Science Fiction & Fantasy


ROBERT SILVERBERG “Hawksbill Station”. Novella. First appeared in Galaxy SF, August 1967. Reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1968, edited by Terry Carr &Donald A. Wollheim (Ace, paperback, 1967). First collected in The Reality Trip and Other Implausibilities (Ballantine, paperback, 1973). Expanded to the novel of the same title (Doubleday, hardcover, 1968). Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1968 for Best Novella of 1967.

   Governments of the 21st Century have found Hawksbill Station, located two billions years in Earth’s past, an excellent spot for deported political agitators. Jim Barrett, with greatest seniority, is the acknowledged king whose kingdom is going completely insane. A crisis seems to form with the new arrival of Lew Hahn, who is strangely different.

   The ending is a letdown from what goes before, is perhaps too simple in comparison with the masterful construction that precedes. It could be the background for a much longer story.

Rating: ****

— June 1968.

ROGER ZELAZNY “Damnation Alley.” Novella. First appeared in Galaxy SF, October 1967. First collected in The Last Defender of Camelot (Pocket, 1980). Reprinted in Supertanks, edited by Martin H. Greenberg et al (Ace, 1987). Expanded into the novel of the same title (Putnam, hardcover, 1969). Nominated for a Hugo Award in Best Novella category (placed third). Film: 20th Century Fox, 1977, with Jan-Michael Vincent (as Tanner) and George Peppard.

   Damnation Alley is the cross-continent route from Los Angeles to Boston, some years after the Bomb. The plague has hit Boston, and Hell Tanner is one of the drivers sent out with the essential serum [they need]. Armored cars are necessary to avoid radioactivity, mutated monsters, and violent storms.

   Tanner is an ex-convict, a Hell’s Angel gangleader, who is forced into leading the caravan with the promise of a full pardon. It is his story, his changing reaction to the job he must do, with side glimpses into the resiliency of man. There is, of course, a tremendous build-up of tension and emotion as Boston gradually becomes reachable.

   Zelazny’s picture of a new world is both beautiful and horribly terrifying: do you believe that?

Rating: *****

— June 1968.

   

LARRY MADDOCK – The Golden Goddess Gambit. Agent from T.E.R.R.A #2. Ace G-620; paperback original, 1st printing, 1967. Cover art credited to Sergio Leone.

   An inscribed plaque found in ancient Crete indicates that the time-structure of pre-historic Earth is being tampered with, possibly by a member of Empire. Hannibal Fortune and Webley trace the plaque back 10,000 years to an island continent in the Atlantic, unrecorded in history. Kronos, the ruler of his own niche in time, is actually a renegade T.E.R.R..A. agent and has established his own religion, designed mainly to perpetuate his own lineage.

   Normi, the girl saved by Fortune from a mob, tells an interesting story of palace politics, which Kronos manipulated to achieve his reign. The beginning of the book is slow, however, and the ending is a muddled mess, hardly worth waiting for. Human breeding has its problems (pages 95-96), so it is doubtful that Kronos could have really affected history. Note that Fortune is taught swordsmanship by a man called d’Kammp.

Rating: **

— June 1968.

   
Bibliographic Update: Larry Maddock was the pen name of Jack Owen Jardine, who wrote a small number of SF novels and short stories under this and several other pseudonyms in the 1960s, including Howard L. Cory, in collaboration with his wife, Julie Ann Jardine .
   

         The Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series

1. The Flying Saucer Gambit (1966)
2. The Golden Goddess Gambit (1967)
3. The Emerald Elephant Gambit (1967)
4. The Time Trap Gambit (1969)

MACK REYNOLDS – Computer War. Ace Double H-34; paperback original, December 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, June & July 1967. Reprinted as half of Ace Double 11650, paperback, February 1973.

   Economic reasons lead the government of Alphaland to go to war with the second planetary power Betastan. Computer predictions are that a two-month conflict will be enough for [an Alphaville] victory, but the Betastani have read Ho Chi Minh (page 62) and retaliate with sabotage, high-level infiltration and other forms of standard guerilla warfare.

   The result is predictable. The excuse for a hero is needed only to have everything explained to him; enough of nerdy cloddy flats! The subversive Karlists have good ideas — it might be more interesting to see how they succeed in victory.

Rating: *½

— June 1968.

   

ANALOG SF.  June 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art: John Schoenherr. Overall rating: **

HARRY HARRISON “The Men from P.I.G.” Novelette. Porcine Interstellar Guard, that is. Nothing more than the title suggests: rather poor Analog-type adventures on a colonial planet. (2)

CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “Compound Interest.” About 12 pages summarizing “Experts in the Field” (Analog, May 1967; reviewed here) plus [four more with] a new ending. (1)

JOHN T. PHILLIFENT “Aim for the Heel.” Novelette. Not SF. The “Man from CODE” this time, able to avenge the deaths of thousands by acting strictly within the law. (3)

E. G. VON WALD “Something Important.” The aliens’ message for help is ignored because of previously garbled transmissions. (2)

MACK REYNOLDS “Computer War.” Serial, part 2 of 2. See review to follow shortly.

LAWRENCE A. PERKINS “Bite.” An unpopular doctor is infected with rabies. (2)

– May/June 1968

ROBERT SILVERBERG – The Time Hoppers. Doubleday & Co., hardcover, 1967. Avon S372, paperback, October 1968; cover art by Don Punchatz. Belmont Tower, paperback, 1974. Ace, paperback, 1982. Expansion of the story “Hopper,” which first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, October 1956, and was collected in Next Stop the Stars (Ace Double F-145, 1962).

   Quellen, a minor bureaucrat in the Secretariat of Crime, found his own solution to the overcrowded conditions of the world in the year 2490: a secret illegal hideaway in Africa. But others have resorted to time travel as an answer to their problems, and Quellen is assigned the job of stopping the hoppers without disturbing the stability of the present time.

   There are the usual paradoxes which are brought out, [and] the obvious course of action occurs soon enough, but there is more. Mankind is becoming dehumanized with the intolerable masses of people. Unspeakable crimes and customs are common, sore of a preliminary interlude before the world of Archexecutive Shale in “Pity about Earth” (Report 93), but here they are more forcefully realized. Time travel has this time become the background to an excellent picture of despair.

Rating: ****½

— May 1968.

   

ELIZABETH BEAR & SARAH MONETTE “Boojum.” Short story. First appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Nightshade Books, 2008). Reprinted in three “Best of Year” anthologies edited by Kathryn Cramer & David G. Hartwell; by Gardner Dozois; and by Rich Horton. Also reprinted in Cosmic Corsairs, edited by Hank Davis & Christopher Ruocchio (Baen, 2020).

   Nothing says “space opera” more than pirates in space, and that’s exactly what this story’s about. What’s somewhat unique (though perhaps not entirely) is that the pirates’ ship is a living organism, a boojum, a spacefaring vessel they have named the Lavinia Whateley. She is described as “a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.”

   What is likely to be even more unique is that when the crew has finished plundering their latest prey, Vinnie finishes it off, hull, engines and all, by, um, eating it. Part of their loot in their latest score are some cylindrical metal containers containing human brains. Captain Song laughs it off, but Black Alice Bradley, a junior grade engineer, is not so sure about it. She is right.

   The cylinders were a shipment intended for the Mi-Go, and they want what they paid for. The Mi-Go come “from the outer rim of the Solar System, the black cold hurtling rocks of the Öpik-Oort Cloud. Like the Boojums, they could swim between the stars.” Black Alice likens them to “the pseudoroaches of Venus … with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings.”

   Black Alice likes living in Vinnie, and hopes someday Vinnie will respond in kind. Luckily she is on the outside of the ship on a repair mission when the Mi-Go show up … but you will have to read anything more than this on your own. This is as far as I go.

   I think that Black Alice, who is the primary protagonist in this one, could be played in a TV show based on it by the young lady who stars in Poker Face, which I reviewed on this blog a while back. She’s a most sympathetic figure, in a definitely non-conformist way.

   Other than the action that’s packed into this one, well, I assume you all recognized the Lewis Carroll reference. But what about the Livinia Whately (from The Dunwich Horror) and the Mi-Go (aka the Fungi from Yuggoth)? This gives the tale a whole new dimension, most certainly so.

ERNEST HILL – Pity About Earth. Ace Double H-566; 1st printing, 1968. Published back to back with Space Chantey, by R. A. Lafferty, reviewed here. Cover art by Kelly Freas.

   In a future more than 30,000 years from now, man has lost his place in the universe, to the machines that have taken away even his humanity. The Publisher controls all forms of communication: TV, tapes, and papers that sell only advertising space.

   Archexecutive Shale represents mankind’s loss of feeling and does not know what it means to care. The hybrid half-ape Marylin he befriends is more human than he. The scientific laboratory’s experiments on living humans are something worse than black comedy. Is this any way to run a universe?

   Marylin takes the role of Publisher and initiates the slow process of restoring to man the illusion he controls [his existence]. Not very subtle, but tending to be both fascinating and dull.

Rating: ***½

— May 1968.

   

Bibliographic Update: Ernest Hill was a British SF writer whose other two novels were published only in the UK: The G. C. Radiation (1971) and The Quark Invasion (1978). Of several dozen short stories, most if not all also appear to have been published only in the UK, many for New Worlds SF.

R. A. LAFFERTY РSpace Chantey. Ace Double H-56, paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Published back-to-back with Pity About Earth by Ernest Hill (to be reviewed soon). Cover art by Vaughn Bod̩.

   Captain Roadstrun and his crew decide not to return ti Earth immediately after the war ends. Thus begins a wild, woolly and sometimes wonderful parody of the Odyssey. All the important episodes are evident, though coming out strangely different through Lafferty’s eyes and brain.

   The first and last chapters are the funniest, but the entire book is written to fit my idea of the Theatre of the Absurd. Would the story have been better if Lafferty hadn’t written himself (and the crewman) into situations where no escape was possible, but somehow they did, or is this the stuff of tall tales? Note: the cover painting and the interior illustrations by Bodé are excellent.

Rating: ***½

— May 1968.

GALAXY SF – June 1967. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Gray Morrow. Overall rating: ***

POUL ANDERSON – To Outlive Eternity. Serial; part 1 of 2. See review following the July 1967 issue.       [NOTE: Expanded in 1970 and published as the novel Tau Zero.]

GARY WRIGHT “Mirror of Ice.” More a sports story than SF, but an exciting account of a new form of bobsledding. (4)

R. A. LAFFERTY “Polity and Customs of the Camiroi.” Further investigation of politics, religion, and life on Camiroi. (3)       [NOTE: This follows the story “Primary Education of the Camiroi” in the December 1966 issue.]

ROGER ZELAZNY “The Man Who Loved the Faioli.” The gravekeeper of the universe meets a comforter of those who are about to die. Wish I understood. (3)        [NOTE: This story has been collected and anthologized many times.]

C. C. MACAPP “Spare That Tree.” Novelette. A detective tries to regain a stolen tree by disguising himself as a tree himself. Goes from bad to worse. (1)

JIM HARMON “Howling Day.” The advance publicity releases for an invasion of Earth are mistaken for scripts. (2)

LARRY NIVEN “The Adults.” Novella. An alien in search for a lost colony brings Earth the roots and seeds for the tree-of-life, but the discovery is no longer needed or wanted by mankind. The alien’s culture is brought out piecewise and sympathetically, and its death, while necessary, is also regrettable. However, the story is clumsily written, and even worse, poorly edited. Much too long [at 70 pages]; the ending is best. ***        [NOTE: This story was expanded in 1973 and published as the novel The Protectors.]

CHARLES V. DeVET “Alien’s Bequest.” An alien invader was sent with the best wishes of another intelligent race. (3)

— April-May 1968.

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