Penthouse October 1974

Penthouse

October 1974

It's October, 1974, and if we take a look at the top albums on the Billboard Hot 200 chart, If You Love Me Let Me Know by Olivia Newton-John stands at Number One, a clear indicator that she would be one of the best-selling female artists of the decade.

 

 

The latest issue of Penthouse magazine is on the stands, with Laura Doone, a stunning Linda Carter look-alike, as our cover girl.

 

Looking at the Penthouse Forum, alas, 'monopede mania' still endures, having emerged as a Forum obsession about two years previously (where and when K. W. Jeter decided to immortalize it in his 1972 cyberpunk novel 'Dr. Adder'). 

 

In the 'Music' column, coverage is given to some up-and-coming acts that embrace the 'glitter' sensibility. There is Dana Gillespie, a backing vocalist on some of David Bowie's records. Dana is (gasp) a lesbian ! Despite this provocative marketing angle, Dana's LP, Weren't Born A Man, never got much traction among the public. 

There's also an eccentric crossdresser named Wayne Country, who doesn't have an album out yet, but, we are assured, is the Next Big Thing. 

 

Then there is another glitter act, some guys calling themselves 'Kiss,' who are '...having an incredible amount of money pumped into them by Casablanca Records.' 

Kiss, we are informed, '....all wear bats wings and black leather boots, with red spots and stars painted across their faces, and the group's bassist is a dead ringer for Divine, the three-hundred pound drag queen of the film Pink Flamingos.' 

 

What a gimmick ! This band will be dropping out of sight very soon, now.........

 

 

In the magazine's text pieces, we have an article by Robert Sherrill titled 'The Old Shell Game,' which asserts that the oil companies are leveraging the Oil Crisis to extort money from the public. This was a common theme throughout the 1970s.

 

 

Thanks to the success of the movie The Godfather, the 1970s were preoccupied with gangsters and the Mafia, and so we have an excerpt from the book 'The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano' by Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer. Even before the book was published in January 1975, it was being criticized for having fictitious content.

 

 

There's also an excerpt from the novel 'Emmanuelle,' as by Emmanuelle Arsan (it later would be revealed that it was her husband, Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, who in fact wrote the book). 

 

While it chronicles all sorts of sexual escapades on the part of the heroine, 'Emmanuelle' is perhaps a bit too highbrow for the readership of Penthouse. But Bob Gucccione got, what Bob Guccione wanted. The story does have a striking illustration by surrealist artist Paul Birkbeck.

 

Now, on to the nudies. The portfolio for Laura Doone is, in my opinion, one the best that Guccione ever did. Lots of soft-focus, lots of accessories: pearls, scarves, stockings, floppy-brimmed hats. Purely Seventies !

 

Let's not quit while we're ahead, and proceed to another portfolio: this one, 'The Cincinnati Kid,' features the lissome brunette Karen Dermer !

And that's how it was, fifty years ago, in the pages of Penthouse magazine..................

Book Review: Junkyard

Book Review: 'Junkyard' by Barry Porter

3 / 5 Stars

'Junkyard' (284 pp.) was published by Zebra Books in November, 1989. The cover illustration is one of the best of any entry in the Paperbacks from Hell era; sadly, the artist is uncredited (I can't make out their signature).

Author Barry Porter published one other horror paperback for Zebra Books; 'Dark Souls' (1989).

'Junkyard' is set in the small Midwestern (?) town of Winsome. In the opening chapter we are introduced to a common plot device in Paperbacks from Hell: a wino / vagrant / bum / Unhoused Person has the misfortune to wander into someplace they shouldn't; in this case, it's the town junkyard. Where the monsters depicted on the book's cover lurk in the darkness.

It's no spoiler to reveal that the junkyard monsters are mutant rats the size of a German shepherd dog. These mutants are ravenous and will unite to take down prey larger than themselves.

In due course we are introduced to a foursome of teens, who have been friends since childhood and who just happen to have erected a makeshift club house, called the 'Pit,' deep inside the passageways of the junkyard.....! 

(these sorts of contrivances are a major driver of the storyline in 'Junkyard').

For the teens, their childhood refuge has morphed into a hangout for drinking beer and watching porno VHS tapes. It's also a place to take chicks when it's time for a hot n' heavy makeout session. But of course, what Nick, Larry, Ray, and Mark don't realize is that not only are there man-eating rodents loose among the trash and debris, but that the rats are getting hungrier and more aggressive. And the junkyard is the last place anyone should be when night falls, and the rats come out of their warrens, seeking warm flesh to devour........

I had to struggle through 'Junkyard.' Like so many Paperbacks from Hell, the author laboriously devotes the first three-fourths of the novel to frame the plot and set things up for the climatic confrontation. We get all sorts of adumbrations and foreshadowings and intimations of EVIL !!!!!!!!!!!  And there is a lot of padding in the form of telling, not showing, the mental and emotional states of the characters, presumably to get the reader to care about who survives and what will be left of them (the characters, not the readers). I kept wondering when, finally, the narrative would gain some kind of momentum. 

At page 222, 'Junkyard' does kick into higher gear, and there is enough gore and action (including the liberal use of flamethrowers) to impart some degree of redemption to the novel for trying my patience in plodding through the first 221 pages. 

The verdict ? Like so many Paperbacks from Hell, 'Junkyard' now is selling for exorbitant sums at the hands of bookjackers and speculators. I've seen starting prices of $19, all the way up to $188 (!). If you are a Paperback Fanatic, spending about $20 for this title may be justified, but the novel doesn't have enough impact to justify paying more than that.

Fall 2024 is spooky stories season

FALL 2024 IS SPOOKY STORIES SEASON AT THE PORPOR BOOKS BLOG !

That's right, friends ! Every October, we here at the PorPor Books Blog dedicate our reviews and overviews to all manner of spooky tales, be they fiction or nonfiction. For 2024, we have an inventory of reviews sufficient to devote the season, rather than just a single month, to horror content. 

 

So stand by for reviews of novels and anthologies, all during these next two months, here at the PorPor Books Blog !

On the shelf in the back of the store

On the Shelf in the Back of the Store

The other day I stopped in at a rather disheveled comic book shop in upstate New York and walking into the lesser-trafficked back portion of the store, I saw they had shelving set aside for paperback and hardcover books. Most of the titles were Star Trek and Star Wars franchise stuff, but they had a surprisingly large collection of vintage sci-fi paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s. I purchased the five books, pictured above, for $2 each. 

I doubt any of them are memorable works, but still, it's always worth poking around those neglected little corners of the store where the owners stash the more obscure items in their inventory......

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia

'The Science Fiction Encyclopedia / The Encyclopedia of  Science Fiction'
Edited by Peter Nicholls

Over the past few months, I've been dipping into my rather battered copy of the 1981 Granada edition of 'The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ' (672 pp.), which first appeared in 1979 in the UK and USA (where it was titled 'The Science Fiction Encyclopedia').

'The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction' (TEoSF) was one of a number of such tomes that appeared in the late 1970s, signals that the genre, in the aftermath of the release of Star Wars and the visibility of the New Wave movement, was rapidly becoming a powerful commercial presence not just in book publishing, but the entire mass-media environment. 

It's impressive to consider that the encyclopedia was assembled in an era well before the internet and Google. Indeed, it's about as comprehensive as one could expect given the data gathering technology of the late 70s. 

Editor Nicholls was joined by 33 other contributors, including Brian Aldiss, John Brosnan, David Masson, Franz Rottensteiner, John Saldek, and Brian Stableford. Nicholls acknowledges that the reference library at the the Science Fiction Foundation of North East London Polytechnic (now titled the Polytechnic of East London) was crucial to compiling the encyclopedia.

Any encyclopedia is vulnerable to criticism that it neglects some topics in favor of others, and this criticism could of course be leveled af TEoSF. But of course, emphasis would be given to topics that were deemed important in the period of the late 1970s, and other topics, such as Cyberpunk, either simply didn't exist back then, or were in too nascent a state to be given a full treatment. So the book's themes of 'television', 'esp', 'suspended animation', and 'mainstream writers of SF' may seem quaint in 2023, but 44 years ago, they were very au courant.

Thumbing through the pages of TEoSF brings with it all sorts of strange and entertaining little revelations that Baby Boomers like myself will cherish. And of course, I wound up making a list of paperbacks that, based on entries in the book, seemed worthy of attention.

The writing in TEoSF can be uneven, as the contributors are given the rather difficult task of providing content for a reference book that also is intended to be read for some degree of pleasure. Nicholls's entries are well-written and successfully balance the goals of being scholarly, but accessible. 

But the worst offender is the UK critic and editor John Clute, who is second only to Nicholls in the number of contributions. Clute's entries have the self-consciously pretentious and jargon- riddled quality of someone who very much wants to be perceived as a Serious Scholar. I've criticized Clute in another post here at the PorPor Blog, so I won't beat a dead horse...........

One thing that becomes apparent in reading TEoSF is the the degree of dedication and commitment to the project displayed by editor Peter Nicholls, an Australian writer for whom the book was his first major foray into the editorial landscape. Nicholls would go on to write two books that were quite informative, and well served both fans and the general public, 'The Science in Science Fiction' (1982), and 'The World of Fantastic Films: An Illustrated Survey' (1985). 

Nicholls would co-author another print edition of TEoSF in 1993, but thereafter, increasing ill-health limited Nicholls's efforts as writer and editor. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2000, and died in 2018. One can only wonder what contributions to the genre he could have made, had he not been stricken while still at a relatively young age.

Who will want a copy of 'The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction' ? Well, Baby Boomers, who can remember how the genre was nearly 45 years ago, likely will find perusing its pages to be worthwhile and nostalgic. 

But I doubt newer sci-fi fans will find the printed version from 1979 to be very useful, given that the current, online version - which is free - constantly is updated, and reflects the enormous growth in the subject that has taken place in the past four decades. Perhaps it's best to view the Encyclopedia of 1979 as a product unique to its time and place, and those interested in such things are its recommended audience.

James Blish's A Light to Fight By

 A Light to Fight By

by James Blish

Penthouse, June, 1972

The June, 1972 issue of Penthouse magazine featured a short story from sci-fi writer James Blish.

'A Light to Fight By' is mildly sci-fi. It's set in a near-future New York City where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is wider and the police are prone to addressing street incidents via interdicting with armored vehicles.

Protagonist Ken Cassidy is a white savior (back in '72, the term was revered, mind you) who has turned aside a potential lucrative career as a stockbroker to instead provide counseling and supervision to Puerto Rican youth patronizing the Third Avenue Youth Center in East Harlem.

Ken had served in Vietnam, and upon arriving back in the City, had undergone a transformation:

When Ken had come back, he had made the mistake of going to see the quiet Puerto Rican who had been his First Sergeant; and there he had seen also the families jammed together five and six to a room, the kids just able to walk playing with empty beer cans for lack of a better toy, the 12 year-old boys hustling their 13 year-old sisters, the useless young men blustering and shooting craps or pitching pennies by the stoops, the screaming bruised women, the black-eyed unwanted babies, the dried old men who had arrived too late to learn English....and the cops hovering around them, waiting for any damn excuse at all to bring one of their expensively armored riot-control crawlers.

Wow......what a terse, hardboiled, description of life in the dark corners of the American dream !

Facetiousness aside, I found 'A Light' to be one of the better fiction works of Blish that I have yet read (although, to be honest, I tend not to seek out his stuff). The story has a subversive little twist at its end that keeps it from being yet another glib Moral Message about discrimination, poverty, and privilege.

Unfortunately, 'A Light to Fight By' doesn't appear in any of the Blish story collections published to date, probably because it's not a sci-fi tale.

So, I'm going to post the printed pages here at the PorPor Blog. They are as legible as I can make them from 300 dpi scans of a 52 year-old magazine............

Book Review: Tower of Dreams

Book Review: 'Tower of Dreams' by Jamil Nasir

4 / 5 Stars

 

'Tower of Dreams' (231 pp.) was published by Bantam Spectra in January 1999. It's one of six science fiction and fantasy novels author Nasir has published between 1995 and 2013. My review of his 1995 novel 'Quasar' is here.

 

'Tower' is set some 25 or so years into the 21st century. Blaine Ramsey, the protagonist, is an 'Image digger,' one of a select group of people with the ability to enter into a dreamlike state and receive imagery being fabricated by the collective unconscious of the surrounding populace. The use of meditative techniques and special herbs allows the digger to retain images encountered in dreams, and archive them into computers. The saved images can be used by multinational corporations for advertising and marketing campaigns. The more unorthodox an image, the more valued it is to the corporations.

 

As the novel opens, Ramsey is working for a prominent West Coast firm called Icon. He's been dispatched to a rural area in Jordan, there to dig into the surrounding Arab culture for new and provocative images. While engaged in his reveries, Ramsey has a particularly vivid dream about Buthaina, a beautiful Arab girl who lives in the home adjacent to his. However idyllic the start of his dream, it ends in tragedy when the girl is brutally beaten by her father. 

 

Ramsey becomes obsessed with Buthaina, not only convinced that she is a real human being, but that he can rescue her. Ramsey arranges to travel to Cairo, where he hopes to learn more about Buthaina's true identity and hopefully, her whereabouts. 

 

This near-future Cairo is a nightmarish place; Egypt has a population of 100 million, 35 million of whom live in the city. Stuffed into crumbling buildings and breathing dangerously polluted air, the vast majority of the populace are overwhelmed by poverty:

 

Beggars suddenly swarmed around the car, hanging on the windows on both sides with their dirty hands, entreating in broken English and French, trying to catch Blaine's eye, reaching into the car to clutch at him. Many were children or women holding babies. They made room for a security policeman to approach the car but otherwise ignored him. For the first time since coming to Cairo Blaine felt suddenly afraid of them, of the starving, homeless, desperate people in their hordes upon hordes. He rolled up the taxi windows with difficulty, almost catching a few insistent fingers in the glass, feeling guilty, angry, and a little sick, as he guessed visiting foreigners - it was only a courtesy to call them 'tourists' anymore - felt.

 

Ramsey's search takes him from the slums to the glittering nightclubs and high-rise apartment buildings of the city's wealthy elite. But his search is constrained by ominous events: debilitating visions of Buthaina come to Ramsey in his waking hours, and the visions coincide with alarming indications that a catastrophic earthquake looms for Egypt. Increasingly, the quest to find Buthaina requires a willingness to risk loss of life or limb. But Ramsey is too far gone in his obsession to think about stopping..........

 

I won't disclose spoilers about the denouement of the novel, but it involves a kind of 'Arab Magic Realism' that, for me, was unsatisfying and led me to award the book four, rather than five, Stars.

 

While the word 'cyberpunk' appears neither in the book nor in any of the advertising blurbs, I believe 'Tower' to be a second-generation cyberpunk novel. It's the book's cyberpunk aspects, and its Middle Eastern / Arab / Muslim setting, that give 'Tower' its offbeat quality. In this regard it is something of a spiritual successor to the 'Budayeen' novels of George Alec Effinger. But Nasir, who is the son of a Palestinian father and an American mother, has an inherent familiarity with the culture of the society he writes about that Effinger did not have. This familiarity gives the book a powerful verisimilitude.

Summing up, readers looking for a cyberpunk novel that eschews the traditional First World, or East Asian, locales and characters will find that 'Tower of Dreams' offer something new and imaginative.

Theme from 'S.W.A.T.'

Rhythm Heritage, 1975

Yesterday as I was driving along I was listening to the Sirius XM 'Seventies' channel, and the deejay was talking about how she was soliciting nominations for the 'greatest theme songs' of the decade, from listeners. On the Facebook page, there are at present over 300 nominations.

 

After about 10-15 seconds of contemplation, I knew that I had my candidate.

'The Theme from S.W.A.T.'

 

The show aired on ABC for two seasons, 1975 - 1976, before being cancelled (ostensibly because it was too violent; from what I remember from watching episodes in '76, the show was quite tame by modern standards). The theme song to the show, performed by the group 'Rhythm Heritage', was released as a single in November 1975 and peaked at number one on the Hot 100 chart in late February, 1976.

 

Rhythm Heritage did some cool stuff, including the theme to the TV show 'Baretta.'

I defy anyone to listen to 'The Theme from S.W.A.T.' and not immediately be geared up for some Special Weapons and Tactics action !

Dressing Up with Don (and the Girls)

'Dressing Up' with Don (and the Girls)

There was one negligee, it was six feet long, it was the prettiest one....six feet long, and it had a kind of drawstring at the chest so you could expand the chest....of course, this was my father's nightgown.

Every sci-fi fan who grew up during the Baby Boomer era is familiar with DAW Books, an imprint founded by Donald A. Wollheim, who was an author and editor of note in the genre.

Over at PBS, there's an interesting documentary about 'Casa Susanna,' a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York where, in the 1950s and 1960s, crossdressing men would go to enjoy their fetish among others with similar attitudes.

 

Wollheim was not only a frequent visitor to Casa Susanna, he wrote (under the pseudonym 'Darrell G. Raynor') a novel, titled 'A Year Among the Girls,' about life at the camp.

 

The documentary features an interview with Wollheim's daughter Betsy, who has her theories as to why her father was emotionally and psychologically invested in crossdressing. According to Betsy, Wollheim at times could be 'cruel' to his wife and daughter and to his authors, but never to his fellow crossdressers.

 

I can't say I'll look at DAW books quite the same way again.............

Book Review: Montezuma Strip

Book Review: 'Montezuma Strip' by Alan Dean Foster

 4 / 5 Stars

'Montezuma Strip' (215 pp.) was published by Warner Books in August, 1995. The cover is by Don Pucky.

Alan Dean Foster (b. 1946) is one of the more prolific sci-fi writers of the past 50 years. His first novel, 'Luana,' was issued in 1974. That same year he was assigned to write the novelization of the movie 'Dark Star,' after which he embarked on a very successful career writing novelizations for many properties. His 1978 novel 'Splinter of the Mind's Eye' was the very first Star Wars spinoff novel, and one of several that he wrote for the franchise. Foster also produced a sizeable body of tie-ins for the Star Trek, Aliens, Transformers, and 'Dinotopia' franchises.

Foster has had success with his own novels, with some these, such as the 'Icerigger' series, representing the more popular sci-fi paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s.

Perhaps because Foster 'wrote for a living,' and was content to focus on salable productions, he was not a member of the sci-fi literati during the New Wave era: he never published any stories in any of the 22 volumes of Damon Knight's 'Orbit' series, nor in any of the 12 volumes of Robert Silverberg's 'New Dimensions' anthologies.

When cyberpunk came on the scene, unsurprisingly, Foster embraced the genre. Starting in 1988, under the pseudonym 'James Lawson,' he published five stories in the digests Amazing and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, these featuring a Chicano detective named Angel Cardenas. 

In 2002 Foster published a full-length novel, titled 'The Mocking Program,' featuring Cardenas.

Cardenas lives in a near-future USA where the border with Mexico is more a concept than a reality, and high-tech corporations, maquiladoras, and the underclass compete for money and power in the region from Los Angeles ('LaLa') east to El Paso ('East Elpaso Juarez'). In this eponymous Strip, Cardenas has value as an 'intuitive,' meaning he can assess whether someone is being honest, or concealing something, when speaking. This quality of being a human lie detector makes him an important member of the Nogales, Arizona, federales office.

Foster's diction get can rather florid, especially when it comes to hardboiled similes: 

There were at least a dozen gangs that called Puerto Penasco home.....They lived in a condition of colloidal anarchy, battling among themselves as often as with rivals. This made it tough on the local federales, since a gang member one week might metamorphose into an independent skim artist the next.

***

....they clung to the flanks of the plants like whale lice to favored cetaceans.

***

Wormy G tied his boat up beneath the gaping maw of an old, broken piling that looked like a leviathan's half-extracted tooth.

***

 ....the captain shuffled through a pile of printouts on his desk like an aborigine digging for edible grubs before finally shoving a hard copy at his guest.

 ***

As well, I came across the words and phrases 'elutriate,' 'omphalos of noplace,' and 'chalcedony,' so readers of 'Montezuma' will need to gird themselves for some thickened prose..........

Anyways, my capsule summaries of the entries in 'Montezuma Strip':

Sanctuary (Amazing, 1988): Cardenas and his dog Charliebo are assigned to investigate the mysterious deaths of two programmers, Wallace Crescent and Vladimir Noschek, who were the top programmers at their respective companies. Something, or someone, has performed a remote lobotomy on the programmers, and may be looking for other victims. 

This story starts out well enough, but as it progresses the plot becomes overly complicated (real-world scientist Rupert Sheldrake, and his theory of 'morphogenetic fields,' is invoked) and the proto-Singularity phenomenon that underlies the denouement is a bit contrived.

Heartwired (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1992): an incel named Wormy G hangs out with the Teslas gang, mostly because Nita, gangleader Paco's girlfriend, will sometimes smile at Wormy. Could love be a possibility ? This story is well served by a street-level perspective, and a touch of pathos. 

Gagrito (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1993): the Strip has a booming trade in 'magimals'; these are animals that have been outfitted with wireless controller chips and circuitry that allow the animals to be manipulated into walking on their hind legs, opening doors, operating simple machines, or even speaking. A band of animal rights activists are taking violent action against the sellers of these altered species.

Hellado (Amazing, 1993): Esteban and Chuy come up with a scheme to raid the cargo cars in the train yard. They discover something disturbing in one of their targets........

Our Lady of the Machine (Amazing, 1994): a holographic manifestation of the Madonna is shaking down business owners. Those who won't come across, wind up dead.

Summing up, 'Montezuma Strip' joins the 'Budayeen' novels of George Alec Effinger as  foundational works that meld the crime / private eye and cyberpunk genres. In this regard, Foster and Effinger laid the groundwork for later novels in this genre, such as the 'Carlucci' books of Richard Paul Russo, 'Noir' by K. W. Jeter, and 'Black Glass' by John Shirley. If you like those novels, you're going to like 'Montezuma Strip.'