"%J» SPECIAL HOLIDAY ISSUE THE REAL BIONIC LOVER DID DIARRHEA KILLTHE DINOSAURS? EXCLUSIVE: WHY WE HAVE SEX MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS IN THE ANDES 30 BEST GAMES IN THE WORLD BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR PLUS: A COMPLETE SF NOVELETTE annruiVOL. 6 NO. 3 DECEMBER 1983 EDITOR IN CHIEF & DESIGN DIRECTOR: BOB GUCCIONE PRESDENT: KATHY KEETON EDITOR: DICK TERESl GRAPHICS DIRECTOR -RANK DEVINO A^l DIRECTOR: A.iZASOH I WOODSON V EXECUTIVE ED TOR: GLR\£ W LLIAMS III lvl.ANA.GTJ3 [Till OR PAL A. -ILTS CONTENTS PAGE FIRST WORD Opinion Paul Zweig 6 EARTH Environment Douglas Starr 16 WHY WE HAVE SEX Lite Kathleen McAuliffe 18 SPACE Comment Nick Engler 20 GROUP DREAMING Mind Patrick Huyghe 24 T-A ^cALB'ONIC LOVER Body Ruth Winter 26 BREAKTHROUGHS Technology Phoebe Ho ban 28 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Compufers Phoebe Hoban 32 FILM. The Arls Jonathan Rosenbaum 36 ELK I ROCKS OF THE YEAR The Arts Charles Piatt 38 LX-LORATIONS Travel Phyllis Wollman 42 STARS Astronomy Terence Dickinson 44 CONTINUUM Data Bank 49 LIGHTS IN THE ANDES Article Patrick Tierney 58 THE CIRCUS ANIMALS' Fiction Scott Russell Sanders 66 DESERTION DAWN OF A NEW RAY . Article T A. Heppenheimer 74 CITIES OF TOMORROW Pictorial Charles Piatt 78 GEORGE SCHALLER Interview John Stein 84 CYBERSHOCK Article Robert Malone 92 TRACK OF A LEGEND Fiction Cynthia Felice 98 VEGETOLOGY Pictorial Lee Boltin 107 MONOLYTH Fiction Jayge Carr 114 MOTHER SUN Article Edward Regis, Jr. 122 THE LURKING DUCK Novelette Scott Baker 130 SOCIAL DINOSAURS Article Kathleen Stein 138 ANTIMATTER UFOs, etc. 153 BE5"f 30 GAMES Diversions Scot Morris 190 BRIDGE OF SHADOWS Phenomena Barrie Rokeach 200 Clyde James Aragon Ellen Schuster, owner and director of Ella Studio, in Dallas, is an advertising :e photographer- Oil is Found in the Minds of .Men was commissioned by : Forest Oil Corporation. The mind is cracked open, and the symbolic Slight oi imagination. 4 OMNI ' More than 30 years ago George Orwell years of aerial bombardment, and erected a signpost in our future wih remember the atom bombs dropped on his foreboding novel 19S< By that terrible Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the date, according to Orwell, mankind as. Second World War, ' we know it would' have ceased' to exist. So Orwell wrote his terrible fairy tale There Would 'have been no nuclear and changed the way we all think. Big-' holocaust, no war to. end all wars that Brother, newspeak, and thought-control— would' leave the earth to. be inherited by later we called it brainwashing—became insects. The disaster Orwell predicted part of our vocabulary. Orwell's desperate was subtler, almost unnoticed. You might v:eion was only a fantasy, a kind of call it a death by government. People negative utopia. but we saw. with a shiver, would goon living, working, singing. They that he had been right about many would simply have stopped thinking;, things. We didn't have "iiciion machines." individual consciousness would have been but we did have-floods of soporific TV abolished. In Orwell's imagined lutu;e entertainment, and we had the Cold' War the activities of-life would obey an and the paralyzing jargon of government unrelenting plan, devised by technocrats- bureaucracies. So 1984 continued to scientists of manipulation — as if men stand in our future, as something we had been reborn as* ants in a vast shabby laughed about nervously but secretly nest known as the world. feared. And now, next month, it . Orwell was will terribly ingenious in working be here, and we cannot ' help seeing that out how this silent holocaust was going for all Orwell's grimly prophetic fantasy, to be accomplished. In 1984 governments he was wrong. rewrite the.past in colossal word lacto- Oh, yes, governments—and potentially FIRST nes. Propaganda spills all day from science—have turned- out to be pretty television sets that also have (he chilling much as destructive as Orwell predicted. ability to spy on the viewer. Thorp are Yet, man, gritty and unpredictable, spies everywhere ("Big Brother is watch- buoyed by private WORD feelings, slightly ou; ::•; ing you!.") on the lookout not only tor control By Paul Zweig. af all times, has not succumbed. acts ot political resistance but for any kind: The individual has proved to be the of independent feeling. Novels-. and flaw in all plans'; he is the sauare pen in * Next month 1984 popular songs, a; all the -round holes of political power" wilt masses, are manufactured by devices be here, and we cannot He is the dissident who will -not yield, or called Sic-tiqn .-machines and are widely help seeing that at least not yield ail the way. And so 1984 dis*;ibi..re;-.l lo ihe people. Even language has become a date like other-dates, a for ail George Orwell's itself— that last gritty opponent of the year in which there will be the usual mix powers of government -has been recast grimly prophetic oi contradictions plenty of unemployment' as a farm of pseudosoenhlic noubte- and hunger but lower oil prices, more fantasy, he was wrong3 talk known as newspeak. .personal' computers Ae a soiling for all this, the world Is in of.education, Some of our rivers will a permanent state of war. .Nothing become polluted, but others will get catastrophic, simply a string of crises cleaner. Television will putthe .nation to announced on television and in- the . sleep, yet there will be plenty who will be newspapers to Justify economic shortages awake. The Cold War will rattle on inces- and longer work hours, and also to santly. But the end will not be in sight. provide public expression for the . 1984 will be swept into history as a curious abolished private pleasures. of sexuality .obsession with disaster, as mankind- and love. fumbles on unpredictably in a mixture of In one sense [1984 is the ultimate mad- tragedy and renewal. scientisf novel. Big Brother exists only Maybe in the 30 years since Orwell as an assemblage of machines that wrote his book, the world has become less fabricate information, distribute it and interested in total solutions: more spy on people; .machines rule. The Ministry pragmatic and open-ended, probably of Truth is a Rube Goldberg contraption more confused. We don't quite believe- in of speaking tubes, -chattering typewriters. "progress" anymore, but we don't believe Shredding devices. In its basement are in a. slide into the abyss either. Unless it laboratories that- dissect- men's minds, is- the abyss Jonathan- Schell meditates on making of use the sort of mad, methodical in his recent book The Fate of the Estrtri: science we. associate with' the sorcerer's a last, nuclear devastation. Until then, r l e The ^tate is virtually a however, mankind will get on with its twentieth-century Frankenstein; It is piecemeal, contradictory, and probably science' gone wild-. unsinkable existence, and there will be In away Orwell didn't have to invent all no "1984. "DO that muqh. He had only to- look at-Stalins political purges and- the. subsequent Paul Zweig is chairman of the comparative Soviet recasting of history, or at Hitler's literature di scientifically efficient death camps. He .V,?'.v York h'.-?, bioj'api;,' : o- ;V;;.'{ Wh:>:!hvi w,.i had only to look at Europe, ruined by fan a* published oy Basic Socks m -'934 DfUirUIBU! hfP=£NHI:lf,T:f- mot far from San Francisco, behind began to flower this summer. This mother and father ree:s a psychopathic high fences and tight security, phenomenon occurs every 80 years and duck hater. Scoff Baker's chilling there is a dazzling white room precedes a years-long dormant period novelette begins on page 130. that's almost large enough to hold a during which the plants don't regenerate. In "Track of a Legend" (page 98) football field. It is filled with a massive Unless alternate food sources are found, science-fiction writer Cynthia Felice tells steel lattice that supports long chains of many pandas will die of starvation. a gentle, warm story about a Christmas blue cylindrical pipe. The sophisticated But pandas are not Schaller's only on the ragged edge of tomorrow. A space equipment is just part of the world's passion. The subject of this month's colonist is exiled to Earth and faces most powerful laser, now under Interview (page 84) is the world's leading enormous problems of readjustment. construction, which will be used for expert on the ecostructures of many Pocket Books has just published Felice's research on controlled fusion. rare animals, including African lions and novel Eclipses. Much of the work on large lasers is top gorillas, Indian tigers, and Tibetan snow In "Monolyth" (page 114), a modernized secret because it is conducted at the leopards. As readers will quickly space opera, a mad scientist wants to laboratories where the nation's hydrogen discover, he's also a purveyor of modern rule the universe. He recruits a hard- bombs are being developed. In "Dawn jungle tales, His life is dedicated to bitten, cynical old space pilot, the only of a New Ray" (page 74), science writer saving near-extinct species and to one capable of implementing the T. A. Heppenheimer penetrates the inner educating us about the tragic implications megalomaniac's plans. Author Jayge sanctum, revealing the intricacies of of habital destruction. "The world is Can says she grew up on stories with the devices themselves and explaining being totaled," Schaller warns, "and, God such classic plots. Carr's second novel, the reasons for the secrecy, knows, this [Reagan] administration Navigator's Sindrome, was published this Heppenheimer has written two needs all the pressure it can get, because spring by Doubleday and is scheduled widely acclaimed books, The Real it has the worst attitude toward the to go into a second printing.