones and her telepathic abilities can save him—but her pettiness causes her to hesitate.  It is up to Kirk, frantic with worry for his friend (indeed, seemingly more worried than he was for his ship, for once) to convince the doctor to do her utmost.  In the end, what convinces her is the thought that Kollos would never forgive her if she let Spock die.


Kirk gives Dr. Jones a tough talk.  To his credit, he is immediately concerned he did it wrong.  (For the most part, he does…but one arrow hits the mark.)

I must express how excellent Shatner's performance is in this episode, as well.  Missing are his usual, scenery-chewing tics.  I have to think that the superlative jobs the cast did in this outing must be somewhat attributed to director Ralph Senensky.

Indeed, all of the "staff officers" of the show, from the cinematographer to the score master to the costume designer, work to elevate the production of "Truth".  There are unusual angles, edits, and lenses to convey the disjointedness of insanity and to give a fresh feeling to the show; the score is entirely new and very evocative (though the distinctive "fight" theme is used perhaps one time too many); Dr. Jones' dress, which turns out to be a sensor web, enabling the normally sightless doctor to navigate (an excellent twist tastefully revealed), is terrific.

To be sure, the episode is not completely unexplored territory.  Ugliness not equaling evil was a significant message in "The Devil in the Dark", with the monstrous Horta being a gentle, desperate mother being.  The Enterprise has visited the galactic barrier twice before, in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name".  Both Spock and the ship are put in danger, two occurrences which the show-runners have made almost de riguer as plot drivers.


Amok Spock—don't drop acid, kids.

But it's the way it's all done that's special.  Beyond the first class work turned in by the cast and crew, the writer must be credited.  The pacing is unusual for Trek, with the episode's four acts of unequal length adding to the dreamy sense of madness that suffuses the episode.  There is no one crisis to be resolved, but a mounting series of crises all revolving around the Spock/Miranda/Kollos relationship.  In the end, the episode is not about Spock surviving or the Enterprise crew getting home safely, but about an unique woman in an unique situation navigating the fusion of not two but three alien races.

It's a rich, beautiful thing.  Jean Lisoette Aroeste is a new name to me.  This may well be her very first screenplay, and it is her newness that brings such a fresh cast to the show.  Just as IF has made it its mission to bring new writers into the literary SF genre, it appears that the mature show of Star Trek may be providing that same vehicle for SF screenwriters (particularly women—the upcoming script, "The Empath" is also by a TV novice, the friend of a fanzine-writing friend).

I can't wait to see how the show develops as a result.  5 stars.

You've come a long way, baby


by Janice L. Newman

Most of the time, Star Trek gets it right. Women are frequently shown in positions of power and authority, and are given the respect such positions deserve. But even in the future, they occasionally run afoul of the undercurrent of sexism omnipresent in our own society. The dismissive attitude about Lieutenant Palamas in Who Mourns for Adonais, for example, or the exasperation shown toward Commissioner Hedford in Metamorphosis (not to mention the lack of concern for her ultimate fate), jar uncomfortably against our hopes and visions of a world where women have true equality and are allowed to pursue their dreams without facing condemnation or condescension—regardless of whether their dream is to be an engineer, a mother, or both.

The silver lining is when the women turn the sexist expectations of the male crewmembers on their heads. The treatment of Dr. Miranda Jones by the senior officers of the Enterprise (excluding Spock) borders on insulting. Dr. McCoy questions her career choice, while Captain Kirk is convinced of his own ability to divert her attention to himself, and patronizingly explains to her what she really wants.

Some of the best moments of the episode are when Dr. Jones defies the men’s expectations. Consider this exchange:

Dr. McCoy: “How can one so beautiful condemn herself to look upon ugliness the rest of her life? Will we allow it, gentlemen?”

All the men at the table: Certainly not.

Dr. Jones: How can one so full of joy and the love of life as you, Doctor, condemn yourself to look upon disease and suffering for the rest of your life? Can we allow that, gentlemen?

Or this one:

Captain Kirk: You're young, attractive and human. Sooner or later, no matter how beautiful their minds are, you're going to yearn for someone who looks like yourself, someone who isn't ugly.

Miranda: Ugly. What is ugly? Who is to say whether Kollos is too ugly to bear or too beautiful to bear?

Miranda’s quick witted responses, turning the men’s words back on themselves, are enormously satisfying. Her resistance to Captain Kirk’s charms is equally delightful. As much as I dislike any portrayal of sexism in the future, Miranda’s counters made it worth it. They made me wonder about the author of the episode, who she(?) is and whether she encounters such comments in her own daily life. Were the words of Dr. Jones intended to give professional women everywhere a blueprint for how to deal with such difficult situations?

Four and a half stars.

The Ambassadors


by Joe Reid

An ambassador is one that represents their country to a host country.  This week in Star Trek we got to see several ambassadors of several races…and of more than one variety.

From the onset of the episode, when we were introduced to Dr. Jones, her desirability as a woman was heavily stressed.  Kirk paid Jones several compliments that would lead one to think that Kirk really had a strong interest in her.  These were followed by McCoy, and even Spock, who later dressed in Vulcan formal attire with the intent of honoring Dr. Jones. 

All the males in this episode seemed strongly drawn to Dr. Jones, even the poor lovesick fellow who lost his life pursuing her.  What was also clear was that Doctor Jones had absolutely no interest in the attention of these men in the episode.  She was essentially at war with those who wanted her (perhaps a necessary battle to win status as a woman).  What piqued her interest was the possibility of building a stronger connection to ambassador Kollos through a mind melding.

Her desire for Kollos was so all-encompassing that when it was revealed that Spock would have an opportunity to meld with Kollos ahead of her, she screamed out in frustration.  Her rejection of the attentions of all other men throughout the episode demonstrated her desire for Kollos.

In the end, her desires were requited.  Kollos did indeed have some measure of desire for her as well.  We saw this as when he joined with Spock, Kollos paid special attention to her, highlighting the fact that her future and his would be intertwined going forward on his world in their near future.  Although this was complicated when he also paid special attention to Uhura, Jones was able to receive confirmation of Kollos’ feeling for her when she melded with Spock in order to save his life.  That connection to Kollos through Spock was all that she needed to assuage her fears and insecurity about her future with Kollos.

This successful conclusion to the story had Spock himself playing as the ambassador from the heart of Kollos to the heart of Jones, thus ending the quiet war between men and the doctor.


Happy endings for everyone.

It was a fantastic story with solid acting, great costumes, and three-dimensional characterizations.  More of this please!

Five stars




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 20, 1968] Giants among Men (November 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Black Power

The politics of race have been an actively displayed part of the Olympics as long as I can remember.  Who can forget boxer Joe Louis defeating Max Schmelling at the 1936 Summer Games in Nazi Berlin?  So it should come as no surprise that, at a time when the race crisis in America has reached a fever pitch, that there should be an expression of solidarity and protest at this year's quadrennial event in Mexico City.

The fellows with their hands "clenched in a fist, marching to the [Mexico City] War" (to paraphrase Ritchie Havens) are medal-winning sprinters Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) who had just won the 200-meter finals.  Peter Norman of Australia (Silver), while making no physical gesture, is wearing the same "Olympics Project for Human Rights" medal as his fellow winners.

Why did the winners present this display? I'll let Carlos speak for himself with his comments at a post-race, press conference:

We both want you to print what I say the way I say it or not at all.  When we arrived, there were boos.  We want to make it clear that white people seem to think black people are animals doing a job.  We want people to understand that we are not animals or rats.  We want you to tell Americans and all the world that if they do not care what black people do, they should not go to see black people perform.

If you think we are bad, the 1972 Olympic Games are going to be mighty rough because Africans are winning all the medals."

Carlos added, responding to press references to "Negro athletes" said,

I prefer to be called 'black'…If I do something bad, they won't say American, they say Negro.

Smith and Carlos, described by the Los Angeles Times as "Negro Militants", have been expelled from the Games by International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage.  This is the height of hypocrisy—how many times have we heard "we don't mind if Negroes protest; we just get upset when they riot and burn things"?  Yet, here we have two men, American sports heroes, who peacefully highlight the plight of the Afro-American in our fraught country, and they're the bad guys?

With anti-Brundage feelings piqued and the U.S. expected to win today in the 400 and 1,600 meter relay finals (with nary a white man on competing on the teams), it is quite possible further displays of solidarity will be presented during the playing of our National Anthem.

Right on, brothers.

Speculative Power

It is with this as backdrop that I finished this month's issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which also leads with a powerful image.  Does it deliver as striking a message?  Let's read on and see:


by Gray Morrow

Once There Was a Giant, by Keith Laumer

Ulrik Baird is an interstellar merchant carrying a cargo of ten flash frozen miners in need of medical attention.  In the vicinity of the low-gravity planet Vangard, his drive goes out, sending him hurtling toward the planet.  But the planet is quarantined, off limits to outsiders.  Nevertheless, Baird has no choice—a landing will happen one way or another; if it's a hard landing, the miners won't survive.  Grudgingly, interstellar traffic control grants him clearance and coordinates to touch down softly.  The approach is too fast for safety, and so Baird ejects, parachuting down, his frigid charges ejected safely in a separate, parachuting pod.

All according to Baird's plan.

Under the name of Carl Patton, Baird meets up with the last surviving man on Vangard, a 12 foot behemoth with the nickname 'Johnny Thunder'.  Together with his 7' mastiff, the giant insists on accompanying Patton to where the pod of miners landed somewhere in the frozen wastes.

Again, all according to plan.

The plan is, in fact, quite clever, and this story marks a rare return to form for Laumer, who has been phoning it in of late.  This is a story Poul Anderson would have woven liberally with archaicisms and mawkish sentiment.  Laumer plays it straight, sounding more like E.C. Tubb in his first (the good) Dumarest story.

What keeps the tale from excellence is its resolution.  Ultimately, Laumer provides the Hollywood ending, where everyone's a winner (more or less).  His moral is roughly the same as Dickson's in this month's Building off the Line: some men are Real Men to be envied.  The story even has a riveting travel sequence that takes up much of the story.  An interesting bit of synchronicity.

I think I like this one better than Dickson's, but I still would have prefered something more downbeat, more nuanced.  Four stars.

The Devil in Exile, by Brian Cleeve

Brother, here we go again.

Old Nick and his right-hand demon, Belphagor, were thrown out of the underworld by unionized hellions.  An attempt to get Jack O'Hara, formerly a common drunk, lately a crime boss, to cross the union lines to bring the Devil back to power backfired when O'Hara took charge of The Pit.

Now, down to their last pence, Lucifer and friend pose as upper crust Britishers and miraculously (is that the word?) become heads of the Ministry of Broadcasting.  Their debaucherous fare quickly wins over not just the terrestrial airwaves, but also those in Hell, and the Prince of Lies is restored to his rightful throne.  Finis.

This installation is as tiresome and would-be-but-not-actually funny as the other two.  Good riddance.

Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

Coins, by Leo P. Kelley

In the time of Afterit, decades after The Bomb poisoned the world with its radioactive seed, humans have given up making decisions.  After all, that's what brought about the Apocalypse, isn't it?  Men making decisions?  Instead, life is reduced to a series of 50/50 chances, each determined by the flip of a common coin.

Vividly written, but the premise (and the story's ending) are better suited to the comics.  Anyone remember Batman's nemesis Two-Face from the '40s?

Three stars.

A Score for Timothy, by Joseph Harris

Timothy Porterfield is one of the world's greatest mystery writers.  When he passes away after a long career, this seems to be the end—after all, does not death write the final chapter?  Perhaps not, with the help of a medium with a flair for automatic writing.  Nevertheless, there is still one final twist to the tale of Timothy…

Well wrought, atmospheric, and you're never quite sure how it will turn out.  I liked it.  Four stars.

Investigating the Curiosity Drive, by Tom Herzog

Curiosity killed the cat, but could it not also kill the human?  And if one's goal is to test to determine whether or not curiosity be the salient feature of any sentient being, isn't it vital that one pick a being who isn't wise to your test?

This is a silly story, ultimately building to a joke that isn't worth the trip.  Two stars.

The Planetary Eccentric , by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor discusses the discovery of Pluto and how it simply can't be the "Planet X" Percival Lowell was looking for.  He does not quite so far as to say that it's not a planet at all, however, as some have opined.

Good article.  Four stars.

Young Girl at an Open Half-Door, by Fred Saberhagen

The Museum of Art is haunted, it seems.  Every night, an elusive prowler sets off the alarms in two of rooms housing prize exhibits.  When a troubleshooter is dispatched, he finds the intruder is on something of a salvage mission, rescuing the art as insurance against an impending disaster.  More importantly, said troubleshooter finds love…

It's a well-told story, and the ending is suitably chilling, though I found the romantic elements a bit too rushed for plausibility.  Four stars.

The Kings of the Sea, by Sterling E. Lanier

In this, the second shaggy dog story of Brigadier Ffelowes, we return to 1938 Sweden for a brush with gods that make the Aesir look like Johnny-Come-Latelies.  It's sort of Lovecraftian and not as compelling as the first tale Ffelowes recounted, which took place in the Caribbean.  Not bad; just sort of pedestrian.

Three stars.

Stepping down from the podium

You know, it's nice to be able to step away from the real world for a while.  There are important things going on that one must keep tabs on, causes to support, but everyone needs a break.  Thankfully, this month's F&SF, while it presents no absolute stand-outs, nevertheless presents no real clunkers, and it finishes at 3.4 stars—well above the 3-star line.

And that's something to salute!




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 18, 1968] Little monsters (Star Trek: "And the Children Shall Lead")

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by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek is, first and foremost, a science fiction show. But science fiction is a special genre in that it need not be constrained by the same rules as other genres. A story that’s science fiction can also be a Western, a romance, a mystery…or a horror story, such as Wolf in the Fold and Catspaw attempted to be. On the first Friday in October, we gathered our friends in our backyard and watched on our portable 13" one of the scariest episodes of Star Trek I’ve seen yet.

The story opens with a landing party (which includes the Captain, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy, as has become standard these days) investigating a research colony that has fallen out of contact with the Federation. They find the research team dead, all of them having drunk poison. One member is conveniently still alive, but can only gasp out a few cryptic words before collapsing.

The heroes’ shock is interrupted and then multiplied when a group of children (of varying ages and ethnicities) burst out of the shelter and immediately begin playing noisy games, apparently unconcerned that their parents are lying there dead.

This theme is repeated when the children are brought back to the ship. At first they’re cooperative, but when asked questions about their parents and their family life they ignore or dismiss them, pulling each other into games involving shouting and running.

The whole setup is pretty creepy, with the contrast of the dead bodies and the unconcerned children being particularly effective. Soon, the viewer learns that there’s more going on with the children than meets the eye. Out of sight of the adults, they use a singsong chant to summon an alien who instructs them to ‘control the crew’ and tells them ‘you know how to do that’.


The "friendly angel" exhorts his minions as they pound the table with Nuremberg rally fervor

So begins the truly scary part of the story. The children scatter to different parts of the ship. By making a pounding gesture with one hand, they can force the crew to see what they want them to see, usually an illusion that taps into a deeply-held fear. One by one the crewmembers fall under the spell, even Spock at one point asking the Captain, “Why are we bothering Starfleet?” when Kirk orders him to send out a distress call.

Seeing the normally unflappable crew caught up in the children’s illusions is genuinely disconcerting – Sulu grabs Kirk’s arm to keep him away from the controls, Scotty threatens him, Chekov points a phaser at him – but the children in the background of each shot are the ones that carry the real menace. Whether it’s the red-haired ringleader on the bridge or the tiny boy partially-obscured in engineering, it’s clear that the kids are the ones really in charge, and that’s a terrifying thought. Maybe on a larger TV screen or a well-lit room it would have worked less well. On our small color TV, watched outside on a chilly October night, it was riveting.

Spock and Kirk eventually manage to overcome the control and, after inspiring doubts in the children’s minds about their alien friend, use a recording of the children’s chant to summon the alien. Kirk breaks through the children’s seeming apathy by showing them recordings of their parents, then cutting to shots of their parents’ bodies and gravestones. It’s tough love, but it works. The children turn against the alien and it disintegrates, yelling, “Death to you all!” as it dies.

Kirk comforts the weeping children, telling them, “It’s all right.” I’m not sure it is all right, at least not for the kids. After all, their parents are dead, and they helped kill them. Thus we are left with a lingering horror despite the ‘happy ending’.

I liked this episode more than I’d expected to. Child actors are notoriously tricky to work with, but their performances weren’t too bad. In fact, far worse was the children’s alien friend, who they called ‘angel’ and Kirk called, ‘Gorgon’. He was played by Melvin Belli, perhaps most famous for being the attorney who represented Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald; for an actor, he's a pretty good lawyer. Perhaps the stilted delivery to the children was intentional, but I couldn’t help but feel a better performer could have delivered the lines far more convincingly and with greater menace.

Still, it was a great start to the spookiest month of the year, and a nice return to form for Star Trek. I’m taking off half a star for the Gorgon’s poor performance, leaving it with three and a half stars.

Who's Responsible?


by Lorelei Marcus

There's a new show this season that rivals Star Trek in popularity for us young folks.  It's called Mod Squad, and it stars three young adults who work as undercover cops.  Unlike most of the police shows on TV, it has a lot of heart, and it's not afraid to tell it like it is.  Most compelling, though, is the hope it portrays.  It gives us the cops we want to see—diverse, young, relatable, and trying to do good and protect people.


The Mod Squad and their Captain (the Klingon in "Friday's Child")

The Mod Squad leads are a far cry from the militant, "law-and-order" brutes who aim firehoses at kids in a sit-in or beat protestors bloody at the Democratic National convention.  All the adults of today are calling for law and order, scared of what the kids will do.  Funny enough, I think we all really want the same thing: peace.  But to get it, we need to stop shipping our boys to die in Vietnam, stop packing black people into city slums, and stop ogling girls like they're nothing but pieces of meat.  We need change, and sadly, I don't think any of the old politicians of today can give us that change.

I feel a kinship with the children of last week's Star Trek episode.  Those kids wanted freedom, and the right to happiness, and time with the ones they loved.  Yet they also terrified me, because under the right (wrong) guidance, they had great power, and that power was misled.  With that power, they plunged the Enterprise into anarchy, rendering each of our beloved and competent crew useless by playing on their fears.  Even Captain Kirk was reduced to a dithering, anxious fool for a time.  Most horrifying was the children being tricked into causing the death of their own parents.  Like those kids, we (me and my generation) are pent up and we want change.  We have the power to make it happen.  But is it worth it if it costs us our loved ones?


From a recent Nixon for President commercial: how he wants you to see kids

But the thing is, kids aren't inherently scary—just, under the right circumstances, desperate.  We don't have money or experience.  We're growing up in uncertain times and we're scared to death we won't make it past 20.  Ultimately, we don't want to hurt anyone.  We just want to save ourselves.  But I can see that fear makes us dangerous, and the adults, too.  We're all scared, like stampeding zebras, unsure of where we're going, and who we're trampling in our path.  I can bet those kids on the Enterprise were scared.  How might the episode have ended differently if one adult stopped to see their point of view?

Who will stop to see ours?  Or will we have to keep shaking our firsts to be heard, playing on fears until someone gets hurt?  Something will bridge the gap, I hope.  Maybe it starts with a conversation sparked by this episode.  For that, and its compelling pacing, story, and acting, I give this episode four stars.

Successes and Failures of Fear


by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

In the face of overwhelming odds, the core Enterprise crew remains frighteningly efficient. Those same strengths are devastating when turned back on our heroes. Scotty's steady, unmoving presence and protection of the auxiliary control blocks Kirk and Spock from the engines. Sulu's precision is narrowed to keep the ship on course and unscathed, unable to question if the weapons he sees are real. Chekov's loyalty is strained, torn between his Captain and the even higher authority of Starfleet command.


"You die, Captain—and we all go up in rank!"

The odd one out is Lt. Uhura. While her colleagues' fears and perceptions revolved around duty, she was shown a painful death in old age, reflected in a mirror only she could see. This was just the latest time a woman on 'Trek was derailed by loss of youth or beauty. Yeoman Rand, distressed over her legs in Miri, Lt. Galway afraid to sleep after aging rapidly in The Deadly Years (at least the mirror she complained of actually existed). The trio taking the Venus drug in Mudd's Women. Uhura herself already encountered this when she was offered an immortal, youthful robot body in I, Mudd – and importantly, chose not to accept. She's a professional, and there was already the perfect moment to set her fear: when Kirk's instruction to the bridge security came out as garbled nonsense. Communication is her specialty, and she's had to relearn language before when Nomad erased her knowledge in The Changeling.

Pushing the crew in the wrong direction is a masterstroke. These people are exceptional at what they do and they don't know the harm they are causing. This is where the horror crept in. Not only was the crew unaware that they were helping the "angel" towards its destination, they were convinced that they were keeping the ship safe. Modern day propaganda may not manifest visions or change perception so literally, but if everything you know is telling you one thing, how do you begin to question it? A sense of justice or duty isn't enough, and the most well-intentioned can still cause great damage. Kirk orders a security shift change, and two officers are transported to where the planet is supposed to be, only to die silently in empty space, off screen. These deaths feel entirely preventable – no one was shooting at them, there was no need to fight! And yet, horribly, there was no way for any of them to know. Like his crew, Kirk did everything right, and it still resulted in tragedy. The children induced an artificial anxiety, but the aftermath will haunt the crew for much longer. How to know if a future mission is doing more good than harm? Or perhaps even worse, has the Enterprise been an unknowing party to devastation in the past, all while under the impression of a successful mission?

4 stars

Without Followers, Evil Cannot Spread


by Robin Rose Graves

Initially, I was annoyed by yet another “magical children” plot in Star Trek, as in the first season we had "Charlie X", and overall I’m not fond of Trek including magic as a seemingly limitless device. Despite my initial hesitation, the episode won me over with its appropriately creepy tone and mastermind behind the children’s behavior, who I feel has great political relevance to our own history.

To summon the Gorgon, the children chant “hail, hail, fire and snow…” which could possibly be a play on the word “heil.” Perhaps the Gorgon targeting children for recruits was a nod to Hitler’s youth – or maybe it has something deeper to say about the followers who enable such evil men to rise to power. Perhaps the children represent naivete that can be preyed upon, a selfishness that can be manipulated, and a lack of regard to consequences. “Evil does seek power by suppressing the truth,” Spock noted of the children being unaware of what they were doing. “Or by misleading the innocent,” McCoy added. The Gorgon was not just an alien version of Hitler, but every demagogue we’ve known and are yet to know, from Lincoln Rockwell to George Wallace.


"Segregation now, Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever!"

“They’re children being misled,” Kirk said, in defense of the children, to which Spock replied “they are followers. Without followers, evil cannot spread.” Within these lines, Spock exposed the Gorgon’s strength and weakness, and reminded us that it is the people who give leaders power, but those same followers can take that power away. That, I believe, is the true message of the episode.

Appropriately, this episode was followed by a commercial for Richard Nixon aimed at today's youth.


3 stars.

Un-asked Questions


by Joe Reid

“And the Children Shall Lead” is this week’s episode of Star Trek.  It is frankly an episode that leaves much to be desired.  It has too many open questions that could have been answered, but in the end were not, coupled with a threat that is so easy to spot that it makes one wonder whether the outcome couldn’t have been avoided by asking a few simple questions.  How about we go over a few of the questions that might have saved our heroes a lot of hassle?

Question 1 – “Do you think that these children might be responsible for all the dead adults on this planet?"  When you come to a place where all the adults and parents are dead, and you find a bunch of playing and laughing children who could care less, there is something wrong.  Perhaps it would not be a good idea to take them to your ship full of adults.  Those children are as queer as a three-dollar bill!  Leave them on the planet and watch them closely.  There is no need to endanger the crew by rushing to rescue ill-mannered brats.


"You do see these bodies, right, kids?"

Question 2 – “Who is letting all of these rude children into restricted areas?” There was a child in Engineering, a child roaming the halls driving crew members around like cattle, and multiple children on the bridge.  These children were not invisible and were clearly in areas where visiting children should not be visiting.  If Nurse Chapel was to see these children to their quarters and they end up roaming the ship, there should be disciplinary action taken against her.  [To be fair, Kirk did order a security guard to watch the kids.  Said guard was immediately co-opted by Tommy Starnes.  Indeed, this is one of the few episodes with appropriate (though inadequate) levels of security) (ed.)]

Question 3 – “Did anyone else see that glowing intruder over there?” If anyone at all had been alerted to a translucent glowing alien on the ship, folks might have been more careful.  Perhaps people might have anticipated a danger to themselves or to the “defenseless” children that were guests on the ship.  How about we go to yellow alert until this uninvited alien is abducted? [None of the crew saw the gorgon until the final encounter; by the time Kirk suspected an alien on board, the crew had already been co-opted. (Ed.)]

I find all the things that occurred in this entry to completely lack credibility where this normally overly inquisitive crew is involved.  Usually asking a few questions would trigger Kirk’s powers of “Kirk-sposition”, where the captain would exposit to a degree as to turn the very Oracle of Delphi green with envy with his level of accuracy.  The fact that simple questions such as the ones presented above were left un-uttered, left me questioning why I failed to switch the television off.  It was not good in my opinion.

One star

Give kids a chance


by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

This is my first creepy-child Star Trek episode review since having my first child last November and all of it hit so much harder than it would have a year ago. The ages of the kids, their games, their attempts to control the world around them using whatever tools consistently work, much of it reminded me of my little guy.

Which made this exchange so horrifying I nearly turned off my TV:

KIRK: They're children.
SPOCK: Captain, the four hundred and thirty men and women on board the Enterprise and the ship itself are endangered by these children.
KIRK: They don't understand the evil that they're doing.
SPOCK: Perhaps that is true, but the evil that is within them is spreading fast, and unless we can find a way to remove it
KIRK: We'll have to kill them.

Um, what? Have you no brig? Have you no tranquilizers? Have you no compassion? [Have you no stun setting on your phasers? (ed)]

The easy slip from 'they're a danger to us' to 'we must kill them' could only be made by someone without kids, or perhaps without the caregiving responsibility for them. Like many people who give birth, my kid endangered my life during his time entering this world; but I would not more kill him than kill myself. We're a dyad, he and I, less and less biologically the older he gets, but certainly still emotionally. Once one has had that experience of one body becoming two, it is difficult to look at any child and not see the halos of your own. And the cries of children? Not only do they get the milk flowing, but the tears too.

Dr. McCoy laughing in delight at the children crying was nearly as chilling to me as the horrible ways they were manipulated by this week's evil alien.

The alien way in which the children were treated made me realize how strange life on the Enterprise must be. They had no children-sized beds, no play area, no children's library or jungle gym. I wrote in the fanzine Tricorder I about what it might take for Yeoman Rand to seek an abortion using teleporter technology, but even there I had assumed in my heart that this advanced civilization could find a way to keep families intact while allowing parents to be the great explorers we all are every single day (and explainers, and shoe tie-ers, and booty wipers and tear driers…).


There are alien contact specialists on board the Enterprise—perhaps one of them might have been better qualified to talk to them than the fellow who couldn't explain the Birds and the Bees to Charlie Evans…

The fact that the Enterprise has no children is newly shocking to me. So much of the universe must be missed by excluding that unique perspective. So many potential alien diplomatic relationships must be missed when societies first encounter Star Fleet and are confronted by a uniformed crew of mostly-singletons. Of course, there is for many people everything right and nothing wrong in being single, being child free, or some mix of the same. Both are states whose partisans I wish joy to. But parents too have our own well-earned perspectives and skills, as do the children we protect and harbor and launch out into the wide, wide galaxy.

What would this episode have been like if, as Lorelei mentioned, someone had actually tried to communicate with the children: another parent or another child? The best interlocutors are sometimes the ones most closely sited by those to whom they wish to speak, and integrating this troubled and troubling group into an existing, healthy culture of children aboard a starship would have been a fascinating twist to this story. I hope one day to watch a Star Trek where both children and parents have a voice and role in the narrative, beyond guest stars and evil foils.

Three stars for threatening to kill traumatized kids who were being manipulated by an adult. No me gusta.

[Come join us tonight (October 18th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek!  KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings.  You won't want to miss it…]




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Horror, Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 16, 1968] Cinemascope: Barbarella, Ice Station Zebra, and Night of the Living Dead

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An Exquisite Delight: Barbarella


by Natalie Devitt


[Striptease in space]

Hot off the heels of Danger: Diabolik, producer Dino De Laurentis is at it again with another comic book adaptation, this time Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella. The French-Italian co-production is based on the sexy French comic book and directed by Roger Vadim (1956’s And God Created Woman). The movie’s title character is played by the none other than Vadim’s wife, the gorgeous Jane Fonda, who since her breakout role in 1965’s Cat Ballou, has been making name for herself in Hollywood, beyond just benefiting from her already famous last name.


[Make love, not war]

As the film’s heroine, a “5-star double-rated astronavigatrix”, she is contacted by Dianthus, the President of the Republic of Earth (French actor Claude Dauphin) at the beginning of the film, requesting that she set out in search of a supposedly young scientist by the name of Doctor Durand Durand, who reportedly vanished into “the uncharted regions of Tau Ceti” after creating a weapon known as the positronic ray. The device is so powerful that it threatens “to shatter the loving union of the universe”, which had “been pacified for centuries.” Barbarella is the president’s last hope to bring the doctor to justice and prevent possible bloodshed, because he has “no armies or police.” That said, she is armed with some weapons from the Museum of Conflict for “self-preservation” and urged to use all of her “incomparable talents” during her mission.


[Barbarella at the controls of her groovy spacecraft]

Shortly after beginning her journey, Barbarella gets caught in a magnetic storm, which results in her crashing her spaceship into Planet 16, located in the system of Tau Ceti. While stranded there, she meets 2 “marvelous little girls” who knock her out with a snowball, I kid you not. After taking her captive, they bring her to what she recognizes as Doctor Durand Durand’s wrecked spacecraft, but he is nowhere in sight. In fact, most of the inhabitants of the planet appear to be children. Barbarella threatens them with, “untie me or I’m going to call your parents!” Unfazed, the kids sic a pack of creepy dolls with razor-sharp teeth on her, leaving her with some abrasions and badly torn clothes. Luckily for Barbarella, a man draped in furs, known as Mark Hand the Catchman (Italian actor, Ugo Tognazzi), comes to her rescue. He and the authorities capture the children in nets.


[What nightmares are made of]

Afterwards, Mark Hand takes her back to his vehicle, which is basically a cabin on wheels with sails. There, he suggests she repay him for coming to her rescue by making love to him the old-fashioned way, something apparently that has not been done in centuries on Earth, because there is a newer and more civilized way to do the deed, involving individuals taking a pill and pressing the palms of their hands together. Ever the adventurous type, Barbarella agrees, forgetting all about her recent injuries. He fixes her spaceship, offers her some clothing and a tip on the doctor’s possible location, Sogo.


[Barbarella with Mark Hand after he saves her from the children and the dolls]

Barbarella tries to flee Planet 16, but shortly after takeoff, her spacecraft crashes yet again, this time near Sogo, in the Labyrinth of the City of Night on a planet called Lythion. There, she meets a blind angel named Pygar, played by John Phillip Law of 1967’s Death Rides a Horse and more recently Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. He tells her he has lost “the will to fly.” Pygar introduces her to a wise old man named Professor Ping. Here, French mime Marcel Marceau plays Professor Ping, who offers to help her fix her spaceship so she does not get stuck in the Labyrinth, a very frightening place, filled with those exiled from Sogo, City of Night. While Professor Ping works on her spacecraft, Pygar defends Barbarella against the Great Tyrant of Sogo’s guards. Later, one thing leads to another and they sleep together. Almost immediately after their encounter, Pygar miraculously regains his will to fly. He flies her to Sogo, but things take a turn for the worse when the guards to the Great Tyrant, also known as the Black Queen (and little one-eyed wench), spot them.


[Barbarella and her "fine-feathered friend" on their way to Sogo]

Barbarella and Pygar are taken in by the Black Queen’s guards. Model, actress and rock music muse, Anita Pallenberg, stars as the Black Queen. The earthling and the angel find themselves in the Chamber of Ultimate Solution, where they have to choose between 3 different types of death. Just as Barbarella and Pygar are about to choose, they are stopped by concierge to the Great Tyrant, played by Irish actor Milo O’Shea. Pygar and Barbarella end up being separated.


[Her Majesty The Black Queen]

The Black Queen gives orders for Barbarella to be thrown into a giant cage filled with birds, who peck at her and tear her clothes, again. She falls down a secret escape chute, which leads Barbarella into another room, where she meets Dildano, head of the revolutionary forces, played by David Hemmings (of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up). They get to know each other better. Afterwards, they devise a plan to capture the Black Queen while she is asleep in her Chamber of Dreams, so she can “divulge the whereabouts of Doctor Durand Durand.”


[Barbarella in the cage filled with "darling" birds]

I would imagine for the more sophisticated filmgoer, Barbarella’s plot and characters leave much to be desired. Barbarella hardly grows over the course of the film. In fact, no matter what happens to her, she maintains a certain level of naïveté through the entire picture. The same can be said for most of the characters in the film, who tend to be very one-dimensional and are often pretty silly.


[Speaking of silly characters, here are Stomoxys and Glossina with Barbarella after they kidnap her]

Turns out the movie posters sum up what Barbarella is all about with the line, “See Barbarella Do Her Thing!” When the movie’s protagonist is not taking up a tryst with someone new, she quite literally has killer dolls and birds tear what little clothing she does wear to shreds. Barbarella also seems to be irresistible to both men and women. And while it is nice to see a female protagonist, especially one that does not conform often outdated and puritanical views around sexuality, she is clearly some sort of male fantasy. One thing that does make her and the film more complicated is that she sure seems to find herself being tortured a lot.


[Her name isn't pretty pretty, it's Barbarella]

The movie’s opening sequence, involves the main character stripping in zero gravity, before even one word of dialogue is uttered. This alone should tell the viewer exactly what lies ahead. In addition, Barbarella does not bother putting on a stitch of clothing in order to speak to, of all people, the president. Another scene involves the concierge to the Great Tyrant putting Barbarella in his machine, which will cause her to “die of pleasure.” But it turns out that his machine is no match for Barbarella! What I am getting at is that part the film’s charm is that it is pure fluff. Entertaining fluff, sure, but fluff nevertheless.


[Barbarella in the Excessive Machine]

To top things off, Barbarella drives what else but a pink spaceship that has an interior decked out with iconic paintings on the walls, gaudy statues, and floor to ceiling orange shag carpeting. Even if Barbarella is guilty of being an absolute spectacle of style over substance, it does feature some incredibly creative costumes by Paco Rabanne, decent special effects and impressively psychedelic set design. Also, the movie’s theme song had me singing “Barbarella, Bar, Barbarella” for days after watching the film.


[Barbarella inside the Black Queens's psychedelic Chamber of Dreams]

Barbarella probably will not be nominated for any of the major awards anytime soon, but it is still a fun ride. More serious SF fans may want to steer clear of the movie, but I would recommend it to viewers with camp sensibilities. Three stars.


[Will Barbarella and Dildano be successful in carrying out their plan?]

Ice Station Zero: Ice Station Zebra


by Tonya R. Moore

Ice Station Zebra is a paltry film for which, apparently, little expense was spared. The production is elaborate. The special effects and visual details are impressive. The actors’ performances are mostly convincing. The plot of this film, however, leaves a great deal to be desired.

First, some background:

The story of the Russian satellite in Ice Station Zebra is loosely based on real-life technology and events. Discover 2 was an American satellite, a prototype of the optical reconnaissance Discoverer series, launched in early April 1959. It was cylindrical in shape and its film return vehicle, the capsule, was manufactured by General Electric.

Though it neither carried film nor conducted surveillance, Discover 2 was the first satellite equipped with a re-entry capsule and was the first to send a payload back to Earth. As depicted in the movie, mission control did lose track of the capsule when a timing error caused it to land in the vicinity of Spitsbergen, Norway instead of Hawaii. Attempts to recover the capsule were unsuccessful and some suspect it may currently be in the possession of the Soviet Union.

The standout star of the film for SF fans is probably Patrick McGoohan (David Jones in Ice Station Zebra), who is famously known for his role as John Drake in the British television series, Danger Man (Secret Agent in the U.S.) and more recently, The Prisoner. McGoohan is actually an Irish-American who was born in Queens, New York and spent his childhood years in Ireland. The actor is based in England where he has performed in several notable film and television roles over the past decade. Sadly, his performance is not enough to elevate the film beyond mediocrity…

In the first scene of Ice Station Zebra, men in uniform sit in a cramped room equipped with sophisticated machinery, looking very serious.

This is followed by footage of a small object separating from an inexplicably phallic Russian satellite orbiting the earth.

The focus shifts to the main character. Rock Hudson stars as Cdr. James Ferraday, Commander of USN nuclear submarine, USS Tigerfish.

While visiting a drinking bar, Ferraday gets a call on the establishment’s phone.

He promptly leaves to go to another bar. At the second bar, he goes upstairs to a private room where he meets Admiral Garvey.

The admiral gives him a sketchy summary of some potentially disastrous incident at Ice Station Zebra, located at or somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole.

Garvey issues an urgent order sending Ferraday and his submarine crew on an investigative rescue mission to Ice Station Zebra. They are to escort a certain David Jones to Ice Station Zebra, a man whose background they do not know. It is made clear that David Jones has some super-secret agenda pertaining to Russian military intelligence. His true objective for going to Ice Station Zebra is not to be divulged to Ferraday or crew.

David Jones, a paranoid Englishman of Russian origin with a noticeable dependence on hard liquor, isaccompanied by a platoon of marines led by Lt. Jonathan Hansen. Later, the Russian defector (?) Boris Vaslov…

… and Capt. Leslie Anders–The Token Black Man (played by Cleveland Brown and activist Jim Brown), are airlifted by helicopter to board the USS Tigerfish.

After a brief display of the requisite male posturing, the mission goes underway. (eg. Hansen is disrespectful. Anders puts him in his place.)

Upon reaching the North Pole, the USS Tigerfish attempts to breach the surface ice. The first few attempts fail so Ferraday decides to fire a torpedo at the ice.

Disaster strikes when the torpedo shaft/channel (?) suddenly opens. A deluge of freezing Arctic seawater comes pouring in and the USS Tigerfish starts sinking fast. The panicked crew and guests work together to get the situation under control and somehow, the number of casualties are limited to one.

Signs of sabotage are confirmed. Despite the presence of a born-Russian with questionable motives, Jones immediately suspects the Token Black Man of being the culprit instead. His reasoning? Anders comes with impeccable credentials and that just can’t be believable.

The USS Tigerfish successfully breaches thinner ice and surfaces. Ferraday leads Jones, Anders, Vaslov, the marines and a team handpicked from his own crew across treacherous the ice-scape, leaving someone else in charge of the submarine and its operations.

Following a near-death mishap on the way…

… the contingent arrives at the partially burnt out remains of Ice Station Zebra.

They locate some survivors while Jones begins frantically searching for the very secret, very mysterious object. Vaslov joins the search. Ferraday reveals that he actually knows that Jones is searching for a certain 8mm (?) / video tape (?) with highly classified spy intel containing footage and the locations of all of the US nuclear bases.

Reports of incoming fighter airplanes from opposing armies ramp up the urgency of the mission.

The Token Black Man is framed for someone else’s (Vaslov) treasonous act and shot multiple times (by Jones), to death. Naturally.

Disgusted by the stereotypical inevitability of this outcome, I took this opportunity to take a long bathroom break, returning in time for…

A transmission/press release is broadcasted reporting the successful rescue of Ice Station Zebra’s survivors.

– and all’s well that ends well, apparently.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

A Shambling Mess: Night of the Living Dead


by Amber Dubin

I was so pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the first horror movie that I reviewed (Rosemary's Baby) that I thought I had been too quick to dismiss the horror genre entirely. Thus, with a freshly opened mind, I decided to celebrate the Halloween season with a bag of popcorn and a screening of what was promised to be another horror classic. I'll admit that the bar was maybe set too high, so I tried very hard to be kind in my assessment of The Night of The Living Dead. In this, I summarily failed. This film had many never-before-seen, innovative elements and a rather bold story-telling style, but I simply did not see it fit for a major motion picture screen. I could not help but feel like I was being led down a garden path with the promise of the type of character development and storyline that could support this decently to moderately talented cast, only to be jilted at the altar by the loosely shambled together pile of scene changes that make up this film.

Night of the Living Dead shambled into theaters October 1st, 1968

Night of the Living Dead does exactly this when it gets my hopes up in the opening scene. There is something to be said for tension built through hair-raising music played over shots of a lone Pontiac driving over rolling hills in a set of old-fashioned grainy black and white landscape shots. By the time we get to the first lines of the movie, I was already on edge in a subtle way that I was hoping would bode well for the types of thrills would continue throughout. This was my first disappointment, and just like the protracted winding trip that Pontiac took around turn after promising turn, this film alternately dilly dallied, rambled, and ultimately fell flat at a dead end.

The most grounded character in the movie

The opening lines of the movie are delivered by a couple of youngsters named Johnny and Barbra who are visiting the gravesite of their deceased father. They disrespectfully bicker over the obligation the whole time, carelessly switching the radio off right in the middle of an ominous "all points bulletin" and ignoring the slow approach of a shambling figure in the distance. Mocking his sister over her healthy fear of graveyards, Johnny practically tosses Barbra in front of the approaching stranger, only to instantly regret it when the man grabs her by the throat. Johnny comes to Barbra's defense but is overcome rather awkwardly by the man slowly wrestling him to the ground and smooshing the glasses off of his face. Barbra, ever the loyal sister, doesn't bother checking if Johnny is ok before running to the car by herself, losing her shoe and falling to the ground, because it's just not scary enough if the fleeing woman isn't both helpless and unlikeable.

Shoes have always been a woman's greatest weakness

She finds shelter in her locked car for a moment before the man manages to break the window with a brick. Suddenly, she realizes the key is in the ignition and she slowly rolls the Pontiac down the hill. Even though her path is unobstructed, she drives distractedly enough to veer off the road and ding her side mirror slightly on a tree. This mirror seems to be so vital to her escape, that she decides that it'd be safer to abandon the car entirely and run barefoot through the woods away from her attacker (utter genius, this one).

Mind you, the limping man in the graveyard had no special makeup on, so for all we know she just abandoned her brother to be assaulted by a partially disabled, demented, old man. Literally the only way I can assume the strange congregants outside are "living dead" people is because that's title of the movie.

Maybe he's just lost and looking to borrow a cup of sugar

I expected the film to fall into a "poor decision-making blonde flees from monster" formula at this point, but when Barbra seeks refuge in an abandoned house, this film abruptly loses the plot for me. Barbara's actions have made precious little sense up until now, but after entering this house, her cognitive abilities fall to absolute bits. The first illogical decision comes when she is startled by the corpse of the homeowner and decides to rush outside to take her chances with her pursuer, running directly into the headlights of an arriving car. She stands bathed in the blinding lights, confused and wincing as if bracing herself to be struck; instead a complete stranger emerges, grabs her up and rushes her back inside. Unlike I, who was shouting "who are you and where did you come from?" at the screen, Barbra offers no greeting or introduction to this stranger and immediately falls in line behind his frantic attempts to create safety and figure out what's going on.

Ben may cut a dashing profile, but it makes no sense why Barbra would trust him implicitly and make no attempt to ask or help him figure out what's going on

It is here that the stranger, whom we eventually come to know as Ben, takes the torch (sometimes literally) of the protagonist of the story. While Barbra dissolves into quiet hysteria, Ben violently dispatches several of the mindless congregants around the house, dragging their corpses to the lawn and setting them on fire to warn off the others. Once he's mostly boarded up the whole house by himself, Barbra launches into an awkward re-telling of everything we've seen her do in the film so far. Suddenly, she remembers she had a brother. She jumps up and throws herself at the newly sealed door, insisting "we must find Johnny now!" slapping Ben when he refuses. He immediately slaps her back, which normally would appall me, but here seems the only logical way to get the hysterical woman to stop throwing herself in front of monsters and cars.

Ben continues to secure the house, finding food and a weapon, hooking up a radio, and even bringing Barbra shoes as an apology for slapping her. When the radio crackles to life, we settle in with the now catatonic Barbra for our long-awaited first taste of an explanation of what on earth is going on in this world. We are offered the laughably pathetic explanation that the world is being seized by "an epidemic of homicide." We don't even get a chance to finish rolling our eyes at this when we are surprised by Barbra's scream as she witnesses people emerge from the basement.

Suddenly, basement people!

There's absolutely no logical explanation as to why four able-bodied people and a child would remain hidden in the cellar of a house with distressed survivors upstairs, only to emerge and be suddenly invested in those additional survivors coming back downstairs with them. Harry, the obnoxious, stubborn patriarch of the Cooper family, offers such a poor explanation for his motives that I wonder whether this scene had less of a script and more of a general direction to the actors to come up with their own dialog. The teenaged couple, Tom and Judy, are convinced by this awkward exchange to come up and help Ben, while Harry's wife and sick child remain downstairs. Here we are introduced to Helen Cooper, played by Marilyn Eastman, who is a strikingly beautiful, classy and sharp-witted woman. She's responsible for nearly every cogent argument in the film and is such a mismatch for her husband that we are left to wonder why such a talented actress is filling that role and not that of the protagonist.

The stakes are now raised by the fact that there are three women and a sick child to defend. This emboldens Ben to make a plan to escape that involves Ben and Tom getting to the gas pump and truck outside by the barn. It is here that a schism appears in the group, and Harry quietly makes it his mission to undermine Ben's authority for every decision Ben makes (in much the same way I expect he is accustomed to undermining all his wife's opinions).

Behind every bullheaded man, a long-suffering wife bonded to him by poor writing

In another jarring turn, the focus shifts once again to the teen couple, Tom and Judy. Judy begs Tom not to go outside with Ben. She offers little in the way of verbal persuasion, but the scene is suddenly charged with so much of a different type of tension that one wonders if their mutual attraction isn't based in real life. They're clearly not meant to make it out of this movie alive, but knowing this didn't soften the blow for me when their escape plan literally goes up in flames, and Judy's caught jacket condemns them to a particularly gruesome and fiery death.

A romance doomed to go down in flames

From here the rest of the film devolves into a fairly predictable series of disasters: Ben is forced to shoot an increasingly paranoid, maniacal and erratic Harry Cooper in self-defense, Barbara opens a door in order to be eaten by her now undead brother, and the survivors retreat to barricade the cellar. Karen, the little girl who's been lying prone and feverish suffering from an undead bite wound this whole time, suddenly springs to life as a crazed, cannibalistic creature. Her mother is just as shocked as the audience at this development, and she falls back, helplessly paralyzed in fear. To everyone's genuine horror, the child discards the bits of her father's flesh from her teeth as she advances on her mother, violently tearing her apart with a gardening spade.

Ben is set with the unenviable task of destroying the now undead nuclear family and he does so, huddling up next to the barricade afterwards and falling into a fitful sleep as the beleaguered lone survivor of this ordeal. The next day he emerges into the now silent and destroyed house. He is greeted with a swift bullet between the eyes from a sharp-shooting member of the crisis response team tasked with cleaning up the invasion of undead; thus rendering all the heroism and hard-fought survivalism of the entire film moot.

Karen picks up some unusual eating habits

Though I was disappointed in this film as a whole, there were several things I did enjoy about it. I found it added a layer of realism to have the story background delivered by inter-cut scenes of a TV broadcast filled with busy scientists and professors on Capitol Hill trying to say as little as possible to the microphones being shoved in their faces. I thought it was a creative, bold take to explain how their situation was caused when the "unburied dead" were exposed to radiation from a destroyed Venusian satellite. I even found it authentically frightening when the teen couple immolates themselves and Ben is left to fight through the darkness and the silently encroaching hoard with nothing but a chair leg torch, all the while having to listen to the unnerving gnashing and chewing sounds of the undead dining on the burnt flesh of the unfortunate couples' bodies.

Extra! Extra! No one Knows What's Going On!

While I recognize that the film is making an innovative attempt to enhance the drama with bold lighting choices, I see this attempt as a failure because the lighting is so severe that the audience is unable to see what's going on. A particularly disappointing example of this comes in the authentically scary moment where Karen is committing matricide, and she is darkened in such deep shadow that you can barely see her at all. I was also disappointed that the score was absolutely all over the place. The beginning crescendo of appropriate music only serves to make the rest of the sound in the film feel poorly balanced by proving that at least one member of the staff knows how to smoothly score at least one scene. Cymbals crash and trumpets blast when stationary objects are meant to surprise the viewers, cricket noises get played very loudly in a bizarre attempt to make the approach of the undead hoards eerie, and yet the sound suddenly dies when the situation takes an actual dire turn; In a genuinely scary moment when undead break the window open, they do so noiselessly and a grasping, attacking undead hand gets dismembered in frustrating silence.

What made me feel this film was not of high enough quality to be released in theaters was the unforgivably sloppy pacing and direction. The Barbra-centered, awkward, choppy scenes at the beginning felt padded for runtime, and yet we are rushed through a systematic slaughter of the entire cast at the end. The script of each scene varies in quality so wildly that there are tonal shifts fast enough to give me whiplash. I felt volleyed between at least one writer who understood how couples banter, and one that decided to put a group of actors in a room and suggest that they improvise. The end result makes the film feel like a loosely connected collection of scenes, rather than a cogent story that supports character development or enhances the performances of some of the cast's talented actors.

Ben, the tragic hero who couldn't defeat racism(?)

While I appreciated the idea that Ben's death at the end implies that his race makes him just as worthless to society as the monsters getting burned in the fields, it's a poorly executed and shoe-horned-in concept. If that was going to be the message in the end, the least that could have been done is that he be attacked or singled out based on his race; but even Harry's prejudice against him was not clearly race-related and could have purely stemmed from him being an overbearing, control-obsessed, vile man.

Next time I decide to watch a film with an open mind, I'll make sure to look out for brain eaters first.

Two stars.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 14, 1968] Outta Space and Outta Mind (Doctor Who: The Mind Robber)

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By Jessica Holmes

This month on Doctor Who, we’re headed out of space and out of time and into a place rather more strange: the land of fiction. This is a bit of a weird one.

Let’s take a look at The Mind Robber, shall we?


This is supposed to be lava. Or Dulkis has oddly foamy volcanoes.

Once Upon A Time

Trying to describe the plot of The Mind Robber is like trying to describe the plot of Yellow Submarine or Alice In Wonderland. Technically speaking you can, but doing it in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re off your head on cough syrup (which I currently am, but that’s beside the point) is another question. We’re firmly in dream-logic territory here, so you might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.

With the TARDIS sitting in the path of an oncoming lava flow, it would behoove the Doctor to find somewhere else to park his motor. However, the ship refuses to start, forcing the Doctor to use the emergency unit to yoink the TARDIS out of reality entirely. And that is where the real trouble begins.

Being nowhere and nowhen, you’d think the TARDIS and its inhabitants would be safe. Surely nothing could exist outside of time and space, right? The Doctor doesn’t know, and what he doesn’t know can most certainly hurt them.

It’s not long before visions of home and voices in their head lure the three of them outside the safety of the TARDIS. When they try to return, the ship disintegrates, stranding them in a pitch-dark void.

The next we see of the crew, they’re separated and searching for each other in some sort of maze. Jamie gets shot by an English redcoat and turns into a faceless cardboard cutout. Zoe ends up trapped in a jar. The Doctor is beset by creepy children with a fondness for riddles.

It makes exactly as much sense in context.

The Doctor revives Jamie by putting his face back together (badly), and once reunited with Zoe the group try to get their bearings. What appears from ground level as a maze or a dense forest is in fact a page of written text. They’re in a world of words.

They’re then captured by tin soldiers and led to a black void where a charging unicorn tries to run them through. That’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write in the context of Doctor Who.

How do you stop a charging unicorn? Remind it that there’s no such thing as unicorns, silly. This actually works, and becomes a handy method for dealing with the fantastical threats of this strange place. In a world of imagination, belief is a powerful thing.

After another run-in with a redcoat, the Doctor gets a chance to fix Jamie’s face (he went all cardboard-y after once again trying to bring a knife to a gun-fight), the group find their way to a labyrinth. There they get separated, and the Doctor and Zoe come face to face with a Minotaur. Handsome fellow. Meanwhile, Jamie climbs Rapunzel’s tower. She doesn’t think much of him (only a prince is good enough for her), but is quite amusingly resigned to having every Tom, Dick and Harry use her hair as a rope.

Following a run-in with Medusa, some handy directions from Gulliver and a little tussle with a comic strip villain (and surprising combat skills from Zoe), the Doctor and Zoe eventually join him. Inside the tower, they find a device that’s been attempting (unsuccessfully) to predict (or control) the Doctor’s progress, narrating it as if it was in a storybook. Someone is trying to turn the Doctor into fiction.

The man behind the curtain, so to speak, is the Master (Emrys Jones). Formerly a serialist from the 1920s, he's now a servant to a supercomputer with a bit of a god-complex and no imagination.


Not shown: the gross bit of something or other the Master had in the corner of his mouth in some shots. Maybe he'd just finished his lunch when the Doctor showed up.

He’s technically a prisoner, but is quite enjoying himself. He has access to all of human literature and gets to make make-believe a reality. But he’s no longer young, and the Doctor is ageless. That’s why he’s been trying to trap him in this fictional world. In short… it’s a job offer.

One the Doctor isn't allowed to refuse, but he does so anyway.

The Master responds to his obstinance by taking Jamie and Zoe captive and trapping them between the pages of a book, both literally and figuratively. The line between those two concepts is quite blurry in the land of fiction.

The Doctor makes a run for it. He tries to edit the master tape of his narrative, but realises that writing fiction with himself as a character would trap him inside the story, and the Master would be able to do as he pleased.


This is probably the most miserable I've seen this Doctor. At one point he's on the verge of tears. Some very nice acting from Troughton. I just want to give him a hug and a cup of tea.

Getting tired of his resistance, the Master uses his powers to turn a fictionalised Jamie and Zoe against the Doctor. They trick him into stepping into a trap (which he really should have seen coming, but then again he was very upset and thought he'd lost them forever). With that, the Doctor’s imagination becomes part of the computer.

But what is this all for? The same thing every other Doctor Who villain wants, apparently. To take over the Earth.

However, the problem with plugging the Doctor directly into this computer is that he has a mind of his own. Now he can manipulate the narrative. What ensues could be called a battle of wills, but could equally be called a playground slapfight, but without anyone running home crying to Mummy about the other children not playing the game properly.

The Doctor frees Jamie and Zoe, so the Master dreams up a threat, which the Doctor conjures up a defence against, and on and on it goes. Neither side gets much of an advantage over the other, but the situation gets odder by the second. At one point Sir Lancelot ends up fighting Blackbeard. It is delightfully weird.

All this push and pull overloads the computer, and it eventually jams up, allowing the Doctor to break free. As the robots start firing on everything in sight, the Doctor and company flee. The computer blows up behind them, taking the fictional world with it.

With the narrative broken, things go back to how they should be. The TARDIS is in one piece. The Doctor and his companions are safe (as they ever can be)… and I expect that somewhere in the 20s a writer is waking up from a nap having had a very strange dream indeed.

Curiouser and Curiouser

So this is a surreal story to say the least. You’ve got companions changing faces (Hamish Wilson makes a pretty good Jamie for an episode), reality warping to fit a story, and a whole cast of fictional characters swanning about the narrative. Well, it’s a fictional story, so they’re all made up. Fictional within the world of Doctor Who. Extra-fictional. Double fictional.

You’ve got your classics like Medusa (with rather excellent stop-motion snake hair) and the Minotaur, at least one fairytale princess, a raygun-toting supervillain, and even book characters. Lemuel Gulliver (Bernard Horsfall) is probably the most prominent of the bunch. He pops up every now and then to speak in an oddly cryptic manner and offer some friendly advice before swanning off again. The reason for his cryptic speech is simple: he can only speak in words that his written counterpart used. He does his best to get his point across, but his vocabulary can only stretch so far. He acts of his own volition, but is unable to act against the will of the Master or even perceive anything that the Master doesn’t want him to see.

That’s just such a fascinating idea to me. It's a really interesting way to distinguish between the fictional and the real. And yet with that in mind, I have to wonder something. Lemuel Gulliver was never real in the first place, but there are characters in this story who were. How much of the original Edward Teach is left inside the fictionalised version of Blackbeard? Or Cyrano de Bergerac? Are they constructed entirely from the imagination? Or are they like the Master Controller, plucked out of time and forced to assume a role? It’s a ghastly fate when you think about it.

Come to think of it, it’s not so pleasant for the people who were never real in the first place. They might lack free will and have limited means to express themselves, but does that mean they don’t have actual consciousness? Do they think and feel, or are they just puppets with the illusion of life? Did they die when the computer blew up? Could they even be said to be alive in the first place? Am I thinking much too deeply about a surrealist romp?

Maybe we’ll leave this one to the philosophers.

Final Thoughts

What an odd serial. I still have questions about where the fiction-obsessed computer came from, or how it had such a huge degree of control over reality (or unreality, I should say), but mostly I’m just delighted. It’s so much fun! You never know what’s going to happen next, but whatever it is, it’s bound to be wonderful. Childlike glee, that’s what it gave me. I was big on the Greek myths as a child (the monster-related ones, naturally), so when the Minotaur turned up it was almost like an old friend. A big, old, man-eating friend.

Also, is it bad I’ve never got around to reading Gulliver’s Travels? I think I had a picture book about that bit with the little people but otherwise I have no idea what happens in it.

Anyway. The Mind Robber. It’s weird and surreal and sometimes things happen for no clear reason other than ‘because that’s how the story goes’, and I am…fine with that. I’m actually perfectly fine with not understanding everything. Why shouldn’t the world outside time and space as we understand it be one of pure imagination?

4.5 out of 5 stars for The Mind Robber




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 12, 1968] (October 1968 Galactoscope)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Although only bi-annual, rather than quarterly, at the moment, Carnell continues to regularly release his anthology series, easily eclipsing Pohl’s Star series and Knight’s Orbit. Will it be lucky #13?

New Writings in S-F 13
Hardback cover for New Writings in SF 13
Carnell notes there is an international flavour to this volume, with four Brits, Two Aussies, One American and One Belgian. Has any English Language SF publication series managed to have a male Belgian author before a woman author of any nationality? I think it may be a first! (International SF had both in its second issue.)

The Divided House by John Rackham
Leaving in 1984 on a ten-year voyage to look for intelligent life, Space-Farer IV now returns (due to time compression) in 2104. They find an Earth divided by genetics between the ruling Croms and their slaves, the Nandys, and the crew are split into the different camps.

I recently saw Judgement at Nuremburg on the BBC and this brought to my mind a scene where a witness on the sterilization procedure says:

My Mother…She was a hardworking woman, and it is not fair what you say. Here. I want to show you. I have here her picture. I would like you to look at it. I would like you to judge. I want that you tell me, was she feeble-minded? My mother! Was she feeble-minded? Was she?

This story addresses the question of eugenics, how we can judge one type of person to be inferior to another and how easy it is for science to be perverted. Important ideas.

And yet, I am not 100% sure I understand the conclusion he is meant to be reaching, nor the way in which it is delivered. I suspect this may be a story Rackham is planning to expand to novel length.

Three Stars for now.

Public Service by Sydney J. Bounds
On a densely populated island city, the fire service are reduced to a policy of containment instead of stopping fires. The poor are crying out for change, but what else can Fire Control do?

Reading this, I wondered if it was inspired by Kowloon Walled City, where the lack of access roads make it impossible for fire vehicles to enter. As such, it felt believable even in its exaggerated fashion, and Bounds put it together with great style. Dark, atmospheric but an all too realistic vision of the future.

Four Stars

The Ferryman on the River by David Kyle
The tower platform is a common site from which people throw themselves to their death. Hector is a salvager who takes away those who jump and offers them a new life. But is he salvation or slaver?

This is very much a stylistic piece, so your opinions will likely depend on how you feel about a regular switch between long run-on sentences full of descriptions and short clipped statements, in other words, how I write. I like it.

Four Stars

Testament by Vincent King
The Exploration Corps travel to 3m2t670, the last unexplored planetary system in the galaxy. Their mission, to determine if any other world has ever evolved life. We hear the record of Officer Dahndehr as his apparent discovery of the remnants of an ancient civilization turns to disaster.

King has tended to specialize in Vancian Medieval Futurism, but he manages to do well here in more common SFnal settings. It is a touch old fashioned, like a combination between Clarke and Ashton Smith, but he adds a unique style to it and has a twist in the tail I did not expect. Well done all round.

Four Stars

The Macbeth Expiation by M. John Harrison
On an unexplored planet an expedition shoots a group of alien beasts. When they return to the site, however, there is no sign of the encounter. Did they fail to hit them? Were they hallucinating in the first place? Or is something stranger going on?

This is described as a psychological thriller, and I would say that is accurate. It is a fairly atmospheric example, which makes us question what is real, albeit an unexceptional one.

A high three stars, probably a fourth for those who really enjoy the subgenre.

Representative by David Rome
Catton is an insurance salesman who is annoyed by his young neighbours, The Brownings. They laugh off his sales attempts and are convinced they will never need it. However, upon discovering a near identical couple have moved in next to his friends, he suspects something stranger is happening.

This is another example of what I term “Exurban Uncanny”, which often turns up in New Writings, unnerving stories about the sterileness of new towns. This is a pretty good story of this type, if rather obvious.

Three Stars

The Beach by John Baxter
People live in the warm embrace of the beach. Swimming, partying and in full contentment. One day Jael suddenly notices that buildings exist beyond the beach and leaves to investigate.

I am not sure what to make of this. Is it meant to be a mockery of surf bums? A stylistic experiment? An exploration of how people cope with trauma?

Whatever it is, Baxter writes it well enough to earn Three Stars.

The City, Dying by Eddy C. Bertin
Written in a sloping up and down fashion: A Thousand separate pieces each crying out for help Then below in big bold letters: Destroying
In breathless and experimental style, Bertin tells of Wade’s attempts to find meaning whilst living in a police state. But, in such a place, what is reality and what is nightmare?

Apparently, this was originally written for a Belgian literary contest, then translated into Dutch and further into English, revised by the author each time. However, you wouldn’t know it. It reads incredibly well and makes use of the kind of typographical experiments en vogue in New Worlds.

Yet, it doesn’t feel like it is doing anything particularly new; rather it is what might happen if Kafka had submitted a piece to Michael Moorcock.

A high three stars

Keep Calm and Carry On
So, overall, this was a pretty solid volume of his series. Nothing that would rise to an all time classic but nothing I did not find interesting to read. Will the series continue its success? Given the British John C. has been editing SF publications for just as long as his American counterpart, I don’t see either of them putting down their red pens any time soon.


by Victoria Silverwolf

Laughing to Keep From Crying?

The latest Ace Double (H-91) contains two short novels (probably novellas, really) with plots that seem comic, at first glance, but are treated mostly in a serious manner. Let's take a look at them.

Murphy's Law

The shorter of the two presents a situation in which anything that could go wrong does go wrong.

Target: Terra, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Some folks are inside a space station carrying nuclear weapons to be used against the Enemy should war break out. Our hapless hero, Intelligence Officer Angelo DiStefano, has to deal with artificial gravity that changes from zero to three times Earth normal, and everything in between, at random. His magnetic boots wander around on their own. The food machine produces inedible stuff that looks like weirdly colored snakes.

Bad enough, but when he finds out that the station's weapons are aimed at every major city on Earth, Good Guys or Bad Guys, he's got real problems.

So far, the story seems like a black comedy farce. I was taken by surprise, therefore, when an expository chapter reveals that the majority of Asians died in a plague that didn't harm non-Asians. Not exactly funny. Anyway, that's got something to do with the surviving Asians getting ready to attack the others, which will cause the station's missiles to launch.

(I should mention that the station has run out of sex suppressant, so the only woman aboard has a paranoid fear of being raped. Sorry, I'm not laughing.)

Angelo tries to figure out who's trying to wipe out all life on Earth. Aliens? A mad saboteur? And what can be done to prevent total Armageddon?

There's a lot of quirky characters, from a "midget" electronics genius to a captain who never leaves the bridge. Besides the distasteful content I mentioned above, there's also another armed space station containing Africans. The implication that there's a sort of racial Cold War going on doesn't fit very well with the silly slapstick that starts the story.

Two stars.

Far Out Music

The other, slightly longer, half of the book features a musical group set on going where no one has ever rocked and rolled before.

The Proxima Project, by John Rackham


Cover art by John Schoenherr.

Horace McCool is a rich guy who is obsessed with the band's female singer. The members of the Trippers call themselves Jim, Jem, Johnny, and Yum-Yum. Nobody knows their real names, or anything else about them.

Horace wants to marry Yum-Yum, even though he's never even met her. When he manages to make his way backstage during a concert, she's not interested at all. (Her utter disdain may be best demonstrated by the fact that she casually strips nude in front of him in order to take a shower.) Unable to take a very firm No! for an answer, Howard gives her a gift that has a tracking unit hidden in it. With his loyal secretary, who has her own crush on one of the male members of the group, Horace follows Yum-Yum and the others to a mansion on the Moon, and then much further.

Sounds like a romantic comedy, doesn't it? And yet there's a serious tone to much of the story. The four members of the Trippers are super-geniuses who only started the band so they could raise enough money for their secret project. They're cynical about the rest of the human species, and just want to get away from Earth forever, even if it means a seemingly suicidal one-way voyage.

Horace's mad passion seems way out of character for an otherwise sensible fellow. The climax of the story strained credibility to the breaking point. I suppose the author might be saying something about the worship of celebrities and the Generation Gap, but it's not a profound work in any way.

Two stars.

A is for Anywhere

Next on my reading list is a book that takes its two protagonists on another wild journey, but not into outer space.

Dimension A, by L. P. Davies

The narrator is a teenage boy who gets a message from a buddy of the same age. It seems that the other fellow's uncle disappeared, along with his mysterious helper. Enlisting the aid of a scientist, for whom the narrator works, they try to figure out what happened.

Not much of a mystery, really, because we find out right away that the uncle was working on a way to reach a parallel reality known as (you guessed it) Dimension A. (Does that mean our own universe is Dimension B?)

What with one thing and another, the two kids accidentally land in Dimension A, and don't see a way back. They have to deal with hallucinations created by an unseen entity behind a green mist, as well as primitive humans who somehow manage to have ray guns. Can they find the missing uncle and make their way home?

The novel seems intended for younger readers, mostly because of the age of the two main characters. The language isn't overly simple, and adults of any age can read it without feeling they're being talked down to. The book doesn't try to be anything but an imaginative science fiction adventure story, and it succeeds at that modest goal.

Three stars.

New and Improved?

Two well-known writers recently published expanded versions of earlier works.

Into the Slave Nebula, by John Brunner

This is a revision of one half of an Ace Double from 1960. (D-421, to be exact. The other half was Dr. Futurity by Philip K. Dick.)


Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.

I haven't read it, so I can't compare it with the new version.


Cover art by Kelly Freas.

At some time in the far future, Earth is a place of wealth and leisure. Robots and androids (artificially grown humans, with blue skin to identify them) do the work, while other folks enjoy themselves.

(There's a brief mention of people who have lost their wealth through foolish behavior. They're known as the Dispossessed. Otherwise, poverty doesn't exist.)

During a time of wild celebration, the protagonist stumbles across an android who has been severely beaten and maimed. Another android, knowing his fellow slave can't survive, puts him out of his misery with an injection. The protagonist is horrified by what happened to the dead android, but it's just considered destruction of property instead of murder.

(Given the different skin color of the android and their legal position in society, an analogy with American slavery prior to the Civil War seems likely.)

Adding to the mystery is the discovery of a dead man nearby with a knife in his chest. A police detective comes by, but doesn't seem very interested in solving the case.

The surviving android, noticing that our hero is sympathetic, slips him an item taken from the dead man. It reveals that he was a very important person everywhere but Earth. This sends the protagonist on a journey to several different colonized planets, where he learns the dark secret behind the manufacturing of the androids. Along the way, people keep trying to kill him.

(There's a plot twist that made me want to call the book Blue Like Me, but that seemed too frivolous.)

Not in the same league as the author's groundbreaking masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar, but a competent science fiction novel.

Three stars.

Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg

The novella Hawksbill Station appeared in the August 1967 issue of Galaxy.


Cover art by Sol Dember.

The Noble Editor gave it a positive review when it first appeared. Will the novel be better, worse, or about the same?


Cover art by Pat Steir.

In the twenty-first century, the United States is under a totalitarian (but superficially benign) government. Capital punishment is banned, but political prisoners are sent back in time about one billion years. Since travel to the future is impossible, this is equivalent to a life sentence.

The protagonist is the de facto leader of the exiles. (All male, by the way; there's another prison colony for women millions of years apart from the men. The novel never visits the female prisoners, and that might make for an interesting sequel.) He's more or less sane, unlike many of the other guys. One is trying to make a woman out of mud. Another is trying to use ESP to escape. Yet another attempts to contact aliens.

The situation changes when a new prisoner arrives. He's younger than usual, for one thing. More telling is the fact that he claims to be a economist, but doesn't known a darn thing about economics. What is he doing here?

If you've read the novella, you know that's the same plot. What's been added is a series of flashbacks, showing how the main character became a revolutionary and how he was betrayed and imprisoned. (These sections also feature the novel's only female character. She doesn't show up too much, but her fate adds a certain poignancy.)

The flashbacks make the character and the world in which he lives seem more real, but they're not absolutely necessary. Whether you prefer the leaner novella or the richer novel is a matter of taste. There isn't a big difference in quality, if any.

Four stars.


by Gideon Marcus

The Spawn of the Death Machine, by Ted White

Ted White has done it again…in more ways than one.

Some of you may remember Rosemary Benton's stellar review of Android Avenger, in which she gave five stars to the tale of Bob Tanner, a cyborg and revolutionary in a staid, computer-run future.

In the luridly (but appropriately) titled Spawn of the Death machine, Bob Tanner is back, and so is Ted White in fine form.

First, a little background, from the horse's mouth:

SPAWN was sold originally to Paperback Library, but was not my first submission to them (through my agent). The first book I submitted to them (in outline) was BY FURIES POSSESSED. They said they were looking for an Ace-Book-type book, so I figured, wothell archy, how about the sequel to an Ace Book? Which SPAWN is, being the sequel to ANDROID AVENGER (original title, changed by Don Wollheim, was THE DEATH MACHINE). That they bought.

The cover of the original edition of SPAWN was by Jeff Jones, who showed me the painting before I'd finished the book. The protagonist is holding a knife and defending the girl. So I wrote that into the book as a scene. But the art director decided to "improve" the cover and had the knife repainted (crudely) as a sword, and had shackles added to the girl, twisting her body in an anatomically absurd position. Pissed Jeff off no end, and me too.

Per Ted, Jeff is working on rewriting the rules of conduct for cover artists (keeping original paintings, selling only one-time repro rights). If successful, it will be a boon for all artists.

Anyway, as for the story…

Bob Tanner is wakened inside some sort of vault, naked, amnesiac. The robot brain inside exhorts him to explore the outside world, to spend a year amongst the humans, then report back with what he finds.

It turns out that civilization is long passed. He first arrives at the ruins of New York, the outskirts of which are inhabited by the most primitive of survivors, generations removed from the civilization Tanner only remembers in fragments. He is captured but escapes, taking with him the young Rifka, a captive member of the tribe.

Thus begins a series of adventures including a tangle with a bear, a run-in with a more advanced town with a mayor who doesn't let newcomers leave, a widespread constellation of farming communities at a 19th Century level of technology, and even a super-advanced enclave run by a group of individuals who were once the underdogs of society.

Through it all, Tanner becomes increasingly aware of his non-human nature—his metal bones, his ability to breathe fire, the hyperspeed he is capable of in brief spurts. And, at last, he discovers who he really is and decides what destiny he will forge for himself.

As is typical for Ted's books, I tore through this novel in short order. The man can't write a dull sentence even with a gun to his head. He takes the most cliché of settings and turns it into something fresh, certainly a damnsight better than Zelazny's recent stab at postapocalypse with Damnation Alley.

This may sound silly, but what I really liked about the book is that it's a romance. And not a "superman claims grateful damsel as prize" romance, but a believable progression of a relationship. Rifka is a well-realized character, one imbued with passion and an independent nature and set of priorities. It's not surprising that Ted draws her with such care—she is named after his wife, Robin Postal (Rifka means Robin in Yiddish). But, in general, the author is good with his female characters, surprising not just for the genre, but for the pulpy subgenre and venue.

I also really appreciate that one gets a pretty full picture of Bob Tanner even without having read the first book (in fact, I haven't, though it's on my shelf—it's really tough to find the time to read everything; even stuff you know is good). Honestly, the only real demerit to the book is its structure, really a series of vignettes. In that way, it is reminiscent of Omha Abides, C.C. MacApp's recent After-The-Apocalypse novel. Sure, White writes it better than most anyone else, but it still suffers from the disjointed, episodic nature of it.

Still, 4.5 stars, and I'm sure it'll make the Galactic Stars or at least get honorable mention this year.


by Jason Sacks

Star Well, by Alexei Panshin

I have a new favorite science fiction writer whose work I’m going to track. His name is Alexei Panshin and he’s had a terrific 1968.

Several months ago I reviewed Panshin’s novel Rite of Passage and found it intriguing, with great atmospherics, complex characters and a clever attitude which seemed to tell the story in multiple dimensions. Panshin told his story with a slightly ironic reserve to it, an approach which gave a detached commentary on the events, as if the narrator of the tale was someone looking back fondly at the events which shaped her.

That element is on display again in his newest novel, Star Well, but this time that ironic detached commentary reads like wry takes on the world readers are experiencing in the novel. For instance:

The apparently frightening and hopeless situation may turn out to have a candy-cream interior. That has been the main premise of the happy ending since the return of Ulysses.

Or he brings in a cute, clever meta-commentary about plot elements which gives the reader an aha! kind of feeling:

When managers of illicit traffic meet, their biggest plaint is the employment problem. In a word, henchmen. There are all too few young crooks willing to take training service under older and more accomplished men.

… a commentary which then goes into a detailed explanation of why it’s so dang hard to get good help these days, especially in a star base many light years away from anything important.

In short, these excerpts read like a bit of postmodern commentary on the space opera of Robert Heinlein. And since Panshin has written a monograph about Heinlein (Heinlein in Dimension, available through your local library, I’m sure), that reference has to be intentional.

Mr. Panshin's analysis of Heinlein

The lead character here is one Anthony Villiers, a kind of lazy trust fund baby who’s spending his life just wandering the Nashurite Empire, occasionally drifting when he has cash, occasionally grifting when he doesn’t have cash. He’s aristocratic and hates getting his hands dirty, but he also has a gentlemanly aspect about him which makes Villiers feel charming and kind.

Villiers finds himself at the Star Well, a space port/gambling hall/shopping stopover which has been drilled into an asteroid in an area of space in which “the stars don’t grow”; in other words, a simple stopover for travelers who need a warm bed and maybe a touch of the illicit while on their way to their final destination. As such, it’s a perfect place for illegal smuggling and inept, corrupt bureaucrats who are striving to improve their social position or at least their bank accounts.

A photo of Mr. Panshin from last year.

As you might guess, Villiers can’t help but get involved in the events at the Star Well, becoming quite the reluctant hero as he finds himself in conflict with Godwin, a man of low birth who yearns to be aristocratic, and Godwin’s boss Hisan Bashir Shirabi, a man with a massive inferiority complex who yearns to be like Villiers. Our protagonist also becomes unexpectedly close friends with the fifteen-year-old Louisa Parini, who traveled to Star Well en route to a stuffy finishing school but who craves adventure.

This is all so lightweight and enjoyable, and this whole charming souffle of a novel comes in at a mere 154 very quick pages – just like a Heinlein juvenile. And just like one of the juvies, there’s plenty of hints we’ll see more of Anthony Villiers in the future as he continues his peripatetic wanderings. I hope to spend many years following our besotted aristocrat as he wanders through the Nashurite Empire.

3.5 stars




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