TIMOTHY ZAHN “The Dreamsender.” First appeared in Analog SF, July 1980. Collected in Cascade Point and Other Stories (Blue Jay Books, hardcover, 1986).

   One of Timothy Zahn’s earliest stories, its leading character a fellow named Jefferson Morgan who has the rare ability to contact people through their dreams. He has been using this talent in a career he has built for himself as something in the nature of  a private eye. In this tale which falls on the border of science fiction and just a tinge of fantasy, he is hired by a woman trying to find her husband, who has in essence, disappeared.

   The task, as it happens, is easy. The husband is on the moon. That she knows, but in one short phone call (or the equivalent) she has had with him, he was very evasive, and in a followup conversation she has had with his superior officer, she is told that he is on a secret expedition, and that while he is fine, she should not try to contact him again.

   This is not enough information for her, certainly, and Morgan allows himself the opportunity to go to the moon to learn more. (Most of his cases do not lend themselves to his actually leaving his home or office.) What follows from here is a bit of puzzle, one that’s equally clever. straight forward and easily solved, told in an easy to read style that sucks the reader in from page one on.

   You might think that Zahn could have used the character several times over – his ability is actually more interesting than this story itself – but he did not. This makes sense, though. Once he’s cracked the case, he’s set up for life.

FANTASTIC UNIVERSE SF – February 1956. Editor: Leo Margulies. Cover art: Kelly Freas. Overall rating: **½.

EDMUND COOPER “The End of the Journey.” The captain is the only survivor of a voyage testing a new experimental space drive. (3)

ROBERT ABERNATHY “Grandpa’s Lie Soap.” One man is capable of telling lies is a world he made incapable of interpreting falsehoods. (3)

THEODORE PRATT “Shades of Davy Crockett.” Davy comes back to dicover the commercial success of his name and fame. (2)

ROGER DEE “The Man Who Had Spiders.” Extraterrestrial spiders have advantages, but wants spiders around all the time? (4)

SAM MERWIN, JR. “Passage to Anywhere.” Novelette. Matter transmitter fails on Earth, but does make space travel feasible. An argument for world government. (2)

ETHEL G. LEWIS “The Vapor Horn.” An international healing device contains other worlds. (0)

ROBERT SILVERBERG “A Woman’s Right.” A psychometrist, hired by a man to help his wife and save their marriage cures the man;s psychosis instead, (3)

F. B. BRYNING “For Man Must Work.” The marital problems of an engineer of a space station: his wife wants to return to Earth. (3)

FRANK BELKNAP LONG “Young Man with a Trumpet.”How animals carried on after the departure of man. (3)

JOHN JAKES “The Cybernetic Kid.” A boy genius competes against the latest electronic marvels (3)

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. December 1967. Cover artist: Jack Gaughan. Editor: Edward L. Ferman. Overall rating: ***½.

DAVID REDD “Sundown.” Novelette. The confrontation between man and creatures of fantasy; creatures not of love, but of hate, yet capable of understanding, and of pity. (5)

LARRY EISENBERG “The Saga of DMM.” Emmett Duckworth. The discovery of a new chemical stimulant. (4)

STUART & JENNIFER PALMER “Brain Wave,” Novelette. Telepathic contact with another galaxy – anticlimactic, like a long bad joke. (3)

ALGIS BUDRYS “Carberus.” Not Sf, or even fantasy, but four long puns. (3)

DEAN R. KOONTZ “To Behold the Sun.” Adventure and trauma upon an expedition to the sun. (3)

GAHAN WILSON “The Power of the Mandarin.” A series character not unlike Fun Manchu comes to life and to have power over the author (and editor). (4)

LEONARD TUSHNET “The Chalmlins.” The guardian angels of some Jewish Polish-Americans, who need them. (3)

J. G. BALLARD “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D.” Vermilion Sands. Three, no, four men who sculpt clouds, and the insane woman whose portrait they create. Haunting. (4)

TIM AKERS “A Murder of Knights.” Published in Sword and Planet, edited by Christopher Ruocchio (Baen Books, trade paperback, 2021).

   As the story begins, two men are on a quest, one they apparently have been ordered to be upon. We gradually learn what they must do. We never do quite learn who ordered them, but since the thrust of the tale does not depend on that, it does not matter. At some short length, they arrive at an isolated village where the mayor’s daughter has been abducted by a broodmother (think of something comparable to a monstrous spider-like creature, but worse).

   The question of the quest, and the tasks they are bound to do are now apparent.

   It is never quite clear on what world they are in. It may be Earth, it may not. It most probably isn’t. Technology seems to have previously existed on the planet. It does not now. Life is primitive in the world they are. The weapons they have are little better than swords, but magic also plays a part in their attack on the monster they must kill — or be killed by.

   There is, of course, little that is new in this tale. Many of us have read this short adventure many times, and for some of us, for a long time. Tim Akers, the author, tells it well. Here’s a short example:

   
   You might think Mr. Akers is a young fellow, as I did when starting this tale, but he is 53 and has written several novels and short stories, perhaps all in a similar vein, but none of which have I noticed before. From the ending, I thought a sequel could easily have followed, but so far, such an event has not occurred.

   I would happily read it if it had.

   As previously noted, I never owned the Berkley Highland edition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) with Paul Lehr’s cover art, having purchased my long-gone, oversized trade paperback—now identified, with the aid of my main man Gilbert Colon, as a 1969 Elephant Edition from Pendulum Press—at a grade-school book fair.

   Since my 1986 Signet Classic edition has an afterword by SF legend Isaac Asimov, I don’t exactly feel short-changed. He notes, “Wells was well-grounded in the science of his day and he was always careful, in his science fiction tales, to draw upon actual science as much as he could,” e.g., American astronomer Percival Lowell’s book Mars (1894), which suggested intelligent Martians, based on the later-discredited observations of “canals” on its surface.

   What Asimov calls “the very first tale of interplanetary warfare the world had ever seen, the first story of an invasion of Earth by alien beings” returns to the first person after The Invisible Man (1897). “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s… Yet across the gulf of space…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” Writing early in the next century, the unnamed narrator joins an astronomer, Ogilvy, at an observatory in the Surrey village of Ottershaw, and sees a “jetting out of gas” from Mars.

   After the first falling star is seen rushing over Winchester, Ogilvy—certain that a meteor has fallen on nearby Horsell Common—is surprised to find that “the Thing” is a cylinder with a 30-yard diameter, whose circular top begins to unscrew.

   Mentally linking it with the flash on Mars, he fetches London journalist Henderson from Woking, yet upon their arrival, the signs of life have ceased; alerted by his newspaper boy to the presumed “dead men from Mars,” the narrator hastens there from his home in Maybury, finding it equally inert. Later, the pit surrounded by a crowd of hundreds, the end of the screw comes out, and what emerges is not the man-like occupant they expect, but a many-tentacled horror.

   The pulsating, bear-sized “rounded bulk [rises] slowly and painfully…due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth”; it has “oily brown skin [that] glistened like wet leather [and two] immense eyes [with] extraordinary intensity [above a] V-shaped mouth…the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva.” It is joined by another, and as the crowd scatters in horror, a shopman accidentally pushed into the pit vanishes while trying to climb out, shrieks, and is heard no more. A Deputation including Ogilvy, Henderson, and Stent, the Astronomer Royal, advances waving a white flag in an attempt to communicate, only to be incinerated by the Heat-Ray from a “black, domelike object.”

   Returning home after his terrified flight, the narrator reassures his wife that the Martians’ limited mobility will confine them to the pit, yet inside it, a noise of hammering betokens the machines they are making ready, and another cylinder falls by the Byfleet Golf Links.

   Soldiers arrive, and with the Heat-Ray coming too close for comfort, he takes his wife to her cousins in Leatherhead, renting a cart from the Spotted Dog’s landlord. As he departs in a violent thunderstorm, a third cylinder falls, while the lightning reveals a “monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside…a walking engine of glittering metal…articulate ropes of steel dangling from it…”

   Crashing the cart as a second appears, emitting puffs of green smoke from its joints and a deafening howl of “Aloo! Aloo!,” the narrator makes his way home on foot, stumbling on the landlord’s body en route. He offers refuge to a passing soldier, who relates their rout by the hooded tripods—also equipped with Heat-Rays—then himself sees Weybridge and Shepperton laid to waste: “Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and universal.” Fearing a “disastrous struggle” around London, he plans to take his wife out of the country from Leatherhead to Newhaven, detouring via Epsom to avoid the third cylinder, yet nearly loses his life in the Thames as the Heat-Ray boils it.

   As cylinders fall daily and more artillery is arrayed, having felled one tripod, the narrator presses on toward London, paddling downriver in an abandoned boat, and while he lies dozing, exhausted, on the Middlesex side, he is joined by a curate fleeing Weybridge, his mind shaken by what he has seen.

   Meanwhile—with news slow to travel—his brother, a medical student, is among the Londoners unaware of the gravity of the situation until the approach of the “boilers on stilts” and a poisonous Black Smoke that stifles the gunners. The end of organized opposition leads to “the great panic” and a mass exodus, with the narrator’s brother saving two ladies from a gang trying to steal their “little pony-chaise.”

   On the Essex coast, the trio secures passage aboard an Ostend-bound paddle steamer, and after the vividly described chaos—with its torrent of real locales adding verisimilitude—“Book One: The Coming of the Martians” concludes as the torpedo ram H.M.S. Thunder Child destroys two tripods before being sunk.

   “The Earth under the Martians” resumes the narrator’s attempt to reach Leatherhead, when he and the curate see a Martian picking up people and tossing them in a metallic carrier. A cylinder hits the house where they are foraging for food, burying them under the ruins with a sentinel tripod nearby, and from concealment therein, they have a unique opportunity to observe the enemy at close range.

   During their days of imprisonment, the narrator sees a spidery “handling-machine” in the pit remove and assemble pieces of an apparatus from the cylinder. The Martians, which he believes communicate telepathically, are sexless and never sleep, have evolved largely into brain, and obviate digestion by injecting “fresh, living blood of other creatures…into their own veins,” hence the human-harvesting. “Micro-organisms, which cause so much disease and pain on earth, have either never appeared on Mars or Martian sanitary science eliminated them ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such…never entered the scheme of their life.”

   Now insane, the curate resists rationing the food, loudly proclaims that God is punishing humanity, and forces the narrator to silence him with the butt of a meat chopper, too late to prevent alerting a Martian; as he hides in the coal cellar, a tentacle pulls the curate out to his death.

   On the 15th day, he escapes, finding the unoccupied pit overrun by Mars’s red weed and containing aluminum bars refined from the clay. Raiding gardens for food, he feels like “an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel,” amid great swathes of destruction and the weed choking the Thames and the Wey, which finally “succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread…due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria…”

   On Putney Hill, the narrator encounters the artilleryman he’d sheltered, who believes the Martians are learning to fly; if so, “It is all over with humanity,” destined to be bred for food, made pets, or trained to hunt one another.

   He parts from “this strange undisciplined dreamer,” who envisions the ablest humans surviving underground in drains and tunnels, preserving their knowledge in books, ultimately capturing tripods to turn their Heat-Rays against the Martians. Traversing dead London, the narrator hears a wailing of “Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” from a stationary tripod, then stilled, and finds the wrecked handling-machine whence “a pack of starving mongrels [competes over] a piece of putrescent red meat…”

   Other motionless tripods, with hungry birds pecking at “lank shreds of brown” hanging from their hoods, reveal that the Martians had succumbed to “the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared…slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon this earth.”

   As the joyful news spreads around the world and relief pours into London, the unwitting narrator is taken in, wandering and raving, by kindly people who inform him that Leatherhead has been destroyed. Yet soon after he returns home, his wife and cousin arrive to seek him, and he marvels “that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.”

   The War of the Worlds (1953) was one of four collaborations between producer George Pal and director Byron Haskin (1899-1994); The Naked Jungle (1954) was based on Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen Versus the Ants” (Esquire, December 1938), which resembles Wells’s “The Empire of the Ants” (The Strand Magazine, December 1905). The woes of Conquest of Space (1955) are legendary, and their reunion on The Power (1968) fared no better. In the interim, Haskin directed From the Earth to the Moon (1958), shifting from Wells to Jules Verne, and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), an update of Daniel Defoe’s classic, also contributing to the seminal SF series The Outer Limits in various capacities.

   From 1922 to 1937, Haskin was primarily a cinematographer, with occasional directorial credits, and in the second phase of his career, through 1944, he worked mainly in special effects. Nominated for four consecutive Academy Awards in that category (1940-1943), after winning the 1939 technical achievement award for the development and application of the triple head background projector, he was thus ideal for the effects-heavy War of the Worlds. Ironically, it earned Gordon Jennings the special-effects Oscar that had eluded Haskin; War was also nominated for film editing (Everett Douglas) and sound recording (Loren L. Ryder), and received a 2004 “Retro Hugo” for the Best Dramatic Presentation.

   For years, I lamented that, unlike in his Wells adaptation The Time Machine (1960), Pal had updated the story to the present with a script by Barré Lyndon, who wrote the twice-filmed stage play The Man in Half Moon Street (1939). He adapted the 1944 version of The Lodger and the Thriller episode “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (4/11/61) from well-known works about the serial killer, and was one of the writers on the ill-fated Conquest. But I grew to see the wisdom of giving it an immediacy with a modern setting, following in the footsteps of Orson Welles, whose Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast (10/30/38) sparked the furore re-enacted in the TV-movie The Night That Panicked America (1975).

   In his Directors Guild of America Oral History interview with Joe Adamson, Haskin said, “The threat to humanity…was an antiquated machine looking like a water tank tottering around the country on creaky legs, blowing whiffs of smoke, frightening a cast directly out of Agatha Christie—the vicar and the butler and other rural characters….[But] we had to consider the atomic bomb and the impact of that technology…I thought surely we should modernize it, which meant a new story, with new characters. [So w]e ignored the people and the complications of the [Wells novel] and created a new story line with new characters and complications,” headed by physicist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry).

   Among the illustrious names who had been attached to the property, or expressed interest in adapting it, since Paramount had acquired it in the ’20s were Cecil B. DeMille, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Korda, and Pal’s old Puppetoons colleague Ray Harryhausen, who even animated test footage of the Martian emerging from the cylinder.

   The film opens on a literal high note, with Leith Stevens’s enthusiastic main-title theme, and multi-colored credits punctuated by flashes of lightning. Depictions of the planets by astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell—like Stevens a frequent Pal collaborator—underly a commentary by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, some of it taken almost verbatim from the novel.

   By the marquee for a reissue of DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and her pastor uncle, Dr. Matthew Collins (Lewis Martin), see the initial “meteor” fall near Linda Rosa, starting a blaze soon brought under control. As it cools, the lookout suggests that some Pacific Tech scientists fishing up at Pine Summit check it out, so Forrester remains while Pryor (Bob Cornthwaite) flies Bilderbeck (Sandro Giglio) back in Forrester’s plane. Sylvia, who teaches library science at USC, is familiar with his work and meets him at the crater, where Forrester detects radioactivity, prompting Sheriff Bogany (Walter Sande) to post some deputies, and infers that the meteor must be hollow.

   Forrester is invited to stay with Collins while it cools further, but as he joins Sylvia for a square dance in the social hall, Wash Perry (Bill Phipps), Salvatore (Jack Kruschen), and Alonzo Hogue (Paul Birch) see the cylinder unscrew, immolated with their white flag by a cobra-like appendage that emerges. At the dance, the lights, phone, and watches all go dead; with his watch magnetized and a compass now pointing to the gully, Forrester has Bogany alert the military after they see the men’s ashes and another cylinder descending. Marine Colonel Ralph Heffner (Vernon Rich) surrounds the gully as Canada’s Professor McPherson (Edgar Barrier) confirms the reports of cylinders falling in European nations.

   After much activity in the gully and the arrival of Major General Mann (Les Tremayne), with reports of mass destruction spreading worldwide, the Martian war machine arises, a manta-ray-shaped craft made of copper and designed by co-art director (with Hal Pereira) Albert Nozaki, supported by three invisible legs of energy.

   Seeking to communicate with an advanced civilization he presumes is “nearer the Creator,” Collins approaches, a Bible held high, reciting Psalm 23, only to be mown down. During a fruitless attack, exploding shells reveal impenetrable electromagnetic domes; as Mann races to warn Washington of their meson-neutralizing energy beam, Heffner is killed leading a doomed holding action.

   The military plane in which Forrester and Sylvia are fleeing crashes, so they take refuge in a deserted farmhouse, where she relates wandering off as a child, waiting in a church for “the one who loved me best,” Uncle Matthew, to find her. As in the novel, the house is hit by a falling cylinder and penetrated by a tentacle; Forrester chops off the tri-colored electronic eye it bears and scares away the diminutive, spindly Martian (Charles Gemora) that touches her shoulder. During “the rout of civilization [and] massacre of humanity,” with its torrents of refugees, Washington is the only “unassailed strategic point,” at which Mann is informed of the decision to use the atom bomb, to be monitored by Pacific Tech.

   Forrester and Sylvia finally arrive with the eye and her scarf, soaked with Martian blood that Dr. Duprey (Ann Codee) says is extremely anemic. Bilderbeck attributes their light-sensitivity to Mars’s weaker sunlight, noting that “everything about them seems to be in threes”; Dr. James (Alex Frazer) connects the eye to a projector, so they see themselves from the Martians’ distorted viewpoint.

   With all radio dead, reporter Paul Frees, later of The Time Machine, makes tape-recordings for the benefit of posterity, “if any,” and as the bomb is shrugged off, L.A. is evacuated, with Mann vowing to fight on with whatever the scientists can develop—but their instrument-filled truck is seized en route to the Rockies.

   The impressive scenes of the exodus alternate the spectacles of streets choked with cars and people, literally heading for the hills, or empty and strewn with debris, while the mob separates Sylvia from the scientists. Forrester searches for her as the Martians decimate the city, with extremely detailed miniatures, and finally finds her, as he knew he would, in the Reverend Bethany’s (Russ Conway) church; suddenly, silence breaks out as a war machine crashes into the street, a sight that we learn is swiftly repeated around the world. Forrester watches its hatch open above the rubble and an arm bearing three digits—each tipped with what looks like a suction cup—slowly emerge, pulsate briefly, then lie limp.

   Hardwicke explains, “The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune [so they] began to kill them”; his closing line, again almost verbatim from Wells, completes a religious motif.

   Said Haskin, “I was as responsible as anybody for a lot of the major turns [from sometime atheist Wells]. The constant re-occurrence of the religious note came from having nobody solving our final dilemma but God. It became expedient to ring a few church bells to get some kind of ominous feel to the goddamn thing.” When Bilderbeck says, “the Martians can conquer the Earth in six days,” Sylvia points out, “The same number of days it took to create it.”

   Although DeMille chose not to make the film himself, he heartily endorsed his friend Pal as producer, rendering every support possible; Pal and associate producer Frank Freeman, Jr.—another of his champions, and the son of Paramount head Y. Frank Freeman—have cameos as bums listening to a radio news broadcast. The grateful Pal also asked DeMille to narrate, but in declining, he suggested Hardwicke, a veteran of Wells’s Things to Come (1936) and an apt choice to read his fellow Englishman’s words. In an early, and perhaps wisely abandoned, plan, the last portion of the film was to have been shot in 3-D, with the audience donning their glasses as the cast did their protective goggles before the a-bomb.

   In 1988, in dubious homage, Trace Beaulieu debuted as mad scientist Clayton Forrester on the perennial Mystery Science Theater 3000, while the two-season syndicated series The War of the Worlds premiered; Robinson returned as Sylvia in this continuation of the film, positing that the aliens—retconned as coming from Mor-Tax, not Mars—had been in suspended animation.

   She and Barry also had cameos as the grandparents in Steven Spielberg’s big-budget 2005 remake with Tom Cruise, which restored elements such as the red weed, the harvesting of blood (to fertilize it), and an analog of the curate. Yet it seems safe to say that as the granddaddy of alien invasions, this War will go on forever.
      
   

Up next: The First Men in the Moon
   

Sources/works consulted:

Asimov, Isaac, afterword to The War of the Worlds, pp. 206-215.

Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).

Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).

Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).

Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).

Haskin, Byron, Byron Haskin: A Directors Guild of America Oral History, interviewed by Joe Adamson (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984).

Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)

Von Gunden, Kenneth, and Stuart H. Stock, Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films (New York: Arlington House, 1982).

Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2 volumes; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982-6).

Wells, H.G., The War of the Worlds (New York: Signet Classic, 1986).

Wikipedia
   
   

Online sources

https://archive.org/details/the-war-of-the-worlds_202301.

   Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “All You Zombies –.” First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959, after reportedly being rejected by Playboy after that magazine had requested a short work of adult fiction from the author. Collected in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (Gnome Press, hardcover, 1959). Reprinted many time since, including The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Robert Silverberg (Arbor House, 1980) and Time Troopers, edited by Hank Davis & Christopher Ruocchio (Baen Books, 2022).

   A guy walks into a bar and eventually begins telling on the other side of the counter his life story. It’s a strange one. It turns out that he, so far, has had a very strange existence. He was born a girl but was stolen from his mother when he was born. He did have a child while still female…

   And from there it gets complicated. I think I have explained everything as best I can without telling you everything, but between you and me and a handy time travel machine, there is only one major character in the story. Only one.

   I loved this story when I first read it, I don’t remember where or when, was totally puzzled the second time. Third time, a couple of days ago, and I loved it again, the pieces all falling into place as smoothly as anyone could make it. If there were any flaws, but given the number of times it’s collected and reprinted, someone else would have found them by now.

   The title? That’s one the first things that comes to our protagonist’s mind once he comes to grips with his life in the world. Where (or how) do the rest of us come in?

   For the record, reading this yesterday and trying to keep the threads of the story straight, I was struck by how smooth a writer Robert Heinlein was when he was at his prime. He was one of the best.

EDMOND HAMILTON – The Weapon from Beyond. Starwolf #1. Ace G-639. Paperback original; 1st printing, 1967. Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Collected in Starwolf (Ace, paperback, 1982); and in Starwolves and the Interstellar Patrol (Baen, paperback, 2008).

   Space opera in the old tradition, but with an added measure of characterization and ideas.

   Margan Chane, ex-Starwolf, hunted by his former allies in pirating and raiding, joins a crew of mercenaries from Earth in a hunt for a weapon supposedly hidden in the depths of Corvus Nebula. There is no weapon, only the remains of a wrecked alien spaceship, but there are indication that a rescue fleet is on the way.

   The mercenaries, interesting in themselves, are the realization of Earth’s most valuable resources in a universe of riches: Men. Men capable of doing the job asked of them. Chane has to sort out his emotions in a personal conflict caused by his sudden change of environment, now having to be hunted and perhaps having to fight his old comrades on the side of fellow Earthmen, with one he can like and even respect.

   Humans of this future have their scientific research oriented toward weaponry, while the liens do not seem to have had to suffer and learn to turn away from violence. Which is better?

   Logically constructed, except that the mercenaries still expect to fin the “weapon” after landing when the enemy cruisers leave the planet “defenseless.” Otherwise, the story has both action and thoughtful passages in the right proportion. Most entertaining,

Rating: ****

PIERS ANTHONY – Sos the Rope. Pyramid X-1890. Paperback original; 1st printing, October 1968. Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Serialized earlier in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July-Aug-Sept 1968, Collected in Battle Circle (Avon, paperback, 1978).

   A strange triangle formed between two men and a woman becomes the key to the future of a post-war semi-feudal society, There are the warriors whose problems are solved by the force of arms, by trial by combat. And there are the crazies, who supply the traditions of learning and the past.

   Any form of unifying leadership is discouraged by the secret underground manufacturers of all supplies, and it is Sos’ friend Sol who threatens to provide that leadership, with the help of Sos, which would upset the balance of this precarious society. Sola is the wife of Sol, who bears the daughter of Sos. And it is Sos who is sent to end Sol’s leadership, and who then becomes the one who must be destroyed, What he has built, he must also destroy.

   A dilemma, unresolved. To strive for the benefits of civilization again, or to maintain the present because with it civilization brings destruction? What to do with an empire that cannot withstand those who have the power and wish to keep it for themselves?

   Much much more than for Lin Carter’s “swords and sorcery.”

Rating: *****

STEVEN POPKES “The Ice.” Novella. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2003. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 21st Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (St. Martin’s, trade paperback, July 2004).

   Phil Berger was a high school hockey player in the Boston area, and a pretty good one, when a local reporter files a story about him that changes his life forever.  As the story goes, he is the cloned son of Gordie Howe. [Sidebar here: Gordie Howe was the greatest hockey player of all time, playing for the pros from 1946 to 1971, one Wayne Gretsky notwithstanding. We could argue about that. I saw him play twice, once in Detroit and once here in Hartford. Gordie Howe, that is.]

   The circumstances are vague, but one does not argue with DNA testing. It is a lot of pressure on a young boy. He makes it to playing in college, but it doesn’t last long. It also turns out that he was not the only result of whatever experiments somebody was running. The other boy, Phil’s age, was not as successful.

   This is a long story, full of small highlights and lots of valleys. He moves to the American southwest, gets a job barkeeping, then a better one. He gets married, has a son, and lives his life the best he can. This is barely science fiction, until the end, when the story finally makes it rounds and comes around to the point, which is a significant one. But while it is being told, it is one you cannot put down, even if you are not a hockey fan.

   I have not read anything else by Steven Popkes, who seems to have made a living doing real jobs, not depending on writing SF for a living. He wrote a couple of novels in the late 1980s/early 90s, then a dozen or so more from 2016 to now. These appear to be mostly self-published.

   He did continue writing shorter work all through this period. This not an uncommon career path for many SF writers. Based on this sample of size one, though, he seems to have done fine, but in my opinion, he could have been a real contender.

KENNETH BULMER – The Star Venturers. Ace Double 22600; 1st printing, 1969. Published back-to-back with The Fall of the Dream Machine, by Dean R. Koontz [reviewed here]. Cover art by John Schoenherr.

   Thrown together by fate, Jarrett, Todd and Sue hunt for the abductor of a missing prince. Jarrett is forced on the venture by a two-bit princess. Todd becomes his friend and follows along, and Sue is the daughter of another adventurer who has not been heard from since being sent out on the same task as Jarrett.

   Probably the dullest story of galactic adventure I have read in some time. Kiddie stuff for adults. And since the girl’s father has not yet been found by story’s end, there’s gonna be more, unhappy day.

Rating: *

   
PostScript: Assuming I was correct in my assessment of this book, the good news is that there was not a sequel to it. At least, I don’t think so.