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TITLE PAGE ...................................................... Page 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................... Page 3
COLOPHON ........................................................ Page 5
STAFFING ........................................................ Page 5
'73 WRAPUP: The Year In Review--
THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 by Richard Delap ............... Page 9
THE "ORIGINAL" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 by Richard Delap ........... Page 17
1973 SF/FANTASY MAGAZINE WRAP-UP by Richard Delap ........... Page 26
DEVILS, DEMONS, AND ASSORTED DAMNATIONS: A
Review of 1973's Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
Films by Richard Delap .................................... Page 28
SCIENCE FICTION IN GERMANY by Frank Flugge .................. Page 34
SCIENCE FICTION IN JAPAN IN 1973 by Takumi Shibano .......... Page 36
1973 COMICS-THE YEAR IN REVIEW by Kim Weston ................ Page 39
TV IN 1973 by Beth Slick .................................... Page 44
BONNIE'S BEASTIES-- Art Folio by Bonnie Dalzell ................. Page 47
FAN FICTION--
YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU'VE BEEN UNTIL YOU'VE
COME BACK HOME AGAIN by Joseph T. Mayhew .................. Page 57
THE MASTER OF HIS FATES by Alexis A. Gilliland .............. Page 62
BOOKWORLD--
Editor's Column by David Weems .............................. Page 64
Reviews--
AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS by Richard Delap ................... Page 67
BITS AND PIECES: SCIENCE FICTION IS EVERYWHERE
by Richard Delap .......................................... Page 82
WILLIAMSON AND THE ACADEMIC REVIEWER
by Sam Moskowitz .......................................... Page 87
Review of Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Science
Fiction and Fantasy by Jim Goldfrank ...................... Page 89
Three reviews by Michael Walsh:
Wandor's Ride ........................................... Page 91
Worms of the Earth ...................................... Page 91
The Book of Weird ....................................... Page 91
Four reviews by David Weems:
The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A ........... Page 92
The Nothing Book: Wanna Make Something of It? ........... Page 93
The Fall of Colossus .................................... Page 93
Star Trek Log One ....................................... Page 94
TWJ-84/4
BOOK WORLD (continued)
Two reviews by Barry Gillam ................................. Page 95
The Glory Game .......................................... Page 95
Herovit's World ......................................... Page 98
Review of The Crystal Man by Michael Walsh .................. Page 100
Review of The Crystal Skull by Trina King ................... Page 101
Review of The Coming Dark Age by Michael T. Shoemaker ....... Page 102
FANZINES AND FANAC--
FANZINE FRICASSEE: FANZINE REVIEWS
by Michael T. Shoemaker ................................... Page 105
('Zines reviewed: Maybe: Worlds of Fandom; Notes from
the Chemistry Department; Dynatron; Godless; Cypher)
FANSTATIC AND FEEDBACK: Lettercolumn--
LoC's from:
Mike Glicksohn .......................................... Page 111
Martin Williams ......................................... Page 111
Robert Smoot ............................................ Page 111
Avedon Carol ............................................ Page 112
Harlan Ellison .......................................... Page 113
Darrell Schweitzer ...................................... Page 114
Stephen Gregg ........................................... Page 116
Richard Delap ........................................... Page 117
Don D'Ammassa ........................................... Page 117
ETCETERA: And All That Fits....
Letter and Recipe by Jim Goldfrank ...................... Page 118
A SPECIAL THANKS FROM THE DISCON II COMMITTEE ................... Page 120
FLUX DE MOTS: Editor's Pages (Don Miller) ....................... Page 121
INDICIA:
INDEX TO VOLUME 12 OF THE WSFA JOURNAL (#'s 67-72) .......... Page W11
With Supplemental Issues
CREDITS:
Front Cover by Chris Bassford; Back Cover by Walt Simonson; Inside Covers by Michael Weems. Interior illos: for the Fiction Section--the Mayhew story Illustrated by Ray Ridenour, diagram inked by David Weems--the illo at the end of Alexis Gilliland's story by unknown artist 'DVJ'; other illos-- Alexis Gilliland (43, 46, 66, 86, 103, 109, and LoC column's logo); Bergeron (6); David Weems (16); and Walt Simonson (81).
Offset Pages done by David Weems, Wayne Piatt, and Bill Hixon. Most lettering and logos done by David Weems. Offset publishing by the WSFA Press with the kind assistance of Chick Derry. Mimeographed sections typed and published by Don Miller. Thanks also to anyone we have inadvertently forgotten, if any.
TWJ is published irregularly (for now at least). This issue is priced on the following basis: For continental subscribers--2¢ per printed page rounded upward to the nearest 25¢ (see the editors' page for the exact price and explanations); for foreign subscribers getting TWJ only, the price is 4 issues for $6. TWJ is still normally available as part of the SOTWJ sub, prorated against the subscription of the Son in 25¢ increments. The SOTWJ rate is 8 issues for $2 (Don will have an editors comment in the Son about the rates). Ads accepted for SOTWJ, but not for TWJ. Both 'zines are free for published contributions; trades by arrangement only or by Trade/Sub. Editorial address is that of Don Miller (see staffing below). Deadline for material for #85 is 1 February 1974.
STAFFING: The WSFA Press consists of the following personnel--
Editor-in-chief and Publisher:
Donald L. Miller
12315 Judson Road
Wheaton, MD, USA, 20906
Associate Editor and Publications Manager:
Bill Hixon
870 Quince Orchard Blvd. #T2
Gaithersburg, MD, USA 20760
Associate Editors, Section Editors, and Publishers:
David W. Weems
P.O. Box 309
Oakton, VA, USA 22124Wayne V. Piatt
P.O. Box 309
Oakton, VA, USA, 22124
Art Editor:
Alexis Gilliland
[redacted from online edition]
Arlington, VA, USA 22204
SECTION EDITORS:
David W. Weems -- Bookworld
Wayne V. Piatt -- Articles and Prozines
Bill Hixon -- Fiction and Lettercolumn
Kim Weston -- Comics and Films
Don Miller -- Features, News, Bibliographies, Indexes, Fanac and Fanzines, and TV and Radio
Staff Reviewers: David Weems, Don D'Ammassa, Jim Goldfrank, Michael Walsh, Michael T. Shoemaker, Richard Delap, Les Mayer, Bill Hixon, Wayne V. Piatt, Kim Weston, and Jim Lawson.
Staff Artists: Alexis Gilliland and Ray Ridenour.
Overseas Agents: AUSTRALIA--Robin Johnson, GPO Box 4039, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia; GERMANY--Frank Flugge, 5868 Letmathe, Eichendorffweg 16, West Germany; JAPAN-Takumi Shibano, 1-14-11. O-kayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan; S. AFRICA--A. B. Ackerman, Cheshire Home, 890 Main Rd., Moseley, 4001 S. Africa; U .K .--Eric Bentcliffe, 17 Riverside Cresc., Holmes Chapel, Cheshire GW4 7NR England.
The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2, edited by Terry Carr (Ballantine 03312; $1.25; 370pp.; 1973)
The 1973 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim; with Arthur W. Saha (DAW UQ1053; 95¢; 253 pp.; 1973) hardcover: SF Book Club; $1.98
Best SF: 1972, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss (Putnam; $5.95; 254pp.; 1973) paper: Berkley 02381; 95¢
Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, 2nd Annual Collection, edited by Lester del Rey (E. P. Dutton & Co.; $6.95; 251 pp.; 1973)
Best Science Fiction for 1973, edited by Forrest J. Ackerman (Ace 91360; $1.25; 268 pp.; 1973)
We're down one volume from last year's six, as DAW Books has apparently dropped the Richard Davis horror anthology. So here are five new books to help us gain an overview of last year's SF output, and, as expected, quite a selection of works have been culled from the original anthologies in addition to the magazines. And if readers were depressed by the astoundingly low quality of last year's stories, they won't be much encouraged by the majority of this year's efforts. While each volume has a share of good stories, only one can claim that its contents adequately represent the variety and high points of excellence in a year of heavy publication. The rest range from passably good work to incredible ineptitude both in selection and presentation of stories. Eight stories are printed twice in this year's books, two of which even seem to deserve the distinction and have in addition collected Hugo awards.
In this year's race to present us with the best, Terry Carr has left all competition far behind with his selection of sixteen stories that Ballantine has presented in 370 meaty pages for the delightfully reasonable price of $1.25. (In space alone, not to mention content, this is such a real bargain that I fully expect Carr to run away with the lead position in the fan polls for best anthology, and Ballantine is to be thanked for giving the public SF quality without making them pay through the nose for it.)
Carr is also to be appreciated as the only editor willing to give lengthy space to what is surely one of the best science fiction stories in many, many years, Gene Wolfe's phenomenal novella, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus". There is no excuse for the other editors, Harrison/Aldiss especially, to have ignored a work which so perfectly represents complex cultural and character interaction, which is possible only in an SF milieu, by introducing a reasoned cross between the objective and the subjective. I have discussed this work at length elsewhere, and I will only tell you here that you should read this story, which is so unique, so special, that it truly lives up to that overused term
TWJ-84/10
THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
"instant classic". Your standing as a dedicated SF fan is indubitably threatened if you have failed to read it. (And when you've finished, run to the bookstore to get the Scribner hardcover edition, which contains two additional novellas which together with the title story form one of the most outstanding SF novels of the decade.)
Tie-winners of this year's Hugo, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's "The Meeting" and R.A. Lafferty's "Eurema's Dam", are two fine and quite different examples of popular current SF. The Pohl/Kornbluth story deals with the parents of "handicapped" children and speculates on the moral choices forced on them by the progress of science, a difficult theme handled with compassion and restraint. Lafferty's tale, on the other hand, is an hilarious and abrasive story of "the last dumb kid ever born", whose awkwardness forces him to devise a means to muddle through this uncaring world. His development of intelligent machines that eventually run the world makes him even more an outcast in his society, at last moving him to discover the ultimate light of his true talent. Mildly moralizing but without preachments, this is Lafferty at his near-best, dancing over SF cliches with Fred Astaire precision and having a hell of a good time.
Poul Anderson's impressive "Fortune Hunter" tells of a desperate and pitiable man, his actions selfish and well-planned, whose mind is as polluted as the urban environmental future in which Anderson places him. The man is morally corrupt but he is not totally insensitized by his corruption, and it is this quality which gives the reader a strong emotional identification and makes his story a truly sad and moving one. Edward Bryant's "Their Thousandth Season", a prize-winning Clarion story, is one of the better Cinnebar stories, powerful yet delicate assemblage of memory vignettes among bored and unhappy immortals at an elite party gathering. Dante's fundamental truth--"There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in misery, the time when we were happy."--is dramatised with staggering impact for we who do see its diminished reflection in a normal lifespan.
A single "family" unit of the future--"eighteen adults (two triplet marriages, a quad, and a group of eight)"--in a home in the Himalayas is examined by Joanna Russ with brevity but startling depth in "Nobody's Home". But Russ is not looking at (or for Utopia. She finds the human problems basic--society's problems as a whole are built from individual relationships-and these personal stories tell us more about society than society itself ever can. Our strength, philosophically, is in human terms only, as is our need, but is this ever going to be enough to cover the imperfections in the human race? If this story doesn't make you stop and think, I would suppose that Russ is seeing much too clearly for you. Clear away the bric-a-brac, the debris of your time in space. Read it again. And again. Continue to do so until you see something, anything, new. Then you'll find that newness is very old indeed, and that Russ's insight is remarkably keen.
Grahame Leman's "Controversial Mode" (included in Pohl's best anthology of last year, where it made its first U.S. appearance) is a funny yet pessimistic view of the future relationship between man and machine. Robert Silverberg's "Caliban" transports a man with a hairy, imperfect body to the future where people have remolded themselves to the "standard model"--blond, blue-eyed, slender and sleek--examining the underlying theme of conformity vs. individualism on a simple but entertaining level. Alexei
THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
and Cory Panshin's "Sky Blue" is a moral fable on ecology that proposes we're gonna need some help to get out of the mess we've created. Naomi Mitchison's "Miss Omega Raven" is a carefully complex narration by an intelligent bird, who tells of her rise to power and glory under the guidance of her respected creator, a God-man. The clipped sentences and direct lines of thought make an interesting counterpoint to the hazy, slightly sinister undertones.
In "Hero", Joe W. Haldeman writes the typical ANALOG story of military tactics with an untypical touch of rough language and blunt sex, dealing with the training given to a conscripted army sent to battle aliens. It's a harsh and brutal story, but one that is true to its purpose. Gordon Eklund's "Grasshopper Time" is an occasionally powerful but vaguely detailed account of two youngsters cared for by a recluse who is the offspring of an unexplained human-alien mating; and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Painwise" is an uneven but slickly written story of a man who has been "rewired" to feel no bodily pain, an isolation which leads to a far more troublesome psychological pain.
The final three stories have all proved popular ones, but I find them the least valuable of the book. Ben Bova's "Zero Gee" is a silly and psychologically contrived story of an astronaut who wants to try sex in free-fall. Robert Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World" deals with people discussing the end of the world in banal party chatter as the world around them disintegrates, but the story is totally trapped in its irony and crushed by heavy-handedness. And William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" presents a new electronic art-medium (a "sensatron") and a love triangle, yet Rotsler is so busy plucking a sentimental tune that he fails to notice his characters are depthless, his electronic device a bittersweet contrivance, and his plot a generally aimless chase after traditional romanticism. (Rotsler's story is published here in a revised version that lengthens but doesn't really improve the original story which appeared in an earlier Carr anthology.) The popularity of the foregoing three stories, despite my dislike of them, gained enough attention to make me shoulder aside my objections, however, and not chastise their inclusion here.
As a unit, Carr's selections are more than just entertainment. They represent thoughtful editorial choice that truly and honestly condenses the year's voluminous output to a worthy presentation. If you're going to buy only one "best" volume, Carr's book is the one to buy.
Wollheim gets his volume off to a bad start with a slightly hysterical introduction in which he states: "Lately there has been a rising tide of what we are coming to think of as Science Fiction by People Who Hate Science Fiction." He denounces the deluge of original anthologies (from which he has selected only two stories, neither of them very good), calling Again, Dangerous Visions a "remarkable book", yet including no stories from it because he feels the book should be judged ''as a whole"-perhaps the most nonsensical reason ever offered for rejecting a source of quality material.
A notable story here is W. Macfarlane's "Changing Woman", in which the modern world complements the magical work of a legendary Indian woman in a very amusing
TWJ-84/12
THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
mixture that includes one of the funniest love scenes you'll ever read. Almost as good is Frederik Pohl's much-discussed "The Gold at the Starbow's End", a subtle and sometimes very nasty satire which contrasts the progress of a starship crew with the regress of the earth they've left behind and throws in some tricky moral somersaults along the way.
"The Man Who Walked Home" by James Tiptree, Jr. is an interesting bit about world's first time traveler, but lacks emotional depth and becomes a good story rather than a great one. T.J. Bass's "Rorqual Maru" is one of the stories in his Nebish Hive World series, a mildly entertaining episode in which the future's mutated humans struggle to gain an adequate food supply in a world just beginning to recover from man's widespread destruction. Robert J. Tilley's 'Willie's Blues" is another time-traveler yarn (this one with the traveler worried about the influence his visit will have) that manages to soften its stereotypes with a smooth writing style. The plot of Vernor Vinge's "Long Shot" is quite predictable, yet his focus of character interest, a cyborg ship sent from a dying Earth to Alpha Centauri, is quite engaging and makes for a moderately entertaining tale.
The remaining four stories have less to recommend them.
Of initial interest perhaps is Michael G. Coney's "Oh, Valinda!", since its appearance here marks its first U.S. publication. Coney here sees the future of man reaching out for new worlds to exploit, as a continuing adventure, but like most of the early pulp adventures the situation as all and the characters are automatically molded to fit. He takes a lot for granted in assuming the reader will be convinced by interworld relations that, for all the mystery of giant leviathans and otherworld social customs, is a dry and mostly boring rehash of pedestrian Earthlike politics, policies, and stubbornness. He uses a love affair (which has occurred before the story's opening) to motivate the explosive conclusion without ever once delving into the character of the lovers, forcing the reader to interpret the actions with uncertain referents. The story is so plodding, however, that I doubt many will find such an interpretation worth the bother.
Like his previous "The Queen of Air and Darkness", Poul Anderson's "Goat Song" is an award-winning story (both the Nebula and the Hugo) that seems to bowl over readers with fast-moving melodrama and brilliant color, so much so, in fact, that they apparently confuse the simplistic philosophising for probing insight and fail to see the story for the inelegant and ill-thought jumble it really is. Clifford D. Simak's "To Walk a City's Street" makes a similar mistake and covers a lot of hokey plotting with curt, realistic dialogue that sounds good but is equally unreasonable and misleading. And finally, Phyllis MacLennan's "Thus Love Betrays Us" tells once more of man and alien but misses capturing the desperation and irony of the title by using a flat and toneless style.
Wollheim's collection offers some fairly good reading, but as a whole is a weak cross-section that lacks the quality to represent the year's best.
In the introduction to the Harrison/Aldiss volume, Harry Harrison gets bitchy and proclaims "very much of what is now published with the SF label is not science fiction
THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
at all". He goes on to say-"what I am against is bad fiction of any kind, and particularly bad science fiction"; but his pronouncement and slightly dictatorial demands for SF are negated by the selection of stories he thinks are "both good science fiction and good fiction", when in fact most of them are mediocre as either.
Out of a dozen stories, I find only two worthy contenders for status. The late Ken W. Purdy's "In the Matter of the Assassin Merefirs" is a stingingly good satire of the little man caught up in the wheels of justice that grind him to mincemeat in the so-called effort to protect him. (In light of recent revelations about the corrupted machinations of American government, the story is bloodcurdlingly perceptive.) Christopher Priest's startling "The Head and the Hand" is a grand guignol tale of a man who has become a notorious and wealthy celebrity by lopping off parts of his body as entertainment for frenzied audiences. Reduced to a limbless head and torso, his final grotesque public appearance amalgamates a variety of electric psychological jolts that will have the reader's hair standing on end.
Joe W. Haldeman's "Hero" makes a second appearance, but the remainder of the collection has nothing of much interest.
Brian W. Aldiss's "As For Our Fatal Continuity..." is a rather bland spoof about the intellectualization of art, with a little religious satire tossed in to make it even more difficult. James Gunn's "The Old Folks" gives senior citizens a bizarre revenge upon their thoughtless children, but the plot twists are crude devices that reduce the supposed threat to fake-sinister preposterousness. Robert F. Young's "The Years" is yet another time-travel yarn, short but much too obvious. Andre Carneiro's "Darkness" is a moral tale with no real moral and a mystery with no resolution, an essentially empty story about a plague of darkness in which men who were previously blind become the experts on survival.
"Weihnachtabend" is an alternate-world story that serves as a sounding board for a study of the inalterable human condition. Unlike Keith Robert's previous excellent novel, Pavane, this one fails to create characters who can withstand the fascination built into the background, and they melt away like ghosts before this picture of British domination after the Nazi triumph. Alex Hamilton's "Words of Warning" is a British bit of weak-tea humor in which words begin to disappear from books, marching like little men across the room and out the window in protest to their misuse by man. (Harrison may think this is SF, but in my book it's fantasy, in case anyone out there is fussy about such a distinction.)
Jonathan Ela's "From Sea to Shining Sea" comes in the form of a magazine article that points out how greed and folly pack more clout than conservational need; at best, a very mild bit of humor. "An Imaginary Journey to the Moon", written by a student in Ghana, Victor Sabah, is interesting for the view it offers American readers into the mind of a young person from a nation struggling to catch up with a world already breathless from trying to keep up itself. The display may be a valuable one, but I don't think it is valuable enough to warrant its publication here. And Howard L. Myers' "Out, Wit!" is so concerned with being a clever tale that it deflates its point about conservative close-mindedness.
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THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
In addition, there is a selection of cartoons and poems and a surprisingly valueless afterword by Brian Aldiss wherein he discounts the "trendy" SF stories (none of which he singles out except to mention in passing the film Silent Running, which was almost as flawed as Aldiss' memory of its plot) but offers only Philip K. Dick as an example of a writer of lasting value (yet doesn't bother to give much detail as to why).
To date this series has been lively and often full of surprises, and I simply can't explain the ineptitude of this year's edition. Maybe the editors ate some bad mushrooms, or were busy picking lint from their navels, or, horrors!, perhaps they were paid in advance? Whatever, I certainly hope it doesn't happen again.
Lester del Rey seems less incensed than Wollheim and less bitchy than Harrison, but he similarly concludes that the abundance of original anthologies is a bit too much and that "the result will be spotty at best". Del Rey's middle-of-the-road policy leads him to state that his choice of stories consists of "stories that entertain--but entertain at a very high level", while he rather conflictingly proclaims that "I have never read as little good short fiction in any given year since 1940."
Nearly half of del Rey's selections appear in other volumes--Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World", Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Meeting", Lafferty's "Eurema's Dam", Vinge's "Long Shot", MacLennan's "Thus Love Betrays Us", Tiptree's "The Man Who Walked Home", and Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" (the latter in the unrevised version).
The book's best story, and one sadly ignored by the other editors, is Thomas N. Scortia's "Woman's Rib", which tells of an aging scientist's obsession with immortality and hits the heart not with sledgehammer blows but with the subtle penetration of a high-gauge needle. A couple of good but hardly outstanding stories finish off the inadequate supply of passable material: Gordon Eklund's "Underbelly" is a study of immortality and death which examines an ordinary man under extraordinary conditions and Jack C. Haldeman's "Watchdog" involves the reader emotionally with a great machine awaiting the return of man and gives him a solid punch of empathy as the machine struggles against loneliness and madness.
The remaining five stories are all losing entries. Larry Niven's "Cloak of Anarchy" is a preachy and flatly moralizing mess about educating the public, while Isaac Asimov's "The Greatest Asset" tries (and fails) to disguise its preachiness in a very thin fictional mold. Both stories are from ANALOG, the home of SF lectures posing as entertainment.
Donald Noakes' "The Long Silence" tries to brainwash us into believing that noisy crowds are stupid and that total silence will give them a chance to think clearly, a supposition the crowds accept in utter terror. No reader should be subjected to such foolishness, especially when he has to pay for it, but del Rey offers two more in the same vein. C.N. Gloeckner's "Miscount" is a half-wit joke about thieving aliens on the moon, and Robert L. Davis' "Teratohippus" disastrously mishandles an interesting idea--humans hitch a ride across a great ice tundra inside a giant alien beast by shoveling in the sediment and ponderous dialogue in equally heavy measure.
THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
Del Rey seems to me obsessed by stories that are geared to simple, one-dimensional ideas, a concern that overshadows the qualities of drama and good writing. This collection is stuffed to the brim with ideas, but as shown here they do not always make good stories, and del Rey's choices do not by any criteria (except his own) represent an acceptable sampling of the year's best.
Forrest J. Ackerman's collection would be immeasurably better if the publisher had discarded Ackerman's editorial trash. He echoes Harrison's comment, but as he is unable to write a clear sentence it appears as an example of his recurring carelessness: "an inordinate amount of science fiction nowadays is NOT science fiction". His complaint is obviously groundless, as he later refers to Robert Bloch's Hugo-winning fantasy short story, "The Hell-Bound Train" as "sf"--a term he randomly interchanges with SF, sci-fic, science fiction, sif--while his juvenile, perilously inane and vulgar attempts at humor are offensive to any intelligent audience, as well as non-instructive and harmful to younger and more naive readers.
The real tragedy of this editorial mess is that Ackerman has actually collected three quite good stories, none of which appear in rival volumes, and browsing potential buyers may reject the whole book if they read any of Ackerman's introductory idiocy.
Frederik Pohl's "The Merchants of Venus" is an exciting, old-fashioned adventure that borrows the intense character development characteristic of the so-called "new wave" and creates a well-rounded and fully developed hybrid that should appeal to almost every taste. The background, a scientifically plausible Venus, is perfect for the sense-of-wonder element desired by so many readers, here the discovery of alien tunnels and artifacts; yet the characters are rich and full-bodied, reacting to the setting and each other with very human motives that secure them as the plot focus.
Philip Jose Farmer is also rejecting stereotypes in the delightful "Seventy Years of Decpop", wherein the world must adjust to decreasing population caused by near-total world sterility. Farmer cleverly balances the world view with one man's assessment of the adjustment process, and finds a mix of gravity and humor that reflects the emotional well-being we will need to make our way through the complications of technological nightmare and social upheaval.
In "What We Learned from This Morning's Newspaper", Robert Silverberg takes a cliche concept and decorates it with slight aberrations that give it a totally different look. What initially seems to be just another fiction about people who try to grasp a profit by looking into the future takes a shift in observation that makes the concluding disaster both suspenseful and surprising.
Since these three stories account for over half the wordage I recommend the book to anyone who missed them before, in spite of my objections to much of the remaining material.
Of the rest only Thomas N. Scortia's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" has much interest, and that comes mostly from the basic idea--a speculation on human-alien sex--which carries the reader piggyback over some obviously contrived plotting.
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THE "BEST" ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
Norman Spinrad's "A Thing of Beauty" is a new twist on the old Brooklyn Bridge joke, only amusing if you're one of the ones who still laugh at Brooklyn Bridge jokes. Milton A. Rothman's "Getting Together" is a badly reasoned tale of a robot who becomes involved in human group therapy. Robert Bloch's "Forever and Amen" is a stale rehash of the-richest-man-in-the-world-seeks-immortality syndrome, almost totally without the needed suspense. "Ersatz Eternal" is as awful as the worst of A.E. van Vogt's previous efforts, making three men prisoners (for reasons unknown) of an eternal pseudo-world created by an unseen alien (for reasons unknown) in a story that has no point (for reasons known only to the author). The dialogue is as execrable as the non-plot, and Ackerman's choice of such drivel is indefensible (unless you consider the fact that Ackerman is van Vogt's agent?).
In addition there is the text of Frederik Pohl's 1972 LACon Guest of Honor speech, "The Shape of Science Fiction to Come", which is more of a good-hearted, optimistic and grateful thank-you science fiction's creators and supporters speech rather than a real exploration of the theme presented in the title.
I will only recommend the volume for those who haven't read the Pohl, Farmer and Silverberg stories. The rest of you are advised to avoid it like the black plague of editorial tastelessness that it is.
1973 was, to put it bluntly, a bitch. It is difficult enough just to read all the volumes of original stories during a year, but it becomes a bother, an aggravation, and finally a reason for disgust when you write letter after letter to dinky publishing houses that publish one volume of SF, then refuse to tell you when their book was published, refuse to quote a price, refuse even to answer your inquiries.
The above reasons will explain to you why this column has been delayed for months. An optimist at heart, I kept hoping I could cover everything, but despite all my efforts I never could find out if Roger Elwood's Adrift In Space, published by Lerner, was a collection of original stories, or if Way Out, also edited by Elwood and published by Whitman, was actually published for sale or whether all copies had been permanently secreted in Whitman's Wisconsin warehouse. There may be other books published of which I am not aware--most likely more junk from the obstinate pig-brain of Roger Elwood, who has funneled a lot of money to SF writers but in general treats the genre as if it were the best way to waste paper and degrade talent--but I've now delayed this review for months and at last I've given up trying.
Following are thirty-three anthologies of 1973, some of them very much worth buying, others of which should be trashed without a moment's hesitation. The review concludes with a list of my choices of the anthologies' best and runner-up stories.
The Alien Condition, edited by Stephen Goldin (Ballantine 03212; $1.25; 206pp.)
Aside from a fine short story by Vonda McIntyre, and some passable ones by James Tiptree, Jr., Thomas Pickens, and Rachel Cosgrove Payes, Goldin's theme of exploring the minds and lives of alien beings did not produce much of worth. The majority of writers could not overcome their weak plots, the 'alienness' more often nonsense than imaginative speculation, and some of the writing (S. Kye Boult, Alan Dean Foster, Arthur Byron Cover) is simply too awful to be believed. A total of twelve stories, four of them good--meager pickings, in my estimation.
Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes,
edited by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia (Follett; $6.95; 190pp.)
More Little Monsters, edited by Roger Elwood
and Vic Ghidalia (Lancer 95235; 95¢; 190pp.)
I've lumped these two volumes together because they are primarily reprint anthologies, but include a few new stories. Androids. . . is an odd mixture of early work by Poe, de Maupassant and the like, that tries to hide the cobwebs with stories of more recent vintage by writers like Asimov and Clarke. The six new stories, with the exception of Robert Silverberg's "The Mutant Season", a simple but pleasant tale of the
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THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
day the mutants come out of hiding, are unrelievedly atrocious. More Little Monsters is the same type of mix, eleven reprints which hit several literary lows but no highs, and two originals which are so crudely amateur it's embarrassing even to read them. If Elwood and Ghidalia have any value as an editorial team, it's only to warn readers that they've hit the bottom of the barrel and there's no place to go but up.
Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, edited by Harry Harrison (Random House; $7.95; 332 pp.)
Intended as a tribute to the late John Campbell, who was responsible for the nurturing of many of today's best-known science fiction writers, Astounding is a fairly good collection that one wishes had been quite a lot better. It tracks right down the middle between good and bad; and while Asimov, Bester, Clement, de Camp, Dickson, Simak, and Cogswell have each contributed works that would comprise a quite readable issue of Campbell's magazine, there's not really even one memorable story among them. This will be out in paperback by the end of 1974 and I'd advise you to sample it before investing eight dollars in the hardcover, which is a high price to pay for a lukewarm tribute.
Bad Moon Rising, edited by Thomas M. Disch (Harper & Row; $6.95; 302pp.)
Blurbed as "an anthology of political forebodings", Disch's collection represents, as he tells us in the introduction, "both kinds of politics, the ideal and the pragmatic." Some of Disch's choices are fine: Michael Moorcock's "An Apocalypse: Some Scenes from European Life" (incorporated into his novel Breakfast in the Ruins) and Disch's own "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire" (part of his excellent novel 334) are by far the best stories. There are some downers here as well, and there's enough of them to give this book a sort of grand guignol excessiveness that is sure to displease a number of fans. It's a good collection, but it's polemically ripe and heavy and hard to take in one lump sum. Try it, but like wine, a sip at a time.
Chains of the Sea, edited by Robert Silverberg (Thomas Nelson; $6.50; 221 pp.)
Collections of novellas have become very popular with readers over the past five years, and this "showcase for three of the most highly regarded of the newer writers: Geo. Alec Effinger, Gardner R. Dozois, and Gordon Eklund" is one of the best to yet appear. Eklund's "The Shrine of Sebastian" and Dozois' title story run away with most of the honors, Dozois' garnering a Hugo nomination for his work, but all of the stories are good ones, proving that the genre need not depend on reprints written by the superstars of yesterday, that new talent is with us now and needs only a chance to display the new wares. One of the year's best buys, sure to become a collector's item.
Children of Infinity: Original Science Fiction Stories for Young Readers, edited by Roger Elwood, illustrated by Jaqui Morgan (Franklin Watts; $5.95; 178pp.)
Lester del Rey introduces this collection with minimal pandering and an obvious eagerness to let young readers know that SF stories are not only fun but "useful and
THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
valuable ways of training for the real, changing world." Del Rey's short essay will likely excite youngsters far more than the ten stories. Anderson, Malzberg, Scortia, and Raymond F. Jones contribute reasonably good pieces, but the rest are shoddy, gruesome bits of rubbish, ignorant of the sharp sensitivity of children and without any sort of literary merit. Give it only to a kid you hate.
Clarion III, edited by Robin Scott Wilson (Signet Q5503; 95¢; 224pp.)
It looks as if this may be the last Clarion volume, as nothing is scheduled to appear in 1974. It will be a tragic loss, for the Clarion books have been an exciting showcase for new talent, as well as providing the reader with some insight into how established authors work with new writers and help them develop. The results are never exclusively good, but the series holds up remarkably well in comparison with books from the established veterans, and the successes are often like lightning bolts, unexpected and electric. (Weak sales, I suspect, would have more to do with Signet's poor covers than with the contents of the books.)
Demon Kind, edited by Roger Elwood (Avon 14886; 75¢; 192pp.)
This is one of Elwood's better collections, a sequel to last year's reprint anthology, Young Demons, containing stories about children with strange powers. There are a few duds (by Lafferty, Holly, Spinrad, and McCaffrey), but they are more than offset by the good works of Malzberg, Farmer and Laurence Yep, the latter one of the best and most shockingly ignored of the new writers. What is really surprising about this book is the variety of approaches to the theme of strange children, no one story is quite like any other and the best ones are wondrously fresh and lively. A good book, and a bargain at 75 cents.
Eros In Orbit, edited by Joseph Elder (hardbound--Trident Press; $6.95; 189 pp.: paper--Pocket Books 77720; 1974; 95¢)
Elder has packaged an okay anthology that is not really as depressing or as anti-sexual as Mr. Elder's introduction would have you believe. When it comes to sex, however, the writers you expect to be impressive are often not as forthright as you'd hoped; while others (in this case, Pamela Sargent and Thomas Scortia) hop to it with incredible gusto. The collection does not adequately live up to its theme, but the good stories are well worth reading, and the paperback edition is reasonably priced.
An Exaltation of Stars: Transcendental Adventures In Science Fiction, edited by Terry Carr (hardbound--Simon and Schuster; $6.95; 191 pp.: paper--Pocket Books 77737; 1974; 95¢)
Carr has collected three novellas here, which range from the dismal (Robert Silverberg's "The Feast of St. Dionysus") to the adequate (Roger Zelazny's "Kjwalll'kje'k'koothailll'kje'k") to the superb (Edgar Pangborn's "My Brother Leopold"). The question behind these stories, as Carr explains, is "what might religion come to mean to us under new circumstances?" It is a question that offers
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THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
a lot of room for SF writers; and the diversity of the three stories is satisfying, even if all the individual stories are not. Overall, a good collection that should satisfy most readers.
Flame Tree Planet: An Anthology of Religious Science Fantasy edited by Roger Elwood (Concordia 2528; $1.35; 159pp.)
Science fiction is the very last genre of fiction which should be pigeonholed by Christian bias, but that's exactly what Elwood has done in this book, which he introduces with a messy glop of half-truths, poor research, outright lies, and (I guess) 'faith'. The reader could ignore most of this if it weren't that most of the stories are equally steeped in pulpit-pounding and brainwashing. . . done, of course, with love and understanding, the same kind of love and understanding meted out by muggers, rapists, and other unsavory types. It's bad enough to be preached at, but when it's not even done well, it's too much to bear. Put this one directly into the trashbin.
Flashing Swords #1, edited by Lin Carter
(Nelson Doubleday and SF Book Club; $1.49; 175 pp.: paper--Dell 2640;
1973; 95¢)
Flashing Swords #2, edited by Lin Carter (Nelson Doubleday and
SF Book Club; $1.49; 200 pp.: paper--Dell 3123; 1974; 95¢)
Sword and sorcery fans will eat these two books up, what with names like Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and Michael Moorcock among the contributors. The stories range from good to poor, but the average is rather higher than one usually in S&S, none of the stories great, but a number of them lightly entertaining, energetic and pleasant. Fans of 'pure' SF will probably enjoy the first volume most, but those who really dig this sort of writing will probably like both.
Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives, edited
by Roger Elwood (hardbound--Macmillan; $5.95; 198pp.: paper--Collier
01980; 1973; $1.50)
Frontiers 2: The New Mind, edited by Roger Elwood
(hardbound--Macmillan; $5.95; 180pp.: paper--Collier 01981; 1973; $1.50)
Macmillan published the paper editions of these anthologies concurrently with the hardcover editions, which would be a financial aid for fans if the volumes weren't so ordinary and uninspired that neither one is really worth buying. #1 has two fine stories by Barry Malzberg, plus a couple of fairly good items by Silverberg and Wolfe, with the remaining eight all wipeouts. #2 has three good items, by Lafferty, Effinger, and Jerry Sohl, with the other six again wipeouts. With paper editions now as high as $1.50, only fans with money to burn--does anybody have that stuff these days?--are going to continue wasting it on Elwood books put together with dollar signs rather than respect in mind.
Future City, edited by Roger Elwood (hardbound--Trident Press; $7.95; 256pp.: paper--Pocket Books 77936; 1974; 95¢)
Mr. Elwood tells us that anthologies must have a raison d'être for existing today, that anthologies of a "potpourri design" are today no longer welcome (strange comment--
THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
I wonder if he's looked at the books he's turned out this year?). So this book is "an anthology that is created rather than packaged", we are told, and to that end we have nineteen stories, three bits of verse, a preface by the editor, a foreword by Clifford Simak, and an afterword by Frederik Pohl. Maybe my vision is topsy-turvy, but it still looks like a potpourri to me. Actually this is not really too bad a book, though the quality is as mixed as ever and I could find only two stories worthy of placing on my runners-up listing. Quite readable, however, and the 95 cent edition is a moderately good buy.
Future Quest, edited by Roger Elwood (Avon 16808; 95¢; 192 pp.)
Aside from a couple of mildly good stories by Malzberg and C.L. Grant, this turns out to be one of Elwood's worst collections, with some of SF's most respected names shoveling out garbage with a vengeance. Worst offender is Anne McCaffrey, who opens the book with "Dull Drums", an appropriately titled mess of clichés that writes down to young readers with dialogue like: "you can tell 'em to feck [sic] off." (I call it a poor method of catering to Elwood's much-publicized and basically senseless objection to the word "fuck".) Any teenager whose stomach doesn't turn over at that deserves to have nothing better to read.
Infinity Five, edited by Robert Hoskins (Lancer 75477; 95¢; 208pp.)
With the folding of Lancer books, the Infinity series comes to an end. (Curtis Books was supposed to take it, but they folded as well, so it looks as if this series has had it.) #5 is not very successful, devoting nearly half its pages to a bumbled novella by Dean R. Koontz; but there are some passable works by Silverberg, Thurston, Carr, and Zebrowski, plus a three-page wowser by Scott Edelstein, giving the book a little bounce with its dying breath. I know of no series that has gone as far as five volumes without producing at least one less-than-inspired book; it's too bad Infinity had to exit on a bummer.
Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves, and Things,
edited by Roger Elwood, illustrated by Franz Altschuler (Rand McNally;
$3.95; 117pp.)
Science Fiction Tales: Invaders, Creatures, and
Alien Worlds, edited by Roger Elwood, illustrated by Rod Ruth
(Rand McNally; $3.95; 124pp.)
Each of these books is designed specifically for children, the first a minor but entertaining collection which demands little more of youngsters than that they be able to read adequately well, the second a much less pleasant book with stories so predigested they just lie on the pages like icky green goo. It's probably much easier to write horror stories for children, for science fiction demands an approach that must work explanations into the story structure without upsetting the dramatic content. The horror stories are for the most part rapid and lively, while the science fiction tales are depressingly dull and corny, even by children's standards (which require simplicity, but not idiocy).
New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg (hardbound--Nelson Doubleday and SF Book Club; $1.49; 212pp.: paper--Signet Q5805; 1974; 95¢)
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THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
Silverberg's New Dimensions just gets better and better, this third volume a superior example of distinctive editing which contains several stories undoubtedly among the year's best. Doubleday has dropped the series, and it is only through the SF Book Club that one can buy the hardcover edition, a practice I hope the Club continues through future volumes. This one has eleven stories, of which I found only two to be less than satisfactory, making it one of the year's best buys, in either hardcover or paper. This one has every claim to be called the year's best original anthology.
No Mind of Man: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg (Hawthorn; $5.95; 182pp.)
Another collection of three novellas, including Terry Carr's "The Winds At Starmont", an action-adventure tale with a weak and watery philosophical content; Richard A. Lupoff's "The Partridge Project", about a probability-analyzing computer, told with catch-as-catch-can prose that skips between cool logic and old-pulps contrivance; and Robert Silverberg's "This Is the Road", which tells of future mutants in a predictable but adventurous story that is really much greater fun than its plot warrants. Not too satisfying as a total unit, but perhaps worth the money if you can find a paper edition later.
Nova 3, edited by Harry Harrison (Walker; $6.95; 243pp.)
After the dreadful second volume of this series, Harrison has bounced back with a much better book, still not up to the quality of the first volume, but a well-rounded collection of thirteen stories, at least two of which are among the year's better works (by Aldiss and Malzberg) and several of more than nominal interest (Farmer, Sheckley, Edelstein, and others). Even the few stories I found less than good are more like misfires than bad writing. It's not a great collection, but it's certainly a far cry from the worst.
Omega, edited by Roger Elwood (hardbound--Walker; $6.95; 190 pp.: paper--Fawcett Gold Medal M3030; 1974; 95¢)
Not much in this one. Elwood is after 'name' writers again and doesn't seem to care much what they give him, while the new writers fill in the holes with tossoff items of equal disinterest. Five stories are at best readable (Farmer, Sutherland, Martin, Anderson, and Biggle), but even they have a fillup quality, like something rushed out to feed a hungry magazine at deadline time. I can't even recommend the paper edition of this one. Save your money.
Orbit 12, edited by Damon Knight (hardbound--Putnam; $5.95; 254pp.: paper--Berkley Medallion 02409; 1974; 95¢)
The longest-running series in SF anthologies, Orbit again offers a wide variety of stories, some of which at least should appeal to almost any SF reader. Vonda McIntyre has a story, "The Genius Freaks", which has been almost totally ignored in favor of her other recent works, but I think it's one of her best and should be noticed.
THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
Fine stories by Le Guin, Wilhelm, and a very interesting cycle of tales by Brian Aldiss, plump out the volume to a hefty helping of science fictional mulligan stew. Competition is heavy this year, but Orbit should have no trouble holding its readers.
The Other Side of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Stories About Young People of the Future, edited by Roger Elwood, illustrated by Herbert Danska (Random House; $3.95; 207 pp.)
Young readers would be having an SF feast if it weren't that Elwood's anthologies are such a famine of content. This one features nine new stories, of which three (by Brackett, Green, and Holly) are at best tolerable items, with the rest, as usual, dredged up from the bottom of a slime-coated pit. The only conclusion I can reach after reading these books for 'young people', is that Elwood must actively hate children, must despise and deplore them, to continue offering them such yawn-inducing reading. Why on earth do the publishers keep buying this crap--are they that desperate?
Saving Worlds, edited by Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd (hardbound--Doubleday; $6.95; 237 pp.: paper - under the title The Wounded Planet--Bantam Q7789; 1974; $1.25)
Ecological disaster!--what a peg on which to hang a cluster of SF stories! (Really original idea, huh?) Despite Frank Herbert's rather trite introduction ("increase your grasp on probabilities") and the presence of Elwood as one half of the editing team, this anthology is never as bad as one might expect. Gene Wolfe offers a couple of splendid stories (in a total of sixteen), and some verse by Tom Disch and D.M. Price proves to be among the best I've yet seen in an SF anthology. You may want to ignore the stories by van Vogt, Anderson, and two or three lesser-knowns, but the book is a surprisingly solid package with enough variation to please almost any reader.
Showcase, edited by Roger Elwood (Harper & Row; $5.95; 191 pp.)
This book is without question Elwood's best 1973 anthology, although it, too, is slightly marred by what seems to be an oddly random selection and ordering of stories. There are twelve in this collection, and while only three women are represented herein, they contribute by far the book's best works. Joanna Russ' "The Soul of a Servant" deals with social classes and offers a compassionate, insightful, other-side-of-the-coin look at Uncle Tom-ism. Raylyn Moore's "Trigononomy" is about a world-changer and is an intellectual's paradise crammed with speculative nuances that nibble away at deductive reasoning like lazy piranhas; while Carol Emshwiller's "The Childhood of the Human Hero" refracts morals in a twisting maze of moralistic fantasies. Silverberg, Lafferty, Malzberg, Green, and Wolfe also contribute some worthwhile items, and the book is one of the few worth buying in hardcover.
Ten Tomorrows, edited by Roger Elwood (Fawcett Gold Medal M2820; 95¢; 224 pp.)
Again a fitful selection of stories, ranging from a sharp little stinger by Pamela Sargent to an awkward play by James Blish to a pseudo-psychology vacuity by Anne
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THE 'ORIGINAL' ANTHOLOGIES: 1973 (Continued)
McCaffrey (who in the past year has turned out more poor stories for Elwood than any one author should ever produce). Silverberg, Pangborn, and Niven offer some moderately good items, but the remainder are consistently tiresome, often trashy pieces that should never have been placed in print. It's a mediocre book, a very bad buy even at paperback prices.
Three Trips In Time and Space: Original Novellas of Science Fiction (hardbound--Hawthorn; $5.95; 193pp.: paper--Dell 8827; 1974; 95¢)
Three new novellas, and not a good one among them. Larry Niven's "Flash Crowd" once again plays around with 'displacement booth', and while the humor is occasionally funny, the plot has undernourished muscles and the final explanations come as too little and too late. John Brunner's "You'll Take the High Road" is an absurdist holiday that falls over into low-comedy routines, the fast-clipped dialogue so sloppy that it eventually becomes droningly stale. Jack Vance's "Rumfuddle" has the author thumb-twiddling around a lot of loose ends to reach a climax so preposterously grotesque the reader is almost (but not quite) willing to forgive him the preceding silliness. It might be possible to forgive one author for striking out, but all three? Naw, they shoulda all stood home in bed this game.
Two Views of Wonder, edited by Thomas N. Scortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Ballantine 23713; $1.25; 271 pp.)
Aha, a book with a new idea. The editors have presented six themes to six pairs of writers, one male and one female, hoping to find if there were truly any detectable difference in the male and female approach to writing. Writing to a theme is not, I think, the best idea for an anthology, though some have managed to succeed fairly well with the method. It seems a necessity in this case, however, and while the result is not of consistent top quality, there are several good stories and a really excellent one by editor Yarbro. For $1.25, a pretty good investment.
Universe 3, edited by Terry Carr (Random House; $5.95; 209pp.)
Carr's anthology series has not had a very impressive history to date, and this third volume is equally disjointed and uneven. One can forgive quite a bit of mixed quality, however, when presented with stories like Gene Wolfe's "The Death of Doctor Island", a mind-bending fusion of sense-of-wonder and inner-space, and Gordon Eklund's "Free City Blues", about an eccentric female adventurer whose precipitant actions whirl her through a post-holocaust dazzle that will leave the reader exhausted but elated. The remaining five stories stack up as weak support, but the Wolfe and Eklund stories take up nearly half the book's pages, so I'll have to give this one a passing grade in spite of its deficiencies.
Aldiss, Brian W.: "The Expensive Delicate Ship" (Nova 3)
Busby, F.M.: "Road Map" (Clarion III)
Eklund, Gordon: "The Shrine of Sebastian" (Chains of the Sea)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (New Dimensions 3)
McIntyre, Vonda N.: "The Genius Freaks" (Orbit 12)
Moorcock, Michael: "An Apocalypse: Some Scenes from European Life" (Bad Moon Rising)
Pangborn, Edgar: "My Brother Leopold" (An Exaltation of Stars)
Russ, Joanna: "The Soul of a Servant" (Showcase)
Wolfe, Gene: "The Death of Doctor Island" (Universe 3)
Chelsea Quinn: "Un Bel Di" (Two Views of Wonder)
Braly, Malcolm: "An Outline of History" (Bad Moon Rising)
Carr, Terry: "They Live on Levels" (New Dimensions 3)
Disch, Thomas M.: "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire" (Bad Moon Rising)
Dozois, Gardner R.: "Chains of the Sea" (Chains of the Sea)
Earls, William: "Bus Station" (Clarion III)
Edelstein, Scott: "Isaac Under Pressure" (Infinity Five)
Eklund, Gordon: "Free City Blues" (Universe 3)
Farmer, Philip Jose: "Monologue" (Demon Kind)
Koontz, Dean R.: "The Undercity" (Future City)
Lafferty, R.A.: "Days of Grass, Days of Straw" (New Dimensions 3)
Lafferty, R.A.: "The World As Will and Wallpaper" (Future City)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: "Direction of the Road" (Orbit 12)
Macfarlane, W.: "How Shall We Conquer?" (New Dimensions 3)
Malzberg, Barry N.: "Dreaming and Conversations: Two Rules by Which to Live" (Nova 3)
Malzberg, Barry N.: "Linkage" (Demon Kind)
Malzberg, Barry N.: "Those Wonderful Years" (Frontiers 1)
McIntyre, Vonda N.: "Wings" (The Alien Condition)
Moore, Raylyn: "Trigononomy" (Showcase)
Naylor, Charles: "We Are Dainty Little People" (Bad Moon Rising)
Nielsen, Lin: "When Pappy Isn't There" (Clarion III)
O'Donnell, K.M. (Barry Malzberg): "Getting Around" (Frontiers 1)
Sargent, Pamela: "Clone Sister" (Eros In Orbit)
Sargent, Pamela: "Matthew" (Ten Tomorrows)
Scortia, Thomas N.: "Flowering Narcissus" (Eros In Orbit)
Tiptree, Jr., James: "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (New Dimensions 3)
Wilhelm, Kate: "The Red Canary" (Orbit 12)
Wissner, Robert: "Say Goodbye to the World's Last Brothel" (Clarion III)
Wolfe, Gene: "An Article About Hunting" (Saving Worlds)
Wolfe, Gene: "Beautyland" (Saving Worlds)
Yep, Laurence: "The Eddystone Light" (Demon Kind)
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The magazines presented us with well over 300 new stories in 1973, not including the novels, and, as ever, they range from the very best to the very worst examples of fiction. Fifty-nine issues of the various titles were on sale, averaging just a shade over five new stories per issue, a wide spectrum which produced the longest runners-up list I've had in years. Individually, the magazines were as follows:
Amazing Stories and Fantastic:
For the first time in five years Amazing placed a story on my list of bests in addition to placing one story in the runners-up listing. Fantastic placed one runner-up story. From a total of less than fifty stories, this proves a mild showing for magazines with a decided penchant for weak short fiction.
As an editor, Ted White is prone to giving newcomers a chance at professional publication, but doesn't seem to have time to prod them into rewriting their stories--settling for boring page-fillers or failed experiments. The magazines still carry that flush of fanzine enthusiasm and interests, colorfully packaged and haphazardly presented, of surefire interest to confirmed fans, but perhaps less appealing to the general reader. Both magazines seem to be keeping afloat by this special appeal--the big question is whether White can withstand the tide of rising postal rates and poor newsstand distribution. Can he afford to be more discriminating? Perhaps not, but the coming year may prove to be the most challenging and eventually deciding one White has yet had to face. Lotsaluck, fella.
Analog:
Analog slips one story into the best listing and places three runners-up, from a total of nearly sixty stories, which doesn't seem too bad until one considers that the remainder of Analog's fiction weighs heavily on the debit side of the ledger. For all Bova's efforts to revitalize the magazine with a selection of different types of sf, sometimes controversial to the magazine's seemingly austere audience, the filler material remains much the same as that published in Campbell's final, trying years. Of course, one needs to consider the financial end of the matter, I suppose, for if Analog changes too drastically, the sales might begin to drop, and I doubt Conde Nast would sit still very long for that. Bova's efforts to improve the magazine seem slow-moving and very gradual, but perhaps in the end, this will work to swing Analog into prime-mover position once again. As ever, the magazine looks beautiful and features a steady supply of technically-oriented articles and pleasing features such as P. Schuyler Miller's always-good book column. As hard as this magazine is to take at times, I do think it's getting better. I just wish Bova could manage to speed up to more than a snail's pace in the improvement.
Fantasy and Science Fiction:
Since F&SF never publishes more than one novel a year, this leaves room for many more short stories (over ninety this year) and gives the magazine a greater chance of nabbing the majority of bests. But along with opportunity there must also be an editor with a talent for finding these stories and getting them into print. That F&SF places on the list with half of both the bests and runners-up is due to the remarkable abilities of Edward Ferman, the only editor who seems capable of regularly stealing away top-class material that the anthologists would dearly love to get for their “original” collections. How he does it, I don't know, but he has kept F&SF the unchallenged superior in the magazine field, plumping out each issue with Asimov's science column, Gahan Wilson's incomparable cartoons, a welcome film review column by Baird Searles, and the best book reviewers in the business. F&SF has been number one and it remains number one, unquestionably.
The Haunt of Horror:
There doesn't seem much point in discussing this magazine now, as it folded after two rather dismal issues with no stories worth remembering. The odd thing about the whole matter was that the publisher squashed the magazine before assessing its sales power by waiting for returns, and the last I heard, some unpublished material will be used in several sister publications that cater to the comics crowd. Don't look for reviews of it from me, however; I don't review the comics. (Since Richard wrote this,
Haunt of Horror has been revived as one of Marvel's black and white magazines. The story quality is correspondingly lower--WVP.)
Galaxy and Worlds of If:
A grand total of sixty-five new stories from both these magazines with three bests and ten runners-up between them, which is really an improvement over the past couple of years. Just as things are beginning to look up, with Galaxy once again returning to monthly publication, the magazines are pushed into another editorial flurry.
James Baen becomes editor of If at year's end, and, according to a telephone conversation I had with him some weeks back, much of the material he has on hand for 1974 sounds very promising indeed. Baen wants to get back to science fiction and is going to try very hard to push some big-name writers into producing it, while his enthusiasm is so infectious that I find myself really hoping he can pull it off. In addition, I have just heard that Baen will temporarily be editing Galaxy as well, for Ejler Jakobson has just announced his resignation. A time of changes can be uncomfortable and difficult, but one hopes it foretells yet more improvement. The features and reviews in both magazines are still on the mediocre side, however, and very little space is devoted to them. Fiction is the keynote here, and it seems to be getting better all the time. (Most fans know by now of Jim Baen's announcement, at Discon II, that Worlds of If has been terminated. It was a surprise to all, including Jim. It's a shame; the magazine was improving every issue. Let's hope the publishers change their minds. Maybe a letter campaign?--WVP)
Vertex:
With a total of five issues and thirty-nine new stories (the reprints in the initial issues appear to have been dropped for good), Vertex has started off with a resounding splash into a genre new to this publisher. The magazine is a big slick, overpriced at $1.50 an issue, with a heavy emphasis on art and a detrimental lack of emphasis on quality fiction. In fact, Vertex couldn't even place one runner-up story. Don Pfeil is editor of this gaudy botch and the illiteracy of so many of the stories hints that the man is really desperate for material or regards his as a group of half-wits who drool as they (try to) read. The most interesting feature of the magazine is a series of author interviews, few of which are depthful but all of which are strong selling-points to readers who want to know more about the man behind the typewriter (including how he looks, since all the interviews are photo-illustrated). To date, the interviews have all been with male authors, which by this time should be directing some complaints Pfeil's way. The science articles range from newspaper dryness to brisk condescension. As of the moment, Vertex looks like a financial success--whether it can hold a dedicated audience for much longer without improving its fiction content does not seem too likely.
Weird Tales:
Moskowitz's revival of the famous Weird Tales seems to have been welcomed by many readers, myself included. Unfortunately, it has not been accepting subscriptions and seems to have had very poor distribution, which bodes ill for its survival beyond a few issues (as of this writing, the Winter '73 issue is the last to have gone on sale and the magazine may already have been suspended). To date, the reprints have been the major focus of the fiction--only nine new stories were published, none of them very good--but Moskowitz's long article on William Hope Hodgson will delight readers who have missed such pieces from Moskowitz since his series of articles in Amazing some years ago. I can only say I hope the magazine can fight it through to survival.
Best SF/Fantasy Magazine Stories: 1973
Bishop, Michael: Death and Designation Among the Asadi
(F&SF, February)
Busby, F.M.: Cage a Man (F&SF, September)
Claremont, C.S.: Psimed (F&SF, April)
Eklund, Gordon: The Ascending Aye (Amazing, January)
Ellison, Harlan: The Deathbird (F&SF, March)
Grant, C.L.: Come Dance With Me On My Pony's Grave
(F&SF, July)
Le Guin, Ursula K.: Field of Vision (Galaxy, October)
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McIntyre, Vonda N.: Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand
(Analog, October)
Taves, Ernest: Mayflower Three (Galaxy, Jan.-Feb.)
Tiptree, Jr., James: The Women Men Don't See (F&SF,
December)
Runners-up:
Aickman, Robert: Pages from a Young Girl's Journal
(F&SF, February)
Bishop, Michael: The White Otters of Childhood
(F&SF, July)
Boyd, John: The Girl and the Dolphin (Galaxy, March-April)
Bretnor, R.: Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All (F&SF,
October)
Buck, Doris Pitkin: Blackberry Winter (F&SF, June)
Busby, F.M.: The Learning of Eeshta (If, Sept.-Oct.)
Butler, Chris G.: A Coffin in Egypt (F&SF, March)
Clarke, J.B.: Six Men From Alpha (Galaxy, March-April)
Cobb, C.G.: Moonacy (F&SF, December)
Green, Joseph: Robustus Revisited (F&SF, April)
Kelley, Leo P.: Song (F&SF, February)
Leiber, Fritz: Cat Three (F&SF, October)
Macfarlane, W.: Quickening (Galaxy, October)
McLaughlin, Dean: To Walk With Thunder (Amazing, August)
Myers, Howard L.: Health Hazard (Analog, January)
Pohl, Frederick: In the Problem Pit (F&SF, September)
Ross, Jim: A Matter of Time (Fantastic, November)
Schumack, Scott: Persephone and Hades (Analog, September)
Sheckley, Robert: A Suppliant in Space (Galaxy, November)
Sladek, John: Solar Shoe-Salesman by Ph*l*p K. D*ck
(F&SF, March)
Stickgold, Bob: Susie's Reality (If, May-June)
Taves, Ernest: Luna One (Galaxy, July-August)
Taves, Ernest: Mayflower Two (Galaxy, November)
Wilhelm, Kate: Whatever Happened to the Olmecs?
(F&SF, October)
Wilson, Gahan: The Zombie Butler (F&SF, March)
Wolfe, Gene: How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back
the German Invasion (Analog, May)
Wolfe, Gene: Westwind (If, July-August)
Young, Robert F.: The Giantess (F&SF, July)
Young, Robert F.: Girl Saturday (Galaxy, May-June)
Already acknowledged and noted as such by most fans and reviewers, 1973 was not a memorable year for filmed science fiction. Fantasy and horror movies, however, were numerous, seemingly sparked by the success of William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist and the attendant publicity over the film version released at year's end. The trend to horror was evident all year long, carried through unceasingly month after month, and causing a market glut that was impossible to ignore.
While the majority of horror films were the usual low-budget quickies ground out and sold with the screaming promotion and substandard quality of cheap hamburgers, there were yet several surprises along the way. It was those unexpected jewels that made the year a “horror” success in spite of the exploitation barrage, and hopefully it presages the emergence of a new group of directors who understand that horror is more than Technicolored blood-splashing and random gore.
1972's prizewinner at the Atlanta Film Festival, Who Fears the Devil?, from the book by Manly Wade Wellman, finally distribution through Jack H. Harris Enterprises. The title was changed to The Legend
of Hillbilly John; but the film proved to be a less than satisfactory fantasy, troubled by Melvin Levy's undisciplined script, mediocre actors hampered by poor film editing which left in amateurish pauses and dialogue gaps, and uninspired, budget-poor special effects.
The first two months of the year were crammed with a number of little pictures of little interest. Hallmark Releasing's Last House on the Left was a sickening mess of vulgarity and blood, yet audiences seemed to go wild for it and it made lots of money. Hallmark's followup, Slaughter Hotel--an Italian import formerly titled Asylum Erotica; with much of the sex cut to gain it an “R” rating--was reportedly more of the same, but I didn't bother to see it (once stung, twice shy, you know). The rest, none of which I have seen, line up as follows: Gamalex Associates' House of Terror; Hemisphere's The Devil's Nightmare and In the Devil's Garden (packaged together at year's end to cash in on the exorcism craze); Ellman Enterprises' Alabama's Ghost; Gemini's Blood Orgy of the She-Devils; Indepix Releasing's Scream Bloody Murder; Premier Productions' Private Parts (Premier is a subsidiary of MGM, which uses this moniker for decidedly offbeat or “X”-rated films); Independent International's Blood of Ghastly Horror; Film Ventures International's When Women Had Tails and Love Factor (two semi-sf features), Cannon's Silent Night, Bloody Night (formerly titled Zora and starring Patrick O'Neal and John Carradine); Boxoffice International's The Virgins and the Vampires; and Jack H. Harris Enterprises' Hungry Wives (a reportedly mediocre witchccraft drama from the director of the “underground classic”, Night of the Living Dead).
The major companies as well turned out a number of small films that died quietly at the boxoffice. Columbia's The Creeping Flesh was director Freddie Francis' latest from Britain, starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, with the usual Victorian setting and a story about a mad scientist trying to develop an antidote for evil. Columbia's A Reflection of Fear was another in the ever-flowing stream of psycho-horror dramas, and despite the presence of a fine cast--Robert Shaw, Sally Kellerman, Mary Ure, and Sondra Locke--it dawdled along much too placidly to a predestined conclusion. Cinerama released two pictures directed by Bernard Girard, who showed some promise with Hollywood pictures like Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round several years ago but was sadly never given a chance to develop. I have been unable to find any information of the first, The Mind Snatchers, but the second, A Name for Evil, was based on a 1947 novel by Andrew Lytle (reprinted a few years ago as an Avon paperback) and starred Robert Culp and Samantha Eggar. The film was made in Canada--which provided some incongruous mountains for the Louisiana setting-and the plot was a disastrously muddied swamp of corny domestic melodrama and ghost story, neither of which concluded with much sense.
MGM's Slither was an amusing comedy that for most of its length seemed to have a strange element of fantasy interwoven with its skullduggery plot. While the fantasy didn't pan out as such, the film had a surrealistic quality that made the film strangely unclassifiable. The tight, witty script and extravagant visual humor was carried off very well by an enthusiastic cast (James Caan, Peter Boyle and, especially, Sally Kellerman) who seemed to joy in the film's hectic absurdity.
In the spring Columbia released its multi-million dollar musical remake of James Hilton's fantasy, Lost Horizon, but Burt Bacharach's muzak songs, an oversudsed script and Ross Hunter's glossy but blank production values had audiences wishing the whole mess had been left to rot in Shangri-La.
The moppet trade was given a big sales campaign to interest them in Paramount's Charlotte's Web, but this Hanna-Barbara cartoon fantasy, based on the popular E.B. White novel, couldn't muster the interest that Disney productions receive. The book, though long a children's favorite, was given filmic good humor which was marred by unimaginative and often shamelessly derivative animation techniques. The voices, with Debbie Reynolds as a marvelous Charlotte and Paul Lynde almost perfect as the greedy cat, were at all times superior to the sappy songs and uneven script.
On the other side of the tracks adult audiences were given an equally outrageous fantasy, the hard-core pornofilm The Devil in Miss Jones. Like Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame, Georgina Spelvin became almost a household name after audiences turned on to her now-famed suicide and snake sequences in this film. (On the way to Torcon, I had the opportunity to see this in Chicago, and ended up instead having an expensive meal at a restaurant specializing in cheese dinners and located right across the street from the theatre showing the Spelvin opus. To this day I wonder if I'd rather have seen Spelvin and the snake rather than eat cheese. I suppose now that the Supreme Court decision has cleared hard-core out from my home town, I'll never know.)
Cinerama's The Vault of Horror was the second multi-episode horror drama drawn from stories originally published in the EC comics, and like the first film each sequence was so predictable that viewers could recite every line of dialogue right along with the cast. Glynis John and Terry-Thomas had the best of weak material in a mildly amusing sequence about a bachelor-turned-husband whose wife is not quite up to his demands for neatness; but the remaining four episodes, despite good casts, are flat
TWJ-84/30
and lifeless items that plod along as contrivedly as the insipid interconnecting episode about five men in an elevator descending to a graveyard. This was directed by Roy Ward Baker, as was a second film from Cinerama, And Now the Screaming Starts, and Baker's desultory pace kept this one from getting off the ground as well. Based on David Case's novel, Fengriffen, the story is about a family curse visited on virgin brides, but even the presence of talented Peter Cushing couldn't offset the dawdling script.
American International Pictures (AIP) picked up a couple of films from independent producers about this time. The first, a Canadian-made exploitation item titled Cannibal Girls, was as cheapjack as its title indicates, only terrifying if you are terrified by scenes of young ladies chewing on pieces of bloody meat purported to be human flesh (looked more like rubbery beef liver to me). A very silly picture, more funny than frightening.
The sad part about AIP's advertising campaigns is that you can't tell a class picture from a trash picture, and while the ads for Brian de Palma's Sisters weren't as blood-oriented as those for Cannibal Girls, they gave little indication of the superb quality of this low-budget but very high-polish Hitchcock pastiche. De Palma's story, scripted by himself and Louisa Rose, centers around a young woman whose one-night romantic involvement with a man she's met on a television quiz show leads to his grisly stabbing murder, likely the most shockingly violent and terrifying murder scene since Psycho's famous shower. The death seems to be the work of the woman's sister (the two are surgically separated Siamese twins), who remains unseen but occasionally heard off-camera. When a lady reporter sees the murder from a nearby window, the story takes on a tension-filled development as the reporter seeks police aid, soon finding all evidence of the crime has disappeared and she also in danger, her knowledge of the murder marking her as the next victim of the psychotic sister. The story is not a particularly outstanding one, but de Palma's treatment is so refined and expert that it simply doesn't matter. The murder scenes are blood-curdling, the film editing crisp and exciting (with the best use of split-screen I've yet seen), and the suspense buildup unbelievedly heightened by Bernard Herrman's fantastic musical score. Performances as well are very fine, bringing sharp control to a script that, as in Hitchcock films, spins between high humor and high horror at a dizzying rate. Top-notch filmmaking, certainly one of the better suspense items in recent years.
Vincent Price, who seems to be enjoying his films more since he's allowed to play for as many laughs as chills, gives a double-dose of both in United Artists' Theatre of Blood. This time he's a totally mad, totally bad Shakespearian actor who takes out his vengeance on the critics who have ignored him when voting their annual awards. One by one he knocks them off, each death procedure drawn from one of the Great Bard's works, with the deaths as grim as they are ironically amusing. Price is delightful--well, hell, he's delightful even in bad films, and he's certainly made plenty of those--as is Diana Rigg as his daughter; and while the film is clearly no classic it's a fast-paced bit of fluff that light-hearted (so to speak) sadistic fun.
There was another lineup of “B” films to pad out the bottom half of double-bills or fill the smallest sections of all those new fourplex theatres around the country: Cambist's The Crazies (title later changed to Code Name Trixie when George “Night of the Living Dead” Romero's film about a virus-bred madness didn't repeat the previous success); Cannon's I, Monster; Horizon Film's Miss Leslie's Dolls and Zaat; Film Ventures International's Legend of Blood Castle; Cinemation's The Night God Screamed; Buena Vista's Charley and the Angel (a Disney feature, not one of the better ones); and MGM's Wicked, Wicked (a very poor psycho-murder drama featuring split-screen techniques and music from Phantom of the Opera, both of which were ineptly utilized).
John Landis, who wrote, directed and starred in Schlock, a nostalgic horror-comedy about the missing link, had plenty to brag about after his film won the Golden Asteroid top prize at the Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival last July. The film received only lukewarm reviews in the U.S., however, and distribution by Jack H. Harris Enterprises has been so poor that only a few west coast communities have seen it to date.
The first big sf film of the year was MGM's Soylent Green, adapted from Harry Harrison's tight and bitter novel, Make Room! Make Room! into a loose and senseless screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg. The opening premise is similar to Harrison's--the murder of an industrialist leads an investigating detective on a challenging trail through the overpopulated and degenerating hell of New York City, circa 2022. But where Harrison's novel was a tense manhunt trailing through riots, hysterical crowds and shocking food shortages (not to mention a host of very interesting characters who lived in this depressing world as if they really belonged there), the film version used only little snippets of the book and fabricated a silly mishmash of “furniture” girls (live-in prostitutes), underpopulated crowd scenes, and (eek! gasp!) food wafers made from the bodies of the dead. We got a nice performance from the late
Edward G. Robinson in a supporting role, but the rest of the cast (Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten) didn't seem much interested, though with that dreadful script one can hardly blame them. Richard Fleischer's direction is awful--his action scenes have no energy and his quiet scenes fade away altogether. It's easy to complain about a film that aborts the fine material on which it is based; but Soylent Green is worse than that. It is simply bad filmmaking. The knowledge that the film was heavily promoted and made lots of money only makes the matter that much more unbearable.
MGM also had The Mutation scheduled for release, but the folding of MGM as a distribution outlet during the summer cancelled this British-made sf horror drama, and I read that Columbia has taken the film for 1974.
With a proposed television series in the near future, the 20th Century Fox “Apes” series drags to a slow close with Battle for the Planet of the Apes, in which the original characters by Pierre Boulle have carelessly been reduced to distant cardboard relatives, down to the last fake hair on their chinny chin-chins. Roddy McDowall is the only actor to carry through to this last feature, but a weary script by John William and Joyce Hooper Corrington and J. Lee Thompson's torpid direction leave him no more than a simpleminded monkey. Good riddance to a craze that far outlived its filmic worth.
Cinerama's British import, Terror in the Wax Museum, boasts a terrific cast--Ray Milland, Broderick Crawford, Maurice Evans, Elsa Lanchester, John Carradine, Shani Wallis--that is enough to make any moviegoer's mouth water. Sadly the only watering mouths are those of the actors, dribbling and spluttering over some of the most atrocious dialogue ever to make its way to the screen. The plot is yet one more retread of the familiar murders-in-the-museum syndrome, but the actors who play the wax museum dummies flutter and move very noticeably--a blessing in this case as it distracts the viewer from a script that is too bad to be funny. Th!s kind of filmmaking is shameful and, worse, insulting.
The same problem was present in 20th Century Fox's The Neptune Factor, in which a decent cast is dragged through two hours of inane dialogue and cheapjack special effects, all resulting in damned little suspense and fidgety nervous laughs that merely make the audience realize how silly and incredibly boring the whole mess really is. Fox had better luck, both commercially and artistically, with the film adaptation of a Richard Matheson horror novel, The Legend of Hell House. This was James H. Nicholson's first picture away from AIP (after years producing with Samuel Z. Arkoff), and also his last, for he died just as the picture was going into release. Very sad, for Nicholson managed to pump more class into this film than any he ever made for AIP. Matheson adapted his own work into screenplay form and John Hough directed with the emphasis on slow-mounting tension as a small group of people seek to learn the secret of a “haunted” house in which incarnate evil crawls through every floorboard. The film builds very well indeed to some quite frightening scenes (including one of the strangest rape scenes ever filmed, in which Pamela Franklin is assaulted by a “ghost”); but the film falls down very badly in the end, as did the novel, with a splashy but unfortunately preposterous explanation for all the weird goings-on.
AIP continued a relatively slow year for horror and sf films, concentrating more on action and sex melodramas. For the summer AIP released the sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream (titled Blacula II during production), to last year's surprise hit, Blacula, but this second film didn't equal the success of the first, and it disappeared before I had a chance to see it. I wish I could say I had also missed Raw Meat, another British import, but I caught it on the lower half of a double-bill at the drive-in, and stuck it out because I admire the talent of Donald Pleasance. The vague plot is a lamebrained notion about a group of cannibalistic humans living in abandoned London subway tunnels and sneaking out on occasion to grab some bloody fresh victims. The film was so dark that drive-in viewing made it impossible to see what was going on most of the time, for which I think I should be grateful considering that what I could see was unrelievedly awful.
Universal released a double-bill during the summer, of which the top feature, Ssssssss, was a welcome surprise. The plot is formula stuff--a mad scientist is experimenting with snakes in hopes of crossing them with humans to create a race that will survive the collapse he sees approaching from man's environmental destruction--but Hal Dresner's script lovingly harkens back to the old-time thrillers that kept a keen balance between the serious and the silly and succeeded in making the movie fun in spite of its contrived nature. There are some fine scenes done with real snakes, including a chilling one in which a man is bitten in a shower stall by a black mamba, and John “Apes” Chamber's make-up for the metamorphosed human-to-snake creatures is extraordinarily good for a low-budget programmer. The co-feature, The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, is less good and looks as if it were made for television rather than theatre showings (too many close-ups and stark color schemes in all the interiors).
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Warner Bros. imported the British-made O Lucky Man!, which contained a few scenes of surrealistic fantasy but is another which is difficult to classify. It was, however, a very good film, with a snappy song score and some of the funniest dialogue I've heard all year. Worth seeing for fantasy fans, even if it doesn't quite classify.
Another batch of small pictures, some of which may still be playing throughout the country for the next year or so, rounds out the summer: Hampton International's Naked Evil; New Yorker's Jonathan (a German-made vampire story that has received some of the strangest reviews I've seen on a horror film but hasn't had much playoff yet); Cinepix' Sensuous Sorceress; Entertainment Ventures' The Flesh and Blood Show (“R”-rated junk from a company that usually specializes in “X”-rated junk); MGM's Trader Horn (a very cheap, unbelievably bad remake of a quasi-fantasy jungle adventure); Howco International's The Legend of Boggy Creek (a semi-fiction semi-documentary filmed in Arkansas, if you can believe that); Centaur Releasing's Invasion of the Bee Girls (high sex, low sf); Film Productions' Legacy of Satan and Blood (two rock-bottom cheapies from Gerard Damiano, director of Deep Throat); K-Tel's Mister Superinvisible; Playboy/Universal's The Naked Ape (Desmond Morris should sue!); and Unisphere's The Bride.
Avco-Embassy's Nightwatch, based on Lucille Fletcher's play which was full of more holes than a slice of swiss cheese, was a lushly produced film that couldn't plug the holes up with any more mayonnaise dressing. Elizabeth Taylor has every inflection of the harried heroine role down pat by this time, and she's given class-A assistance by the late Laurence Harvey and Billie Whitelaw in this convoluted but basically quite shallow horror-mystery. Nice to look at but not much to think about.
Going out of the business with a film that almost didn't get produced at all (if you believe author-director Michael Crichton's introduction to the Bantam paperback printing of his screenplay), MGM gave Westworld a clever promotional campaign that helped turn this relatively low-budget sf drama into a money machine. The title indicates one section of a huge and expensive resort playground for the monied class, where the excitement of bygone glories (the wild west, Roman decadence, or medieval splendor) is recreated with intricately programmed robots and elaborate settings. The robots go haywire and fake gunfights (or swordplay, or whatever) turn into real battles in which the human visitors die off quickly--except, of course, for the main character, a clumsy and rather stupid businessman, played in a slightly bored manner by Richard Benjamin. The special effects work was sometimes very clever, and Yul Brynner's stalking gunfighter has a menace that comes across very well. The good moments, however, are much too infrequent and the remainder is so trite, with endless chatter that doesn't progress the plot by even a millimeter, that any sf fan is bound to be saddened to see such workable potential reduced by bad editing to throwaway trivia. It's like re-reading all those old pulp magazines and seeing terrific ideas demolished by inept writers who played formula then played out as nobodies. Very sad.
MGM had one more film scheduled, Nightmare Honeymoon, but it never got into release under the MGM moniker, and may appear next year from United Artists (unless it ends up sold directly to television, a strong possibility).
Paramount's Tales That Witness Madness is yet another multi-episode thriller from England. Written by Jay Fairbank--a pseudonym for actress Jennifer Jayne, according to Variety--the film recounts the stories of four inmates of a mental institution, each one a bit sillier than the one before, until we reach the concluding episode featuring a pudgy Kim Novak (her worst acting ever in an already undistinguished career) as a middleaged (?) mother of a teenage (??) daughter who ends up a virgin (???) sacrifice, her flesh served to guests invited to the mother's backyard luau. Production values are good, but the director is again film hackmaster Freddie Francis, and if the script doesn't work Francis is the least likely one to cover it.
Cinerama's Doctor Death: Seeker of Souls received a couple of passable reviews from the trade press, but I haven't seen a trace of it anywhere (must be still hiding out in the small towns, where audiences aren't so demanding?). Capital's Luana, another jungle fantasy about a young female Tarzan-like character, had a quick playoff here and I missed it also (you can read a novelization written by Alan Dean Foster and published by Ballantine if you're a sucker for this kind of thrill). Cinerama's Arnold is a horror-suspense-comedy that's doing big business in the boonies but is reportedly even worse than you could expect. And Cinerama's The Pyx is yet another Canadian-made feature, with the added box-office draw of Karen Black in the role of a prostitute whose downhill ride on sex and drugs turns deadly when she becomes involved with a satan-worshipping cult. The film is an uneven mixture, marred by aimless sequences that try to mask a thin plot, but at times interesting for the nifty performances of Black and Christopher Plummer and a stimulating use of the flashback (a difficult technique that receives good treatment here). Another notable asset is a striking medley of songs which Miss Black sings in the background. Sometimes clever, sometimes dull, it just misses being a good picture.
Once more, near year's end, a bumper crop of also-rans: Cinemation's Hunchback of the Morgue; Hallmark Releasing's Don't Look in the Basement; 20th Century Fox's Hex (which has been so elusive that even the trade press is wondering what happened to it); Paragon's The Horrible Sexy Vampire; Entertainment Pyramid's Grave of the Vampire; Media Cinema's The Killing Kind; (starring Ann Sothern and Ruth Roman, directed by horror-suspense expert Curtis Harrington, and shown at last year's Cannes Film Festival but getting a very slow, sparse playoff in the U.S.); AIP's Thriller (another that seems to have disappeared altogether); Sunset International's Terror On Half Moon Street; Unisphere's The House That Cried Murder; Joseph Green's Blade; Diplomat's The Werewolf of Washington (a comedy set in the D.C. area, but the Watergate scandals seem to be hurting rather than helping business on this one); Paramount's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (perhaps one of the most publicized fantasies in years and certainly one of the biggest busts moneywise since the book's popularity didn't carry over to film audiences); and Film-Makers International's The Clones (sf's latest “in” theme, and film which seemed to play every area around the country except mine *sigh*).
The Christmas holidays always brings a flux of “big” films, and this year was no exception. The remarkable part of it was that there were five films of a fantasy or sf slant all within the space of a month, several of them getting the blockbuster type of business that comes along very seldom these days. Warner Bros.' The Exorcist hit like a hurricane, and,as I write this in late spring, the high winds are still blowing a multitude of greenbacks in that studio's direction. William Peter Blatty collected an Oscar for his screen treatment of his own bestselling novel, and the sound technicians were awarded for the superb dubbing that helped the film achieve some of its spectacular aural (not to mention visual) effects.
What is so disheartening about this phenomenon is that none of the people involved in this project (except perhaps the special effects crew) deserved any more than passing mention. Blatty's novel, which was easily seen merely to be a novelized screenplay from the beginning, was a shallow, poorly-written jumble of pretentious religious assertions and flakey characters who are so crudely motivated by Blatty's reach for shock effect that they can never take on motivations of their own.
The shocks are translated to the screen as violently as possible, with young Regan, an actress's daughter who becomes possessed by a demon, spewing a stream of obscenities, engaging in acts of self-degradation, and becoming the agent by which all the other characters confront their own weaknesses. Watching the poor girl vomit, masturbate, and change from a pretty young thing to a vile and hideous monster is probably the cinematic peak of make-up artistry, but this kind of impact can carry a movie only to a visual highpoint. A film that lacks quality in every other aspect is going to have problems being remembered as more than a momentary thrill. The Exorcist will, I believe, be rapidly relegated to no more than a cursory footnote in motion picture history.
Far more successful artistically, despite poor boxoffice response, is Paramount's Don't Look Now, director Nicolas Roeg's assertion that crudity is hardly necessary to provide chills in the horror genre. Smoothly adapted from a workaday Daphne du Maurier short story, Allan Scott and Chris Bryant's screenplay builds the suspense of psychic horror through a cast of characters that reacts believably to the terrors which mount around them toward an incredible pitch. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie deliver polished, cunning performances as a young British couple who have lost their daughter in a tragic drowning accident. While in Venice they meet two sisters, one of whom is a psychic and warns them that they should leave, for danger awaits them in this city. The question is--from where does the danger come? From the sisters themselves? From the visions of his dead daughter that the husband sees scampering through the dark and dingy canals of wintertime Venice? From the wife? The red herrings are almost entirely visual, and Roeg, himself an expert cinematographer, ties the dramatic elements together in visual symbolisms that are delicately crafted and quite possibly the finest example of such symbols ever put on film. By all accounts one of the year's very best films, and one not to be missed.
United Artists' Sleeper is another Woody Allen extravaganza that qualifies as science fiction, for in it Allen is revived in the future after 200 years of cryonics storage (wrapped in tin foil, no less!). Hunted as a renegade by the regulatory government, Allen rushes here and there through a series of escapades that range from hilarious slapstick to frenetic and slapdash verbal humor that slides between literary witticisms and desperate corn with blundering unease. The film has been very popular with both sf fans and general viewers, but it has exactly the same faults that seem to mar all of Allen's feature films--the frenzied pace can only continue so long as the dialogue remains at a stable highpoint, and the dialogue in this film has a tendency to slow to a crawl between the inspired buts of humor. Granted the film has some terrifically funny moments--Allen trying to steal a giant banana, Allen and Diane Keaton in a “sex machine”--but the fun isn't sustained very well, and the picture sinks to the flat tire stage more often than not.
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Avco-Embassy's The Day of the Dolphin is one of those saddening films that you want to like very much and end up not liking much at all. The problems again are with the plot, in which a slow-moving but mildly entertaining tale of a scientist who has made verbal contact with dolphins shifts to an idiotic cloak-and-dagger melodrama in which evil corporate bigwigs use the innocent dolphins in a plan to assassinate the President of the United States. The sinister-doings angle is tepid and destructive, but the film is such a visual treat--director Mike Nichols uses every opportunity to show off the engaging dolphins skimming through the clear blue waters with extraordinary grace, the sense of lovely freedom intensified by George Delerue's hauntingly beautiful music score--that most viewers will be satisfied if they just ignore the story and let their eyes revel in the visual pleasures.
Roger Corman (who once helmed all those Edgar Allan Poe things for AIP) has formed his own company, New World Pictures, which specializes in hard action pictures for saturation bookings around the country. He's made enough money from these programmers to invest in more worthwhile projects, first by importing Ingmar Bergman's excellent Cries and Whispers, and now by purchasing the U.S. release rights to a French-Czechoslovakian co-produced animated fantasy, Fantastic Planet (La Planete Sauvage). Adapted by Rene Laloux (who also directed) and Roland Topor (who designed the visual graphics) from a novel by Stefan Wul (unpublished in the U.S. to my knowledge), the film utilizes a simplistic sf concept in which humans (Oms) are kept as pets by the blue giants (Dagues) of a faraway world. There are wild Oms, too, who live in burrows and fight to survive the carnivorous beasts and plants of this weird planet; and the hero, who is the special pet of a young female giant, runs away to join them, stealing an educational headphone from his master, a device by which the wild Oms gain the needed information to escape and find a world of their own. It's old-fashioned science fiction for anyone with more than neofan knowledge of the genre, but it's good old-fashioned sf, actionful, exciting, bristling with throwaway concepts. The animation is refreshingly different from the Disney-smooth techniques American audiences are accustomed to seeing, the “limited” animation techniques used to distinct advantage, the drawing rough and somewhat hard-edged but not crude, and the muted colors exceptionally fitting. It would be nice to see this same group tackle sf on a more challenging level, but in the meantime this one serves very nicely indeed and is a pleasant, diverting entertainment.
And that's it for 1973. It will be interesting to see if science fiction holds its own in the coming sf award presentation, or if the voters decide to broaden the interpretation of the term “sf” to include some of the superior fantasy films which far outrank the year's science fiction. At the moment the year's strongest contenders seem to be Soylent Green, Sisters, The Legend of Hell House, Westworld, Ssssssss, The Day of the Dolphin, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, Sleeper, and Fantastic Planet. And if I'm not mistaken, it looks to be a very tough race indeed.
1. Clubs.
In 1970, before the world con in Heidelberg, the AST (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Spekulative Thematik) was founded. This is a work group which is interested in sociological SF, and publishes one of the most famous German SF magazines: SCIENCE FICTION TIMES.
At the beginning of 1973, a special new group, the AFPSF (Arbeitskreis für politische Science Fiction), entered the scene. Their stated aims were the analysis of the correlation between politics (Marxism!) and SF, and the promotion of political SF.
Actually, efforts to found the AFPSF began in July, 1972, when they tried to organize themselves, and started publishing an internal discussion magazine called Inter Nos. But the real breakthrough occurred in January, 1973, with the publication of their long-awaited magazine, Zeitgeist (this was available to non-members as well as members).
At the same time as Zeitgeist was published, however, controversies developed among the members, and a few weeks later the group's leaders--Kurt Sterz and Jürgen Elsässer--abandoned the AFPSF. The members who were left tried to save the remnants of their organization. In August (Jürgen Elsässer had returned to the group), in one last attempt to rebel, they adopted a new name: SASL (Sozialistischer Arbeitskreis Spekulative Literatur). Today the AFPSF (or SASL) is nearly forgotten.
2. Conventions.
August, 1973 was also the month for the 18th annual convention of the SFCD (Science Fiction Club Deutschland), which was held in Ulm. It was well covered by the press, a rarity in Germany. (Contrary to the situation in the Anglo-American countries, where SF clubs are much better known to the general public, in Germany SF fans live on the shady side of the public interest--and it's always a unique event when the German press pays any attention to German SF activities.)
To give you an idea of what German fans like, I'll list some of the results of the 1972 fanpoll.
Best German Book of 1972: Einstein's Erben, by Herbert W. Franke. 2nd, Mutantenmilieu, by Uwe Brankner; 3rd, Schule der Atheisten, by Arno Schmidt.
Best Foreign Book of 1972: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. 2nd, Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem; 3rd, Nacht und Schimmel, by Stanislaw Lem.
Best Film of 1972: Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick). 2nd, Slaughterhouse Five (George Roy Hill); 3rd, Andromeda (Robert Wise).
Best Fanzine of 1972: (I'll list all 10 places, since these fanzines may be known to you through Don Miller's reviews of most of them in SOTWJ) 1, Quarber Merkur; 2, Science Fiction Times; 3, Andromeda (SFCD clubzine); 4, Andro-Nachrichten (SFCD clubzine); 5, Magira (FOLLOW zine); 6, Alpha; 7, Munich Round Up (U.S. Agent, Andrew Porter); 8, Story Center (SFCD story mag); 9, Tellus International (SFCD fanzine in English) ; 10, Fanews.
Other categories were: Best Fan Artist, Best Fan Author, Best Music, Best Professional Graphics, and Best Radio Play.
Another convention of note was the comic-con in Berlin. It was held at Easter, and was a disaster, financially and programwise, for the INCOS (Interessengemeinschaft Comic Strip), who had organized the con. The GoH was supposed to be the most famous German comic artist, Hans-Rudi Wäscher (one might say the German comic scene originated with Wäscher some decades ago, with such series of his as Ivanhoe, Sigurd, Lancelot, Marco Polo, etc.). But Wäscher was only in the convention hall for a few hours, and Stan Lee didn't show up at all.
A third major convention was the “Fest der Fantasie”, the annual FOLLOW convention (FOLLOW= Fellowship of the Lords of Wonder, the German Fantasy & Sword-and-Sorcery club). The con was probably no different than S&S cons in the U.S., so I won't devote any more space to it here.
3. Books and Magazines.
There were many new books in 1973, of course including more translations from the U.S. and the U.K. than original German SF.
A major event in the field was the publication of the first in a new series by the German publishing house Pabel: Kenneth Robeson's Doc Savage. This series was first published in the U.S. from to 1933 to 1949, with a new edition started by Bantam Books in 1969. Now, after 40 years, German readers will also be able to follow the adventures of the Man of Bronze.
A second major event was the publication, by Insel Verlag, of Polaris, Ein Science Fiction Almanach. This pocket book is actually a new magazine, equivalent in content to such American magazines as Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vertex, etc. Its first issue combines SF stories, articles on SF (by Robert Plank, Stanislaw Lem, and Franz Rottensteiner), and fantastic art. It is edited by Franz Rottensteiner (who also edits the excellent fanzine Quarber Merkur), will limit itself to the work of European writers, and will appear twice a year.
Finally, Germany now has its own Sword-and-Sorcery pulp series--called Dragon. After the thrilling Conan series and the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Fantasy literature has gained many more readers in Germany.
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4. Fanzines.
I am always astounded to see how large a number of fanzines is being published in Germany. I am already familiar with 56 titles, and I wonder how many more there may be that I don't know about. I think that's a lot for a country such as Germany, where SF plays such a small role in relation to the U.S.
Most fans who have been in fandom a while naturally devote their attention to such major 'zines as Quarber Merkur, Science Fiction Times, Munich Round Up, and the like. Those fanzines which are new and have only only a small print run are usually read only by the younger fans.
However, in October, 1972, a newcomer appeared on the scene, and received quick acceptance by fandom. In January 1973, when the second issue was published, it already had established a strong position among the German fanzines. I'm talking about Vampir, a magazine for those with an interest in science fiction and horror films. You can find out more about this marvelous 'zine by reading the reviews of it appearing in SOTWJ.
Another important new German fanzine is Clutch Blood (that appears to be a nonsensical title, but if you speak German you will realize that the title is pronounced like the German word “Klatschblatt”, which in English means “tittle-tattle paper”). Perhaps Clutch Blood is a new attempt to make German fandom more fannish than it is now. In the early years of German fandom, fanzines like this one were spread all over the country. Clutch Blood contains only articles and LoCs on fannish matters, and has an unusually large number of fans contributing to it.
5. Films.
Especially noteworthy among the films released in Germany during 1973 were Welt am Draht (Simulachron 2), produced by Rainer Warner Fass binder, and based upon the novel by Daniel F. Galouye; Ben (which picks up where Willard ended...); Tales from the Crypt (with Peter Cushing); Die Nacht der reitenden Leichen (one of the best horror films I've ever seen); and Andy Warhol's Dracula (I think Warhol has since made better films).
Note that I listed four horror films, but only one SF film (which appeared on TV; the other four were shown in the movies). In Germany good SF films are very rare, but horror films (most of them miserable, of course) can be seen every day.
6. SF in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
The first convention of SF fans in the GDR took place in Halle, in late August. Three authors were present: Gunther Kruphat, Carlos Rasch (who will be the GoH at the next SFCD con in Letmathe--August 2-5, 1974), and Mr. Rank (Sorry--don't know his first name). Also present were some “Kulturfunktionäre”: a professional reader and the scientist of literature Sckerl. For the fans, the convention was a big disappointment. The convention goal of providing a basis for future cooperation between all persons with an interest in SF who are living in the GDR was not reached.
1. Three Major Events.
The leading story in Japanese SF in 1973 is the phenomenal sales record of Nippon Chimbotsu (Submersion of Japan), written by Sakyo Komatsu (b. 1931), and published by Kobun-sha. This novel was released in March, 1973, and topped the best-seller lists for the year with an astonishing sale of nearly 4,000,000 copies (2,000,000 each of Volumes 1 and 2). [[I would suspect that this might be the largest sales figure for a proper (or rather, hard) science fiction story-not just for Japan, but for anyplace in the world.] A film adapted from the novel by Toho-Eiga Co. was released in December; it was also very successful.
Nippon Chimbotsu begins with a series of natural convulsions (earthquakes, explosions of dead volcanoes, etc.), and famous geophysicist Dr. Tadokoro and his research team predict that the whole
of Japan will have sunk within a year or two. The author's explanation of the phenomena in the story is very scientific (it is based on the latest theory of “mantle conversion”); his descriptions of phenomena and the activities of research groups, etc., are all very vivid, and are supported by his broad knowledge. But he says that his main purpose was to focus on the difficult escape of the approximately 100,000,000 people in the doomed country, rather than on the scientific background of the phenomena--and the story is also a serious political novel which illustrates very complex interrelationships between many countries.
At the end of the story, when all of Japan is under the sea and some 70,000,000 people have been rescued, instead of “The End” the author wrote “The End of the First Part” which indicated that he is going to continue the novel, telling about the wanderings of the homeless groups of Japanese in strange lands and through many eras.
Another major news item is that San-Rei-Zan Hiroku (A Hidden History of the “Hi” Tribe), written by Ryo Hammura (b. 1933) and published by Hayakawa-shobo, won the first “Izumi-Kyoka Literary Award” (a newly established award somewhat interested in fantasies). This was the first time any SF author has been given a mainstream literary award in Japan. The story is about a fictitious old superhuman group (or family), which--unknown to the Japanese--greatly influenced the history of their nation. The author made his debut in 1963 in a story contest promoted by Hayakawa-shobo, and after several years of obscurity, started writing very actively in 1970, showing a high degree of skill in story-telling.
The third major event in Japanese SF in 1973 is the appearance in bookstores in December of a new SF prozine named Kiso-Tengai (Fantastic). Published by Seiko-sha, it contains both SF and mystery stories (all translations), plus some original articles and other non-fiction items, and the official date of publication of the first issue (as printed in the magazine) is January 1974. The 'zine is published monthly, and I hear that it is selling well.
This is only Japan's second SF prozine. The first, named SF-Magazine and published by Hayakawa-shobo, has been published since 1960.
2. Authors.
Shin'ichi Hoshi (b. 1926), ranked side-by-side with Sakyo Komatsu as an SF author, had two hardcover collections published during 1973. He mainly writes short stories, and is a sort of Japanese version of Ray Bradbury, except that his writing is characterized by an elegant sense of fable rather than poesy. (Sakyo Komatsu is the Japanese counterpart of Robert Heinlein.)
Yasutaka Tsutsui (b. 1934), who closely follows Hoshi and Komatsu in popularity, is cultivating his own field --, a slapstick-style fantasy with sharp criticisms of humanity and human society. The number of hardcover books he has had published reached 20 in 1973, and most of them are best sellers. His most recent book is the collection Nokyo Tsuki e Iku (“Nokyo” on the Moon). [“Nokyo” is a rich Japanese farmers' union.]
Kazumase Hirai (b. 1938) recently took a big step, with his new hero the Wolf Guy. This is a sort of werewolf, and is in Hirai's popular action series.
Koichi Yamano (b. 1939), whose first book, Take the X-Train (a collection), was published in 1965, has been busy advancing his own literary movement in Japanese SF, as the leader of the “New Wave” writers in Japan.
Ichiro Kano (b. 1928), a noted mystery writer, has had his first straight SF story, Musei Shudan (The Fallen Race), published in 1973. It deals with the human race at about the year 2300 A.D., at a time when humanity has been greatly reduced in numbers because only a few of its members still have the ability to reproduce.
In addition to the above-named seven, we also have the following active (full-time) SF writers in Japan: Ryu Mitsuse (b. 1925), Taku Mayamura (b. 1934), Aritsune Toyota (b. 1938), Tsutomu Miyazaki (b. 1932), Masami Fukushima (b. 1929), and Takashi Ishikawa (b. 1930). And a few semi-professional writers such as Fujio Ishihara (b. 1933) and Shozo Tokura (b. 1925) are also active.
3. Publishing Activity.
A new bimonthly magazine, Genso To Kaiki (Fantasy and Horror) appeared in April, 1973. It had five issues out by the end of the year.
As for books, around 160 were published in 1973 (about ¼ of them in hardback)--although the borderline between SF and non-SF is quite vague, so I cannot give an exact figure. About two-thirds of the books published were translations.
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Hayakawa SF Series, which started in 1957, reached 300 volumes during 1973, although its pace has slowed down somewhat. Notable among its 1973 releases are Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and McCaffrey's Dragonflight.
Hayakawa SF Bunko (a small paperback series), which started in 1970, passed the 130-volume mark, with such releases as Dune and Farmer's The Maker of the Universe particularly welcome among its 1973 titles.
The SF line of Sogen Suiri Bunko (another small paperback series), which initiated in 1963, reached 150 titles during 1973, with the Conan series and Leiber's The Wanderer especially noteworthy.
Notable releases by the general publishers are Michael Crichton's Terminal Man, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and Jack Finney's Time and Again from Hayakawa-shobo; W.P. Bratty's Exorcist from Kodansha; and Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiada, from Shuei-sha. (The last-named book has been highly praised by Japanese literary critics.)
Most active translators during 1973 were Tetsu Yano, Hisashi Asakura, and Masahiro Noda.
4. Fandom.
During 1973 I received more than 200 fanzines, published by around 60 fans and fan groups in Japan. Some of the 'zines are printed, some hand-mimeoed; some have been published continuously for more than 10 years, some saw just one issue and then vanished. Most are genzines, with the others devoted to a single author, or specialized in a particular area such as horror, news, comics, etc. And some contain both SF and non-SF stories and articles.
The most highly regarded fa