But first I've got to mention Emsh's cover for this issue of Science Fiction Adventures--it is one of the most beautiful covers I have ever seen! The colors are terrific, and the female figure with the long neck, long fingers, long hair and big eyes, pictured at such a striking angle, is mesmerizing. Even if the stories we read today are no good, Emsh has rendered this publication an immortal classic!
"Valley Beyond Time" by Robert Silverberg
"Valley Beyond Time" is one of those stories in which people are magically transported to a strange environment by a god-like entity and squabble among themselves in a way that the author intends will address philosophical issues. The bulk of the story is acceptable filler stuff, kind of repetitive and a little boring but not exactly bad. But then comes the abrupt ending, an ending which is annoying and serves as the straw that broke the thoat's back. Gotta give "Valley Beyond Time" a marginal negative grade.
It is the 27th century; mankind has colonized numerous planets and has dealings with a bunch of alien races. Our main character Thornhill is 37, an engineer born on Earth who now owns a mine on a colony planet. One day he wakes up in a beautiful valley on some other planet with no memory of his real life--he thinks he has lived his entire life here. Some other people hail him and explain the situation and his memory returns in an hour or so. Why did Silverberg include the lost memory jazz if the guy was going to get his memory back two pages later?
There are nine people in the Valley. All were teleported here while going about their normal business. The natural leader of the group is a short man who is a big game hunter, an outgoing type who is determined to escape the valley. There is a forcefield blocking the easy route out of the valley, and the mountains to either side of the valley are steep, so the hunter has his work cut out for him. Other obstacles include the fact that the immaterial being that brought them here and calls itself "the Watcher" informs the internees that if any one of them gets out of the Valley, all nine of them will have to leave, and some of the internees don't want to leave. Most prominent of those satisfied with life in the Valley is an aged academic, an Earth man who was living on Mars so his weak heart could take advantage of the lower gravity; he wants to stay in the Valley because here he feels perfectly healthy. In fact, when a big strong guy punches him and kills him, the academic comes back to life in a few minutes--others watch as his wounds heal miraculously in moments.
Among the nine is a beautiful girl astronomer and she and engineer Thornhill almost at once become an item. The bulk of "Valley Beyond Time" is like a wish fulfillment fantasy for the kind of nerds who read SF magazines in the Fifties--without any effort on your own part you get sent to a place where you can't get sick or get killed, and in hours you are snuggling up to a hot chick who--just like you!--is interested in science! Of course, Silverberg introduces the typical SF theme that utopian life is not what it is cracked up to be, that if life is too easy, if there are no obstacles and goals, life becomes unsatisfying--the people in the Valley don't even have to hunt and gather food, nourishment just falls from the sky three times a day! The people in the Valley are not living the lives of real men and women, but of pets, the pets of the Watcher. The elderly academic certainly prefers the life of a pet to death as a man, especially when he hits it off with the other human woman among the nine, and Thornhill and the astronomer, who worked hard all day at stressful jobs back in real life, seriously consider whether this life as a pet is better than holding responsible positions back in the real world.
One reason I am giving "Valley Beyond Time" a negative review is that Silverberg introduces all kinds of elements and then doesn't exploit them profitably, just dispenses with them perfunctorily. There are nine people in the Valley, but the three nonhumans and the woman who gets involved with the academic don't do much of anything, don't have personalities. Conflict is introduced among some of these various characters and then just waved away when the plot needs to move forward. Why didn't Silverberg just cut some of these figures in a later revision? Did he (like Harlan Ellison, in an interview in the December 1981 issue of Twilight Zone magazine claims he did) not bother to revise his stories, just write them as he went along and then send a first draft off to the editor?
You'd expect the philosophical core of the story to be the issue of whether life as a pet or child is preferable to life as a responsible adult. In real life, living on public assistance in public housing, or in your mother's basement, has its attractions, so the choice has some tension, the issue has some ambiguity. Silverberg's story starts out with such ambiguity, but doesn't maintain it, instead Silverberg quickly adds new factors that make the decision a "no-brainer" and the academic and his squeeze do a 180 and Thornhill and the astronomer climb off the fence. You see, when Thornhill and the astronomer declare their love for each other, they find they can't have sex! (Silverberg is a little cagey about describing what happens, saying "It was then when Thornhill discovered that sex was impossible in the Valley. He felt no desire, no tingling of need, nothing.") And when the pets realize they are growing younger, there is the fear they will be reduced to infancy. So all nine internees agree to climb a mountain in an effort to escape the Valley.
At the top of the mountain, for some reason, the Watcher appears, and it isn't immaterial at all, but a sort of serpentine or vermiform creature with a helmet that gives it psychic powers. In a way I didn't catch, the big game hunter is able to grab the Watcher, when before the Watcher seemed to just fly around at will in a gaseous form. It was also unclear to me why the Watcher, who earlier in the story used its psychic powers to pacify the humans when they got violent, allowed itself to be grappled and slain by the humans. I also didn't understand why the death of the Watcher and the wreck of its helmet didn't strand the people in the Valley but instead led to them being teleported back, safe and sound, to the time and place from which they had been plucked.
Draining his story of any possible mystery or tragedy, Silverberg has Thornhill telephone the astronomer, who lives in another star system, and she agrees to join him at his mine; if she wants to maintain her career, Thornhill is wealthy enough to build her an observatory right there at the mining colony. Every single time something bad can happen to any of the nine characters, every single time they might have to make a hard choice or make a sacrifice or suffer from a mistake, Silverberg pulls their feet out of the fire. Not good.
"Earth Shall Live Again" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)
Navarre returns to the planet of his birth after a year away. Silverberg gives us more info on the history of this planet and Navarre's own family than he did in episode 1. That Vegan advisor has apparently turned the king whom Navarre closely served against Navarre, and the planet is essentially ruled by this Vegan, less gently and efficiently than it was when Navarre had the king's ear. Navarre knows all the secret doors around the palace, so is able to get to the king despite the Vegan's prohibitions. Navarre finds the king practically a prisoner--the Vegan is almost dictator of the planet! The king is happy to see Navarre, hopes Navarre will help him regain power from the Vegan, but the clever Vegan appears and he has proof that Navarre hopes to reconstruct the Terran Empire with the ten thousand humans he revived when he found them on Earth. So Navarre winds up in the dungeon.
Navarre tricks a guard into giving him his blaster and Navarre blasts his way out of the dungeon. Then he mugs and bribes people in order to disguise himself as a non-human (remember, he is the only human on the planet.) Navarre manages to bluff his way onto a space liner and off the planet--he has to do something to protect the humans he revived because that the Vegan is on to their scheme to restore the human hegemony of one hundred thousand years ago and is sending a war fleet to take care of them.
Navarre rejoins the half-breed and the beautiful woman who were his comrades in the quest to find Earth in "The Chalice of Death." The woman is the advisor to the king of another planet, and she wangles Navarre a position as admiral in the planet's space navy and command of three warships. The two pure-blood humans discover that their half-breed buddy has betrayed them to the Vegan, told the Vegan where Earth is. Navarre guns down the biracial traitor and takes his three ships to the system of Sol, where he ambushes and easily captures the three ships sent by the Vegan. The aliens crewing the six ships are imprisoned and replaced with revived humans--these six vessels will form the nucleus of the force which will, Navarre hopes, regain for Earthmen control of the universe.
"Earth Shall Live Again" feels like weak filler. The espionage and action material feels pedestrian and banal, sometimes even silly; the characters lack personality and you don't care about them; and Silverberg makes little mistakes like using "galaxy" to mean "universe" sometimes but other times making it clear that the characters are travelling between or among different galaxies. The only real suspense the story generates is by making the reader wonder if Silverberg is going to ultimately endorse Earthman dominance over non-human races, or at the last moment reveal that the Earth empire was bad and rebuilding it is immoral or a mistake; throughout the entire story humans are shown to be superior to nonhumans, but at times Navarre acts pretty violently and ruthlessly. I keep wondering what exactly Silverberg's models for the humans in the story are--are they like the Jews of the Diaspora rebuilding Israel, or like Romans or Englishmen rebuilding the Pax Romana or the Pax Britannica?
I'm afraid I have to give "Earth Shall Live Again" a thumbs down; Silverberg just doesn't bring to this adventure/espionage material the kind of style or passion that people like Jack Vance, Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett do.
"Captain Bedlam" by Harry Harrison
My fears were unfounded--this is no joke story. "Captain Bedlam" is in the long tradition of elitist SF stories in which a tiny faction of members of the cognitive elite put one over on the common run of humanity and in the tradition of pessimistic SF stories that suggest man is not fit for space, that going beyond Earth's atmosphere will kill you or drive you insane tout suite. I'm not sympathetic to these attitudes, but Harrison employs them to produce an effective story full of SF speculations and human drama. Thumbs up!
Mankind has established installations on other planets within the solar system. His whole life, young Jon has been fascinated by space and wanted to be a space pilot. He gets into the space crew training program, and is one of the tiny minority of students smart enough and independent-minded enough to recognize that the picture of space the establishment has been giving the public, even the thousands of staff who actually maintain space ships, is bogus! Exposure to radiation, lack of gravity, and a score of other pervasive phenomena up in space make people insane and thus render them unable to pilot a space ship! So how are all these ships flying between Earth, the moon, and Mars? The government takes the finest physical and intellectual specimens of humanity and induces a split-personality disorder in them! The new personality is carefully tailored to accept all the maddening conditions of space and vigorously trained to have perfect focus, super strength, super reflexes, etc. This second personality only emerges upon entering the cockpit of a spaceship, and the two personalities share zero memories. A pilot feels like he steps into the cockpit and then immediately out of it at his destination, but he has to talk to normies as if he remembers the entire flight.
We follow Jon as he is trained and graduates--Harrison does a good job making this believable and interesting while maintaining a strong human angle. (According to wikipedia, Harrison himself served as a gunnery instructor in World War II and this experience perhaps contributes to his depiction.) Harrison also skillfully handles the adventure and sense-of-wonder climax, when, on a trip to one of Jupiter's moons, the furthest journey an Earth ship has ever attempted, a meteorite strikes the ship and Jon wakes up during the flight, injured. Jon's normal personality, his second super personality, and a third emergency personality, must work in succession to save Jon's life, the life of the frozen scientists aboard, and the mission and ship.
"Captain Bedlam" is very good--economical, exciting, full of cool speculations and human emotion. A real relief after Silverberg's two mundane and even shoddy contributions.
John Carnell reprinted "Captain Bedlam" in a 1958 issue of New Worlds, and the story has reappeared in multiple Harrison collections.
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I can't deny that my look at this magazine has been a disappointment, but Emsh with the cover and interior illos for "Valley Beyond Time" (the astronomer and aliens look great) and Harrison with "Captain Bedlam" do masterful work and remind us of the potential of SF to captivate and arouse excitement in the reader.
Next time we'll look at the third and final episode of Silverberg's "Lest We Forget Thee, Earth"/"Chalice of Death" series and some of the stories that were printed alongside it in the March '58 ish of Science Fiction Adventures.
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