KNOT A FANZINE #2 2020 A compendium produced by Marc Ortlieb, P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill Vic 3131. [email protected]. This issue will be published in January 2021.

Notes From The Spectacle Case

As mentioned in the previous issue, Knot A Fanzine is a compendium of my ANZAPA contributions for the year, minus the mailing comments, which really don’t make much sense outside of ANZAPA. I published the first issue late in 2020, covering my 2019 ANZAPA contributions (plus one 2018 zine). This one will cover the strange COVID-19 ridden year of 2020. Now that I’ve caught up with this, expect the next issue in January 2021, all things being equal. ANZAPA, as you may or may not know, is the Australia New Zealand Amateur Press Association. While not having quite the pedigree of FAPA or SAPS, it’s one of the few remaining amateur press associations that has gone from strength to strength of late. The December 2020 mailing has 502 pages from 25 of its 27 members. We currently have 22 Australian members, from Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia. We don’t currently have members from Western Australia or Tasmania, though we have had in the past. Despite the name of the apa, we don’t currently have any New Zealand members. ANZAPA started off life as APA-A but became ANZAPA when it was decided that, if the U.S. had Frank Zappa, we could have ANZAPA. It then took about 38 mailings until we actually got a New Zealand member - Mervyn Barrett. Since then there have been other New Zealand members, but there are none on the current roster. Of our overseas members, we currently have two from the U.K. and three from the U.S.A. (a few of the current memberships are joint memberships.) During the COVID-19 restrictions in Victoria there were serious difficulties in continuing as a paper based apa - not the least being an issue that has dogged the apa for several years, that is the cost of posting large amounts of paper to interstate and overseas members. Added to this, the postal service became increasingly unreliable as the pandemic progressed. As an experiment, with Mailing 314, contributions were sent as pdf files to our OBE (Official Bloody Editor) Bruce Gillespie who, with the help of David Grigg, combined the pdfs to produce a mailing that was available to members via Dropbox. This has worked very well for the past five mailings. Bruce grew concerned that David was doing all the work and he felt that his own computer skills did not match the new format of the apa and so passed the reins of power over to David. It should be noted that Bruce completed an unbroken stint as OBE from August 2004 until October 2020, a total of 97 mailings. ANZAPA is bimonthly. Interestingly enough, in August 2004 Bruce took over the role of OBE from David Grigg. Some people are just suckers for punishment. I’m not sure why ANZAPA has maintained such a healthy level of activity. We do have some great writers as members and have had such for the duration of ANZAPA’s history. When you become part of conversations with Bruce Gillespie, Leigh Edmonds, Jack Herman, Claire Brialey, Christina Lake and David Grigg, then you are in wonderful company. We also have two Worldcon Chairpersons on the membership roster - David Grigg and Perry Middlemiss. Three of our members, Leigh, Bruce and Gary Mason, were founder members of APA-A though each has taken a sabbatical from ANZAPA in the past. ANZAPA allows us to interact on a level above the often trite level of commentary in places like Facebook. Not that I’m averse to haunting the pages of Facebook but ANZAPA allows more depth of conversations. Leigh Edmonds regularly contributes material related to various histories that he has been researching. But, for all that, it’s still a great place to keep in contact with fannish friends from days gone by. We’ve even done face-to-face on a major scale. The tenth anniversary of ANZAPA was celebrated with a mini-convention at the home of John Foyster and featured, apart from a massive ANZAPA collation, games of table tennis, early computer games and all sorts of fun. So, given that I no longer have the time or inclination to become involved in the fanzine production, conventions or fan writing that I used to enjoy, ANZAPA provides me with the perfect outlet for the remnants of my fannish energy. They used to say that FAPA was where old fen went to die. ANZAPA is where old fen can go to live. Photos from ANZAPACon in 1978. Top Left The late John Bangsund. Bottom Right Leanne Frahm and me.

1 KNOT WHAT IT SEEMS An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected] but, in deference to a little history, this issue is being started in the City of Elizabeth South Australia, where the temperature is too bloody hot. Paine and Head are batting in a much cooler Melbourne. Half their luck.

NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE The week around Christmas saw me visiting Mum in Elizabeth. The people at the Elizabeth Motor Inn are starting to recognize me. I had, as I did the previous year, dropped into Cash Converters, just next to the Elizabeth Railway Station, and bought a second-hand bicycle. This one was a minor improvement on the one I’d bought previously – it seemed to have working front and rear brakes and rear gears. The frame was sound and it had good thick tires. This time I was better prepared – I had in my rucksack my spare helmet, pump, gloves and hi-vis stripes, along with front and rear lights. I wheeled the bike over to the Motor Inn, where the proprietors greeted me by name and I settled in. As it turned out, the bike wasn’t in as good condition as I’d initially thought. The front brakes, which I thought I could adjust, required a new brake lever and the gears tended to slip. Still, for $30 I wasn’t complaining. The allen keys I had weren’t enough to adjust the brake cables and so I had to do a bit of searching around the Elizabeth Town Centre to find an adjustable wrench. It was only after using that that I discovered the problems with the front brake lever. Still, the bike got me around Elizabeth for the week I was there and, about half way through my visit, the Inn proprietors kindly offered to store the bike in their shed for my next visit – I thanked them and will take a replacement brake lever with me the next time I visit. My next visit will certainly not be over Christmas. Adelaide was going through one of its sequences of 40°C plus days and Mum wasn’t up to more than 30 minute visits, fortunately in the mornings before the heat really hit, and so I spent most of my afternoons in my air-conditioned Motel Room, watching the cricket. The bike did allow me to reacquaint myself with Elizabeth, which is very flat and so the tendency of the gears to slip was only inconvenient when I was working my way around the roundabouts, of which Elizabeth has several. I was once again reminded of how very dry Elizabeth gets. There was nowhere near the amount of greenery I associate with Melbourne. I also had another encounter with three corner jacks – the reason I was more interested in thick tires on the bike than its brakes. One must have made its way into my room on my shoe. It then transferred itself from the carpet into my heel. Elizabeth hasn’t changed all that much since I used to live there. The shopping centres have either died or increased in size. The one thing I did notice while wondering around the Elizabeth Town Centre was that I was very much out of place due to my lack of tattoos. (My brother Jon also noted that I have too many of my own teeth as well.) There has been some building but most of the houses are still the same single storey stand-alone buildings. There are plenty of ovals – one of which was occupied by a giant inflatable water slide while I was there. A couple of the schools have disappeared with my alma mater changing its name from Elizabeth High School to Playford International College. Sadly of the eight Scout Groups that were there when I was involved, there are now only two – Elizabeth Park and Edinburgh Park. The other thing that hasn’t changed much is in Adelaide. Okay, Adelaide now has a longer tram line and there do appear to be a few new buildings, plus a newish footbridge over the Torrens, but the Jerusalem, my favourite Lebanese restaurant is still there and so I did get a meal with my brothers Chris & Jon and their partners Soo and Alison. (Some of you would have met Soo, who was involved in Adelaide fandom and who was a good friend of Mandy Herriot.) The Jerusalem is something of a dive on Hindley Street with laminex-covered tables and an attempt to disguise the ceiling with a tent-like fabric. It’s not as cheap as it used to be, but the food is still good – certainly the nicest hummus I’ve ever tasted. Every now and then I wonder what life would have been like had I stayed in South Australia but I’m very happy that I didn’t. I prefer Melbourne where I have now lived for more than half of my life. My only real reason for visiting Elizabeth now is Mum and her health is so poor that I can’t see myself making many more visits to see her. As it is, I’m not certain that my visits really registered with her. I think Elizabeth High School is coming up for another significant anniversary/reunion that might drag me back over, especially if a poker game is on the cards, but we’ll see. It was a good place to grow up, but it’s no longer home.

2 LESSER LIGHTS

My Fancy Lewis Carroll

I painted her a gushing thing, With years about a score; I little thought to find they were A least a dozen more; My fancy gave her eyes of blue, A curly auburn head: I came to find the blue a green, The auburn turned to red.

She boxed my ears this morning, They tingled very much; I own that I could wish her A somewhat lighter touch; And if you ask me how Her charms might be improved, I would not have them added to, But just a few removed!

She has the bear's ethereal grace, The bland hyaena's laugh, The footstep of the elephant, The neck of a giraffe; I love her still, believe me, Though my heart its passion hides; "She's all my fancy painted her," But oh! how much besides!

Although Lewis Carroll created many of my favourite pieces of writing, some of his poems were simply not up to scratch, missing the whimsy and wit of “Jabberwocky” or “The Hunting of the Snark”. He occasionally recovers some of that whimsy as in “The Gardiner’s Song” from Sylvie and Bruno, and I’ve already covered “Phantasmagoria” and “Hiawatha’s Photographing” in previous ANZAPA contributions. But there are some really bad ones as well, including the poem that Dodgson believed was the best he’d ever written, “A Fairy Duet” with its chorus: For I think it is Love For I feel it is Love For I’m sure it is nothing but love. Okay, so the Beatles wrote “All You Need Is Love”, but they had LSD as an excuse and, despite Grace Slick’s opinion, I don’t think you can blame laudanum for Carroll’s lyrics. A number of his poems seem very pedestrian with occasional hints that they are sending up Victorian poems of which I am unaware. But, while I was going through Complete And Utter Nonsense, produced by the Folio Society, I did chance upon the little gem, “My Fancy”, quoted above. Carroll had used the line “She’s all my fancy painted him” in a verse, published in 1855, ten years before the publication of Alice in Wonderland. Modified portions of this were then incorporated into the court scene in Alice in Wonderland, where they comprise the White Rabbit’s evidence. The original line comes from “Alice Grey” a popular song, written by William Mee and Mrs P. Millard that starts: She's all my fancy painted her, She's lovely, she's divine, But her heart it is another's, She never can be mine; While the poem that appears in Alice in Wonderland is far more silly and full of nonsense the version that appears as “My Fancy” is far closer to a straight parody in its use of rhyme scheme and in its sending up of the sentiments of the original. “Alice Grey” speaks of eyes and hair thus: Her dark brown hair is braided O'er a brow of spotless white; Her soft blue eye now languishes, Now flashes with delight; While I can accept that much of Carroll’s work was written with children in mind, this poem seems one of the few in which the author’s adult voice intrudes. For a start, the object of his affections is pictured as a twenty year old, who, on closer inspection, may well be in her early thirties – not Carroll’s usual preference. And the cynical tone of the poem makes it seem a lot more modern. Given my taste for cynicism, I couldn’t help but compare the tone to that evident in such songs as Richard Thompson’s “Nearly in Love”: 3 You're the one I've wanted so long But then again I might be wrong Now you look just right in the pale moonlight But let me turn the headlights on Or Tom Lehrer “She’s My Girl” In winter the bedroom is one large ice cube, And she squeezes the toothpaste from the middle of the tube. Her hairs in the sink Have driven me to drink, But she's my girl, she's my girl, she's my girl, And I love her. The animal comparisons are also echoed in the work of another group who would surely count Lewis Carroll as a strong influence, The Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band. In “The Canyons of Your Mind” Viv Stanshall sings And I kiss your perfumed hair The sweet essence of giraffe to his imagined girlfriend, called Frying Pan. (That song, incidentally, features one of the world’s worst guitar solos by the late lamented Neil Innes.) So what might have driven Carroll to this sort of parody? Could it simply have been pique at the maudlin sentimentality of Victorian music hall or was it an actual experience? Lehrer admits that “She’s My Girl” was influenced by love songs on the order of he's just my Bill, my man, my Joe, my Max, and so on where the girl who sings them tells you that, although the man she loves is anti-social, alcoholic, physically repulsive, or just plain unsanitary, nevertheless she is his because he is hers, or something like that. It’s clear that Carroll was more than happy to parody didactic poems and songs – noting his parodies of “How doth the little busy bee” and “The Old Man’s Comforts” but is that all there is to this particular ditty? The section where he describes his continuing love for her even though his heart hides its passion sounds just a little too much like his unrequited love for Alice Liddell but he makes light of this in all his less than complimentary animal comparisons. Could this be akin to the Peanuts cartoon strip when Charlie Brown admits to being so tongue-tied in the presence of the little red-haired girl that he is compelled to hit her? Carroll did have a tendency to use words as his weapons – one can’t imagine him actually doing anything physical. Perhaps his parody does reflect his metaphorical impotence. There is a deep sarcasm in his explanation that her charms might be improved not by adding to them but with the subtraction of a few. I don’t think we need to put literal quotation marks around the word “charms” to hear the tone of voice in those lines any more than we need to picture the understatement with which he wishes her a “slightly lighter touch.” So we come again to the reason for the vitriol expressed in the poem. My belief is that it relates to Carroll’s dislike for most grown women. We see it in the Ugly Duchess and the Queen of Hearts in the Alice books. We see it in the Mother and the Daughter in “Hiawatha’s Photographing”. Carroll, it would appear, never really forgave his sweet female child friends for becoming women. Little boys can grow up to be pigs but quite handsome pigs. Little girls grow up to be women with all of their pretentions and foibles. To Carroll the fact that “She’s all my fancy painted her” is damning enough, but that she is more than that adds the final nail to the coffin. ---oOo---

KNOT PRETTY

Knots aren’t just for tying ropes together, for tying up parcels; for attaching horses to rails or for immobilizing bank managers. There is a whole slew of knots that are more decorative than functional. In the seventies people discovered the “art” of macramé. Now I was never particularly enamored of that particular craft. One accepted it as a harmless little pastime, much like pouring your own candles, or tie dying your own t-shirts but, given my current obsession with scouting and my new-found ability to master the eye splice, I thought I’d take a look at macramé in terms of the knotting involved. The Wikipedia article that was my first port of call notes that the art form dates back at least as far as the Babylonians and that it was used to tidy up the edges of woven cloth. The article notes “The decorative fringes also helped to keep flies off camels and horses in northern Africa.” That, at least, gave the form an acceptable function. It was seen as a cheaper version of lace and was, like scrimshaw, created by sailors while not busy at sea. They referred to it as “McNamara’s lace” or “square knotting.” It was used to create hammocks and belts and covers for parts of the ship – an early form of yarn bombing. Indeed one of my favourite decorative knots – the Turk’s Head – could be used to create mats or covers for knife handles before one of Baden Powell’s Scout trainers hit upon the idea of using the two stranded version as a woggle indicating that the wearer had completed his/her basic Leader training. The use of “McNamara’s lace” by sailors, incidentally, places in context lines from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark 4 “There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck, Or would sit making lace in the bow” Martin Gardiner notes that, in Andrew Lang’s review of The Hunting of the Snark it is suggested that the Beaver was portrayed as feminine – I hope he wasn’t drawn to that conclusion by the double entendre – and it’s true that Henry Holiday’s illustration does show the traditional method of creating lace but Carroll, having traveled widely, probably would have been aware of this particular nautical pass-time and so the Beaver, far from being engaged in a dainty feminine artform, could well have been creating macramé pieces to sell when the ship was in port. The interesting thing about macramé is that it seems to use very simple knots – the reef knot (or square knot) and the half hitch, with Wikipedia noting that granny knots and larks head knots could also be used – and yet can produce very ornate patterns, I guess in the same way that very simple knitting stitches can be used to create many different patterns. The uninteresting thing about macramé is that it got used to produce a tangle of wall hangings that, after several years of gathering dust on seventies walls were consigned to landfill. Knotting, being a pattern, allows for its use to convey messages. All sorts of rumours regarding spies hiding codes into ordinary knitting were allegedly used to justify a ban on knitting in World War II. And it makes sense. Knitting can provide a binary code, with knit being a 0 and purl being a 1. I’d hate to imagine what the completed knitted item would look like – no doubt a lot better than Madame DeFarge’s efforts, except without the splatters of blood. (I just saw advertised on Facebook a bracelet representing dots and dashes. The message was ..-…--.-.-.- -.-----..- I’ll leave you to translate it.) And the history of using knots to represent information goes right back to the Andean South American cultures where quipo were used to record numerical values for census data and which may have been used to represent language, though the jury is, apparently, still out on that one. The use of knotted rope to represent numbers still survives in our unit for speed at sea – the knot, which is one nautical mile per hour, or 1.85 km/hour. The knots used to calculate speed were 47 feet three inches apart on a rope attached to a wooden panel. They’d throw the panel overboard and it would drag in the water. One deckhand would then allow the rope to pay out, counting the number of knots that passed through his fingers while another hand would time this, using a thirty second (or 28 second) sand glass. I’m not sure whether this made the sailor doing the timing a second hand but I guess that's not important. They could thus calculate the speed of the ship. The nature of the knot is not clearly explained in any on my sources, though on some pictures it appears to be a simple overhand knot, while, on others, it seems to be a short series of overhand knots on a piece of string spliced into the main line. In yet others, they have loops, signifying half knots tied halfway between each major knot with another alternative being a sequence of overhand knots – 1, 2, 3, 4 – signifying the number of knots that have passed through the hand’s hand. But I think I’ve given myself enough rope… I’m still impressed by the role of string and other fibres in our history. I don’t think historians fully appreciate that. Scholars talk about the discover of fire and the invention of the wheel but I think that our ability to use string, wool and rope in all their various forms is a key to understanding our human nature. Hang loose! ---oOo---

5 THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION November 1969 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman Contents Novelets: “A Feminine Jurisdiction”, Sterling E. Lanier; “Diaspora”, Robin Scott. Short Stories: “The Mouse” Howard Fast; “Penny Dreadful” Ron Goulart; “The Crib Circuit” Miriam Allen DeFord; “Come Up And See Me Sometime” Gilbert Thomas; “After The Bomb Clichés” Bruce McAllister; “After The Myths Went Home” Robert Silverberg Article: “The Sin Of The Scientist”, Isaac Asimov; Books: Alexei Panshin Cartoon: Gahan Wilson; Cover: Jack Gaughan

Howard Fast’s The Edge of Tomorrow was one of the first science fiction collections I ever owned - passed on to me by Dad when he decided I was serious about collecting sf. On finding “The Mouse” in this issue of F&SF, I did my standard trick of consulting Professor Wiki and discovered a little bit more about Fast. He suffered for his political beliefs during the McCarthy era. He wrote the novel Spartacus. Dad took us to see the film version, based on the novel, just before we left England. Given my lack of interest in film as a medium, I hadn’t noted that Spartacus was directed by Stanley Kubrick, a director I hadn’t heard of until 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. Strangely enough I didn’t encounter Dr Strangelove until later and, less surprisingly, I didn’t encounter Lolita until she was old enough to be legal. Also, Professor Wiki tells me that Howard Fast wrote a book called Lord Baden-Powell of the Boy Scouts (1941). But onto this story. Science fiction has a tradition of looking at the effects of enhancing intelligence, from Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius to Daniel Keye’s “Flowers For Algernon” which, incidentally, appeared in F&SF in 1959. (I don’t think I have that issue.) Ironically this is the effect of increasing the intelligence of a wild mouse, as opposed to a laboratory white mouse. Aliens operate on a mouse in order to create a mobile intelligence gatherer. Through the eyes of a mouse we see human society and its foibles. There is a minor McGuffin here. The aliens come from a high density planet and so can’t take the mouse back with them. Thus the mouse remains stuck on Earth with no equivalent. (At least when Spider Robinson introduced Ralph von Wow Wow, he provided Callahan’s Bar where Ralph could be accepted.) Stirling E. Lanier’s “A Feminine Jurisdiction” is one of his Brigadier Ffellowes bar stories, following on from “Fraternity Brother” in the August 1969 F&SF. Once more Ffellowes finds himself in a European backwater, in this case in the Greek Islands, facing a semi-Lovecraftian horror - this one drawing from Greek Mythology. This occurs at the time of the German invasion of Crete during World War II and the antagonist in the story is a typically brutal German Waffen SS officer. (I will allow myself a minor nitpick here, just to note that there weren’t any SS Forces involved in the invasion.) Lanier drops a couple of gentle hints regarding the nature of the ancient Greek temple on this long-forgotten island and suffice to say it has nothing to do with Hippolyta and her Amazons. Certainly an entertaining romp of a story and it is somewhat apposite that the Gahan Wilson cartoon immediately following the tale is themed on Stonehenge. (And this is probably a good place to pay tribute to Wilson who died in November - certainly one of my favourite cartoonists.) Ron Goulart’s “Barnum” stories have never really struck a chord with me. They tend to be the sort of forced humour that Harry Harrison used in a couple of the later “Stainless Steel Rat” stories. The characters seem pure Los Angeles, transported into space. In “Penny Dreadful” Jose Silvera starts by shaking down a nude theatre company for his authors fee for their adaptation of the story of the Green Knight’s search for the Holy Grail and is then persuaded to ghost write three novels for a Wild Bill Hickok style frontiersman. This somehow gets him involved with an attempted coup d’etat but still sees him getting part of his money, all in the course of ten pages. Some interesting picaresque fiction, but not of the type that would have me returning for more. In his Book Review column, Alexei Panshin laments the growing popularity of science fiction, including the way pop culture has annexed sf ideas. He reviews Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain in less than glowing terms and disposes of Clarke’s Against The Fall of Night and Leiber’s A Spectre Is Haunting Texas. The most interesting review is of Ursula K LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Panshin notes it is “well above the average in literacy, invention and ambition … but ultimately as a story it is a flat failure” and “it is only the faintest taste of what science fiction might be.” I wonder if he changed his opinion. Miriam Allen deFord’s “The Crib Circuit” takes on the idea of what may happen to cryogenically stored humans when they are awakened in the twenty fifth century. As a concession to the reader, deFord doesn’t make the changes in the Inglis language too extreme and we do have minor fashion changes, including the removal of the nudity taboo. The story itself seems to follow the expected pattern until the protagonist, confronted with the knowledge that she will be euthanased once she has provided the scholars with enough information about the twentieth century, comes up with a story about how she was, before being frozen, a specially gifted telepath with the capacity to communicate with aliens who were to determine the fate of humanity. The story is then rushed to an ending. Once more this is a story with too many ideas jammed into a very limited number of words. While economy of the word count to idea ratio has been one of the strengths of the science fiction short story, it can lead to a degree of disappointment at the lack of substance. I was once fortunate enough to travel from Blackburn to Melbourne by train in the company of Bob Shaw who explained to me that the ideas that could fuel a short story could just as easily support an entire novel, and would bring in far more money. Gilbert Thomas appears to be one of those writers who only occasionally dabbled in science fiction and, when he did, he sold to Ed Ferman, his stories then being translated into French. According to the ISFDB, he only had six stories published - five of them in F&SF. One story, “Luana” made it into one of Judith Merrill’s anthologies and into

6 one of the F&SF best of anthologies. His story in this issue “Come Up And see Me Sometime” is the last listed in ISFDB and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Mae West quotation it appropriates. This one is clearly in the F&SF ballpark, combining domestic violence and a child prodigy who invents his own anti-gravity device to escape his father’s violence. I can find no biographical information on him but I’m sure I would be able to find some if I could dig out some older F&SFs. It took Robert Heinlein two novels to deal with the nuclear bunkers and the Last Trump in Farnham’s Freehold and Job. Bruce McAllister manages it in five pages in his vignette “After The Bomb Clichés”. He manages to take us from minor office personality clashes to Armageddon Field without drawing breath. A cute little tale from an author with two Hugo nominations and a Nebula nomination to his credit. I’d hate to imagine how many of Asimov’s science articles I’ve read over the years, but some of them stick in the memory. One that did was “I’m Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover” that dealt with some ideas on how you could get a Universe from nothing. Laurence Krauss has dealt with this question more recently in his book “A Universe From Nothing” but Asimov made a decent fist of it in his F&SF article. The article in this issue is another that stuck. It’s called “The Sin Of The Scientist” and looks at how sin can be defined in scientific terms. Asimov distinguishes between science that incidentally causes harm to people, science that harms people for patriotic purposes and science that creates more good than harm. He saves his main opprobrium for Fritz Haber, who invented the process by which we fix atmospheric nitrogen - a good thing - but who also deliberately developed some of the poison gases used in the trenches in World War I. Asimov concludes that the sin in science relates to any scientist who develops indiscriminating weapons of mass destruction, such as poison gases and biological weapons. Perhaps a little over-simplistic but I can live with that. Robin Scott’s “Diaspora” is a real mixed bag of a story. It starts being a fairly typical “Maverick bucks the fundamentalist system on a newly colonised planet” and then descends to a Heinleinish pastiche that John W. Campbell Jr would have happily published. Robin Scott is properly known as Robin Scott Wilson and he founded the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. This piece certainly seems evidence for the adage “Those who can’t do, teach.” To my untutored mind, his sentences are far too long. The opening paragraph consists of two sentences, the second of which runs to 79 words, but it feels longer, probably due to the inclusion of words such as orotund and metraculite. The piece is obstructed by great big expository lumps, many of them delivered by a sort of a cross between Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw and his Lorenzo Smythe. (I guess, if you are going to base your characters on other books, it helps to pick Hugo winning books as your hunting ground.) As you may have gathered, I didn’t enjoy this - probably because, as an ex-teacher, I suspect it’s exactly the sort of thing I might have written, had I ever overcome my natural lack of motivation. The final story in this issue is by Robert Silverberg and it is, needless to say, well crafted and interesting. “After The Myths Went Home” examines what can happen when humanity has the technology to create its mythological heroes, gods and villains. Silverberg has his scientist create the ancient gods and heroes but, given that the story is set in the year 12450, those ancient heroes include deified versions of Galileo, Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. I was interested to note that, although Silverberg’s cast list includes Adam, Eve, Thor and Krishna, plus an assortment of saints, Christ, Yahveh and Mohammed don’t get a guernsey. Finally humanity gets fed up f them and sends them back into oblivion. My favourite twist is that Cassandra - the last to go - warns them that they should not get rid of all of their myths. Needless to say, she is not believed and should have been. My favourite ad from this issue reads “Information on anything. Free. Details DCS-A Wall Street Station, Box 1023, New York 10005” Someone’s time machine clearly tapped into the Internet.

7 KNOT AGAIN An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected]

NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE CASE I know that I tend to rabbit on a bit about my Scouting experiences but I really do find that, through Scouting I get a hell of a lot of experiences that I wouldn’t otherwise. Let’s take this week as an example and I think you’ll see what I mean. Monday: 7:30 am start at the Victorian Scout Heritage Centre. Signed in and, after a brief natter with the other early birds headed off to my office to do a little newspaper article scanning before everyone else arrived. The articles were dealing with Mornington District Scouts, mostly dating from the mid-1960s – a time when I was living in Elizabeth and was a Scout with the 8th Elizabeth Scout Group. Some of them dealt with events, such as raft races and investitures of new Scouts; others dealt with the problems faced by obtaining and maintaining halls. The last Monday of each month features our formal meeting. This one wasn’t graced by our patron Lord Michael Baden-Powell of Gilwell, though he had dropped in the previous week. Michael is the grandson of Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. He recently ascended to the title on the death of his brother, who had no children. I’m currently working with Don, who looks after badges and scarves and he noted that I’d failed in my homework task, which was to identify which Group an old scarf, which he’d assigned to me, belonged to. After the meeting, it was back to the scanner. Some of the newspaper clippings were too big for my little A4 scanner and so I had to use the A3 scanner in the main office, which required a little reconfiguration of the host computer. I’ve improved my understanding of Windows no end while working at Heritage. A friendly lunch – with Birthday Cake for dessert – followed by a meeting with Don and our Windows guru to nut out how I could assist in cataloguing badges and scarves without stuffing up Don’s system. Birthday Cake is one feature of Scout Heritage. With twenty volunteers working in the centre it’s a rare week when we don’t have a birthday to celebrate. Some of those Birthdays are well on the other side of eighty. Heritage is one of the few groups I’ve joined where I brought down the average age of the group. Following the meeting I had a brief discussion with Peter – a Regional Venturer Leader and one of the stalwarts of Heritage Centre – with regards to a display we were creating for the Victorian Scout Headquarters. We arranged a time to visit HQ to strip the previous display and to put in the material I’d been gathering for the new display. We had been displaying material to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Scout Leader Training Courses. The new one was to centre on an event called Cuboree, where several thousand Cub Scouts and about fifteen hundred adults camp together for five days in the Dandenong ranges. This year is the tenth such event. Our children, Michael & Natalie attended Cuborees two and three respectively and I’ve attended all the rest since then. After that discussion I did some more scanning, sorted through a large striped bag full of scarves, badges and Scouting memorabilia and then headed off for home – via the Snowgum Shop to purchase some record books for my two Scout Groups. Monday night was something completely different. Charles, one of my Group Committee at 6th Box Hill Scout Group is a member of a Masonic Lodge. This one is devoted to Scouting, being the Baden-Powell Lodge, and it celebrates the birthday of Lord Robert Baden-Powell – Founder’s Day – by presenting an award to a deserving Rover Crew. Rovers are the oldest “youth” section in Scouting, being for young adults, aged between eighteen and twenty-six. I will admit to being somewhat apprehensive about attending, given that my knowledge of Masonic Lodges mainly derives from the popular literature. To add to my nerves, the head of the Lodge – a Scouting friend of mine – had phoned me while I was at Heritage, asking if I’d help out one of the Lodge members in leading the singing of a couple of campfire songs. I hadn’t really associated campfire songs with Masonic Lodges, but I’m always happy to inflict my voice on others. Fortunately the ceremonial aspects of the evening were kept to a minimum, especially given that there were several of us “outsiders” present. Women were also present – I’m not sure whether or not this is allowed in more formal Lodge events – and one of the women, with whom I’d worked on Scouting events, explained that some of the closed cases around the main room, were only opened if everyone present was part of the Lodge. The ceremonial aspects involved some formal ushering in of people, including the Rover Crew and the Victorian Deputy Chief Commissioner of Scouting. There was some ceremonial clothing, a few ritual statements, the occasional ceremonial hand gesture and some symbolic artifacts. I was confirmed in my feeling that I’m not Mason material when one of the officials noted that belief in a higher being was a prerequisite for Masonic membership. As a good Dawkinsian atheist I wouldn’t pass muster. I did though see a number of people with whom I’d worked in Scouting, including Lord Michael Baden-Powell and his wife. The ceremony was followed by a rather nice dinner, during which I got to natter to some old friends and one old adversary. A Scout Blanket, covered in badges, was auctioned for charity, with the final bid being $1,000. I was surprised to recognize the auctioneer as Rob, the ex-Group Leader from the Scout Group that Michael & Natalie went through. Due to differences of opinion, I’d left that Group to join another. However, time adds perspective and Rob and I had a good and very cordial catch-up. The singing went well too. Their regular singer and I worked nicely as a team 8 and people joined in. All in all an interesting evening – not one that I intend to repeat, but once my initial nerves had calmed, I relaxed and enjoyed the company. Tuesday afternoon saw me in the company of several people, some of whom may well have been Freemasons. I was at the City of Whitehorse Council rooms for a presentation on how to apply for Council grants. As a Group Leader, I am responsible for the upkeep of my Groups’ halls and there are times it helps to have a little money to do so. I learnt all about applying for grants to assist seniors in the community – not particularly useful for a Scout Group unless I was the senior under consideration – and about the different classifications of grants. They didn’t say anything about how to move one’s council into a marginal electorate but I didn’t really need ten million dollars for a swimming pool so that was fine. I do now know how to apply for free vouchers for the local rubbish tip and so the afternoon wasn’t wasted, even with the “Death by Power-Point” section of the presentation. Tuesday evening was a trifle more active. A friend of mine from the above mentioned 8th Elizabeth Scout Group is involved with an orienteering/regaining group. Geoff moved to Melbourne well before I did and, while he is not involved in fandom, his flat in St Kilda did provide Rob Lock and me with somewhere to stay when we came to Melbourne for Aussiecon in 1975. The orienteers kindly provide an activity based on finding a number of checkpoints on a map within an hour. It is purely to do with reading a map – no need for compass or GPS. It runs every Tuesday, during Daylight Saving, and, though open to everybody, specifically encourages Scout Groups to come along. During school term time it often uses Scout halls as starting points and for their toilet facilities. The Scout Group can then run a sausage sizzle for the returning runners/walkers/cyclists – a nice little fund-raiser. I’ve been assisting with the organization, working with participating Scout groups and acting as a general gopher. I don’t do the course, preferring to help behind the scenes, but I do insist on cycling to each venue, which has increased the mileage I’ve been doing on the bicycle recently. This insistence has caused minor problems, like the previous week, when it pissed down and I had to wade the bike through ankle-deep water on the bike path home. This Tuesday was nicer. It had rained in the morning – including just as I was cycling home from the Whitehorse Council Offices – but, by the time of the Adventure Racing, it was fairly dry. Gardiner’s Creek was flowing well, but not over the path I used. I’ve been learning about some of the less obvious applications of information technology. Whereas, in the past, each participant had a card, which they punched at every checkpoint they found, now they go out with a chipped tag that they pass over the sensor at each checkpoint. When they return, the computer prints out their score, detailing time, checkpoints found and any time penalties to itemize how they went. Even our Joey Scouts – the youngest section in Scouts – participate and have fun, while building up the basics of map reading. It’s a real family event – with people taking their dogs and with babies in harnesses riding on Dad’s or Mum’s shoulders. I also bump into Scout Leaders I know from training or from other Scouting events. As we get towards the end of Daylight Saving I find myself cycling home in the dark, but I know most of the local bike paths and so this is not an issue. And so we come to Wednesday. This time I was wearing my Scout Heritage hat again. (Probably more accurate to talk about my Scout Heritage shirt, as I have four uniform shirts, one for 6th Box Hill, one for Blackburn South, one for Scout Heritage Centre and one generic, which is the on in the photo above.) This was the morning Peter and I went into Scout Headquarters to change over the displays from Woodbadge to Cuboree. Scouting bureaucracy seems to have expanded of late. Scouts Headquarters occupies a large building in Mount Waverley but there never seems to be enough parking there. Fortunately I know it well enough to be able to find a space. I’m also distinctive enough that people recognize me and don’t ask embarrassing questions like “What are you doing taking items from that display case?” And, with the arrival of the coffee van, everyone came out of the woodwork and I was able to catch up with a few folk I’d worked with in the past. Wednesday was otherwise rather quiet in a Scouting sense. I did drop into Bunnings on my way home, to collect some masking tape they’d kindly donated to 6th Box Hill but, once I got home, apart from a little administrative stuff, I left off Scouting and did a little of this ANZAPA contribution instead. Amazing how, despite my retirement, I seldom get around to doing as much in the way of fanac as I otherwise might. Thursday was very light on for Scouting. Apart from going through some e-mails, all I did was attend our Cub Scout meeting that evening. That’s right. I was actually involved assisting in running a session for one of my Cub Packs. Rather novel. Fortunately it was the responsibility of Oo, our new Cub Scout Leader, to run the program. She had prepared an evening’s cooking, which the Cubs enjoyed – cooking chicken nuggets and decorating arrowroot biscuits so that they looked like Koala faces. Keith took them to the oval just above the hall for some “letting steam off” soccer, which allowed the more sedate cooking activity to proceed without too much hyperactivity. (It was probably mean to let the Cubs go home on a sugar high from the left over cake decoration/lollies.) I sorted though some bureaucracy and we got to appoint a new Second for Red Six. Friday was almost Scout Free. Due to our planned Saturday visit to the Guide and Scout Aquatic Centre at Sandringham, I had to do my usual Saturday shopping trip a day early, but I managed to combine that with a visit to the Blackburn South Hall to pick up some tarps I’d borrowed from 6th Box Hill and a visit to the 6th Box Hill hall to drop

9 off the tarps and the Bunnings masking tape. Easy day, except that Blackburn South’s books of Scout raffle tickets arrived in the post box, ready to be assigned to families for sale… Mind you, I could have done without the phonecall at 10:30pm from the parent who hadn’t read or followed the instructions about the Saturday sailing trip. Saturday was full on. I needed the early morning alarm to get to the Sailing Centre in time to greet our youth members and their parents. Also bumped into one of the instructors, with whom I’d worked on training courses. Scouting does tend to be very incestuous. Davo, the head instructor, was a friend of the people with whom I work at Scout Heritage and so we caught up with assorted gossip. In previous years I would have taken my swimming togs and joined the Group, particularly in the canoes, though the little five person yachts looked like fun as well. However I decided to do my tired old geezer impersonations and spend a pleasant time nattering to the other leaders and watching the kids falling off the paddle boards. I left early in order o drop in to Snowgum again, partly to get the kids their badges for their afternoon’s work. So. On the Seventh Day I rested – no formal Scouting activities but a chance to catch up with some paperwork and to sort the badges I was due to take to the Northlands Scout Heritage store room on the Monday. Retirement? Not really. I’ve just swapped paid work, which I didn’t mind some of the time, for volunteer Scouting work, which I enjoy. P.S. Was I really out and about that much? After a week’s social distancing it seems unlikely that that really happened.

KNOT ENOUGH

I was trying to think about science fiction stories that depended on knots so that I could keep up the general theme of these contributions, but there really weren’t enough to make it worthwhile. Indeed the only one I could think of that really fits the bill is the short story “A Subway Named Moëbius” by A.J. Deutch which appeared in Astounding in 1950, in multitudinous anthologies since then, which won a Retro Hugo in 2001 and which, unbeknownst to me was made into a film called Moëbius in 1996 with the setting changed to Buenos Aires. I doubt that there are many ANZAPAns who haven’t read the story, which postulates that, by adding a shuttle loop to the New York subway system it creates a multidimensional knot into which a train disappears. As far as I can gather it was Deutch’s only published story and, given that it appeared in more that eighteen anthologies I’m betting that it would give Deutch a crack at the best percentage rate for stories written:stories anthologised. Deutch was a published astronomer but I wouldn’t count that against his percentage.

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION December 1969 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman Contents Novelets: “Bye, Bye Banana Bird”, Sonya Dorman; “Formula For A Special Baby”, Julian F. Grow. Short Stories: “Hunting” Robin Carson; “The Adventure Of The Martian Client” Manly W. Wellman and Wade Wellman; “The Falcon And The Falconer” Barry Maltzberg; “Lord Of Sensation” Leonard Tushnet Article: “The Luxon Wall”, Isaac Asimov; Cartoon: Gahan Wilson; Cover: Ed Emsh

I’m tempted to list “Bye, Bye Banana Bird” by Sonya Dorman as another story influenced by Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. (That list already includes Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Harry Harrison’s Bill The Galactic Hero.) This one deals with the training of Roxy Rimidon a new recruit to the Planet Patrol Academy. In theory it should be a good feminist take on your typical male military training, but it’s somewhat undercut by Rimidon’s intention to screw her male commanding officer, her concerns about the size of her hips and issues surrounding her military haircut. Through the training and Rimidon’s first mission, Dorman establishes her character and nature, setting us up for other stories in the series. The two sequels also appear in F&SF and so I have no doubt I’ll get back to them in later ANZAPAs. I know I once read them and so they shouldn’t require too much catching up. As for this one, it’s good escapist science fiction with enough gender reversal to satisfy the first wave of sf feminism. “Hunting” is pure fantasy that would not seem out of place in an Ancient Greek setting but has, instead, been moved to the backwoods of North America. Robin Carson is one of those authors about whom the information is limited. He(?) appears to have published one novel Pawn of Time: An Extravaganza and perhaps some essays. The story blurb for this short story cites a number of novels and translation from the Italian, but there doesn’t seem much further information, apart from the citation of three articles in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. In some ways this story is a retelling of the myth of Acteon and Artemis, in which Acteon, while hunting, sees Artemis naked, is turned into a stag and is killed by his own hunting dogs. The fact that the hunter in this story is called Hart is a little bit too obvious. His failings are also far more typical of a suburban American male than would be likely in a heroic Greek hunter. And, rather than a naked goddess, Hart encounters a backwoodsman who gives him a potion guaranteed to make him small like a deer, so as to not spook his chosen prey. Needless to say, the effects of the potion are somewhat more than the hunter might have wished. F&SF has a taste for folk tales sent in the American wilderness. Gahan Wilson’s cartoon puts a twist on the commercialization of superheroes. “The Adventure Of The Martian Client” is, in the best Holmesian tradition, narrated by Dr John Watson and deals with the Martian invasion of London, as previously chronicled by H.G. Wells, though Dr Watson’s opinion of Wells is not particularly positive, dismissing him as “a known radical and atheist, a companion of Frank Harris, George 10 Bernard Shaw and worse.” The story is the first in a series of stories linking the Martian invasion to Holmes and Professor Challenger and they manage to remain true to the general feeling of Conan Doyle’s characters. The story is certainly tongue-in-cheek to an extent – having Professor Challenger, for instance, inventing the term “television” and making reference to Holmes’ seven percent solution, as dealt with in Nicolas Meyer’s Holmes pastiche. The Wellmans have fun with the concept – updating it from Wells earlier work, by noting the Mars is not as Wells had imagined it and so picturing it as the staging post for an interstellar invasion. Needless to say, Holmes, Watson and Challenger win through. “The Falcon And The Falconer” by Barry Maltzberg is another attempt to mesh science fiction and Christianity, in a similar fashion to Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star”, James Blish’s “A Case Of Conscience” or Harry Harrison’s “The Streets of Ashkelon”. To my mind, the major difference is that, in Maltzberg’s story, the religious element becomes more literal, whereas Blish & Harrison looked more at the sociological effects of religion on an indigenous population. “Lord Of Sensation” by Leonard Tushnet is a story of its time, echoing the San Francisco Be Ins where the aim was to appeal to all of the senses. Here the ultimate entrepreneur, a sort of Bill Graham, combined with Owsley Stanley, keeps inventing different ways to enhance the senses, each of which provides a temporary high but which then succumbs to disastrous side effects. It’s a sort of morality lesson well at odds with the idea that science can improve life – something that science fiction tended to concentrate on in the late sixties, despite people like Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner encouraging people to embrace science in their pursuit of an alternative life style. Tushnet was a New Jersey doctor who published most of his work in F&SF, though he did also get stories in Vertex and in Again Dangerous Visions. I do have a fondness for Asimov’s science articles. I’m aware of his limitations as a writer and of various limitations as a social human being, but he makes a great explainer. In “The Luxon Wall” he takes on our understanding of the limitation that is the speed of light in a vacuum. He starts with the Lorentz equation as a given. It’s been a while since I studied this sort of physics and so I’m willing to accept this. One of these days I’ll go back over my basic physics and remind myself of how Lorentz came up with the equation in the first place. He then examines how the mass of an object increases as it approaches the speed of light. For an object with real mass, the equation shows that, at the speed of light its mass becomes infinite. Sounds strange, but, by looking at high- speed sub-atomic particles, the maths works up to very close to the speed of light. In one area, modern physics has overtaken Asimov’s article. At the time he was writing it, it was assumed that neutrinos had no mass. Current theories only work if the three neutrinos do have a rest mass, but it’s very small – of the order of somewhere between 0.2 and 2 eV, where eV is an electron volt. The mass of an electron is about 500,000 eV. Regardless of this, Asimov’s article then goes on to discuss the possibility of tachyons – particles with a mass that is a multiple of I, the square root of minus 1 – i.e. “imaginary mass. Asimov’s conclusion is that real objects cannot travel faster than light, leaving science fiction writers stuck with warping space, or relying on time dilation or generation ships. And Asimov’s article rather segues into Julian F. Grow’s “Formula For A Special Baby”. This is another F&SF tale in the American wilderness and continues the tale of Dr Hiram Pertwee, the wild West Doctor encountered in “Bonita Egg” in the September ’69 issue of F&SF. Grow plays with sf tropes and so his alien arrives in a flying teacup, rather than a saucer. Due to the unexpected presence of his nursemaid/guardian, the alien has landed in the USA rather than Germany, where his mission was to whisper a certain very famous physics equation into the ears of a German baby by the name of Albert. I’m sure you can see where that is going. Through gold old country common sense, Pertwee accomplishes his mission and solves the alien’s personal issue into the bargain. Another cute little story. And so to the Market Place for this issue. I’m not sure whether I prefer SWEDISH beauties, magazines, movies, photos, slides etc. Choose from the leading collection in Scandinavia Or I HAVE COLLECTED THE MOST UNUSUAL THINGS IN THE UNIVERSE. Earthlings:

11 KNOT SERIOUS An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected]

ALL THE BEST EXPERIMENTS FEATURE EXPLOSIONS: The Science in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

While Charles Dodgson is well known as the author of Alice In Wonderland and as a mathematician and photographer, his interest extended into other fields, as befitted a Victorian intellectual. His incorporation of mathematical and logical puzzles into his letters, poems and books is well documented but his interest in Science less so – probably because many of his scientific musings are confined to his two later books: Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). Sylvie and Bruno is a strangely modern version of a novel, with multiple story lines that blend into each other. There is a narrator, the eponymous two children who are real at times, fairies at other times, and inhabitants of a strange fantasy world at other times, and there is a love story, between a Lady and her suitor Arthur which, in the best romantic tradition, does not go smoothly. The narrator is, at times part of the story but, at others, is an insubstantial observer. Some of the characters play one role in the “real” world and others in the strange fantasy world of Outland. It has weird verses interpolated but which don’t seem integrated into the story in the same way as the nonsense verses in the Alice books were part of the stories. Very early in Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll mentions telepathy – a term coined by Frederic W.H. Myers in 1882 Society for Psychical Research. He is on a train and a veiled Lady boards the train. Carroll, as narrator, speculates on her “hazel eyes and lips” (this while noting the “monotonous throb” of the engine.) “I closed my eyes again saying to myself “ – couldn’t have a better chance for an experiment in Telepathy! I’ll think out her face, and afterwards test the portrait with the original.” (p 295 Complete Works Lewis Carroll) Wikipedia notes: “He (Carroll) was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research, and one of his letters suggests that he accepted as real what was then called "thought reading". Dodgson wrote some studies of various philosophical arguments.” Having accidentally initiated a conversation with the Lady, they fall to discussing whether there is a greater amount of Science in books or in minds. The narrator concludes that although there is a great deal of written science that no living person has read and there is so much thought-out science that hasn’t been written “everything, recorded in books, must have once been in some mind…” (p 298) This somehow morphs into an explanation by the Professor of how to have a plunge bath in a strange contraption of his own devising that puts one in mind of the White Knight’s inventions from Through the Looking Glass. Like his contemporary Mark Twain. Dodgson had a fascination with strange inventions. The Lady then starts to muse on the fact that, as people started to travel by steam, books got shorter, because one didn’t have the time to read longer books. The narrator then extrapolates this and suggests that, when one travels by electricity, the books will shrink to the size of pamphlets. Could this be anticipating the FitzGerald/Lorentz contraction where, the faster you go, the shorter you get? This had been postulated in 1889 by George FitzGerald and again in 1892 by Hendrik Lorenz. Carroll could have claimed credit for the idea, but, instead, he goes off on a biological tangent, suggesting that this tendency is a reverse Darwinism where, “Instead of developing a mouse into an elephant, you would develop an elephant into a mouse.” (p320) Sadly, this demonstrates that Carroll had a limited understanding of Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution, but it does show that he was aware of the developments in biology. Darwin and Wallace published in 1859 and so their work would have been well-known to Carroll. I’ve been having trouble pinning down exact references but it would appear that Dodgson had little time for Darwin’s theories preferring a religious explanation of the nature of life to a materialistic one. Carroll is on firmer ground when discussing Newtonian physics. Arthur, the Lady’s suitor, and the Lady, now identified as Lady Muriel are discussing weight – during which discussion Carroll gets to make a point that sounds almost like modern feminism. (p340) “How convenient it would be,” Lady Muriel laughingly remarked, à propos of my having insisted on saving her the trouble of carrying a cup of tea across the room to the Earl, “if cups of tea had no weight at all! Then perhaps ladies would sometimes be permitted to carry them for short distances!” “One can easily imagine a situation,” said Arthur, “where things would necessarily have no weight, relatively to each other, though each would have its usual weight, looked at by itself.” Here we have Arthur distinguishing between the concepts of weight and mass, without ever using the term mass, despite the fact that the concept of gravitational mass had been introduced by Newton. Perhaps he was being over solicitous of the Lady’s feminine sensibilities. Arthur then goes on to deal with the concept of “weightlessness” or free fall as we’d consider it. He postulates two body problem, in which a room is placed a few billion miles above a planet and allowed to fall towards the planet with nothing else near enough to disturb it – a typically Einsteinian thought experiment. 12 “Well, now, if I take this book, and hold it out at arm's length, of course I feel its weight. It is trying to fall, and I prevent it. And, if I let go, it fails to the floor. But, if we were all falling together, it couldn't be trying to fall any quicker, you know: for, if I let go, what more could it do than fall? And, as my hand would be falling too—at the same rate—it would never leave it, for that would be to get ahead of it in the race. And it could never overtake the failing floor!” “I see it clearly,” said Lady Muriel. “But it makes one dizzy to think of such things! How can you make us do it?” “There is a more curious idea yet,” I ventured to say. “Suppose a cord fastened to the house, from below, and pulled down by some one on the planet. Then of course the house goes faster than its natural rate of falling: but the furniture—with our noble selves—would go on failing at their old pace, and would therefore be left behind.” “Practically, we should rise to the ceiling,” said the Earl. “The inevitable result of which would be concussion of brain.” “To avoid that,” said Arthur, “let us have the furniture fixed to the floor, and ourselves tied down to the furniture. Then the five-o'clock-tea could go on in peace.” “With one little drawback!” Lady Muriel gaily interrupted. “We should take the cups down with us: but what about the tea?” “I had forgotten the tea,” Arthur confessed. “That, no doubt, would rise to the ceiling unless you chose to drink it on the way!” It’s a very clear statement about the nature of free fall which, while obvious to us with the presence of international space stations, demonstrates Carroll’s ability to think through the consequences of Newton’s Laws without actually having encountered objects in free fall. Of course Carroll hasn’t worked out the logistics of tying a few billion miles of cord to the bottom of the house but this is, after all, a thought experiment. Carroll is also familiar with a little psychology. He neatly paraphrases Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: “…The Banquet comes first, of course. People never enjoy Abstract Science, you know, when they're ravenous with hunger.” (p 358). I’m not sure that Maslow’s 1943 paper acknowledged Carroll, but I feel it should have.1 Combining optics and physiology, Arthur and Lady Muriel fall to discussing how the image on the retina is inverted and that the brain must correct this in some way. Here they draw on the work of René Decartes who, when not being a drunken fart, used a dissected bull’s eye to establish the fact that the eye did indeed create an inverted image on the retina. How the brain then made the correction was studied by George Stratton in the 1890s. He was the researcher who tried wearing inverting glasses and who discovered that the brain, over several days, could be taught to adjust, so that things looked the right way up again, only to have to relearn this when the glasses were removed. Dodgson would not have known of this research when writing Sylvie and Bruno, but he makes his own speculations. “And isn't strange,” said the young lady, passing with startling suddenness from Sentiment to Science, “that the mere impact of certain coloured rays upon the Retina should give us such exquisite pleasure?” “You have studied Physiology, then?” a certain young Doctor courteously enquired. “Oh, yes! Isn't it a sweet Science?” Arthur slightly smiled. “It seems a paradox, does it not,” he went on, “that the image formed on the Retina should be inverted?” “It is puzzling,” she candidly admitted. “Why is it we do not see things upside-down?” “You have never heard the Theory, then, that the Brain also is inverted?” “No indeed! What a beautiful fact! But how is it proved?” “Thus,” replied Arthur, with all the gravity of ten Professors rolled into one. “What we call the vertex of the Brain is really its base: and what we call its base is really its vertex: it is simply a question of nomenclature.” This last polysyllable settled the matter. I rather suspect that we still don’t fully understand the processes by which the brain does make the correction. Dodgson was certainly aware of the scientific method and plays with it in order to understand how Arthur has lost his relationship with the Lady Muriel. (p423) 'First accumulate a mass of Facts: and then construct a Theory.' That, I believe, is the true Scientific Method. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and began to accumulate Facts.

1 Though not strictly on topic I can’t resist noting a terrible pun that Carroll sneaks into Sylvie and Bruno’s visit to Dog Land (p 382). Carroll was a seasoned sea traveler and would have been familiar with naval parlance. In this section he mentions that the King of Dogland consults his time piece which is, of course, a dog watch, the first of which runs from 4:00 to 6:00pm, with the second dog watch running from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. 13 A smooth grassy slope, bounded, at the upper end, by venerable ruins half buried in ivy, at the lower, by a stream seen through arching trees—a dozen gaily-dressed people, seated in little groups here and there—some open hampers—the debris of a picnic—such were the Facts accumulated by the Scientific Researcher. And now, what deep, far-reaching Theory was he to construct from them? The Researcher found himself at fault. Yet stay! One Fact had escaped his notice. While all the rest were grouped in twos and in threes, Arthur was alone: while all tongues were talking, his was silent: while all faces were gay, his was gloomy and despondent. Here was a Fact indeed! The Researcher felt that a Theory must be constructed without delay. Dodgson does tend to be more Aristotelian than Newtonian in his Science. He prefers a philosophical approach to an experimental one. Following some comments on Botanical Science, occasioned by the bunch of Fairy Flowers that Bruno sells to the narrator for a ‘ap’ny, and their mysterious disappearance, we find the following musings on cause and effect: (p447) “It has occurred to me,” said Arthur, “as a curious problem in Teleology—the Science of Final Causes,” he added, in answer to an enquiring look from Lady Muriel. “And a Final Cause is—?” “Well, suppose we say—the last of a series of connected events—each of the series being the cause of the next —for whose sake the first event takes place.” “But the last event is practically an effect of the first, isn't it? And yet you call it a cause of it!” Arthur pondered a moment. “The words are rather confusing, I grant you,” he said. “Will this do? The last event is an effect of the first: but the necessity for that event is a cause of the necessity for the first.” Many a cosmologist has speculated on this very issue, whether it is essential to have a first cause in order to have a final effect. Biologists have also been accused of using teleological arguments in dealing with evolutionary processes. To look to Wikipedia: In modern science, explanations that rely on teleology are often, but not always, avoided, either because they are unnecessary or because whether they are true or false is thought to be beyond the ability of human perception and understanding to judge. But using teleology as an explanatory style, in particular within evolutionary biology, is still controversial. A few biologists and a large number of lay people, particularly those with a religious bent, have a tendency to look at the end product of an evolutionary process as the reason for the process, thus seeing the functionality of the eye as the reason for the whole process, whereas a true evolutionary biologist sees the process as independent of the final result. Stephen Jay Gould hinted at such in his book Wonderful Life where he notes that the presence of a potential ancestral chordate, Pikaia, does not mean that, were the tape of history rewound and played again from scratch that we would end up with a world of vertebrates. This section is followed by speculations regarding reducing living organisms in size, a topic already broached in Dodgson’s speculations regarding reducing an elephant to the size of a mouse. For all of his mathematical understanding, Dodgson shows little understanding of the inverse square laws that show that you can’t shrink or enlarge organisms to the degree he suggests without seriously changing the relative proportions of arms, legs and the like. But that didn’t enter into his descriptions of Alice’s changes in size in Alice in Wonderland. Our next encounter of physics in Sylvie and Bruno comes in the description of the Professor’s Outlandish Watch. H.G. Wells “The Time Machine” was not published until 1895, but Dodson had already anticipated the use of machinery to change time with the Professor’s watch. He notes that, with most watches, time is irrelevant as they both go on irrespective of one another. His watch, on the other hand, takes time with it and has the ability to drag time into the past. (p457) He demonstrates this by dragging time fifteen minutes into the past, much to the consternation of Bruno who, fifteen minutes previously, had been stung by a bee. The narrator takes pity on Bruno and implores the Professor to move the watch forward again so that Bruno doesn’t have to experience the pain of the bee sting all over again. The watch is limited to turning back time a month and is incapable of moving into the future in advance of what the Professor calls true time. The watch does, though, have another setting which can make the events of the next hour occur in reverse order – an interesting idea, given the previous discussions of first and last causes. Wikipedia notes that there is one earlier story in which a clock that allows one to travel back in time was used: “The Clock That Went Backwards” by Edward Page Mitchell published in New York’s The Sun newspaper on September 18th 1881 but suggests that

14 neither Carroll nor Wells would have been aware of it. Chronological travelling clocks were clearly an idea whose time had come. Having established the nature of the watch, Carroll’s narrator then decides, in the best scientific traditions, to experiment with it. The first experiment is rather simple. Having observed a conversation between two fishwives – a conversation that avoids the type of language customarily associated with fishwives – he decides to push the watch back a minute and so observes the conversation being repeated – and this well before videotape machines with rewind facility. He then decides to try to make more effective use of the power of the machine. He observes a bicycle accident, caused by a box falling from a wagon into the path of on on-coming cyclist. Having rendered assistance to the injured cyclist, he rewinds time and moves the dropped box and the cyclist passes by unharmed. However, at exactly the same moment that the narrator turned back the watch, the scene resets itself, with the injured cyclist exactly where he was before the narrator made the changes. Thus the watch, while allowing time to replay for a brief loop, resets things. This negates the potential for a Grandfather Paradox as the separate reality created by the time traveller reverts to normal at the moment the time traveller sets off into the past – there is a temporary parallel universe created but it remains within a closed loop. The narrator then carries out a second experiment – he presses the setting that reverses time for an hour. In that time he is apparently invisible to a family as he watches them un-sewing embroidery, un-eating a roast dinner which is unsliced from the roast etc. Dodgson doesn’t quite go to the extent that was explored in the Red Dwarf episode “Backwards” where Cat has an un-shit in the woods, but it’s interesting to see his exploration of the reversal of time’s arrow. He doesn’t quite take things to their logical conclusion in that, although the conversations occur in the wrong order, the words themselves aren’t backwards. That would have made the whole section very difficult to read. The final philosophical discussion appears to have more to do with the nature of free will, occasioned by a child’s observation that Sundays, which should be a day of worshipful joy, are, instead, boring and tedious. (p498) Arthur notes that Science has shown that Nature goes by fixed, regular laws – certainly the Newtonian interpretation of Science. Arthur comes back to the nature of causation: “You grant then that I can, by an act of free choice, move this cup,” suiting the action to the word, “this way or that way?” “Yes, I grant it.” “Well, let us see how far the result is produced by fixed laws. The cup moves because certain mechanical forces are impressed on it by my hand. My hand moves because certain forces—electric, magnetic, or whatever 'nerve- force' may prove to be—are impressed on it by my brain. This nerve-force, stored in the brain, would probably be traceable, if Science were complete, to chemical forces supplied to the brain by the blood, and ultimately derived from the food I eat and the air I breathe.” “But would not that be Fatalism? Where would Free-Will come in?” “In choice of nerves,” replied Arthur. “The nerve-force in the brain may flow just as naturally down one nerve as down another. We need something more than a fixed Law of Nature to settle which nerve shall carry it. That 'something' is Free-Will.” Lady Muriel comes to the conclusion that prayer can only influence things that are under humanity’s control and that, to pray for things that are only under God’s control would be impious. Sylvie and Bruno ends with Lady Muriel engaged to the military Captain and Arthur left without the love of his life. Sylvie And Bruno Concluded begins in a far less interesting manner, at least to me. Much of it is concerned with aspects of Christian theology and with the romance story between Arthur and Lady Muriel. Arthur’s rival for the Lady Muriel’s attentions has been discarded because of his lack of Christian beliefs. The narrator spends time pondering the morality of people inheriting wealth for which they haven’t worked but doesn’t quite come down on the side of socialism. There’s even a suggestion that trickle down economics works – I guess I’ll have to give the standard excuses for Dodgson here. He was getting old and he did live in an incredibly conservative society. There are also little bits of moralising on the evils of drink in the working classes. Much as I like Carroll’s work, I don’t think I’d have gotten on very well with Charles Dodgson. We return to science in the seventh chapter of the book where Lady Muriel introduces the narrator to Mein Herr, a German gentleman whom the narrator initially mistakes for the Professor from the previous book. (p576) Mein Herr explains a Moëbius strip, calling it a Paper Ring. He then goes on to instruct the Lady Muriel in how to sew several handkerchiefs into a bag in such a manner that the inside and the outside are the same. Mein Herr refers to it as Fortuna’s Purse but we’d see it as the equivalent of a Klein Bottle – a concept first described by the German mathematician Felix Klein in 1882. Given that mathematics was Dodgson’s profession and that paradoxes fascinated

15 him, it’s no great surprise to see him introducing the concept here. Given that Moëbius and Johann Listing were both developing a theory of topology in the 1880s, it’s quite reasonable that Mein Herr is a German. Mein Herr then goes off on a track that would see him anticipate M.C. Escher’s ever descending stair cases. He explains that trains in his country don’t need engines, just brakes, because they work by gravity. All train lines burrow through the earth and are perfectly straight and so the middle of the track is closer to the centre of the Earth than the ends. To start the train, you just let it fall towards the centre of the track and then you allow its momentum to carry it to the other end of the line. I’m guessing that, for the sake of his argument, Mein Herr’s trains are thoroughly friction free. Later, at a social event, (p 614) Mein Herr discusses Artificial Selection, in terms Darwin would have appreciated. He even starts by citing the breeding for particular characteristics in pigeons, but goes, from there, to human eugenics in which Mein Herr’s countrymen have bred people so that they are less dense than water so that no one can ever drown. In practice our average density is less than that of water, as long as we keep breathing, but that’s another issue altogether. Mein Herr notes that the eventual aim of their eugenics program is to breed people who are lighter than air. Bruno’s “innocent” question does get to the heart of the problem with human eugenics: “What doos oo do wiz the peoples that’s too heavy?” Bruno solemnly enquired. “We have applied the same process,” Mein Herr continued, not noticing Bruno’s question, “to many other purposes. We have gone on selecting walking-sticks—always keeping those that walked best—till we have obtained some, that can walk by themselves! We have gone on selecting cotton-wool, till we have got some lighter than air! You’ve no idea what a useful material it is! We call it ‘Imponderal.’” Much as the Nazis concentrated more on the technology than the human implications, so do Mein Herr’s people. Mind you, the idea of stuffing parcels with imponderal so that they have negative weight is attractive, especially as it means that, when you post such a parcel, the post office has to pay you. It would make fanzine production far more economic. Mein Herr then goes on to discuss maps, noting that, in his country, they experimented with the scale of maps, given that the larger the scale of a map, the more accurate it is. They eventually settled on a map that was on the scale of a mile to a mile, but they never actually spread it out, following objections from the farmers and so decided to use the whole country as its own map. This is followed by Mein Herr describing a friend’s visit, by balloon to a planet so small that you can walk around it in twenty minutes and where, if a soldier wanted to shoot someone, they would fire in the opposite direction and so shoot their enemy in the back. Uncle Fester, from The Addams Family, would have loved this. Not exactly Science, but certainly a science fictional idea. Now what was the story in which an astronaut stranded on an asteroid uses a golf club to launch explosive packages into orbit to create an SOS? At some point Mein Herr metamorphoses into simply an old man with rather strange ideas on the Newtonian laws of motion. p(628) He mentions that a perfect sphere, such as a bullet, when dropped falls in a straight line with accelerated velocity and notes that such a bullet fired horizontally does not move in a straight line, due to its falling under the influence of gravity. He then decides that a perfect sphere, if shielded from the effect of gravity could then continue to accelerate in a straight line and so has one of his professors test the idea by eating enough suet-dumplings to turn himself into a perfect sphere and then, shielded from the downward force of gravity by a pair of legs, he sets off horizontally, accelerating all the time until he runs into a haystack. Had the haystack not stopped him, he would have continued straight into space. It’s all beautifully Newtonian, except that the old man does not explain what force is acting upon the professor to give him the accelerated velocity, but it’s right. The only reason we tend to launch orbital rockets straight up is to give them less atmosphere and so less air frictional force to overcome. On an airless world, launching vertically would be just as effective, provided that there were no haystacks in the way.2 Our next reference to Science comes in the Professor’s lecture on the Axioms of Science – something that Bruno wants delivered as soon as possible so that he can get to the experiments – a sentiment shared by many students in Science classes. The Axioms are as follows: “The First Axiom,” the Professor read out in a great hurry, “consists of these words, ‘Whatever is, is.’ And the Second consists of these words, ‘Whatever isn’t, isn’t.’ Sadly too few people are aware of these Axioms and so have a tendency to want to believe that things that aren’t, are. I’m sure though that Richard Dawkins and Aron Ra would support the Axioms. The Professor follows these up with a display of specimens, including Aqua Pura, or water, which allows another chance to preach against alcohol, a

2 It’s just after this section that Sylvie is telling Bruno a story that features owls and Bruno asks if owls cry. This is Dodgson exhibiting his erudition. It’s a quotation from Shakespeare’s “Ariel’s Song” from The Tempest. Janet Frame took it from Shakespeare for the title of her novel Owls Do Cry. 16 Blue Beetle with three blue spots under its wings3, which has escaped, an elephant, which is too big to see properly without a “minimifying-glass” which reduces it to the size of a mouse (note previous references to elephants and mice) and a flea, which is enlarged to the size of a horse, using a “megaloscope”. In this section, Dodgson reveals his lack of understanding of the taxonomic naming of common animals, giving Mus Communis for the common mouse and Equus Communis for the common horse.4 Though this could well be simply Dodgson making fun of “experts” such as the Professor. The Professor finally gets around to the part that Bruno wants – the experiments. For the first, he gets Bruno to hold on to two knobs while the Professor turns a handle. Bruno’s response is “It jingled my elbows, and it banged my back, and it crinkled my hair, and it buzzed among my bones!” There’s no picture to go with this experiment, but it sounds very much like a Wimshurst machine, a device for generating electrostatic charges, developed between 1880 and 1883. The successor to this – the van der Graaf generator – is often used in High School physics classes and has a similar effect on students. For experiment number two, the Professor decides to expose Bruno to Black Light, which he created by putting a lighted candle in a box and pouring black ink all over it. Bruno puts his head in the box, which has been covered by a blanket but admits that: “I saw nuffin!” Bruno sadly replied. “It were too dark!” “He has described the appearance of the thing exactly!” the Professor exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Black Light, and Nothing, look so extremely alike, at first sight, that I don’t wonder he failed to distinguish them! Of course this is to be expected as humans can’t see in the UV wavelengths. UV had been known since the beginning of the 19th Century and, by 1878 its ability to kill bacteria was known. However here we can simply see the Professor using a little flimflam to befuddle his audience. Although incandescent globes had been patented by 1879, it’s doubtful that anyone was using them at this time to produce the Black Light so beloved of 1960s bedroom posters. According to Wikipedia, the most common name for UV Rays in the 19th Century was “chemical rays”. The Professor’s Third Experiment is a demonstration of Hooke’s Law and the concept of elastic limits. The Professor came down, and led the way to where a post had been driven firmly into the ground. To one side of the post was fastened a chain, with an iron weight hooked on to the end of it, and from the other side projected a piece of whalebone, with a ring at the end of it. “This is a most interesting Experiment!” the Professor announced. “It will need time, I’m afraid: but that is a trifling disadvantage. Now observe. If I were to unhook this weight, and let go, it would fall to the ground. You do not deny that?” Nobody denied it. “And in the same way, if I were to bend this piece of whalebone round the post—thus—and put the ring over this hook—thus—it stays bent: but, if I unhook it, it straightens itself again. You do not deny that?” Again, nobody denied it. “Well, now, suppose we left things just as they are, for a long time. The force of the whalebone would get exhausted, you know, and it would stay bent, even when you unhooked it. Now, why shouldn’t the same thing happen with the weight? The whalebone gets so used to being bent, that it ca’n’t straighten itself any more. Why shouldn’t the weight get so used to being held up, that it ca’n’t fall any more? That’s what I want to know!” Sadly the Professor is stretching his analogy beyond its elastic limit and, besides, he claims that it might take two thousand years for the weight to become accustomed to not falling, at which point it’s decided to move on to the Fourth Experiment “For this concluding Experiment, I will take a certain Alkali, or Acid—I forget which. Now you’ll see what will happen when I mix it with Some——” here he took up a bottle, and looked at it doubtfully, “—when I mix it with— with Something——” Here the Emperor interrupted. “What’s the name of the stuff?” he asked. “I don’t remember the name,” said the Professor: “and the label has come off.” He emptied it quickly into the other bottle, and, with a tremendous bang, both bottles flew to pieces, upsetting all the machines, and filling the Pavilion with thick black smoke.

3 I suspect that this is a topical reference but I’m not aware of its meaning.

4 The correct taxonomic names are Mus musculus (Linnaeus 1758) and Equus ferus caballus( Linnaeus, 1758) Given the fact that these names were given by Linnaeus, there’s no excuse for accidentally misnaming them. 17 Sounds like just the sort of Experiment that would suit even the most jaded of Chemistry students. Sadly Carroll doesn’t name any of the chemicals used – the 19th Century equivalent of “Don’t try this at home.” And this covers the science in the Sylvie and Bruno books, apart from the very last section where, after Arthur has been reunited with the Lady Muriel and after Sylvie and Bruno are reunited with their father, the King of Elfland, there comes a question of two lockets – one blue and the other red. “It’s blue, one way,” she said softly to herself, “and it’s red, the other way! Why, I thought there were two of them—Father!” she suddenly exclaimed, laying the Jewel once more in his hand, “I do believe it was the same Jewel all the time!” “Then you choosed it from itself,” Bruno thoughtfully remarked. “Father, could Sylvie choose a thing from itself?” “Yes, my own one,” the old man replied to Sylvie, not noticing Bruno’s embarrassing question, “it was the same Jewel—but you chose quite right.” And he fastened the ribbon round her neck again. “SYLVIE WILL LOVE ALL—ALL WILL LOVE SYLVIE,” Bruno murmured, raising himself on tiptoe to kiss the ‘little red star.’ “And, when you look at it, it’s red and fierce like the sun—and, when you look through it, it’s gentle and blue like the sky!” “God’s own sky,” Sylvie said, dreamily. “God’s own sky,” the little fellow repeated, as they stood, lovingly clinging together, and looking out into the night. “But oh, Sylvie, what makes the sky such a darling blue?” Sylvie’s sweet lips shaped themselves to reply, but her voice sounded faint and very far away. The vision was fast slipping from my eager gaze: but it seemed to me, in that last bewildering moment, that not Sylvie but an angel was looking out through those trustful brown eyes, and that not Sylvie’s but an angel’s voice was whispering “It is love.” So religion triumphs over science and that’s probably the reason I find these books far less satisfying than I find the Alice books. But there are some fun speculations to be found in them.

18 WHAT I SHOULDN’T FIND WHILE CLEANING UP.

One of the things about a lack of Scouting is that I’ve been tidying the study. Further evidence of this will be found later in this issue. However, I probably shouldn’t have found this issue of Rip Off Comix #2 – dated at 1977…

19 DIGGING INTO THE PAST

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION January 1970 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman Contents Novelets: “Longtooth”, Edgar Pangborn; “A Third Hand”, Dean R. Koontz. Short Stories: “A Matter Of Time And Place” Larry Eisenberg; “E Pluribus Solo” Bruce McAllister; “Car Sinister” Gene Wolfe; “Ride The Thunder” Jack Cady; “Bughouse” Doris Pitkin Buck; “A Delicate Operation Robin Scott Article: Books Joanna Russ; “The Lunar Honor-roll Wall”, Isaac Asimov; Cartoon: Gahan Wilson; Cover: Mel Hunter

“Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn is a classy piece of writing combining the Maine wilderness with a Bigfoot story. Interesting to see a second such story in F&SF following on from Vance Aandahl’s “An Adventure in the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness” in the August ’69 edition. I suspect that discoveries by the Leakeys and others in the 1950s and 1960s made the possibilities of surviving hominid cousins more plausible. The story is also consistent with the tendency of science fiction in the 1960s and 70s to move from outer space to our own backyard. Indeed, the story would change little had it been about a man hunting for his wife after she’d been kidnapped by Inuit. I was, to a degree, put in mind of the John Wayne movie The Searchers in the way that the protagonist in this story reacts to finding his kidnapped wife. Pangborn’s “Angel’s Egg” has long been a favourite story of mine and this one shares a similar feel and narrator. Joanna Russ, in her “Books” column rips apart one book I‘ve read – Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, heaps praise on Jack Vance’s Emphyrio, totally trashes Robert Merle’s The Day of the Dolphin, is even-handed with the stories in Harry Harrison & Brian Aldiss’s Best SF: 1968 and is somewhat bemused by K.M. O’Donnell’s The Empty People. I must see if we have a copy of Emphyrio in the house. Larry Eisenberg’s “A Matter of Time and Place” is one of his Emmett Duckworth stories and is told, more or less, tongue in cheek. I find his stories similar to Reginald Bretnor’s Papa Schimmelhorn stories in that they poke gentle fun at the military-industrial complex. And I can’t resist a story with lines such as “Your argument smacks of sophistry.” This is a story of its time, looking as it does at the involvement of scientists in the Vietnam War. After two interesting but failed attempts at the perfect weapon, Duckworth comes up with an intriguing way to make use of a rather strange reading of the nature of entropy, leading to peace talks in Vietnam. Rather dubious, but fun. Bruce McAllister’s “E Pluribus Solo” is a story that might relate well to Americans but doesn’t to me. It’s about a “bounty hunter” who has been hired to kill the last remaining bald eagle but South Africans who see it as payback for all of the American hunters who have killed all of the South African game animals. I’d have preferred a story about a South African who goes about killing bow wielding American dentists. Gene Wolfe’s “Car Sinister” doesn’t betray any hint of the influential writer he was to become. It’s listed as his first story for F&SF, which also notes that he had stories in Damon Knight’s Orbit collections prior to this. ISFDB lists other previous publications in If and in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. This one is a one pun story that Wolfe builds upon – it is the concept of cars getting serviced at service stations – a one liner that John Steinbeck threw off in The Grapes Of Wrath. If I had to place it with any other story, it would be with Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Seas With Oysters” and, given that that one picked up a Hugo, I suppose it’s not in bad company. Wolfe makes no attempt to justify his conceit in terms of the actual rationale, though he does have fun describing how the narrator gets a demonstration of how a stud Aston Martin is mated with a prim and proper Volks squareback, aided by ramps and jacks. It’s a nice piece of whimsy but ends rather abruptly. I’m guessing that Wolfe couldn’t work out where the story was going to go from there. It’s probably the wrong day to be reading Dean Koontz’s “A Third Hand”: The final weapon was a virus released on the Chinese mainland…the speedy killer had wiped out approximately one half of the Chinese male population. I found out a second reason for not reading this story. It’s terribly bad. It’s not even as if it’s a first story. ISFDB lists fourteen previous publications. And Koontz has gone on to be a very prolific and successful author. But this one is just clunky, not really exploring the potential of a psionically gifted, physically disabled super-genius. It is more or less a standard amateur private eye defeats manipulating drug lord and corrupt police department story with plot holes so wide you could drive a coach and four through them. The super-genius doesn’t even preview the taped evidence that he shows to the corrupt policeman. The story is cluttered with bad science fiction clichés, such as servo- motors, intelligent reprogrammed androids, telekinesis and newspapers delivered by fax. Indeed, it reads like a parody

20 of such stories, except that it isn’t funny. Nope. Even when in COVID-19 home semi-isolation, this isn’t one I’d wish upon bored readers. Jack Cady’s “Ride The Thunder” is a far more traditional F&SF story – part ghost story, part native American spirituality and part rural American horror. Clearly crafted by someone who knows trucks and truck drivers – the story was originally published in a truckers’ magazine – it conjures up the spirits of those who push their rigs over the lands of their forefathers. It’s not my favourite type of story but I have to admire the skill of the author and the strength of his language. According to his bibliographical details, Cady picked up a Nebula Award in 1993 for “The Night We Buried Road Dog” which also appeared in F&SF. (Somehow I doubt that I will get as far as that edition in these pages.) Doris Pitkin Buck, a science fiction writer and poet, was one of the founders of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Her story here, “Bughouse”, impressed me more that did “Transgressor’s Way” in the July 1969 F&SF but her background as a poet is certainly obvious in the amount of vocabulary she uses to tart up what is a fairly simple idea. The story takes a theme that was used by Lewis Carroll when talking of the Red King or of the characters in The Matrix. I’m not sure whether to classify this one as fantasy or science fiction, given the way the plot relies on a magic potion somehow sourced via traditional Chinese medicine obtained in an opium den. Not bad, but somewhat verbose. Way back before Google if I wanted to find out obscure facts about science, I’d rely on Isaac Asimov’s column. Here he talks about the way that craters on the Moon were named and about how his father instilled in him a love of learning. He makes a case for naming lunar craters for Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells and Willy Ley. I note, from Wikipedia, that were craters named for Willy Ley and H.G. Wells in 1970 but Poe seems to have missed out. There is a crater on Mars named after Asimov, as well as an asteroid. Heinlein also has an asteroid named after him as does Arthur C. Clarke. The names of a number of features on Pluto’s moon Charon are science fiction related, including a mountain for Clarke and one for Octavia Butler – a much deserved honour, but I hope I’m not the only person who notes that Butler Mons could be subject to a double entendre. Robin Scott’s “A Delicate Operation” is set against the background of the Iron Curtain and details the plans to extract an East German scientist from behind the Berlin Wall. It’s easy to make fun of writers when their morality seems to be locked into their particular milieu but Scott’s easy use of the term “dyke” to describe one of the characters in the story plus the need to explain that dyke means lesbian did jar with me as a reader in 2020. (I wonder if it would even have registered when I first read this story in 1970.) It wasn’t until I got to the end of the story that I remembered that the sexuality of the English physician recruited to assist in the defection and that of the East German scientist was germane to the plot. Add to that the fact that the narrator is intended to be a typically sexist American intelligence operative and the fact that the scientist works in the biomedical field and I can forgive the language that is, in this day and age, unsound. What I can’t forgive is the terrible pun in the title. At the risk of providing a spoiler, I’ll note that Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil was published later in 1970. And so to the Market Place for this issue: Help create Paradise. “Doc”, 1080 Newport, Long Beach, Ca 90804

BOOKS THAT I FINALLY GOT AROUND TO READING DURING THE WAR LOCKDOWN One of the joys of not Scouting has been making a little sense of my room and, in the course of that, I’ve been discovering books with little bookmarks in them that indicate that I started reading them, but never got around to finishing them. One of these is Richard Dawkins An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (Black Swan 2014). I’m well aware that Dawkins isn’t everyone’s favourite. He has a tendency to be rather brutal in stating his opinions but, since I tend to agree with much of what he says, I don’t mind this and I find his wit amusing and cutting. This is the first volume of his autobiography and reminds me that I must obtain the second volume. It covers his ancestry and his life up to the publication of The Selfish Gene. In dealing with his childhood, it reminds me, in a strange way, of Brian Aldiss’ The Hand Reared Boy, without all of the sexual references. I guess it is set in a similar milieu, though Dawkins spent much of his childhood in Africa, while Aldiss’s book is very much limited to England. The writing is much as one has come to expect from Dawkins popular science writing – very erudite, rather chatty, and some interesting admissions of juvenile wrong-doing. It’s sprinkled with references to indicate that Dawkins’ family were comfortable in the company of the lower ranks of the upper classes. In addition to his father being a pall bearer at Baden-Powell’s funeral in Kenya, Dawkins name drops David Attenborough and, later in the book notes the names of all sorts of luminaries with whom he shared classes in English “public” schools and later at Oxford. It must have been a heady time. There are a couple of matter of fact references to sex. I rather liked the low key way in which he notes his loss of virginity “I didn’t finally lose my virginity until much later, at the rather advanced age of twenty two, to a sweet 21 cellist in London, who removed her skirt in order to play to me in her bedsitter (you can’t play the cello in a tight skirt) – and then removed everything else.” One of the areas where I find I disagree with Dawkins is in his treatment of paedophilia, to which there are two references in the book. He describes one teacher who put his hands into Dawkins’ shorts when Dawkins was about eleven and “did no more than have a little feel”. Dawkins then notes “I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.” Dawkins mentions another teacher “One of our masters – the only one we were allowed to call by his nickname – was prone to fall in love with the prettier boys. He never, as far as we knew, went any further than to put an arm around them in class and make suggestive remarks, but nowadays that would probably be enough to land him in terrible trouble with the police – and tabloid-inflamed vigilantes.” I guess Dawkins was a product of that British “public” school system where such activities were common – much as they were in Australia’s Catholic school system – but this seems a little dismissive of issues that have done more damage than he seems willing to acknowledge. Given Dawkins’ current role as a “militant” atheist it’s interesting to see how much of a role the Church of England had in his up-bringing – a role that he doesn’t seem to resent in any way. I think I can understand this. Having done a little of my primary schooling in an English primary school I can relate to the way that religious observances underpinned much of the schooling there, at that time. My mother assures me that I expressed an interest in becoming a vicar when I was young in England and Dawkins expresses similar thoughts. Fortunately I lost all of that when we moved to Australia when I was nine. Dawkins found his own way out of that mode of thinking, a transition that he deals with in a very brief section while discussing his secondary school experiences where he went from being a fanatical Christian, because Elvis Presley was a Christian, through to being a Lamarckian evolutionist, to being a Darwinian militant atheist. This he covers in five pages of the autobiography pp 139-143. The last part of the book veers away from being autobiography into a rather technical description of some of his early work in the evolutionary implications of animal behaviour. He covers his interest in creating computerised data gathering and in analysing such data. It gets more technical than I can follow but Dawkins clearly believes that this is more important than going through the details of his life. He finally muses on how his interest in poetry has contributed to his success in writing. Anyway, an interesting read, even if I did skim the latter section. Now I’m going to have to grab a copy of the second volume. ---oOo--- ‘“Come on, Stan lad, said O’Brien, “give us one of yer love songs, one of dem with all the strains.”’ Spike Milligan Puckoon One of the joys of social distancing has been doing some sorting. As will be noted in my comment to Alan Stewart below, one of the things I found was an ancient Adelaide bus ticket in an old note book. That also had the following filk, composed at Swancon in 1986. Given that the perpetrators included a couple of people from our current ANZAPA roster, I thought “Why not?”

SWANCON MEMBER (To the tune of “Ryebuck Shearer”)

I come from old Vic where the weather’s cold And heat over thirty makes me fold But Perth over Easter is colder I am told So this year I’m a Swancon member. MAO

If I don’t crash a party before I go And drink and filk, in the morning feel low So I’ll pass up the panels and miss all that they know ‘Cause this year I’m a Swancon Member. JRH

He comes from the East and his name is Jack He pubs his zines to complete fanac But not he’s drinking, talking and playing the hack ‘Cause this year he’s a Swancon Member JRH

I come from the south and I read fanzines I’d go to the cons but it’s beyond my means 22 But a dozen or more is the number I have seen And this year I’m a Swancon Member. LYNC

I come from the west; it’s my first Swancon Got wrecked last year at Aussiecon With naught but a concrete floor to sleep upon And this year I’m a Swancon Member. Unknown W.A. fan

23 KNOT OF TOADS An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected] Final pages 22/7/2020

Contents HIT THE FROG AND TOAD JACK 2 BOOK REVIEW BRIEF CANDLE IN THE DARK 4 DIGGING INTO THE PAST F&SF February 1970 5

Cartoon by Jane Taubman

24 KNOT OF TOADS An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected]

HIT THE FROG AND TOAD JACK An article dedicated to the proposition that all knowledge is to be found in fanzines

I sometimes wonder why amphibia don’t get much of a showing in science fiction. We get plenty of cats of various types and dogs, spiders, dragons and various apes, but where is the science fiction writer who makes use of frogs, toads, salamanders or caecilians? I do have vague recollections of sf set in the days when Venus was pictured as a swampy world, populated by vaguely amphibious humanoids but amphibians don’t even feature in James White’s vast menagerie of aliens in the Sector General stories. So how do we go in Australia when it comes to amphibians? While we do have an incredible range of frogs, Australia is totally devoid of salamanders, apart from in zoos or the axolotls (Mexican Walking Fish) brought in as pets. According to Wikipedia, salamanders evolved in the super continent of Laurasia during the mid to late Permian and, being almost totally freshwater creatures, did not make it as far south as Gondwana. Following the collision of North America and South American, salamanders have migrated into the southern continent. An interesting footnote mentions that salamander fossils have been found in the Murgon fossil deposits in Queensland, dating back to the early Tertiary period, about 55 million years ago. At this point, Australia was starting to separate from Antarctica, but that doesn’t really explain how salamanders chanced to be in Queensland, when Australia and Laurasia had been separated for almost 100 million years. Biology of the Amphibians suggests that, even before the breakup of Pangea there was, at the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic, an arid zone separating what would become Europe, Asia and North America from the Gondwanan continents of South America, Africa, India, Antarctica and Australia. Thus, in general, salamanders would have been unable to migrate to Gondwana after evolving in Laurasia. All temnospondyls on other continents had become extinct by the Late Jurassic, but they persisted in southeastern Australia.With the demise of the last of the temnospondyl amphibians in the Cretaceous, only the Lissamphibia (modern amphibians) remained, comprising the Anura (frogs and toads), Caudata (salamanders and newts) and Apoda (caecilians). Of these, only the frogs and toads currently inhabit Australia. The Eocene fossil locality at Murgon, Queensland, reveals that salamanders may have once lived in Australia, along with leiopelmatids, an archaic frog family that still survives in New Zealand. The absence of the worm-like caecilians in Australia is striking, given their wide distribution (fossil and living) in other Gondwanan fragments at lower latitudes.5 The Triassic-Jurassic extinction event around 199.6 Mya led to the extinction of most Mesozoic temnospondyls. The brachyopoids survived, as well as a few capitosauroids and trematosauroids. While the latter two groups soon became extinct, brachyopoids persisted and grew to large sizes during the Jurassic. Among brachyopoids, the brachyopids flourished in China and the chigutisaurids became common in Gondwana. The most recent known temnospondyl was the giant chigutisaurid Koolasuchus, known from the Early Cretaceous of Australia. It survived in rift valleys that were too cold in the winter for pseudosuchians that normally would have competed with them. Koolasuchus was one of the largest of the brachyopoids, with an estimated weight of 500 kg6 But the mystery regarding amphibians that got to me was the total absence of the third group from Australia. Now I have a fascination with what many might consider odd offshoots of the evolutionary bush, as some of you may have noticed in my article about tunicates in a previous ANZAPA. This interest extended to the chitons - a branch of the molluscs that is often overlooked - and peripatus, that rather strange creature than seems to have descended from a common ancestor it shares with both worms and arthropods. So, while most people are familiar with frogs, toads and salamanders I was drawn to one further group - the Gymnophiona or caecilians. These are legless amphibians which, from a cursory glance, look like nothing more than overgrown earthworms. There are currently about 183 different species. In learning more about them I discovered a new word, which, I suppose, could come in useful the next time I watch 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. That word is “edaphic” - related to or caused by particular soil conditions. Most of the caecilians are burrowers, with particularly strong skulls for ramming their way through soil or leaf litter. All are carnivorous, living on worms and other small invertebrates. There are a few purely aquatic species. All seem to have the bands that make their similarity to earthworms even stronger but they have skeletons, lungs, the left one being larger than the right, as is often the case with snakes, and mouths with teeth. Appropriate to their fossorial nature, caecilians are monochromats - their

5Living Australia http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p194981/pdf/chapter-3.pdf

6Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temnospondyli 25 eyes are usually covered by skin or bone and only have rods and not cones and so they can’t detect colour. All other amphibians have the ability to perceive colour. They have two sensory tentacles between the eyes and the nostrils. Another feature that distinguishes them from other amphibians is that they have a lower metabolic rate, no doubt related to the fact that they are burrowers, living in waterlogged soil, which is notably deficient in oxygen.The caecilians show no trace of legs, not even having homologues of a pelvic girdle. No appendicular skeleton - they are completely limbless and have no shoulder girdle, but there is a kink in the spine where the pelvic girdle once was7 “Unlike other extant amphibians, many caecilian amphibians have collagenous scales hidden in annular folds in the skin, the function of which is unknown”8 Some of the ancient terrestrial amphibians even had extensive bony coverings on their bodies which would have protected them from the emerging reptilian predators. Though no other modern day amphibians have scales, this characteristic is known in many fossil amphibians, including many of the temnospondyls. This group of amphibians included some very large beasts such as the four metre long capitosauroids, some of which have been found in Australian fossil beds. Amphibians have developed a number of strategies to work around the fact that their eggs can’t protect the embryo from drying out. Even among the frogs, you get some strange adaptations: the sadly extinct gastric brooding frog where the female turned off its stomach acids and enzymes and raised its young from egg to froglet in its stomach; in the pouched frog, males have brooding pouches and, once the eggs- which are played in leaf litter, have hatched into tadpoles, the tadpoles live in the pouch until they metamorphose into frogs. I also like the frog that lays individual eggs in the base of bromeliad plants and which then returns to the bromeliad regularly to lay infertile eggs, which act as a food source for the developing tadpole. Caecilians show a number of reproductive strategies. Some have a free-living larval stage, some lay eggs in which the larval stage completes its metamorphosis into the adult form and yet others, including the fully aquatic form, give birth to live young. “Several major events in caecilian evolution occurred along the Teresomata branch including the loss of a free-living larval stage and the origin of maternal feeding”9 This maternal feeding, which can take one of two forms, skin feeding, in which the female develops a thicker skin which the free-living larvae rasp at with special teeth, or a similar process in species that give birth to live adult forms where the internally developing young feed on the lining of the oviduct. The former strategy is called “maternal dermatophagy”10 and is seen in a Kenyan species Boulengerula taitana while the latter strategy is given the great name of “matriphagy”11 The skin cells are even modified to contain more protein and fat to support the developing young. I would have thought that this habit alone would have made them ideal candidates for some form of Lovecraftian horror story. Caecilians are also strange in that they are the only amphibians with a venomous bite. True there are frogs, toads and salamanders that produce poisons, but those tend to be limited to skin secretions, such as the poisons found on the skins of poison arrow frogs or cane toads. Some caecilians also produce poisonous skin secretions but, in addition, they have been discovered to have venom glands associated with their teeth. “The researchers are also unsure how

7 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/obl4he/vertebratediversity/caecilians.html

8María Torres-Sánchez, David J. Gower, David Alvarez-Ponce, Christopher J. Creevey, Mark Wilkinson & Diego San Mauro op cit

9What lies beneath? Molecular evolution during the radiation of caecilian amphibians María Torres-Sánchez, David J. Gower, David Alvarez-Ponce, Christopher J. Creevey, Mark Wilkinson & Diego San Mauro

10Life-history evolution and mitogenomic phylogeny of caecilian amphibians DiegoSan MauroaDavid J.GoweraHendrikMüllerbSimon P.LoadercRafaelZardoyadRonald A.NussbaumeMarkWilkinsona

11https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/amphibians/group/caecilians/ 26 widespread venom glands are among caecilian species, which currently number more than 200 (with many more likely unknown). If the ducts are found in ancient lineages, it could indicate that caecilians were among the first land-living vertebrates to lace their bites with venom.”12

Caecilians are not well represented in the fossil record but there are one or two, such as Eocaecilia from the early Jurassic (see right) - though I didn’t see this in any of the Jurassic Park movies. Indeed, when I first encountered mention of these little beasties in the mid-1980s there was only one known fossil, from the Eocene. One tends to forget how much palaeontology has advanced in the past thirty years or so. The fascinating fact is not just that we have fossils of these strange creatures but that palaeontologists have been able to identify them and have been able to work out so much about them from the limited fossil evidence. The skull on the left - from Eocaecilia - gives you an idea of how little information we have on these creatures. Yet, from this and a sequence of measurements based on it and living caecilians, palaeontologists have been able to draw conclusions regarding its position in the amphibians and have even been able to deduce that it may have had the small tentacles though these aren’t shown in the reconstruction on the right. The description of this is classic biology speak and shows how specialised the language becomes - some more words to add to my vocabulary: paired olfactory nerve foramina, which are known only to occur in extant caecilians; the latter are possibly related to the evolution of the tentacle, a caecilian autapomorphy13. (foramina are holes in the skull that allow nerves to pass through and an autapomorphy is a feature confined to a particular evolutionary line - thus the production of milk would be an autapomorphy of the mammals whereas feathers are the autapomorphy that shows birds and dinosaurs to be on the same evolutionary line. Aren’t you glad you asked?) So there you have it - everything you didn’t need to know about caecilians and weren’t afraid to ask. Now I’ll leave it to you creative types to develop an alien, taking advantage of your knowledge of weird life styles and physiology of this lesser known branch of the amphibians. The only thing that I cannot work out is how Noah managed to look after them on the ark.

P.S. just to add to your collection of weird amphibian facts, the caecilians are the only group of amphibians where internal fertilisation is the rule. Male caecilians have an intromittent organ called a phallodeum. (There’s another word to add to my collection for 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.) Well we may speak of giant horny toads but, apart from the fact that horny toads are lizards not amphibia, frogs and toads do not have penises.

BOOK REVIEW Brief Candle In The Dark - Richard Dawkins

This is the second volume of Richard Dawkins autobiography and the major question to which it leads me is “Does Dawkins really understand what an autobiography is?” The writing is, as ever, lively and interesting, enlivened with humour and some cutting comments. As in the first volume, Dawkins proves himself to be an adept name-dropper. I caught a few of them, given my background in biology, but many are connected to more esoteric areas of the biological sciences. It was interesting to note the references to John Krebs, the son of Hans Krebs, after whom the Krebs’ Cycle - a key part of the aerobic respiration process is named. Dawkins also makes references to his wife, Lalla Ward and to Douglas Adams, clearly establishing his science fiction credentials. The area in which his autobiography falters is, as in the first volume, he spends too much time talking about the technical aspects of his work and his books at the expense of biographical information. In his first book he made fairly frequent mention of his first wife, Marian Stamp but their divorce is scarcely noted. His second marriage, to Eve Barham is not mentioned, apart from in connection to their daughter Juliet Dawkins and her death, well after they had divorced. His marriage to Lalla Ward gets more space but this volume was published before their subsequent amicable divorce in 2016. The last section of the book recaps much of what had already appeared in his popular science books. In discussing memes, Richard Dawkins notes a technique anticipated by Jack Herman – perhaps an example of Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance. I remember Jack Herman describing that, while he was teaching ESL, he would tell is students that the word “fragile” was pronounced “frag-illy” in order to imprint his trademark on his students. Note Dawkins thought experiment ; “perhaps take a word with a conventional pronunciation, invent a ‘mutant’ mispronunciation and broadcast it, daily, to tens of thousands of people; then, later, investigate whether the mutant pronunciation takes over the meme pool and becomes the norm”. Mind you, Dawkins would take grave exception to his name being associated with Sheldrake’s, and Sheldrake even more. From what I’ve seen on YouTube, there’s no love lost between the pair of them.

12 It’s Not a Snake, but Beware of Its Venomous Bite New York Times

13 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050743 27 There are many anecdotes regarding the company that Dawkins kept both at Oxford and during his time in the U.S.A. and the book gives one a very clear picture of the sociology of upper crust British academia. Dawkins seems to enjoy the minute of life in a traditional English University in a manner akin to the way church-goers respond to the ceremonial aspects of their particular religious observances. Although a key part of the book, Dawkins does not dwell on his writing of The God Delusion. Indeed, he spends more time discussing the mathematics of digger wasp burrow selection. It is interesting, though, to see his thoughts on the book and how he seen Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great as a complementary volume. Certainly he doesn’t hold back when expressing his opinion of theology scholars who start with the assumption that God exists, and his condemnation of Islam is every bit as cutting as his condemnation of Christianity. Equally he can be cutting of others with whom he disagrees. When discussing reactions to The Selfish Gene he notes “Characteristically, the error was most articulately expressed by Stephen Gould, whose genius for getting things wrong matched the eloquence with which he did so:” All in all then, it’s an interesting insight into Dawkin’s psyche and one that I appreciate. I will admit that I have more sympathy for his views and his approach than I do for those who wish that he’d be less strident in expressing his views. I suspect that this is because Dawkins comes from an English tradition that allowed The Goons, Monty Python and The Hitchhikers’ Guide to The Galaxy to come into existence. Above all, I’m sorry that this autobiography marked his 70th Birthday and so there is unlikely to be a third volume.

DIGGING INTO THE PAST

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION February 1970 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Contents

Novelets: “From The Moon With Love”, Neil Shapiro; “His Only Safari”, Sterling E. Lanier; “Initiation”, Joanna Russ.

Short Stories: “M-1” Gahan Wilson; “The Tracy Business” Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson; “Dream Patrol” Charles W. Runyon. Article: Books, James Blish; “The Multiplying Elements”, Isaac Asimov; Cartoon: Gahan Wilson; Poem: “Watching Apollo”, Barry Maltzberg. Cover: Michael Gilbert

For a story that, on the surface, would appear to be one of the classic sf “plot not”s, Neil Shapiro’s “From the Moon With Love” is not too bad at all. It centres on Dorn and Lara, clones built from germ banks on a Moon base who are the last remnants of the human race and their encounter with a group of aliens – The Ezkeel – who are intent on them helping to repopulate the Earth. Yes, I think you can guess which “plot not” is being invoked here. The story’s saving graces are that it has that semi-mythical feeling that I associate with Cordwainer Smith’s best fiction and that the characters aren’t one-dimensional. Shapiro seems to have had a brief sf writing career, going from 1969 to 1978 and mainly appearing in F&SF or Vertex. He had two novels to his credit. Micheal Gilbert’s wrap-around cover has connections to the story. According to the introduction, he brought the story to Ed Ferman’s attention in the first place. Gahan Wilson was better known for his cartoons and his book review column than for his fiction but, in the former, he had the knack of being able to twist reality just enough to trouble the mind. (I suspect that Gary Larson’s cartoons owed more than a little to Wilson’s arse-about sensibilities.) “M-1” is a vignette that does, in a few more words, what Wilson’s cartoons did. James Blish’s Book column deals with the Ballantine fantasy line, particularly their reissues of two James Branch Cabell novels Figures of Earth and The Silver Stallion; Lord Dunsany’s The King Of Elfland’s Daughter; William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World and Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star, all of which had introductions by Lin Carter. It was reading Lin Carter’s book on Tolkien that got me reading James Branch Cabell in the first place – in the Ballantine editions. Blish waxes lyrical over Cabell‘s work and I think I can understand why. Some of Cabell’s ideas were shockingly modern and I love his way of taking the piss out of religion and society though I must admit I found some of his books very hard going. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned elsewhere in ANZAPA I still credit Cabell as being the major inspiration for Heinlein’s Job. I haven’t read any of the other books that are reviewed in this article. Gahan Wilson’s cartoon in this issue confirms all my preconceptions regarding stock brokers. Nothing like a bit of animal sacrifice and entrail-reading to drive that stock market down. Lanier’s “His Only Safari” continues Brigadier Ffellowes’ exploits in the 1940s. This time Ffellows travels into H. Rider Haggard territory, with a touch of Egyptian mythology coloured with just a tincture of werewolf tradition. One can’t help but feel that these would have made a great television series in the Raiders of the Lost Ark tradition. Interesting to note that the story is set in Kenya in 1939 and features mention of the KAR – the King’s African Rifles. Had he set it two years later he could have used Richard Dawkins’ father, John, as a character. (I’ve just read the first volume of Dawkins autobiography, which mentions how Dawkins came to be born in Kenya while his father was 28 posted there as a member of the KAR.) It’s a great story in the “Darkest Africa” tradition and, in the best tradition of such series, gives a hint of stories yet to come. ISFDB lists 13 in all. Barry Maltzberg’s poem simply adds a load to what Donovan sang about in “The Intergalactic Laxative”. Even astronauts need to shit. Joanna Russ’ “Initiation” was the perfect story to read during a viral epidemic because I had to read it twice before it even started to make sense. It was worth it. It’s a story that looks at the issues when a pair of ordinary humans encounter a planet, cut off from the rest of humanity for 150 years, inhabited by telepaths. This is the first part of Russ’s novel And Chaos Died and, from the pristine state of our copy of the novel, I’d guess that I didn’t get around to reading it after buying it. The novella is certainly an example of what I consider “New Wave” science fiction and it’s difficult to keep track of what is “real” and what is a hallucination inflicted on the protagonist by mind contact with the telepaths. The language and images are fascinating but the plot takes a little teasing out. Now, having recovered the novel from the bookshelf, I can read the story for a third time along with the rest of the book. Ed Ferman had a good touch as an editor. He followed up the very “New Wave” Russ novelette with a simple hard-boiled detective story from Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson. This one telegraphs its ending very early in the story. It reminds me of nothing more than the Firesign Theatre’s The Further Adventures Of Nick Danger. It’s a cute piece of fluff that acts as an emotional relief after the intensity of Russ’s story. “Buck” Coulson & DeWeese were well known in fannish circles and were key members of fandom from the 50s through to the eighties. They also wrote, in collaboration or individually, novelisations based on Star Trek and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Yandro, the fanzine that Coulson edited with Juanita Coulson, picked up the Hugo in 1965. Asimov’s column, “The Multiplying Elements”, is a good summary of how the rare earth elements were discovered and how that allowed the expansion of the Periodic Table. “Dream Patrol” by Charles W. Runyon is a far more typical story about the nature of reality than “Initiation”. Set against the backdrop of an interplanetary war it postulates an enemy that can project a Virtual Reality Tokyo Rose, which has the ability to pick out images from the targets mind and to incorporate them into the illusion. The protagonist is alone in a Sentinal ship having sent his partner back to base as a result of a psychosis brought on by the enemy’s projection. He has to deal with a virtual seductress, who he murders, only to have a new partner arrive from base with the same characteristics as the virtual seductress who he murdered. I think the LSD of the late 1960s/early 1970s had a lot to answer for. The Marketplace from this issue contributes more to Fan History than to the sense of the bizarre I usually encounter there. “AGACON 70…The most extravagant Deep South Regional ever held. Come to METROPOLIS before Heicon.” Attending membership cost all of $2.50!

29 KNOT THE SAME An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected] Final pages

Farewell to Two Friends Two particularly sad events have marked the time between the last ANZAPA and this one. Needless to say the first of those was the death of John Bangsund. John’s role in involving many of us in this strange sub-culture that is fandom cannot be over-stated. In my case, it was discovering two of John’s fanzines on a freebie table at Aussiecon in 1975. My first encounter with fanzines started at the top, with two issues of Philosophical Gas. Like so many others, I figured that I could produce fanzines too - not that I ever aspired to such heights, but the knowledge that fanzines existed and could be an entry point to fandom was very important. John also played a major role in my becoming involved in Adelaide fandom and in a major renaissance in Adelaide fandom. At the time of Aussiecon, what there was of Adelaide fandom centred on AUSFA, the Adelaide University Science Fiction Association. Indeed members of that group ran a small Relaxation in the Adelaide Hills in the summer following Aussiecon and I attended that, where I was to meet Robin Johnson and a whole slew of members of MUSFA, including Roger Weddall and Francis Payne. But it was the news that John was moving to Adelaide that gave the push to get non-Uni fandom restarted in Adelaide. While doing some of my COVID assisted tidying up of my study, I discovered a letter from John from 1983, which was in response to my request for material for a fund-raiser I was putting together to help get Bob Shaw over to Australia for Aussiecon Two “I hope you’ll forgive the nostalgic-sentimental bit, but one of my fondest fannish memories is of you coming to see me at the Afton Private Hotel three on South Terrace that day in January 1976, when I’d just arrived in a city I’d always loved and suddenly realised I was no longer a tourist but a resident, and felt awfully alone. The inestimable Robin Johnson made sure there was a letter at the desk for me, and then you came in person and shared my broom-cupboard of room and my cigarette smoke and unfamiliar company for a while, and I started thinking I could live happily in Adelaide. Which I did, and not least thanks to your friendship.” Wow. And believe me, that was one of the most nervous moments of my fannish career - going to meet the epitome of the Australian science fiction community based on a couple of shared letters and a fanzine or two. But it worked out well. Friday night gatherings with John at the Botanic Hotel led to the South Australian Science Fiction Society being reborn, under the leadership of Allan Bray. John, who was joined in Adelaide by Sally, provided several pleasant gatherings, both in the Adelaide Hills and later in Mile End. I got to meet legendary fannish cats Dylan and Donovan and to get an idea of the erudition that John embodied. It was also through John that I met Gary Mason too. Amazing times. The other friend we have lost is Phil Ware. Phil was not as easy to know as John. I can’t even remember the first time I met him, though it could have been at Unicon III when a number of MUSFA folk came round to my house in Morphett Vale - just up from the site of the convention - and we smoked certain substances while playing the Official Dealer McDope game. It was certainly at that convention that I met Mandy Herriot and her then partner Dave Hodson who crashing at my place on the second night of the convention, having slept in their car on the first night. Mandy and Dave broke up and Mandy moved to Melbourne. I remember helping Phil and Terry Stroud load a trailer with Mandy’s stuff. Phil and Mandy became a couple and married. Phil wasn’t a writer but he got things done - an invaluable member of the Melbourne fannish moving brigade in the days when we were continually moving fans from one place to another and Mandy and Phil’s place became the centre for various amateur renovations - one of which, I recall, involved sanding weatherboards to the bare wood for re-painting. Phil and Terry were also tech support for many Melbourne conventions at the time and they provided some spectacular cakes at cons. I suspect that Terry did the cake work, but Phil was always on hand to help carry them down. (One was almost too big to fit in the hotel lift.) (That’s Phil on the right.) 30 Phil was central to our Friday night dinners, just up from Space Age Books, where we’d gather before getting Justin out for dinner. It was there that such plans as getting our regular waitress, Jessica, a Ditmar nomination for services to fandom. (Eventually Carey Handfield won the Ditmar, but we insisted on him presenting a replica to Jessica as his atonement for having taken what was rightfully hers.) Phil did have a habit of taking things too literally and when, on one occasion, Jessica waved her hand at him and admonished him to eat, Mandy had to step in, otherwise Jessica would have suffered serious bite wounds… Much as I didn’t see much of John when family life and work took precedence over fannish socialising, I rather lost touch with Mandy & Phil over the years. Our kids had grown up and so we no longer had the children’s birthday parties that had come to replace Friday night dinners. Mandy and Phil were over on the other side of the bay and we were no longer that involved in conventions. So I was saddened to hear of Phil’s cancer diagnosis and that he had succumbed to it. He was a one off and his death a reminder of a time when Melbourne fandom was, for me, a more idiosyncratic bunch of people. Vale John and Phil.

FOLLOW FOLLOW FOLLOW FOLLOW

The story goes that a perfectly normal toad was hopping his way through the Land Of Oz when he chanced upon the Wicked Witch of the East who was in a terrible mood and, without a simple by your leave, she cast a spell on the toad that turned him bright yellow from head to webbed foot. Needless to say he wasn’t thrilled by this and sought out Glinda, The Good Witch of the South and asked her to return his natural colour. Glinda tried her very best spell but, try as she might, she could only counteract part of the Wicked Witch’s spell. The toad’s whole body was returned to its original off-green hue, apart from his penis, which remained stubbornly yellow.14 “What can I do?” cried the toad. “I’m sorry. It’s beyond my ability to correct,” said Glinda. “You must seek help from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Do you know how to find him?” “Of course,” remarked the toad and set off forthwith. Glinda was about to return home when she heard a heartfelt trumpeting noise and there, trudging across the field, came a bright yellow elephant. “Oh,” said Glinda. “Don’t tell me. You have just crossed paths with the Wicked Witch of the East.” “Yes,” replied the elephant. “And she was in a terrible mood. I barely had time to wish her a good day when she cast a spell on me, turning my handsome grey skin to this terrible bright yellow. I don’t suppose you could do anything about that could you?” “I could try,” said Glinda. But, try as she might, her counter spell succeeded only in returning the elephant’s skin to grey. His penis was still a fluorescent yellow.15 “Oh dear,” said the elephant. “This will never do. Can’t you remedy this. It stands out like…like…like… well you know what.” “I’m sorry. It’s beyond my ability to correct,” said Glinda. “You must seek help from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Do you know how to find him?” “No.” remarked the elephant. “I don’t know where he lives. What can I do?” “It’s simple,” replied Glinda. “You must follow the yellow pricked toad.”

No. There’s no excuse for that, but I have finally gotten around to reading Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and to be perfectly honest, it pales in comparison to my own favourite novel from the genre Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I wasn’t quite expecting that, as the two books would, on the surface, appear to provide the foundations for some great reading. But they are, in some ways, mirror images of each other. In the case of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I’m very fond of the film and so expected that I’d enjoy reading the book. In the case of Alice, I love the books but have yet to encounter a film version that does justice to the books. So what is it about the written version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that is so disappointing? My first issue is with the rather pedestrian prose. Take, for instance, the opening lines: Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em,

14 Those who waded through my previous ANZAPA contribution will be aware that this is not anatomically correct but I would never let an inconvenient fact interfere with a bad joke.

15 Anatomically correct. 31 who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. Compare that to the opening lines from Alice: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?' I suppose this might be because, although both books are targeted at younger readers, Baum is talking down to his readers, whereas Carroll is expecting his readers to rise to his level. That the opening sentence of Alice has entered into the public consciousness, while Baum’s has not, attests to the strength of Carroll’s writing. The rest of Baum’s paragraph goes into detail describing the house, whereas Carroll gets straight into the story, with the White Rabbit appearing in the next paragraph. There is also the establishment of a point of view. Carroll takes us straight inside Alice’s mind, whereas we rarely get the feeling that we know what Dorothy is thinking. We start with the idea that Alice is a young girl with very strong opinions, whereas Dorothy’s internal musings are conveyed in the third person. Compare: Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon. to 'Well!' thought Alice to herself, 'after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!' (Which was very likely true.) Both girls land unharmed. Here is Dorothy’s landing: She was awakened by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. Alice’s landing, on the other hand: …suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. There is an immediacy there, not to be found in Dorothy’s experience. But apart from prose style, what sets these two books apart? The ways their encounters with the strange denizens of their respective lands are expressed is another dividing feature. Here is Dorothy’s first encounter with The Scarecrow: Dorothy leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully at the Scarecrow. Its head was a small sack stuffed with straw, with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it to represent a face. An old, pointed blue hat, that had belonged to some Munchkin, was perched on his head, and the rest of the figure was a blue suit of clothes, worn and faded, which had also been stuffed with straw. Compare this to Alice’s first encounter with the Caterpillar: She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else. There is an animation there that is missing in Baum’s literal description. While I don’t really like Disney’s animated version of Alice, it’s easy to see how the animators who did that particular sequence were given a clear head start. Carroll’s Alice is a far more feisty character than Baum’s Dorothy. Alice travels alone, taking it up to the characters she meets on more or less equal terms. She’s not afraid to tell off other characters, as she does in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Dorothy, on the other hand, requires a team with whom to travel and, apart from a minor altercation with the Cowardly Lion when she first meets him and her disappointment in the Wizard when she meets him face to face seems fairly passive. Even her destruction of the Wicked Witch of the West is more by accident than design. Here we run into the differences between the film and the book. Judy Garland’s portrayal of Dorothy is far stronger than the character in the book and indeed makes me think more of Alice. Indeed, the film is far better plotted than the novel and all credit must go to the screen writers Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf. They got rid of a lot of extraneous nonsense from the original book. Despite the book being targeted at young children, it contains far more graphic violence than does Alice. The Queen of Hearts threatens to chop of heads but the Tin Woodman uses his axe to devastating effect on a Wildcat that threatens the mouse kingdom: As it came nearer the Tin Woodman saw that running before the beast was a little gray field mouse, and although he had no heart he knew it was wrong for the Wildcat to try to kill such a pretty, harmless creature.So the Woodman raised his axe, and as the Wildcat ran by he gave it a quick blow that cut the beast's head clean off from its body, and it rolled over at his feet in two pieces. For some reason, this sequence does not make it into the film nor does the bloodbath where the Woodman dispatches forty of the Wicked Witch’s wolves. Even the Scarecrow gets into the act, wringing the necks of the crows the Witch sends to attack Dorothy’s party. Mind you, he doesn’t escape unscathed: Others of the Monkeys caught the Scarecrow, and with their long fingers pulled all of the straw out of his clothes and head. They made his hat and boots and clothes into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree. The destruction of the Wicked Witch is, as has been noted, a disappointment. The Witch tries to remove the shoes that Dorothy had taken from the house flattened Wicked Witch of the East and Dorothy simply picks up a bucket of water that comes conveniently to hand and pours it over the witch, who conveniently dissolves - not a very neat solution, but I note that the screenwriters of that terrible 1962 movie of Day Of The Triffids weren’t above stealing the technique to kill off the triffids. (The idea of a witch who can be dissolved in water leaving a bucket of water around the house does tend to stretch ones credulity.) While the film ends after the Wicked Witch has been disposed of, the book keeps piling tasks onto Dorothy’s

32 shoulders. After the Wizard disappears in his balloon she has to go in search of Glinda, The Good Witch of the South and, to do so, she has to face a couple of challenges before reaching Glinda who tells her how to click her heels together to get the magic shoes (silver, rather than the film’s ruby version.) and, with a terrible sense of anticlimax, Dorothy is back in Kansas: Aunt Em had just come out of the house to water the cabbages when she looked up and saw Dorothy running toward her. "My darling child!" she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses. "Where in the world did you come from?" "From the Land of Oz," said Dorothy gravely. "And here is Toto, too. And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!" Whereas the end of Alice: So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard— while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs. So, when all is said and done, Lewis Carroll’s writing is far stronger and more memorable that Baum’s but far more difficult to film convincingly. We have such clear pictures of Alice created in the first place by Carroll’s writing and reenforced by Tenniel’s drawings. Dorothy, on the other hand, lends herself more easily to a film adaptation and it is that that we remember far more than Baum’s writing.

DIGGING INTO THE PAST

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION March 1970 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Contents: Complete Short Novel:“The Fatal Fulfillment” Poul Anderson. Short Stories: “The Night Of The Eye” Dennis Etchison; “Harvest” Leo P. Kelley; “Fun-nee” Miriam Allen deFord; “The Chameleon” Larry Eisenberg; Charles Miller, “The Tangled Web Of Neil Weaver” Article: Books, Gahan Wilson; “The Falls Of Troy”, L. Sprague deCamp; “Bridging The Gaps”, Isaac Asimov; Cartoon: Gahan Wilson; Cover: Ronald Walotsky

Poul Anderson. “The Fatal Fulillment”. This one is part of a challenge, set to ive authors, to start with a common introduction, written by Keith Laumer, and to complete a novella. The completed novellas were then to appear in a book entitled “The Five Fates.” The other authors were Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison, Gordon Dickson and Laumer himself. This piece by Anderson is unlike most of his stories. It is a near future piece, dealing with attempts to use a computer simulation to arrive at a solution to an epidemic of mental illness sweeping the world – a rather apposite story given recent issues with COVID-19. It took me a while to get into the story but, once I’d gotten used to it, I found that it raised a number of interesting possibilities, with a decidedly 60s/70s slant. Gahan Wilson’s book column deals reviews three horror anthologies and one horror novel. I can’t comment as I’ve read none of the books involved. Wikipedia says all sorts of nice things about Dennis Etchison’s writing and notes that he was nominated for or won numerous World Fantasy and Horror awards. I can only assume that the rest of his work is far better than “The Night Of The Eye”. I just couldn’t get involved in his sentences or in his characters. It was a story that was trying too hard to be literary and to create a new horror trope based on meeting Death on a 20th Century road. I’m not fond of horror as a genre at the best of times and this one really didn’t seem to advance my opinion. “Harvest” by Leo P. Kelley. Very much a 1970s story about colonisation, intolerance and the evils brought about through racism. I suspect that I would have thought this novel and daring when I first read it but it has not aged particularly well. A number of the more stfnal comics of the time dealt with this theme graphically. Although sort in outer space, this one could equally well describe some of the aspects pdf the European conquest of North America or Australia. I note that I have four Leo P. Kelley books on the shelves, but I don’t recall reading any of them and so I’m guessing that they didn’t impress me that much. The one positive review I’ve found is for his satirical novel The Coins Of Murph which may be worth re-reading. “The Falls Of Troy” is one of L. Sprague deCamp’s essays on archaeology. It’s informative but otherwise 33 pedestrian. That said, it does whet the appetite with brief mentions of the various civilisations that interacted with the cities that existed on the site of Troy. I’m tempted to see if I can find my copy of The Hittites to find out what connections there were between that particular empire and Troy. Hmmn. A little Googling and reading and I’m far better educated on the peoples of Troy. Another thank you to L. Sprague deCamp! Miriam Allen deFord’s “Fun-nee” covers the same theme as Kelley’s “Harvest” but with a more upbeat ending. It seems a little trite today and I was almost tempted to quote one of Melanie Safka’s lines “There’s nothing nicer that singing an unnecessary peace song.” But then I look at what’s happening in the U.S. with BLM and in Brazil with the dispossession of the indigenous peoples and in Australia with the destruction of 46,000 year old cultural sites - perhaps we’d be better off if we were still reading and writing this type of story. “The Chameleon” by Larry Eisenberg is one that should have been most germane at this point in the U.S. elections. It’s a story about the ultimate computer surveying program that creates a hologram of the candidate and then subtly modifies it based on feedback from a sampled audience. Unfortunately what we have instead are candidates who model themselves to reflect the prejudices of…wait a moment. Perhaps the story does fit the current situation. The one fault in this is that it succumbs to the temptation of relying on a punchline to complete the story. Asimov’s article in this issue, “Bridging the Gaps”, is a great introductory piece on how chemists in the mid nineteenth century started to note patterns in the properties of elements, of how Mendeleev developed the Periodic Table and of his wonderful insight in leaving blank spots on the table - predicting that elements with the correct properties would be discovered that would fill the gaps. There can be no doubt that the reason we consider some Scientific Ideas to be so brilliant is because of their predictive power and The Periodic Table deserves a bow in that respect. Not that there aren’t further discoveries to be made that throw further light on why some elements have the properties that they do have. It wasn’t until well into my career as a chemistry teacher that I found out why mercury has the properties that it does have. I’m not sure that I fully understand that reason, which has to do with relativity and the speed of mercury’s inner shell electrons but I’m glad that there is a reason. (The bit I don’t understand is why, given the explanation in terms of mercury retaining its outer shell electrons rather than releasing them to a delocalised cloud, mercury is still a reasonably good conductor of electricity. I’ll have to do some more Googling.) The article I found also notes that gold is gold coloured for similar relativistic reasons. There’s another reason why a Great Scientific idea’s strength lies in its ability to explain really diverse phenomena. Gahan Wilson’s cartoon presents the logical reason for not using werewolves to pilot spaceships bound for the Moon. “The Tangled Web of Neil Weaver” appears to be Charles Miller’s only story. It’s a pleasant little piece of suburban witchcraft and low impact horror. It has all the hallmarks of a story written by a university student who never took his writing any further. It is set in a college and references Ouija boards, college parties complete with Rolling Stones music and Ted Kennedy. The plot twist at the end lifts the story just above your average pentacle piece. And the Classified Ad for this issue? “RICHES are being made EVERYWHERE FROM AUSTRALIA’S MINING BOOM. LEARN how to parcipate NOW and receive also a sample AUSTRALIAN GEM STONE by return mail. Send $2.00 ANNVER EXPORTAS, Box 155, P.O. Balgowlah 2093 Australia. Add 25¢ for air mail return.”

ANZAPA SUMMARY OCTOBER 2019-AUGUST 2020

First Name Surname Zines Pages First Name Surname Zines Pages & Mark 7 157 3 30 Claire Brialey Jeanne Mealy Plummer 3 44 1 6 Derrick Ashby Perry Middlemiss 7 260 3 26 Garry Dalrymple Terry Morris 2 16 6 39 Leigh Edmonds John Newman 6 175 6 60 John & Diane Fox Roman Orszanski 12 140 6 13 Bruce Gillespie Cath Ortlieb 8 156 6 76 Michael F. Green Marc Ortlieb 8 78 6 93 David R. Grigg Bob and Riep Margaret 7 124 6 78 Jack R. Herman Lucy Schmeidler

34 6 154 5 55 Kim Huett Gerald Smith 2 20 4 26 Christina Lake Spike 12 24 6 44 Dave Langford Franked Alan Stewart 7 90 1 6 Eric Lindsay R.-Laurraine Tutihasi 8 103 6 49 LynC Sally Yeoland 1 4 Murray Franked MacLachlan 10 190 Gary Mason

TOTAL Oct 2019-Aug 27 171 2330 2020 Memberships LAST YEAR Oct 2018-Aug 24 152 1759 2019 Memberships

So, are we suffering the dreaded pdf bloat? Hard to tell, but it’s good to see the number of memberships is up. Gosh. Without a real limit on members, we could even extend beyond 30 members… I remember the days of waiting lists.

35

KNOT AS WE KNOW IT An ANZAPAzine produced by Marc Ortlieb of P.O. Box 215 Forest Hill, 3131. [email protected] Trying for the patriarch look with beard but no moustache for this Movember.

IT DIVIDES TO MULTIPLY

I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube videos in which some interesting characters take on “Creation Scientists”. These include Aron Ra and the delightful Viced Rhino. Aron Ra tends to create mini-documentaries on aspects of biology - he has a particular interest in an aspect of taxonomy known as cladistics and in pointing out how the diversity of life only really makes sense when viewed through the lens of evolutionary theory. Viced Rhino has a tendency to take a creationist video, show parts of it, and take it apart. What they continually note is that Creation “Scientists” have a tendency to fall back on a few tricks.

1) Conflating the theory of evolution with the concept of abiogenesis and the Big Bang theory of cosmology i.e. they will brand any scientific study of origins as “evolution” and will then will argue that evolution can’t be a fact because “evolutionists” can’t explain the origin of life or the origins of the Universe. The theory of evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life and is only used to explain how the diversity of life on this planet can be explained in terms of variation and the effects of natural selection and a few other speciation promotors like genetic drift, the founder effect and occasionally pure chance. As for the Big Bang theory, it is not currently fully understood how our universe began but the explanations of what we do know are based on observations and on how the theory makes predictions that have been confirmed by observations.

2) They argue against long superseded scientific theories, as though what Darwin wrote in the Origin Of Species is the current state of evolutionary theory. Part of this comes from the fact that some of these Creation Scientists like to refer to those who accept the Theory Of Evolution as Darwinists. They don’t seem to realise that people interested in a scientific understanding of the world don’t base their judgements on the sacred writings of “Prophets” but rather look at the body of knowledge that has been built up by countless people who would be more than happy to tear down a scientific theory with evidence. Scientific theories that don’t match the facts are either discarded or modified - Newton’s Gravitational Theory, built up on the works of others like Kepler, was, and still is very effective, within certain limits. Einstein’s work modified that theory and explained things that Newton’s don’t - like aspects of the orbit of Mercury. Einstein predicted aspects of that orbit and Eddington’s observations confirmed that prediction. But we can still use Newtonian gravitational theory to work out how to get a space craft to Mars - provided that all the scientists working on it agree to use metric units, rather than some of the team working in Imperial and the rest in metric… The predictions made by scientific theories, unlike prophecies from holy books, tend to be born out by observation, or the theories are abandoned or modified. Creationists have been known to argue against the concept of abiogenesis because they have read of how Louis Pasteur disproved the Theory of Spontaneous Generation, not recognising that Pasteur simply disproved the idea that rotting meat would spontaneously generate maggots and that bacteria could be spontaneously generated in spoiled milk.

36 3) They consciously cherry pick and quote mine. They find a sentence from a genuine scientist that they think can be used to bring down the entire edifice that is evolutionary theory. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould developed an idea called punctuated equilibrium which suggested that, for many organisms, evolution wasn’t a smooth and gradual process but that some species existed unchanged for generations with occasional periods of rapid change - rapid meaning over 50,000 to 100,000 years - a time scale that Young Earth creationists would have trouble fitting into their 6,000 or so year history of the Universe. Creationists then extract one or two sentences from their work that, out of context, disagree with an aspect of evolutionary theory and use it to shed doubt on the whole of evolutionary theory. The classic piece of quote mining comes in a sentence from Darwin’s Origin of The Species: To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. They tend to forget to include the rest of the paragraph which notes the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. This cherry picking extends to arguing against the efficiency of radiometric dating, finding what they see as glaring discrepancies in dates for rocks thus determined without looking at the scientifically acknowledged limits of particular dating techniques. They will, for example, cite cases where rocks from dated recent volcanic eruptions have been dated to several hundreds or thousands or millions of years without acknowledging that geologists are aware that such volcanic rocks can contain unmodified inclusions of grains of rock which are millions of years old and that geologists take this into account when using radiometric dating.

4) They cite examples of scientific mistakes or fraud that have been disproven by science, often within years of the original claims, as evidence that the whole theory is flawed. The two most common of these are Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man. The former is common knowledge. It was a deliberate hoax that made its way into science textbooks and which lasted for several years from its initial discovery in 1912 until its final conclusive debunking in 1953 when scientific techniques established its bogus nature. Nebraska Man was a more short- lived error, where an ancient pig tooth, discovered in 1917, was mistaken for a hominid tooth. Here the error was compounded when an artist then created a picture of what Nebraska Man might have looked like for a popular magazine Illustrated London News. The true origin of the tooth was discovered through further exploration of the site and the claim that it was a hominid tooth was withdrawn in 1927. In both cases, mistakes were made by scientists - perhaps because of a patriotic desire to prove that humans had originated in their own countries and not in Africa - but were also corrected by more detailed examination of the evidence, not be reference to any particular religious text.

5) They have the mistaken belief that the use of the term “Theory” means that evolution is not a fact. In this, they demonstrate their total misunderstanding of the meaning of “Theory” in science and fail to understand that it represents a best model, rather than an unproven hypothesis, indeed showing that they don’t understand that a Scientific Theory can never be proven and that it is always subject to modification through examining evidence. The Theory of Gravity and Germ Theory are both scientific theories and both have been subject to modification over the years. Robert Koch had no idea that viruses, prions or viroids existed and yet his and Pasteur’s concepts of disease, appropriately modified, are still the basis of our understanding of infection. (I don’t note any Creationists describing epidemiologists as Kochians or Pasteureans and I hope that none of them still attribute disease to demonic possession.)

These, and other erroneous arguments are used by Creationists to cast doubt on our understanding of Evolutionary Theory and that brings me to this article. (I know it was a pretty long preamble.) Few people really understand the nature of science. We’re fed with comical photos of Albert Einstein or images of Archimedes jumping out of his bath and yelling “Eureka!” Now I’m aware that I’m preaching to the choir here but this seems to be the main reason that people have this idea that science is egalitarian - that if one person can come up with an idea, then anyone can challenge it, regardless of how much they actually know about the topic. I think that this might be part of the reason for Richard Dawkins coming across as arrogant. Dawkins is aware of all of the work that goes into creating a scientific theory and so gets impatient with those who figure that their ignorance is as important as the carefully created edifice of a scientific Theory - and yes, I did use the word “created”. Scientific Theories are created in an attempt to model phenomena that we see in he material world. Thus they are subject to modification, as the evidence demands. (When you think about it, so is religion. “Give me that old time religion” is a song that many red-hat wearing adherents of a particularly fundamentalist brand of Christianity would happily adopt as their theme song, even though they wouldn’t be caught dead practising Christianity in earlier forms. Hell, I doubt that many of them even speak Latin.) What got me started on this particular chain of thought was going through my bookshelves and weeding out books that I will never again even open. It was with great delight that I threw out books on educational theory and books that I’d bought when teaching that abomination of a mishmash, Social Studies. In doing so, I found some of my old science books, many of them bought in order to compare current understanding of science with what was accepted fifty or so years ago. One of these was entitled Replication And Recombination Of 37 Genetic Material and it consists of the papers delivered at a conference held in Canberra from August 28th to September 1st 1967 under the auspices of The Australian Academy of Sciences and The United States National Academy of Sciences. Just as a side note, the price certainly devolved. It reads $6.75 $6.08 $2.00 20¢. The article that caught my eye was “The biochemical and genetic autonomy of chloroplasts” by Paul R. Whitfeld and Donald Spencer. This seems a genuine trans-Pacific collaboration, as Whitfeld was a CSIRO scientist, active into the 1980s and Spencer worked at the university of California Los Angeles. When I first learnt about cells, they were considered to be bags of chemicals enclosed in a membrane with a nucleus that did all of the work. The presence of organelles like chloroplasts and mitochondria and of vacuoles was known - they could be seen under the microscope - but the nature of cell membranes was very poorly understood. The fluid mosaic model of cell membranes, which described membranes in terms of proteins and polysaccharides floating in a phospholipid bi-layer, was proposed in 1972 by which time I’d already completed my initial training in biological science. It took a 90° turn in biological thinking to come up with an explanation of how the eukaryotic cell (cells with nuclei) came into being, and that was championed by the evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis. Margulis was one of those mavericks, like Gould and Eldredge, whom Creationists love to take out of context. Her scientific credentials are clearly established. Discover magazine listed her as one of the fifty most important women in science. Incidentally she was also married to Carl Sagan for seven years. She argued against the neo-Darwinian concept of evolution, preferring to develop the idea, previously proposed in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s, that cells were the result of symbiosis between independent bacterial cells. This idea had fallen out of favour but Margulis championed the concept, going so far as to assist in the translation from Russian to English of Boris Kozo-Polyansky’s Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, originally published in 1924, but either ignored or ridiculed by the Western biological establishment. Margulis published her own work, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”, in 1966, as you’ll note, just before the articles that I found on my bookshelf. Dawkins was one of the biologists who originally opposed Margulis’ ideas, but who later came to say: I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it. What is the relevance of this? In science it’s all well and good to espouse large scale ideas, but without the leg work done by countless other scientists, grand ideas can be just so much hot air. One has to think that Whitfield and Spencer would have encountered Margulis’ ideas but there’s nary a hint of that in their article. They are more interested in confirming the idea that chloroplasts are semi-autonomous and to do so, they had to show that the chloroplasts did indeed have a unique set of genetic material - their own DNA. This involved some very finicky chemical analysis. They had to extract DNA from chloroplasts which they removed from cells and had to ensure that their preparations weren’t contaminated by DNA from the cell nucleus. They then compared the DNA they extracted with nuclear DNA - their conclusion was that they weren’t sure that the chloroplast and nuclear DNAs were different. (They have subsequently been found to be different. That, in many plants, chloroplast DNA is circular, as is bacterial DNA, was a further piece of evidence for Margulis’ ideas.) They could, though, show that the chemical in the chloroplasts was double stranded DNA rather than the similar single stranded RNA; they treated their preparation with an enzyme that was known to break up DNA and one that was known to break up RNA and only the former enzyme reacted with their preparation. They also went on to examine whether or not the chloroplasts could duplicate their DNA - they did so by making chemically tabled nucleic acid molecules available to the chloroplasts and then demonstrated that these nucleic acids had been incorporated into the chloroplast DNA. They were also able to show that chloroplasts contained their own ribosomes - complexes of RNA and protein that are essential when a cell creates proteins from the DNA template. Whitfield and Spencer identified the percentage of chloroplast DNA that coded for proteins that they could identify and concluded that it amounted to only about six percent of the DNA i.e. that there was a lot more information on the DNA, meaning that the chloroplasts could be doing a lot of their own protein synthesis. It has since been established that the typical chloroplast DNA codes for about 100 proteins whereas Whitfield and Spencer suggested that there was enough DNA to code for thousands of proteins. They also discovered that there were stretches of DNA in the cell nucleus that created proteins

38 essential for the manufacture of new chloroplasts. In doing so, they justified their hypothesis that chloroplasts were only semi-autonomous - they cannot live independent of the cell of which they are a part. They did not then go on to suggest that chloroplasts were the descendants of once free living bacteria, as Margulis averred. However, their work was a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that, when fully assembled, would support the idea that eukaryotic cells were indeed the descendants of colonies of bacterial and allied prokaryotic cells. Similar work done on the DNA of another cell organelle - the mitochondrion - provided further evidence of this - the presence of DNA in mitochondria is now well known and is used in evaluating evolutionary relationships between organisms and to speculate on a Mitochondrial Eve, from whom all living human beings are descended. Mitochondria are only inherited from the female parent as we get them from our mother’s egg cell. The mitochondria in sperm aren’t part of the new zygote. In the picture above you can see some of this detail with the mitochondrion being the large purple feature in the middle of the left hand side of the picture. It’s a quite amazing picture of the interior of a cell, showing the complexity of internal membranes and some of the tubulin structures that make up the internal skeleton of the cell. The point, then, is that our understanding of the process of evolution relies on a symbiosis between biologists like Margulis, who created overarching theories like her symbiosis theory and the legwork done by laboratory workers like Whitfield and Spencer. Creationists tend to ignore the latter aspect of that partnership, intent on picking holes in a theory for philosophical reasons, rather than doing the hard work. Cell biologists have come a long way in establishing that the bag of chemicals I was told about in the early 1970s is actually an incredibly complex system, coordinating these semi-autonomous organelles, a network of internal cell membranes and an internal protein-based skeleton - the cytoskeleton - along with protein pumps in the cell membranes, the membrane delineated cell areas where proteins and the like are made and even items like flagella and cilia, which can move the cell, or move liquids past the cell. All of this has been discovered by hard working biologists but, in a way, they have made a rod for their own backs, because Creationists look at the complexity and proclaim that it couldn’t have come into existence by natural processes. True. A fully functioning eukaryotic cell could not have come into being straight from the primordial soup, or from chemical reactions around a volcanic vent. But Margulis and her fellow workers showed that it didn’t have to. Small components could have built up and then combined through what was initially a symbiotic relationship where the bacteria gave up their independence and found that division of labour resulted in the ability to function effectively. (I won’t say better - after all, this planet is still home to far more bacteria than it is to eukaryotic organisms.) Needless to say, this takes time - time which the Young Earth Creationists won’t allow because an Archbishop used the genealogies in his favourite book to calculate that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old. But, when we look at the geological evidence, prokaryotic life existed alone on the planet for close to a billion years - plenty of time for the symbiosis to establish eukaryotic cells. Just a final note: there was a line to the effect: “They said Galileo was a crackpot. They said Einstein was a crackpot. They said Darwin was a crackpot!” “They also said it of a lot of crackpots!” Not all ideas that come out of left field prove to be as ground-breaking as Margulis’ ideas. When I was learning about human evolution, I encountered the work of Elaine Morgan and her book The Aquatic Ape, that built on an idea, suggested by marine biologist Alister Hardy, that many of the features distinguishing human beings from other apes, such as our paucity of fur and presence of stores of subcutaneous fat could be explained if humans depended from an ape ancestor that spent a great deal of time in the water. Although the idea is generally dismissed by the scientific community, it has led to some interesting hypotheses, which have been put to the test. Although no consensus has been reached, the idea that human brain evolution might have been given a push by humans increasing the amount of seafood in their diet has garnered some support and, as a strange little sideline, the vernix - a fatty substance that surrounds a new-born human - has been shown to have a similar composition to similar materials that coat sea lion pups. So who knows? A little more of the 99% perspiration might yet yield something interesting.

CHEMICAL OF THE DAY - Arsole

A delightful little molecule. According to Wikipedia, “Arsole itself has not been reported in pure form”. So there are no pure arsoles. Chemically it’s similar to pyrrole with an arsenic atom where pyrrole has a nitrogen atom. If your arsole looks like this you’re probably overdue a visit to the doctor.

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION April 1970 Cover Price 60c Editor Edward L. Ferman

Novella “Ill Met in Lankhmar” Fritz Leiber; Cartoon Gahan Wilson; Books James Blish; Short story “Soulmate” Charles W. Runyon; Novelette “In Black of Many Colors” Neil Shapiro; Short story “The Brief, Swinging Career of Dan and Judy Smythe” Carter Wilson; Short story “The Wizard of Atala” Richard A. Lupoff; Article “The Nobel Prize That Wasn’t" Isaac Asimov; Short story “They All Ran After the Farmer's Wife” Raylyn Moore; Cover Chesley Bonestell

39 Fritz Leiber’s “Ill Met in Lankhmar” is a Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story that acts as a prequel to the others, dealing, as it does, with the first meeting of the pair. It’s the sort of sword and sorcery story that would lead to the huge explosion in fantasy role playing games that would follow the release of Dungeons and Dragons in 1974. But all the ingredients are here - a mighty thewed warrior, a cunning thief, eldritch wizardry and a quest that would leave the protagonists’ lady friends a pair of strangled corpses freeing the pair to pursue their subsequent adventures. I may be doing the story a disservice, given that Leiber basically created the format that so many others would follow. Needless to say, the writing is skilful, polished and effective and the story rattles along at a goodly pace. Gahan Wilson’s cartoon explains many of the issues that can affect one’s television reception. James Blish’s book reviews in this issue range from a book of sf poetry, through Roger Zelazny’s Creatures Of Light And Darkness, a Jack Vance anthology and an old George Macdonald fantasy - Lilith - to a pair of more modern novels, Dan Morgan’s The New Minds and The Several Minds, both of which I remember enjoying back in the Seventies. I tend to associate them with writers like Edmund Cooper. I suspect, from reading Blish’s review, I may not find them as interesting now. “Soulmate” by Charles W. Runyon is an example of the morality play style horror story in which a character’s evil nature leads to them falling foul of a supernatural and horrific set of just desserts. There must have been something in the water in the late 60s, early 70s because I remember a number of underground comics which also followed that particular path, usually with the advantage of a more graphic format. This one could have provided the script for a story in Slow Death Comics in the early 1970s. (Must check through my collection. I saw #7 listed for $139.00 on one of the comics auction sites.) Neil Shapiro’s “In Black of Many Colors” tempts me to read more of his work. It’s set on a spaceship with characters that remind me of Cordwainer Smith’s. There is an enigmatic telepathic woman, Cinnabar, a Star-Captain Lync Harley (Hi LynC) and a battered sympathetic robot called Four. The plot centres on the need to make contact with a newly discovered alien race. The language is strong and poetic, even dropping into touches of the forgotten English writer William Shakespeare or inserting short poems, as Smith was also want to do. Red for greed./Black for fear./ Yellow for lust./Crimson for hate./Green for deceit. It’s the sort of love story that leaves one strangely unsatisfied. I note that, in my previous review of a Neil Shapiro story - in the February F&SF - I also detected a Cordwainer Smith vibe in his writing. ISFDB mentions a couple more of his stories in F&SF but I’ll then have to dig around and see if I have any copies of Vertex where the rest of his stories were published. There are also two novels listed. “The Brief, Swinging Career of Dan and Judy Smythe” by Carter Wilson would probably bookend nicely with “Soulmate” except that it is a far more mundane urban horror story, indeed, given that that the Manson family murders took place in 1969, I don’t understand why it has been included in a magazine dealing with Fantasy and Science Fiction, as it is neither. Okay, so the murder aspect involves a non-human agent and makes reference to the Romans, but it’s a tenuous connection at best.

I know that Richard Lupoff had strong connections to the science fiction and fantasy field and, given his very recent death, I probably shouldn’t say this but “The Wizard of Atala” is one of the most tedious sorcery stories I’ve ever read. The conversations are all in that strange dialect of English sometimes called “Forsooth” and the characters are lumbered with names like Ninantor and Yao-tchall. The mangling of the syntax is terrible: …he, Ninantor, could bring with him his chiefest weapon and tool, his quick mind and intricate thought,… I hope Lupoff will be remembered more for his best fanzine Hugo in 1963 than for this type of story. “The Nobel Prize That Wasn’t" is another of Isaac Asimov’s excellent looks at the history of Chemistry. I hate to admit it but, as an ex-Chemistry teacher, I’d never heard of British physicist Henry Gwyn-Jeffrerys Moseley, yet, as Asimov notes, he was a key figure in developing our current understanding of the Periodic Table and the concept of atomic number. The sad thing is that he died at Gallipoli. Another Australian connection was that he worked with X- Ray spectroscopy with the Braggs. “They All Ran After the Farmer's Wife” by Raylyn Moore is a cross between Of Mice And Men and the sort of tale where every character’s name exudes some sort of Biblical reference, a characteristic, I gather, of Kansas farming country. In this one, the central character, an ex-preacher, is called Clay Justus - the Christian name, one assumes, referring to the clay from which Adam was sculpted. Other characters include the farmer, Simeon (“God has heard”), and his wife Bep, whose full name is Hepzibah (“my delight is in her”), both minor Biblical characters, and Aza, whose character seems somewhat demonic and so I’m sure one can link him to the demon Asmodeus. He certainly does support Clay’s lust for the farmer’s wife. As to the moral of the story, well Clay follow’s Aza’s advice and leaves with Bep and so I guess that the Devil does win. (The introduction to the story notes that Raylyn Moore was Ward Moore’s - Bring The Jubilee - wife.) The market place for his issue includes: UNCOMPROMISING IDEALIST wishes to meet young woman 18-23, 5’2”, pisces, taurus, cancer. Object: matrimony. Write Zahra, P.O. Box 224, Greystone Park, N.J. 07950. Well, it was the Age of Aquarius!

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