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Editor, Julie Davis; Executive Editor, Pat Hornsey
Fiction:
The Highest Dive • short story by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗
Deep Freeze • short fiction by David Grigg ∗∗∗
Second Einstein • short fiction by C. D. Renmore ∗∗+
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Jim Burns
Interior artwork Tony Roberts (x2), Eddie Jones, Jim Burns, Patrick Woodroffe, Tony Masero, Bruce Pennington, Peter Jones, uncredited (x2)
Editorial
Book Reviews • by Malcolm Edwards (x4), John Brosnan, Peter Weston, Peter Linnett
A Look at Space 1999 • essay by John Brosnan
News • by Julie Davis
SF in the Cinema: The Ultimate Warrior • film review by John Brosnan
Paperbacks on Trial • book review matrix by Maxim Jakubowski
On the Way to the Stars: Part Three: Into the Abyss • essay by Peter Weston
Letters
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
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The Highest Dive by Jack Williamson2 is an old-school SF story that opens with a young man called Max caught in a violent storm on Atlas, a massive alien planet with very low gravity and high winds. As Max struggles to avoid being blown away he lapses into unconsciousness, and the story flashbacks to his time on Earth, his decision to go to the planet, and his familiarisation on arrival. This latter includes a trip to a pool:
He saw no water anywhere. The ridge was nearly flat on top, flaked and cracked with time. Ropes stretched along its rim. The reddish desert lay far, far below. Feeling bewildered, he looked back at Komatsu.
‘There’s our pool.’ Komatsu leaned out to point straight down. ‘The only open water we’ve found on Atlas.’
He gripped the rope and looked. The time-worn wall of something like black rock dropped straight down so far it made him giddy. At last he found the pool—a small round mirror of bright blue water tucked under the very foot of that frightening cliff.
‘It’s deep enough.’ Queerly casual, Komatsu pointed at another hand-rope, stretching from their feet to a rock down in the pool. ‘We climb that to get back.’ He grinned at Max. ‘Want me to go first?’
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Max stared at his dark, gaunt face. ‘We’re too . . . too high!’
‘Just a thousand feet.’ Komatsu’s grin grew wider. ‘About the same as ten at home. You fall slow here, kid. With air resistance, your terminal velocity is about fifteen feet a second. From any height, you never fall faster. Watch me.’
He peeled off his yellow suit, moved to the rim in a lazy, one legged dance, floated over it. Max leaned out to watch him drifting slowly down, arms spread like wings to guide him. He was a long time in the air, and his body had dwindled to a far dark speck before he broke the blue mirror of the pool. p. 3
When Max recovers consciousness he finds himself miles up in the air. As the near-permanent clouds temporarily clear, he sees (spoiler) a huge alien city. Max contacts his team, and they gain an insight into what the planet really is . . . . After this conversation, Max’s only chance of survival is to try control his descent to dive into a body of water beside the camp.
This has a slightly dated feel, and there is no explanation as to why the alien city wasn’t revealed earlier by ground radar, but the story isn’t bad, and the final scene gives a mini-sense of wonder buzz.
Deep Freeze by David Grigg starts with the protagonist waking up in an underground deep-sleep/suspended animation facility. When he explores the upper levels and the surface he discovers there has been a nuclear war, and two hundred years have passed—not the thirty he expected.
He wanders about on the surface for a while and then returns to the facility, where he wakes a young woman for company. She is devastated to find out her cancer won’t be cured (all the frozen, bar the corrupt protagonist, were put into deep sleep to await a cure for their conditions).
The man then goes out again, this time to look for food, and surprises a primitive tribe which flees. He takes their abandoned possessions and food back to the girl but, after they eat, she asks him to put her back to sleep. He does this, and then goes to find the tribe.
All of this back and forth is a setup for the final section where, after he has made contact with the tribe (spoiler), he goes hunting with them. The shock ending has him discover that they are eating the occupants of the cryogenic facility!
I remember liking this the first time around, and, apart from a dull section after he wakes, its grisly inevitability is still quite entertaining.
The last story Second Einstein, is by C. D. Renmore, and appears to be the writer’s debut.3 It starts with a failed PhD student called Lionel White in an observatory, where recalls his failed thesis defence at the hands of a professor called Haynes:
For the hundredth time, he re-lived the interview; every detail was still there even after five long years. He had started, at Haynes’ request, by outlining the main thesis, which he called his Creative Correlation Hypothesis.
In its simplest and most compact form, this hypothesis said that, in scientific research, if a discovery isn’t made by person A, then it will be made by person B, eventually.
[. . .]
But then White had gone further and, perhaps too enthusiastically, given his conclusion: that once the correlation of scientific effort exceeds a certain threshold, the tide of knowledge will advance at an average rate that is almost independent of individual brilliance. In particular, individual geniuses no longer set the pace of scientific progress. The massed attack on the frontier of science will progress, said White, at an average rate that even a Newton or an Einstein could not match.
Haynes seemed about to explode, but subsided sufficiently to be merely condescending in his reply. ‘Look here, young man, you had better get one or two things straight. Firstly, you can’t measure an Einstein or a Newton in multiples of lesser men. That would be as ridiculous as to suggest that two men each with an IQ of 100 are as good as one man with an IQ of 200. Secondly, you’re being too superficial in judging the equivalence of two peoples’ work. You said that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics were essentially equivalent to Schrodinger’s wave equation. Would you care to justify that in any detail? Any detail?’
White stared at the floor, as if seeking inspiration there. Even if he could answer Haynes’ question in detail—which he could not—it was the wrong question! Utterly beside the point.
[. . .]
‘I take your point, of course, sir. But look at it in this way: will you grant that over ninety per cent of the scientists who ever lived are still alive today, in 1976?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And that the combined resources of all the laboratories on Earth are sufficient to conduct literally thousands of related experiments on virtually any aspect of modern physics?’
‘With some reservations, yes; but what are you getting at?’
‘Simply this, sir: the probability of a major breakthrough depends on the number of scientists and the number of experiments; plus of course a correlation factor which will in general be complex. Although their experiments will not all be inspired ones, eventually someone, somewhere, will do just the experiment that an Einstein or a Newton would have suggested.
And, of course, they will make the same discovery. There are many millions of scientists now, and highly correlated efforts can produce results that no one person can achieve.’
[. . .]
Haynes now resumed the attack with something approaching personal animosity.
‘There are flaws in that. Just because someone does the right experiment it does not follow that they appreciate its significance. In fact, if they did the experiment more or less at random we have an independent probability to consider altogether: whether the significance of the result will be appreciated by a non-Einstein or a non-Newton at all. The combined probability that the same person will both do the right experiment and appreciate its significance is just about zero, I should think. Are you seriously suggesting that if Einstein or Newton had never lived, we might still have advanced to the state of our present know ledge in physics?’
White took a deep breath. ‘I am suggesting that as a distinct possibility; and further, I think that we might possibly be even more advanced than we are today.’ p. 26
After this intriguing (albeit talking heads) beginning, the story becomes something else entirely as the alien Fornax land near the observatory. The Fornax monitor numerous civilisations throughout the Galaxy and, as humanity has recently tripped the atomic-use alarm, they have come to make changes that will prevent humanity developing an interstellar drive.
Their solution (spoiler) involves sending White back in time to kill Newton and Einstein. This provides an ironic ending to the story, where White’s theories prove to be correct, and humanity has developed more quickly than they had in the world where the two scientists did not die. In this changed timestream, White is an acclaimed scientist, and humanity has conquered the aliens.
This is a relatively complex story, and one that has a lot of moving parts (the highbrow theory, the aliens, time travel, etc.). It probably has too much going on and, more importantly, it doesn’t quite convince, e.g., why are the original aliens still with White after the changes are made? That said, it’s an entertaining piece and an promising debut. It is a pity we didn’t see more work from this writer.
The Cover by Jim Burns is the one he produced for Kurt Vonnegut’s book The Sirens of Titan. The Interior artwork features two good paintings by Bruce Pennington (above) and Peter Jones (below), and there is also colour work from Tony Roberts (I also liked his piece for Beyond Apollo), Eddie Jones, and Patrick Woodroffe (I’m not sure why there are curved exhaust trails coming from the spaceship in the latter painting). One of the B&W story illustrations is by Tony Masero, the other two are uncredited.
The short Editorial contains the usual blather about the stories and articles, but there is an intriguing paragraph at the end:
We intend to publish special issues devoted to robots and UFOs; interviews with D G Compton and Harlan Ellison; a special French issue with stories and illustrations from France (in translation, of course); a science fact article on gravity which is more than apples dropping on your head; a history of sf film taking over from where John Baxter’s book Science Fiction in the Cinema left off; a retrospective look at Jefferson Airplane/Starship (the most sf orientated group around—as some will have it); an illustrated series about future transport, and lots more American sf artist interviews. How lucky can you get? p. 1
There were only three more issues after this one, and they didn’t include the Harlan Ellison interview (presumably this surfaced elsewhere), or the intriguing sounding French issue which I would like to have seen (I suspect Maxim Jakubowski was involved with this project4).
Two of the Book Reviews aren’t actually on p. 17 but appear alongside the Editorial on the first page: these include John Bronsan’s piece on A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films by Jeff Rovin, and Malcolm Edwards’ on Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael G. Coney. Bronsan starts off with this:
It is just that; a pictorial history of science fiction films and little else. It’s silly to be disappointed by a book that lives up to its title but I can’t help feeling that author Jeff Rovin would have produced a much more valuable book if he’d put more work into the text accompanying the photographs. As it stands, the book is just a catalogue of sf films with, in most cases, one paragraph devoted to each film. The main exception is an extended piece on Things to Come but this, so Rovin tells us, was written by Alan Asherman, the same person who supplied all the stills for the book. I can’t understand why Asherman didn’t write the whole book himself as his piece stands head and shoulders above the rest of the written material. p. 1
That, essentially, is the review: the other 90% is nit-picking about film minutiae, or the merits of various other films. As in the Space: 1999 piece below, Bronsan does tend to maunder—it’s a pity the editors didn’t get a grip.
Malcolm Edwards has this on Michael G. Coney (whose novel Hello Summer, Goodbye he liked):
[He] has not been writing novels for long, but he is proving a remarkably consistent and amazingly prolific performer with a real talent for constructing tightly-knit plots; and he seems to have established a name, a style and a string of credits in the batting of an eyelid. When I try to think of precedents, I can only come up with John Brunner at the outset of his career . . . but I would rate Coney higher than Brunner (as he was then). I do wish that he would stop setting his novels in dressed-up versions of English fishing villages, but I’m sure he will, in time. p. 1
It is impressive that Edwards manages to describe the novel, and also contextualize Coney, within both the writer’s own career and the field, in such a short space (although I see the review is actually four hundred words long, approximately a paperback page). Edwards also contributes three more reviews (The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson, and The Wizard of Anharitte by Colin Kapp). He manages to put his finger on one of the reasons I like Dick’s Castle but am lukewarm about the likes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:
Science fiction is full of ‘classics’ which make a great initial impression but don’t stand up to rereading. The Man in the High Castle is one of those rare books which actually improves on second reading. Dick writes with more care, albeit less exuberance, than in most of his novels, and the result is a finely-wrought novel that is one of the best in all science fiction. p. 17
Peter Weston reviews the plotless Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and, when he compares it with Rama and The Sands of Mars (1951), opines that the latter is the best of the three.
Peter Linnett reviews the Robert Sheckley Omnibus by Robert Sheckley, a volume I bought and loved, and still own.
A Look at Space 1999 by John Brosnan is an article about the execrable TV series from the mid-70s, and it starts with this:
Space 1999 swings right out of any conventional sci-fi dimension/ raves the ATV press release, ‘at the same time taking advantage of all the scientific facts that are known, such as the existence of a phenomenon known as a “black sun”, a mass of gaseous substance developing into an impenetrable ball from a burned-out asteroid, with such tremendous gravitation that it pulls everything into it, even light. Anything near it simply disappears. It upsets all theories of existence, even time. This provides the background to one episode. Time ceases to have any meaning. The players find themselves in eternity, with the sudden conviction that the whole Universe is a living thought.’ p. 4
It gets worse, when Brosnan describes the medical condition of one of the characters:
As for Professor Bergman, well he’s pretty straightforward compared with the others. ‘He is to some degree the father-figure of the key personnel on Moon Base Alpha. To some extent, he is very much the proverbial professor. He has a brilliant mind which has been responsible for a number of developments in space science, but he is unworldly in many practical matters.’ Apart from that his main problem is that he has a mechanical heart which . . . ‘because it responds more slowly to nervous stimuli than does a normal human heart, reduces his reactions to most emotional stresses. Whatever the situation, he is almost entirely physically immune from panic’. Just as the script writers are almost entirely immune from logic. If anyone can explain to me how a sluggish heart is going to prevent its owner from experiencing panic I would like to hear from them. The adrenalin might not be pumped through the system so quickly but I would imagine that the only way you could prevent the brain from experiencing fear or panic would be to shut off the blood supply completely—which wouldn’t make for a very lively character. p. 4
Bronsan’s commentary continues in a similarly amusing vein but, unfortunately, the last quarter of the review is a superfluous examination of the wonderful special effects—as if anyone cares by this point.
News by Julie Davis is fairly thin on the ground this issue (half the space is taken up by John Bronsan’s SF in the Cinema: The Ultimate Warrior, which sounds like unpretentious fun). There is information about a revived BSFA, and what seems to be a verbatim press release from the L5 society:
The space colonies would have a virtually unlimited clean source of energy, an abundance and variety of food and material goods, freedom to travel and independence from large-scale government. The initial colonies would provide living accommodation (of a luxury standard) for up to 10,000 people and would provide plenty of jobs, shops, schools, libraries and other buildings. The colonies would also have their own rivers and lakes, stocked with fish, parklands (with birds, animals, trees) and there could even be hills and possibly mountains. Is this just a fanciful dream? No! The space engineering ability exists today and many detailed technical reports are now flowing out of universities and organisations in the USA, where the concept was born. There are participants in these studies from such institutions as [MIT], [Caltech], Princeton University, New York Polytechnic, and even the space agency NASA.
The first stage of the space colony, called Model 1 or ‘Sunflower’, could be built before the end of the 1980s. p. 10
Good luck with that.
Paperbacks on Trial is the book review matrix complied by Maxim Jakubowski. I’ve mentioned my fascination with these before, and could happily do so again at length: I’ll limit myself to observing that Harrison and Jakubowski both thought Le Guin’s The Dispossessed mediocre. The next time you hate a book everyone else loves, remember that you aren’t the only one who feels that way.
On the Way to the Stars: Part Three: Into the Abyss by Peter Weston discusses the various types of space drives and their pros and cons with reference to various genre works, e.g., “A similar combination of cold-sleep and solar sails appears in Niven and Pournelle’s recent Mote in God’s Eye, while a first-class treatment is given by Poul Anderson in Orbit Unlimited.” It reminded me I still have several of these books to read (Anderson’s Tau Zero is probably the most egregious omission). I don’t know why the covers illustrating the piece are so badly cropped.
The Letters are mostly responses to Ian Covell’s letter in a previous issue attacking Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Anne Looker, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, replies:
Your prolific correspondent. Mr Covell (SFM Vol 2 No 10) seems to be in danger of choking on his own spleen. So The Female Man makes him angry, angry enough to forbid discussion of a book and then go on to hurl abuse at it and the author—an example of masculine illogic perhaps? The Female Man made me angry as well, though. I’m sure, for very different reasons. I am not a ‘feminist’ in the accepted sense of the word nor do I wish to chase the subject of women’s lib into your columns, but I feel that it is up to someone, preferably a woman, to take up cudgels on behalf of Ms Russ and her book. Mr Covell states that the author is an ‘idiot’. That is his own private view. I am not acquainted with the lady and would therefore hesitate to form so harsh a judgement. However. I fail to see anything idiotic in the views she expresses in The Female Man. Admittedly, she exaggerates, but hyperbole has always been the legitimate tool of any writer or speaker who is trying to make a point: and Ms Russ has at least for me succeeded in making her point.
The Female Man has some of the qualities of a fable but there is an element of truth in it which brings the reader up short. I realise that the men in the novel are grotesque parodies of the men most women know (and love?) but, nevertheless, we women recognise them only too well. Man at his ghastly worst—being patronising when he means to be nice, man incapable of thinking further than his balls whenever he’s in the company of a woman. There are many men, I know, who are not like this but, unfortunately, Ms Russ’ prototypes still live and breathe and inflict themselves upon us.
Of course The Female Man is sexist. That is the whole point of the book. Try altering all the females to males as your correspondent suggests. You will end up not with a work expressing the male chauvinist point of view but with a work expressing nothing at all—incomprehensible claptrap. You could possibly rewrite Asimov, and many others, reversing the sexes . . . but Russ? It’s unthinkable. What she says about the sexes is valid only one way; and it is valid. Perhaps you have to be a woman to realise it. Maybe she goes too far but she does succeed in Shocking readers, both male and female, into an open awareness of what they already secretly know to be true: namely, the injustices and indignities the sexes inflict on each other. In our society the main victims are women, but it can work both ways. Ms Russ’ ‘heroines’ are generally as unpleasant as her ‘heroes’, the women’s excuse is that they are more sinned against than sinning.
Meanwhile, it would help if people refrained from childish abuse. It may be comforting to affix names like ‘male chauvinist pig’ and ‘female chauvinist sow’ to those whose views we do not share: such a method of classifying individuals means that once we’ve put an individual in a convenient category we can stop considering and evaluating what they have to say. A lazy man’s (or woman’s) way out! p. 28
The more things change, the more they stay the same . . . .
Malcolm Edwards from Harrow, Middlesex, adds:
Your correspondent Ian Covell seems such a pleasant chap that I would hate to be forced into arguing with him. I would love to be convinced by the clever sophistry of his argument that Edmund Cooper’s clearly self-contradictory remarks were really perfectly consistent all the time, but I’m afraid my mind refuses to bend quite far enough.
I suppose I should apologise for having enjoyed A Far Sunset eight years ago. I didn’t actually say that I thought it represented the direction in which sf ought to go. I happen to enjoy, for example, the stories of Leigh Brackett, but I would hate Philip K Dick or J G Ballard to start copying her. In fact, oddly enough. I don’t happen to look upon sf as a single object to be steered in a particular direction, as though it were a car.
It’s strange that Mr Covell should demonstrate such hatred for Joanna Russ’ views, as expressed in The Female Man, and yet should apparently wish to defend Edmund Cooper’s views, which he admits are ‘reverse-identical’ to Ms Russ’. I am equally out of sympathy with both of them, though I can see, sadly, that it is the attitudes of people like Mr Cooper which produce overreactions like Joanna Russ’. What it is that produces Ian Covell’s over-reactions is another matter—but that’s his problem. p. 28
The final letter is about UFOs, and news of a special UFO issue—which thankfully did not appear.
The Query Box by Walter Gillings is the regular pre-internet Q&A column (you don’t know how lucky you are these days). I learned this about Thea von Harbou, the impressive actress from Metropolis (which I just watched for the first time recently and thought marvellous):
[Fritz Lang] wrote the screenplays of some of his early movies, such as Destiny (1921), before collaborating with Thea von Harbou, who later became his wife. She was the author of the novel on which the film Metropolis (1926) was based, and which was published here in 1927 by the Readers Library. p. 28
This is quite a good issue, with better than normal artwork and stories. ●
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1. ISFDB lists this as “January” because, when there is no date on a magazine, ISFDB uses the actual month of publication for the issue date. However, Mike Ashley states in Gateways to Forever, p. 128: “The first issue of Science Fiction Monthly appeared on the last Wednesday of January 1974.” He adds in footnote #147: “All issues were undated, carrying only an issue and volume number, but technically the first issue was for February 1974 and it continued on a monthly schedule.”
So—all the ISFDB dates are out by one month, and this can be seen most clearly by looking at v01n11 and v02n11, the two Christmas/December issues, which are listed as November ones.
2. The Williamson story is one of the few stories from this British magazine to be selected for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology. It appeared in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 edited by Terry Carr (Dell Rey/Ballantine, 1977). (Bob Shaw’s Dark Icarus was also in a ‘Best’, but it appeared in Worlds of If a couple of months after it was published in Science Fiction Monthly).
3. Renmore’s ISFDB page shows only this story and a couple of fact articles, all from the mid-70s.
4. Maxim Jakubowski was a regular contributor to both Science Fiction Monthly and SF Digest (the single issue successor to SFM ), and he later edited/translated the anthology Travelling Towards Epsilon, a collection of French SF. Its ISFDB page is here. ●
