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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 17, 1970] (June Galactoscope Part Two!)

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BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.

by Jason Sacks

Our Friends from Frolix 8, by Philip K. Dick

My favorite author, Philip K. Dick, has a new novel out this month. His previous novel, Ubik, was one of my favorite works by him. Ubik was an explosive look at reality and history and happiness and travel and so much more, one of his rich tapestry books which feels beguilingly simple until you pull back the layers and discover the complexity of the world Dick made.

Dick’s new novel is called Our Friends from Frolix 8. Frolix is not as good as Ubik or many of PKD’s other novels. In fact, Dick mentioned to the fan press that this book was a quickly-written attempt to raise cash in a hurry.

But Our Friends from Frolix 8 is not a bad novel, not at all.

Cover by John Schoenherr

As always, Dick centers his novel around a miserable male protagonist. Nick Appleton is a classic Dickian schlub. He works at the ignoble job of tire regroover, a job his dad had before him, and his grandfather before his dad. But Nick has dreams. No, not for himself. That would be futile in an uncaring world.

Nick has dreams for his son Bobby. As we meet Nick, teenage Bobby is taking the civil service exam in the chance to become an employee of the current Terran government. The government is run by the New Men, evolved superhumans with uncanny abilities to read minds, perform telekinesis, and perform other incredible skills. Bobby has some ability to read minds, so Nick has hopes…

…which are dashed by an uncaring bureaucracy and by the mediocrity of Bobby’s abilities.

In one of the more heartbreaking scenes in a Dick novel, two petty government bureaucrats don’t even bother to look at Bobby’s test scores because they simply don’t care about the boy. The Appletons are Under Men, ordinary people with no ability to advance at all in their society; consequently, there’s just no reason for the bureaucrats to care about this faceless family.

Nick gets more and more angry about Bobby’s fate, in a classic Dickian scene. We feel Appleton’s impotent fury as he literally rages against City Hall to his uncaring wife. As Nick leaves the house to try to figure out how he can help Bobby, Nick begins meeting people who are radicalized to oppose the structure of this impossible world. Through them, he begins to learn about Eric Cordon, leader of the resistance. He soon becomes involved with a group which plans to break Cordon out of government prison.

From there Frolix 8 spins in a few surprising Dickian directions: for one, we meet a council ruler who has the power of telepathy but hates his wife. For another, we spend time with the great Thors Provoni, a man who went into space to learn how to restore Old Men to power and returns to Earth ready to overturn everything that had happened prior to these events. And we witness revolutions and falls from grace and a whole lot of complex existential angst.

This is almost a great novel. Frolix 8 shows all the signs of having been written fast. There are several distracting continuity errors in the book, and this novel demonstrates how Dick often improvises his books rather than working from an outline. That aspect gives this novel the feeling of veering from one storyline to the next, seldom pausing to consider what happened or to give context.

But in its tale of a perversely arranged society, in its tale of a simple man whose smallest dreams are thwarted, in its wildly imaginative tale of Thors Provoni, this actually is a pretty good Dick novel. I found myself upset when Nick was upset, found myself raging mentally about his family's raw deal, and found myself grooving on the way PKD seems to pinball from one idea to the next, scarcely giving me the chance to catch my breath.

Even average Dick is pretty great.

4 stars.

A young white man with short hair wearing a navy P-coat, blue polo collar, and green t-shirt.
by Brian Collins

Until a couple years ago, I had no idea who D. G. Compton was. I don't keep up with the British writers as much as I ought to; you could consider it an unconscious tendency, sprouting from the Irish part of my heritage. But Compton has written about one novel a year over the past five years and one or two have fallen through the cracks. I have yet to read Synthajoy or Farewell, Earth's Bliss, but I do have his latest, The Steel Crocodile. This is a ponderous and only nominally SFnal novel, but these qualities are mostly to its advantage.

The Steel Crocodile, by D. G. Compton

Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon.

Matthew and Abigail Oliver have hit a snag in their marriage, or rather a few related snags. Matthew is a sociology professor who takes a job working for the Colindale Institute, an international institute of scientists responsible for controlling (advancing as well as sometimes restricting) scientific discoveries in Britain and mainland Europe. The Colindale has come under fire from the CLC (Civil Liberties Committee) over ethical quandaries, including corruption within the institute. One of these CLC guys, Edmund Gryphon, was an old college buddy of Matthew's, and so Gryphon wants Matthew to find out what he can about the Colindale once he's inside. Mere hours after their meeting, police find Gryphon dead—apparently murdered with a laser weapon. The news is a shock to the Olivers, not least because Abigail used to have romantic feelings for Gryphon. Abigail herself is a devout Catholic while Matthew is basically an agnostic, the latter admitting that his faith in the God of Abraham is weak, and also filtered through his wife's genuine devotion. Without Abigail, Matthew would not believe in God.

We're met with a murder mystery in the first chapter, but it turns out that John Henderson, Matthew's predecessor at the Colindale, also died under suspicious circumstances. We have two deaths, as if we're in a detective novel—only there's no detective, no Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe on the case. We do eventually get answers as to who or what killed these men, but Compton is far less interested in solving his own mystery than observing the slowly crumbling relationships of the characters involved in said mystery. The novel is structured such that we alternate between Matthew and Abigail's perspectives, from scene to scene, showing that despite their marriage appearing happy on the surface these are two very different people with different ideas as to what might be happening at the Colindale. Abigail's plot is complicated by her younger brother, Paul, being a wide-eyed revolutionary who has rejected both Matthew's company-man attitude and Abigail's Christian pacifism. These are characters with conflicting loyalties; in other words, they're a lot like real people.

I don't recall there being a given year for the events of the novel, but The Steel Crocodile could just as likely take place a decade from now as anywhen. Compton's near-future Britain is troubled—maybe only slightly more than the Britain of today. There is, of course, a big and very SFnal threat, in the form of the Bohn 507, a super-computer housed at Colindale headquarters. The Bohn is not akin to HAL 9000, but rather is shown to be little more than a tool for the Colindale's director and his dreams of producing what I guess I could describe as a surrogate for God. Ah yes, a computer thinking itself God, I'm sure we haven't heard that one before; but the same time, the point of the Bohn is not to develop a God complex but to provide what all the religion and ethics classes in the world could not. Much like how The Steel Crocodile is a detective novel without a detective, the world of the novel is undoubtedly a Christian one—only God is nowhere to be found. He seems to have gone out for lunch. This is a problem that disturbs Abigail, naturally, although despite SF's tendency towards atheism (or at least indifference at the idea of the Biblical God), Compton does not make light of Abigail's beliefs or taunt her for it. Abigail is indeed one of the best female characters I've read in an SF story as of late, by a considerable margin.

There is also, unfortunately, the sense that The Steel Crocodile does spin its wheels occasionally; at just over 250 pages it could have been trimmed here and there. There is also the sense, between all the internal monologuing (which there is a lot of) and the debates between characters, that Compton really wants his novel to be About Something; luckily for him, it is. We rarely get religiously serious SF novels (Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, James Blish's A Case of Conscience and more recent Black Easter, plus a few others), but if Graham Greene were to write an SF novel (it's possible, but unlikely), it would look something like The Steel Crocodile. I would say, as someone who is not a Catholic or even a Christian, that this is a high point of praise.

Four stars.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Time and Again, by Jack Finney


Jacket design by Vincent Ceci / Push Pin Studios

I know we’ve all read what feels like a million stories about time travel, but Jack Finney’s latest novel, Time and Again, strips the genre to its skeleton and assembles a different sort of story around it, one that presents a compellingly alternative way to tell a story driven by time travel. Si Morley, a sketch artist working in advertising in New York City, is jolted out of his respectably ordinary life by representatives from a top-secret government project. He has been determined to be the perfect specimen to test a truly surreal hypothesis: that if given enough training, and with a little push from hypnotic suggestion, it might be possible for a person to force themselves back to a specific point in time through willpower alone. To my surprise, this actually works, and Si finds himself trying to navigate the NYC of 1882 in order to solve a decades-old mystery.

Every author who uses NYC as a backdrop at least attempts to pin down a likeness of the city true to their own perceptions, and no good likeness is ever the same as another, but somehow they all feel accurate. I think it's endlessly fun to experience how yet another writer is going to bring to life such a multitudinous city, and here we get two! Finney produces a modern-day NYC that feels suffocatingly huge, a giant on the verge of collapsing under the weight of progress. By contrast, his 1882 NYC is a near-perfect tableau of glittering galas and horse-drawn carriages.

I am not the sort of person to be easily convinced to romanticize New York in the 1800s – the smallpox and smell of horse manure alone is enough to remind me how grateful I am to live in a more comfortable age. But Si has an artist’s eye, and Finney brings his perspective to life so vividly that I really felt like I was seeing this old world through him with no time to dwell on any annoying practicalities. The book is beautifully illustrated with Si’s sketches and photos, and the way he sees the old New York makes a perfectly romantic backdrop for a well-paced mystery.

Absurdly, the book chooses not to elaborate almost at all on the mechanism of time travel, audaciously rejecting the fancy machines and sciencey jargon of other works in the genre. When the explanations I was waiting for did not come, I realized that the story was asking a lot more of my imagination than I was used to. It almost feels too dignified to dirty its hands with pseudo-technical exposition, leaving more room to explore the philosophical and ethical concerns that crop up in the process of trying to engineer human history. If time travel were invented today, exciting as it would be, I do actually think I would be less concerned with how it was made possible and more worried about those with access to it running amok through the past trying to tweak things in their own image. At the very least, I hope that whoever gets to time travel first reads this book and fancies themselves a Si Morley.

Five stars; this one made a believer out of me.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope)

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Tune in tomorrow morning (April 17) for FULL APOLLO 13 SPLASHDOWN COVERAGE!!!

black and white photo of a dark-haired white woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Six-Gun Planet, by John Jakes

The author is better known around these parts for his sword-and-sorcery yarns about Brak the Barbarian, firmly in the tradition of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan. This new novel is a horse of a different color.

The cover of Six-Gun Planet.  The title is written in red block capitals across the top.  Beneath, the story summary reads: This is the story of the planet Missouri, whose revolutionary goals were to duplicate in the 23rd century the Terrafirman Old West, even if they had to use robot pintos for special effects.  Below the text, three images are superimposed over a background of psychedelic swirls in bright primary colors.  The first, at the top left, shows the planet Jupiter with its storm spot, encircled by a bright yellow aura.  In the center, a rope noose descends from the top of the image.  Inside the loop, an orange sunset sky surrounds a cowboy drawn in black and white in the foreground.  He is wearing a tall hat, gun belt, and cowboy boots.  His legs are bowed and his hands appear to be reaching for his gun as he stares malevolently at the viewer from under his hat brim.  In the background, two smaller cowboys, also black and white, appear far in the distance. On the right, three sandstone mountains in shades of yellow and orange appear to be blasting off into space supported by rockets shooting fire beneath them.
Cover art by Richard Powers

The planet Missouri had a revolution some time before the story begins. Advanced technology and a bureaucratic form of government were replaced by nineteenth century ways of doing things and fierce individualism.

In other words, the place now resembles Hollywood's fantasy of the Old West. There are some so-called savages who play the role of American Indians. Towns are full of outlaws and dance hall girls. There are sheriffs around, supposedly to maintain law and order, but they aren't very effective.

Our long-suffering hero is Zak Randolph, a minor government worker who ekes out a living by supplying souvenirs (such as miniature outhouses) to tourists and staging phony shootouts to entertain visitors from other worlds. He also arranges to have local badmen sent to more civilized planets to amuse those who hire them.

This latter function gets him in trouble. One of the leased gunfighters heads back to Missouri before his contract runs out. Zak has to track him down or risk losing his position. (What keeps him on the wild-and-wooly planet at all are his girlfriend and the presence of native plants that supply minerals that can be made into jewelry. Otherwise, he's a peaceable sort who hates the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the place.)

Along the way, he has to deal with ruffians who despise him as a coward. There's also the mystery of a legendary gunfighter called Buffalo Yung. Zak isn't sure this terrifying figure really exists. Then he gets reports from various places that he's been shot dead, apparently more than once. And what does this have to do with the disappearing bodies of lawmen killed by Yung?

Continue reading [April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope) →

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 6, 1970] The Waters of Centaurus, And Chaos Died, and High Sorcery

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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.

photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
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.

The Waters of Centaurus, by Rosel George Brown

A book cover, primarily black and white. The image suggests a twisted, futuristic, mechanical face, with odd orange-pink lips. The letters of the title and author are in white, and somewhat mechanical in shape as well.
Cover art by Margo Herr

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.

A book cover, showing a dark-haired woman in a blue cocktail dress with matching gloves, holding a cigar. There is a futuristic city behind her. The title reads
Order a copy today!

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.

Continue reading [March 6, 1970] The Waters of Centaurus, And Chaos Died, and High Sorcery →

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide

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[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…]

BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.
by Jason Sacks

Time Trap, by Keith Laumer

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.

A BERKLEY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL KEITH LAUMER author of the 'Rebel
cover by Richard Powers

Continue reading [February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide →

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[January 25, 1970] Alien Island, Enchantress from the Stars, The Winds of Darkover, and The Anything Tree

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[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

A photo portrait of Brian Collins. He is a casually dressed white man with closely cropped dark hair, moustache, and beard (both kempt). He is casually dressed and reading an issue of 'Fantasy and Science Fiction'.
by Brian Collins

You may look at the byline for today's book of mine and wonder if your eyes are deceiving you; but no, that really is T. L. Sherred, who some older readers may remember as having written a few SF stories more than 15 years ago. Indeed, it has been so long since Sherred last appeared that it seems as if JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF had been born and then crucified in the interim, what with how much the field has changed since 1955. Now Sherred comes to us with what is apparently his debut novel.

Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred

Book cover, featuring a psychedelic illustration juxtaposing the round earth (with autumn trees and clouds inset) against a warped cube of space featuring a landscape of white peaks and pink shadows.  Large artificial structures of the same white material dominate the space proximal to the earth
Cover art by Carol Inouye.

The gist of it is that humanoid aliens, called the Regans, have come to Earth, in the name of a kind of cultural exchange; it just so happens that they've landed in Sherred's home state of Michigan. Dana Iverson holds part-time jobs as a barmaid and cafeteria worker, but secretly she works for the CIA, thus acting as our eyes and ears for the story that unfolds. A barfly buddy of Iverson's, Ken Jordan, gets randomly (or at least it seems random) selected as Earth's ambassador for the meeting with the Regans. For the Regans' part, they've provided the unrealistically gorgeous space captain Lee Kay Lukkari. The idea is that Jordan and Lukkari merge personalities and memories, quite literally, such that they learn of each other's cultures in about as direct and intimate a way as one can imagine. The neutral ground, which Jordan soon enough transforms into a kind of Xanadu, is the island of the book's title, positioned on the US-Canada border, just outside Michigan.

What could possibly go wrong? Actually, quite a lot.

Readers with good memories may recall a very good story of Sherred's from a very long time ago, "E for Effort," which involves a seemingly innocuous invention (a time-viewer that the characters use to their economic advantage) but which soon comes to have apocalyptic consequences. I have to say I'm a bit confused as to why Sherred, who for all I know has spent the past 15 years selling used cars, should suddenly emerge from hibernation with this specific novel. It's not that Alien Island is a bad novel exactly, but rather that while it follows a similar trajectory to that minor classic of Sherred's that I mentioned, and while it seems to come from the same place of pessimism regarding humanity's future in the wake of the atomic bomb, this is a narrative that doesn't benefit whatsoever from being rendered a novel. Certainly it would have worked better as a novella, given the small cast of main characters, the claustrophobic setting, and the single-mindedness of its message. The sad part is that it's by no means a bad message.

The other question I have to ask is why Sherred waited until, say, the past few years to write this novel of his. True, there are passages wherein the characters discuss sex, in a pretty inoffensive fashion (those expecting steamy human-on-space-babe intimacy will come away disappointed), but the language is more or less clean. I will say, it's not often you read an SF novel by one of "the old guard" these days and have the protagonist/narrator be a woman; that much of Iverson's conflict comes from her jealousy of Lukkari and her ill-hidden affection for Jordan is not as steep a price to pay as it sounds. Another thing to its credit is that Alien Island is a satire with a point to make, which I understand is going off of a low bar, but it still distresses me how many alleged satires strike me as utterly vacuous. Similarly to "E for Effort," this is basically a story about the pinhead humanity stands on, between nuclear annihilation and possibly ascending to a higher place. With "E for Effort" it was a time-viewer, whereas with Alien Island it's intervention on the part of some benign, if hard-to-read aliens.

One more thing: Without giving away specifics, I was worried that Sherred's novel would repeat the black hole of nuclear doom that "E for Effort" headed for by its end; but this novel's ending, which has a strangely biblical resonance, could be considered cautiously optimistic. Incidentally, "cautiously optimistic" is how I also feel about Sherred returning to the field after so long.

Three stars, but I was hoping for more.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Ace Double 89250

The Winds of Darkover, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Book cover, featuring a painted illustration of a snow-swept landscape with a walled city in the background, its towers just catching the light of a crepuscular red sky.  In the close foreground, separated from the city by a great distance, we see four figures with trousers, knee-high boots, tunics, metallic helmets and sleeves, gauntlets, and brightly colored capes.  Red, yellow, and green are running in a line with swords drawn towards blue in the middle distance
by Kelly Freas

This month’s Ace Double gives us the fifth story set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover universe. A standalone story, The Winds of Darkover requires no prior knowledge of the series.

Generations removed from the colonists from whom they descended, the people of Darkover, a little waystation planet, live in an archaic feudal society lorded over by a ruling class with psychic abilities. Deep in the mountains, one of these noble families is thrust into turmoil when a bandit tribe lays siege to Storn Castle, and to save her family Lady Melitta of Storn is forced to flee in search of aid.

Seemingly unrelated, high above the planet a disgraced spaceport dispatcher named Dan Barron is unceremoniously relieved of his position after a paralyzing psychic vision renders him useless in an emergency and endangers the lives of several pilots. To salvage his employment he is sent on a humiliating planet-side mission at the request of the Darkovan Lord Valdir to instruct his men in the construction of lenses used in telescopes. Barron agrees reluctantly, but the psychic visions that cost him his job continue to plague his mind and body.

Bradley’s setting is dazzling; Darkover is unmistakably reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but filled with enough alien wonders and ancient history to give the impression that this world is much bigger than the little story it contains. The story, unfortunately, does its world little justice. Each event feels cobbled together out of necessity, and the sum of the parts is a story that jerks from one scene to the next with little regard for cohesion. The third act is so brief that the resolution feels unearned. My biggest issue, however, was the baffling choice to write one of its main characters out of importance.

Melitta of Storn is driven from her besieged home with the fate of her family entirely dependent on her wit and bravery, and seems like the obvious candidate for the heroine of a pulp fantasy. Rather than do the obvious, however, Bradley is apparently content to allow Melitta to gradually fade into the background with little impact on the plot. Until, of course, it is time for her to be the milquetoast half of a romance with Barron so under-baked I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped any pages.

The Winds of Darkover is a serviceable but ultimately skippable installment in the Darkover saga. It is buoyed only by its fantastical setting, and the story a disappointingly uninspired patchwork of genre fantasy staples. Two stars.

The Anything Tree, by John Rackham

Book cover, featuring a surreal illustration of a brown tree with neither ground nor sky, against a background of green leaves.  The lower part of the tree is shaped as a great and solemn mask, and limbs like arms rise from the convolutions of the bark
by John Schoenherr

The other half of this Ace Double is The Anything Tree by John Rackham, and I found myself enjoying this one a lot more than I thought I would upon reading the opening pages. The first few paragraphs describe the heroine flippantly enough that I thought the rest of the book was going to be dismissive of her, but once the plot picked up I was pleasantly surprised.

Selena Ash is a covert agent sent on a mission by her father’s company to locate the planet of a tree with miraculous properties, and she does so under the guise of a thrill-seeking socialite who enjoys interplanetary racing. A mysterious sabotage sends her ship crash-landing onto a lush forest planet that she believes to be uninhabited… until she runs into Joe, a fellow explorer who has inexplicably “gone native” and made this planet his home, loincloth and all. Joe acts as Selena’s guide as they traverse this obscure planet to escape her adversaries, and she slowly begins to understand that Joe has a certain kinship with the plant life that populates this planet. As she grows to share his affinity for the friendly alien flora, she realizes that his solitary existence might be less lonely than she had initially believed.

Some of the inciting incidents of the plot feel a little contrived, but I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy this fantastically verdant paradise of a planet. Selena’s awareness of the existence of a kind of sapience possessed by the plants, not so much intelligence as base creature instinct, grows gradually enough to coax the reader along into an unwitting empathy with vegetation. Even the romance feels earnest and sweet, as the two protagonists are brought mentally and spiritually into togetherness by willingly joining the plants in their blissful existence. This unfamiliar way of existing is joyful in its inhumanity, compelling enough for me to ignore any plot contrivance or cliché and just be one with the greenery.

Maybe the contempt at the beginning of this story was justified, by Selena and all of humanity, me included. Rackham’s reverent wonder for the criminally unappreciated plant rings clear as a bell, compelling enough for me to set aside my dumb human logic and be reminded by the flowers of the joy of existing as a living creature. Four stars.

A photo portrait of Jessica Dickinson Goodman. She is a white woman with straight dark hair pulled back behind her head.  She wears a zipped up jacket, and is smiling at the camera.
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Enchantress From the Stars, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl

Today, 230 young women are undergraduates beginning their Spring semester at Yale where this time a year ago, none were. The education of women is a profession as old as learning, but has only recently been taken up by a range of our nation's institutions of higher learning. Stories about young women's minds, as opposed to their bodies or the uses men find for them, are as welcome and necessary as air.

Book cover, printed in yellow with black accents, featuring what appears to be a background pattern of clouds in half-tone with the title in an otherwise emptied circle above a triptych of circular prints in the lower-half of the cover, overlapping in a triangle.  Each of the circles bears a different image of a person, printed three times at horizontal offsets.

Enchantress from the Stars is a story of a young woman's exploration of her world through the worlds – and worldviews – of others. This story has three alternating perspectives but Elana's view is the central one, with scenes through Jarel and Georyn's eyes weaving around it but never overwhelming the forthright and careful way Elana approaches her story.

This is a story fans of Star Trek would deeply enjoy, with its Federation and moral imperatives not to interfere, its mix of timelines and technologies, and most of all, its earnest heart. It brings a duty-bound respect for and curiosity about all living things that fans of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant Uhura – as well as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov – might enjoy.

Elana's world is divided into thirds, with her society at the top, as those who have control over the power of both machines and minds. Jeral's society is second tier, with control over mechanicals like space ships and mining engines and laser weapons, but no psychic powers. Georyn's world languishes in the bottom third of the power hierarchy, medieval with no machines and no mental powers, but he does hold a belief in magic that allows him to understand the world around him in some ways that are initially lost on Jeral.

The "dragon" that appears early in this story shows the deep potential for this tripartite frame. First, we hear of a dragon from Georyn and the number of people who have gone to fight it and never returned. Then we see through Jarel's eyes it is a fire-breathing forest clearing machine from the empire he serves in a junior capacity, and that the people Georyn has lost to the "dragon" are actually imprisoned by Jeral's colonizers. Finally, and most complexly, we understand the dragon through Elana's eyes, as both the monster of myth and of man, its terribleness and terror flowing from both wellsprings.

Enchantress from the Stars invites readers to engage in the kind of profound and transformative empathy that the best of science fiction and fantasy can draw from us. We see events from our own views as readers, from hers, from those of her father and coworker and the people she seeks to protect and those whose aggression she seeks to defuse. As I read, I found myself reinterpreting everything Georyn and Jeral said through Elana's view, a pleasant mental and emotional stretch that only grew more satisfying the more practice I had at it.

That juxtaposition between science fiction and fantasy is in a way at the heart of what makes Enchantress from the Stars so magical and remarkable, because the genre shifts depending on who is telling the story. Georyn's fantasy is Jeral's horror is Elana's science fiction. Most books ask us to walk in one stranger's shoes, and leave us better off for doing it; Enchantress from the Stars invites us to several views and gives us the tools to truly understand them.

In this moment where professors are having to learn to address their students as "ladies and gentlemen" and not merely "gentlemen," I believe we could all use as much practice expanding our worldviews as possible, to include new genders, new perspectives, and as many new ways of being as we can in a never ending effort to fully understand what it means to be human.

Americans today live under a constitution that does not once include the word "she" or "woman" or "girl." It has been nearly 50 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced and it still, still has not passed. Maybe some of those young women at Yale will get it passed or their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, which is celebrating its 100 year anniversary of admitting women this year, will see it through.

Like Elana's world, ours is unequal. It is full of dangers and arbitrary death, patriarchies that bind and urge conformity and restrict human potential. It is also full of girls like Elana, boys like Georyn and Jeral, young people who are willing to challenge what they can see with their own eyes is wrong in the world. Who are willing to take what they are given by their fathers, older brothers, commanders, and societies and say: no, this is not for me; for me, I choose another way.

Enchantress from the Stars gives them and us the time and space to question, to discern what our worlds are and should be and can be. It is a novel that gives us readers a breath of time, a bare string of moments, to consider: what have we received today that we will reject, reform, and remake tomorrow? Who will we teach ourselves and others to be? Who will we become?

Who do we want to be?

(Four stars)

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 28, 1969] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan

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[We are proud to introduce our newest associate, late of Texas and now a confirmed Golden Stater. Don't let her self-effacing first paragraph mislead you—Winona is not only a brilliant young engineer, but she has a talent for prose, as you will soon see…]

A photo portrait of Winona Mendezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Several weeks ago, I was plucked from obscurity off the streets of San Diego by the Traveller himself. He was quite taken to hear that I was a long-time fan of the same books and magazines, and I had quite a lot of thoughts on them, if only anyone cared to listen. Wasn’t it fortunate, then, that he did know lots of people who might care? You can call it a chance encounter, serendipity, dumb luck–but me personally? I think somebody up there likes me.

He invited me to cut my teeth on something easy, something that was near and dear to my heart. And so, I’d like to start with one of my favorites, a satirist’s take on religion, morality, and free will. This one is not a recent publication but I do find myself going back to it, clinging to it when it feels the world is spinning a little too fast.

The book cover. In the foreground, there is a technological orb with cables and a trail of flying rocks in front of a woman with long hair, her hands behind her head and her ayes closed. There are two other less visible characters behind the first one, and the silhouette of a tall and narrow structure. The cover, along the title and the author's name, sports the tagline "A remarkable and terrifying novel of how life might be for the space travallers of the future".

The Sirens of Titan is the second of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, first published in 1959. It is a convoluted interplanetary melodrama centered on the life of Malachi Constant, the richest man in America through no merit of his own. Having inherited and further amassed a staggering fortune through sheer luck, he finds himself enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle while quietly, passively longing for a lightning-bolt of fate to give his life a higher purpose. This lightning-bolt does come – from the apparition of New England billionaire Winston Rumfoord, whose pleasure-seeking space expeditions have turned him and his faithful dog into incorporeal, semi-omniscient wavelengths and sent them undulating throughout the solar system.

The plot unfurls erratically, as though Vonnegut himself is along for the ride as much as his characters. Constant is invited by Rumfoord on a planet-hopping journey through space, promising him adventure and treasure and women of incomparable beauty. But when Constant declines, already not being in want of anything on Earth, he is told that he will have no say in the matter. His fate has been decided for him, and his life will culminate in a meeting with Rumfoord on Titan regardless of any actions he takes to the contrary–all that remains to be seen is the in-between.

Malachi, along with the cast of characters whose stories entwine with his, are plucked from their lives and scattered like chess pieces across the solar system. Our spoiled, iniquitous protagonist with the world at his feet is suddenly a hapless pawn in a cosmic journey so sprawling and incomprehensible that each move from one place to the next feels chosen at random. As a result, the culmination of each loose end being gathered up one-by-one and woven seamlessly back together in the ending is masterfully executed. Any disorientation felt by the reader as unwitting characters are flung through spacetime by the narrative is replaced by a deeper, longer-lasting discomfort as the machinations of fate are slowly unveiled to be much more deliberate, though no less insipid.

Still, the novel is dotted with moments of lucidity on the parts of the characters, whose determination to understand and derive meaning from their lives only grows as it becomes increasingly clear how little control they have over their own destiny. These moments are as stars in a sky of absurd nihilism, and it is left to Constant and company—and the reader—to string them together into constellations of meaning.

Vonnegut’s satirical voice, whetted on his first novel (Player Piano, 1952), is wielded now with the skill and precision of a scalpel. Darkly ironic humor disarms the reader just enough for them to be thrown full off-kilter by a constant subversion of expectations. The ridiculously circuitous route the novel takes to find its conclusion seems fitting; the answers to the questions the book raises are even more elusive and slippery in real life. It’s a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless to read our own struggle for meaning through the lens of a protagonist whose comical shortcomings as a self-absorbed chauvinist make him a difficult character to like, at least in the beginning. If the illusion of free will must give way to an existential nightmare against which we must find our own meaning, it may as well be funny.

Sirens of Titan is over a decade old by now, but there’s never a wrong time to come to terms with the futility of your own existence. Maybe, like me, it can help you find your footing in an ever-changing world. Five stars.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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