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[October 10, 1968] Going Native (Star Trek: "The Paradise Syndrome")

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by Gideon Marcus

With two episodes under its belt, the third season of Star Trek has both disappointed and elated.  The general reaction to "Spock's Brain" amongst the fan population (beyond the Journey) was universally negative.  Buck Coulson of Yandro has even called for this season's producer Fred Freiberger to be ridden out on a rail.  On the other hand, "The Enterprise Incident" wowed everyone.  And so, we waited eagerly for Trek at 9:59 PM on a Friday night, a night when we could have been out drinking and carousing (who are we kidding—we're probably the only group for whom the Friday night "death slot" is actually perfect timing).

What we got was…well, closer to "Spock's Brain" in terms of quality.  In brief:

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a remarkably Earthlike planet, complete with pine trees, honeysuckle, and orange blossom (Spock must feel left out; when's the last time they visited a world just like Vulcan?) They are on a tight deadline: a moon-massed asteroid is making its inexorable way toward a collision with the planet.  While it will take two months to reach its target, the Enterprise must deflect the body now, or the ship will not be able to sufficiently perturb the colossus from its present orbit.

Why they don't do this first is not explained.  Perhaps they wanted to make sure there was something to protect on the planet before they went through all the trouble.


"I guess we do need to save this planet."

There is: a race of humans on the planet.  These are also familiar, exhibiting traits of the Navaho, Cherokee, and Delaware tribes in ancient America (which sounds as plausible as a mix of French, Turkish, and Finnish cultures to me, but what do I know?) Beyond this, they discover an alien obelisk, clearly not made by the present inhabitants.  A door to its interior is inadvertently opened, and Kirk falls in.  After an encounter with some mind-numbing equipment inside, the captain loses all of his memory.  Spock and McCoy, unable to find him, reluctantly abandon him to shift the asteroid.

Kirk emerges from the obelisk and is immediately accepted as a god.  It helps that he saves a drowned child with artificial respiration and has a profound knowledge of primitive agriculture and lighting techniques.  Conflict arises when he is given the Medicine Man's badge of office literally from the head of the former bearer.  Worse still, in his new role he is expected to man the obelisk, which is actually a deflector station, when the asteroid approaches.  Of course, Kirk doesn't know how to do this.  Well, let's hope the Enterprise can stop it.


"Oy.  I feel like the whole Sioux Nation is tap-dancing on my head."

They can't.  They burn out every circuit on the ship trying to repel the asteroid, then to destroy it.  (We do learn that the Enterprise has four forward-facing phasers, which is a nice bit of trivia.) Their warp drive destroyed, the starship must limp back to the planet on impulse power, just four hours ahead of the asteroid, and try to find a way to activate the obelisk.  Spock spends two months on the problem, concluding only at the last minute that the strange glyphs decorating the structure are musical notes.  When recited in proper sequence, they will open the thing up.


Spock, staying up to figure out the glyphs…or perhaps he's watching Johnny Carson.

Cut to Kirk (now known as "Kirok") atop the obelisk, the trees swaying and thunder rolling from the tidal force of the approaching moon.  Beside him is Miramanee, the native princess to whom he has been wed and who bears his child.  And there are lots of rocks.  A whole bunch of rocks.  Not tossed by the wind but by angry tribesmen who are angry that the false god can't figure out the obelisk.


"Oooo, that smarts!"

Spock and McCoy arrive in the nick-o-time to save the day.  Kirk's memory is restored.  He gets them in the obelisk.  Spock works the machine (pressing a single button), and everything is fine.  Except Miramanee.  Her internal injuries are too great, and she and the unborn child are doomed.  Kirk is sad.  FINIS.


"Your star medicine man can save me, right?" "Um…"

Boy.  The biggest problem with this episode is its contrived nature.  This asteroid must be in the planet's solar system, yet the Enterprise has to go Warp NINE to reach it in time, straining its engines.  Last episode, Warp Nine took the starship through the entire Romulan Neutral Zone in about a minute.  Then, on impulse, it takes two months to come back.  In Where No Man Has Gone Before, The Doomsday Machine, Balance of Terror, and The Menagerie, it's established that impulse may be slower than warp, but it's still faster than light.  Get your technologies straight!


"Whatever you do, Mr. Sulu, don't take us out of Reverse!"

I also have trouble with the length of time it takes for Spock to decode the glyphs.  In prior episodes, particularly "Wolf in the Fold" and "Conscience of the King", it's been shown that the ship's computer is extremely knowledgeable and very good at coordinating facts.  This should have been a trivial problem for it to solve.  Moreover, why didn't Spock enlist help?  After all, it's not as if there isn't anyone else on the vessel skilled at communications, foreign tongues, and music…


Did Uhura have any lines this episode?  Or was it just this quick cutaway?

The episode isn't terrible.  It's reasonably paced (except when scenes are padded, like when Kirk, in voiceover, tells us exactly what he just told Miramanee in person about the shipboard dreams he's been having).  The score is mostly new.  The special effects are tremendous.  The on-location shooting is lovely, especially since we're not at the usual Vasquez Rocks location (q.v. "Arena", "Friday's Child", etc. etc. etc.)

But it could have been more.  A real exploration of Kirk finally getting a beach to walk on, away from the burdens of command.  Instead, between the contrived plot, director Jud Taylor's inability to restrain Shatner's innate desire to chew scenery, and the tired white-man-as-savior-to-red-savages cliché (and couldn't the show have followed the trend set by High Chapparal and cast actual Native Americans?), I can't give this tale more than 2.5 stars.

That's better than Margaret Armen's first essay into Trekdom, "Gamesters of Triskelion", but that's damning with faint praise…

Cosmic Implications


by Lorelei Marcus

I cannot deny that this episode is severely flawed in many aspects, and I think that is important to highlight.  But I would rather devote my piece to the interesting universal implications brought on by the existence of "The Preservers".

As Spock explains in the latter half of the episode, the Earth ecology and Indian tribes appear to have been seeded on the planet (rather than having evolved there) by the same advanced race that left the obelisk.  His theory is that this alien race sought out dying civilizations and relocated them to inhabitable planets to preserve them.


A relic of the empire

Per McCoy's following off-hand observation, this becomes an easy explanation for many, if not all, of the humanoids scattered across the galaxy.

Previously, I theorized that the Star Trek universe actually comprised many alternate Earths in a sort of condensed multiverse, leading to a vast array of inhabitable planets and human-like aliens.  With the addition of the Preservers, I think this theory is still viable, but now under the assumption that the many Earths were created to seed human communities.  Indeed, perhaps even the moon-massed asteroid was placed around the planet to simulate our own moon.

This raises the question whether all the Earthlike worlds, from the one in "Miri" to pre-contaminated Sigma Iota 2 to the Roman world of "Bread and Circuses", were Preserver colonies.  The over-controlling computer in "Return of the Archons" may have been a Preserver artifact left to regulate the colony. "Patterns of Force" even has two planets of humanoids next to each other.  Maybe the Zeons were originally rescued Jews from 1940's Europe, explaining their overly apt names so similar to Isaac and Abram.

Theorizing aside, two major questions remain surrounding the Preservers.  First, who are they?  We've thus far encountered quite a few super powerful races who could fit the bill, but I think the technology level and the musical basis for communications suggests a less advanced level than, say the Organians (who presumably are beyond such things).

My first thought was the Greek Gods in "Who Mourns for Adonais", but the implication is that Apollo and the other Gods were stranded on their planet after one trip to Earth, making it impossible for them to seed multiple colonies.  A more likely candidate is Trelane's race.  The obsession with and research of human cultures, the machine that can turn a hostile world into a clement one, and even the knowledge of music—Trelane has a harpsichord in his living room—all make the adults of Trelane's race a leading candidate.  Trelane himself may have been studying an old human civilization to locate and preserve future ones.


After all, who wouldn't want to save this fellow?

This leads me to my second question: why are the Preservers obsessed with humans in particular?  We have seen there are more intelligent aliens than just humans, with their own rich civilizations and history.  The Vulcans are the prime example of this.  Could the Romulans have originated from a Preserver colony seeded from Vulcan?  It seems quite likely, particularly if the colonists were obtained during or shortly after Vulcan's warring period.

Could this mean there are also rogue Klingon colonies evolved separately from the main empire?  Did they exist once but were subsequently captured and incorporated?  If the Preservers did not single out humans for preservation, perhaps the reason human settlements are so often found by the Enterprise is that the Preservers seeded them close to Earth for Terrans to find.

As my compatriots and I have mentioned, this was not a great episode.  However, it kept me entertained nearly to the end, and its premises create vast implications about the Star Trek universe.  For that, at least, I give it three stars.

Pilgrim's Regress


by Amber Dubin

After fans fought tooth and nail to prevent the series's cancellation, you'd think the episodes in season 3 would reflect the very best writing Star Trek has to offer. Instead, for episode 3, we have writer Margaret Armen, author of "Gamesters of Triskellion," who has not yet proven herself to be the show's best and brightest. I can't imagine the way this episode turned out was entirely her fault, however. I sense the pitch for this episode went somewhat like this: "Hey Margaret, we have this leftover set from a Western near a lake that we can use for this episode. We can only spare a couple regular staff members for the field shots so make sure at least half of the episode takes place on the ship. Oh, and Shatner's been complaining he hasn't had enough space to spread his wings so make sure this one's especially Kirk-focused. Make it happen."

I imagine the resulting scramble was: "uh, ok.. Western themes.. uh, Pocahontas.. and the rest of the crew was separated by .. uh.. an asteroid! and it's Star Trek because of.. ancient alien technology! Phew, I did it!" The resulting episode feels rushed, uninspired, and at times as frustratingly offensive as I find nearly all Westerns.

They get all the creativity out of the way at the beginning of the episode when they describe the planet as earth-like but entirely crater-free, and an advanced alien obelisk is introduced that Kirk accidentally opens with a series of tones. The fact that he gets amnesia by accidentally activating a booby trap, I found pretty creative as well, even though Shatner's delivery of the moment of shock leaves much to be desired.

It's all downhill from there, however, as the very premise for why the three bridge officers are exploring the planet is completely absurd. It's ridiculous that they would be casually exploring an imperiled planet, 30 minutes before their last opportunity to deviate the oncoming asteroid's path. It's silly that Kirk wanders off by himself without telling anyone what he's doing, and even more absurd that Spock has to explain to McCoy with rocks why they have run out of time to recover their captain when he gets lost. The resulting tension on the ship is painfully contrived, as not only is it revealed that they're so far from the asteroid that they have to speed at warp 9 for so long that they burn out the engines, but they also are immediately out of options when two rounds of phaser fire seems to have no effect. It's also silly that Spock would make the decision to limp back to the planet on impulse power, directly in the path of the asteroid and it's sillier that it takes him almost that entire two months to decode the music-based glyphs on the obelisk, when it has been well-established how well-versed the half-Vulcan is in musical pursuits.

The plot on the planet is not much more cogent than on the ship. The brain-damaged Kirk immediately woos and falls in love with the chief's daughter, because all red roads lead to Pocahontas. I cannot even bother getting offended by how many times the Native Americans are referred to as "primitive," even though it's more than infuriating that the longer Kirk spends with the tribe, the more broken and rudimentary his speech becomes (although this could have been Shatner more than enthusiastically taking advantage of an opportunity to talk more slowly). The part I get most offended by is a white savior bringing with him the innovative concepts of food preservation and lamps.  Native American tribes were famous for their food preservation techniques! Moreover, the concept that indoor lighting had to be introduced to Native Americans is beyond insulting. Even cavemen brought torches into their caves! How primitive are they claiming this tribe to be? Also, I simply cannot abide the idea that an entire space-faring medical team could not heal Kirk's wife's mortal wound that could only have been inflicted by a maximum of two rocks. It was obvious the character had to die so that Kirk didn't look like a monster for abandoning his family on a backwater planet, but I think it's a mark of bad writing when I can so blatantly see the intention behind weak plot points.

Overall, this episode plays very much like a holiday special. It's the type of episode to be watched when you're stuffed as a tick after thanksgiving dinner and don't feel like getting up to change the channel. It's not particularly exhausting, but it's also neither memorable nor good. Someone did spend quite a lot of time making that cloak and obelisk look beautiful, though, so for that I give the episode..

2 stars.


"We can fly!  We can fly!  We can fly!"

[Come join us tomorrow night (October 11th) 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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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 8, 1968] Probing the future (November 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Professional opinion

Fred Pohl opens up this month's issue of Galaxy with a summary of the letters he's received from readers on how they would, in 100 words or fewer, successfully resolve the war in Vietnam.  He has great faith in the power of harnessing a bunch of smart folks to spit out solutions to problems.  I honestly don't know how useful someone's cursory stab at peace in Southeast Asia can be, even if it's from the pen of a clearly clever person like Judith Merril or Larry Niven.

He did, however, talk about a different kind of brain-tapping, one that has me very excited.  There's something called Sigma, which is a scientific way of presenting scenarios to people and assessing their likelihood, feasability, and desirability.  A consensus can then be reached and a mass-mind prediction derived. 

And as it turns out, I recently was sent a copy of Probe a 14-volume compilation of technological predictions made by the folks at TRW's Space Technology Laboratories—the folks who gave us Pioneers 0, 1 and 2, Explorer 6, Atlas Able, Pioneer 5, the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, and parts of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module.  I've only just started perusing it, but it makes for fascinating reading.  Of course, only time will tell if their predictions are accurate, or if they're even asking the right questions.

Of course, science fictioneers have been predicting the future in their own way for half a century.  And while the stories in this issue may not depict situations that ever come to pass, I have to say that are, at least, quite entertaining!


by Sol Dember, illustrating Building on the Line

Perris Way, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

I had not expected a continuation of the story, "Nightwing," but "Perris Way" is a direct sequel.  The tale picks up with our nameless Watcher, whose profession of scanning the skies for alien invasion, is no longer relevant as the invasion has come and succeeded, heading toward Perris (Paris) with his companion, the former Prince of Roum.  That latter, a member of the Dominator caste, was blinded during the invasion by the alien-in-disguise Gormon for forcing himself upon the Flier, Avluela, whom Gormon loved.  The two arrived at France's former capital to become members of the guild of Rememberers.

The erstwhile Watcher becomes an apprentice, and during his training discovers the true history of Earth and the hubristic crime that warranted the alien invasion.  His halcyon half-year with the Rememberers is abruptly terminated when the Prince shames the guild with a tactless act.  The Watcher, caught on the horns of a dilemma comprising the remedy to a Rememberer's anger versus (perhaps misplaced) loyalty to the Prince, comes up with a solution that ultimately pleases no one.  It also leaves room for a Part 3, which, if a novelization be forthcoming, is probably necessary to reach the appropriate length.

Silverbob's language is exquisite.  His poetic SFnal prose is probably even better than Zelazny's, and more approachable than Delany's.  His history of Earth is as fascinating as any that has been drawn.  On the other hand, he never treats his women well, and they are always sex objects, one way or another.  Contrast that with James Schmitz's Dr. Nile Etland, showcased just last month in Analog, lest someone want to lecture me on how "this is just the way things are."  Women do not exist just to be scenery, as much as those who hum "I'm a Girl Watcher" and hound the bosomy New Yorker Francine Gottfried on the way to work might like to think so.

It's still terrific stuff, but I can't give it more than four stars.

Keep Moving, by Miriam Allen deFord

Science fiction stories often play with the premise, "If this goes on…"  DeFord, one of the genre's most venerable authors, offers up a 22nd Century in which freeways pave virtually every square inch of the planet, and commuter culture has become the norm.  People don't even have homes anymore—they simply live in their cars, driving constantly to obtain food, entertainment, and presumably working while moving.

One man decides he's had enough and founds the "Live-In" movement, boldly staying put in one place over night.  This crazy idea wins the casual endorsement of dozens and the fervent support of one particular woman, a rather famous poet.  The ensuing partnership proves unstoppable.

Absolutely silly, but also quite charming.  Three stars.

Building on the Line, by Gordon R. Dickson


by Gray Morrow

Clancy and Plotchin are mismatched, feuding workers on the Line, a galaxy-spanning set of teleporter stations.  The two are building a set of Starlinks on the hostile world of XN-4010 when its incorporeal, gibbering race of "hobgoblins" unleashes a meteorite storm upon them.  Plotchin is incapacitated, maybe dead, but there is hope that an experimental cryogenic unit in the man's suit might be sustaining him.

Clancy decides that staying put and waiting for rescue is less desirable than making the 36-mile trek back to the main exploration ship.  And so, with Plotchin in his arms, he begins the brutal trek through the ice and near-vacuum of XN-4010, the hobgoblins nibbling at his psyche the entire way.  This bit is truly thrilling, reminiscent of the middle section of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel when our heroes are making a similar journey across the frozen wastes of Pluto.

The denouement, however, is a rather windy extolling of the virtues of heroic men expanding the horizons of mankind.  It all felt a little hollow, especially as it is intimated that the hobgoblins may not be malicious but simply trying to defend their world from an onslaught of human tourists.  That, to me, was the more important point, and it was tossed aside.  Framed differently, Line's premise could have made an excellent novel, with themes similar to those explored brilliantly in Silverberg's The Man in the Maze.  Alas.

Still, it's beautifully written, and the first two thirds are a wild ride.

Four stars.

For Your Information: My Friend, the Nautilus, by Willy Ley

This is quite a neat piece, definitely a throwback to Willy's better days.  It's really the evolutionary history of mollusks, with an eventual focus on nautiloids and their relatives, the ammonites.  No, this is not a Pennsylvania religious sect but a prolific family of shelled mollusks that thrived during the Age of Dinosaurs.

Given that octopuses (Ley calls the plural 'octopi', tsk tsk) are shockingly intelligent, and ammonites were advanced nautiloids, I think stories about sapient Mesozoic shellfish would be fascinating.  Be sure to credit me with the idea if you use it.

Four stars.

The Market in Aliens, by K. M. O'Donnell

An unscrupulous fellow runs a brisk trade in sapient aliens.  He has occasional twinges of guilt, but he perseveres, nevertheless.

This is a dark, ugly story.  Looking back on it, I think I have to give it four stars.  It says a lot with a little.

Locust Years, by Douglas R. Mason


by Brock

In the not too far future, universities literally recreate the past, casting lines through time to reel in prehistorical happenings for student viewing.  But when a construction accident summons a wounded mastodon and opens up a time vortex, no one is safe—up to and including humans from other time frames!

This is an interesting story, if initially difficult to apprehend.  Probably the best thing the author has written to date.  Three stars.

The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine, by Brian W. Aldiss

This one's about bitter, middle-aged man, reeling from the recent loss of his wife and his ejection from the board of the company that made his fortune.  Said company has discovered the secret of synthetic life, starting with the recreation of dinosaurs, and with the aim of creating complete humans.  Ostensibly, the man hates his father-in-law, erstwhile partner in the endeavor, for his lack of morality, and for the coldness he has hitherto shown his family.  In fact, there is something deeper going on, and a rift that may not be mendable, even as the father-in-law attempts to attone.

I found myself moved by this one.  Definitely one of Aldiss' better efforts of late.

Four stars.

Eeeetz Ch, by H. H. Hollis


by Dan Adkins

I had gone into this one expecting from the title some sort of joke story.  It's not.

Dolphins are hot news this decade.  From Flipper to People of the Sea to World of Ptavvs, the idea of porpoises being partner sapients is catching on in a big way.  Hollis' story details the visit of the junior Senator from Hawaii, Ramon Coatl (presumably of Filipino ancestry), to a Caribbean research center.  There, the dolphin called Andy but really named Eeeetz Ch is being fitted with artificial hands and tested on advanced machinery.  But the tests go both ways—the two scientists working with him (a man and a woman, the woman being the senior engineer; Silverbob, take notes) are fitted with artificial gills that plug into a plate surgically embedded in their sternums.

There's doesn't exactly seem to be a plot to the whole thing, until it's done, and you understand the stakes of Coatl's visit.  Hollis says a lot about intelligence and handicaps, about technology and ethics, without spelling it out too heavy-handedly.  Most impressively, all of the characters are extremely well realized.  Andy the dolphin, in particular, is an alien.  A likeable, sympathetic one, but not human.

This is my favorite story of the issue.  It's both conventional and new, prosaic and profound.  It made me laugh a couple of times.  It kept me riveted.

Five stars.

Like, wow!

What a contrast, huh?  Last month, Galaxy finished at a dismal 2.4.  This month, we're at 3.9, probaby the best mag of the year.  It reminds me of the old Gold days of the early '50s.  Of course with a spread like that, it's hard to make any solid predictions, but at least there's always a chance every month that Galaxy will knock it out of the park like it did this month.

That's something to look forward to!

(oh, and dig the cool offer on the back of the mag—Trek is everywhere!)




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 6, 1968] Snail on the Slope? (November 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Suspicions confirmed—this November Amazing names as Editor Barry N. Malzberg, who was listed last issue as Associate Editor.  Sol Cohen is now merely the Publisher.  Oddly, though, the editorial is by Harry Harrison, now listed as Associate Editor (though most likely gone).  Go figure, or just say it’s more Sol Cohen chaos.

Johnny Bruck is back as the cover artist; this one (from Perry Rhodan #109, published in 1963) looks even more cliched and perfunctory than his earlier covers, making me wonder if they are really getting worse, or if I am just getting more tired of them.


by Johnny Bruck

“New” is sprinkled across the cover wherever possible to distract from the fact that once again, reprints dominate.  Four new short stories take up 36 pages, just under 25% of the magazine. And the prize: “plus stories by: RAY BRADBURY (Winner of the Aviation Space Writers Association’s Top Award). . . .” Does Bradbury need that kind of boosting? 

One of the new stories, interestingly, is a collaboration between Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany.  When Delany appeared with a novel excerpt in the issue before last, his name was misspelled about half the time; this issue, it’s misspelled “Delaney” everywhere—on the cover, on the contents page (twice), on the first page of the story, in the book review column.  Well, small mercy, it’s spelled right in the blurb for the story. 

There are worse production botches, discussed when I get to them.

Harrison’s editorial, Science Fiction and the Establishment, is superficial and banal: the Establishment doesn’t like SF, it’s a problem all over, but it’s starting to get better, someday it will be gone.  The book review column continues interestingly but incestuously, with James Blish as William Atheling reviewing Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany reviewing Blish.  Leon E. Stover contributes another in his “Science of Man” series, discussed below.

Despite all the above kvetching about the magazine’s presentation, the good news is that the new short stories are as interesting a batch as we’ve seen in Amazing for a while, and the reprints are all readable or better, unlike many of their predecessors. 

Power of the Nail, by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany

Ellison and Delany’s Power of the Nail reads like what Ellison was publishing in the SF magazines around 1957, polished up by a smoother writer.  Robert Zagaramendo and his wife Margret are Ecological Observers on the planet Saquetta, and boy howdy is Margret pissed: “You promised me better than this, somewhere.” Robert’s not too thrilled either, especially with Margret.  Bickering is constant.

Saquetta features the Saquettes, mole-like aliens who are not at all cute, but have the interesting trait of being reincarnated when they die naturally, which is most of the time.  But the vibrations of the “phase-antenna of the automatic ecology equipment” that the humans are burying in various locations draw the Saquettes away from their usual hideouts to places where they are vulnerable to attack by giant predatory birds, called molloks because that’s what the Saquettes scream when they’re being hunted.


by Dan Adkins

After further conflict with his wife, including a near-rape, Robert sets up “ecology equipment” near an especially large Saquette colony, complete with lurking molloks, and goes back later to find, as expected, hundreds of dead Saquettes.  He builds little round coffins for them and nails them together, then goes back and tells Margret that they’re going home—and shortly, suffers a terrible and fatal punishment that is not clearly explained, though one may surmise it is related to the operation of the "automatic ecology equipment."  (Compare David H. Keller's The Doorbell if you've ever read it.) In the moral universe of the story, it’s obviously because he decided to sacrifice hundreds of Saquettes in order to escape an emotionally intolerable situation.

It's a very vivid and readable story, which goes some way towards compensating for its ultimate obscurity.  Three stars.

The Monsters, by David R. Bunch

The formerly prolific David R. Bunch, who has not appeared in Amazing since Sol Cohen took over, is back with The Monsters.  It’s short as usual for Bunch, and on a familiar theme: the need to harden one’s small children against the brutalities of life by brutalizing them pre-emptively.  (See Bunch’s earlier story A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins, Fantastic June 1961, and thence to Judith Merril’s annual “year’s best” volume.) Here, the threat the children are to be prepared for is a bit trite, but the writing is brisk and economical.  Three stars.

Try Again, by Jack Wodhams

Jack Wodhams is new to me, though the Journeyer-in-Chief has not thought highly of his work in Analog.  His Try Again is surprisingly good.  Pyler, a psychiatrist, is having a session with the precocious five-year-old Tommy, who says he has lived before and remembers it.  But this isn’t quite the same life as before, since with adult memories he acts differently the second time around.  Tommy is much burdened by his knowledge of future events and the question whether he could do anything about them (it’s 1935, Mussolini has just invaded Ethiopia; and Tommy knows what comes later).  Shortly he is kidnapped to Germany.  An alternative history, even worse than the real one, is telegraphically unfolded.  Tommy, who has disappeared from the plot after his interrogation, reappears at the terrible end.  Four stars—maybe a bit crude, but powerful.


by Jeff Jones

The reading experience is undermined at the end by Amazing’s production values, or lack of them.  The story stops on page 29 in the midst of a sentence with no “continued on” notice, and the reader is left to rummage through the magazine to find the rest of the text on page 138.

This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty

R.A. Lafferty’s This Grand Carcass is, typically, told in high Tall Tale mode, and it is also clearly a moral tale, though the precise moral may be a bit obscure.  Mord comes to Juniper Tell offering to sell a device cheap that will allow Tell to “own the worlds.” So why is he selling it?  He’s dying. Tell bites and is the new owner of Gahn, for Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus, which soon enough is outdoing and dominating all the other “general purpose machines.” Shortly, it is a full partner with Tell (in Tell and Gahn—get it?). 

Before long, Tell, like Mord, is almost, er, gone, and Gahn (whose power inputs have been revealed as dummies) candidly admits: “I use you.  I use human fuel.  I establish symbiosis with you.  I suck you out.  I eat you up.” So Tell sells Gahn on to the next high-rolling sucker.  Moral, did I say?  Machines are the Devil?  Anything that makes humans’ work too easy is damnation?  Something along those lines, I’m sure.  This is not one of Lafferty’s best; it is simultaneously obvious and vague and less deliciously absurd than Lafferty at his best.  But it’s amusing enough, good for three stars.

The Dwarf, by Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf (Fantastic, January/February 1954), Mr. Bigelow, a dwarf, visits the carnival daily, forks over his dime at the Mirror Maze, and heads straight for the mirror that makes him look large.  Aimee, a carnival worker, hangs out in the booth with ticket-seller Ralph when her business is slow.  She is sympathetic to Mr. Bigelow’s plight.  Ralph isn’t, and makes fun of him, and of her.  Aimee discovers that Mr. Bigelow makes a living writing detective stories, which reveal his inner torments.  Ralph plays a nasty trick on him, proving that Ralph is nasty, which we already knew.


by Sanford Kossln

Rather abruptly, end of story.  Or is it?  There’s no “Continued on . . .” at the end.  As with Try Again, I rummaged through the magazine, but found no loose piece of the story.  So I checked the original 1954 Fantastic . . . and there’s an entire page of text at the end that is omitted from this reprinted version.

No rating, since the full text doesn’t actually appear in the magazine.  It’s not one of Bradbury’s better stories to my taste, but it’s a whole lot better complete than truncated.  Sheesh.

The Traveling Crag, by Theodore Sturgeon

The Traveling Crag, from the July 1951 Fantastic Adventures, is a silly confection by Theodore Sturgeon—a non-trivial category of his ouevre.  On the other hand, silliness by Sturgeon is more palatable than that from less accomplished hands.

Cris is a literary agent with an assistant, Naome, who is obviously in love with him, though he is oblivious.  Cris has received a story, The Traveling Crag, from an unknown, Sig Weiss, which “grabs you by the throat, shakes your bones, puts a heartbeat into your lymph ducts and finally slams you down, gasping, weak, and oh so happy,” and incidentally makes a lot of money fast.  But Weiss sends no more stories.  Cris visits to find out why, and the local storekeeper warns him, “Meanest bastard ever lived,” a judgment Weiss lives up to in the flesh.


by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)

When Weiss finally submits another story at Cris’s urging, it begins: “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light-years from Sol.” This is the beginning of a notorious subscription ad that ran in Galaxy, headlined YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY!, designed to distinguish Galaxy’s policy from that of lowbrow pulp magazines like . . . Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories.  So to perpetrate this in-joke, Sturgeon must have convinced not only Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, but also Fantastic Adventures editor Howard Browne, to allow it.

But I digress.  The point is that Weiss has turned in a bunch of crap, continuing his mean-bastard performance.  Meanwhile, Cris meets Miss Tillie Moroney, who is offering a reward for an “authentic case of devil into saint,” and eventually tells him a story—“a science fiction plot”—about a humanoid race that has developed the ultimate weapon, one of which has apparently been lost on Earth for thousands of years.  And she wants Cris to get Weiss to write another blockbuster story and then find out how and where he wrote it.

So Weiss produces another story that makes everyone cry, and Cris and Tillie head out to see him, but Naome the assistant contrives to get there first, and the ultimate weapon, a small object found after a rockslide, proves to have been the key to Weiss’s transformation, but it gets triggered, and one of Tillie’s blouse buttons emits communications from the humanoids, who explain to them all telepathically that the ultimate weapon was one that stops useless conflict, and now a reaction is propagating through the atmosphere to bring the weapon’s benefits to all the world (it’s science!), and by the way Naome has paired off with Weiss, and Nick with Tillie.  “Outside, it was a greener world, and all over it the birds sang.”

It's all just Too Much, but rendered so smoothly as to disarm even the house misanthrope’s ire.  Three stars for this feat of making fatuity charming.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

“Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed, for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind.  Universe?  Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit.  Universe?  The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of whose who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak.  The word is a mockery.  Yet how glibly men utter it!  How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!”

Yes!  Rave on!  Here is a fine specimen of the peak of cosmos-spanning rhetoric occasionally reached by early (pre-Campbell) SF, and what follows lives up to it in naïve grandeur.  It is the first paragraph of He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, a novella from the August 1936 Amazing.

The plot is essentially that of The Man from the Atom run backwards.  Atoms are solar systems and galaxies are molecules, and the Professor has devised a substance (called Shrinx!) that will reduce humans to subatomic dimensions so they can explore the sub-universes.  When his unnamed assistant is unenthusiastic about making this one-way trip, the Prof stabs hin with the needle.  As he shrinks, the Prof drops him onto a block of Rehyllium-X (sic!), where he descends into a microscopic scratch on its surface and is chased around by a germ, fearsomely portrayed by illustrator Morey.


by Leo Morey

Soon enough, our hero finds himself surrounded by luminous masses—nebulae!—and then, as he shrinks further, stars and planets.  He alights on one occupied by gaseous intelligences, shrinks further to a planet of cave-dwellers, and then (in a powerful passage) to a planet of machines gone out of control.  Their birdlike creators have fled to the world’s moon, as their mechanical heirs maniacally tear down the remains of their civilization and remake the world closer to their circuits’ desire. 

Our hero continues downward, or smallward, through universes he cannot bring himself to recount except in the most summary form (“Suns dying . . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more years of sustenance . . . [etc.]”) But then . . . he is mysteriously attracted to a tiny, distant spark of yellow, which on approach proves to be circled by planets including a tiny blue one that twinkles invitingly, so he approaches, descends, and finds himself in . . . Cleveland!

Well, actually, he lands in Lake Erie, flooding much of Cleveland as well as nearby Toledo.  Upon attaining dry land, he is accosted by aircraft shooting at him, which he finds annoying.  He is bundled into a vehicle and taken to Cleveland, to a building where scientists assemble to interrogate him, but are unable to understand his thoughts, though he can read theirs.  He is not impressed by them, or humanity.  He escapes and flees into the countryside, where he is drawn to an isolated house occupied by a writer, of science fiction of course, who is sufficiently enlightened to be capable of receiving his thought, and to whom the shrinking man tells his tale before continuing his apparently endless and by now wearisome voyage.

In one sense this is an odd story for Amazing to reprint, since it appeared in the 1946 anthology Adventures and Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—one of the oldest stories in the book, and the only one from Amazing.  That book is so well known that stories included in it are much more likely to be familiar to current Amazing readers than most of Sol Cohen’s other reprints.  I read that anthology when I was a kid and wondered what this old-fashioned story based on scientific nonsense was doing in the company of Heinlein, Asimov, et al.  But I’m younger than that now and can better appreciate its hokey majesty.  Four stars, allowing for its age.

Henry Hasse (b. 1913) began publishing SF in 1933; this is his third published story.  Aside from it, he is best known for collaborating with Ray Bradbury on a few minor early stories.  None of his other work, which has appeared sporadically over the decades, has garnered the recognition that this story has. 

One side note: This story presents a very early occurrence of what later was named Tuckerization, after its heavy use by Wilson Tucker: giving fictional characters the names of real members of the SF community.  The Cleveland writer to whom the shrinking man tells his story is named Stanton Cobb Lentz, obviously a reference to Stanton A. Coblentz, a prolific SF writer mainly of the late ‘20s and ‘30s, whose work is nowadays most charitably described as quaint. 

The Last Day, by Richard Matheson


by Robert Kay

In Richard Matheson’s The Last Day (Amazing, April/May 1953), the Sun is about to destroy Earth (it’s swollen and red and much too hot).  Protagonist wakes up after the last night, which he and friends have spent in drunken, lustful, and/or senselessly destructive pursuits.  He decides this approach to the end is unsatisfactory, and after wrestling with his conscience reluctantly heads to his parents’ house (shooting an attacker en route).  He has avoided this visit for years because of his mother’s excessive piety.  But on this final hot day, she’s cool, and they hang out waiting for the end.  The editor blurbs: “Waxing philosophical is like waxing a floor; it is powerful easy to fall on your face while trying it.” Matheson does not.  Four stars, mainly for keeping just on the right side of bathos as he renders the conventional sentiments.

Science of Man: War Is Peace, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover is back with another of his “Science of Man” articles, War Is Peace, written in his usual dogmatic style.  He takes on the likes of Konrad Lorenz (of On Aggression), arguing that aggression is not a mode of behavior that we must sublimate or otherwise redirect, but a goal-directed extension of human social organization.  He says: “The ethologists have nothing to offer that can improve on what Karl von Clauswitz said of war in the 19th century: that it is an extension of politics carried on by different means.” And he concludes: “There is no magic solution to be found in animal behavior studies, psychology, or biology.  Do not be misled.  The only solution is better politics.  But we have to know that to want it.” Well, maybe—he has no suggestions for how we get there in practice.  But Stover recounts much entertaining anthropological lore along the way.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Well, that wasn’t bad at all.  The new material is lively and interesting, and even the reprints are all readable or better, with nothing grossly stupid or incompetent.  Admittedly, that shouldn’t be the standard, but in Sol Cohen-world it does make a difference.  This issue is a magazine that one might actually purchase for enjoyment and not as a duty, a change not to be sneezed at.  Can it continue?

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




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 4, 1968] (Star Trek: "The Enterprise Incident")

3 Comments


by Erica Frank

This episode begins with Kirk acting strangely, and everyone on the Enterprise has noticed. He is snappish, angry, arbitrary; he gives orders that defy Federation law and threatens people who argue with him.

His crew is loyal; they have been through many hardships together—so when he orders them into the Romulan Zone, they obey, although they are obviously nervous.


The Captain's orders are final

They are, of course, discovered, surrounded by Romulan vessels of a new, Klingon design. Kirk and Spock are compelled to beam aboard the Romulan ship to discuss matters, in exchange for two Romulan prisoners sent to the Enterprise. Kirk insists their location is a matter of instrument error: by the time they discovered the mistake, they were too deep in Romulan territory to get away quickly. The Romulan Commander (the first woman flag officer we have met in the show) says that sounds like—well, she doesn't call it the produce of a hind end of a male cow, because she is being politely formal, and this is a television show for families (and the Romulans may not have cattle), but she obviously indicates that it sounds implausible to her.


Color her unconvinced

Spock… confirms her opinion. Says the captain has been irrational recently. That he ordered them past the Neutral Zone. Kirk gets angry and threatens him, and is removed to the Romulan brig. Later, he injures himself enough that they call McCoy to attend him, and he attacks Spock. Spock defends himself with the "Vulcan death grip," an attack we haven't seen before, that looks surprisingly similar to the mind-meld grip.


The closer Jim gets, the worse he looks…

The Romulans send the captain's body back to his ship while the Romulan Commander attempts to convince Spock that he'd be much happier in the Romulan empire.

Have we seen this before?

McCoy revives Kirk. (I wonder if anyone actually thought Kirk died.) Kirk tells a select few people that his supposed insanity was a ruse, a form of dodging accountability in case they were captured. This is an undercover mission. 

The interesting part of the episode, for me, is the Romulan Commander's discussions with Spock. She attempts to seduce him in multiple ways, first laying out how much more power he'd have in the Romulan empire, and when Spock says he does not want command of a ship, she switches tactics. She offers him fine Vulcan food, which he admits is better than what's on the Enterprise. Pours him drinks—first a clear blue-green liquid, and later something orange, served in small glasses like liquor. Spock eats tiny food on toothpicks, and relaxes with her.

She puts herself into the bargain: "Romulan women are not like Vulcan females; they're not… dedicated to pure logic." She drapes herself enticingly, making sure he knows what she's offering. She whispers her name in his ear, and he tells her it's beautiful.


Oiling her traps

At each point, he makes appreciative comments, tells her that the offer is indeed a good one. That he can tell he'd have more power, more freedom, more creature comforts in the Romulan empire.

Eventually, he agrees to her terms: he will lead a small party of Romulans aboard the Enterprise, and from there order the ship to surrender at a Romulan port, her flagship at its side.

It doesn't matter what the terms are. He's lying. He's obviously lying—at least, it's obvious to anyone who knows him. Maybe outsiders who think Vulcans are actually emotionless would believe that Spock agreeing that the food is good means he's content to betray his heritage and his captain and wander off to a government with helmets designed to cover pointed ears.

Predictable but not boring

Instead, it turns out Spock was stalling for time so Kirk could sneak back to the Romulan ship in disguise and grab the new cloaking device. Scotty then has to install and use it before the Romulans get their phasers online—of course there's a deadline. But if we didn't believe Spock used a death grip on Kirk, we weren't going to believe the Romulans would succeed in blowing up the Enterprise. We wonder how they will escape, but not whether.

We could see the Commander convincing herself that her seduction was working—and we could also see Spock watching her reactions, feeding her facts that would convince her that he agreed, without actually admitting to being moved by her offer. Since he's a Vulcan, she doesn't expect him to offer an emotional reaction—and she fails to notice that not only is his enthusiasm lacking, so is any admission that he's actually been persuaded.

He says that the food is better than what the Enterprise has—he doesn't say that he'd leave his position for it. "Please give up your career; we have better snacks" is not going to work on anyone who actually likes their job.

Four stars. I loved the nuanced interactions between them, and I could tell something was off about Kirk but wasn't sure what until McCoy revived him.

Rewriting the present


by Gideon Marcus

Somewhere in North Korea, 83 American sailors and officers are interned, their captain occasionally forced to make confessions as to why his spy ship, the U.S.S. Pueblo, was inside Communist waters in January of this year.  I'm sure you all remember the news—air units were redeployed from Vietnam to Japan, the U.S.S. Enterprise (the aircraft carrier, not Kirk's ship) was stationed off the North Korean coast, and there were rumbles of an impending World War 3.  Indeed, if it hadn't been for the North Vietnamese launching their Tet holidays offensive at the end of January, shifting our focus, who knows where things might have ended up?

With The Enterprise Incident, the metaphor couldn't be more blatant.  The Romulans have been remolded.  Gone are the Kriegsmarine/Roman hybrids that populated "Balance of Terror".  Now they are cloaked in Orientalism, down to the little sideburns Joanne Linville sports, with their smooth speech reminiscent of every movie that features a sinister Red Chinese or Korean.  Vina's exotic theme from "The Cage" has been reworked for the Romulan Commander (effectively, I might add).  The defense-minded Romulans, who showed no interest in capturing the Enterprise when it violated the Neutral zone in "The Deadly Years", suddenly want nothing more than the prize of one of Star Fleet's finest vessels, a greed that proves their undoing.

And so, the American public gets to have its cake and eat it, too.  The Romulan Commander has the right of it when she accuses Kirk of entering Romulan space on a Federation-sanctioned espionage mission to get the cloaking device.  Yet, thanks to a series of Mission: Impossible-style exploits, the "good guys" get away with not only bearding the lion, but stealing the lioness. Rah, rah.  We win.


For ease of maintenance, you can't beat the easy-to-remove Cloaking Device!

This episode is only the latest in what has become a kind of motif.  Earlier this year, John Wayne's "The Green Berets" (the movie that took Sulu away from us for much of Trek's second season) turned Vietnam into World War 2, complete with a platoon with soldiers named Muldoon and Kowalski—and precious few black troops.  David Janssen, no longer a fugitive, plays a jaded reporter, who comes to learn the value of the American presence in Southeast Asia.  And so, contrary to any news you might have read this year, we win the war in Vietnam.

And just last month, the movie Anzio came out, detailing that SNAFU of a landing on the Italian coast in January 1944.  Robert Mitchum plays…a jaded reporter, who comes to learn the pointlessness of the American presence in southern Europe.  Thus, the anti-war movement comes to World War 2.

Mind you, "The Enterprise Incident" is better than either of those two movies.  It's superlatively paced, the dialogue crackles, the chemistry between Nimoy and Linville is palpable, and Shatner makes a convincing Romulan.  I'm even getting used to Scotty's new hairdo.  But the flag-waving has not been so blatant since "The Omega Glory".  Juxtaposed with the nauseating Nixon ad that aired halfway through, lambasting American policy in Vietnam and promising "peace with honor", the episode just didn't sit well with me.

Four stars.  Just have your Maalox tablets handy.

The Lady IS the Tiger


by Janice L. Newman

I’ll admit, when I watched The Enterprise Incident the other night, at first I was frustrated by the behavior of the Romulan Commander. But upon watching the tape we made of the episode with our trusty “Videocorder”, my feelings changed.

Women have an interesting, inconsistent place in the Star Trek universe. Sometimes they are slaves or seemingly exist only to titillate the male characters, like Shahna or Kara (the dancer from “Wolf in the Fold”). Sometimes they have positions of power and importance, like Uhura, Commissioner Nancy Hedford, or Sylvia. Yet even the women in the latter group often give up their position or power when tempted by romantic love. I originally thought the Romulan Commander fell into this same trap, but upon re-watching the episode, I realized I was wrong.

The Romulan Commander is doing her job.


These boots are made for commanding

When the Enterprise flew into the neutral zone, what a plum it must have seemed had fallen into their lap. After the ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ response from “The Deadly Years”, perhaps the Romulans re-evaluated their policy for when a ship like the Enterprise strayed into their territory. Or perhaps this particular commander was just especially ambitious. Regardless, rather than immediately blowing up the ship, she looked for a way to capture it and its wealth of intelligence. Knowing that the crew would surely self-destruct rather than let themselves be taken, she sought a crack in their armor that she could exploit.

Her interest in Spock thus becomes a rational, considered strategy rather than that of a woman letting her heart overrule her mind. She is believably attracted to him, but she is also doing her duty. If she can ‘turn’ Spock, and if he then orders the crew to surrender rather than self-destructing, not only will she win the starship, but the cooperation of a high-ranking Starfleet officer.

Perhaps her reach exceeds her grasp. Perhaps she is too greedy. With the benefit of hindsight and inside knowledge of Kirk’s and Spock’s personalities, it’s easy to be judgemental and say, “She should have just blown up the ship,” or “She should have known better.” But these are still better than, “She should have been thinking with her head rather than her heart.”

When her actions are viewed as those of an ambitious Romulan Commander who wants to get ahead and who is loyal to her people, they make perfect sense. After all, how many times has Captain Kirk used seduction to manipulate women and get what he wants? Can we blame the Romulan Commander for taking a gamble and trying the same? She may have lost, but I can’t help but respect her for trying.

I also appreciated Spock’s acknowledgement that no other outcome was possible, because she would not have truly respected him if he’d made such a choice. No matter how attracted to him she might have been, in the end she would merely have been using him, and they both know it. If there were any doubts that she was seducing him for political more than personal reasons, this line lays them to rest.

Three and a half stars.

The bounty


by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

Two officers beam onto a ship. The captain is confident and capable, skilled at manipulation, and fools even the audience. One provides a distraction and the other collects a valuable asset in a dangerous gamble.

No, I don't mean Kirk stealing the cloaking device.

It was a neat trick and one that allowed the Enterprise to escape without a trace, but I would argue that it was not the actual mission goal, or at least, not the only mission goal. As Kirk and Spock went up against the Commander – who could serve as the Romulan answer to Captain Kirk – this was yet another layer of the ruse. Romulan technology is advanced, but what is more powerful? Knowledge.

It was only in "Balance of Terror" that Romulans were even seen for the first time in a century. Additionally, Starfleet intelligence had already told some of the Bridge crew that Romulans were now using Klingon ship design. Between a cloaking device and the weapons capability to obliterate entire outposts, why switch to a design that the Fleet is not only more familiar with but has dealt with more often? The Enterprise could be destroyed before they ever make contact with a ship past the Neutral Zone. An alliance with the Klingons could change the terms of the Organian peace treaty. Klingon/Federation battles may not be possible but bringing in allies might circumnavigate the way the Organians neutralized fighting capabilities. Finding a way to disrupt a power consolidation such as that seems a far more compelling reason to risk losing the Enterprise or potentially igniting a new conflict with the Romulans.


Spock obtains the real prize of the expedition

With Kirk "dead" and the more immediate threat "discovered", Spock was free to act. He and the Commander shared cultural information, confirming aspects of what the species knew of each other. He also had time to observe Romulan command structure, the quarters of the Commander, and possibly even collect information from her mind. This would be a gamble, as they share distant ancestry and Spock can be vulnerable when connecting with another mind, but not inherently riskier than the plan for Kirk.

Whether they escape with the cloaking device or intelligence, Starfleet gains something to use.

5 stars

Mission: Possible


by Joe Reid

In his letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul says, “…I am made all things to all men, that I by all means save some.” This episode, “The Enterprise Incident”, epitomized becoming many things to a varied audience.  This episode skillfully blended multiple themes and genres into a cohesive quilt that when looked at from a distance you realize isn’t a quilt at all.  It is a beautiful tapestry, a singular thing that through different sets of eyes will reveal itself differently. 

In the past I complained about episodes that attempted to do too many things in one airing: “The Gamesters of Triskelion” comes to mind.  The different themes in that episode were not blended, to the point of being jarring.  “The Enterprise Incident” presents a military thriller, a heist story, a secret agent tale, a romance, and a science fiction story all rolled into one.  This unified, multifaceted story is not the only reason that I loved this episode.  Here are some other reasons:

It didn’t go out of the way to tell the audience what was happening.  The events told the story.  There was no long explanation from Captain Kirk as to what was happening.  We were given no reason why Romulans were flying Klingon ships.  There was no discussion as to why the commander of the Romulans was female and whether that was common.  The audience was given no revelation as to whether or not Romulan commander had feelings for Spock or if she was simply tricking him.  In this episode things were what they were, and it was up to the audience to make sense of the event for themselves.  An intelligent tale for intelligent viewers.


Even Subcommander Tal is impressed

Another reason to love this episode is because of the amount of respect that was given to the Romulans.  There were not overtly evil, mustache twirling, or stupid enemies in this episode.  The Romulans made no logical missteps in the episode.  Their actions were based on information that they verified.  The Romulan commander didn’t take it for granted that Kirk lost his sanity, she allowed the information to be verified by both Spock and Bones before believing it.  The Romulans monitored transmissions from their own ship and acted when they discovered alien/human signals.  They remained vigilant and intelligent in every scene.  Spock and the others didn’t defeat the Romulans, they simply outmaneuvered them by being slightly more clever in the way they responded to the information that each person had at the time.  Outside of Kirk faking his death, no one was even killed in this episode, which for Star Trek is rare.

Seeing what came before it, I would have thought it impossible for Star Trek to tell a unique and novel multifaceted story, representing so many things to so many people, without speaking down to the audience.  I’m happy to say that they successfully completed the mission in more ways than one.  For that I am grateful.

Five stars




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 30, 1968] A spoonful of sugar… (October 1968 Analog)

4 Comments


by Gideon Marcus

Sputnik all over again?

Last week, the Soviets produced their latest space spectacular, potentially leaving America in the dust again.  Zond 5, launched September 14, was sent around the moon, returning safely to Earth on the 22nd.

It's tempting to say, "What's the big deal," right?  We've sent probes to the moon, too, and the Russkies have orbited lunar satellites and soft-landed spacecraft.  What's special about Zond?  Well, it's suspected that "Zond", a monicker usually reserved for interplanetary spacecraft, is really a lunar-adapted Soyuz.  That means the Communists have completed a successful, robotic dry run for a human mission to the moon.  We haven't even launched our first manned Apollo yet!

So we're in something of a race.  Apollo 7 will go up in a couple of weeks, testing the spacecraft for an endurance run in Earth orbit.  Apollo 8 is due to be a circumlunar shot, to be launched near the end of the year.  That's the one to beat: if the Soviets make that journey before us, that'll be a feather in their cap.

That said, while our program was delayed 20 months due to the tragedy of Apollo 1 last year, the Soviet lunar program has undergone some setbacks, too.  Most notably, their Saturn equivalent appears to be having teething troubles.  While they might be able to send a Soyuz around the moon with their current rockets, landing cosmonauts will require a beefier launch system.  Our Saturn is already man-rated.

If I were a betting man, I'd give the odds of the Soviets beating us around the moon at around 50/50.  But as for landing on the moon, which is still planned for some time next year, I think we're still favored to win that one.

The medicine

This month's issue of Analog starts off extremely well.  Savor the taste of the opening piece, as it's what will sustain you through the rest…


by Kelly Freas

The Pirate, by Poul Anderson

Trevelyan is the agent of an arcane, galaxy-wide service.  Most of the such agents are employed for scouting, search and rescue, and mediation services.  This time, Trevelyan is on a mission of crime prevention.  His suspect: Murdoch Juan and his partner, Faustina.  Ostensibly, they aim to set up pre-made colonies on the marginal world of Good Luck, offering transport and homes to settlers at a bargain.  Trevelyan knows such endeavors are never profitable, and he suspects a shady angle.


by Kelly Freas

Such concerns are confirmed when he and his alien shipmate, Smokesmith, discover Murdoch's true target: a once-inhabited world, seared with abated radiation, abounding in empty cities ripe for occupation.  But is that what the dead race would have wanted?

Poul Anderson's writing ranges from turgid to sublime.  This piece is much closer to the latter end of the scale, and it benefits from lacking the author's typical linguistic tics.  In addition to being a good read and an excellent depiction of a true alien race, I appreciate the moral questions raised and the conservationist attitude expressed.  This would be good required reading for any apprentice building contractor or would-be Schliemann.

Five stars.

Mission of Ignorance, by Christopher Anvil


by Leo Summers

The galactic aliens have returned.  Last time, they brought three gifts to revolutionize our food production, our computers, and our birth control—and leave us completely at their mercy.  This time, Earth is being a bit more circumspect.  Rather than accepting the ambassadors with open arms, a buck 2nd Lieutenant is dispatched to treat with them—with absolutely no briefing at all, but with a set of instructions designed to terrify and befuddle the extraterrestrials.

I often joke that every Chris Anvil story begins with [Military rank] [Name] [present participle verb], and this is no exception.  I also, less jokingly, note that Chris Anvil's stories for Analog tend to be smug, stupid affairs.  Thus, I was surprised to find I didn't hate this piece.  It is somewhat smug, and the latter half is all explanation, but the premise is kind of interesting.

Right on the 2/3 border.  I'll be generous and say three stars.

Taking the Lid Off, by William T. Powers

The "lid" in this science article refers to Earth's atmosphere, which prevents us from seeing the universe in most of the interesting wavelengths like X-ray and infrared.  Powers, who wrote a terrific article on measuring charged particles last year, offers up a less impressive, but serviceable piece on lunar and orbital telescopes.  It's just a bit less coherent than his last article, and with fewer revelations, although I did appreciate his explanation of using gravity gradients to stabilize satellites.

Three stars.

The Steiger Effect, by Betsy Curtis


by Leo Summers

Human merchants arrive at a planet that views internal combustion as a kind of witchcraft.  Nevertheless, they buy our engines when they are demonstrated to work.  But the engines all mysteriously conk out when humans reach a certain distance away.  Turns out they—and all internal combustion engines, everywhere—run on psi energy, and always have. 'Humans secretly have psi powers and don't know it' certainly sounds like a plot tailor-made for Campbell, doesn't it?

Never mind that the premise makes no sense; the division of the (otherwise completely humanoid) alien society into "Men" (those who do with their minds) and "Boys" (those who do with their brawn) hews too close to a metaphor of antebellum days in the American South for comfort.

One star.

Underground, by Lawrence A. Perkins


by Kelly Freas

A senator is kidnapped by a Latin American insurgency that plans to harness earthquakes to topple their oppressive dictator [a plot reminiscent of the Doctor Who episode "Enemy of the World" -Ed].

This piece reads like one of those Ted Thomas mini science articles from F&SF turned into a story, except there's no real story—just a lot of show and tell.

Two stars.

The Tuvela (Part 2 of 2), by James H. Schmitz


by John Schoenherr

Last installment, we learned that the colony of Nandy-Cline was about to be invaded by the rapacious Parahuans.  The only thing holding them back was the concern that humanity was led by a shadow cabal of "Tuvela", a subrace of genetic supermen.  Now, the security of the world lies in the hands of the youthful Dr. Nile Etland, who must convince the Parahuan that she is one of the mythical Tuvela.  Luckily, she has a quartet of sapient otters as wingmen…

This is a frustrating novel.  The premise is excellent, and Schmitz is one of SF's few authors who lets women be heroes.  What keeps this book at the three-star level for me is the lack of characterization.  I have a vague idea of who Ticos Cay is, the two-hundred year old man who we meet as a prisoner of the Parahuan.  I even kind of know the various Parahuan.  But Etland is a cipher, utterly uninteresting as a person.  She goes through her James Bond maneuvers with competence and a few jitters, but with precious little demonstration of a soul.

My nephew enjoyed this serial a lot.  It is creative, and the biology of the world well realized.  If only I could say the same for Nile Etland.

Three stars.

Doing the math

Thus ends the month with Analog clocking in at 2.9, just under the 3-star line.  Ahead of it are The Farthest Reaches (3.4), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1) and IF (3.1).  The pack below it is far below—Galaxy (2.4), Worlds of Fantasy (2.3), and Fantastic (2).

The worthy stuff would fill two magazines, which would be an impressive amount if it hadn't taken seven publications to produce it.  Women penetrated the magazines pretty well this month, but their lack of pieces in Worlds of Fantasy and The Farthest Reaches brought the aggregate percentage down to 11%.

And so, with science fiction as with science fact, we find ourselves in a bit of a holding pattern, awaiting what's to come next month.  But whether it's the Soviets or the Americans, Campbell or Ferman, someone will entertain us.

And that's worth being ready for!

[Stop Press: Mark just got his reviews of this month's New Worlds to me.  It's too late to run an article, so we'll be doubling up next month.  For the sake of statistics, however, the magazine raises the amount of worthy material slightly, and it reduces feminine participation in SF magazine prose for October 1968 to 10%.  Stay tuned…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[September 26, 1968] Brain drain: (Star Trek: "Spock's Brain")

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[Star Trek is back for its third season!  Accordingly, we've devoted a great many inches to this rather uneven debut….]


by Janice L. Newman

This week we gathered all our friends together to start off a new season of Star Trek. We served dinner, then put our little portable color set outside and everyone enjoyed the lovely late summer night.

Well, everyone except me, that is. I was stuck inside with a VERY nasty cold that, oddly enough, no one else wanted to share with me. It made watching Spock’s Brain a lonely experience, but it did give me space to focus on the episode without being distracted by gasps, groans, or laughter—except my own, that is.

With the recent threats of cancelation and huge fan response, I expected NBC to put their best foot forward starting the new season. For Season 2 they knocked it out of the park with Amok Time. Could they do it again?

In a word, no.

Spock’s Brain had a lot of good elements. The set up was interesting, if fairly typical by now. An unknown alien vessel confronts the Enterprise. An alien woman appears on the bridge and knocks everyone out with a gadget worn on her wrist. When the crew awakens again, they are horrified to discover that Spock is missing. Then, in a twist I could not have predicted, they find that Spock’s body is in Sick Bay, but his brain has been carefully removed!


Kirk's brain doesn't pass muster…

Somehow Spock’s “incredible Vulcan physique” (McCoy’s words, not mine) allows him to survive without a brain until McCoy can get him on futuristic life support. However, they must get back Spock’s brain within 24 hours, McCoy tells Kirk, or they won’t be able to reconnect it.

Kirk, furious and terrified, orders the navigator to follow the trail of the other ship. When it dead ends in a known system, they must determine which of the three planets has Spock’s brain. Playing a hunch that the audience knows will be correct, Kirk chooses the one that seems the least likely.

The surface of the world is cold and barren, populated by all-male tribes of primitive humans. Beneath the ground, women live in luxury and comfort. But both groups are strangely childlike. Neither understand what Kirk wants when he demands “Spock’s Brain”.

The away team consists of Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Mr. Spock—or rather, his body, controlled remotely by McCoy with a little gadget. He is even more inexpressive than usual, and little ticking sounds are heard whenever he moves. If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is.


Own your own clockwork Spock!

The team is captured, escape, and eventually make their way to where Spock’s brain has been hooked up to the machine controlling the entire complex. His autonomic functions have been repurposed to control the air, water, heating, and so on. It’s not a new idea in SF—Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang did something similar if I recall correctly—but it was one of the more interesting plot points in the episode.


Spock's brain after getting the Sargon treatment

The team learns that the childlike people occasionally get temporary boosts to their knowledge by wearing a funny helmet with pins sticking out of it. This is how their leader was able to remove Spock’s brain. When they force her to again partake of the forbidden knowledge, however, she refuses to help them. If Spock’s brain is removed, the machines will cease to function and her people will die.

McCoy, left with no other choice, dons the helmet himself, receives a temporary boost in knowledge and skill, and proceeds to reattach Spock’s brain. The knowledge runs out before he can finish, but fortunately he’s able to connect Spock’s vocal cords, and the Vulcan is then able to guide him through reattaching the rest.

Kirk, meanwhile, tells the leader not to worry her pretty little head, because soon the women and men will be living together like they should have been all along, and the Federation will ‘help’ them.

Spock is unusually garrulous as the episode ends, lecturing them all on Ancient Rome as the theme swells triumphantly.


Spock is all better now—he didn't even muss his hair!

The frustrating thing about Spock’s Brain is that there’s so much good in it. The acting is very good. Kelley, Shatner, and Nimoy feel like they’ve really started to slot together as a team. Their banter is smoother than ever, Kirk’s over-acting is kept to a minimum, and they deliver the most nonsensical lines with absolute sincerity and straight faces. For that alone, they all deserve Emmys.

Added to that is Marc Daniels’ excellent direction, with interesting angles and innovative camera work. The music, too, was new.

Yet none of it mattered, because the fundamental plot was such schlock that it was impossible to take seriously. Every time McCoy screamed out, “Where are we going to look for Spock’s brain?” or Nimoy robotically walked across the screen as little ticking sounds followed along in the background, I was thrown right out of the world of Star Trek and into a bad B-movie. It was funny. It just wasn’t Star Trek.

Hopefully next week the studio will have something better to offer us.

Two stars.

A Sow's Ear from a Silk Purse


by Amber Dubin

This episode started with promise, the way the scantily clad, mysteriously powerful alien women that smoothly and silently dispatches the entire crew harkens back to the hostile takeovers we’ve seen in other episodes like Norman from “I, Mudd” or the Kelvans from “By any other name.” We expect, then, the plot to follow a similarly cerebral path where this new species of alien demonstrates how their improvements upon humanoid society have allowed them to surpass us in power while sacrificing one very human trait whose immense value they’ve forgotten. That would be following a tried and true formula of an episode that, while banal, can still be entertaining. It is seemingly from this scaffold that this episode attempts to reach to higher heights, without recognizing that it never truly took the time to support itself beforehand.

This reach is visible in the beautifully presented viewscreens, the dramatic "behind the captain's chair" camera angle they debut in this episode, the smooth score, matchless acting and the shiny new svelte uniforms they've adorned the cast with. They took a step backwards with Scottie's new haircut, which is so devastatingly unflattering that it makes Chekov's Monkees wig look tolerable, but it's a small misstep when compared to the unforgivable sin of completely forgetting to attach these shiny tassels to an intelligible script or plot.


For once, Chekov's hair looks better than Scotty's…

The most obvious problem with the plot is the concept of removing Spock's brain. Spock has had his body hijacked countless other times but the insistence of using the removal of his physical cerebral organ this time, instead of just his consciousness, makes all the subsequent actions ridiculous. Also, the fact that none of the Imorgs even seem to know what a brain is is absurd. This leads me to my second biggest problem with the episode, and that is that the alien societal structure is incredibly poorly designed. Ostensibly, the species is segregated across gender lines with the females (the Imorgs) living underground, most likely for their own protection as the males (the Morgs) seem to have descended into violent, brainless savages. The most interesting implication I find with this structure is that Imorgs are described by the Morgs as “bringers of pain and delight.” This implies, to me, that their society must survive by the Imorgs periodically returning to the surface, not just to discipline the Morgs, but also to.. ahem.. milk them of their genetic material for reproductive purposes.

While this is a comical concept, the explanation for this setup makes no sense. It is explained that they became so advanced and so comfortable that their species' intelligence gradually atrophied like an unused muscle, thus requiring the externalization of said intelligence in the archival brain-training headset that certain members of society can put on to receive the combined knowledge of the ancients at their intellectual peak. Yet this raises the question: how did their loss of intelligence happen so slowly that it was unavoidable and yet so quickly that they were able to see it coming in order to store it externally to be used later? Perhaps there was a brain-eating disease that only spared the less intelligent? Yet this does not explain how McCoy's readings picked up evidence of a gradual degradation and does not explain how the best solution that these highly intelligent beings could come up with is to turn their habitat into a body controlled by a physical cerebral organ sustained for 10,000 year periods; meanwhile the remnants of their species are left to crawl around said body mindlessly like ants in a glass-bound ant hill.

As absurd as this premise makes the episode, it introduces what I see as its most redemptive quality: the positive sexism. As often as this show strives for portraying women as valued members of an advanced society, it's my personal opinion that it falls short too many times. This episode seeks to bend the needle at least a little bit in favor of a 'women being smarter than men' narrative, and I am a fan. The Imorgs, while dumb, are no more dumb than the Morgs, and I am quite fond of the fact that their highly intelligent ancestors chose the females as the more reliable receptacles into which to download the collective knowledge of their species. I also enjoyed that, while graced with the knowledge and basically the consciousness of the ancients, the Imorg priestess is successfully able to out-smart Kirk and is completely immune to his powers of persuasion. I find it infinitely refreshing that Captain Kirk doesn’t once again save the day by aggressively teaching the femme-fatale the value of love. Although when said woman decries that they can’t control the men without systems of punishment and reward, Kirk does sneak in a snide “there are other ways.” I could be reading too far into it, but the way he delivered the line made me think he was more than willing to provide instructions as to techniques that women can use to get men to do what they want (maybe he’d even suggest a hands on approach to the milking process).


"How about some lessons in healthy sexual relations?"

Despite this episode's obvious flaws, which there are many, I wouldn't overall say this is a bad episode. It's a testament to the commitment of the actors that they're willing to deliver solid performances of the sometimes silly lines with depth and sometimes deadly seriousness (Nurse Chapel’s 10 second fall alone is Oscar-worthy). In general, the characters appear much more polished than we've seen in some other episodes; and the lighting, which I think is a little too severe for Shatner's face in a couple of scenes, was an interesting departure and a bold choice. What the episode lacked in structural continuity, it tried to make up for in fluid pacing, an exceptional score, and special effects opticals that I believe have vastly improved from even the last season. Ultimately, however, the failure of editors to cut the obvious silliness out of the script makes all the high quality elements feel like lipstick on a pig.

They say you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear but apparently you can make a sow’s ear from a silk purse. This episode makes for one very stylish pig, but if it’s just going to dunk its head in the mud, I don’t see the point of the wasted effort.

Three stars.

The Mental Divide


by Joe Reid

Star Trek has returned for a 3rd season!  I've missed our weekly sneak peek into the future as well as that regular glance into the mirror of our present.  “Spock's Brain” is the name of this entry.  Spock's brain is the apparent focus of this episode, at least on the surface.  As I stated before, Star Trek is sometimes a mirror to show us who we are or may become.  In “Spock's Brain”, we don't look good.

Watching shows like Star Trek, we see ourselves as the heroes.  We picture ourselves as Kirk.  We are Uhura.  We are Chekov.  From a narrative standpoint, we are actually the silly characters that the crew of the Enterprise are fighting, kissing, lying to, or helping each week.  This week, we are the inhabitants of Sigma Draconis 6.  What do the people of this planet tell us about ourselves?

The people of Sigma Draconis 6, which I will call Sixers from here forward, were divided by sex.  The Sixer males were ignorant of relationships with the females outside of knowing them as the ones that bring pain and pleasure.  Similarly, many men in our world don’t understand women.  We sometimes reduce women to being instruments of pleasure, which if not handled correctly might lead to intense pain.  Of course, it doesn’t help at all if men are uneducated and uncultured.  Such men are reduced to seeing women in the context of either, “Heavens!  She makes me feel good!”, or “Dammit! She is a pain in the neck!”


Women gain the upper hand in the battle of the sexes.

The Sixer women, being physically weaker than the men, and as ignorant as them, defaulted to using instruments of pain and pleasure to get what they wanted from men.  Although the episode didn’t offer what pleasures were given to the men, I myself am intimately aware of the pleasures that today’s women use to get their way from a man and of the pain some of them inflict when they are not satisfied.  Bill Shakespeare wrote about the fury of a woman’s scorn.  I find myself questioning which is better—the long deep pain caused by a woman who hurts your soul or the short and intense pain of this episode’s futuristic torture device.  Both seem equally bad ways of dealing with the opposite sex, based on an utter lack of compassion.

This portrayed male/female struggle, although interesting, was not a perfect mirror to our culture in that it gave no example to the pain that men have caused women today and throughout history.  Also giving no notion that men could bring pleasure to women outside of what they can physically provide through their labor. In the end, "Spock's Brain" shows us that there must be more to successful human relations than simple Pavlovian techniques.

Another key lesson of the episode involves Spock’s brain and how it was to be used on Sigma Draconis 6.  Sixers females could only continue their way of life if a controller was there to run their world.  Without a controller, the females and males would have to rely on each other in a different way.  This may seem far from reality, but I think this lesson should be taken as a warning rather than an indictment of our society.  We should be wary of any leader, religion, philosophy, or machine that promises to take care of our needs or manage our lives to such a degree that it reduces our interdependence with those around us.  Women and men need each other to survive, but all are better served through understanding and love over pain and pleasure.  Families need each other in the same way.  As do neighbors.  Coworkers.  Citizens of a country.  People of a planet.  Dependence on a solitary thing to care for us may lead to retardation of how we relate to one another.


Why think for yourself when you can just be force-fed knowledge?

For this exciting and thought-provoking episode of Star Trek, I offer 4 of 5 stars.  It told a compelling and suspenseful yarn laced with relevant social commentary and caution—exactly what one wants from science fiction.

Four stars

Third Season Drinking Game


by Erica Frank

Take a drink every time you spot bad science, male chauvinism, Federation cultural supremacy, or the Enterprise crew pretending that an alien culture has human needs, interests, and abilities. …For this episode, make them small drinks. Sips only. Optionally, take long drinks; you may bypass a few others while you're raising your glass.

I'm leaving it to others to discuss the computer technology (take a drink), the womens' clothing (take a drink), and Kirk's ethics (take another drink), so as to focus on the split communities: Women living underground in the warm, computer-controlled facility; men living without technology on the frozen surface.


How are they making their clothes with "no sign of industrial development?" Those are awfully straight seams for hand-worked leather!

They have lived this way for thousands of years, long enough to have long forgotten why, even if they had attempted to keep records. They seem mostly content (or at least resigned): The men fear the women, but they do not band together to attack them; the women see no reason to change anything until they need a new "Controller."

(I have no idea how children happen. They're aliens. Maybe they lay eggs and the Controller keeps them in an incubator.)

But we are probably supposed to believe they are human-like, just split into communities so separate they don't even have words for sex or gender. Are we to believe these people, human-like enough to prefer buildings that are well-suited for our crew, wearing clothing that seems designed for human cultures, have no concept of human-like relationships? Of course not!

We have plenty of examples of what kind of relationships humans have, if you segregate them by sex: sailors, military forces, and even nunneries have a long history of homosexual behavior.

Of course, the residents of Sigma Draconis 6 won't have "gay" relationships that look like modern human ones: They have no notion of "husband and wife." They don't raise children together, don't have one employed partner and one housekeeper. (The men probably need every able-bodied person working for survival; the women's physical needs are all met by the Controller.) So their relationships – which may not be limited to pair-bonding the way that child-raising couples tend to be – would be mostly invisible to casual, short-term visitors like Kirk and his crew.

When the Morg realize that Spock is Kirk's oath-bonded partner, his assault on the women's complex will make so much more sense to them!

Two stars – mostly for the fascination of "how does that work?"; bump it to three if you've been drinking enough to put yourself in a pleasant fog.

Anything but Star Trek


by Lorelei Marcus

I think we're entering a new era.  The music feels different, as if it's finally finding its groove after many years of experimentation.  The politics are different, too, with black delegates trying to sit at the convention (and a young Julian Bond making a plausible run for Vice President!), and a weird match-up between two Vice Presidents.

Most of all, the TV is different.  It's all in color, and there's just so many shows, most of them new.  From Julia to The Mod Squad, everyone's jumping to be the fresh, hip thing.

Except, apparently, Star Trek.

It's ironic that this show, which broke new ground on television in not just science fiction but ethnic diversity chose to take such a step back into the past for its Season 3 debut.  "Spock's Brain" felt like a plot straight out of the '50s.  The society separated by men and women, the spooky science beyond our understanding, and even the new, tighter-fitting uniforms made the episode feel right at home next to Forbidden Planet.

What's worse, this quaint exploration of an alien society clashed sharply with the actual Enterprise and crew.  For instance, the (excellent!) scene in which the bridge crew decide which of the three Sigma Draconis planets to investigate in search of Spock's brain feels like a scene from another show—and might as well be: the sentient races on the other planets never become relevant to the episode.


The bridge becomes the briefing room in one of the best scenes of the episode.

I didn't actually have much problem with the whole "brain removal" element of the plot, just how it was executed.  A lot of the lines felt forced and corny, particularly Spock's indifferent voice-overs.  His dialogue should have been the highlight of the episode, not the drag.  Also, the surgery montage at the end of the episode was cheap, taken straight from Ben Casey or maybe even General Hospital.  I was laughing too hard at that point to care whether or not the brain restoration surgery was a success.

Don't get me wrong.  I did enjoy the episode at the time, and the actors salvaged what they could with the lines they were given, but it ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth.  I'm disappointed that "Spock's Brain" was chosen to be the debut of Season 3.  Perhaps a tongue in cheek episode like this (assuming the camp is deliberate) could have been fine midseason, but putting it front and center feels disrespectful to the show and characters, not to mention the audience.  I don't regret writing all those letters to Mort Werner to keep Star Trek alive, but I fear the result may be a degraded, less sophisticated program.

Let's hope this episode is a fluke and not representative of the rest of the season.

Three stars

Minority Report


by Gideon Marcus

I'm going to go out on a limb here.  I enjoyed this episode.  Perhaps it was the endless summer over which I was starved for new Trek.  Maybe it was the terrific giggles I got out of every time one of the gifted cast had to seriously pronounce the words "Spock's Brain" (usually preceded by variations of "Where are we going to look for…" and "Give back…")

The story didn't bother me.  Was it rushed with intriguing concepts left undeveloped?  Sure, but that's par for the course.  There are only 50 minutes each week with which to introduce a plot and resolve it.  The rest must be done with shorthand.  Indeed, the episode wastes little time, clanging into action with a red-alert signal.  And while Kirk does destroy a 10,000 year old society with no compunctions, he's done so before, under similar conditions ("Return of the Archons" and "The Apple"), and the Federation has specialists to help clean up the ensuing mess.  Plus, in this case, it was personal—they'd taken (chortle) Spock's Brain!

Speaking of plots we've seen before, Spock's Brain (guffaw) is really just the inverse of "Return to Tomorrow".  In that episode, three disembodied brains want Spock's Body (and those of Kirk and Dr. Ann Mulhall).

Of course, in the cold light of day, when I can't be swept along by the superb pacing, the new scoring, the slick new uniforms, the beautiful Daniels-shot bridge (how about those lovely viewscreen shots?!), getting to see all of the B-team doing their jobs, Scotty's disaster of a new hair style (did Jimmy's new wife Anita approve of this?), I can see there are issues with the episode.  For instance, the idea of snatching a brain to power a society is fine.  The notion of finding the best brain for the job makes sense.  But Sigma Draconis had three class M planets in it.  Surely there were scholars on Planet 3 or scientists on Planet 4 who could have done the job.  (Also, Planet 4, with a technology grade of "G" or 2030 A.D. presumably has space travel and perhaps even warp drive—why hadn't they settled/explored Planet 6?)

Also, all this gas about "ion propulsion" being the cat's meow made no sense.  Ion propulsion is something we use today, which I talked about in my article on the (failed) satellite ATS 4.  It is a low thrust , economical drive that uses the constant ejection of cesium atoms to propel a spacecraft.  Maybe Scotty's "ion propulsion" means something different, but it sounds goofy without further explanation.  It's why Trek moved from "lasers", which are new but well known, to "phasers", which are made up but sound cool.  Call it "muon" propulsion or better yet (to make up a word) "buon" or something.


"She's steam-powered, Cap'n!  Far beyond what we can do with antimatter…"

All that said, I want to think that this rather silly script was Trek's essay at deliberate camp, sort of how The Trouble with Tribbles and A Piece of the Action were deliberate comedy and Catspaw was deliberate Halloween creepiness.  In any event, the episode accomplished the main goal, which is that I'm eager to see what's on next week…even if it means I have to stay up past my bedtime to watch the furshlugginer thing, now that they've moved the air time to 10 P.M.!

3.5 stars




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 20, 1968] It comes and goes (October 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Out and in

Being something of a geography buff, one of my favorite games is to go to a thrift shop and inspect their globe collection.  I can generally tell what year a globe was manufactured from the configuration of countries.  And while we haven't had anything like the banner year of 1960, when more than a dozen African states sprang into existence, nevertheless, there are still enough changes every year to keep the game going.

For instance, this month, the Kingdom of Swaziland with its 400,000 denizens, achieved independence from the United Kingdom.  The second-smallest African country, is not entirely free, of couse.  It is completely surrounded by South Africa, with all transportation lines running through Pretoria.  The money is South African.  All telegraph lines go through South Africa.  As for their economy, it's mostly propped up by British hand-outs.

But they do have sovereignty, something South Africa tried to snatch from them time and again, but which was thwarted by the British.  Plus, the new country has vast mineral reserves of asbestos and iron, plus forests and fertile soil.  So King Sobhuza I just might make a go of things.

Going the other way, the people of West Irian (formerly Netherlands New Guinea) have has been annexed as Indonesia's 26th province.  Six years ago, the United Nations stepped in to stop a budding conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesians, who both laid claim to the region.  Now the 800,000 poverty-stricken inhabitants are officially under the auspices of General Suharto.  Sometime soon, they will be given the choice between independence and a union with their neighboring would-be superpower.  It is anyone's guess how free and honest the local elections can be under the Suharto dictatorship (i.e. don't expect a free West Papua any time soon…)


The Morning Star Flag—which you won't see flown until and unless the Irians get independence…

Good and bad

Speaking of mixed bags, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction has much to recommend it, but then there's all the rest of the magazine.  See for yourself:


by Ronald Walotsky

The Meddler, by Larry Niven

Bruce Cheeseborough, Jr. is a private dick operating some time in the near future.  While in the course of waging a one man crusade against the new crime boss, Lester Dunhaven Sinclair, a certain meddler crosses his path.  Said meddler first appears as a nebbishy, softish man, but he quickly betrays himself as a protean blob, possessed of all manner of wondrous powers.  The "Martian" offers to help the detective, granting him invulnerability, the gift of flight, time dilation…but Cheeseborough finds the tilting of the scales unsporting.

Still, when the detective makes his final assault on Chez Sinc, it's going to take every resource he has, from human wit to alien marvel, to come out the other end alive…

The Meddler is a brilliant piece of genre hybridization, combining hard-boiled noir with cunning science fiction.  Every piece of the story's myriad puzzles is meticulously laid out, so that an astute reader can figure out the revelations just before they materialized.  Beyond that, the piece is funny as well as perfectly paced.

Five stars, and a nice broadening of the author's talents.

Time Was, by Phyllis Murphy

Picture a man so obsessed with saving time, that he applies the art of speed reading to life.  You know: skipping over most of it, trying to absorb only the salient points.  Except, how do you know which bits are the important ones?  And what if you lose the ability to focus on any given thing in the pursuit of apprehending everything?

This story reminded me of a friend who insisted a person must do several things at once to be truly efficient.  If she read the paper, she listened to the radio.  When we watched television together, she'd inevitably crochet.  Remarkably efficient…except half the time, she lost track of the show's plot and had to ask us what was going on.

Three stars.

The Wide World of Sports , by Harvey Jacobs

They say that football is a bloody sport, but it's nowhere near as bloody as whatever Jacobs is describing in this story, featuring machine guns, the slaughter of all audience members of a certain name, and general mayhem.

This story would be more effective if it made a lick of sense and/or had a plot.  Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

Coffee Break, by D. F. Jones

There's a Laugh-In bit where the projected news break underneath the action runs, "The United Nations today voted unanimously on everything; UN police are still looking for who put grass in the vents."

This story covers the exact same ground, but it takes much longer to do it, and not in nearly as funny a manner.

Two stars.

Dance Music for a Gone Planet, by Sonya Dorman

Fiddling after Rome is burnt?  A tinge of hope for a post-apocalyptic ode?

I'm not sure—I found this one a bit too obtuse to understand.  Maybe I'm the obtuse one.

Two stars.

Possible, That's All!, by Arthur C. Clarke

The Other Good Doctor takes umbrage at Asimov's assertion that nothing can go faster than light.  He offers up some counterexamples, but they're honestly rather feeble, and the article is not particularly coherent.

Three stars.

Try a Dull Knife, by Harlan Ellison

Eddie Burma is an empath, life of the party, and he has so much to give.  Folks are drawn to his magnetic personality like moths to flame, but, unknowingly, each takes a little bit from Burma in each encounter.  This is the price of popularity: eventually, there can be nothing left of you, the you behind the glamor and charm, because no one wants you.  They just want what rubs off.

If you've heard this refrain before, it's because Ellison delivered a soliloquy on the subject in his last collection, From the Land of Fear.  Harlan is afeared that no one really loves him; they just love The Talent that resides within his physical husk.  Readers of that collection also have encountered Knife in its embryonic form, a snippet of it among the story fragments at the beginning of the book.

Anyway, I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your soul overlaps with Harlan's, then his writing resonates with you as The Truth.  If you are much unlike the man (as, for instance, I am), then you can admire the way he strings words together, but they don't move much.

Three stars for me.  Four stars, perhaps, for you.

Segregationist, by Isaac Asimov

Organ transplants are the topic du jour in both science and science fiction.  I find it particularly interesting that much is made of the muddled identity of a person when they incorporate the parts of other humans (viz. Van Scyoc's A Trip to Cleveland General in this month's Galaxy).  This time around, Asimov takes things a step further: are humans less human if they have metal hearts?  And are robots more human if they incorporate biological components?

I liked this story, one of the better pieces Dr. A has done since largely going on fiction hiatus after the launch of Sputnik.

Four stars.

The Ghost Patrol, by Ron Goulart

Speaking of crossed genres, Ghost Patrol is the latest in the Max Kearny series about an art director who solves occult crimes in his spare time.  These yarns range from hilariously clever to limp.

This one, about a free doctor beset both by celebrity ghosts and Bircher anti-freeloaders, belongs, sadly, in the latter category.

Two stars.

Little Found Satellite, by Isaac Asimov

This month's piece is worth it for the funny anecdote that forms its preface.  The rest is a pleasant, if not particularly deep, history of Saturn's telescopic observation.  The piece culminates in the discovery of Saturn's tenth moon, Janus, just outside the ring system.

Four stars.

The Fangs of the Trees, by Robert Silverberg

At a recent convention, my daughter led a panel entitled "Plants vs. People", in which the panelists and audience discussed green menaces of various kinds.  Triffids, killer ragweed, stuff like that.  I wish I'd had Fangs as an example, as it's a good one.

Zen Holbrook is runs a plantation on a world countless light years from Earth.  His trees produce a valuable, hallucinogenic-juiced fruit.  They're also quasi-sentient, something like ultra-advanced Venus Fly Traps.  Though he tries to keep his relationship with his trees strictly business, he can't help ascribing them personalities, giving them names, and treating them like pampered pets.

Which makes it all the more difficult when he gets news that all of the trees in Sector C have been afflicted with "rust", a disease that not only spells their impending death, but has the risk of spreading throughout the whole planet.  Holbrook must kill his friends lest an entire world's economy die.  Further complicating the matter is his 15-year old niece, Naomi, who would rather die than see the grove decimated.

It is implied, though never specifically stated, that there is no less destructive way to solve the problem: not only must the trees die, but so must an entire species of benign hopper-bear—a link in the infection cycle.  Lord knows what that will do the local ecosystem, but "the needs of the many…"

It's an interesting, thought-provoking piece, composed with Silverberg's usual excellence, though I'm not quite sure which side we're supposed to take, if any.  Like, do we all need to grow up and realize that ecological destruction is a valid and important necessity?  Or is Zen actually the villain?  I could have done without so much of the Uncle's attraction for his niece, too, even if it was supposed to say…something…about Zen's character.  I know that the word for people who ascribe the emotions of an author's creation to the author himself is "moron" (at least, per Larry Niven), but Silverbob sure includes a lot of just-pubescent minors in his stories…

Four stars.

Whaddaya make of that?

If you read judiciously, this month's mag is terrific, kind of like how, if you parse the news in just the right way, it's all positive developments.  Look deeper, and the seams show.  Still, whether the news or the magazine are half full or empty all depends on your temperament, I suppose.

I guess I'll leave with the wishy washy conclusion that's always true: things could be worse!




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 18, 1968] Dangerous Visions (Not Those Dangerous Visions!) (September 1968 Galactoscope)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Finlandia

Emil Petaja is an American writer of Finnish ancestry. His best known works are a series of novels based on the Finnish national epic the Kalevala. (Saga of Lost Earths, The Star Mill, The Stolen Sun, and Tramontane. These were all published from 1966 to 1967.)

Petaja's latest novel, although not part of this series, also deals with themes from Finnish mythology.


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Doctor Stephen McCord is an anthropologist. Although he's the only major character who isn't of Finnish descent, he's studied the culture and knows something of the language.

Before the novel begins, his college buddy Art Mackey took off for a remote area of Montana, in search of his girlfriend Ilma, who mysteriously returned to her old homestead. Stephen gets a tape recording from his friend, giving him a few hints as to what's going on. (It also serves as exposition for the reader.)

It seems that the former logging town of Hellmouth, inhabited by Finnish immigrants, was completely destroyed in a huge forest fire in 1906. When Art arrived in search of Ilma's nearby farmhouse, he found the place looking exactly the way it did six decades ago, with some of the former citizens still alive and kicking.

Intrigued by this mystery (and wondering if his pal has gone nuts), Stephen makes his way to the supposedly vanished town. He discovers that Hellmouth is indeed still around. Furthermore, the inhabitants worship Ukko, the chief god of Finnish legend. (Roughly comparable to Zeus or Thor, I believe.)

Stephen finds Art, and they both search for Ilma. Things get weird when they actually run into what seems to be Ukko, a being whose presence is so overwhelming that it's almost impossible not to fall to one's knees in adoration. The apparent god promises to make Earth a utopia, in exchange for worship. Ukko also has plans for Stephen.

What happens involves Ilma's elderly father Izza, her hunchbacked brother Yalmar, the local schoolteacher/librarian, and the steel plate inside Stephen's head, a souvenir of his time as an ambulance driver during a conflict in Southeast Asia. (Maybe Vietnam, as the story takes place just a little bit in the future, some time in the 1970's.)

The author writes clearly and elegantly. I always knew what was going on and was able to keep track of the characters. There are many vivid descriptions of Petaja's home state of Montana. (He now lives in San Francisco, which is also depicted excellently in the early part of the book.)

Besides having a compelling plot that kept me reading in one sitting, the novel has some intriguing and controversial things to say about the nature of deity and its relationship with humanity. Even at the very end of the text, Stephen still isn't sure if opposing Ukko was the right thing to do.

Four stars.

Comedy and Tragedy

The latest Ace Double to fall into my hands (designated as H-85, for those of you keeping score) offers a pair of short novels with contrasting moods. One is lighthearted, the other is serious. Let's start with the humorous one.

Destination: Saturn, by David Grinnell and Lin Carter


Cover art by Kelly Freas.

David Grinnell is actually the well-known fan, writer, and editor Donald A. Wollheim. He also created the Ace Double series, so he must feel right at home.

This novel was published last year in hardcover.


Cover art by Michael M. Peters.

The protagonist is a filthy rich and rather egotistical fellow named Ajax Calkins. A little research reveals that Wollheim (without co-author Carter) has been writing about him since 1941, sometimes under the pen name Martin Pearson. Most recently, this old material was recycled into the novel Destiny's Orbit. The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review a while back, calling it a juvenile space opera.

In the current volume, Ajax is the king of an asteroid that is actually a gigantic spaceship built by the civilization that was destroyed when their home planet blew up long ago, creating the asteroid belt. He and his fiancée Emily Hackenschmidt are on Earth, leaving the asteroid in the hands (so to speak) of their loyal Martian friend, a spider-like being called Wuj.

Dastardly amoeba-like aliens, the inhabitants of Saturn, are the sworn enemies of Earth. (In a touch of satire, we find out that they were perfectly nice folks until they learned aggression from humans.) Two of the Saturnians disguise themselves as Ajax and Emily and convince Wuj they're the real thing. They set off for Saturn, eager to uncover the ancient spaceship's secrets and use its advanced technology to conquer the solar system.

What I've failed to convey is the fact that this is a comedy. Ajax manages to save the day, of course, but he's also something of a fool. The more levelheaded Emily is often exasperated at him, with good reason.

The novel is written in a dryly tongue-in-cheek style that is more amusing than the usual science fiction farce. There are quite a few witty lines. I'm not a big fan of comic SF, but this one is better than some.

Three stars.

Invader on My Back, by Philip E. High

Let's flip the book over and take a look at something without laughs.


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

The cover proudly announces that this is the novel's first book publication. I assume that's true, but there's also a British hardcover edition that came out this year.


Cover art by Colin Andrews.

The story takes place a few hundred years after society fell apart, for reasons not apparent until later in the novel. Humanity has managed to build itself back up, but there's been a strange change in people. They're divided up into castes. Again, the explanation for this is unknown.

Roughly half of the population consists of Norms; ordinary folks. The other half are Delinks; murderers and other violent criminals. Some Norms and Delinks are also Scuttlers. These are people who have an intense phobia about the sky, and can't bear to look at it.

A small number of folks are Stinkers. Everybody else hates these people; so much so, that few of them survive. Those who do isolate themselves and protect their lives with various resources.

Michael Craig is a Stinker. (That looks like an example of nasty graffiti, doesn't it?) He gets a message from the police (by mail; if he came anywhere near them they would try to kill him) asking him to try an experiment. The cops want to know what would happen if two Stinkers met. Would they loathe each other on sight?

Michael agrees to meet Geo Hastings, a Stinker who lives in Africa. The oddly named Geo turns out to be an attractive woman. If you think the two are going to fall in love, give yourself an A in predicting familiar plot developments.

Besides not trying to kill each other, the two discover that they can communicate telepathically. Things would seem to be turning out nicely, if it were not for the Geeks.

A Geek is a type of human being that has just appeared recently. They are physically superior, tend to be cold-bloodedly calculating, and are intent on wiping out the rest of humanity. In particular, they are bent on destroying the Stinkers; not for the usual reason (pure, unexplained hatred) but as part of their plan to conquer the world.

Without giving anything away (although you may be able to predict the novel's plot twists), let's just say the reason for all these weird happenings is revealed. Can Norms, Delinks, and Stinkers work together against the Geeks and the secret menace behind them? Not to mention the Scuttlers, who have a vital role to play.

This isn't a bad novel. Not great, but not bad. The story held my interest. (I haven't mentioned Michael's three heavily armed robot birds, who are the most charming characters.) It's worth reading once.

Three stars.


by Cora Buhlert

The Long Con: God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake

Science fiction may be my first love, but I read other genres as well. And so my latest pick-up at the local import bookstore was a crime novel entitled God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake. The reason I bought the book is that it just won the prestigious Edgar Award, i.e. the mystery genre's equivalent to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, for the best crime novel of the year, beating out Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. Any novel that can beat a juggernaut like Rosemary's Baby is certainly worth checking out, so I picked it up. And reader, I was not disappointed.

God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake

The Most Gullible Man in New York City

The protagonist of God Save the Mark is one Fred Fitch, who must be the most gullible man in New York City. Fred is a magnet for con artists and there's not a scam in existence that Fred will not fall for.

The novel opens with Fred getting a phone call from a lawyer that his Uncle Matt has died and left Fred more than three hundred thousand US-dollars. This makes even the extremely gullible Fred suspicious, especially since he does not have an Uncle Matt.

So Fred alerts his friend his best and probably only friend, Detective Jack Reilly of the NYPD's "bunco squad", i.e. the police department dealing with fraud. Reilly tells Fred to go to the appointment with the fake lawyer, so Reilly can arrest him red-handed. Alas, Fred is late for the meeting because he got scammed… again and it turns out that the lawyer is not a fraud after all, but the real deal. As is the will of the late Uncle Matt. Fred really did inherit more than three hundred thousand US-dollars.

However, there's a catch or rather several. For starters, Uncle Matt was a con artist himself and the black sheep of the family, which is why Fred has never heard of him. What is more, Uncle Matt, though terminally ill, was murdered. Which makes Fred the prime suspect.

A City of Con Artists

The situation quickly escalates. To begin with, Fred's new found riches make him a target for even more would-be con artists, including a childhood sweetheart who intends to hold him to a marriage proposal made as a kid or sue him for breach of promise and a neighbour who wants to publish his alternate history novel Veni, Vidi, Vici with Air Power via a predatory vanity press. Worse, whoever murdered Uncle Matt is now taking potshots at Fred. Finally, Fred also finds himself entangled with two very different women, Gertie Divine, a former stripper who was the late Uncle Matt's nurse, and Karen Smith, Reilly's bit on the side who still hopes he'll marry her someday, once he gets over his Catholic guilt induced reluctance to divorce his wife.

The intense pressure under which Fred finds himself finally makes him wise up. He tells off several would-be con artists and also puts his skills as an independent researcher to use to investigate Uncle Matt's murder himself, since he no longer trusts the police.

However, there are still many twists and turns ahead, including a hilarious chase scene where Fred steals a child's bicycle to escape his pursuers and ends up tumbling headfirst into a pond in Central Park.

This was the first novel by Donald E. Westlake (who also writes as Richard Stark and under a number of other pen names and has even dabbled in science fiction on occasion) that I read, but it certainly won't be the last, because this book is laugh out loud funny and a complete and utter delight.

In many ways, God Save the Mark is a reminiscent of the screwball comedies of thirty years ago, yet it is also a solid mystery that plays fair with the reader and delivers plenty of red herrings as well as all the clues needed to solve it. The novel also offers an excellent overview of the various cons and scams going around, some I was aware of and others that were completely new to me. The ending is a perfect fit.

A Deserving Winner?

Edgar Award trophy

So is this novel better than Rosemary's Baby? Well, the two books are difficult to compare, because they are so very different. But all in all, I'd agree with the verdict of the Mystery Writers of America that God Save the Mark is a most deserving winner of the 1968 Edgar Award.

A fluffy, frothy caper that will leave you rolling on the floor laughing and guessing till the end.

Five stars.


by Jason Sacks

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Sometimes as a reviewer you just don’t quite trust yourself when you encounter something totally unexpected. When you read a work which feels sui generis for science fiction, a book which draws comparison to literary fiction like Dos Passos, Burges and Nabokov, it’s hard to assess that book in its own context.

John Brunner’s fascinating new novel Stand on Zanzibar is the spiritual successor to those modernist writers.

Brunner’s novel reads as part pulp fiction and part assault-the-senses bursts of information. Zanzibar is a prophecy and a critique, a satire and a work of deep seriousness. It has plot lines and complex emotions and an energy that won’t quit, and at 576 pages of very short chapters, it somehow felt exhausting and left me craving more. It’s also extremely hard to describe, so be aware I’m barely skimming the surface here, and I welcome anybody who’s willing to add their own comments in an LoC to this magazine.

Let’s start with the easy parts to describe. On its most basic level, Stand on Zanzibar is about the problem of overpopulation.  When we all were in diapers, if stood side by side, all of humanity could take up a space roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. By the distant year of 2010, however, as Brunner writes, "If you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space of one foot by two, you could stand us all on the 640 square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar."

There’s so much information contained in one sentence. You get one of the key themes of the novel and also a feeling of Brunner’s approach to his writing. Like Burgess’s punks in Clockwork Orange, the characters in this book chatter and mumble in an invented slang which feels clever and becomes part of the larger reading experience of the book. (Brunner admits a strong influence on  him from Burgess.) The language forces readers out of our comfort zones and therefore pay closer attention to the often fractured way Brunner chooses to tell his tale. (A codder is a certain type of man and a shiggy a certain type of woman and an appleofmyeye is a child, by the way.)

Mr. Brunner

The other key piece of information in that sentence above how fears of world overpopulation has led to strong laws against procreation. Those restrictive rules in turn have created a vast black market in child-rearing, as citizens are shown considering traveling to the state of Puerto Rico to have kids, much as one might escape their home state for an abortion or divorce to defy difficult local laws. World society also angles towards eugenics, forced sterilizations and genetic modifications. Can suicide booths be far behind?

All of the above is mere background – though thoughtful, fascinating background – for the main   thrust of this sprawling exercise. Much of the book tells the story of the small calm African country of Beninia, population 900,000, which has become the main staging point for refugees from wars in three neighboring countries. Those refugees despise each other, but the country has a kind of tenuous peace under the benevolent rule of President Zadkiel F. Obomi. However, President Obomi wants to retire. And when he retires, what will happen to the peace he worked so hard to broker?

Enter another key aspect of this book’s fascinating plot. Obomi is good friends with American Ambassador Elihu Masters, and as they discuss the problem, Masters comes up with an unexpected suggestion: what if American corporation General Technics (motto: "The difficult we did yesterday. The impossible we're doing right now") took over the country? What if the country exchanged its vast offshore mineral and oil reserves for education and infrastructure creation?

Parts of the book alternate between reveries by Obomi and the life in New York City shared by roommates Donald Hogan and Norman House. House is “Afram”, African-American, and has astutely used his race and his native intelligence to gain himself a powerful role inside GT. That means he will be on the ground while GT moves operations to Beninia – that is, of course, if Norman can shake his deep feelings of melancholia and dissatisfaction with his life and his career. Hogan, meanwhile, seems innocent since he spends most of his days at the New York Public Library. But in fact Hogan is a “Dilettanti”, a spy recruited by the government because of his preternatural skills at discovering patterns in seemingly normal experiences. Hogan is passive until “activated” by the government, and he worries about that aspect of his life.

Until he actually is activated and sent to Socialist Asian country of Yatakang, where the government has announced how eminent geneticist Dr. Sugaiguntung has invented a way for everybody around the world to give birth to perfect children. But is their assertion true, or it just a lie on top of all the other lies circulating in this complex world? Can Donald prove the Yatakang government’s announcement is a lie? Can he persuade the people of Yatakang to support the leader of a guerilla rebellion which is happening in the country’s mountains?

Shades of ol' Fidel

*Whew.* There’s so much there just in the plot. I’m sure you can see the pulpy outlines of a Le Carre style spy novel, as well as chances for Swiftian social satire in both storylines I’ve described, and yet all that description barely scratches the surface of this most profoundly wild novel. Because underpinning this entire book is a deeper critique of world society, a society full of selfishness and cheap thrills and tawdry media which creates false reality in its shows.

Most damningly, Brunner presents a world in which people seem constantly interconnected and yet somehow deeply distant from each other. Hogan and House, for instance, despite being roommates, scarcely know anything about each other. The media consumed by the people in this world prevents them from being social, and that gap has vast societal consequences. When people can literally project fictionalized versions of themselves on fantasy television shows, what attraction does the real world have? Drugs are all pervasive. Suburbs are collapsing. The planet is groaning from the weight of all the people living upon it. Yet the vast majority of men and women in this world care much more about the shows they consume than they do about the world they have created.

And there’s so much more here. There’s Shalmaneser, the super computer which makes critical decisions on Earth (wonder if Brunner heard about Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001 ideas?). There’s the muckers, a group of random people who go on killing sprees for no reason. There’s a drug which forces people to tell the truth which is given to a bishop who spends a Sunday mass telling everyone his real feelings about God. I could go on and on, and dear reader, I know I’m skipping one of your favorite elements of this book.

But I grow filled with a bit of despair that I could do an adequate job of explaining any element of this book; even more, I despair at the idea a mere plot summary would be useful to anybody who might be considering reading this astounding book.

So let me sum my feelings up this way. Like many of us here at the Journey, I’ve long been a fan of Mr. Brunner’s writing. But Stand on Zanzibar takes all of John Brunner’s writing abilities and takes them to a quantum level. He displayed massive potential in many of his earlier works, but here Brunner shows that potential paid off in spades.

No matter the context, on first read, Stand on Zanzibar Brunner has delivered the wildest, weirdest, most successful book of the year so far. Previously I called Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage the best book I had read in 1968 up to that point. Brunner’s achievement far exceeds Panshin's. I hope to be rereading this book in that far-flung future of 2010 and seeing how many of Brunner’s prophecies came true.

Five stars.

[And new to the Galactoscope, we are pleased to introduce poet and author Tonya R. Moore, who has dived into New Wave's deep end with her first brush with Chip Delany….]


by Tonya R. Moore

Nova, by Samuel R. Delany

Nova was my first encounter with the work of Samuel R. Delaney who has, thus far, proven himself exemplary of the originality and innovativeness one would expect from the current New Wave of Science Fiction writers. Set in a distant future where humans have migrated to other worlds, this book paints a chaotic but beautiful picture of human turmoil and adventurousness in an ever expanding universe.

Lorq Von Ray is a born upstart from a family of nouveau-riche propelled into high society by their ill-gotten gains. He makes friends and, eventually, enemies with Prince and Ruby, quintessential Earth-nobility driven by power, greed, and a keen sense of self-entitlement.

Von Ray grew up haunted by constant reminders of the social stratum wedging a vast chasm between himself and the siblings. Ever ambitious, Von Ray pits wills and wits against Prince and Ruby, aiming to upset the economic balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.

Further embittered by their twisted and broken friendship, he sets out, with dogged determination, to hit the motherlode of interstellar treasures in the form of illyrion, the ephemeral byproduct of a nova and the most valuable and potent energy source known to mankind.

Should Von Ray succeed in this second attempt to capture this precious material in abundance from the nova, his payload promises to transform the economy of the Pleiades system and upend Prince’s monopoly on interstellar travel technology which allows them to hoard most of the wealth and stratify the balance of power between the Draco and Pleiades systems.

This book introduces a motley cast of characters who are destined to be enmeshed in the many dangers and high drama that comes along with being employed by Von Ray.

Mouse, for example, is a nomadic troubadour eking out a meager living while playing interplanetary hopscotch in the Draco system. He winds up on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, while seeking employment on one of the spaceships bound for other star systems and greater opportunities.

Here, Mouse encounters Lorq Von Ray, scion of the richest family in the Pleiades system and jumps at the opportunity to join the ragtag crew of cyborg studs on Von Ray’s spaceship bound for the heart of an exploding star.

Ruby Red and Prince don’t appreciate Von Ray’s intent to rise above a station they consider beneath them, not to mention shift humanity’s prosperity from Draco to the Pleiades system. A cargo hold filled with seven tons of illyrion would certainly help him achieve that.

Mouse and his syrynx, a musical instrument that conjures holographic imagery, bear witness to the changing times while the melodrama of a twisted love triangle unfolds among Von Ray, the selectively diffident Ruby Red, and the pridefully neurotic Prince.

The gypsy troubadour playing his syrynx is a recurring motif representing the backdrop humanity's culture and history against which the story unfolds. The syrynx, a stolen object, ironically foreshadows the climax of the story where it is once again stolen then turned into a weapon.

Delany’s command of astrophysics and the science behind supernovas is reasonably solid. He proves himself a master of using literary language to describe scientific concepts and the murky dynamics of human interpersonal entanglements but there are elements of Nova that make little sense.

Ruby Red’s complicity with Prince’s cruelty and neurotic behavior seems arbitrary, for instance. As a character, she seems to lack a will of her own. Despite her prominence in the story, we’re never given a real glimpse inside the mind of the woman. What does Ruby Red want? Why does she do the things that she does?

Ultimately, Nova is a beautifully chaotic and original tale rife with vivid, sometimes visceral prose, exuberant dialogue, and an intriguingly colorful cast of characters.

4.5 stars.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 16, 1968] Siriusly? (October 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Summertime, and the living ain't easy

Our longest, hottest summer began early with the shooting of Bobby Kennedy.  It heated up to the sound of Soviet bullets and tank treads in Czechoslovakia and reached a crescendo with the fiasco of a Democratic Convention in Chicago, shuddering in synchronicity with the quake in eastern Iran that killed 10,000.  Meanwhile, radioactive rain from the French H-bomb test soaks Japan, Pete Seeger's daughter, Mika, has been in a Mexico City jail for two months (for participating in anti-police protests), and the 82 crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo are still locked up in North Korea (for participating in unauthorized offshore fishing exercises).

But, hey, thanks to the war in Vietnam, unemployment is at its lowest rate since Korea.  And America has a new Queen, Miss Judith Ford, formerly Queen of Illinois.

Her "subjects" demonstrated a properly American sentiment toward the coronation.  Spurred by a collective called the New York Radical Women, several hundred protesters tossed "beauty" accoutrements into the "freedom trash can": bras, girdles, high-heeled shoes, fake eyelashes, etc.  So there was a bright spot, of sorts.

I wouldn't sent a knight out on a dog like this…

I apologize for coming off sour.  It's not just the season.  I've got a humdinger of a virus, and the latest issue of Galaxy is only making me feel worse.


by Douglas Chaffee

The Villains from Vega IV, by E. J. Gold and H. L. Gold


by Jack Gaughan

Fred Pohl, editor for Galaxy, likes to talk about how Gold, the founding editor for the magazine, was legendarily zealous with his red pen.  Not a single story made it through the slush pile (or any other) without looking like it had been through a Prussian duel.  Now, one could argue that there was merit to this approach: much of vintage Galaxy is superlative.

However, when Gold first submitted a story for an anthology Pohl was putting together, Fred could not help taking delight in a bit of revenge.  He contrived to mark everything, even innocuous conjunctions and prepositions.  When it was done, there was more red than black and white.  The dedication this must have taken!

Reportedly, Gold called Pohl up, and said something to the effect of, "Fred, you're the editor, and I'll defer to your judgment, of course, but…Jesus!"

In any event, it couldn't be this story to which Fred was referring since Villains was co-written by both Gold and his son, Eugene (but not, as I initially thought from the initials, his wife, Evelyn).  It's the silly story of Robert E. Li, President of Vega IV, who comes to Earth to find his young bride, who has run off to be in pictures.  Andytec, a diffident young android, is dispatched to accompany him as bodyguard and detective.

There are some interesting concepts, like the Vegan tradition of 36 year olds marrying 18 year olds, who themselves find new partners upon reaching 36.  At 54, one is then free to marry whomever one likes.  And there's the Bird of Perdition, a chimerical creature biologically rooted into the heads of former criminals (including, surprisingly, the Vegan President).  Semi-intelligent, they spout Poe-derivative prose when alarmed.

But all in all, the story is not funny enough, nor does it break enough ground (indeed, it feels vaguely like a washed out A Specter is Haunting Texas) to sustain its novelet length.  One good bit, however:

"Turn that bloody thing off!" he shouted at me.

"Off, sir?" I said vacantly.  "You can change channels and make it louder, but you can't turn it off.  With the 3V off, what would there be to do?  And it would be so lonely."

Two stars.

All the Myriad Ways, by Larry Niven


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

Things look up a bit, as they always do, with Niven's latest.  An L.A. cop is trying to decode the recent rash of murders and suicides, all spontaneous, few logically motivated.  The timing suggests a connection with Crosstime, the company that just began producing vehicles that can transit parallel time tracks.  In addition to bringing back marvels from other histories—worlds where the Confederacy won the Civil War, or where the planet has been bombed into searing radioactivity—it has also discovered a philosophical crisis.  If everything that could ever be does exist somewhen, does anything you do really matter?

And would you kill/die to find out?

As usual, the value of the tale is in Niven's crisp telling.  I particularly liked the revelation that the world our detective inhabits is not our Earth.  There's not quite enough to the story to make it truly memorable.  It's more of an idea-piece (or, per the author, an anti-idea piece; he doesn't buy the idea of parallel universes, nor does he appreciate their implications.  This is the ad absurdum extension of the concept.)

Of course, I think there is a middle ground: probabilities do exist.  Just because there are two options doesn't mean their chance of occurring is 50/50.  Or as I tell folks, if I flip a coin, it's 50% likely it comes up heads or tails.  But it's 100% likely the coin falls down rather than up.

So while there may be an infinity of universes, it would seem they would all remain confined to the possible, and the preponderance tend toward the probable.  I could also see timelines sort of merging back together if they were close enough.

Anyway, a good story, and thought-provoking.  Four stars.

Thyre Planet, by Kris Neville


by Dan Adkins

One day, an alien race called the Thyres all, suddenly, disappeared.  They left behind an inhabitable world and a working, planetary teleportation booth grid.  Of course, humans jumped at the chance to settle the planet.

The hitch: each use of the booth has an infinitesimal but non-zero chance of killing the traveler.  Hundreds die each year.  A Terran scientist is dispatched to solve the problem.  Convinced it is tied to some abstruse physical law, he secures billions in funding to crash-start a Manhattan Project to rewrite cosmic law.  The endeavor takes on a life of its own, ultimately eclipsing the original problem.  Said problem remains unresolved until the end, and it turns out to be caused by something completely different.

I found this a deeply frustrating story.  Is it a satire of scientific institutions?  A cautionary tale advising us to look for simple explanations before complex ones?  A screed against hasty colonization?  it all muddles together without a satisfactory payoff.  Maybe I read it wrong.

Two stars.

Homespinner, by Jack Wodhams


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

Boy, this was a hard one to rate.  It's about a fellow who lives in a future where houses can be done up in a day, rooms completely redecorated as quickly as one might, today, swap out a picture on the wall.  Said fellow is annoyed that his wife keeps changing his home on a weekly basis.  All he wants is some consistency in his life.  Indeed, you can't help wondering why the couple are together at all, so incompatible they seem.  The husband also seems awfully sexist, expecting his wife to stay at home and do virtually nothing but greet him cheerfully after work.

Of course, you'll figure out what's up with their relationship before it's revealed, and that bit is reasonably clever.  The problem is, the getting there is repetitive and unpleasant.  I get why, but I feel a more skilled author could have put it together better.

For some reason, however, I appreciate it enough to give it three stars.

Criminal in Utopia, by Mack Reynolds


by Brand

In yet another story exploring "People's Capitalism", the American welfare state of the 1980s, a citizen embarks on a crime spree to improve his lot.  After all, in a system where everyone is supposed to be equal, the only way to get ahead is to cheat.

The question is: in an economy where income is strictly tied to each person, and all transactions are electronicized and trackable, can a person get more than he deserves?

As usual for Reynolds, a mildly diverting story and some very interesting technologies.  Three stars.

For Your Information: The Orbit of Explorer-1, by Willy Ley

Despite the sexy subject matter (I dig space stuff), this piece on…well…the orbit of Explorer-1…is pretty dull stuff.  I think Ley's heart just isn't in these articles very often anymore.

Three stars.

I Bring You Hands, by Colin Kapp


by Virgil Finlay

A rather amoral fellow is a Hands merchant.  These are tape-programmable, robotic hands that can do a physical task an infinite number of times.  Perfect for replacing assembly line workers, tailors, cooks, you name it.  Along the way, the salesman has an affair with one of the workers whose job he causes to be roboticized.  The end is not a pleasant one for the Hands dealer.

I had a lot of hopes for this story.  I thought it was going to make some sort of statement about mechanization, the ensuing unemployment, and how society adapts to change.  Instead, it was all thrown away for a cheap, obvious, macabre finish.

Two stars.

A Visit to Cleveland General, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc


by Jack Gaughan

Two brothers were in an air-car accident.  Just one emerged.  So why does Albin have trouble distinguishing himself from the deceased Deon?  Why does he need to take a pill every morning "for memory"?  And what are those aerosols Miss Kling, the nurse at Cleveland General, keeps spraying to affect everyone's mood and recollection?  Particularly in surgery, where body parts are shuffled into various people, muddling the identifies of donor and recipient?

Visit is a decent enough piece, thematically and literally, though you'll guess what's going on very quickly.  Scientifically, it makes no lick of sense.

Three stars.

The Warbots, by Larry S. Todd


by Todd

You'd think I would be quite keen on a fictional history of legged assault vehicles.  This one, however, is both too goofy and far too long to scratch that itch.

Two stars.

Behind the Sandrat Hoax, by Christopher Anvil


by Safrani

My first thought upon reaching this final piece was, "Oh, great—a Chris Anvil epistolary story."

And that thought was justified.

It's about how a prospector on New Venus discovers that eating the raw stomach of a desert rat allows the consumer to digest water from grass, but the proud scientific community doesn't like the way the research is done and impedes progress.  All of the scientists are made of straw, you see.

I was surprised not to find this in Analog—I guess sometimes things are too lousy even for Campbell.  On the other hand, Campbell gets the credit for tainting Anvil so that he's now worthless wherever he publishes.

One star.

Dimmer than a thousand squibs

2.4 stars.  Not only is that dismal, but recall that an issue of Galaxy is half-again as long as a normal mag.

There's a reason I paused for breath halfway to tear through The Weathermonger (and that is a good read!) Anyway, all things pass, and summer's only got five days left to it.  Surely next season will see an improvement, yes?




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 14, 1968] Half a Loaf is Better Than None (October 1968 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

You don't have to be a sociologist to realize that the past few years have been one of cultural upheaval. The hippies, the struggle for civil rights, protests against the war in Vietnam; I could go on and on.

An example happened one week ago, when hundreds of women protested at the Miss America pageant. They asked to be treated as human beings, not as stereotyped images of artificial standards of beauty.


Members of the emerging Women's Liberation movement toss things like stiletto heels, makeup, and copies of Playboy magazine into a symbolic garbage can.

A recurring theme of these social changes is the desire for freedom. It can even be seen in popular culture. For nearly a month, for example, the number one song in the USA has been People Got to be Free by the Rascals.


They seem very serious about it.

This is a laudable goal, of course, and there's a long way to go before we can truly say that oppressed groups are liberated. An optimist might say we're halfway there.

Speaking of halfway . . .

Four of One, Half an Octad of the Other

I've been griping for quite a while about Fantastic filling its pages with reprints, along with one or two new stories per issue. Maybe somebody at the magazine heard me. Of the eight stories in the latest issue, only half are reprinted. That's progress!


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

You can see the cover screaming New at you. Ironically, the cover art is old. It served as the back cover of the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.


As you can see, they reversed it, covered up a pretty big part of it, and just generally made it look worse.

Did I say halfway? The four new stories take up somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the magazine. They're all clustered together at the front.

The Sound of Space, by Ross Rocklynne

A spaceman returns from a two-year voyage to Alpha Centauri. He shows up at Triton, a moon of Neptune, where his fiancée is waiting for him.


Illustration by Jeff Jones.

She's upset because he hasn't aged at all. (This is supposedly an effect of weightlessness, which seems unlikely to me.) She also doesn't like the fact that space travelers are notorious for being irreligious. She takes him to church, and tells him that she's going to marry the pastor unless he goes back to Earth and ages in its gravity. The spaceman comes up with a wild scheme to show the woman and the pastor what deep space is really like.

The premise of gravity being the cause of aging isn't exactly plausible, to say the least. The story is written in an odd style, with verbal quirks. The woman inserts a fair amount of French into her speech. People often talk in flowery language that doesn't sound like anything anybody would really say. Folks are often referred to as Sir So-and-So (such as Sir Preacher); the spaceman even calls mortality Sir Death.

Two stars.

The Dragons of Telsa, by Arthur Porges

As an example of the care with which the magazine is put together, the cover and the table of contents call this yarn The Dragons of Tesla (note the change in spelling.)

Anyway, this is the latest in a series of science lessons disguised as fiction featuring the clever Ensign De Ruyter. In this tale, he and his captain explore the planet Telsa (not Tesla). It's hot and has an atmosphere without oxygen. There are a huge number of dangerous reptilian predators around.

(Herds of hundreds and hundreds of predators? That seems unlikely, given the typical predator-to-prey ratio you'd expect.)

After wiping out a whole bunch of the beasts with their ray guns, the unlucky pair run out of the energy that powers their weapons. They go hide in a cave, which just happens to have exactly the stuff that De Ruyter needs to save the day.

As I may have suggested above, the plot depends on a pretty outrageous coincidence. (Gosh, the cave has a pool of liquid rubidium and an object that's shaped like a shallow bowl! Just what we need to play Mister Wizard!)

It's like minor league Hal Clement.

Two stars.

Oaten, by K. M. O'Donnell

It's not a big secret that K. M. O'Donnell is actually Barry Malzberg, the magazine's new assistant editor. He's had a few New Wave stories published here and there.

This epistolary tale relates the misadventures of a sort of social psychologist, for lack of a better term, among aliens. He goes through a ritual, not understanding what's going on, leading to a bizarre climax.

I've supplied a pretty bad synopsis, because it's not easy to figure out what's going on. The nature of the so-called Oaten, for example, is particularly puzzling. Then there's that ending . . .

I really don't know what to make of this thing.

Two stars.

Where Is Mrs. Malcolmn?, by Susan A. Lewin

The magazine proudly announces that this is a first publication. That's not always a good sign. In another example of careful editing, the table of contents spells the character's name Malcolm, which looks more normal to me. The text makes it clear that it's really the less likely Malcolmn.


Uncredited photograph, one of three accompanying the story that pretty much all show the same thing.

A woman recovering from a heart attack investigates what she thinks is a water tower that appears out of nowhere. If you've ever read any science fiction before, you'll know exactly what happens.

There's not really much to say about this extremely predictable first story. Was it written just to go with the photographs? Lots of room for improvement, I suppose.

One star.

So much for new stuff. On to the reprints.

Lords of the Underworld, by L. Taylor Hansen

The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this yarn.


Cover art by J. Allen St. John.

Three guys are fooling around in the California desert, doing archeological stuff. One of them very casually mentions that he's built a time machine. The main character (the other two disappear from the story quickly) sends himself back thousands of years.


Illustration by St. John also.

This leads to a rip-roaring adventure, as the hero defeats an evil empire nearly by himself. There's a beautiful princess to help him, a sinister cultist to destroy, vampire bats, a saber-toothed tiger, and, yes, a dinosaur. Lots of stuff goes on.

It's all nonsense, of course. There are some nice descriptions, but the whole thing is pretty darn goofy. The open-ended conclusion suggests a sequel, but I don't think there was one.

Two stars.

Between Two Worlds, by Milton Lesser

The December 1955 issue of the magazine is the source of this fantasy story.


Cover art by Edward Valigursky.

A meek fellow has dreams about being Jason from mythology. Of course, he really is living as the legendary hero. He falls in love with the warrior maiden Atalanta, fights with Hercules, wins the golden fleece, and so forth. If you've seen the nifty movie Jason and the Argonauts, you know what to expect. There's a surprise ending that's not surprising.


Illustration by Louis Priscilla.

This piece comes from a brief, odd period in the history of Fantastic when it was dedicated to wish fulfillment stories. Or, as you can tell from the cover, male fantasies. It's not as openly voyeuristic as the other stories seem to be, judging by their descriptions, although Atalanta is stark naked at one point.

As a retelling of an old story, it's OK. Otherwise, there's not much to it.

Two stars.

Bandits of Time, by Ray Cummings

This wild and wooly adventure comes from the December 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Rod Ruth.

A mysterious fellow approaches a reporter and his blind girlfriend. He promises them a wonderful life if they'll meet him at a certain place in the middle of the night. He also says he'll restore the woman's sight.


Illustration by Ruth as well.

Understandably, the reporter is suspicious. He takes his girlfriend home and shows up at the designated place with a fellow newsman, hoping for a big story. Instead, he discovers that the woman has been kidnapped. She and the two reporters are sent two million years into the future.

The weird man who approached them has a mad scheme to set up his own private empire in a distant future when humanity has devolved to a primitive state. He takes along male criminals from all periods of history, as well as kidnapped women to mate with them.

Can the two heroes escape being executed by the insane dictator? Will the woman regain her sight? Will the seductive would-be empress prove to be an enemy or a friend?

Two time travel yarns from 1941, both of them full of nonstop action. This one isn't quite as wacky as the first one, although there's a revelation about the madman's identity that comes out of nowhere.

Two stars.

The Monument, by Henry Slesar

We finish up with a mood piece from the July 1956 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Ed Valigursky.

A small group of tourists are on a spaceship headed for the Moon. A couple of them complain a lot. The captain opens the observation window to show them something.


Illustration by William Llewellyn.

The plot is very simple. The story accomplishes what it sets out to do. Maybe that's enough.

Three stars.

Half Empty or Half Full?

Either I'm in a bad mood or this was a very weak issue. Maybe I should have given out some three star ratings to some of the stories, maybe not. My time might have been better spent making a sandwich.


A full loaf of diet bread counts as half a loaf of regular bread, doesn't it?




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