Book Review: Alternities

Book Review: 'Alternities' by Michael Kube-McDowell

 3 / 5 Stars

It’s August 21, 1966, and in an alternate universe, in an alternate United States, in an alternate Philadelphia, Senator Walter Endicott is sitting in his suite at the Bellevue Stratford hotel, waiting for a visit from a call girl. Suddenly the lights in his suite dim and go out. Endicott opens the door and sees a faint, greenish glow at the end of the darkened hallway. But as he walks towards it, he encounters a maze of some kind, constructed out of the darkness and seething with alien energies.

When Endicott finally reaches a closed door, opens it, and steps through, he finds himself in an abandoned hotel. Emerging into the street outside, he is astonished to discover he is in Boston, outside the Cambridge Hotel. But even though it’s August 22, 1966, it’s not his Boston…..for the copy of the Globe in the corner newspaper vending box has the Cleveland Indians beating the New York Yankees in a game that, in Endicott's Boston, has yet to be played…..

Not one to pass up a chance for personal gain, Endicott decides to take up residence in this ‘alternity’, a parallel world where the people and places may have the same names, but history has taken a slightly different course. Using his knowledge of the existence of the wormhole that leads to at least six other ‘alternities’, Endicott is able to place himself in power in the political structure of what has become the ‘Home Alternity’.

It’s now the Fall of 1976, and President Peter Robinson confronts an aggressive Soviet Union, a Soviet Union with greater military, economic, and political power than his United States can muster. The technological secrets plundered from the other alternities by teams of ‘moles’ and ‘runners’ are helping the US gain on the Soviets, but not fast enough to suit Robinson. But with the closely-held knowledge that he and his aides can escape to another existence in a parallel world, a kind of 'ultimate' fallout shelter, he realizes he may not have to wait decades for ascendancy over the hated enemy. 

Robinson embarks on a campaign of covert military action against the Soviet Bloc, aware that if things lead to a nuclear war, the rest of the country can burn while he and his cronies escape to start over in a different universe……..

I picked up ‘Alternities’ (Ace Books, 383 pp.) back when it first was published in October 1988, but gave up after the first 75 pages, bored by its deliberate pacing. I recently decided to give it another try and did indeed finish it.

The narrative revolves around three major characters: the cunning and amoral Senator Endicott; the megalomaniacal President Peter Robinson; and Rayne Wallace, a ‘runner’ who travels the maze between worlds, retrieving goods and information from teams covertly operating in the unsuspecting host alternities.

This novel is not so much an SF work as it is a political thriller, one with a deliberately darker and more cynical take on Cold War conflicts than the Tom Clancy novels of the 1980s, such as ‘’Red Storm Rising’. The presence of the alternities is used not so much to expound on deep themes of physics or cosmology, but mainly as a plot a device by which author Kube-McDowell can engage in ‘what if’ scenarios about US / Soviet brinksmanship. In this regard, the book works rather well.

Where ‘Alternities’ loses steam is in the chapters dealing with the adventures of Rayne Wallace, who uses his access to a given alternity - where he never existed - to befriend the doppelganger of a former girlfriend. These sections of the novel, as well as those dealing with Wallace’s strained marriage and family life in his Home alternity, tend to be steeped in emotionally burdened prose and can grow tiresome.

Overall, however, ‘Alternities’ remains a good alternate world novel, superior in many ways to the rote entries in this genre churned out by Harry Turtledove. While the plot at times tends to lose momentum over the span of the book’s 383 pages, the resolution of the crisis of the Alternities is ably handled by author Kube-McDowell. Readers interested in an alt-history tale that explores Cold War themes may want to give this novel a try.

Fever by Halmos

'Fever' by Halmos

from the August 1977 issue of Heavy Metal

Featuring outstanding pen-and-ink artistry, a moldering corpse, a vomiting girl, and a gruesome sword stroke, this wordless six-page comic from the August 1977 issue of HM is one of the better strips to appear in the first year of the magazine's publication. 

Unfortunately, a Google search for 'Halmos' turns up very little information about this artist and whether his or her collected graphic art is available in single volume compilation(s).

Book Review: Weird Heroes No. 1

Book Review: 'Weird Heroes' No. 1, edited by Byron Preiss

1 / 5 Stars

By 1975 the Nostalgia Craze that had been started by the release of the film Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 had come to be a dominant component of American popular culture. 

The time was right for editor and author Byron Preiss to pitch an idea to Pyramid Books: create a lineage of paperbacks designed to mimic the format and content of the old-style pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s.

‘Weird Heroes’ (1975, 256 pp.) was the first of eight volumes that saw print between 1975 and 1977; numbers 1-2, 5 and 8 were anthologies, while the remaining numbers contained a single novel. 

The ‘Weird Heroes’ format provided numerous black and white or halftone illustrations with each volume, in keeping with the concept of the pulp magazine layout.

In his Introduction to the first volume, Preiss makes some decidedly pious remarks about avoiding the inclusion of tales featuring overly violent or sexual content, having in mind the men’s action paperbacks that were bestselling outlets for fiction in the 70s: The Executioner, The Destroyer, The Penetrator, etc. ‘Weird Heroes’, he tells us, is designed to showcase tales that evoke the clean, wholesome fun of the pulps. 

Unfortunately, Preiss winds up being too contrived in his selection of stories, and the end result is an anthology concept that, in my opinion, misses the mark.

‘Weird Heroes’ starts with a short story by the omnipresent Ron Goulart (Goulart contributes the novel that occupies Weird Heroes #3, as well as a story to Weird Heroes #6). Gypsy, the lead character, is a hip time traveler who arrives in a dystopian London of 2033. It’s not as bad as Goulart’s other efforts at humorous sci-fi, but that’s not really saying much.

Comics writer Archie Goodwin contributes ‘Stalker: the Darkstar File’, featuring a ‘half-breed’ Indian counterculture hero, modeled to a large extent on ‘Billy Jack’ (albeit with longer hair). 

With its plotting and prose style adhering pretty closely to the traditional detective story template, ‘Stalker’ is the best entry in the anthology. It provides an interesting look at a portion of the Sun Belt (Oklahoma) at a time when that region of the US was starting to ascend to a more prominent role in the nation's economic and political arenas.

Editor Preiss provides ‘Guts’, the worst story in the collection. Preiss decides to take The Fonz, makes him not an American Jew (i.e., Henry Winkler) but an Israeli Jew (named Mark Gutstein), and sends him back in time to 1976 to prevent Manhattan from being immolated by ‘radiofrenetic material’. 

It’s bad enough to base a story on a greaser spouting 50s hipster patter, but Preiss compounds the awfulness by using every Burroughsian, New Wave SF prose contrivance he can think of: chunks of text written in ALL CAPS, pages of dialogue that shift without context from the first- to the third-person POV, scattered epigrams in Hebrew, outrageously arty metaphors (‘Cocoa krispies scream under the pressure of Barrie’s spoon…’) etc., etc.

‘Rose in the Sunshine State’, by JoAnn Kobin, first saw print in 1974 in a feminist literary magazine (?!) titled Aphra. Including ‘Rose’ in ‘Weird Heroes’, editor Preiss solemnly tells us in his Introduction to the story, fits in with the offbeat theme of the anthology and allows for depiction of a hero over 50 years of age. 

‘Rose’ is the depressing tale of a 68 year-old woman who lives with her husband, and other Jewish retirees, in a ‘active seniors community’ in Miami. The narrative focuses on the psychology of pending mortality among the aged and infirm. The story is well-written, and I imagine fans of Old Jewish Lady Fiction (think Tille Olsen and ‘Tell Me A Riddle’) will like it, but having ‘Rose’ in ‘Weird Heroes’ is so contrived as to torpedo the whole concept of a pulp-hero inspired anthology.

The next entry in the lineup (and an interlude from fiction pieces), is an interview with Fritz Leiber, conducted by editor Preiss, and focusing on the old pulps. Leiber is less than overwhelmed with nostalgia over the whole pulp era, something that appears to leave Preiss a bit nonplussed.

The final story in the book is Philip Jose Farmer’s ‘Greatheart Silver in: Showdown at Shootout’, an overwhelmingly camped-up story about a former airship pilot who becomes a private detective after being shot down by ‘The Mad Fokker’ (titter). 

Greatheart Silver teams up with an elderly incarnation of 'The Shadow' and journeys to Tombstone, Arizona, for the final battle between armies of elderly pulp heroes and villains, all identified with cutesy pseudonyms (e.g., ‘Doc Ravage’, ‘Chimp’, and ‘Porkchop’). Farmer so overdoes his approach to ‘Greatheart’ that the story winds up sinking under the weight of its own smarminess.

‘Weird Heroes’ has very nice illustrations by Alex Nino, Sternako, Dan Sheridan, and Tom  Sutton.

The verdict ? ‘Weird Heroes’ has an interesting concept, but Preiss fails to do much with his editorial status, choosing to go with a mostly bland and unremarkable collection of stories. I’ll have to see if ‘Heroes’ # 2 improves on things, but I'm not holding my breath…..

Epic Illustrated Summer 1980

'Epic Illustrated', Summer 1980

The second issue of Marvel’s ‘Epic Illustrated’ is the Summer 1980 issue and features a cover illustration by Richard Corben. 

This issue provides a Letters column; not surprisingly, many writers reference ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine, and Archie Goodwin exhibits some testiness in his responses to these letters, arguing that he and Stan Lee “…have our own distinct editorial tastes and points of view”, and that “I don’t believe the two magazines will ever be so similar that one will cancel the other out….If you want to feel that Epic is better (than Heavy Metal), we’re not about to talk you out of it.” 

This issue features a lengthy first installment of R.E. Howard’s ‘Almuric’, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Tim Conrad. It’s not a bad strip. ‘Monkey See’, by Steve Bisette and Rick Veitch, deals with trigger-happy teens on an otherworldy fishing trip. 

Mimicking Heavy Metal’s use of topical columns during the Ted White editorial years, there is an interesting text feature on ‘Fantasy and the fantastic in European comics’ by Maurice Horn.

Jim Starlin’s self-indulgent ‘Metamorphosis Odyssey’ continues. ‘Killraven’ artist P. Craig Russell provides ‘Siegfried and the Dragon’, with some distinctive colors and skillfull penciling.

There is an interview with TV producer Glan A. Larson about the ‘Buck Rogers’ show, and a black and white strip titled ‘Tarn’s World’ by Robert Wakelin; good artwork, but an underwhelming script by Archie Goodwin.

One of the better pieces in this issue is the low-key ‘Seven Moon’s Light (Casts Complex Shadows)’, an adaptation of the Samuel Delany story by Howard Chaykin. I’ve posted it below.

'Gamma Point 3' by Sergio Macedo

from the compilation 'Psychorock'

During the  first few years of Heavy Metal magazine's existence (1977 - 1979), some of the best artwork was that done by the Brazilian artist Sergio Macedo (b. 1951). His initial pieces were primarily black and white strips, but in 1979 he produced the serial feature 'Telefield' (aka 'Telechamp').

Whether in black and white or color, Macedo's meticulous artwork has a distinctive style that incorporates the visual imagery associated with Buddhism and TM, along with that of bikers and punk culture. It's an offbeat mix, but when you throw in lots of nudity, it becomes something the stoner readership of HM eagerly embraced.

The large-format paperback 'Psychorock' was released by Heavy Metal Books in 1977; this is a compilation of  5 of Macedo's b & w Metal Hurlant strips from the late 70s.

Posted below is 'Gamma Point 3'

Richard Corben interview from Heavy Metal part two

Richard Corben interview Part II

from the July 1981 issue of Heavy Metal

After unsuccessfully trying to establish that Corben's artwork somehow is a reflection of a unique state of deviancy or neurosis, Heavy Metal interviewer Brad Balfour drops the amateur psychoanalysis, and focuses the interview (as he should have done from the start) on Corben's life as an artist. 

There are some interesting observations concerning Corben's reception by the underground comix practitioners of the late 60s and early 70s.....

'The Experiment' by Justo Jimeno

from the Spring 1986 issue of Heavy Metal magazine

Heavy Metal magazine ran into difficulties in 1986. 

The magazine adopted a quarterly publication schedule, with Editor-in-Chief Julie Lynch declaring the change was expressly designed to provide readers with a longer-length magazine with 3 - 4 complete stories in each issue, as opposed to the previous philosophy of running stories in monthly installments. 

This may have been true, or it may simply have been a way of putting a brave face on the reality of decreasing circulation.

By 1986 mainstream color comics were exploding in terms of titles and circulation, a phenomenon aided and abetted by the arival of dedicated comic shops. 

These shops served as comic book-centered brick-and-mortar retail outlets, replacing the five-and-dime and drugstore outlets that, up until the 80s, were the primary retail outlets for comic books. 

Significantly, the existence of these shops also meant that non-Code approved books had a ready sales outlet perfectly timed to exploit the advent of a large demographic of comic book purchasers over 21. 

Soon, the more 'adult' or 'mature' material that had been the sole playground of the Warren magazines, Heavy Metal, and Epic Illustrated, was flowing from myriad color comic books issued not only from the major publishers, but from an ever-expanding list of indie publishers. Stoners and emerging blocs of fanboys no longer had to spend 3 to 5 dollars for an issue of Heavy Metal or Creepy for their T&A; they could get it for $1.25 or less from a non-Code approved comic book.

Still, some good, shorter-length material did continue to appear in Heavy Metal, albeit more sporadically. Among the more memorable pieces was this creepy proto-Steampunk story, featuring outstanding artwork from the talented Spanish artist Justo Jimeno Bazaga. 

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review: A Spaceship for the King

Book Review: 'A Spaceship for the King' by Jerry Pournelle

4 / 5 Stars 

‘A Spaceship for the King’ first was serialized in Analog in the Winter of 1971 - 1972. A revised version was published by DAW, as Book No. 42 (157 pp.), in February 1973. The cover artwork is by Kelly Freas.

Subsequent printings of the novel by Orbit, Simon and Schuster, Pocket Books, and Baen, used the title 'King David's Spaceship'. 

After engaging in internecine warfare for centuries, the Galactic Empire emerges victorious but badly depleted. Re-establishing its hegemony over the various colony worlds scattered around the galaxy will have to be done on the cheap. Accordingly, individual destroyers are sent out to convince those planets unenthused about re-joining the Empire…. and paying taxes…of the error of their ways. Only those planets with starflight capability are immune from coercion, as the Empire has no desire to battle any forces with a technological capacity equal to its own.

On Prince Samual’s World, the arrival of an Imperial destroyer causes consternation. For centuries the citizens of Samual’s World, where the technology is at a level similar to that of Central Europe ca.1950, have occupied themselves with various Ruritanian wars and intrigues. At first they resist the Imperial force, but after several of their cities and armies are burned to cinders by the orbiting destroyer, they have no choice but to submit to the Empire.

King David the Ninth, the ruler of Samual’s World, is ill disposed to seeing his planet become a  vassal to the distant Empire. There is one loophole that he can exploit: any planet possessing spaceflight is granted a measure of independence from Imperial rule. But how can Samual’s World build a functioning starship when the Empire carefully restricts access to advanced technology ? 

The answer: on the planet Makassar, now descended into barbarity and anarchy, stands a Temple with a library filled with data records from Old Earth – including records on how to construct a starship.

Former colonel Nathan MacKinnie finds himself the lead agent on a desperate mission for King David: under the guise of a Trader, MacKinnie is to board an Imperial Trading Association starship heading to Makassar. Once on Makassar, MacKinnie is to locate the Temple and gain the library records that will lead to freedom for Prince Samual’s World.

But the mission will not be easy. The Empire has no interest in sending an escort to protect a group of traders and merchants on a backwater planet like Makassar. It will fall to MacKinnie to make his own way through pirate fleets and barbarian hordes to the Temple…and once there, he has to convince the ruling aristocracy to let him have access to the sacred records no off-worlder is allowed to see….

‘A Spaceship for the King’ is a well-written, solid SF adventure with a military bent. Author Pournelle has tended to be overlooked by the SF establishment at large, primarily because of his libertarian / conservative political attitudes and the decidedly commercial nature of much of his fiction (Pournelle, along with longtime co-author Larry Niven, never embraced the New Wave ethos or its creed of Art before Commerce).

There are passages of ‘Spaceship’ that get a little too self-indulgent; a description of a sea engagement comes across as an excerpt from a Patrick O’Brian ‘Aubrey’ novel, and a chapter dealing with a ground engagement goes a bit too deeply into the tactical aspects of sword and shield warfare.

Overall, however, ‘Spaceship’ is one of the better of the early releases by DAW Books, and is worth searching out.

Killraven Amazing Adventures No. 39

Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 39

(November 1976)

This is it ! 

It’s early Fall 1976 and the final issue of the 22-issue ‘War of the Worlds’ series, starring Killraven, is out and in the pages of ‘Amazing Adventures’ (November 1976).

The cover tells us it’s ‘The Final Glory’….is this the final battle, the ultimate showdown with the Martians ? Will Killraven and his crew engage in one last desperate struggle to overthrow Earth’s conquerors and make the planet free again ?

Nope…! 

In fact, this last installment of the original Killraven saga is one of the lamest conclusions in the history of modern comics !

‘Mourning Prey’ has nothing to do with the Martian at all. Not only are there no Martians in this issue, but it’s pretty plain that Stan Lee and Archie Goodwin had no intention of commissioning a special concluding story arc. Killraven’s sales were bad, the series was being canceled, so they simply ran whatever story writer Don McGregor had in the queue.

‘Mourning Prey’ is McGregor’s writing at its worst: clumsy flashbacks, poetic, purple language, empty phrases designed to communicate Something Profound. Toss in the fact that the main adversary is a Butterfly Woman (?!) who’s mad at Killraven for slaughtering some purple caterpillars (?!), and you have the makings of a real underwhelming story………

As always, artist Craig Russell’s work is of good quality and struggles to express itself under McGregor’s verbiage.

So here it is in its entirety, the last issue of the ‘Killraven / War of the Worlds’ series from the mid-70s: