Tag Archives: venture

[April 14, 1970] Take this spaceship to Alpha Centauri (May 1970 Venture)

Coverage of the Apollo 13 crisis continues!

TUNE IN!



by David Levinson

Skyjacked

Until recently, it seemed like there was at least one major airplane crash every month. That’s one of the reasons almost every airport has a place where you can buy short-term life insurance for your flight. But crashes seem to be giving way to a new risk: hijacking (or skyjacking as headlines writers would have it; the term will never stick). Last year alone, there were roughly 100 incidents around the world. That’s worse than crashes ever were.

In the U.S., the hijacker usually demands to be taken to Cuba. It’s mostly an inconvenience for the passengers, who get to their destination much later than planned and don’t even get to see any of Cuba. It’s become so common that it’s the subject of jokes and skits. But these incidents are taking on a more violent turn.

My colleague Cora recently reported on two failed hijacking attempts in Munich, one of which left one dead and ten injured. Not long after that, Swissair Flight 330 was destroyed by a bomb. Those three attacks have been attributed to a Palestinian terrorist organization. On March 1st, a bomb was found on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight before it left Rome. On the 17th, a gunman aboard an Eastern Airlines shuttle flight wounded the pilot and fatally wounded the co-pilot after being told the plane had to refuel in Boston. Fortunately, the co-pilot was able to wrest the gun away from the hijacker before succumbing to his wounds, allowing the pilot to land the plane safely. To date, this is the only airplane hijacking in America to end with a fatality.

On March 31st, a Japanese group calling themselves the Red Army Faction hijacked a flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka and demanded they be flown to Cuba. After being told the plane was incapable of flying that far, they demanded they be flown to North Korea instead. While refueling in Fukuoka, they released 23 passengers, mostly children and the elderly. An attempt was made to land the plane in South Korea and trick the hijackers into believing they’d reached Pyongyang. Unfortunately, they realized what was going on after the plane landed. Following some tense negotiations, the Japanese Vice Minister for Transportation, Shinjiro Yamamura, traded himself for the rest of the passengers and the plane flew on to North Korea. The hijackers were granted asylum and the plane and crew were allowed to return to Japan (not necessarily a given with North Korea) a few days later, arriving in Tokyo on the morning of April 5th.

That’s a lot in less than two months. But in the midst of all that, airplane hijackings and bombings also made it to the movies. March 5th saw the premiere of Airport. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a disaster or a hit; either way it’s star-studded. Take a look at the poster.

Promotional poster for the movie Airport. It shows the faces of twelve actors around a prominent list of their names: Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Barry Nelson, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter, Barbara Hale.You probably know who most of these people are.

Based on the 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey, the film is about the operations of an airport crippled by a blizzard and dealing with a wrecked plane on the tarmac and an inbound flight with a suicide bomber aboard, plus lots of soap opera stuff. While critics almost universally panned the book, it spent 64 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 30 at #1, and was the biggest selling novel of 1968. The critics are no kinder to the film (“dull” seems to be one of the nicer things they say), but once it went to wider release, it promptly spent two weeks as number one at the box office and is still in the top five. There must be something in the water. Or the air.

Spacejacked

The hijacking theme continues in this month’s Venture, which is dominated by Edward Wellen’s new novel. It’s normal for Venture to give most of its space to a condensed novel, but it feels like more space than usual is taken up this time.

Cover of Venture Science Fiction. It announces Hijack, a novel by Edward Wellen. The illustration is a handful of humanoid figures running while rockets lift off and a gigantic sun burns in the background. The figures are highly stylized and the colors are angry red and yellow.I’m still not sold on Tanner’s covers, but this one is better than most. Art by Bert Tanner

Continue reading [April 14, 1970] Take this spaceship to Alpha Centauri (May 1970 Venture)

[January 14, 1970] Root Rot (February 1970 Venture)


by David Levinson

A less perfect union

Unions have been a positive for workers. They’re why we have the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, paid time off, why blue collar workers are able to buy a house, not to mention not owing their soul to the company store; I’m old enough to remember when none of those things were a given. Of course, as human institutions, they are also flawed, and where money and power flows, those flaws can turn to worse things. That’s what gives many politicians—and the editor of a certain science fiction magazine—a pretext to rail against them.

One of the most important unions this century has been the United Mine Workers of America. Much of that stems from the four decades of leadership by John L. Lewis, who died last June. Lewis took a well-earned retirement in 1960 and was replaced by his vice president Thomas Kennedy. Old and in poor health, Kennedy was largely a caretaker and was soon followed by Lewis’ chosen successor, W.A. “Tough Tony” Boyle.

Lewis ran the UMWA with an iron fist, ignoring demands by the rank-and-file for a greater say in the union. He maintained his power through skill, charisma, and reputation. Boyle has run things with a similar style, but lacks most of what kept Lewis in charge. There’s even a feeling among the membership that he tends to favor the interests of the mine owners over the workers.

Enter Joseph “Jock” Yablonski. He was one of the leading figures in the opposition to Boyle’s policies. He had also been the president of the UMW’s District 5 until Boyle unilaterally stripped him of office in 1965. Last May, Yablonski announced he would challenge Boyle for the UMW presidency in the December election and was formally nominated in September. Boyle won the election on December 9th by an almost 2-to-1 margin, and Yablonski conceded. However after seeing the detailed election results, Yablonski promptly asked the Department of Labor to investigate the election. On the 18th, he also filed five civil lawsuits in federal court against the UMW over a variety of irregularities.

On January 5th, Yablonski’s older son, Kenneth, discovered the bodies of Yablonski, his wife Margaret, and their 25-year-old daughter Charlotte in their home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The next day 20,000 miners in West Virginia staged a one-day wildcat strike in protest against Tony Boyle, who they believe is responsible for the murders. Hours after the Yablonskis were buried, several of his supporters met with his attorney to plan further actions to reform the union.

Three black and white headshot photographs with names and captions underneath each. On the left, Mrs. Margaret Yablonski, a middle-aged white woman with dark hair.  She is smiling and wearing a dark jacket. Under her name the caption reads 'Bled to death.' In the center, Joseph A. Yablonski, a middle-aged white man with gray or white hair. He has a neutral expression and is wearing a neutral colored suit with a dark tie.  Under his name the caption reads 'Murder a mystery.' On the right, Charlotte Yablonski, a young white woman with dark hair. She is smiling and wearing a dark blouse. Under her name the caption reads 'Shot twice in head.'

As I write, the police have no leads. A $60,000 reward has been offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction. I don’t want to point any fingers without evidence, but an awful lot of people close to Yablonski are looking hard at Tony Boyle and the acrimony surrounding last month’s election.

Corrupt institutions

Most of this month’s Venture is given over to the new Keith Laumer novel, which spends quite a while with miners. But it and the other stories in the issue deal with corruption, both institutional and personal.

The February 1970 cover of Venture Science Fiction magazine.  A drawing in pen and marker.  The outlines are in black ink. The shadows are filled in with lines of magenta marker, and the highlights similarly in orange. At the bottom there is a man's head with a boxy hexagonal helmet over it.  It covers his eyes and extends down nearly to the end of his nose. Two conical extensions stick out from the sides.  Over his head a narrow white disc is hanging - it could be the top of a mine shaft or a floating UFO.  Two outsized human hands frame the image, palms facing inward as if about to grasp something.A not very representational image for Laumer’s new story. Art by Bert Tanner

Continue reading [January 14, 1970] Root Rot (February 1970 Venture)

[October 20, 1969] There was a ship (November 1969 Venture)


by David Levinson

”There was a ship,” quoth he.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Northwest to Alaska

Almost from the moment Europeans discovered the Americas, they’ve been looking for a sea route to Asia across the top of the continent. Dubbed the Northwest Passage by the English (because they were trying to travel west), the name stuck, and the route has been of interest ever since. The McClure Arctic expedition showed there was a sea route in 1850, though much of it was blocked by ice, and the journey was partially completed by sledge. Roald Amundsen became the first to go from Atlantic to Pacific entirely by ship between 1903 and 1906.

When oil was discovered last year at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of Alaska, attention turned once again to the Northwest Passage. A pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to a mostly ice-free port like Anchorage or Valdez faces a number of technological and legal challenges, so, even though planning is well underway and several hundred miles of pipe have already been ordered, oil companies are taking a look at the viability of shipping through the Northwest Passage.

Enter the SS Manhattan, an oil tanker owned and operated by the Esso company; she’s also the largest merchant vessel registered in the United States. She has been refitted with an icebreaker bow by the Finnish shipbuilder Wärtsilä, which built a huge ice tank to help optimize the design.

The SS Manhattan breaking through the ice of the Northwest Passage.

The Manhattan left Pennsylvania in August and sailed for Alaska under the command of Captain Roger A. Steward. Sea ice in the M’Clure Strait forced her take a more southerly route through the Canadian Arctic archipelago. After she reached Prudhoe Bay, a token barrel of crude oil was placed aboard, and the return voyage began. The ship cleared the Passage on September 14th, becoming the first commercial vessel to make the transit.

Is the Northwest Passage now open for commerce? Maybe, maybe not. The Manhattan required the support of several American and Canadian coast guard icebreakers to get through. Also the legal challenges a pipeline faces may be nothing compared to the sea route. Canada considers all waters in the Arctic archipelago to be internal waters, not an international shipping lane. In fact, at one point a group of Inuit hunters stopped the ship and demanded the captain request permission to pass through Canadian territory. He did so, and permission was granted.

So there are legal problems. Whether the Passage can be used year-round is also unknown. There’s talk of sending another ship this winter to see if the way is open then. Time will tell, but I’m betting on the pipeline.

Involving, but avoiding, calamity

There’s something about a shipwreck that seems to resonate with people. From The Wreck of the Hesperus (the bane of schoolchildren for nearly a century) to A Night to Remember (something of a disaster itself at the box office), wrecks are found all through popular entertainment. Science fiction is no exception, although the ships are usually in space. This month’s Venture offers no fewer than three ship related disasters, not to mention a plane crash and a global disaster.

Thankfully, the issue itself is not a disaster.  Quite the contrary, actually.

Art by Tanner

This issue’s cover is a slight improvement over the last. It’s recognizably science fiction, and there’s a second color.

Continue reading [October 20, 1969] There was a ship (November 1969 Venture)

[July 2, 1969] Merging streams (August 1969 Venture)


by David Levinson

Joining the mainstream

Every Sunday, the New York Times publishes a list of the best selling books of the last week. It tends to be a mix of high-brow, literary novels and potboilers—especially spy thrillers—along with the occasional gothic romance and a mystery once in a blue moon. But to the best of my knowledge, it’s never had a science fiction novel prior to this year. As of the latest list, it has not one but two, both of which have been reviewed here at the Journey. There’s even a third that could be said to have sfnal elements if you stand on your head and squint a bit.

In its tenth week on the list and slipping one spot to number six is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Of course, Vonnegut is none too happy about his work being labelled science fiction. Meanwhile, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain hit the list for the first time in eighth place. The potential third novel is Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, which seems to be set on an Earth exactly like ours with a slightly different history or on a counter-Earth on the other side of the sun. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be much science fiction in the plot, so I’m not really inclined to include it.

Does this mean our beloved genre has finally hit the big time? Probably not. As I said, Vonnegut doesn’t want to associate with us, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Crichton thinks of his book as a thriller. (I could be wrong, but that’s how it’s being marketed.) 2001 did all right at the box office, but was panned by critics (including some SF critics). Star Trek has been canceled, leaving Land of the Giants—a show so bad it makes Lost in Space look smart—the closest thing to SF on television. But just maybe the boundaries are weakening, even if we wind up having to sneak in the back door with those who won’t acknowledge us.

Sophomore or sophomoric?

The second issue of Mercury Publishing’s second attempt at Venture SF is on the stands. How is it? Well, before we crack it open, let’s look at the outside.

More geometric shapes and color washes. Art by Bert Tanner

Continue reading [July 2, 1969] Merging streams (August 1969 Venture)

[May 11, 1962] Unfixed in the Heavens (The Seed of Earth, by Robert Silverberg)


by Gideon Marcus

A hundred and fifty years from now, the stars are finally attainable.  With the invention of a reliable and quick interstellar drive, the galaxy is now ripe for colonization.  But humanity is too fat and happy to leave the nest; the world government is forced to conscript candidates to become unwilling pioneers.  Six thousand men and women are sent on sixty starships every day toward some farflung world.  The goal: to ensure that the human race can be spread as widely as possible.

This is the premise of Robert Silverberg's newest piece, a short novel published in the :June 1962 Galaxy called The Seed of Earth.  It's really two novellas in one, the first half dealing with the lives of four conscriptees as they are selected and prepared for departure, and the second half about what happens to them once they reach their destination. 

Seed has an interesting, complicated history.  The second part originally appeared in the May 1957 issue of Venture as The Winds of Siros.  In this story, two newlywed colonist couples are abducted from their settlement by voyeuristic aliens who lock them in a cave and watch the emotional drama ensue.  After the four escape, the women determine that they were with the wrong men and change partners.  It's all supposed to be rather daring and progressive.

Venture was a short-lived companion to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, designed to be a "more adult" alternative to F&SF.  What this really meant was more stories about sex, and since the stories were almost exclusively written by men (and modern society being what it is), there were a lot of demeaning, disturbing pieces in Venture

The example that turned me off of the magazine was, in fact, also by Robert Silverberg.  Called Eve and the Twenty-three Adams (March 1958), it featured an all-stag starship crew and the lone woman included on the roster to "service" them.  When she expressed reluctance at her role, she was drugged into submission for the duration of the flight.  It was all very light-hearted, just a rollicking tale.  Like Garrett's Queen Bee.

Silverberg's difficulty with the concept of feminine agency was also evident in Siros (and thus, in Seed).  The male colonists get to choose whom they want to marry from among the female colonists, and while the women have the right of refusal for the first few rounds, all of them must end up with someone, ultimately.  Now, as Siros plays out, we see that the system is not particularly rigid and, in the end, the woman colonists do have some choice in the matter.  But it's informal, and it's at the sufferance of the men.  Hardly an equal situation.

In fact, there is a strong streak of puritanical prudishness in Seed.  At one point, a woman's pregnancy is described as "a lapse in virtue."  I recognize that Silverberg's intent was to show that our current (late 50's/early 60's) morality is antiquated and needs to be shaken up.  Hence, the laudable plot elements of wife-swapping and polyamory that form the core of Siros/Seed Part 2.  But it just doesn't seem plausible that Earth of 2117 would be exactly as, if not more, conservative as modern day, and that only by unleashing humans on a raw world can they undo the straitjacket. 

Seed's first part was added to Siros to make the piece long enough for publication as a stand-alone novel.  Ballantine and Doubleday, the "respectable" s-f publishers, rejected it.  H.L. Gold, Galaxy's editor, accepted Seed for its paperback series (I reviewed one of them: the excellent The City in the Sea), but the series was discontinued before Seed saw print.  Ultimately, it ended up in the magazine proper.

Part One of Seed isn't bad: a quartet of reasonably interesting character portraits with a bonus view through the eyes of the fellow tasked with finalizing the crew selections.  The characterization is better in this half, which makes sense – the Silverberg writing Part One was older than the one who wrote Part Two.  The problem here isn't so much the writing or the flow.  It's the flaws in the fundamental premise.  In Seed, forced emigration has gone on for a generation.  Are there really hundreds of thousands of habitable planets within 30 light years of Earth ripe for colonization without any need for protective technology or planetary engineering?  Are there even that many planets?  Does it make sense to invest just one hundred strangers in a colony rather than shipping more than one load to a promising destination? 

And how is it plausible that a draft for colonization is even required?  To all accounts, Silverberg's world is no utopia – in fact, it seems hardly different from our current one, societally and technologically.  Surely there would be 2,190,000 immigrant candidates out of billions every year.  Contrast Seed with Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky – there, one was lucky if one could leave Earth. 

The Seed of Earth is ultimately a rather unsuccessful "fix-up" story.  The beginning doesn't flow well into the end, and neither portion rings very true.  I'd charitably give three stars to the first part and two to the second, for an aggregate of 2.5 stars.  That's probably overgenerous, but I can give Silverberg credit for the effort, at least.