Marion Zimmer Bradley is an odd duck.

As a writer for a niche genre (science fiction), as a woman in a male-dominated field, as an occultist mystic in a stolidly Judeo-Christian world (she founded the Aquarian Order of the Restoration), and as someone who pines for the days when the genre was more fantastic, Bradley is many times over a breed apart.



That dislocation from the mainstream of society, even the mainstreams of rarefied slivers of society, has acted as a sort of crucible on her imagination. At the risk of engaging in unlicensed psychoanalysis, it seems that all this pent up desire to escape the real world has turned into a torrent she's focused at her writing. In the past several years, I've marked a focus of her work toward the psychic and the pulpy. It's hardly hidden – she said as much in the introduction to her first book:

While I was still collecting rejection slips for my early efforts, the fashion changed. Adventures on faraway worlds and strange dimensions went out of fashion, and the new look in science-fiction — emphasis on the science — came in...I think, there is a place, a wish, a need and hunger for the wonder and color of the world way out. The world beyond the stars. The world we won’t live to see.

Except her far futures don't have many futuristic trappings. Her settings are invariably medieval in flavor, with swashbuckling sword-wielders, hot-blooded heroes and beautiful damsels. It's pretty clear that this is the world she wants to live in, one of duels and kin-loyalty, where women, while they may be strong, also yield to a man's will.

We saw it in A Door Through Space, and we see it in the new Ace Double, #F-153. It's two Bradleys for the price of one (40 cents), and it, beginning to end, has Bradley's stamp upon it.

(see the rest at Galactic Journey!)

by Gideon Marcus

What if the South had won at Antietam? Or the Mongols had not been so savaged by the Hungarians at Mohi? If Hitler had grown up an artist? Time travel has been a staple of science fiction since the genre was formalized. One of the newer flavors of the time travel ouvre is the "sideways-in-time" story, where the "what-if" has become reality. Sometimes the tale is told in isolation, the characters unaware of any other history. Oftimes, the alternate timeline is just one of many.



(see the rest at Galactic Journey!)

by Gideon Marcus



God help me, I've found a new medium for my science fiction addiction.

Before 1950, I was strictly a toe-dipper in the scientifiction sea. I'd read a few books, perused a pulp now and then. Then Galaxy came out, and I quickly secured a regular subscription to the monthly magazine. After I got turned onto the genre, I began picking up books at the stores, occasionally grabbing copies of F&SF, Imagination, Astounding, and Satellite, too. By 1957, my dance card was pretty full. I was reading up to seven magazines a month, and I'd already filled a small bookcase with novels.

Then I started this column.

Well, I couldn't very well leave magazines or books unbought. How then could I give an honest appraisal of the genre as a whole? By 1960, I was up to two large bookcases – one for magazines, and one for books. For me, the magazine bust of the late 50's was something of a blessing: fewer digests to collect!

I might have been all right with this load, juggling work, family, books and magazines. But then I discovered Ace Doubles.

Occupying that niche between single novels and story collections, Ace Doubles are two short novels bound back to back. It's a format that's been around since 1952, but I generally ignored them. I figured the material was either rehashes of magazine serials, or stuff too mediocre to warrant its own release.

I wasn't far off the mark, but at the same time, after plowing through a few of them, I determined that there was often solid entertainment to be had amongst the pages of these two-headed beasts. And so I start on my third set of bookshelves...and my first review of an Ace Double: serial number F-113.



(see the rest at Galactic Journey!)