DEAN R. KOONTZ – Star Quest. Ace Double H-70; paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Cover art by Gray Morrow. Published back-to-back with Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. Apparently never reprinted.

   The universe has been the scene of a centuries-long war between the Romaghians and the Setessins. On a restricted primitive planet Tohm is forcibly separated from his love Tarnilee by invading Romaghians. His search for her leads him to the slave planet Basa II, where he joins a group of hunted Muties, mutants caused by the effects of nuclear warfare,

   The latter have learned the power of shifting between divided universes, and have successfully rid their universe of warring worlds.

   Shallow on first reading, but Dean says there are allegorical points. The warring enemies are descendants of the radical right and the radical left; the mutants are “soulbrothers” – the victims of the attempted cleansing of guilt – who have succeeded in ending war, But who are the mutants with white eyes, tangible lust creatures, who periodically appear and disappear?

   This will probably not rate well with others, sorry to say. Dean does have a good picturesque style.

Rating: ***

WALTER TEVIS – The Man Who Fell to Earth. Gold Medal k1276, paperback original, February 1963. Cover art by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon. Reprinted several times, including: Avon, paperback, 1976 (slightly updated); Bantam, paperback, 1981. Film: British Lion Film Corporation, UK, 1976; Cinema 5, US, 1976 (starring David Bowie). TV Movie: ABC, 1987. Plus two TV Mini-series.

   An alien, an Anthean, comes to Earth. They’ve run out of resources on Anthea.

   The Antheans had just enough fuel to send one of them to Earth.

   He’s long, tall and gangly, with bird like bones, but with prosthetics looks human enough to pass. He’s learned English from intercepted television broadcasts.

   He has a bagful of diamonds which he pawns til he raises a decent stake.

   He buys a suit of clothes, passage to nyc, rooms at a luxury hotel, and visits the best patent lawyer money can buy. He shows the lawyer formulas for more efficient oil processing, digital photography, digital recording technology, and offers 10% of the profits if the lawyer will take care of the patents and hire the infrastructure to start World Enterprises Corporation. The lawyer salivates.

   Before you know it, the Anthean is a multimillionaire. An Elon Musk-like titan of technology.

   His next project is a huge spacecraft whose secret purpose is to travel to Anthea to bring the rest of his race to Earth. To take over. To rule the earth in a wise dictatorship. To save Earth from the destructiveness of man.

   But the CIA discovers him and his plans. He’s arrested. Officially, the change is being a suspected non-us citizen without proper immigration papers. But he’s forged perfect proof of citizenship and has all the right papers. He’s too famous to kill, and the administration doesn’t dare tell the public he’s an actual alien. It’s an election year, and they’d be laughed out of office. Other big business moguls and the press are hounding the government on this warrantless arrest of a titan of industry. So he’s released.

   But his plans are ruined. There is no way the US government will allow the incomplete spaceship to be finished. And if the Antheans arrived they’d be arrested or killed.

   The Anthean realizes he’ll never see his people again, his wife and family. They’ll be unable to forestall man’s foretold fate of self destruction.

   He discovers the pleasures of gin. He soaks his loneliness. And decides, what the hell is all this for? Who cares? Better to drink my way to oblivion.

   An affecting and strangely believable meditation on loneliness.

JOHN BRUNNER – Into the Slave Nebula. Lancer 73-797, paperback. 1968. Cover art by Kelley Freas. Expanded and/or revamped edition of Slavers of Space (Ace Double D-421. paperback original, 1960).

   An earlier version was Slavers of Space, which I remember reading, not that any of the details came back right away, but the ending was familiar almost from the beginning of this one. It wasn’t difficult. Do you remember those old cowboy movies, where the outlaws have the hero in their power, and instead of shooting him on the spot, someone says, “No. Wait. I have a better idea,” which proves to be the beginning of their downfall?

   Derry Horn of Earth is tracing the path of murdered Lars Talibrand back through space, and the the same time learning the truth about the androids being shipped to Earth, when he is captured by one of ringleaders of the kidnapping gang. For the androids are really humans, dyed blue. Horn is turned blue, too, but allowed to suffer. and so he can reveal the gang’s secret to the first friend he meets. The same is up!

   The picture of Earth (domesticated to the point of perversion) and the stars (still havens for adventurers, rougher and tougher as one progresses from Earth) is quite good. It must have been these details that were added. The story itself seems to have been unchanged.

Rating: ***

KENNETH ROBESON – The Other World. Doc Savage #83. Bantam F3877, paperback, October 1968. Previously published in the January 1940 issue of Doc Savage Magaine.

   The struggle between two fur dealers over strange and beautiful furs leads Doc Savage and his crew to an underground world, the entrance to which is hidden somewhere in the Arctic wilderness. This world still lives in prehistoric times, with the usual assortment of dinosaurs and other menacing creatures.

   The villains are vicious – to stop a letter from getting to Doc Savage, they simply smash the mailbox open with a sledgehammer – and in spite of being short on science, scenes in the other world (especially the one illustrated on the [paperback] cover) are exciting, But the idea is not new, rather third – or fourth-rate by this time

Rating: **

RAY BRADBURY “Gotcha!” First published in Redbook, August 1978. Collected in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Knopf, 1980). Reprinted in The Year’s Finest Fantasy Volume 2, edited by Terry Carr (Berkley, 1979) and A Century of Horror 1970-1979, edited by David Drake & Martin H. Greenberg (MJF Books, 1996). TV Adaptation: Ray Bradbury Theater, February 20, 1988 (Season 2, Number 4). [See comment #15.]

   There are authors whose work you can easily recognize – or even more easily, make a pretty good guess – by reading only the first paragraph or two, even if it’s a game you’re playing and it’s hidden from you. Case in point:

   
   Well, what do you think?

   On the particular night that this story takes place, the lady suggests they play a game. In bed. One called Gotcha, she says. He hesitates but then he agrees, That’s when things get scary. Very very scary.

   It gets scarier. You may want to leave the light on tonight when you go to bed, whether alone or with someone else. The ending is not quite as effective as what has come before, but it’s good enough:

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION. October 1967. Seventeenth anniversary issue. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Gray Morrow. Overall rating: ****

ROGER ZELAZNY “Damnation Alley.” Novelette. Previously reviewed here. (*****)

POUL ANDERSON “Poulfinch’s Mythology.” Non-fact article. A look from the future at twelve gods of contemporary America. This did not interest me enough to make me want to see if I agree with Anderson or not. (1)

H. L. GOLD “The Transmogrification of Wamba’s Revenge.” Novelette. A secret formula of the Pygmies, capable of shrinking all living beings to a tenth of their former size, is used on mankind. This means the end of all warfare under the benevolent rulership of the Pygmies, on whom the formula does not work. Pretty obvious when you think about it. (3)

GEORGE O. SMITH “Understanding.” A fifteen year old boy, Terry Lincoln, without Understanding, is given a secret message to Earth that he cannot understand. To obtain the message from him, the Xanabarians must see to it that he obtains Understanding. Which is impossible to explain to he who has it and unnecessary to mention to he who has it, but it is a sort of refined premonition or intuition, necessary for all interstellar traveling cultures, ready to take on responsibility. So why not a better story to go with it? (3)

ALEXEI PANSHIN – Star Well. Anthony Villiers #1. Ace G-756; paperback original; 1st printing, October 1968. Cover by Kelly Freas. Reprinted by Ace, paperback, August 1978. Cover by Vincent Di Fate.

   An Anthony Villiers adventure, a costume piece of the 15th Century, common reckoning, or the year 3418 AD. Villiers himself remains an unknown quantity, but he has that something about him that causes events and crises.

   In this instance, a smuggling operation working out of Star Well, a planetoid in the Flammarion Rift, is broken up by the coincidental visit of Villiers; an Inspector General; and a group of girls being chaperones to Miss McBurney’s Finishing School.

   Emphasis on customs and costumes; clothes make the man, custom eliminates decision-making. Which will become more and more difficult as pressures of society grow and grow.

   A conversational style of writing is used. Here and there, it reminded me Lafferty , and also of Delany. The story, not told precisely in chronological order, but never mind, is slight, and the effort may not hold up over an entire series.

Rating: ****

         The Anthony Villiers series –

1. Star Well (1968)
2. The Thurb Revolution (1968)
3. Masque World (1969)

   A fourth book in the series. The Universal Panthograph, was announced but never published and perhaps never finished.

JAMES BLISH – Faust Aleph-Null. Serialized in If Science Fiction, August-October 1967. Reprinted as Black Easter or Faust Aleph-Null (Doubleday, hardcover, 1968; Dell, paperback, 1969). Also reprinted as The Devil’s Day, paired with the novel The Day After Judgment (Baen, paperback, 1990).

   Outwardly fantasy, this story is actually a treatise on theology, leading up to the no longer startling conclusion that “God is dead.”

   Some time in the past, God is presumed to have made a compromise with the demons of Evil, in the form of the Covenant, which also allows the practice of Magic. The monastery at Monte Albano, the center of white magic, discovers that the black magician Theron Ware is about to perform a potentially disastrous task for a munitions manufacturer, and so the move to stop it, but without actually interfering.

   The Task? To allow the major demons of Hell freedom on Earth for 24 hours, purely as an experiment. This does not speak wll of munitions manufacturers, of course, but as a class, who else could Blish reasonably pick on? Not acceptable, even given the existence of such demons.

   Naturally the experiment goes out of control, with God’s absence from the scene the factor allowing the demons to stay free, breaking the vows that gave then freedom. End of story.

   More work is needed to make this tale credible as a story; as theology, it may be great stuff.

Rating: ***½

PAT CADIGAN “The Sorceress in Spite of Herself.” First published in Isaac Asimov’s SF, December 1982. Reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s SF-Lite, edited by Gardner Dozois (Ace, 1993). Collected in Dirty Work (Mark Ziesing, 1993).

   Pat Cadigan has had a long career as a SF writer, mostly shorter fiction, starting in the late 70s, but she’s produced a handful of well-regarded novels, plus an even longer list of movie and TV tie-in’s.  (These I knew nothing about until I looked up what I could learn about her online just now.) In spite of her long resume, this is the first of her work that I’ve read.

   So, based on very little, or perhaps even on nothing, I’ve assumed she’s been involved solely with what’s called cyberpunk fiction, or perhaps stories centered on near future concepts such as virtual reality. “The Sorcerer in Spite of Herself” proves how wrong I was about that.

   It involves a young woman, married perhaps for half a year, who’s been plagued her whole life by her habit of losing things. She doesn’t know why or how, and when she finally breaks down and tells her husband, he doesn’t believe her. As she explains at some length, he begins to change his mind, gradually of course, but eventually so much so that he begins to wonder how they might cancel out this curse she’s been under for so long.

   It all works out, in a most logical fashion, in a climax that is as funny, say, as it is chilling. A minor work, but one most nicely done.

IF SCIENCE FICTION. October 1967. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Hector Castellon. Overall rating: **½.

HAL CLEMENT “Ocean on Top.” Serial, part 1 of 3. Review to appear after my reading of the full story.

LARRY EISENBERG “Conqueror.” A short but terribly important story of how sex can humiliate the proudest conqueror. (5)

A. E. van VOGT “Enemy of the Silies.” Novelette. More incomprehensible adventures of the Silkies, attacked this time by the Nijjians. Cemp’s only weapon if his Logic of Levels, whatever that might be. You gotta admire van Vogt, if he understands this stuff. (0)

C. C. MacAPP “Winter of the Llangs.” Novelette. An intelligent cattle-like people trapped by the weather are harassed by creatures which might be wolves. Solid alien characterization. (3)

DONALD J. WALSH “Mu Panther,” First story. A hunting party goes after a mutant panther which has more than size going for it, (2)

JAMES BLISH “Faust Aleph-Null.” Serial, part 3 of 3. To be reviewed separately soon.