Folks living in certain parts of southern Mexico and the eastern coast of the United States and Canada were treated to a spectacular sight in the sky a few days ago. On March 7, there was a total eclipse of the sun visible from those areas of the globe.
The sun is about to completely disappear behind the moon.
I live in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, so I missed this extraordinary event. Let's see; when do astronomers think a total solar eclipse will be visible from my neck of the woods? Let me check my almanac.
August 21, 2017. Holy cow, close to half a century to go.
While I'm waiting, I can spend the time reading. Just as a solar eclipse causes the Earth to cool down, at least for a moment, the latest issue of Fantastic features a new novella from one of the masters of imaginative literature that is dominated by a sense of cold. Grab a cup of hot chocolate, wrap yourself up in a blanket, and join me as we dive into its icy pages.
Cover art by Jeff Jones.
Hey! An original piece of art on the cover instead of something borrowed from a German magazine! That's a good sign, as is the promise of a new sword and sorcery yarn from the greatest creator of such. (No offense, Conan fans.)
Editorial, by Ted White
The editor explains that readers have different tastes (obviously) and that he just selects the stories he thinks are the best (even more obviously.) He mentions a new member of the staff, Arnold Katz, who has the job (an unenviable one, to me) of selecting each issue's Fantasy Classic (i.e. reprint) from yellowing copies of Fantastic Adventures. Finally, he states that he goes through all the letters he gets from readers, separates them out by which stories they're commenting on (even cutting up ones that talk about more than one work), and forwarding them to the authors involved. Sounds like a lot of extra work, so wish him good luck.
No rating.
The Snow Women, by Fritz Leiber
Illustrations by Jeff Jones also.
We go back to the teenage years of Fafhrd, before he ran around with the Gray Mouser. (There's one tiny hint that he encountered his future buddy during a brief career as a pirate.) It's the dead of winter in his northern homeland. A troupe of actors is around to provide entertainment, with a fair amount of nubile female flesh on display, for the men only.
That makes it sound like Fafhrd lives in a male-dominated society, but in fact the women have a lot of power, some of it magical. They're also not reluctant to attack the men with snowballs, sometimes causing serious injuries. Fafhrd lives with his widowed mother, who tries to dominate him completely. He's also got a girlfriend, pregnant with his child, who is a tough cookie indeed.
Fafhrd and the tree where he keeps a cache of weapons and other supplies.
The plot gets started when Fafhrd gets mixed up with an alluring actress, who has a complex back story of her own. It seems that other northerners plan to buy her as a slave from the leader of the troupe. Suffice to say that a lot of complications follow. Wait until you find out how Fafhrd uses some firework rockets he steals from the actors!
It's no surprise that this is very well written, with wit, tasteful eroticism, vivid descriptions, and plenty of action. We also get quite a bit of insight into Fafhrd's personality. He's fascinated by the civilized, decadent south in comparison with the barbaric north. The female characters are fully developed, three-dimensional individuals, which is not something you can say about a lot of fantasy and science fiction written by men.
Five stars.
The Wager Lost by Winning, by John Brunner
Illustrations by Michael Kaluta.
This is one of a series of stories about a mysterious figure known only as the Traveller in Black. A couple of tales about him have appeared in British publications. (That's why I'm using the double-l spelling.)
He's a god-like being who wanders around a fantasy world. His mission is a little vague, but it somehow involves order and chaos. We get several brief sections of text describing how he fulfills the desires of those he encounters, often not to their liking.
The Traveller and an empty pedestal that plays a part in the plot.
The Traveller becomes involved with an aristocrat who has kidnapped the inhabitants of a peaceful village in order to use them as slaves that he can risk in wagers with other lords. The ruler believes that the local goddess of luck holds him in her favor. The Traveller makes a bet that she will turn her back on him. The wager plays out in an unexpected way.
The story is full of imaginative details, from the lazy entity who dwells in a lake at the peaceful village to the bizarre methods of gambling engaged in by the lords. The theme of Be Careful What You Wish For may be a familiar one, but there's a lot more to the story than just that.
Four stars.
Dear Aunt Annie, by Gordon Ecklund
Illustration by Michael Hinge.
This, the author's first published story, reveals a willingness to experiment and a fair amount of ambition for a newcomer. It's told from multiple points of view, and we don't get full information on what's going on right away, so it requires careful reading.
After a devastating war, the citizens of the United States are lulled into a state of complete nonviolence through a combination of drugs and psychotherapy. A problem develops when a woman writes to newspaper columnist Aunt Annie for advice, revealing that she attempted suicide. That's not supposed to be possible, so Aunt Annie sends one of her assistants to investigate. The situation leads to debate over how to handle the apparent return of human violence.
The exact nature of Aunt Annie and her assistants doesn't become clear at first, so I won't discuss it here. (The illustration is a clue.) This is more or less a New Wave story, particularly in its disjointed narrative style. I found it both intriguing and confusing.
Three stars.
The Freedom Fighter, by Ray Russell
The narrator is a movie director in the near future. Not only is she one of the few women in that profession (I guess things won't change much over the next few years), she's in trouble with her producer. It seems she doesn't make the kind of movies expected of her.
The story has only one point to make, so I won't give it away here. It's a simple reversal of current trends. The satire plays out as expected. I should note that the text contains derogatory terms for homosexual women and men, which is distasteful.
Two stars.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Hank Stine
Leiber praises the collections Daughters of Earth by Judith Merril and Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore. He also reveals that he has read the manuscript for the new novel And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ (under its initial title End of Chaos) and states that it describes fully what it would feel like to possess powers of telepathy and clairvoyance. (Our own Jason Sacks recently reviewed the same novel.)
Stine has high praise for the British television series The Prisoner, as well as for a novel, with the same title, based on the series by Thomas A. Disch. He is less enthusiastic for Number Two, another book based on the show, by David McDaniel.
No rating.
The Pulsating Planet, by John Broome
The September 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures is the source of this reprint.
Cover art by Robert Fuqua.
Our two-fisted hero is a reporter. For some reason he's on an asteroid heading into the solar system. He claims that he saw a base of enemy aliens, but there's no sign of it. The military is about to arrest him for misleading them, but he manages to kidnap a corporal and head for where the base should be.
Illustration by Albert Magarian
The mismatched pair follow a dwarf into the hidden base. The dwarf is a Mad Scientist, so there's also his Beautiful Daughter for the love interest. Mix in the aliens, some of whom don't really want to invade Earth, and a weird monster for the hero to fight.
The explanation for fact that the alien base appears and disappears is really silly. Corny and poorly written, this is an example of the kind of pulp fiction that gives science fiction a bad name among the literati. If this is a Fantasy Classic, I'd hate to see the ones that didn't make the grade.
One star.
Fantasy Fandom, by Jeffrey Clark
Instead of the usual article reprinted from a fanzine, this is a long letter sent to the magazine's sister publication Amazing. Clark discusses Old Wave and New Wave, stating that there's room for both, and compares science fiction and fantasy with mainstream fiction. Decently done, but there's not a lot that's new here.
Three stars.
According to You, by Various Readers
Very much a mixed bag of letters, with no particular theme to them. Notable is the fact that controversial author David R. Bunch gently points out that one of his stories was announced to be coming soon under the name David Bloch.
No rating.
The Reader Who Came In From The Cold
Overall, a pretty good issue, enough to warm the heart of the lucky person who peruses it on a chilly night in early spring. A couple of disappointments, but the two lead fantasy stories are worth the price of the magazine.
As luck would have it, the first three novels to be reviewed this month were all by women! They all have something else in common—they each have both merits and demerits that sort of cancel out…neither Brown, Russ, nor Norton quite hit it out of the park this time at bat.
by Victoria Silverwolf
In Memoriam
An unavoidable note of sadness fills this review of a newly published novel. The author died of lymphoma in 1967, at the very young age of 41. With that in mind, let's try to take an objective look at her final novel.
This is a direct sequel to Sibyl Sue Blue. My esteemed colleague Janice L. Newman gave that novel a glowing review. In fact, our own Journey Press saw fit to reprint it in a handsome new format.
Sibyl Sue Blue is back. She's a forty-year-old police detective and a widow with a teenage daughter. She's fond of cigars, gin, fancy clothes, and attractive men.
After her previous adventure, she's on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Familiarity with the first novel would help get the reader oriented, but let me try to sum up the situation quickly.
The planet is inhabited by at least three varieties of humanoids. Those dwelling on the main continent can't mate with humans, and don't play much of a role in the plot. The folks living on an island are semi-aquatic, can mate with humans, and are the main focus of the book. The third kind, from a northern continent, supplies our story's antagonist.
Sibyl Sue Blue and her daughter are on the planet as part of a working vacation, enjoying the beach while acting as ambassadors from Earth. Sibyl is attacked by somebody and nearly drowns, but manages to fight off the bad guy handily. That's bad enough, but things get worse when her daughter, in a sort of trance, walks off into the ocean. What's going on?
Let's try to make a complex plot, a lot of which depends on what happened in the first novel, simpler. The antagonist, acting like a James Bond villain, plans to flood the planet by melting the ice caps. He's got a secret underwater lair, as well as a substance that turns air-breathers into water-breathers.
There are several other characters involved, and plenty of plot twists. Unlike the first novel, this one doesn't seem to have much in the way of social commentary. It somehow manages to be action-packed while also spending quite a bit of time describing Sibyl's wardrobe. There's a bit too much drinking of gin and smoking of cigars for my taste.
The antagonist has a very weird love/hate feeling for human women. Sibyl and he somehow manage to be lovers while also trying to kill each other. The speculative biology at the heart of the plot isn't much more plausible than this odd relationship.
Overall, I'd say this is a readable but forgettable potboiler. It's nice to have a middle-aged mother as the heroic protagonist, anyway.
Two months ago, I reviewed one of the worst books I’ve ever covered in this column: Taurus Fourby the absolutely deplorable Rena Vale. This month I review the second novel by promising newcomer Joanna Russ. In some ways And Chaos Died and Taurus Four have nothing in common. In other ways these books have a huge amount of thematic overlap.
I wish I could say Russ’s novel is completely successful. She’s clearly ambitious. And Chaos Died is a novel of heady ideas and language. Russ plays in fascinating ways with internal and external perspectives, delivering a novel of alternating views and alien attitudes. But I feel like she simply fails to reach the heady levels she's aiming for with this novel.
And Chaos Died and Taurus Four both have long sequences which take place on strange alien worlds. On those worlds, beings live in primitive states. Both worlds are Edenic, full of civilizations who are one with the land they live in. The locals in both novels are naked and unashamed, in a world of boundless plenty on a fertile plain. Vale took that setup and revealed her hatred for “primitive” society. Russ takes that setup and delivers something complex and uncanny.
Cover by Diane and Leo Dillon
See, the locals on the planet “speak” telepathically and have psionic ability. Children can speed up or slow down their aging:
"I'm nine," she went on pedantically, "but actually I'm fifteen. I've slowed myself down. That's called 'dragging your feet.' Mother keeps telling me 'Evniki, don't drag your feet,' but catch me hurrying into it!"
There’s playfulness about the ideas of language:
"By the way," she said in a low voice, "I know what it means to cannibalize; it means to eat something. I heard about that." She seemed to hesitate in the half-dark.
But tell me, please," she said, "what does it mean exactly—radio?"
And Russ gives us beautiful literary-minded ideas about perception and peace and communications which abound in this book – at least until Jai returns to an overpopulated, warlike Earth. A shift in global temperatures and climates has devastated our planet; wars and starvation and hatred have made our planet a dystopia. And Jai has been so changed by his experiences on the alien planet that he finally is able to see things on Earth as they really are.
I loved the wildly imaginative approach to this book. The writing here is elliptical and dense. The prose rewards slow reading and attention to detail, but I was never lost in the book. In fact, I often find myself swept away by its literacy and ambitions. At times Russ reads like a less academic, more playful Ursula LeGuin.
Joanna Russ
Russ has deeply inventive ways of putting readers in the mind of psychic people of all ages as well as the ordinary people who have to interact with the natives. The book deserves high marks for the sequences on the alien planet, though I found her Earth-bound scenes a bit cliched.
But the book has another flaw: its treatment of homosexuality.
Our lead character is named Jai Vedh, and very early in the novel Jai proclaims himself to be a homosexual. But partway through And Chaos Died, Jai falls into a relationship with a woman. We are led to believe Jai’s homosexuality is “cured” with that relationship, and he himself even declares his happiness in a “straight” lifestyle.
I know we live in a world in which the American Psychological Association still declares “gayness” as a mental illness. But I still find it unthinkable that an intelligent and well-spoken woman like Joanna Russ would ally herself with the idea that homosexuality can – or even should – be “cured”. Love is love, whether between genders or in the same gender, and I was shocked Russ has her lead character change his whole approach to intimacy so quickly.
I would expect that approach from a Rena Vale, but not from a Joanna Russ. It’s jarring to see, and it really hurt my opinion of the novel.
There’s really nothing wrong with falling short when taking on heady ambitions. Joanna Russ is clearly a talented writer with many ideas. She falls squarely in the cohort of new wave sf authors who are elevating science fiction to new levels and confronting our new decade with a revolution. And Chaos Died aims to feel revolutionary. I feel it’s merely evolutionary.
High Sorcery is an anthology featuring three short stories and two novelettes from Andre Norton. I had a good time with it, though it's not obvious to me why these particular stories were chosen, as any thread linking them together feels no stronger than that of any other in Norton’s body of work, which does have better to offer. Still, it felt like a pretty decent cross-section of her work, and her skill as a writer and storyteller is on full display.
by Gray Morrow
"Wizard’s World" opens on a world ravaged by nuclear war, scattered with mutants who have been subjugated and enslaved for the psychic abilities they developed in the aftermath. Craike is one such mutant, and we find him fleeing a mob wishing to hunt and kill him for his abilities. Unexpectedly, he falls through a rift between worlds and awakes in a land much unlike his own, less technologically advanced and more akin to the days of Medieval Europe. He discovers a man and woman being persecuted for the magical psionic powers they were born with, much like his own, and feels compelled to help them out of an affinity for the hunted.
This story – its premise, its characters, its plot and setting – feel very much at home in a Norton anthology. The dissonant combination of a post-nuclear apocalypse and an Old World fairytale landscape is very characteristic of her tendency to combine genre cliches or buck them altogether, and the equitable inclusion of women and characters of color is still unfortunately rare enough to be notable. I can’t fault this story on any technicalities. Rather, I simply felt that it didn’t quite live up to what we are now well aware the author is capable of.
Beyond our main character, who is given the moral high ground to an extent verging on gratuity, I didn’t feel that any other characters were fleshed out enough to make me properly care about them. Norton has a flair for slowly revealing information to the reader as it is discovered by the protagonist in a way that normally builds excellent suspense, but here I found it disorienting. I don’t even think I properly knew what was going on until far too late in the story, and the female main character’s skittishness toward the Craike meant that I effectively knew too little about her to form an attachment until the end. The ending itself was cut tantalizingly short just as things were happening that I could actually be bothered to care about.
"Wizard’s World" feels like an unfinished draft of a story that could have been excellent, but was forgotten by its author before she could add embellishment enough to distinguish it from any other second-rate fantasy pulp. Sorry, but just two out of five stars for this one.
[David reviewed the tale when it came out a couple of years ago in IF—he was not overly enamored, either (ed.)]
Fortunately, its only up from here.
"Through the Needle’s Eye" is a charming little short story about a young girl named Ernestine, crippled by polio and longing for connection with her able-bodied peers. She meets an older woman named Miss Ruthevan and is struck by her stately beauty, as well as the handicap they both share. Miss Ruthevan has a gift for creating otherworldly masterpieces with embroidery, and takes Ernestine under her wing to teach her the art. But under her tutelage, Ernestine begins to discover that Miss Ruthevan’s talent, passed down through generations of women, comes at a magical cost.
I love bite-sized stories like this; it takes a skilled storyteller to write one in a way that feels satisfying, but still trusts the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The portrayal of disability felt sympathetic without being pitiful. Miss Ruthevan is the type of scorned woman-turned-unsettlingly powerful witch that I love and appreciate. I also love to see a story making use of the underappreciated beauty of the fiber arts. It’s short, but it excels at what it sets out to do, so it's five stars from me. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head for days.
"By a Hair" (originally published July 1958, in Phantom) is another short one. This one concerns a small Balkan village struggling to rebuild and defend itself after being plundered by Nazis. The once-lovely Countess Ana was taken to an extermination camp and now returns maimed beyond recognition. She chooses to devote her now-reclusive life to midwifery and the supernatural arts in service of her small village. Meanwhile, the incomparably beautiful Dagmar has chosen to use her dangerous allure to scheme and climb her way to security. She requests that Ana use her occult powers in service of a treacherous gamble, and receives her desire at a tragically ironic price.
This story left less to the imagination, but was no less effective. Though both women were positioned as diametrically opposed foils of each other, I still found both of their motives perfectly understandable given the desperation of their war-ravaged lives. I could not bring myself to condemn Dagmar for her desire for self-preservation, and that made the ending of this story as bleak as its setting. Of course, it’s also possible that I may have a blind spot in my moral code for beautiful scheming women in a world that leaves them few options. Either way, four stars.
"Ully the Piper" is the final short story in this anthology. In the sleepy, idyllic village of Coomb Brackett, young Ully longs for a life of normalcy after a fall in his childhood rendered him paralyzed. One day he discovers a beautiful flute, and his time spent in the tranquility of nature inspires him to become a talented piper. He wishes to share his gift with the other villagers, until the town bully Matt antagonizes him by taking his flute and leaving him lost in the forest. But Ully’s musical skill did not go unnoticed by the ancient fae who called the forest their home long before it was Coomb Bracket, and it is by their favor that Ully receives his heart’s desire and rises above Matt’s torment.
This one feels like a true fairy tale in its simplicity. Its uncomplicated morals and expected ending did nothing to detract from its beauty. The fae were as mischievous and mysterious and beguiling as they are in all the best fairy stories. There isn’t much for me to say about this one, other than that it feels like the sort of enchanting bedtime story that was read to you as a child, the kind that echoes in the back of your mind when you find yourself wandering through nature alone on moonless nights. Four stars.
"Toys of Tamisan" is the longer of the two novellas, which thankfully left enough room to develop the scenery. Tamisan is a skilled “dreamer,” an occupation inhabited by those who possess the skill to create vivid imaginary worlds and share them with their clientele via a psychic link. She is hired to create engaging dreams for the entertainment of the wealthy Lord Starrex and his cousin Kas, but when she attempts to build a dream world that mirrors an alternate history of their own something goes horribly wrong. She loses control of the world she has created, and is stuck within it and left to devise a way out of her own dream.
The premise of this story certainly appealed to me. I felt that the idea of a dreamer effectively enslaved to create beautiful dreams for a wealthy lord was a poignant distillation of the way that employing artisans to use their creativity in service of creating capital for a wealthy ruling class demeans human creativity as a whole. Other than that though, the story did drag along a little slowly, and after a while I found myself losing track of the plot in a way that made me care even less. This was made even worse by the fact that the ending failed to tie up several loose ends, which made me feel a little silly for even trying to follow.
What did stand out to me, however, was how well-crafted the dialogue was. I think that Norton is uniquely good at writing incisive dialogue, and this was on display in a way that made me look forward to the next line that was about to be said, regardless of where it was about to take the story. It was impressive how economically Norton uses short lines to precisely convey ideas, tone, and mood. It was enough to keep me reminded that Norton is a master of her craft regardless of how boring this story was, and for me that’s enough to elevate the story to a three out of five [Which is also what David gave it when it came out in the May 1969 IF (ed.)]
That puts us at 3.4 stars for the collection, with the two non-reprints being some of the strongest work. It's probably worth 60 cents, even if it's not the best Norton can produce.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
[We've saved the best for last this month—one of these books is sure to be a pick for the Galactic Stars. Read on about this remarkable quartet of science fiction tales…]
Sometimes a back cover blurb sells a book. “ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?” the cover reads in breathless bold sans-serif type. “He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar.” Hooked yet? How about the mention on the cover of “an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniards, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…”
Yeah, you probably thought, take my 75¢ plus tax, because that’s a book I have to read. Especially if it’s scribed by the always delightful Keith Laumer, he of the wildly satirical Retief series. At the very least, Time Trap has to be readable, right?
Well, yes, Time Trap is readable, very much so in fact. I flew through its 143 pages in near lightspeed. But there’s just no there there. Time Trap is like a Big Mac: enjoyable at the time but utterly devoid of any nutrition.
Laumer’s latest is fun, sure, but maybe it’s too much fun. Because the novel is just too silly, too whimsical, too full of absurd wordplay and pointless tangents and the sense that Laumer was scripting little bits of this story between partying with friends and warming up for his next, more serious novel.
cover by Richard Powers
You know those kind of classic Twilight Zone episodes where a character leaves a place to go on a journey, only to end up at the same place they left? Laumer starts Time Trap with a scene similar to that, and I was initially intrigued. My receptors came up, the same way they do when I flick on channel 11 at 6:30 and spend some time with ol’ Rod. But Serling always gives us a twist in the tail that lays a moral lesson on us, gives us something to think about. Laumer, on the other hand, just never really builds on the idea time loop.
Instead the book turns its focus on a different guy, Roger Tyson. His crappy car breaks down on the side of a dark country road on a wretched, rainy night. When a motorist, impossibly, happens to drive down the remote road, Tyson wildly waves his hands to beckon them to stop. The driver turns out to be a girl riding alone on a powerful motorcycle. But, oh no, the cycle crashes into a heap of destruction on the side of the road. The girl is dead… but with her last words, she passes an earpiece over to Tyson.
And there his adventure begins.
It’s a wild and wooly adventure as Tyson and his pals (including the girl, Q’nell, who’s not actually dead but kind of is actually dead– it’s complicated) journey from the deep past of Earth to the far future, all over the world, dodging dinosaurs and armies and molten lava and all manner of obstacles along the way. There’s a body swap and some crazy weapons and an alien who’s a higher level being and all kinds of over-the-top silliness. And all along the way Tyson plays the fool: frightened, confused, acting like a Doctor Who companion who traveled without the Doctor.
The adventure is fun enough read episodically, one chapter per night or something. Reading it all at once was a dive into a short attention span I found exhausting. It all would have been worth it if the destination was entertaining.
But Laumer doesn’t quite nail the landing in any sort of thrilling way; instead, the book ends like one of those human- Meets-God moments which grew so tiresome on Trek (to mix my TV metaphors). The threats to wipe out all life on Earth seem a bit breathy and unconvincing, too much connected to the cliches and not quite as wackily transcendent as Laumer clearly wants them to be.
So, yeah. Time Trap. It’s goofy, silly fun. But where most of Laumer’s other comedic works are smart while also being silly, this is pure silliness. It’s a good book to read to clear your head after watching images from Vietnam on the 6:00 News, but this book probably won’t keep looping in your mind. It will likely be forgotten by the time the Twilight Zone comes on tomorrow.
3 stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Seems Familiar
Back in 1958, Aldous Huxley published a nonfiction book that took a look back at his 1932 novel Brave New World.
Why do I bother to mention this fact, which is familiar to science fiction fans and literary mavens alike? Because a new novel by a bestselling author reminds me so much of Huxley's classic satiric dystopia that it, too, might have been called Brave New World Revisited.
This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin
Cover art by Paul Bacon.
Levin is, of course, best known for his popular novel Rosemary's Baby and the smash hit film adapted from it. Can he handle science fiction as successfully as he did horror fiction?
Some centuries from now, the world is inhabited by people who all look very much alike, with a few minor exceptions. The central authority tells folks where to live, what kind of work to do, who they should marry, and whether or not they should have children.
The populace is kept under control through the mandatory administration of drugs that keep them calm and unaggressive. Words like hate and fight are profanities. Starting at adolescence, people have sex once a week.
Television viewing, apparently for the purpose of propaganda, is a daily ritual. Everything is planned by a huge computer.
Everybody wears a bracelet that is difficult, if not impossible, to remove, and which much be scanned everywhere they go.
Our protagonist is Li RM35M4419, known as Chip. That's because his grandfather, who isn't quite as much a conformist as younger folks, thinks he resembles his great-great-grandfather, and calls him a chip off the old block.
I might note here that there are only four first names for women and an equal number for men. That symbolizes the rigidness of the society, I suppose, but it also seems like a pointless restriction.
Chip is an oddball because he has one green eye and one brown eye. Grandpa takes him to see the real computer, hidden underneath a false facade that is meant to satisfy tourists. This becomes a plot point much later in the book.
We see a lot of Chip's childhood and teen years. Suffice to say that he eventually joins up with a small group of rebels. It turns out to be really easy to avoid the constant bracelet scanning, which makes me wonder why there aren't a lot more rebels. Quite a bit later, Chip discovers a way to avoid the tranquilizing drugs. This is almost as simple as skipping the scanners. Not the most efficient totalitarian dystopia ever imagined!
There's a lot of back and forth running around, but let's sum up. Chip falls in love with one of the rebels, who has gone back to her old tranquilized ways. He kidnaps her and takes off for an island of rebels. Again, this is remarkably easy to do, but at least this time there's a reason, revealed in a plot twist.
I have to mention that Chip rapes the woman he supposedly loves. When she comes out of her drugged state, she accepts this as natural, and their romance continues. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Long and somewhat tedious climax short, Chip leads an attack on the computer, leading up to a surprising revelation as to what's really been going on. This part of the novel is very melodramatic, in sharp contrast to the rest, which is often as bland as the world in which it's set.
Neither original nor plausible, this simply isn't a very good book. It could benefit from some serious editing. Keith Laumer would have told the same story in one-third the length. Robert Sheckley would have made it more satiric. Stick to the scary stuff, Ira.
The year is 2231, and jet-setting science journalist Joel Blake is at the top of his field. His glamorous job has him rubbing shoulders with the brightest minds of his age, and affords him a level of comfort that rarely has him challenging the technological utopia that Earth has become thanks to the control of a world government determined to maintain peace and progress… at any cost. His easy complacency is rattled for the first time when he meets the brilliant astrophysicist Ann Willett at a party she doesn’t want to be at; her aloofness betrays a discontent with the world that he finds fascinating. All his probing yields from her is a frustration at the government’s unwillingness to fund research into any field without an immediate profit motive, leaving her feeling like a great discovery lies just beyond her reach. He’s never met a mind like hers, and he doesn't meet another until work assigns him an interview with the visionary polymath Mark Randall.
Randall’s scientific work spans multiple fields, with seemingly nothing beyond the grasp of his prodigious mind. Feeling as though he has conquered the known world of science, he has turned his attention to the unknown: dimensions beyond human perception, elongation and reversal of the passage of time. Randall and Willett immediately find kindred spirits in each other, leaving Blake to feel insignificant under the shadows of their intellects. But when the tyrannical rulers of their gilded world discover their attempts to liberate mankind from the order they’ve imposed, both scientists are forced to flee into the cosmos, and Blake is left behind to piece together their radical vision for the future of humanity.
Now, I don’t feel that this book did anything I haven’t seen before: the oppressive government, the predictable utopia, the geniuses turned space-fugitives. Randall is very much a stock genius character, as though Sutton wished to rely heavily on our shared cultural knowledge of the Sci-Fi Genius to fill in the gaps left by his sparse characterization. It's all familiar, but familiar in the way my favorite blanket is familiar. If I didn’t like this genre with all its conventions, I wouldn’t be here. No, the reason I connected with this book lay in its smaller details.
The character of Ann Willett was so interesting to me, and though she could (and should!) have been explored in greater depth, I did also get the sense that the tantalizingly sparse but dense scenes centering her character contributed to the air of mystery, the self-imposed isolation that so intrigued Blake and drew him to her. Sutton’s intimate descriptions of spaceflight were scattered with those delightfully technical imaginative flourishes that always betray a writer’s engineering background. Blake’s charmed life as a high-society journalist is simply everything I’ve ever wanted, and I brimmed with envy the entire novel.
My absolute favorite detail was Willett’s violin motif. I’ve always found it hard to put into words the way that the sound of a violin can sound so haunting to me, so profoundly lonely. It fills a room with sorrow and longing in a way to which no other sound compares, and this is the motif through which Sutton conveys Ann Willett’s loneliness. She expresses her solitude in the melodies she plays on her violin, and the invocation of violin music had such a visceral sensory effect on me that she instantly became one of the more unforgettable characters I’ve read. I was so enchanted to read Sutton put into words the lonely beauty of violin song and to know the feeling is more universal than I thought.
It was the details in Whisper From the Stars that appealed to me, minutiae small enough to pass by a reader unnoticed but which felt tailor-made to suit my sensibilities. On its face it's a good, solid, unremarkable book, but it’s so rare and wonderful to recognize so much of your own eccentricities in a book that I’m going to have to give this one four stars.
I cannot think of a more fitting name for Alexander Key's stunning piece of fiction than The Incredible Tide. This fast moving ride of a story immerses the reader immediately with a forcefully aggressive pace and doesn't release one's attention until it has crashed upon the shores of its abrupt conclusion. It takes what appears to be a fantastical hero in a uniquely broken world and anchors to a coming of age anti-fascistic message so masterfully that the reader truly feels the author’s societal warning.
In order to dispel all doubt that the story within is meant as a warning, Alexander Key begins The Incredible Tide with the ominous dedication “To a people unknown, of a land long lost – for surely what is written here has happened before. It depends upon us alone whether it is a reflection or a prophecy.” It is thusly that the reader embarks on the plot like a scavenger unearthing a sandy message in a bottle. Like a freshly unburied treasure, the remarkable 17 year old castaway, Conan of Orme, shakes himself loose of his seemingly unsurvivable circumstances, marooned alone on a tiny cluster of rocks with only birds as companions. It is revealed that he has endured in this solitary state for five years after a catastrophe coined “the incredible tide” drowned a previously Earth-like environment in endless water.
He is “rescued” involuntarily by elderly, frail representatives of one of the fascist factions responsible for plunging the world into this regrettable state. Once taken prisoner, it is revealed to Conan that the New World Order, an Axis-powers-like force, is still greedily fighting over the scraps of this decimated planet, clinging to the totalitarian, short-sighted ways that caused its own destruction. Thankfully, all hope is not lost because Conan and his ilk possess certain super human abilities of perception and telepathy, and they use these powers along with the sometimes equally powerful and very human capacity to love, empathize, and connect with each other and a very strong spiritual source. Conan and all his allies will need to use every opportunity they can to be able to survive and ultimately overthrow the oppressive, greedy and powerful government whose obsession with clinging to its own past threatens to doom the entire future of humanity.
In my experience of dystopian world creation, The Incredible Tide's is vague and as enshrouded in mists as their planet is presently, but I don't think this takes away from the story. I felt like the story could have been longer and the character development and relationships could have had more room to take wing, but there was also something beautiful in the story's conciseness. The way Alexander Key was able to somehow balance a Lord of the Flies-esqe uprising on one shore with a colliding tsunami of Animal Farm oppressive governmental takeover was particularly masterfully done in a short amount of pages. I was also impressed by the way he was able to communicate the absurdity of maintaining an Orwellian Big Brother police state (a la 1984) on the remains of an actively rotting planet. Intriguing too, is a moment very much reminiscent of the unheard warnings that Superman's parents conveyed to the stubborn oligarchs on the planet Krypton before their willful self-destruction; though I felt the way it was communicated here was much more gritty and frustratingly human than the comic book version.
Overall I found The Incredible Tide to be an awe-inspiring, page-turning, and unique adventure that deserves a singular place alongside many other powerful works of dystopian fiction, and I'm rather pleased to see another heavy-hitting ominous warning make it into the 70s, as it has been decades since we've seen such cautionary tales as were more commonplace in the 40s and 50s.
5 stars
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
A recent film has made many of us aware of the first year of the next century. But what about the last year of this century?
(You do know that 2000 will be the last year of the twentieth century and not the first year of the twenty-first century, right? I thought so.)
A new anthology of original science fiction stories attempts to offer a glimpse of that evocative year to come.
The Year 2000, edited by Harry Harrison
Cover art by Pat Steir.
Obviously, all the stories take place three decades from now. Other than that, they have a wide range of themes and styles, from old-fashioned tales of adventure to commentary on social issues to New Wave experimentation. Let's take a look.
America the Beautiful, by Fritz Leiber
The narrator is a poet and scholar who travels to the United States on an academic tour. He stays with a typical American family and has an affair with the adult daughter of his hosts. Despite the fact that pollution has been eliminated and racism is no longer a problem, there's something about the place that makes him uneasy. Part of it has to do with the fact that the USA is still involved in small scale wars, similar to the current conflict in Vietnam.
Although there is a fair amount of futuristic content (rocket transportation between North America and Europe, for example), this reads almost like a mainstream story, something that might be published in a future issue of The New Yorker. It's impressionistic and introspective. Given that it's by Leiber, it's no surprise that it's very well written. Perhaps it's a bit too subtle for me.
Three stars.
Prometheus Rebound, by Daniel F. Galouye
An aircraft that uses the Earth's magnetic field gets in trouble. The huge plane, which looks like a flying saucer, keeps gaining altitude, beyond the control of the pilots. Can an elderly veteran flyer of World War Two help the crew save the lives of all aboard?
There's a ton of technical jargon throughout the story, the vast majority of which went way over my head. The plot depends on a character doing something really foolish.
In Kenya, an area formerly used for raising cattle now serves as a wildlife preserve. The main character is a warden who has to prevent elderly people from following their traditional ways by tending cattle in the region. Part of the preserve is an amusement park, something like an African Disneyland. The protagonist visits the space-themed part of the park, which offers hope for his son's future.
The story offers a thoughtful look at culture change. The warden bitterly regrets what has been lost, but also welcomes improvements. He's an ambiguous sort, not always sympathetic, which adds depth of characterization. The author obviously knows the area and its culture very well, and depicts them vividly.
Four stars.
After the Accident, by Naomi Mitchison
The title disaster contaminated the Earth with radiation. Genetic testing is used to find out which persons would be likely to produce offspring without mutations. The narrator, a biologist and historian, meets a man who plans to send colonists to another world. She becomes pregnant with their child, who will have mutations that will allow it to survive on the planet.
This is a quietly disturbing story. The narrator's calm acceptance of the situation and decision to bear a mutant baby are the most chilling aspects of it. The speculative biology is convincing, the stuff about colonizing another planet less so.
Three stars.
Utopian, By Mack Reynolds
A social activist who was in suspended animation wakes up to find that the world has become the kind of paradise he imagined. There's no money, because everybody has everything they need. The folks who revived him tell him what they need from him.
The fellow went into suspended animation only because the people in the year 2000 used a sort of mental time travel to take over his mind and make him abscond with funds from his organization and then freeze himself. I found this aspect of the story gimmicky and implausible compared to the rest. The impact of the piece depends entirely on its punchline.
Two stars.
Orgy of the Living and the Dying, by Brian W. Aldiss
A man leaves his wife in England to work for a United Nations famine relief agency in India. He has an affair with a physician. When the facility is attacked by bandits, he battles them in an unusual way.
This synopsis makes the story sound like mainstream fiction, without futuristic elements. The main speculative premise is that the man hears voices, some of them seemingly precognitive. Excerpts of what he hears alternate with the narrative portion of the text, giving the work a touch of New Wave.
The author creates an evocative setting, if one that could easily be set today rather than in the year 2000. The man's lust for the doctor causes him to force himself on her at one point. It's hard to accept him as a hero later, when he comes up with a technological way to defeat the bandits. (This technique, by the way, is the part of the story that most evokes the feeling of science fiction, even if there is nothing futuristic about it.)
(The book just calls the author Bertram Chandler, but we know better than that, don't we? It's also no surprise at all that it's a sea story.)
A sea captain (of course!) who went into suspended animation for medical reasons gets thawed out, cured, and given a job commanding a gigantic, automated cargo ship. When things go wrong, he has to make use of his experience with sailing ships to save the day.
Chandler can't be beat when it comes to describing nautical stuff, and in this case he doesn't even have to pretend that his vessel is a starship. It may be hard to believe that a guy whose experience with ships is thirty years out of date would be given command of a futuristic vessel. It may also raise a few hackles to learn that the ship's troubles are caused by a female member of the crew, who messes everything up.
Three stars.
Black is Beautiful, by Robert Silverberg
New York City is populated almost entirely by Black persons, with only a few White commuters and tourists. The main character is an angry teenager who sees the mayor of the city as an Uncle Tom. He stalks a White teenager out of a sense of injustice and seeks revenge.
A White author writing from the point of view of a Black radical is taking a big chance, I think, and could be accused of depicting Black stereotypes. In this case, the gamble pays off pretty well. The teenager is passionate but naive, the Mayor cynical but effective. The story might be read as a debate between two styles of Black activism.
Four stars.
Take It or Leave It, by David I. Masson
Two sections of text alternate, both featuring the same characters. In one, they face challenges like local crime bosses and being forced to move in a technologically advanced society. In the other, they struggle to survive in a world devastated by a plague.
This reads almost like two different stories. The first one is full of futuristic slang and nouns used as verbs. (The word visited is replaced by visitationed, for example.) The second one has more direct language, but is very grim. People hunt cats to eat them, for one thing.
The tricks with language make the story difficult to read. Given the title, I wonder if the author is saying that an imperfect future is a lot better than a horrible one. This is one for New Wave fans.
Three stars.
The Lawgiver, by Keith Laumer
As a way to fight overpopulation in the United States, a controversial law makes it mandatory to terminate pregnancies unless the mother-to-be has a birth permit. (There's also the implication that she has to be married.) The Senator who pushed this law through Congress, against much opposition, confronts a woman made pregnant by his son.
Given the fact that abortion is only legal under certain circumstances in a handful of states, it seems unlikely that it would often be mandatory a mere thirty years from now. (And the story makes it clear that the procedure has to take place even if birth is imminent.)
The author doesn't seem to be making a case for or against abortion, as far as I can tell. The plot is melodramatic, throwing in a car crash to add excitement (and maybe some dark irony.) Still, I have to admit that it held my attention throughout.
Three stars.
To Be a Man, by J. J. Coupling
A fellow is seriously injured in battle and has almost all of his body except brain, eyes, and part of his spinal cord replaced by artificial parts, indistinguishable from the original. He returns from the war to confront his lover.
Much of the story consists of exposition, as the man explains in great detail how his new body works. This makes for dry reading. In sharp contrast to this is the sexual content: it seems that the fellow can be programmed to be a tireless sex partner. This results in an outrageous scene in which all the nurses in a battleground medical facility have an orgy with the guy. Pure male fantasy.
Two stars.
Judas Fish, by Thomas N. Scortia
A man works in a deep sea facility, altering the genetics of fish so that they will lead members of their species into the facility's chambers, to be processed into food for a starving world. Squid-like beings, having intelligence at least as great as humans, steal the fish away. The man's capture of one of the creatures leads to a strange transformation.
This is probably the most speculative story in the book, with a common science fiction theme that goes far beyond just extrapolating the next few decades. Not overly plausible, but readable enough if you're willing to suspend your disbelief.
Three stars.
American Dead, by Harry Harrison
Black guerrillas wage open warfare against the United States government, making use of weapons stolen from the military. An Italian journalist observes an assault by one of the Black commanders.
This is a gruesome vision of the worst possible outcome of current racial tensions in the USA. The manner in which the rebels fight is clearly based on tactics used by the Viet Cong. A powerful and disturbing tale.
Four stars.
Worth Waiting Thirty Years?
Overall, the book is OK, if not great. Some low points, some high points, mostly decent stories if not outstanding ones. Worth reading once, but don't expect it to be in print three decades from now.
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is an hour-long film in which four Edgar Allan Poe stories are recited by Vincent Price. Originally made as a television play (and in a way which suggests it was based on a theatrical production, albeit with the addition of some new visual effects), it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas segment, and I was recently asked to view it as a possible acquisition as a teaching tool by my university’s English Literature department.
The Cask of Amontillado
The programme is split into four segments, in each of which Price recites a different Poe short story. Fairly predictably, these are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Each segment is performed with Price in character as the narrator of each story, with appropriate costuming and sets. Although Price does show a decent range in playing different characters, they’re all very much within Price’s repertoire as an actor, so, although none of the performances are bad, there are no real surprises to be had here.
The Sphinx
I felt the best segment was “The Cask of Amontillado”. Price really seems to relish the role of Montressor and plays him with a wicked twinkle in his eye, surrounded by luxurious draperies and furniture and a banquet-table of food. The weakest for me was “The Sphinx,” which struggled to hold my attention, though it did have an effective use of special effects when we briefly see a skull overlaid over Price’s face at a crucial moment.
The Pit and the Pendulum
By contrast, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was a good enough dramatization of an exciting story, but the problem was that the producer seemed to feel it needed jazzing up with effects shots of Price falling into the pit, Price helpless before the pendulum, Price faced with colour separation overlay ("chroma-key" to yanks) flames, and so forth. The rats were far too cute, with inquisitive little faces and glossy fur, for me to find them horrific.
Finally, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a good choice as the opening story, told simply with the set a bare garret, with Price steadily ramping up the hysteria as the narrator follows his path into murder and madness.
The Tell-Tale Heart
One great benefit I can see from this production is a chance to show audiences who may just know Poe from the cinematic productions loosely based on his work, just how skilled a horror writer Poe was in real life. The issue with something like “The Pit and the Pendulum” is that one can’t really get an entire 90-minute film out of it without adding a lot of material, which, while it can work as a movie, means you lose the terrifying economy of the original story (although if anyone wants to adapt “The Cask of Amontillado”, I think one could spend at least 90 minutes exploring the buildup of resentment in the two characters’ relationships that led up to the final murder). For this reason, I’m recommending that the English Literature department acquires a copy, and would also say that, if it turns up on TV in your region, it’s worth a watch.
3 out of 5 stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
There's A Signpost Up Ahead . . .
Two films I caught recently reminded me of Rod Serling's late, lamented television series Twilight Zone. Let's take a look.
The Moebius Flip
Less than half an hour long, this skiing film is the sort of thing that might be shown at a college campus, before the main feature in a movie theater, or to fill up time on television in the wee hours of the morning. The brief running time isn't the only thing that reminds me of Serling's creation.
We begin with scenes of people skiing, edited in a jumpy way. Jazz, rock, and folk music fill up the soundtrack. The skiers also fool around in the snow, eat some fruit, and so forth.
Suddenly, we see a news announcer. He tells us that scientists have determined that every subatomic particle in the universe has reversed polarity. I'm not sure what that means, but let's see what happens.
Somehow, this is supposed to change the way people perceive things. That means the film turns into a negative of itself.
This goes on for a while, then the movie goes back to normal. Once in a while, it turns back into a negative. I guess that's a Moebius Flip. Along with more skiing, we get folks at an amusement park and eating in a restaurant. This part of the film features some pretty impressive and scary scenes of dangerous winter sports. People ski over huge crevasses, wind up on top of a tower of snow, and hang from cliffs.
Is it worth twenty-odd minutes of your time? Well, if you like psychedelic images or are a big fan of skiing, it could be. The science fiction premise is just an excuse to reverse the colors of the film, and there's no real plot at all. I've never been on a pair of skis, so I can only appreciate the athleticism on display here as an outsider.
Two stars.
Sole Survivor
This is a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS stations in the USA earlier this month. It begins with five men in World War Two uniforms standing around a wrecked American bomber of the time. They seem to be in pretty good shape, given that they're in a desert wasteland. Things get weird when we find out they've been waiting to be rescued for seventeen years.
The crew of the Home Run.
It quickly becomes clear that they are ghosts, waiting for their bodies to be found so they can stop haunting the wreck.
I should note here that the premise is inspired by the case of the Lady Be Good, a bomber that crashed in the Libyan desert in 1943 and was not discovered until 1958.
The real wreck.
Fans of Twilight Zone will remember the episode King Nine Will Not Return, which was also inspired by the fate of the Lady Be Good. That tale goes in a different direction, however.
Two men in an airplane discover the wreck. (By the way, the fact that the ghosts have been waiting for seventeen years means that the movie takes place in 1960 or so. There's no other indication that it's set a decade ago.)
The discoverers, who look more 1970 to me.
This leads to an official investigation by the United States Army. (Remember that the Air Force was part of the Army, and not a separate branch of the service, until a few years after World War Two.) Two officers are in charge of the mission.
William Shatner, fresh from Star Trek, as Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke and Vince Edwards, best known as Ben Casey, as Major Michael Devlin.
They pay a visit to the sole survivor of the Home Run. This fellow parachuted out of the plane and landed in the Mediterranean Sea, managing to make it out alive to continue his military career. (More details of what happened later.)
Brigadier General Russell Hamner, as played by Richard Basehart, recently the star of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Hamner agrees to accompany the two officers to the North African desert. He claims that all of the crew of the Home Run bailed out into the ocean, so the plane must have continued without them for several hundred miles before it crashed. Unlikely, but possible. Flashbacks tell us the real story.
Hamner as the navigator of the Home Run during the war.
The bomber was damaged in an attack by the enemy. The captain ordered Hamner to plot a course back to base, but he panicked and bailed out against orders. Without a navigator, the crew went off course and the plane crashed.
Tension builds as Devlin casts doubt on Hamner's story, and Gronke tells him not to make waves, lest he ruin his career. Both officers have their own concerns about their pasts, adding depth of character. Without giving too much away, let's just say that the truth comes out because of a harmonica, a rubber raft, and Hamner's guilty conscience. There's a powerful and poignant conclusion.
The last ghost faces an eternity playing baseball alone.
This is quite a good movie, particularly for one made for TV. I like the fact that the ghosts appear as ordinary men, rather than being transparent or something. The actors all do a good job. You'll never hear the song Take Me Out To The Ball Game again without having an eerie feeling.
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Over the past several years, AIP has adapted stories by H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen—or at least the drive-in. The results have been mixed, but they could certainly be much worse. The first and still the best of these was The Haunted Palace (adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) back in '63, directed by Roger Corman, with a script by the late Charles Beaumont, and starring an especially tormented Vincent Price. It was a very fine picture. Now we have the latest entry in this "series," The Dunwich Horror, taken from the Lovecraft story of the same name, although it's a pretty loose adaptation.
The Dunwich Horror
One warning I want to give about this movie, one which has nothing to do with sex or violence, is that, aside from being generally a pretty strange film, there are several scenes featuring flashing lights, or a color filter changing rapidly to give one the impression of a strobing light. Some people (thankfully not many) are susceptible to epileptic fits if subjected to such stimuli.
Now, as for the film itself, once we get past what I was surprised to find is an animated (as in a cartoon) opening credits sequence, we start with what seems to be a flashback of a woman giving birth, surrounded by two elderly sisters and an old man. We then flash forward to Miskatonic University, that college of the occult and Lovecraft's making, in Arkham. Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) is a student who, in the college's library, meets a good-looking but unusual young man named Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who is terribly interested in the Necronomicon. I'm sure his interest in the accursed book and his strange deadpan way of talking are perfectly innocuous. A certain professor at Miskatonic, Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), gets a bit of a hunch that Wilbur is up to no good, but for now does nothing about it.
The Necronomicon, kept in a cozy glass case.
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's most celebrated stories, but it's also one of his trickiest. As with "the Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft wrote "The Dunwich Horror" as if it were a report or an essay, a work of journalism or academia, rather than a fiction narrative. There's no protagonist, properly speaking, although Wilbur is certainly the story's nucleus. This remains sort of the case with the film, although Nancy and Armitage now serve as our eyes and ears, or rather as normal people in what becomes an extraordinary situation. However, it's not Sandra Dee or Ed Begley who caught my attention, but Dean Stockwell as Wilbur, who gives almost what could be considered a star-making role (to my knowledge his most high-profile roles up to now were film adaptations of Sons and Lovers and Long Day's Journey into Night), if not for the movie that surrounds him. Unlike his short story counterpart Wilbur here is not physically deformed, but instead talks in a strangely deadened tone, as if human emotions are foreign to him. Stockwell as Wilbur manages to be uncanny simply through how he talks and acts, which is a major point of praise.
Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley and Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner.
Director Daniel Haller and his team of screenwriters have opted to streamline Lovecraft's story while giving it a sort of romance plot, as well as a dose of sex and violence. Sex and Lovecraft have always been uneasy bedfellows, even in something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which explicitly involves sex in its plot. Wilbur is one of two twins, the other having supposedly died in childbirth, with the father being unknown, and his mother having been kept in an asylum for the past two decades. Wilbur lives with his grandfather, Old Man Whateley (Sam Jaffe, who some may recognize as that one scientist in the now-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still), who seems convinced his grandson is also up to no good, but arbitrarily (the film does nothing to explain this) does nothing about Wilbur being a scoundrel. For his part, Wilbur sees Nancy as a pretty fine girl—for a dark ritual, that is. The idea is that if he can steal the Necronomicon and impregnate Nancy (the implication, via a mind-bending scene, is that he rapes her), he can bring one of "the Old Ones" into the human world.
Sam Jaffe as Old Man Whateley and Ed Begley as Professor Henry Armitage.
As this point the plot splits in two, with one half focusing on Wilbur and Nancy's "romance" while the other sees Armitage tracking down the mystery of Wilbur's birth, since it becomes apparent the young man and the Necronomicon are somehow connected. One of the strangest (sorry, "far-out") scenes in the whole movie is when Armitage goes to see Wilbur's mother (Joanne Moore Jordan), who apparently had lost her mind many years ago upon giving birth to Wilbur and his dead twin. When it comes to this movie, there are two types of strange: that of the unnerving sort, and that of the cheesy sort. There are parts (sometimes moments within a single scene) of this movie that do a good job of spooking the audience, and others where it's rather silly. With that said, the nightmarish effect of Jordan's performance combined with the changing color tints in this scene make it one of the most effective. This is a movie that generally shines brightest when it focuses on Stockwell's performance and/or the Gothic cliches (including a creepy old house) that clearly also influenced Lovecraft's writing. Maybe it's because they didn't have the budget for it, but the lack of an on-screen monster for the vast majority of the film's runtime also works in its favor.
Joanne Moore Jordan as Wilbur's mother, who's spent the past two decades as a mental patient.
When Old Man Whateley finally decides to take action, Wilbur kills him for his troubles, along with imprisoning one of Nancy's friends and turning her into some kind of abomination. Meanwhile Wilbur gives his grandfather a heathen burial and in so doing provokes the wrath of the Dunwich townspeople, who never liked the Whateleys anyway. It's revealed, or rather speculated, that Wilbur's twin may not have died after all, but instead gone to the realm of the Old Ones while Wilbur got stuck on Earth as a human. Armitage and the townsfolk succeed in stopping Wilbur from completing his ritual with the unconscious Nancy, Armitage being well-versed enough in the Necronomicon to use the book against Wilbur, killing him with a blast of lightning. So the last of the Whateley men is dead. Unfortunately, the final shot, eerily showing a fetus growing inside Nancy (which is odd, because she's probably only been pregnant a day or two), implying an Old One may be born after all.
Dean Stockwell at his most devilish.
Lovecraft purists will surely be much disappointed with this movie, and even as someone who is not exactly a Lovecraft fan, I have to admit it's by no means perfect. Even at 90 minutes it feels a bit overlong, and it tries desperately to contort one of Lovecraft's more unconventional stories into having a three-act structure. I also get the impression that the addition of blood and breasts was to appease those (people my age and younger) who are suckers for AIP schlock. Not too long ago we had Roger Corman's so-called Poe cycle, which for the most part did Edgar Allan Poe's (and in one case Lovecraft's) fiction justice on modest budgets. I would say The Dunwich Horror is on par with one of the lesser of Corman's Poe movies.
A high three stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!
It's been a while since we've heard from Wilson Tucker, fan-turned-pro-but-still-very-much-a-fan. Hence, I was delighted to see that he had a new book out last month. Except, of course, it's not new at all, as I soon found out.
The story: Corporal Russell Gary, Fifth Army, veteran of "Viet Nam" and now Stateside on a recruiting stint, has gone on a bender for his 30th birthday. When he wakes up in a seedy motel room in a small town outside of Chicago, he finds that everyone in town is dead. Several days dead.
Turns out that some unnamed enemy has ravaged the American northeast with atomic fire and plague. Within 48 hours, almost everyone east of the Mississippi has died. West of the river, what's left of the country has set up a nationwide blockade, ensuring that the pestilence remains contained. No attempt is made to give succor to the thousands of Americans who have proven immune to the diseases.
Silence follows Gary as he braves the increasing barbarism until he can make his way back to civilization. Not a particularly bright nor sympathetic character, but with the instinct and training for survival, he partners up when convenient, kills without compunction when advantageous. He never becomes a brave hero or a romantic figure. Aside from a brief reference to New Orleans' straggling along, there are no enclaves of east-bank recovery. This is a holocaust from which no one is trying to rebuild. Just bands of increasingly hungry and desperate marauders, of which Gary is simply the one Tucker chooses to make his viewpoint.
There is no happy ending—indeed, there can't be. Gary is a disease carrier. The western United States has abandoned the east, and the east is a rotting corpse. And so, we have a story that starts like Andromeda Strain, continues like Alas, Babylon, and ends like a sour version of Spawn of the Death Machine.
Per the copyrights page, The Long Loud Silence originally came out in 1952, and was "specially revised and updated" for this release. That sparked my curiosity—how adroitly would Tucker handle the modernization? 17 years is a fair stretch, so it didn't seem like a slap of paint would be sufficient.
It wasn't. The story feels very much of its time (right around the time I got into science fiction, actually). There are no hippies, no reference to television. Lots of talk about radio and movies. The attack on the country is localized, believed to have been launched from Greenland…because ICBMs hadn't been invented yet. I'm pretty sure the Soviets now have missiles that can hit any part of the country. Certainly the new Russian bombers could hit Los Angeles as easily as New York. There's also a point in the book where a misprinted dogtag is an issue, and the implication is that it dates to the early 40s, which would match if Gary had been a WW2 war vet, which (having gotten a copy of the '52 release) it looks like he originally was. In fact, comparing the two versions, it looks like Gary's war background is the only change.
Setting that aside, and just reading "Europe" for "Viet Nam", how is the book? Well, it reads extremely well up through page 81. Gary teams up with interesting characters, including a fellow soldier/school-teacher, a jewel-mad girl named Irma, and a starving refugee named Sally. Seeing the ravaged geography and following the details of survival are compelling. The abortive probes of the Mississippi are exciting and tragic.
But after that, not only does Gary become more and more unlikable, but the author keeps repeating himself, copying whole passages from earlier in the book. The story just isn't long enough to need reminders like that.
I do appreciate that Tucker was willing to write an anti-hero, gritty and realistic. On the other hand, it means the narrative and the message of Silence is necessarily limited. The journey is interesting, but it doesn't say much other than that everyone is something of a bastard, civilized or otherwise.
Still, I actually finished the book, and quickly, which is more than I can say for the other two books I received last month.*
3.5 stars.
*The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon, is about a planet settled by a generation ship. There are three factions: the greens, espousing the terraforming of the world; the blues, espousing adaptation of humans to the world; the yellows, asserting that landing was a mistake. The yellows were right, but the totalitarian government doesn't want to hear about it. I lost interest around page 40.
*Star Giant, by Dorothy E. Skinkle, is about a seven foot humanoid alien genius who is exiled to Earth. It was too juvenile and silly for me.
I used to know a follower of Aleister Crowley, back in California. A little flighty and blustering, like most of his sect, but he told me something that’s stuck with me ever since:
“If you can't be good, be bad.”
That is a phrase that was in my mind throughout reading Sex and the High Command, the new novel by John Boyd. His last novel, The Rakehells of Heaven, was reviewed last year by Victoria Silverwolf. She described it as "an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke." This novel is much the same, although it has far more dirty jokes than blasphemy. Dedicated “For Aristophanes and Lenny Bruce”.
Ugh. We haven’t even started the book and I’m already rolling my eyes.
by Paul Lehr
Our story follows Navy Captain Benjamin Hansen, captain of the UNS Chattahoochee, bringing his crew to Norfolk, VA, after eighteen months in Antarctica. But the docks are strangely peaceful…
It transpires that a peculiar new drug from California called Vita-Lerp is allowing women to orgasm without the involvement of a man. I have it on good authority that this is possible without drugs, but Vita-Lerp also allows for “self-childbirth” — women are able to reproduce independently, although it seems to result in no boy children being born to those women. Dr. "Mother" Carey, who developed Vita-Lerp, is also president of a movement called the FEMs, which has created cells through women’s meetings and book clubs. These cells have also taught the women “New Logic” and “New Grammar”, which puts a feminine ending on all masculine nouns, and has only female and “neuter” genders.
To help defend against the obsolescence of men, Captain Hansen is brought into the confidence of the highest offices of US power, as well as a crewman of his, Chief Water Tender McCormick. The latter has been chosen for President against Dr. Carey, as he is “Lothario X”, the ideal lover. In return, he asks for a wife of his own, one guaranteed to be “uncorrupted” by the FEMs movement. According to him, ”’I’m not particular, sir. I just want me some pretty little mountain doozy, not over eighteen, with a good shape, who can cook crackling bread.’”
(I’ve never understood that, the belief that women are most desirable when they’re teenagers. Everyone is so awkward and gangly, and pimply besides.)
A man named John Pope is sent to find the woman in question. He is a man’s man, and is the most likeable character in the book by a fair margin. However, not long after he completes his mission, Pope is killed by a prostitute and framed to look as if he died while having sex with another man. Is that the worst fate in the world? Is that the only context in which homosexual love can be imagined by this author?
It is discovered that Vita-Lerp may be used as a rectal suppository, and allows men to become women. The remaining men immediately accept the transformed person as "she” and a woman, an enlightened attitude which is surprising, given how stupid everything has been up to now. Speaking of which, Hansen is eventually taxidermied as an example of the now-extinct male species.
I have had real trouble writing this review, because I couldn’t decide how to go about it. Do I address it as science fiction? As a comedy? If the latter, what humor is there? If I am unable to understand the humor, what conclusions can I draw from the book itself?
”After the ceremony, Dr. Carey’s all-girl crew got the yacht away from the dock at Newport News with a minimum of scraped paint and the loss of only one bollard off the dock.”
Is this funny? I know that there is a stereotype of women not being able to drive well, but I think that is a matter of the limited practice time often afforded them. Beyond the plot’s suggestion of Lysistrata (a play by Aristophanes about women denying their warring husbands sex until they negotiate peace), there doesn’t seem to be much to suggest Aristophanes' wit, either.
The best thing I can say about this book is that it’s never boring. I always was interested in learning what happened next, no matter how stupid or silly.
If you can’t be good, be bad.
Two stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
Let's see; this sure looks like it's a sword-and-sorcery yarn, with a mighty-thewed hero and a dragon. Too bad that has nothing at all to do with what's between the covers. More false advertising, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, let's take a look inside and see what we've got.
We begin at an abandoned gold mine and ghost town that have been changed into a tourist attraction. A guy wearing nothing but a pair of torn shorts runs out of the mine. A ten-foot-tall monster with two heads blasts him with something that causes him to explode from the inside out. There's also a helicopter full of tourists, so old Two Heads blasts them, too.
That gets the reader's attention, anyway. We next meet our hero, a brilliant scientist who has a vast organization working for him. Among his employees are a guy who tells fortunes with a deck of cards and a woman who uses a crystal ball.
Why all this mystical stuff? It seems this guy also uses psychic methods to figure things out. He and his colleagues have a way of looking into their minds, kind of like mediation, and getting glimpses of the future.
Anyway, a military officer shows up and asks our hero to check things out at the site of the helicopter disaster. Heading for the same place, but separately, are two of his associates, a statuesque woman and a ape-like fellow.
(At this point, I was reminded of the old Doc Savage yarns that Bantam Books has been reprinting as slim paperbacks for the past few years. In a lot of ways, this new novel harks back to the pulp magazines of the 1930's.)
From this point on, the chapters alternate between the hero and his two pals. Suffice to say that they all get captured and wind up underground. Besides the two-headed monsters, we've got small robot miners and a bunch of kidnapped humans brainwashed by invisible aliens intent on taking over the world. Did I mention that there's also a Mad Scientist and his Beautiful Daughter?
At times, I thought the author was pulling my leg. There's a fair amount of teasing banter between the hero's two friends, and constant arguments between the monster's two heads. Then there's the scene in which the hero and the Beautiful Daughter keep their conversation secret from the aliens by speaking in Pig Latin . . .
This is a very silly book. Despite what I've said above, I can't really call it a satire or a comedy, because there's also some pretty gruesome violence. It's a quick read, and too goofy to be boring, but hardly worth slapping down four bits at your local drug store.
When writing reviews, it’s generally a good habit to separate the writer from the work. We reviewers have a responsibility to consider a book or story based on the quality of its writing, characterization and themes. We feel obligated not to fixate on a writer’s personal life nor on their political beliefs. Whether that creator supports Reagan or Brown, McCarthy or Nixon, is less important than their ability to write a compelling piece of fiction.
That’s true unless their personal life or political philosophy fuels their fiction – and most especially if that fiction is propaganda for that writer's philosophy.
Taurus Four by Rena Vale is a work of propaganda which shows the true colors of its author. This novel is sexist, pro-colonial, anti-Women’s Lib, anti-hippie, anti-Communist propaganda. Its author is one of the more repulsive creatures to be part of California’s political scene since World War II.
Those are strong words, I know, but please hear why I say them.
Rena Vale has been associated for many years with the work of the California Un-American Activities Committee (CUAC), even into the last decade. She has actively worked against the efforts of anti-War protesters, framed the questions the CUAC used to interrogate their witnesses, and painted the Free Speech Movement a communist plot.
Rena Vale's 1952 treatise on the evils of Communism
Vale has the feeling of a zealot, because she was a convert away from Communism. During the 1930s, she briefly joined the Communist Party, attending meetings alongside luminaries as John Steinbeck, but she felt pushed out by sexist Party members. Vale believed Steinbeck’s research into The Grapes of Wrath demonstrated that the acclaimed author was looking to advocate communism. Vale even claimed that in 1936, while still dabbling with Communist Party membership, she attended a Party meeting at the home of Lucille Ball. Yes, Rena Vale believes Lucille Ball is a Communist.
Vale, in short, is a conspiracy theorist who sees an evil Communist around every corner and a traitorous subversive behind every anti-War protester. She tracked civil rights activists as early as 1963, cataloging the daily lives of members of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination, the Berkeley Peace Center, the Free Speech Movement and other Northern California organizations into a massive compilation of detailed information which might have rivaled that of the national HUAC.
Thus Vale has a significant and long-lasting role in the anti-Communist crusade. That crusade led to loyalty oaths, repression of free speech, and to groups like the Hollywood Ten, skilled screenwriters whom studios denied employment (in fact, I'm reviewing the 'comeback' film for one of those blacklisted writers later this month. Ring Lardner Jr. is credited as the screenwriter of the new film M*A*S*H).
Vale is an avowed anti-Communist. She's a woman who makes her living through the organized and brutal oppression of those who disagree with her.
Vale believes science fiction can be used as propaganda to further her repugnant beliefs. And though science fiction has been used for propaganda since at least the days of H.G. Wells (see The Shape of Things to Come, among other works by him), authors must demonstrate some real grace to make that propaganda compelling.
Cover by Robert Foster. It has has absolutely nothing to do with the book.
There is little grace in Taurus Four. The propaganda is not compelling. I think this brief excerpt will give you a bit of an idea of why I was repulsed rather than compelled by the ideas in this novel.
To communicate, to permit one’s self to become involved emotionally with alien creatures, brought doubt of the total rightness of Earth and Mankind. Did the strong and virile men of the American old West (sic) ever doubt the rightness of white Yankees in pushing westward to the Pacific Ocean? Were there any among them who had the bad judgment to listen to the redman’s tale of woe? If so, history obliterated them. History recorded the words of the strong, not those of the weaklings who fell by the wayside.
Taurus Four is peppered with ideas and phrases like that fragment. At its base in her novel is the pessimistic thought – pessimistic to Vale anyway – that at the end of the Cold War, the Soviets “dictated fashion as well as many other social, political and scientific customs,” that Soviet supremacy “was accepted and [it] became a matter of historical record that the ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ countries were decadent, the people degenerating into pulpy softness.”
From that world we meet our protagonist, Dorian Frank XIV, a pudgy and henpecked 32-year-old “space sociologist” from that soft society who can’t even pilot his landing vessel correctly. Frank crash-lands his ship on Taurus Four, and rather than obey orders and stay close to his ship, Frank decides to wander off in search of food.
More concerned with protecting his tender feet and avoiding sunburns than with prudence, Dorian eventually finds himself in a strange village settled by descendants of 1960s San Francisco war protesters. Those people have gone wild in the 300 years since their ship landed on this distant world: living naked, not cutting their hair or nails, descending into a kind of pidgin English, and eating only fruit from the sacred “manna” tree. They are ruled by a cruel and despotic leader who orders sacrifices to a native god.
While most of the members of the tribe resemble American Indians, the chief’s daughter looks more European-descended: her “skin was almost white instead of the reddish tan of the others; her hair was fine and pale, muscles firm, stomach flat and breasts perfect.”
The girl, Teeda, is racially superior to her peers from a colonial standpoint, which helps cause Dorian to fall for her – despite the fact she’s just 14 years old. Yes, this girl has a man twice her age admiring her breasts (I feel a little sick just quoting that line). But that sexualization is all fine in the context of the novel because, well, the couple barely even kiss before Dorian is rescued. And even beyond that, Teela is hard-wired for the traditional work of women. Despite the fact she’s lived naked all her life, when asked to wash clothes she embraces the work: “I wash now. I think I do more better than you.’ He laughed. ‘It's instinctive I guess—something carried in the genes that makes women want to wash clothes!”
An example of the cards Vale maintained as part of CUAC, this shows how John Steinbeck's activities were tracked.
Frank adopts a paternalistic approach to Teeda – perhaps logical since she is practically young enough to be his daughter. But he also takes a paternalistic approach to the colonists, embracing a James T. Kirk-style approach to upending their peaceful life and introducing chaos and worry into a long-stable existence. Of course, this peaceful society embraced communal property, lack of individual rights, and a feverish devotion to their absolute monarch. All those attributes could be found in the Soviet Union, so by definition they are evil philosophies which must be destroyed.
Therefore Frank, quickly coming into his own as an aggressive man who has even lost his baby fat, is the logical man to redeem these primitive people. He grows into a true Colonial whose mission becomes the need to modernize the natives’ civilization. Frank won't listen to "the redman's tale of woe."
I’ve already written 1000 words on this essay, and I hope my points here are cogent. But I’d like to note one more thing: this book is just not well written.
Oh, sure, Vale is literate. Her sentences aren’t too long, and her settings are vivid enough. But she struggles badly with characterization, she writes a pathetically clichéd villain, and the details of this world are sketchy at best. Over and over, I found myself slightly compelled by a hint of gracefulness in Taurus Four, only to become overwhelmed by bland events of political grandstanding or a disgusting glimpse into her politics.
The book feels amateurish, like the work of someone who understands the mechanics of writing but has no idea of its skills. Since she is 72 years old, I don’t expect Rena Vale to improve.
This is not a good book, and I can’t recommend it. Furthermore, I don’t want Vale to receive another penny of anybody’s money.
1 star.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
That's a question that you can answer with more confidence than before, if you're willing to shell out a whole bunch of bucks. On Christmas Day the Japanese company Seiko introduced the world's first quartz wristwatch. (There have been clocks using quartz crystals, but not anything this small.)
As I understand it, quartz crystals vibrate in a precise manner when voltage is applied to them. Thus, the tiny bit of quartz inside the watch, powered by an itty-bitty battery, provides an unvarying pulse that supplies extraordinary accuracy.
The Quartz Astro 35SQ keeps time to within five seconds per month, which is said to be about one hundred times better than a mechanical watch of good quality.
The catch? You have to pay 450,000 yen for it. That's well over one thousand dollars. You can buy a nice new car for the price of two watches.
Quite a stocking stuffer.
If you like, you can use your fancy new timepiece to measure how long it takes to peruse the latest issue of Fantastic.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
Or maybe the publishers can measure how much time they saved by copying the cover art from yet another issue of Perry Rhodan instead of waiting for an artist to create a new one.
The title translates to The Cannons of Everblack. Note the use of English for what I presume is the name of a planet.
Editorial, by Ted White
This wordy introduction wanders all over the place. The editor states that the magazine is getting a lot more mail from readers. (See the letter column below.) He says that he doesn't like the name of the magazine, and suggests changing it to Fantastic Adventures, the name of the old pulp magazine from which reprints are often drawn. (The sound you hear is me screaming No!)
He discusses the old problem of defining science fiction as distinguished from fantasy. The essay winds up complaining about an article by Norman Spinrad that appeared in the girlie magazine Knight. Apparently Spinrad griped about SF fans and pros being hostile to the New Wave. Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me.
No rating.
Double Whammy, by Robert Bloch
The author of Psycho leads off the issue with another shocker.
Illustration by Michael Hinger.
A guy who works at a sleazy carnival is afraid of the geek. If you don't know what a geek is, you haven't read William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, or seen the movie adapted from it the next year.
A geek is an alcoholic who has fallen so low that the only work he can get is pretending to be a so-called wild man and biting the heads off live chickens.
Our slimy protagonist seduces a teenager. When she tells him she's pregnant, he refuses to marry her, leading to tragic results. The girl is the granddaughter of a Gypsy fortuneteller, who has a reputation for supernatural revenge.
This is an out-and-out horror story that may remind you of the 1932 film Freaks. (Like that controversial film, it features a man without arms or legs.) The author saves his final punch to the reader's gut until the last sentence. If you don't like gruesome terror tales, it may be too much for you. I thought it accomplished what it set out to do very effectively.
Four stars.
The Good Ship Lookoutworld, by Dean R. Koontz
This space opera begins with a fight to the death between a human and a weird alien, apparently just as a sporting event.
Illustration by Ralph Reese.
This violent scene is just a prelude to a yarn in which the triumphant human recruits the narrator (another human) to join him in a mission to salvage a derelict alien starship. The vessel was operated by an extinct species of extraterrestrials who seem to have been nice folks. They just traveled around the universe bringing entertainment. Too bad a disease wiped them out.
The starship turns out to contain the headless skeletons of its crew. That's mysterious and scary enough, but when our heroes journey back to their homebase in it, parts of the ship disappear, one by one. Can they survive the long voyage before the whole thing vanishes?
This is a fast-paced adventure story with a twist in its tail. Given a few clues, you might be able to figure out the surprise ending. It's a little too frenzied for me, but short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome.
Three stars.
Learning It at Miss Rejoyy's, by David R. Bunch
The narrator has dreamed about visiting the place named in the title since childhood, when his dad told him about it. The stunningly desirable Miss Rejoyy promises him an intimate encounter with her if he can meet the requirements. He has to pay to enter a room where his reactions to pain and pleasure will be measured.
The narrative style is less eccentric than usual for this author. The content, however, is just as strange. There are some really disturbing images. The point of this weird allegory is a very pessimistic one, which is likely to turn off many readers. Still, it has an undeniable power.
Three stars.
Hasan (Part Two of Two), by Piers Anthony
Here's the conclusion of this Arabian Nights fantasy.
Illustrations by Jeff Jones.
Summing things up as simply as I can, the title hero went through many adventures before stealing away with a woman who could turn herself into a bird, hiding the bird skin that gave her this power. More or less forced to marry him, she had two sons with him. She eventually found the skin and flew off to her native land with the children.
In this installment, he sets off on an odyssey to find her. This involves a whole lot of encounters with strange people and supernatural beings. In brief, he gets involved with a magician, rides a horse that can run over water, rides on the back of a flying ifrit, meets a group of Amazon warriors, faces an evil Queen, takes part in a huge battle, and witnesses an explosive climax.
Some of the many characters in the story.
A wild ride, indeed. This half of the novel has a fair amount of humor. The magician and the ifrit are particularly amusing. The plot turns into a travelogue of sorts, as Hasan journeys from Arabia to China, then to Indochina and Malaysia, winding up in Sumatra.
A helpful map allows you to follow the hero's travels.
A lengthy afterword from the author explains how he changed the original story from One Thousand and One Nights. He also offers several references. One can admire his scholarship.
The resulting story is entertaining enough. I'm still a little disconcerted by the fact that Hasan kidnaps the bird woman, and that she eventually decides that she loves him anyway. A product of the original, I suppose.
Three stars.
Creation, by L. Sprague de Camp
This is a very short poem about various legends concerning the creation of humanity by an assortment of deities. It leads up to a wry punchline. Not bad for what it is.
Three stars.
Secret of the Stone Doll, by Don Wilcox
The March 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this tale of the South Seas.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
The narrator winds up on a paradisical Pacific island. He falls in love with a local beauty after rescuing her from drowning.
Illustrations by Jay Jackson.
Everything seems to be hunky-dory, but his new bride insists that she must make a journey to a part of the island kept separate from the rest by a stone wall. Because the islanders have a strong taboo against discussing fear or danger, she can't tell him what it's all about. Along the way, they meet a madman with a sword and the object mentioned in the title.
Apparently, he's a visitor to the island, just like the narrator.
I found this exotic, mysterious tale quite intriguing. The revelation about the woman's journey surprised me. (There's an editor's footnote — I assume it's from the original publication — that tries to offer a scientific explanation. This is just silly, and the story works much better as pure fantasy. The new editor's suggestion that it relates to something in Frank Herbert's Dune also stretches things to the breaking point.)
Maybe I'm rating this story higher than it might otherwise deserve because I wasn't expecting much from this issue's reprint. Unlike a lot of yarns from the pulps, it isn't padded at all, with a fairly complex plot told in a moderate number of pages. Anyway, I liked it.
Four stars.
According to You, by Various Readers
As the editorial said, there are a lot of letters. Bill Pronzini offers an amusing response to a reader who didn't like his story How Now Purple Cow in a previous issue. I didn't care for it either, so I'm glad he's a good sport about criticism.
The other letters deal with all kinds of stuff, besides talking about what kind of stories they want to see (offering proof that you can't please everybody.) One speculates about a combination of Communism and Christianity. (The editor dismisses this as unlikely.) Many react to an editorial in a previous issue about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers TV show.
No rating.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Alexander Temple
Just like Fred Lerner did in the last issue, Leiber praises Lin Carter's Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings for its history of fantasy fiction, and condemns Understanding Tolkien by William Ready, while admitting that it has a few good insights. He praises The Quest For Arthur's Britain by Geoffrey Ashe and Isaac Asimov's The Near East: 10,000 Years of History as fine nonfiction books with subjects relating to fantasy fiction.
Temple very briefly discusses The Demons of the Upper Air, a slim little book of poems by Leiber. It's a lukewarm review, talking about his occasional careless choice of words . . . hardly to be compared with his prose and recommends it for Leiber fans only.
Worth Your Time?
This was a pretty good issue, with nothing below average in it. I imagine others will dislike some of the stories, but I was satisfied.
While admiring your new thousand dollar watch, don't forget to get a new calendar as well. I wonder how long I'll be writing 1969 on checks.
Did you make it to either of these groovy concerts?
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
A generation or two from now, the Earth is recovering from a devastating war between the Western World and the Chinasian alliance. At first, the latter was winning, surging into Australia and with a plan to cross the Bering Strait. Then things bogged down. Eschewing the use of nuclear weapons (for an unexplained reason), the death rate became fantastic.
One day, the war just stopped. Or, more specifically, someone stopped them. Sounds like a positive development, but whoever did it is now exerting dictatorial control over the globe, futzing with governments, economies, even population growth rates and somehow slowing the age of human maturity!
Now, a decade after the war, Michael Standard, a battered veteran of the Australian front, is the one man who can stop the war-stopper. He is equipped with a prosthetic arm which is set to fire its hand like a cannon when face to face with the entity who styles himself "The Rim".
In many ways, Earthrim is a conventional action yarn, not too different from the series hero paperbacks like the new "Executioner" series. Standard is an irascible brute who lurches from fight to fight, surviving by animal cunning and will to live. The world Nick Kamin (a new author) creates is not particularly visionary. There is one lady character, and she is a prostitute, existing for the sole purpose of 1) being Standard's lover, and 2) getting Standard to Rim.
But Kamin does some interesting stuff. He begins the story with a compelling hook: Standard is put under to have his prosthetic arm's shoulder put back into its socket, which brings a hapless doctor into the plot. Then we get scenes from Standard's past, woven in quite deftly, making his character more interesting and his personality a bit more palatable (though how he acts like a moron most of the time, but can whip out an erudite observation on topology is a bit strange).
The other characters are actually well drawn, from Jeannine the prostitute to Dr. Graystone. Even the cops on the trail of Standard get decently fleshed out, though their role is somewhat incidental. Kamin is also a compelling author. He's got the modern style down pat, and the lurid mode works well for Ace Doubles.
The biggest problem with the book is the revelation at the end that no character has exercised free will. Everything that happens is ultimately the will of Rim or Condliffe, the fellow who equipped Standard with the arm-gun. The journey is interesting. The writing is good. But the story is a steel lattice that the characters can only inhabit, not change.
Three and a half stars.
Phoenix Ship, by Leigh and Walt Richmond
by Jack Gaughan
The Richmond husband-and-wife team (supposedly, the wife does the typing, with the husband sending telepathic instructions from his living room easy chair) has another Ace Double for us. Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald (S.T.A.R.) Dustin is an Earther, nephew to an asteroid belt-dwelling rabble-rouser named Trevor Dustin. Stan's dad wants his son to be nothing like his uncle, so he enrolls him in an arctic university for a proper indoctrination…er…education. Said education is most unusual. Stan gets weekly "inoculations" and then is given a series of exams. The questions are highly technical—impossible to answer without years of classes. Yes somehow, unconsciously, Stan seems to have the answers floating in the back of his mind.
Not content to let his hindbrain do the work, Stan spends all of his waking hours studying so that he could pass the tests even without the mysterious, subconscious aid. As a result, after four years, Stan has one of the most remarkable minds in the solar system. He finishes his schooling just in time for his uncle to lead a rebellion against Earth, winning independence for the Belt through a series of brilliant space naval maneuvers.
This makes Stan persona non grata on Earth, whereupon the school's headmaster sneeringly informs Stan that he has been drafted into the Marines, and he will have to report for duty in two weeks as one of Earth's finest. Well, Stan won't stand for that—he skips town, heads to orbit, and then off to the Belt…where he has a date with destiny and a second war with Earth.
Written in a much (much!) more juvenile vein than the Kamin, this is an odd duck of a book. With its cardboard characters, mustache-twirling villains, perfunctory inclusion of a single female (to be the love interest, natch), and its basic plot, it feels like something out of the 30s. On the other hand, the loving detail lavished on things like weightless maneuvers, dealing with explosive decompression, and space station construction are pulled from the current pages of Popular Science. There are tantalizing details on living in the Belt. Most interesting was that virtually all of its denizens are scarred or deformed, testament to the hostile environment, but no less human for it. Anderson and Niven have written about Belters, but the Richmonds have taken the first, if clumsy, steps to flesh out living in the Belt, I think.
The problem is neither Anderson nor Niven wrote this book, and the Richmonds really weren't up to it. The subject matter required twice its length. At the hands of a Heinlein, it could have been a second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As is, it's an occasionally entertaining, but largely turgid and by-the-numbers throwaway.
Speaking of husband and wife writing teams… Lord of the Stars is a new juvenile sf adventure co-created by the husband-and-wife team of Jean and Jeff Sutton. Stars is readable and fun, but lacks the fire and flash of the best juveniles.
Like many juveniles, Stars is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of how a young boy discovers a world around him much more complex and interesting than he ever could have expected. As in many of these types of books, Danny has a destiny to fulfill, and as he learns of his destiny, the boy also learns the creature who had mentored him is evil, and he meets his true friends along the way.
Hmm, it occurs to me there is a lot of familiar archetyping in that description. That archetyping is a big part of the strength and weakness of this book. Because sophisticated readers know basically how a story like this will proceed, we're looking for signposts that indicate a different viewpoint or more complexity – as in the recent Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. But the Suttons aren't after the same level of complexity as Panshin was, and that leaves this book as merely an average juvenile sf yarn.
Cover by Albert Orbaan
The Suttons center Lord of the Stars around Danny June. As we meet Danny, he's all alone on a mysterious planet. He's been lost on the planet since his parents' colonist ship blew up, wandering the planet with the help of an amazing telepathic octopus-creature named Zandro. Zandro has incredible abilities and is extremely intelligent, guiding our boy in his means to survive the planet, and seeming to groom Danny for a greater fate.
But others want Danny as well. The great Galactic Empire, spanning thousands of stars, is after Danny. In chapter two we are introduced to the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire, led by Sol Houston, who see Danny as the kind of creature who can destroy their empire.
That aspect of the book is dully familiar, but at least the Suttons bring in a bit of playfulness with the names of the Galactic leaders. For reasons lost in the fog of time, the names Sol and Houston are legendary, so the leader of the empire is named Sol Houston. And so on, names explained in fun and clever asides which added to my pleasure with this book.
Similarly, there's an amusing tangent in which a set of Empire bureaucrats try to figure out what they can do to affect the lives of Danny and his friends. The bureaucrats fall into an almost talmudic debate about which regs to follow, which rules can be broken. It's in those moments one can see real-life arguments with governments and school boards made manifest. (Jean Sutton works as a high school teacher while Jeff Sutton works as an aerospace consultant, so both know plenty about bureaucracy).
But the core of the book centers around Danny, his great psychic powers, and the attempts by his friends and allies to break Danny away from Zandro's influence. Along the way, Danny battles the plans of Gultur, Lord of the Stars; communicates psychically in subspace with a group of androids; and makes friends.
All of this is quite fun, since the Suttons bring just the right amount of seriousness to bear with Lord of the Stars. This is also a well-written, crisp little novel — no surprise since Jeff Sutton has written fiction and nonfiction since he left the Marines after the War. Still, Danny comes across as bit of a cipher and the plot machinations are a bit creaky.
Overall, a pleasant novel that's a bit of a throwback but still is worth the read.
Three stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
The Best Laid Schemes o' Mice an' (Space)Men
Two novels in which interstellar voyages gang agley (with a tip o' the Tam o' Shanter to Bobby Burns) fell into my hands recently. One is by a Yank, the other by a Brit. Let's take a look at 'em.
The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd
Wraparound cover art by Paul Lehr
Atlanta-born Boyd Bradfield Upchurch writes under the penname listed above. He's whipped out a couple of previous novels quickly. The Last Starship from Earth came out last year, and The Pollinators of Eden just a few months ago.
This latest work starts with a psychiatrist interviewing a spaceman who came back from his voyage too early. More concerning is the fact that it was supposed to be a two-man effort, and his partner isn't with him.
The text quickly shifts to first person narration by the astronaut himself. His name is John Adams, better known as Jack. (I'm not sure if his name is supposed to be an allusion to the second President of the United States or not.) He's a Southern boy, just like the author.
His missing buddy is Keven "Red" O'Hara, a stereotypical Irishman who has a toy leprechaun as a good luck charm and wears underwear with green polka dots. (The latter is actually part of the plot.)
We get quite a bit of background about their days before the spaceflight. Suffice to say that, after an encounter with an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher and his nubile daughter, Jack gets religion and Red gets the girl. (He actually marries her but, as we'll see, that hardly ties him down.)
Their mission takes them to a planet in another galaxy. (There's no real reason the place has to be so far away. In other ways, this isn't the most realistic space voyage ever to appear in fiction.) The inhabitants are very human in appearance, the main difference being very long, strong legs that are used in about the same way as arms.
The aliens live in a logical, technologically advanced society with no apparent form of government. Society is made up of what are pretty much universities. The two Earthmen are welcomed, and even allowed to teach classes.
It should be noted that the locals wear extremely short tunics and nothing else, not even underwear. This very casual almost-nudity (which really conceals nothing) goes along with the fact that they consider sex to be no big deal, just something they do when they feel like it. Children often result, of course, and never know who their fathers are.
For Red, this is an opportunity to have relations with as many of the beautiful young women surrounding him as possible. Jack, on the other hand, wants to convert the natives to Christianity. That includes dressing modestly, courting the opposite sex chastely, etc.
Can you guess that this is going to backfire?
Complicating matters is the fact that Jack falls in love with one of the aliens. It seems that Earth doesn't consider extraterrestrials to be human unless they meet a long list of very specific conditions. That includes being able to defend their planet from invaders. (Obviously this is a cynical ploy on the part of Earthlings to be able to enslave any aliens who are weaker than they are.) In essence, Jack is marrying an animal, legally, unless he can prove they meet all the conditions.
Things reach a climax during the performance of an Eastertime Passion Play, meant to convey the story of Christ's sacrifice to the aliens, who are entirely without religion. (Red, nominally a Catholic, goes along with Jack's evangelism, mostly because he enjoys putting on shows.)
Yep, that's not going to go at all well either.
This is a satiric novel, not quite openly comic although it's got some farcical elements. There's also quite a bit of sex. This may be the only science fiction book I've read with a detailed description of a woman's genitalia.
The last part of the novel, which goes back to the psychiatrist, has a twist ending that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe the best way to describe this odd little book is to compare it to an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke.
Three stars.
The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock
Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon
Prolific author and controversial editor Moorcock needs no introduction to Galactic Journeyers.
A fellow named Ryan is aboard a starship heading for a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Barnard's Star. The trip will take five years, and three have already gone by. He's the only person awake on the ship. In hibernation are his wife, their two sons, and other relatives and friends.
(We'll find out, by the way, that a couple of the men have two wives each. This drastic change in Western European society [everybody is British] is taken for granted, with no discussion.)
Flashbacks take us to a future Earth that is rapidly disintegrating into chaos. Tribalism rears its ugly head. Ryan, the manager of a toy company, fires a kindly employee just because the fellow is Welsh. Things get much, much worse as the book continues. Ryan and the others hijack the starship in order to escape Earth, which they feel is doomed.
Aboard the ship, Ryan suffers nightmares. These are often surrealistic. At times, the text turns into words in all capitals that are placed on the page to form other words. These typographical tricks contrast strongly with the main parts of the narrative, which use simple language to convey truly horrific happenings.
It's hard for me to say much more about what happens, because Ryan is quite obviously experiencing a mental breakdown. You can't trust that what you're told is real.
This is a very dark and disturbing book. The New Wave narrative technique associated with the nightmares is a little gimmicky, but otherwise the novel is compelling in its portrait of both individuals and society in general falling apart.
(It should be noted that, according to scuttlebutt, many of the scenes set on Earth were written by Hilary Bailey, who is married to Moorcock. He rewrote that material, and added everything set in space. The resulting work is credited solely to Moorcock, apparently with Bailey's consent.)
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Only one book from me this month, and unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's also, for better or worse, a familiar face. John Jakes has been writing at a mile a minute this year, with The Asylum World being what must be his fourth or fifth novel of 1969. Unlike some previous Jakes novels (a couple of which I reviewed), which lean more towards fantasy, this one is very much science fiction. If anything, the changing of genres is for the worse.
The year is 2031, and while mankind still lives on Earth, to an extent, a widespread race war between blacks and whites (I am not kidding) has resulted in not only Earth being split into Westbloc and Eastbloc (obviously a futuristic equivalent of our current cold war with the Soviets), but, I suppose on the bright side, a Noah's Ark of humanity has been established on Mars, where people live in domes, more or less in racial harmony. Sean Cloud is young, brash, and a "subadministrator" of this Martian colony. He's also hopelessly in love Lydia Vebren, who likes Sean but is hesitant due to his mixed racial heritage. Sean is half-black and half-white, is apparently unable to pass as the latter, and Lydia has a prejudice against black men.
There's also another, larger problem: a fleet of alien ships is making its way through the solar system, to Mars, possibly for peace, but also possibly to make war. The Martian colony does not have the armaments to defend itself, so Sean and Lydia are sent to Earth to bargain with the leadership in Westbloc, which itself is on the verge of turning to shambles.
The back cover says The Asylum World is satire, which strikes me as a bit odd, because in my experience satire is supposed to a) be humorous, and b) provide a topic on which the author may try to prove a point. No doubt this novel is Jakes's attempt at providing commentary on the current political climate in the U.S., especially racial strife over the past decade, not to mention that yes, tensions between the Americans and Soviets have resulted in us nearly blowing ourselves to bits at least once already. The problem is that I'm not sure what the hell he is trying to say, other than to make some center-of-the-road statements such as, for example, bemoaning the irrelevance of the family unit in this not-too-far future. There's a general sentiment of "Why can't we just get along and learn to speak honestly with each other?" which is all well and good, but men around my age and younger are dying. Sean's mixed racial heritage, which seems like it should be fodder for symbolic meaning (he is, after all, the offspring of two races, and now he must join Westbloc with Mars), but Jakes does very little with this.
I could continue to berate Jakes's political naivete, and I could also delve into how even at 170 pages this novel spins its wheels a fair bit (it really could have been a novella); but instead I'll focus some on how, despite taking place several decades into our future, The Asylum World strikes me as having been written only in the past year, maybe in the span of a month or two (why not? Michael Moorcock has written novels in a matter of days), and that I do not see how it could remain relevant in say, another ten years. When Sean comes to Earth he spends most of the novel at the "Nixon-Hilton." Sure. There's also the "Statue of the Three Kennedys." The bubbling conflict between Westbloc and Eastbloc is more or less what we are now dealing with, despite the very real possibility that the Soviet Union may not exist in 2031. Or indeed the United States. This seems like a novel written specifically to be published in 1969, so that readers may "get it" while it still gives the impression of being timely—at which point, having finished the novel in a day or two, said readers will toss it aside. At least Jakes is now slightly less at risk of having to beg for money on a street corner.
Two new science fiction novels that fell into my hands are similar in many ways. Both are by British writers and might be classified as action-packed adventure yarns. Each features a rather ordinary hero who gets involved in a secret scientific project of epic proportions. Both protagonists fall in love along the way. Each has a touch of satire and a cynical attitude about politics.
The main difference is that one takes place in the present and the other is set some centuries from now. Let's take a look at the first one.
Our hero has just lost his job and his live-in girlfriend. He worked as a security expert at a research facility, but certain parts of it were off limits to him. A fellow claiming to work for the United Nations hires him to do some unofficial investigating of the place.
I should mention at this point that everybody the protagonist meets refuses to tell him everything that's going on. I suspect this is a way for the author to keep the reader in suspense. It's also worthy of note that the hero, who is also the narrator, casts a jaundiced eye on the world around him.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact send troops into Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms known as the Prague Spring. This part of the novel is torn straight from the headlines.
As the Cold War heats up, things get complicated. There's an accident at the facility that causes two ambulances to rush away from the place, although there's apparently only one victim. The hero runs into a mysterious woman who knows more about the situation than she lets on (like a lot of characters in the novel.) She's also suffering from some kind of disease she won't discuss. As you'd expect, love blooms.
Add in a gigantic hidden complex of underground tunnels and automated submarines. The big secret behind everything involves Mad Science at its maddest. The protagonist and a few allies battle to stop World War Three from breaking out, and we'll finally learn what the numerical title means. (I suppose it's also an allusion to George Orwell's famous novel 1984, but that's not all.)
Not the most plausible plot in the world. You have to accept the fact that there could be a secret project extending over many miles without anybody finding out about it. If you can suspend your disbelief, it's a very readable page-turner.
Let's jump forward hundreds of years. People are rigidly assigned to different levels of society, with their jobs chosen for them. They can't even marry until the powers that be allow them to do so. There are some folks living in the wilderness outside this system. If the previous novel tipped its hat to 1984, this one owes something to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Our hero works for what seems to be the planet's only news agency. His job is only vaguely described, but it seems to be some kind of editing or proofreading position.
The daughter of the boss fancies herself one of those Spunky Girl Reporters from old black-and-white movies. (That's my interpretation, not the author's.) Somehow she came across a reference to something called (you guessed it) the Weisman Experiment. This happened a few decades ago, and the government has repressed all knowledge of it.
The boss tells the protagonist to help his daughter investigate the mysterious experiment. As soon as they set out, somebody tries to kill them. Whenever they track down one of the few surviving people who remember the Weisman Experiment, that person is murdered.
The hero and the daughter (who will, of course, eventually fall in love) are separated by the powers that be before they get too far. The protagonist goes through some brainwashing to straighten him out, but it doesn't quite work.
The rest of the novel takes us to North Africa, where the hero acquires an ally. (This character is a bit embarrassing, as she speaks in an accent and ends almost all her statements with I theenk.) Next we go to an underwater facility, where he's reunited with the daughter. Eventually, we wind up at the estate of an incredibly wealthy fellow, where we finally find out what the heck the Weisman Experiment was all about.
Like the other novel, this is a fast-moving tale with something to say about the way society is set up. Worth reading once.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
We have two short novels from very different authors, one being a promising young writer and the other one of the more reliable workhorses in the field. Neither novel is all that good, but at the very least I needed something less demanding after I had recently covered Macroscope.
Vinge has written only one or maybe two short stories a year so far, but all of them have been interesting, if not necessarily good. Grimm’s World, his debut novel, is itself an expansion of the novella “Grimm’s Story,” which appeared in Orbit 4 last year. The novel is split into two parts, with the first being “Grimm’s Story,” which as far as I can tell Vinge did not change significantly. If I was just reviewing the first part, I would say it’s fairly good, certainly in keeping with Vinge’s other short fiction. High three to a low four stars.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there.
The short of it is that Svir Hedrigs is an astronomy student who gets roped into a scheme by the notorious Tatja Grimm and her crew, those who make the speculative fiction (although here it’s called “contrivance fiction”) magazine Fantasie, a publication that is so old (centuries old, in fact) that its oldest issues seem to have been lost to time, if not for maybe a handful of collectors. The world is Tu, a distant planet that, like Jack Vance’s Big Planet, is vast and yet poor in metals. (Indeed this reads to a conspicuous degree like a Vance pastiche, albeit without Vance’s sardonic humor, and thus it’s not as entertaining.) Something to think about is that characters in an SF story are pretty much never aware that they’re inside a work of SF, and indeed SF as a school of fiction is rarely mentioned, much like how characters in a horror story are often blissfully unaware (for the moment) that they’re birds in a blood-red cage. Yet in Grimm’s World, what we call speculative fiction these days is held as the highest form of literature. It’s a curious case of characters in SF basically realizing that their world itself is SFnal, and therefore the possibilities are near-endless.
Of course the scheme to rescue a complete collection of Fantasie turns out to be a ruse, with Grimm usurping the tyrannical ruler of the single big land mass on this planet, on the falsehood that she is descended from the former monarchy. It’s at this point that the first part ends, and there’s a rather gaping hole in continuity between parts, the result feeling more like two related novellas than a single work. The second part is considerably weaker. What began as a nice planetary adventure turns into something more military-focused, as the people of Tu are terrorized by a race of humanoid aliens, whom Grimm may or may not be in cahoots with. Said aliens take sort of a hands-off approach with the Tu people, provided that their technology doesn’t become too advanced (a high-powered telescope, “the High Eye,” becomes increasingly an object of fascination as the novel progresses), and also that the Tu people reproduce at a rate to the aliens’ liking. What the aliens intend to do with the human surplus is absurd and raises some questions which Vinge never answers. There’s also a love triangle (or perhaps a love square) that I found totally unconvincing, if only because Svir seems to get a hard-on for whatever woman is within his field of vision.
I liked the first part but found the second part a bit of a slog.
Anderson’s writing is comfortable and comforting: rarely surprising, but often (not always) a mild stimulant that can help one during trying times. Just when I think everything might be going to shit, there’s a new Poul Anderson novel—possibly even two of them. The Rebel Worlds is short enough that it could’ve easily made up one half of an Ace Double, except this is from Signet. A few years ago we got Ensign Flandry, which saw the early days in the career of Dominic Flandry, clearly one of Anderson’s favorite recurring characters (although he’s not one of mine). The Rebel Worlds takes place not too long after Ensign Flandry, with Flandry now Lieutenant Commander and with more responsibilities, but still very much the playboy.
Hugh McCormac, a respected admiral of the Empire, is imprisoned, only to break out and go rogue, taking those loyal to him along for the ride. The prison breakout blossoms into a full-on rebellion across multiple worlds, which is a rather big problem for the Empire. Flandry, despite knowing that the Empire is on the brink of collapse and that “the Long Night” will begin soon enough, stays aligned with those in power—perhaps a sentiment Anderson himself shares, given he supports the war effort in Vietnam despite said war effort turning more sour by the week. Indeed Flandry’s seeming contradiction, between his extreme individualism and his allegiance to what he knows is a dying government, is both the core of his character and something he shares with his creator. We also know, from other Flandry stories, that the Empire will in fact soon collapse and that the Long Night, a centuries-long era of barbarism and disconnect across many worlds, will soon commence. And we know that Flandry is in no imminent danger, for better or worse. The real tension, then, lies in McCormac and his wife Kathryn, who has been taken captive by the Empire on the basis that she might cough up valuable info on her husband.
Something I admire about Anderson, despite sharply disagreeing with his politics, is that he’s evidently fond of anti-heroes (Flandry, Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Gunnar Heim), but he also sometimes concocts anti-villains, in that these characters are technically antagonists but meant to be taken as sympathetic or noble. Despite being a thorn in the Empire’s side, McCormac is basically a good man who cares about those who work for him, never mind he also loves Kathryn very much. Much less sympathetic is Snelund, a planetary governor who is horrifically corrupt, and who also wants to put his filthy hands on Kathryn while she is his prisoner; yet this man also watches over Flandry’s assignment. It should not come as a surprise then that Flandry rescues Kathryn and hides out with her on the planet Dido, which has some unusual alien life. It also shouldn’t be surprising that the two fall in love, although understandably Kathryn still cares for McCormac and isn’t eager to be swept off her feet. (I also must say Anderson tries what I think is a 19th century Southern aristocratic accent with Kathryn, and it’s a bit odd.)
So business as usual for Flandry.
The major problem with The Rebel Worlds is that it’s too short. This is a problem Anderson’s novels sometimes have, but it seems to me that scenes and maybe entire chapters that would have fleshed out the conflict are simply not here. Sure, the plot is basically coherent, but we’re far more often told about things than shown them, to the point where I wonder if Anderson was working with a deadline that he struggled with, even with his near-superhuman writing speed. It’s a fine novel that could have easily been better, with some more time.
A solid three stars.
by Cora Buhlert
A New Chancellor and a New Era
Willy Brandt is sworn in as chancellor of West Germany.
In my last article, I mentioned that West Germany was about to have a federal parliamentary election. Now, that election has come and gone and has led to sweeping political change. Because for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, i.e. twenty years ago, the chancellor is not a member of the conservative party CDU.
Since 1966, West Germany has been governed by a so-called great coalition of the two biggest parties, the above mentioned conservative CDU and the social-democratic party SPD. The great coalition wasn't particularly popular, especially among young people, but due to their large and stable majority, they also got things done.
When the election results started coming in the evening of September 28 and the percentages of the vote won by the CDU and SPD respectively were very close, a lot of people expected that this meant that the great coalition would continue. And indeed, this is what many in the CDU and even the SPD would have preferred.
At home with the Brandts: West Germany's new chancellor Willy Brandt with his Norwegian born wife Rut and their youngest son Matthias.
However, SPD head Willy Brandt, former mayor of West Berlin and West German foreign secretary and vice chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's great coalition cabinet, had different ideas. And so he chose to enter into coalition negotiations not with the CDU, but with the small liberal party FDP. These negotiations bore fruit and the 56-year-old Willy Brandt was sworn in as West Germany's fourth chancellor and head of a social-democratic/liberal coalition government on October 22.
West German president Gustav Heinemann and the new chancellor Willy Brandt shake hands.
Personally, I could not be happier about this development. I've been a supporter of the SPD for as long as I've been able to vote for them (sadly, I spent the first years of my voting age life under a regime where there were no elections) and I have liked Willy Brandt since his time as mayor of West Berlin. What is more, Willy Brandt is not a former Nazi like his predecessor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, but spent the Third Reich in exile in Norway and Sweden. Of course, "not a former Nazi" should be a low bar to clear, but sadly West Germany is still infested with a lot of former Nazis masquerading as democrats. And indeed, the one blemish on the otherwise positive results of the 1969 federal election is that the far right party NPD, successor of the banned Nazi Party, managed to gain 3.8 percent of the vote, though thankfully the five percent hurdle keeps them out of our parliament.
Willy Brandt and his (very male) cabinet pose for a photo on the steps outside Villa Hammerschmidt, seat of the West German president.
In one of his first speeches as chancellor, Willy Brandt said he and his government want to "risk more democracy" and promised long overdue reforms. He also wants to initiate talks with East European governments to thaw the Cold War at least a little. I wish him and his cabinet all the best.
A Magical Mystery Tour: The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland
During my latest trip to my trusty import bookstore, I came across an intriguing looking paperback in the good old spinner rack called The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland. From the title, I assume that this would be a fantasy tale along the lines of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. The Unicorn Girl, however, is a lot stranger than that.
The Unicorn Girl starts off not in a far-away fantasyland, but in a place that – at least viewed from this side of the Atlantic – seems almost as fantastic, namely a coffeehouse cum performance venue called the Trembling Womb on the outskirts of San Francisco. Our hero Michael (a.k.a. Michael Kurland, the author) is sitting at a table, trying to compose a sonnet, while his friend Chester (a.k.a. Chester Anderson, the author of The Butterfly Kid) is performing on stage, when all of a sudden the girl of Michael's dreams walks in – quite literally, because this very girl has been appearing in Michael's dreams since childhood.
Michael does what anyone would do in that situation: he gets up and talks to the girl. Turns out that her name is Sylvia and that she's looking for her lost unicorn. Michael understandably assumes that Sylvia is playing a joke on him, especially since he had addressed her in the sort of pseudo-medieval language you'd hear at a Renaissance Fair. Sylvia, however, is deadly serious. She tells Michael and Chester that she's a circus performer and that her unicorn Adolphus ran away, when they stepped off the train. There's only one problem: train service into San Francisco ceased six years before. As far as I can ascertain from this side of the Atlantic, this isn't true and San Francisco does have train service, as befits a major metropolis, all which suggests that Michael and Chester live in the future, even though their surroundings seem very much like something you could find in San Francisco right now.
When Michael and Chester ask Sylvia, what year it is, she replies "1936", so Michael and Chester assume that time travel is involved. However, the truth is still stranger than this, for Sylvia seems to have no idea where she is. True, San Francisco today is very different from San Francisco in 1936, but you'd assume that Sylvia would at least recognise the name of the city. The fact that she keeps calling California "Nueva España" is also a clue that Sylvia hails from further afield than our version of 1936.
When Michael, Chester and Sylvia head out to look for the missing unicorn, they are met by some Sylvia's circus friends: Dorothy, an attractive but otherwise normal human woman, Giganto, a cyclops from Arcturus, and Ronald, a centaur. Upon seeing this strange trio, Michael and Chester immediately assume that they are experiencing drug-induced hallucinations – as do two random bystanders. It's a reasonable assumption to make, though two people normally don't experience the same hallucinations, even if they took the same drugs. And Chester swears that he hasn't slipped Michael any drugs…
Methinks we're not in Kansas – pardon, San Francisco – anymore
Before our heroes can get to the bottom of this mystery, they split up to search for the missing unicorn, only to find a flying saucer. There is a mysterious blip and Michael, Chester, Sylvia and Dorotha suddenly find themselves elsewhere and elsewhen, namely in the early Victorian era or rather a version of it that is very reminiscent of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories. I guess they should count themselves lucky it wasn't "The Queen Bee" instead.
The sojourn in the Victorian era according to Randall Garrett ends, when our heroes find themselves falsely accused of jewellery theft (and the way the true culprits accomplished those thefts is truly fascinating). During their escape, there is another blip and our heroes find themselves in World War II in the middle of a battlefield…
For most of its pages, The Unicorn Girl is a picaresque romp through time, space and dimensions. Literary allusions abound, for in addition to the Victorian era according to Randall Garrett, our heroes also briefly visit J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. It's all great fun, though eventually, there needs to be an explanation for this weirdness. And so, Michael and Sylvia, who have been temporarily separated from Chester and Dorothy, figure out – with the help of Tom Waters, a friend of Michael's and Chester's who'd disappeared earlier – that the blips always happen in moments of danger and crisis. They provoke another blip and finally land in a world that at least is aware that there is a problem with visitors from other times and universes showing up in their world, even if they have no idea why this is happening.
Turns out that all the different time lines and universes are converging, which may well mean the end of this world and any other. Luckily, there is a way to fix this issue and send everybody back to their own universe. The drawback is that solving the problem will be very dangerous. What is more, Michael, Chester and Tom on the one hand and Sylvia, Dorothy and the unicorn (with whom Sylvia has been reunited by now) on the other will return to different universes, even though Michael and Sylvia as well as Chester and Dorothy have fallen in love amidst all the chaos…
A Trippy Delight
The Unicorn Girl is not the sort of book I would normally have sought out, since I'm not a big fan of psychedelic science fiction. However, I'm glad that I read this book, because it's a true delight.
The novel is suffused with humour and wordplay, whether it's the tendency of the Victorians from the Randall Garrett inspired world to speak in very long, very complicated sentences or Michael parodying a wine connoisseur by evaluating plain water. The dialogue frequently sparkles such as when Sylvia asks, "Do you not travel to far-off planets?" and Chester replies, "We barely travel to nearby planets."
The collection of Middle Eastern folktales known in English as Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights is familiar to folks all over the world. Case in point, as Rod Serling might say, is the recent Japanese animated film Senya Ichiya Monogatari, which is loosely based on the collection.
Japanese poster for the film. I don't know if it will ever show up elsewhere.
I should point out that this is not a cartoon intended for children. Like the work which inspired it, it contains considerable erotic material. If it ever gets released in the USA, it might get the infamous X rating.
I bring this up because the latest issue of Fantastic contains the first part of a new novel inspired by the same source as the film.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck
As is often the case lately, the cover is (ahem) borrowed from a German publication.
Die Herrscher der Nacht (The Ruler of the Night) is the title of the German translation of Jack Williamson's 1948 novel Darker Than You Think.
Editorial, by Ted White
The editor begins by telling us how the magazine's lead serial (see below) fell into his hands. Long story short, it failed to find a publisher, got reviewed in a fanzine, Ted White read it and liked it. He then goes on to relate the big changes in Fantastic and its sister publication Amazing. My esteemed colleague John Boston has already discussed this in detail, so let me give you the Reader's Digest version. Higher price, more words, only one reprint per issue. Nuff said.
No rating.
Hasan (Part One of Two), by Piers Anthony
Illustrations by Jeff Jones.
More than half the magazine consists of the first installment of this Arabian Nights fantasy adventure.
Hasan is a rather naive and foolish young man, living in Arabia around the year 800 or so. He meets a Persian alchemist who demonstrates how to turn copper into gold. His mother warns him not to trust this fire-worshipping infidel, but Hasan's greed overcomes what little common sense he possesses.
The wicked Persian kidnaps him and takes him on an ocean journey to the island of Serendip. (We call it Ceylon nowadays—the magazine provides a helpful map).
Despite this, Hasan still trusts the alchemist enough to perform the dangerous task of being carried to the top of a mountain by a roc, in order to gather the stuff needed to transform copper into gold. The poor sap doesn't realize that the Persian intends to leave him stranded on the peak, where he'll starve to death.
Suffice to say that, with a lot of dumb luck, Hasan makes his way to an isolated palace inhabited by seven beautiful sisters, who adopt him as their brother. He goes on to witness birds change into even more beautiful women, one of whom he is determined to have for his bride. (She has little say in the matter.)
Seeing her naked while she is bathing makes him fall madly in love.
Without giving away too much, let's just say that the further adventures of Hasan and the bird woman will appear in the next issue.
The author appears to be well acquainted with One Thousand and One Nights, given his accompanying article on the subject (see below.) As far as I can tell, he captures the flavor of this kind of Arabian folktale in a convincing way. Despite the fact that the hero is kind of a dope, and that the female characters (except Hasan's long-suffering mother) mostly exist to be alluringly beautiful, this half of the novel makes for light, entertaining reading.
Three stars.
Morality, by Thomas N. Scortia
Illustration by Bruce Jones.
It's obvious from the start that this is a science fiction version of the myth of the Minotaur, although the author doesn't make this explicit until the end. The legendary monster is an alien stranded on Earth, forced to serve an ambitious king while trying to contact his own kind.
There's not much more to this story than its retelling of the old tale. It plays out just as you'd expect.
Two stars.
Would You? by James H. Schmitz
A wealthy fellow invites an equally rich acquaintance to make use of a magic chair. It seems that it has the ability to allow the person seated in it to change the past.
I hope I'm not revealing too much to state that neither man chooses to alter his past, preferring to leave well enough alone. That seems to be the point of the story. A tale of fantasy in which an enchanted object is not used is unusual, I suppose, if not fully satisfying.
Two stars.
Magic Show, by Alan E. Nourse
A couple of guys watch a magic show at a cheap carnival. One of them heckles the magician, who invites him to take part in his greatest feat.
You can probably see where this is going. No surprises in the plot. I have to wonder why a real, powerful magician works at a lousy little carnival.
Two stars.
X: Yes, by Thomas M. Disch
An unspecified referendum always appears on the ballot in every election. Everybody knows that the proper thing to do is vote No. A woman chooses to vote Yes, just as children vote Yes during their mock elections.
Can you tell that this is an odd little story? I'm not sure what the author is getting at, unless it's something about conformity and rebellion. At least it's not a simple, predictable plot. Food for thought, I guess.
Three stars.
Big Man, by Ross Rocklynne
The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this wild yarn.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
I can't argue with the accuracy of the title. A gigantic man — he's said to be one or two miles tall — walks through the Atlantic Ocean to Washington, D. C. The behemoth is under the control of a Mad Scientist, who intends to take over the United States government and run things the way he thinks they should be run.
Illustration by Robert Fuqua.
It's up to a heroic pilot and his girlfriend (who, in an incredible coincidence, turns out to be the sister of the young fellow who was transformed into the giant) to defeat the Mad Scientist and end the reign of terror of the Big Man.
Boy, this is a goofy story. I think the author saw King Kong too many times. The premise is, of course, absurd, and it's treated in the corniest pulp fiction manner imaginable.
One star.
Alf Laylah Wa Laylah — A Essay on The Arabian Nights, by Piers Anthony
As part of the magazine's Fantasy Fandom column, this article is reprinted from the fanzine Niekas. It discusses One Thousand and One Nights in detail, comparing English translations and offering examples of the kinds of tales it contains. Copious footnotes, some serious and some playful. The author clearly knows his subject.
Three stars.
Fantasy Books by Fritz Leiber and Fred Lerner
Leiber quickly gives a positive review of Captive Universe by Harry Harrison, praises Walker and Company for reprinting science fiction classics in handsome hardcover editions, defends the use of strong language in Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, gives thumbs up to A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle, and talks about Eric R. Eddison's fantasy novels. He ends this rapid-fire essay by comparing the way that Heinlein, Spinrad, and Eddison describe a woman's breasts. (The latter excerpt is a really wild bit of outrageously purple prose.)
Lerner, in an article reprinted from the fanzine Akos, talks about two nonfiction books about J. R. R. Tolkien. He dismisses Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings by William Ready as poorly written and overly interpretive, and praises Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter for its discussion of epic fantasy in general.
No rating.
… According to You, by various
The letters from readers offer both praise and criticism. One of the editor's replies reveals that sales of the magazine went down when Cele Goldsmith was in charge, even though the quality of fiction improved. I hope that's not a bad omen for the way Ted White is taking the publication.
No rating.
Worthy of Scheherazade?
Not a great issue, although Anthony's novel and related essay are well worth reading. The new stuff is so-so and the reprint is laughably poor. It might be better to watch an old movie instead.
![[March 10, 1970] Baby, It's Cold (And Dark) Outside (April 1970 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/COVERSMALL-672x372.jpg)
![[March 6, 1970] <i>The Waters of Centaurus</i>, <i>And Chaos Died</i>, and <i>High Sorcery</i>](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700306covers-672x372.jpg)
Joanna Russ
![[February 18, 1970] <i>Time Trap</i>, <i>This Perfect Day</i>, <i>Whisper from the Stars</i>, and <i>The Incredible Tide</i>](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/700220covers-672x372.jpg)
![[February 10, 1970] Thirty Years To Go (<i>The Year 2000</i>, a science fiction anthology by Harry Harrison)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/THEYEARF51970.jpg)
![[January 28, 1970] Cinemascope: Just a Poe Boy (<em>An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe</em>, <em>The Moebius Flip</em>, </em>Sole Survivor</em>, and <em>The Dunwich Horror</em>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/12970-an-evening-of-edgar-allan-poe-0-460-0-690-crop-2830000383-460x372.jpg)
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
The Sphinx
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
![[January 18, 1970] Below par (<i>The Long Loud Silence</i>, <i>Sex and the High Command</i>, <i>Beachhead Planet</i>, and <i>Taurus Four</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/700118covers-672x372.jpg)
![[January 10, 1970] Time On My Hands (February 1970 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/COVER-672x372.jpg)
![[December 16, 1969] Holiday haul (<i>Black Corridor</i> and the December Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/691216covers-672x372.jpg)
![[November 16, 1969] Fun, Frivolity, and Flandry (<i>The Unicorn Girl</i> and more!)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691116covers-672x372.jpg)
![[November 8, 1969] Arabesques (December 1969 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/COVERARTSMALL.jpg)
