SF&F encyclopedia (I-I)ICARUS XB-1 IKARIE XB-1. ICEMAN Film (1984). Universal. Prod Norman Jewison. Dir Fred Schepisi, starring Timothy Hutton, John Lone, Lindsay Crouse. Screenplay Chip Proser, John Drimmer, from a story by Drimmer. 99 mins. Colour.Set in the Arctic (shot in Canada), I tells of a Neanderthal dug out of the ice, thawed, resuscitated and studied. Eschewing the caveman cliches ( APES AND CAVEMEN) of films like TROG (1970), it adopts a sensitive and supposedly realistic manner, much being made of Neanderthal LINGUISTICS. But the story is so thin as to be almost invisible, and the film sags tediously as eco-cliches of the period lead to predictable clashes between the anthropologist, on the side of life, and the female scientist, on the side of cold-blooded research. The scientific methods on display are laughably inept and unlikely. [PN] ICE PIRATES, THE Film (1984). MGM/United Artists. Dir Stewart Raffill, starring Robert Urich, Mary Crosby, Michael D. Roberts, Anjelica Huston, John Matuszak, Ron Perlman. Screenplay Raffill, Stanford Sherman. 94 mins. Colour.Sf parodies have seldom worked well in the cinema, but this is an exception. Jason (Urich) is a pirate captain of a spaceship (he and his crew carry cutlasses and wear high boots) who raids merchant ships for ice (the planets in this area being arid), meets a princess and has adventures. The film's success depends on the script's real knowledge (unusual in the movies) of written sf's dafter conventions as well as the CLICHES of sf cinema; both are neatly caricatured. Particularly lunatic is the final battle in a time warp, with the heroic contenders visibly ageing, the day being saved by the hero's baby who grows rapidly into a man and repels the elderly boarders. There is a small, irritating, chest-bursting ALIEN scuttling around, and Anjelica Huston buckles an expert swash. The farce is played straight enough to work, and the whole thing, though sometimes too broad, is agreeably genial. Raffill went on to direct The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT (1984). [PN] I COME IN PEACE (vt Dark Angel US) Film (1989). Vision. Dir Craig R. Baxley, starring Dolph Lundgren, Brian Benben, Matthias Hues. Screenplay Jonathan Tydor and Leonard Maas Jr. 91 mins. Colour.Good cop (Lundgren) and silly FBI man (Benben) go up against ALIEN drug dealer in Houston, with brief assistance from alien cop. ICIP is rather like a downmarket ALIEN NATION and also borrows from The HIDDEN . The alien, who is collecting human endorphins, is big and uses a razor-edged self-propelled compact disc as a weapon. This formula action movie is only partially redeemed by Mark Helfrich's brisk editing. It ends thus: Alien: "I come in peace." Lundgren: "And you go in pieces, asshole!" [PN] IDLER, THE UK magazine published monthly by Chatto & Windus (later by Dawburn & Ward and others), ed Jerome K. Jerome and Robert BARR - both jointly and separately - and by Arthur Lawrence, Sidney H. Sime, and others, Feb 1892-Mar 1911.Although comparatively short-lived, TI published much sf, mainly through the leanings of its founding editors, both (at times) fantasy authors and both of whom contributed sf stories to its pages. Other notable contributors in its early days were Edwin Lester ARNOLD, Arthur Conan DOYLE, Mark TWAIN and H.G. WELLS. TI continued to publish fantasy and sf from writers such as Patrick Vaux, William Hope HODGSON and Paul Bo'ld until its demise. Many stories from TI were reprinted in MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE. [JE] IDRIS, YUSUF ARABIC SF. IF US DIGEST-size magazine. 175 issues Mar 1952-Nov/Dec 1974. It was founded by the Quinn Publishing Co. with Paul W. FAIRMAN as editor, but James L. QUINN quickly assumed the editorial chair himself, in Nov 1952, holding it until Damon KNIGHT took over Oct 1958-Feb 1959. There were no issues Feb-July 1959 because the title was sold during that year to Digest Productions and became a companion to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION under the editorship of Gal's editor H.L. GOLD, who stayed in the post July 1959-Sep 1961. Frederik POHL assumed the editorship Nov 1961. From July 1963 the publisher operated as Galaxy Publishing Corp. Gal and If were both sold in 1969 to the Universal Publishing and Distributing Co., and Ejler JAKOBSSON took over as editor of both in July 1969. James BAEN became editor with the Mar/Apr issue in 1974, shortly before the magazine folded. For most of its life it was bimonthly, but Mar 1954-June 1955, and again July 1964-May 1970, it was monthly. The latter period was its heyday; it won HUGOS for Best Magazine in 1966, 1967 and 1968. If was at first merely subtitled Worlds of Science Fiction, but in Nov 1961 the cover logo - though not the spine - was altered to Worlds of If Science Fiction. If absorbed its bimonthly companion, WORLDS OF TOMORROW, in 1967. The title was resurrected for one issue by Clifford R. Hong in 1986 (Sep-Nov 1986, vol. 23, number 1, issue 176) and immediately disappeared again.The most notable story appearing in If during the Quinn period - during one year of which, 1953-4, Larry SHAW did most of the actual editing - was James BLISH's classic A CASE OF CONSCIENCE (Sep 1953; exp 1958). At its height, under Pohl, the magazine featured several Hugo-winning stories, including Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Dec 1965-Apr 1966; 1966), Larry NIVEN's "Neutron Star" (Oct 1966) and Harlan ELLISON's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (Mar 1967); other stories included Samuel R. DELANY's "Driftglass" (June 1967). In this period the magazine also featured A.E. VAN VOGT's return to sf-writing after a long absence, and the fourth volume of E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Skylark series, nearly 30 years after the third - Skylark Du Quesne (June-Oct 1965; 1966). Under Jakobsson's editorship the magazine resumed playing second fiddle to Gal and gradually declined until it was merged with its companion as of Jan 1975. It had been, overall, one of the more distinguished sf magazines. Writers who made their debuts in If include David R. BUNCH, Larry Niven, William F. NOLAN, Andrew OFFUTT and Alexei PANSHIN.Artwork was quite good from early on. Ed VALIGURSKY was the first art editor - replaced by Mel Hunter in 1955 - and introduced Kelly FREAS's and Kenneth Fagg's work to the magazine. Later artists included Jack GAUGHAN, Gray MORROW and Wally WOOD.The history of If's UK editions is inordinately complex. Strato Publications reprinted 15 numbered issues from the 1953-4 period, and a further 18 (beginning again at #1) in 1959-62. Gold Star Publications marketed a UK edition Jan-Nov 1967 whose issues were dated 10 months later than the otherwise identical US editions. Copies of the UPD version were imported 1972-4 and numbered for UK release, the numbers running #1-#9 and then, astonishingly, #11, #1, #13, #3, #4 and #5! The last issue of If was never distributed in the UK.Two anthologies of stories from If, in magazine format, were released as The First World of If (anth 1957) and The Second World of If (anth 1958), both ed Quinn. There followed The If Reader of Science Fiction (anth 1966) and The Second If Reader of Science Fiction (anth 1968), both ed Pohl. More recent collections have been The Best from If (anth 1973) ed anon, The Best from If Vol II (anth 1974) ed The Editors of If Magazine, and The Best from If Vol III (anth 1976) ed James Baen. [BS/PN] IGGULDEN, JOHN (1917- ) Australian author whose sf work is restricted to an unremarkable DYSTOPIAN novel, Breakthrough (1960 UK), in which a dictator uses implanted radio-controlled devices for purposes of repression. [JC] IGNOTUS, CORONEL [r] SPAIN. IJAS, JYRKI (NIILO JUHANI) (1943- ) Finnish film editor, translator and journalist, the first of whose (few) sf stories was "Koekaniini" ["Guinea Pig"] in 1968. One of the founders of Aikakone magazine ( FINLAND), he is also publisher and editor of Ikaros magazine, winner of the Finnish Kosmoskyna award in 1988, editor of Ensimmainen yhteys ["First Contact"] (anth 1988) and an sf critic. He wrote the entry on FINLAND for this encyclopedia. [PN] IKARIE CZECH AND SLOVAK SF; Jaroslav OLSA. IKARIE XB-1 (vt Voyage to the End of the Universe; vt Icarus XB-1) Film (1963). Filmove studio Barrandov. Dir Jindrich Polak, starring Zdenek Stepanek, Radovan Lukavsky, Dana Medricka. Screenplay Pavel Juracek, Polak. 81 mins, cut to 65 mins. Colour.This interesting Czech film is set in a giant spaceship (with elaborate interiors designed by Jan Zazvorka) on a long exploratory mission. The shipboard routines, coolly observed, create the impression of a culture alien to ours. The stock situations of comparable US-UK films and tv series ( STAR TREK and SPACE 1999, for example) are mostly avoided by the Czech writers, although the build-up of suspense when the spaceship encounters a wreck floating in space adds a touch of SPACE OPERA. The ending - the spaceship reaches a planet that we realize is contemporary Earth - is a US addition to the otherwise savagely cut print used for US and UK release. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA. IKIN, VAN (GEORGE) (1951- ) Australian editor and writer who began publishing sf stories with "The Lecherous Leech" for Void in 1977, just before that journal became an anthology series. As editor,he published Australian Science Fiction(anth1982), which includes a long historical survey; Glass ReptielBreakout; and Other Australian Speculative Stories(anth 1990); andMortal Fire: Best Australian SF (anth 1993) withTerry DOWLING. [JC] ILIC, DRAGUTIN [r] YUGOSLAVIA. ILIEV, GEORGI [r] BULGARIA. ILLING, WERNER [r] GERMANY. ILLUSTRATED MAN, THE Film (1968). SKM Productions/Warner-Seven Arts. Dir Jack Smight, starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins, Jason Evers. Screenplay Howard B. Kreitsek, based on The Illustrated Man (coll 1951) by Ray BRADBURY. 103 mins. Colour.Bradbury's idea of a man whose various tattoos each represent a different tale did not completely work as an afterthought framework to link the stories of his collection, and it is even less successful in the film, which Bradbury hated. The stories are "The Long Rains" (astronauts lost on Venus), "The Veldt" and "The Last Night of the World"; only "The Veldt" ( VIRTUAL-REALITY nursery animals come to life and are used by future children to dispose of parents) is anything other than limp and literal-minded. The same actors appear in each episode; apparently Smight, the director, was aiming at an atmosphere of downbeat enigma and malign destiny, with Steiger, the tattooed man, as a constantly reincarnated loser. Another Bradbury anthology film is VEL'D (1987). [PN/JB] ILLUSTRATION 1. From the Beginnings to 1978 The historical function of art in sf has been to illustrate rather than interpret; this reflects the hard-edged nature of early GENRE SF itself, which portrayed technics-dominated society rather than interpreting its raisons d'etre; just as this kind of sf was popular science plus human- or wonder-interest, so the illustrations were there to provide page-interest. When these functional attitudes weakened, sf illustrations became freer, aspiring to illumination rather than diagram. Today their relationship to text is often generic rather than specific.Before the SF MAGAZINES, there is little that can be regarded as pure generic sf illustration, though the art history of that early period of sf publication awaits research. Inspiration was derived on the one hand from black-and-white masters of graphic pun, such as Jean Ignace Grandville (1803-1847), Richard ("Dicky") Doyle (1824-1883) and the astonishing Albert ROBIDA, or specialists in futuristic WAR like Fred T. JANE, and on the other hand from more "serious" artists, such as Gustave Dore (1832-1883) and John Martin (1789-1854). The latter in particular, the first artist of the immense, has had great influence; his mighty visions were natural material for Hollywood, and echoes of them abound in, for instance, the original KING KONG (1933).The other matter upon which the first generation of sf illustrators could rely was the spate of pictures of scientific and engineering marvels appearing in the press; a later generation turned to NASA handouts. Many drawings in Hugo GERNSBACK's early magazines in particular can be traced directly to sawn-down or blown-up versions of the Eiffel Tower and the thermionic valve or tube. Such illustrations accompanied stories which were often cautionary in nature: scientific experiments could result in DISASTER; interstellar gas and renegade planets were hazards in Earth's path; ROBOTS were prone to rape inventors' daughters - but still TECHNOLOGY had to go on. The illustrations were diagrams to enforce the thesis, and often set over a line or two of actual text.Yet the subservient role of the sf artist is by no means the whole story. Even in the most commercial period it was recognized that the impact of the cover sold the magazine or paperback; in consequence, care and money went into the cover art. Some artists worked at their best on covers not just because the pay was better. Dedication was a more noteworthy characteristic than artistic excellence among this low-salaried breed of men.Because of printing deadlines some publishers, particularly those with a "stable" of magazines, commissioned covers before stories. As a result, a writer might be asked to write a tale to fit a picture; this doubtful privilege gave the writer his name on the cover but could also entail a cut in the already mean rates of payment.In this way, magazine art developed and became, even if in small compass, a tradition, with names of prolific illustrators like Frank R. PAUL, Virgil FINLAY and Emsh (Ed EMSHWILLER) dominating the field. Interior art became increasingly less tied to text, just as text became less tied to technics. It was free to indulge in the pleasantly hazy symbolism of a Paul ORBAN, the immaculacy of an Alex SCHOMBURG, or even the whimsicality of an Edd CARTIER. It was also at liberty to fudge on the detail in which members of the previous generation of illustrators, such as Frank R. Paul and Elliott DOLD, had gloried. Increasingly, the magazine covers symbolized the spirit of the magazine rather than depicting an incident in an actual story; the series of covers Emsh executed for GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in the early 1960s provides a noteworthy example of this.Increased paper and production costs in the 1940s hit the PULP MAGAZINES hard; as they dwindled, the COMIC book - which grew out of comic strips - rose in popularity. Hal Foster (1892-1982) had started the ever-popular Tarzan strip in 1929, in the same year that BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, drawn by Dick CALKINS and written by Philip NOWLAN, appeared on the scene. What Tarzan did for Africa, Buck did for space. Success bred imitators: the 1930s brought the caveman ALLEY OOP, a sort of anti-Tarzan (by Vincent Hamlin), The Phantom (Lee Falk and Ray Moore), BRICK BRADFORD (Clarence Gray and William Ritt), and the much admired FLASH GORDON, elegantly drawn by Alex RAYMOND. From such SUPERHEROES it was only a step to the king of them all, SUPERMAN. Created by Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster, two sf fans, this character began life in a comic book, Action Comics, in 1938, and was a success from the start. Like Flash and Buck before him, Superman went into RADIO and then into films. By 1941, the fortnightly comic-book version had reached a circulation of 1,400,000. The day of the superhero had dawned. MARVEL COMICS introduced The Fantastic Four in 1961; since then Marvel's fabulous but fallible beings - The Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Silver Surfer and the rest of the grotesques - have changed the nature of comics and, on the whole, improved the standard of draughtsmanship in the field. But the most astonishing developments came from France, in particular from the group of artists (of whom Philippe DRUILLET was one) working for the magazine METAL HURLANT. Here the mood was of brooding unease rather than action; sophisticated surreal effects were achieved without recourse to balloons or commentary.As the written word affected artwork, so artwork influenced the written word. There was a period in sf when interiors of SPACESHIPS were vast, shadowy, and echoing; they came complete with cast-iron doors opening directly onto space and equipped with doorknobs for handles. That was the influence of Calkins's Buck Rogers. Raymond's Flash Gordon had similar effects, and his line of galactic romance, with proud queens dressed in fur-tipped boots and haughty expressions, and usurping villains lurking behind the arras with axe and ray-gun, is with us yet. The enormous vacuum-vehicles of Christopher FOSS spring from A.E. VAN VOGT's epics - and will surely inspire future van Vogts.Imitation is promoted by systems of tight deadlines and tighter payrolls; whatever comes to hand must be used. Artists, like writers, still borrow heavily from each other. In the jungle world of the pulps, artists moved easily from one genre to another, depending on the corporation employing them. We should be surprised not that there is so little individuality but that there is so much. Hubert ROGERS, ASF's chief artist throughout much of the 1940s, produced many covers for other STREET & SMITH magazines; Frank Kelly FREAS, an ASF illustrator of infinite jest, created Mad Magazine's lunatic optimist Alfred E. Neuman ("What, me worry?").In the magazines of the early post-Gernsback period the mode depended heavily on horror and GOTHIC, perhaps because here was a convention readily to hand, waiting to be adapted. Finlay, Lawrence (Lawrence Sterne STEVENS), Hannes BOK, Alexander LEYDENFROST and Cartier are names that spring to mind. These artists of the macabre secured and kept a great following: Finlay and Bok in particular have become revered since their deaths. Leydenfrost, son of a Dutch illustrator, produced some of the most imaginative MONSTERS in the business; they are frequently based on insect morphology.Later sf artists were able to forge an idiom more in tune with the technophile nature of sf. The precept of Frank R. PAUL was decisive here. An artist with training as an architect, Paul was possibly Gernsback's most remarkable discovery. This prodigious talent created his own brand of future city, with its sensuously curving lines an exotic amalgam of Byzantium and the local movie palace, owing something to the Art Deco movement. The same patterns were exaggerated in paranoid style by Elliot DOLD, who developed an intense poetry of machinery. During this period, H.W. WESSO also produced spirited interpretations of mighty cities and machineries, as did Leo MOREY and Orban, but it was the purity of line of Charles SCHNEEMAN and Rogers that best conveyed the aspirations of technocratic culture, where the merely human dwindles in the light of its aseptic artefacts.Few sf illustrations are memorable in their own right; they come and they go. An exception must be made for Schneeman's idealistic picture of E.E. "Doc" SMITH's hero, Kimball Kinnison, the Grey Lensman, striding along with two formidable alien allies (ASF Oct 1939). Together with Rogers's cover for Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Roads Must Roll" (ASF Nov 1939), it represents a synthesis of that immaculate metal-clad future towards which many thought the world was rolling. Of course it was an illusion: WWII was already raging in Europe. In place of Rogers, Freas became ASF's most popular artist; he specialized in roughnecks with guns.ASF was iconoclastic, aware of its brand-image as the intellectual's sf magazine. The emphasis was on the word, which got things done, not the drawing, which was merely decorative; in consequence, much interior artwork was dull. For vigour, one turned to lesser magazines, to the crowded Herman Vestals in Startling Stories and Planet Stories, or to Rod RUTH in Fantastic Adventures, whose spirited sketches for "Queen of the Panther World" by Berkeley LIVINGSTON (July 1948) still retain their power.Of the new 1950s magazines, Gal has already been mentioned. Its misty interior illustrations appeared refreshingly contemporary; best-remembered exponents of this style are William Ashman, Don Sibley, Dick Francis and the alarming Kossin. Among the names rising to prominence in the 1960s were John SCHOENHERR, Mel Hunter (1929- ) and Jack GAUGHAN. By this time, the magazines had tidied up their typography, imitating their powerful rivals in the paperback industry; it is in paperback books that most of the traditional art is aired nowadays.With sf motifs pervading certain strata of popular MUSIC, sf and fantasy art made formidable appearances on record album sleeves. Notably, Roger DEAN's striking composites of machine, insect, animal and bone have convincing power. Dean and the remarkably fecund Patrick Woodroffe (1940- ) published collections of their own work, as did Karel THOLE, King Surrealist of sf art.The new professional magazines of the later 1970s relied heavily on old modes of illustration. GALILEO did best, with Tom Barber striving towards something fresh. But it seemed undeniable that innovations would be more likely to occur elsewhere. Innovation follows cash flow: movies, tv and record-album covers adopted, on a wide front, an idiom that virtually began in the magazines. That early work, for many reasons, can never be repeated; for aesthetic reasons, it cannot be ignored. A number of books of the 1970s deal, in whole or in part, with sf illustration: Hier, L'an 2000 (1973 France; trans as 2000 A.D.: Illustrations from the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps 1975) by Jacques SADOUL; One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration (1974) by Anthony FREWIN; Science Fiction Art (1975) by Brian W. ALDISS and A Pictorial History of Science Fiction (1976) by David A. KYLE. [BWA]2. From 1978 to 1992 This has been a period of few sf magazines: Gal died and the circulations of those that survived slipped inexorably downhill. The new UK magazine INTERZONE (begun 1982) unevenly experimented with cover art in many styles, Ian MILLER's bizarre, STEAMPUNK machines being among the more memorable results. The balance, so far as sf illustration was concerned, became permanently tilted in this period away from magazines and towards the covers of paperback books and the dust-jackets of hardcovers, and even here (remuneration in the book business not being highly competitive) some of the more successful artists, like Frank FRAZETTA, worked only briefly in the field before moving on to other forms of commercial art. A big success on book covers of the late 1970s were the erotic fantasies of Boris VALLEJO, whose busty bimbos in bondage harked back with a kind of frozen tastelessness to the era of the pin-up girl, but after a while his work could most easily be bought in the form of calendars.Through much of the 1970s and 1980s UK sf paperback book covers were dominated by space pictures in a smooth, airbrushed style, with vast spacecraft looming - a style which most critics associated with Chris FOSS. Tim WHITE and Jim BURNS, Foss's heirs as the most successful UK sf illustrators, worked easily in this mode, though much of the best work of both is in other styles. Anthony ROBERTS and Angus MCKIE were also among the guilty parties. Burns was the first UK artist to win a HUGO for his work. While the style lasted, it looked to the casual bookshop browser as if all UK-published sf was effectively the same book.In the USA, sf cover art was dominated through the 1980s by the paintings of Michael WHELAN, meticulous and vivid but perhaps with a rather-too-commercial predictability. He has created what will surely be an all-time record by failing to win the Hugo for Best Professional Artist only twice in the years 1980-1991 inclusive, winning 10 Hugos in all in that category, and an 11th for Best Non-Fiction Book. Some find that the covers of one of his closer competitors, Don MAITZ (who also won a Hugo), have more movement and vigour. Many of Maitz's covers are fantastic rather than technological, and the move away from icons of technology as a means of selling sf in book form was if anything even more pronounced in the USA during the 1980s than in the UK. Sf books sometimes featured the work of almost purely fantastic artists like ROWENA or the well achieved Art Nouveau pastiche of Thomas CANTY (although decorative styles based on woodcuts, stained glass and late-19th-century illustration had previously been used, to very great effect, by Leo and Diane DILLON). Other notable US cover artists of the 1980s include James GURNEY, Barclay SHAW and Darrell SWEET.It is surprising that Surrealist book covers have been used comparatively seldom for sf, despite the memorable work of Richard POWERS in the USA ( BALLANTINE BOOKS during the 1950s) in this supposedly more up-market and respectable style. Others to adopt a semi-Surrealist style were Brian LEWIS in the UK, Paul LEHR in the USA and Karel THOLE in Europe, but none of these are artists whose work is at all typical of the 1980s. The best known sf-Surrealist of our time is, like Thole, a European, and deeply influenced by the traditions of decadent graphic art that were always so much stronger in Europe than in the USA. This is H.R. GIGER, the Swiss painter whose work became justly celebrated in the USA with the film ALIEN (1979), for which he designed both monsters and spacecraft. His biomorphic creations are both phallic and vulval in a manner that, had it appeared in comic strips in the 1950s, would have justified the hysteria of Dr Fredric Wertham (1895-1981), whose book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) charged that coded vaginas appeared in the shading of some comics drawing. (These and similar charges led directly to the introduction of the Comics Code in 1955.) Giger is not a cover artist, and has had only a small influence in that field.It may be that sf illustration as a separate genre is slowly dying away, with the advent of the paperback book not really compensating for the death of the magazines in providing a niche for it. Certainly, there is not much in the sf art of the late 1980s/90s to get excited about; most of the development has been in fantasy art (and much of that, too, deals in visual stereotypes). While general standards are much higher than they were in, say, the PULP MAGAZINES, the sense of lurid freedom seems to have disappeared now that publishers carefully commission book covers which, normally, are designed to attract without giving offence.In one area there have been great advances: the COMICS, once again. Most comics art is poor, but some is very good indeed. A new development in comics, the GRAPHIC NOVEL, has showcased artists, either working in close collaboration with writers or writing their own scenarios, some of whom are exceptional; they include Enki BILAL, Brian BOLLAND, Dave GIBBONS, Dave MCKEAN and Frank MILLER. But this is a wholly different art from sf illustration proper, comics being themselves a storytelling medium whereas magazine illustrations and book covers have the more static function of rendering icons designed to label the publication as being sf (or fantasy) and then to sell it, not to further the story.See the Introduction for lists of comics artists and sf illustrators who receive entries in this encyclopedia. [PN]See also: SEX. ILLUSTRATORS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. IMAGINARY SCIENCE Imaginary science is extremely common in sf; it is not at all the same thing as PSEUDO-SCIENCE. The difference is that the adherents of the pseudo-sciences believe them to be true, whereas the sf writer who uses imaginary science knows perfectly well that it is untrue.Sf has often been criticized for scientific illiteracy, sometimes unfairly, for, while it does produce many simple SCIENTIFIC ERRORS, it commonly uses presently impossible science for two good reasons, neither of them ignorant: (a) what is impossible now may one day become possible; (b) imaginary science may be essential for plot purposes. An example of the first category is the common sf device of MATTER TRANSMISSION. All matter can be described in terms of information and, since all information can be transmitted, then one may legitimately theorize that matter transmission (or at least matter reconstruction) does not transgress the laws of Nature as we know them, even though the practical problems are so vast as to seem, at present, insuperable. (Instantaneous matter transmission, the most common form portrayed in sf, is another kettle of fish: it violates Relativity in the same way as any other mode of FASTER-THAN-LIGHT travel, such as via HYPERSPACE.) Similarly, SUSPENDED ANIMATION is not possible now but, with advances in CRYONICS, one day it may be.We are primarily concerned here with the second category: the imaginary scientific device which does indeed contradict what we know of the sciences, usually PHYSICS, but which allows the writer a kind of imaginative freedom extremely difficult to obtain otherwise. The five best-known examples are ALTERNATE WORLDS; ANTIGRAVITY; FASTER-THAN-LIGHT (or FTL) travel and COMMUNICATION; INVISIBILITY; and TIME TRAVEL. A separate entry is devoted to each of these.The game - it is indeed a game - is to produce as plausible a rationalization for the impossible as the author's artistry will allow, and it is precisely this skill that worries the scientific purist. Thus James BLISH, in his Cities in Flight series (1955-62; omni 1970), explains his SPINDIZZY by referring to work by real theoretical physicists with an air of such bland conviction that a generation of sf readers may have grown up believing that antigravity is possible. Similarly, H.G. WELLS in The Invisible Man (1897) rattles on about refraction with a perfectly straight face. Blish did not believe in antigravity, nor Wells in invisibility: their aim was simply to rationalize the surrealistic central images of their story - US cities flying through space in Blish's book, and a suit and a mask being removed to reveal nothing behind them in Wells's. The imaginary science was there to clear the way, and, of course, to lend conviction to the tale.Time travel is perhaps the clearest example. The ingenuity of sf writers is constantly aimed at subverting the prohibitions physics appears to place on time travel - some to do with causality - because, critically, time travel gives narrative access to the past and the future, and opens up exactly that perspective that is central to sf's finest achievements. Through its (almost certainly impossible) use, sf writers have achieved the freedom to consider things both possible and real, as in the fields of HISTORY, EVOLUTION and even METAPHYSICS - all three in the case of the great original, H.G. Wells's THE TIME MACHINE (1895). A puritanical demand for universal scientific responsibility (the genre is called science fiction after all) would instantly destroy this and many others of sf's most intellectually rigorous works.The publication of many books of scientific popularization in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly those about the relationship of quantum physics to COSMOLOGY, gave new credence to some of the imaginary sciences. If some real scientists were prepared to contemplate quantum-mechanical explanations for ALTERNATE WORLDS, or time-travelling particles like TACHYONS, or the possibility that BLACK HOLES may provide portals to other, distant areas of time or space (or even to "different universes"), then why should not sf authors be allowed the same imaginative warrant? The imaginary sciences took on a new lease of life, and Schrodinger's cat became, belatedly, an overnight success. The cynic, of course, might argue that this is simply a case of sf feeding back into science.A controversial example of imaginary science is the employment of ESP or PSI POWERS - which might more properly be seen as within the province of the pseudo-sciences - as central to the story. Some sf writers, such as Alfred BESTER and Blish, have used psi powers exactly as they might use other imaginary sciences, as an evocative and useful plot device; other sf writers appear to be propagandizing on behalf of parapsychology, or at least succumbing to the lure of wish fulfilment. In SUPERMAN tales especially, the science involved tends to be pseudo rather than imaginary, and perhaps open to criticism on that account.Writers of HARD SF often like to develop a realistic extrapolation from one imaginary change in scientific laws, or even in the fundamental constants of the Universe. Thus Bob SHAW, in THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS (1986), invents a universe where pi equals exactly 3 (and where - perhaps as a remote consequence? - interplanetary travel between two planets closely orbiting one another is possible by balloon); Stephen BAXTER's Raft (1991) takes place in a universe where the force of GRAVITY is very much stronger than in ours; John E. STITH's Redshift Rendezvous (1990) proposes that in HYPERSPACE the velocity of light is 22 mph (35kph).Sf writers have been inventive in creating imaginary scientific devices - such as the "slow glass" of Shaw's poignant "Light of Other Days" (1966) and others, which allows us to view the past because light takes so long to penetrate a sheet of the material - and occasionally even new sciences. An early example of the latter, and still one of the best, is Alfred JARRY's 'pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions. Isaac ASIMOV was especially prolific in creating new sciences, such as POSITRONICS and PSYCHOHISTORY, though in these cases he was somewhat evasive about the details of how they worked; he has also used such old imaginary-science favourites as miniaturization ( GREAT AND SMALL), in Fantastic Voyage (1966), and in THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972) he came up with an "electron pump" that provides us with a limitless supply of electricity (electrons) in return for positrons supplied to an alternate universe. His most absurd coup in the imaginary-science line was "thiotimoline", described in "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" (1948), which parodies the dusty style of a scientific report, and in its several sequels. Thiotimoline is, in effect, a time-travelling chemical which effortlessly reverses cause and effect. Ursula K. LE GUIN likewise came up with a new science in a spoof-scientific paper, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" (1974); therolinguistics is the study of animal language and literature.One real science is thus far imaginary, in the sense that it has no available subject matter: XENOBIOLOGY. [PN] IMAGINARY VOYAGES A term much used in the TERMINOLOGY of sf/fantasy critics, probably derived from the French, whose name for the genre is "voyages imaginaires". From this term was also derived Voyages extraordinaires, the overall series title used by publisher Hetzel on the novels of Jules VERNE. In this encyclopedia the theme is treated under FANTASTIC VOYAGES and PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. A book on the subject is The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (1941) by Philip Babcock GOVE. [PN] IMAGINATION US DIGEST-size magazine. 63 issues. First released Oct 1950 by the Clark Publishing Co., ed Raymond A. PALMER. Early in 1951, with #3, it was acquired by William L. HAMLING's Greenleaf Publishing Co., and continued with Hamling as editor until Oct 1958. Beginning as a bimonthly, it operated a six-weekly and then briefly a monthly schedule Sep 1952-July 1955. Until July 1955 its full title was Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy; from Oct 1955 it became Imagination Science Fiction. Hamling followed a policy of including a short novel in each issue. Among his most frequent contributors were Kris NEVILLE and Daniel F. GALOUYE, both of whom published much of their early work in I; others were Milton LESSER, Dwight V. SWAIN and, towards the end of I's career, Edmond HAMILTON. I dealt primarily in routine SPACE OPERA, and featured an unusually high number of titles ending in exclamation marks. [BS] IMAGINATIVE TALES US DIGEST-size magazine. 26 issues. A bimonthly companion to IMAGINATION, IT was published by William HAMLING's Greenleaf Publishing Co., ed Hamling, Sep 1954-Nov 1958. The last 3 issues, July-Nov 1958, were published under the title Space Travel (but continued the previous numeration) in a doomed effort to capture the post-Sputnik space-enthusiast market.IT began as a humorous FANTASY magazine, the first 6 issues featuring complete novels in the style of Thorne Smith (1892-1934) by Charles F. Myers and Robert BLOCH, but from Sep 1955 it reverted to a policy identical to that of its companion, featuring only sf, with a short novel heading every issue. Regular writers included Edmond HAMILTON, Geoff St Reynard (Robert W. Krepps) and Dwight V. SWAIN, while the supporting short fiction was principally supplied by authors from the regular stable writing for the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines AMZ and Fantastic. [BS] IMAGINE . . . CANADA. I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE Film (1958). Paramount. Dir Gene Fowler Jr, starring Tom Tryon, Gloria Talbot, Ken Lynch. Screenplay Louis Vittes, from a story by Fowler and Vittes. 78 mins. B/w.Another manifestation of the rampant PARANOIA of the 1950s, IMAMFOS might be called an sf version of I Married a Communist. In this enjoyably tasteless MONSTER MOVIE, a young woman's fiance, on the way to his wedding, is captured and replaced by a shape-shifting ALIEN, one of a group whose mission on Earth is to breed with human women in an attempt to replenish their own declining population. The sexual subtext of some other sf B-movies is here brought out into the open, notably in the famous wedding-night scene where a flash of lightning reveals to the audience (but not the wife) the alien lineaments beneath the nervous cigarette-smoking husband's face. But the woman, who grows suspicious of her "spouse" over the next year, convinces a "real" man of what is happening and he organizes a rescue party. The aliens, impervious to bullets, are destroyed when dogs are set on them, and dissolve into writhing, bubbling alien knots. At various points, surprisingly, some sympathy for the aliens is deliberately roused, and in this respect IMAMFOS is more interesting than the otherwise deservedly more celebrated INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), whose story, in part, it imitates. Gene Fowler, a former editor for Fritz LANG, directed well. [PN/JB]See also: INVASION; SEX. IMMORTAL, THE US tv series (1969-71). Paramount/ABC TV. Concept based on the novel The Immortals (fixup 1962) by James E. GUNN. Executive prod Tony Wilson. Prod Lou Morheim. Dirs included Joseph Sargent (pilot), Mike Caffey. Writers included Robert Specht, Stephen Kandel, Dan Ullman. Starring Christopher George, Carol Lynley, Don Knight, David Brian, Barry Sullivan. 75min pilot, followed by 15 50min episodes. Colour.In the 1969 pilot Ben Richards (George) is discovered to have a rare blood-type which renders him immune to disease and to the ageing process. An elderly millionaire wants to keep him locked up as a human fountain of youth, but he escapes to search for his long-lost brother, who may have the same type of blood. The 1970 series reverts to the formula of the hunted man - others are after him, too - having adventures on his travels. The novelization is The Immortal * (1970), also by Gunn. [JB] IMMORTALITY Immortality is one of the basic motifs of speculative thought; the elixir of life and the fountain of youth are hypothetical goals of classic intellectual and exploratory quests. What is usually involved is, strictly speaking, extreme longevity and freedom from ageing - the uselessness of the former without the latter is reflected in the myth of Tithonus and in Jonathan SWIFT's account of the Struldbruggs.One thing immediately noticeable about this rich literary tradition is that immortality is often treated as a false goal, sometimes as a curse recalling the infinitely tedious punishments meted out to Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus and the Wandering Jew. It is understandable that GOTHIC fantasies such as St Leon (1799) by William Godwin (1756-1836), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles MATURIN, The Wandering Jew (1844-5) by Eugene Sue (1804-1857), Auriol (1850) by W. Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) and The Death Ship (1888) by W. Clark RUSSELL should be suspicious; these are cautionary tales, warning against the emptiness of dreams (though a cynic might equally suggest sour grapes). It is perhaps surprising, though, that early sf writers mostly followed suit. Walter BESANT's The Inner House (1888) proposes that immortality would lead to social sterility - an opinion echoed by many later writers, including Martin SWAYNE in The Blue Germ (1918), Harold Scarborough (1897-1935) in The Immortals (1924) and Aldous HUXLEY in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939; vt After Many a Summer UK). Stories which take a brighter view - like George C. FOSTER's The Lost Garden and the trilogy by George S. VIERECK and Paul ELDRIDGE begun with My First Two Thousand Years (1928) - usually have only a few privileged immortals living in a world of mortals. When George Bernard SHAW expressed enthusiasm for universal longevity in Back to Methuselah (1921), Karel CAPEK added a rebutting preface to his own play The Makropoulos Secret (1925) to explain his own opinion that it would be an unmitigated curse even for a single individual.This difference of opinion remains very evident in sf. In some stories immortality is the beginning of limitless opportunity; in others it represents the ultimate stagnation and the end of innovation and change. We find the former view in such early pulp stories as "The Jameson Satellite" (1931) by Neil R. JONES and The Man who Awoke (1933; fixup 1975) by Laurence MANNING, and its converse in David H. KELLER's "Life Everlasting" (1934; title story of Life Everlasting and Other Tales [1947]) and John R. PIERCE's "Invariant" (1944). In later magazine sf, the former attitude is implicit in J.T. MCINTOSH's "Live For Ever" (1954) and James BLISH's "At Death's End" (1954), while the latter is seen in Damon KNIGHT's "World without Children" (1951). Frederik POHL's Drunkard's Walk (1960), Brian W. ALDISS's "The Worm that Flies" (1968) and Bruce MCALLISTER's "Their Immortal Hearts" (1980). There is, however, a general acceptance of the fact that the desire for immortality is immensely powerful, and that it constitutes the ultimate bribe; lurid dramatizations of this supposition include Jack VANCE's To Live Forever (1956), James E. GUNN's The Immortals (1955-60; fixup 1962), John WYNDHAM's Trouble with Lichen (1960), Norman SPINRAD's BUG JACK BARRON (1969), Bob SHAW's One Million Tomorrows (1970), Robert SILVERBERG's The Book of Skulls (1972), Thomas N. SCORTIA's "The Weariest River" (1973) and Mack REYNOLDS's and Dean ING's Eternity (1984). There have been numerous notable sf novels featuring immortal heroes, including A.E. VAN VOGT's The Weapon Makers (1943; 1952), Wilson TUCKER's The Time Masters (1953; rev 1971), Clifford D. SIMAK's WAY STATION (1963), Roger ZELAZNY's THIS IMMORTAL (1966) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's Time Enough for Love (1973). But the dominant opinion seems to be that boredom and sterility must eventually set in. Raymond Z. GALLUN's The Eden Cycle (1974) is an extended study of this presumed phenomenon, and the protagonists of Michael MOORCOCK's Dancers at the End of Time sequence (1972-6) must go to extreme and absurd lengths to keep ennui at bay.Some of the modern stories dealing with the theme are scrupulously analytical, and are among the finest exercises in speculative thought that the genre has produced. Most are respectful of the problematic aspects of longevity, but almost all eventually favour the prospect; notable examples of extended contes philosophiques in this vein include Robert Silverberg's "Born with the Dead" (1974) and Sailing to Byzantium (1985), Octavia E. BUTLER's WILD SEED (1980), Pamela SARGENT's The Golden Space (1982), Kate WILHELM's Welcome, Chaos (1983) and Poul ANDERSON's epic THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS (1989). A particularly notable negative story is "The Tithonian Factor" (1983) by Richard COWPER, in which hasty users of a technology which gives them a Struldbrugg-like longevity are discomfited by the subsequent discovery that humans do indeed have a joyous spiritual afterlife. Damon Knight's "Dio" (1957), Marta RANDALL's Islands (1976; rev 1980) and Frederik POHL's Outnumbering the Dead (1990 UK) are interesting stories about lone mortals in societies of immortals.Research in biotechnology following the cracking of the genetic code has encouraged speculation that technologies of longevity are a real prospect, and a new immediacy was introduced into the theme when R.C.W. Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that CRYONIC preservation might allow people now living to be preserved until the day when they might benefit. Though satirized in such novels as Anders BODELSEN's Freezing Down (1971; vt Freezing Point), this notion inspired a curious political "manifesto" in Alan HARRINGTON's The Immortalist (1969), followed by his extravagant novel Paradise 1 (1977); Harrington prefers the term "emortality", which signifies an immunity to ageing but not to injury. Technologies of longevity and genetically engineered emortality play a central role in Brian M. STABLEFORD's and David LANGFORD's future history The Third Millennium (1985), and the theme is a constant preoccupation in Stableford's recent solo work, notably The Empire of Fear (1988). A collection of essays on immortality in sf is Death and the Serpent (anth 1985) ed Carl B. YOKE and Donald M. HASSLER. A theme anthology is Immortal (anth 1978) ed Jack DANN. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; GODS AND DEMONS; HIVE-MINDS; LOST-WORLDS; MEDICINE; RELIGION; SUPERMAN. IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE, AN VOYAGE A TRAVERS L'IMPOSSIBLE. IMPULSE SCIENCE FANTASY. INCIDENT AT RAVEN'S GATE (vt Encounter at Raven's Gate) Film (1988). Hemdale. Dir Rolf de Heer, starring Steven Vidler, Celin Griffen, Ritchie Singer, Vince Gil, Saturday Rosenberg. Screenplay Marc Rosenberg, de Heer. 89 mins. Colour.Australian cinema has produced a number of under-appreciated genre items, such as The Last Wave (1978) and Razorback (1984). This is another, a conspiracy-cum- UFO movie which locates its bizarre storyline in a dried-up, mean-spirited outback. It starts awkwardly with an unnecessary flashback structure, and risks alienating audiences accustomed to complete explanations for all manifestations, but is otherwise an outstanding atmospheric nail-biter. As in the best 1950s cheapies - IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) is the particular touchstone evoked - the fantastic elements are used to bring out the tensions of the human characters. The pressures on an already uptight policeman turn him into a menace who competes with the influence of the offscreen ALIENS as the source of the film's HORROR, so that IARG wavers between the psycho-movie and alien-encounter genres. Though the film does not produce tentacled monstrosities, it does have a few impressively unsettling moments in the invaded-transformed Raven's Gate farmhouse. [KN] INCREDIBLE HULK, THE US tv series (1977-82). Universal/CBS-TV. Created by Kenneth Johnson (executive prod), starring Bill Bixby, Lou Ferrigno, Jack Colvin. Prods included Nicholas Corea, James D. Parriott, Charles Bowman, Bob Sherman. Dirs included Johnson, Bowman, Kenneth Gilbert, Jeffrey Hayden, Reza Badiyi, Jack Colvin. Writers included Johnson, Parriott, Corea, Karen Harris and Jill Sherman, Richard Christian MATHESON. 5 seasons, 2 100min pilots plus 79 50min episodes. Colour.The series is based on the MARVEL COMICS character of the same name. Mild-mannered scientist Dr David Banner (Bixby) subjects himself to gamma radiation and turns temporarily into a violent, green, 7ft (2.15m) hulk (Ferrigno), a condition that repeats itself whenever he is under stress. The Hulk persona never speaks. Banner has many adventures while on the run, trailed by abrasive investigative reporter McGee (Colvin), who suspects the truth. Only a handful of episodes - notably the 2-part "Prometheus", which involves a meteor freezing Banner/Hulk into an intermediate state - have any sf components aside from the initial SUPERHERO premise. In this formulaic but popular series the Hulk is much more polite (and lacklustre) than his frenzied comic-book counterpart.The 2 pilots and a further 2-episode story were syndicated in the USA and released as movies elsewhere: The Incredible Hulk (1977), Return of the Incredible Hulk (1977; a retitling of "Death in the Family") and Bride of the Incredible Hulk (1978; a retitling of "Married"). 2 made-for-tv movies, both dir Bill Bixby, are Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1979) and Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990). [PN/JB] INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN, THE Film (1977). Quartet Productions/AIP. Written and dir William Sachs, starring Alex Rebar, Burr DeBenning, Ann Sweeny, Michael Aldredge. Additional dialogue Rebecca Ross. 84 mins. Colour.By 1977 the idea of an astronaut returning to Earth after being contaminated by some space infection was well and truly a CLICHE subgenre of the MONSTER MOVIE, an early example being The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955). This time the infection causes great strength, the desire to eat human flesh, and an unfortunate skin disease that gives the astronaut a strong resemblance to man-shaped porridge. Some sequences are rather good, but the special effects are laughable. [PN] INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, THE Film (1957). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Grant Williams, Randy Stuart, April Kent. Screenplay Richard MATHESON, based on his own The Shrinking Man (1956). 81 mins. B/w.This is one of the few truly classic sf films of the 1950s. The basic premise is unscientific, but that does not detract from the power of this story about a man (Williams) who becomes contaminated by a radioactive cloud and starts to shrink. What were once safe and comforting to him become increasingly threatening as he continues to diminish. There is severe sexual anxiety as his wife (Stuart) looms ever larger above him (and patronizes him). In due course his cat becomes a monster and the prosaic confines of his own basement, into which he escapes, become a surrealist jungle. Eventually he disappears completely as the wind blows through autumn leaves and the stars glitter above in a curiously joyful epiphany. Matheson's mature script is intelligently handled by Arnold. Clifford Stine's special effects are a paradigm for how these things should be done.A supposedly comic partial remake starring Lily Tomlin, The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), dir Joel Schumacher, purports to be a SATIRE on the consumer society. [PN/JB]See also: GREAT AND SMALL; HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS; HUGO; MUTANTS; PARANOIA. INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN, THE The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN . INFINITY Original paperback anthology series ed Robert HOSKINS, published by Lancer Books, and presented as a lineal descendant of the magazine INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION (1955-8), whose editor, Larry T. SHAW, was also connected with Lancer; the covers bore the slogan "New Writings in Speculative Fiction". I was a competent but not outstanding series. Regular contributors included Poul ANDERSON, Barry N. MALZBERG and Robert SILVERBERG; Alan BRENNERT and George ZEBROWSKI made their debuts in its pages. Infinity One (anth 1970) reprinted Arthur C. CLARKE's "The Star" (1955) from the first issue of its spiritual ancestor; all other stories were originals. Later volumes were Infinity Two (anth 1971), Three (anth 1972), Four (anth 1972) and Five (anth 1973). The series was terminated when its publisher went bankrupt. [MJE/PN] INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 20 issues Nov 1955-Nov 1958, published by Royal Publications, ed Larry T. SHAW; irregular, with 4 months between some issues, 1 month between others. ISF was one of the most interesting of the flood of new sf magazines in the early and mid-1950s. Its first issue featured Arthur C. CLARKE's HUGO-winning story "The Star", and the magazine went on to publish other good stories by such authors as Isaac ASIMOV, James BLISH, Algis BUDRYS, Damon KNIGHT and C.M. KORNBLUTH; Harlan ELLISON made his debut here with "Glow Worm" (1956). Robert SILVERBERG was another regular - and sometimes prolific-contributor; #20 contained book reviews by him and also 3 of his stories (including "Ozymandias", published as by Ivar Jorgenson). Damon Knight had earlier been ISF's regular critic; much of the material in In Search of Wonder (1956; rev 1967) originated in ISF. After the first issue, all the covers were painted by Ed EMSHWILLER. The original anthology series INFINITY described itself as the "lineal descendant" of ISF. [MJE] ING, DEAN (1931- ) US writer whose work makes effective use of his years in the Air Force (1951-5) and in the engineering profession (1957-70), and reflects in its pragmatic tone - though not in its plotting, which can be pixilated - his training in behavioural psychology (PhD in speech, 1974). Much of his fiction can be described as SURVIVALIST, insofar as military tales set in a post- HOLOCAUST USA necessarily inhabit survivalist terrain; but the violence of his better work is relatively restrained, and the libertarianism ( LIBERTARIAN SF) which underpins his conception of proper behaviour cannot be described as unthinking. Collections like High Tension (coll 1982) and Firefight 2000 (coll 1987), the latter including both fiction and nonfiction, amply demonstrate the cogency of his concerns.DI began writing sf with "Tight Squeeze" for ASF in 1955, though he became active only in the late 1970s. His first novel, Soft Targets (1979), interestingly copes with terrorism in a NEAR-FUTURE setting, though a besetting weakness for melodrama diverts attention from the serious points he makes about the fatal precariousness of societies in the advanced Western World. DI is, in fact, much less interested in that precariousness than in its consequences, and his most significant work, the Ted Quantrill sequence-Systemic Shock (1981), Single Combat (1983) and Wild Country (1985) - is set in a desolated and paranoid post-Bomb USA under the thumb of a theocracy. (The similarity of this setting to Robert A. HEINLEIN's Future History is sufficiently obvious to count as a homage.) Quantrill's life, as he matures, presents a model of and argument for the individual who admits no restraints upon his behaviour but his own recognizance. That Quantrill does not behave poorly derives, perhaps, more from the author's decency than from any notion that near-absolute autonomy makes one fully human. Other titles of interest include several novels written as with Mack REYNOLDS, who died in 1983, based on complete first drafts written by Reynolds; they are Eternity (1984), Home Sweet Home: 2010 A.D. (1984), The Other Time (1984), in which an archaeologist uses TIME TRAVEL to help the Aztecs defeat the Spanish, The Lagrangists (1983), Chaos in Lagrangia (1984), Trojan Orbit (1985) and Deathwish World (1986). His solo books include Anasazi (coll of linked stories 1980), Pulling Through (coll 1983), which comprises a short ROBINSONADE and a series of survivalist articles designed to add versimilitude to the course of the main story, and The Big Lifters (1988), a HARD-SF tale in which entrepreneurship wins the day. In general, DI presents what might be called the acceptable face of survivalism. [JC]Other works: Blood of Eagles (1986), associational; The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989) and its sequel, Butcher Bird (1993); Cathouse * (fixup 1990), tales set in Larry NIVEN's Man-Kzin universe; The Nemesis Mission (1991); Silent Thunder (1991 chap dos).About the author: The Work of Dean Ing: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (1990 chap) by Scott A. Burgess.See also: COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; IMMORTALITY; SOCIAL DARWINISM. INGHAM, FREDERICK Edward Everett HALE. INGREY, DEREK (1929- ) UK writer whose post- HOLOCAUST sf novel, Pig on a Lead (1963), describes the dead-end life of the last surviving humans in the UK - two men, who soon kill each other, and a boy, who survives in the company of a young Eve-figure and the eponymous pig. Told in a remarkable pot pourri of styles, the book makes effective use of many black-humour routines. [JC] INGRID, CHARLES Rhondi VILOTT. INGS, SIMON (DAVID) (1965- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "Blessed Fields" in Other Edens III (anth 1989) ed Christopher EVANS and Robert HOLDSTOCK; and who has become moderately prolific as an author of short stories. His first novel, Hot Head (1992), heatedly and congestedly, and with moments of CYBERPUNK-ish brilliance, presents the life-story and adventures-in VIRTUAL REALITY and other realms-of a lesbian Muslim wanderer in the early 21st century. SI's 2nd novel, City of the Iron Fish (1994), significantly differs from the first novel. The eponymous city, whose physical existence seems as arbitrary as all other physical phenomena in the world of the novel, is reminiscent of such fantasy edificial concentrations as Mervyn PEAKE's Gormenghast, or M. John HARRISON's Viriconium. But the surreal dance of speculation-about cosmology in general, as well as the reality-making function of ART in a world which lacks natural meaning-distinguishes this novel apart from its models. SI may prove to be one of the writers to capture the 1990s. [JC] INNER SPACE In sf TERMINOLOGY, an antonym to "outer space". The term was probably first used in the sf field by Robert BLOCH in a speech at the 1948 Worldcon, but was not widely disseminated at that time. However, in "They Come from Inner Space" (1954 The New Statesman) - an essay he later included in Thoughts in the Wilderness (coll 1957) - J.B. PRIESTLEY more conspicuously suggested that sf mistakenly attempted to explore "the other side of the Sun rather than . . . the hidden life of the psyche". "Beyond all these topical tales, fables and legends" lay "deep feelings of anxiety, fear, and guilt" which themselves required exploration. "Having ruined this planet," he continued, "we take destruction to other planets. This very extension in space of our activities is desolating, at least to minds that are not entirely childish, because it is a move, undertaken in secret despair, in the wrong direction." Whether J.G. BALLARD's first use of the term in 1962 was a separate coining or reflected a memory of this essay, it is clear that he intended to designate something not dissimilar. (It is also possible that he had read "Invasion from Inner Space" [1959 Star Science Fiction #6] by Howard Koch, a story about sceptical COMPUTERS revolutionizing society, but this is obviously a rather different usage.) The term soon became a commonplace, especially with reference to NEW-WAVE writers (like Ballard) who came into prominence in the mid-1960s. [JC/PN]See also: GREAT AND SMALL; MUSIC. INNERSPACE Film (1987). Amblin/Warner Bros. Steven SPIELBERG as an executive prod. Dir Joe DANTE, starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Kevin McCarthy, Fiona Lewis, Meg Ryan. Screenplay Jeffrey Boam, Chip Proser, based on a story by Proser. 120 mins. Colour.In this parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), tough test pilot Tuck (Quaid) is accidentally injected into feeble Jack (Short) while in a miniaturized state. Tuck, though tiny, can to a degree control Jack. In a confused and sometimes unfunny plot, villainous industrial spies pursue a microchip MCGUFFIN and a miniaturized killer is also injected into Jack. Adventures happen. All Dante's films have delightful moments, but this, an attempt to make good commercially after the debacle of EXPLORERS (1985), seems oddly impersonal while at the same time trying too hard. The inside-the-body effects are good. The technical adviser on the movie was Gentry LEE. [PN]See also: CINEMA. INNES, EVAN Zach HUGHES. INSIDE US FANZINE. HUGO; RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY. INTELLIGENCE Intelligence is necessarily one of the issues discussed in the entries on ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF, CYBERNETICS, MUTANTS and SUPERMAN. MACHINE intelligence is discussed under COMPUTERS and ROBOTS. This entry is restricted to stories in which the emphasis is on the actual workings of intelligence in living beings.Much sf refers to intelligence, but a surprisingly small amount gives a good idea of what the workings of a superior or different intelligence would feel like or even look like. In many stories of abnormally intelligent supermen or mutants we have to take the intelligence on trust. Such intelligences were favourites with A.E. VAN VOGT, but their workings are often less than transparent to the reader, as is the case with the hero of his The World of A (1945 ASF; rev 1948; rev vt The World of Null-A 1970), whose blinding leaps of non-Aristotelian logic are frequently incomprehensible and on the face of it rather silly.The first sf story of any significance about intelligence was probably The Curse of Intellect (1895) by Frank Challice Constable, in which an ape is given human intelligence ( APES AND CAVEMEN); the first of real importance was The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911; vt The Wonder US) by J. D. BERESFORD, in which the focus of interest is on the feelings of a superintelligent child growing up in a world of what seem to him subnormals. A colder and harsher reworking of the same theme was twice undertaken by Olaf STAPLEDON, in Odd John (1935), about an abnormally intelligent human whose spiritual powers are also highly developed, and in Sirius (1944), about an intelligent dog. In some ways the latter work is the more successful, perhaps because of the problem in stories of this kind of finding a form of language appropriate to describing an experience which by its very nature cannot be fully comprehended by either the reader - or indeed the writer.One way around the problem of increasing intelligence is to begin with an animal or a moron, so that the higher intelligence is not hopelessly out of reach of our own. This strategy has been adopted in several GENRE-SF stories, of which the two best known are Brain Wave (1954) by Poul ANDERSON and "Flowers for Algernon" (1959) by Daniel KEYES, later much exp as FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1966). The latter, filmed as CHARLY (1968), is a moving story, told largely through his own diaries, of intelligence artificially induced in a moron. Sadly, the process is only temporary; while hero and reader are given a glimpse, surprisingly convincing, of what genius must feel like, the gates of the golden city are soon barred, and the story ends with an itching discomfort in the subnormal mind of the hero and an almost intolerable feeling of loss in the reader's.Superintelligence is often pictured as going along with what seems to ordinary humans a cold indifference and a casual amorality. Perhaps this demonstrates a sour-grapes syndrome. We do not like the thought of being relegated to a minor place in the evolutionary scheme; and, as EVOLUTION is traditionally carried out by a "Nature red in tooth and claw", we half expect that a race of geniuses would treat us cruelly. A prototype of this kind of story is John TAINE's Seeds of Life (1931 AMZ; 1951), in which an accident with radiation transforms a surly laboratory technician into a cruel, glowing supermind in the body of an Adonis; the sense we are given of the workings of his mind is vivid enough to transcend the pulp crankiness of the story's ideas of evolution. Here, too, the growth of intelligence is reversible.Many adults are ready enough to see even normal children as essentially ALIEN creatures, and a flourishing subgenre has been the story of the superchild ( CHILDREN IN SF), often turning on his or her relationship with parents or guardians. Henry KUTTNER reverted to this theme several times, as in "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943, as Lewis Padgett), in which a teaching machine from the future has frightening effects on children, and "When the Bough Breaks" (1944, again as Padgett), in which a peculiarly nauseating superbaby gives his parents a hard time. "Star Bright" (1952) by Mark CLIFTON is a typically pulp version of the intelligence theme in which the manifestations of high intelligence in children - where the real interest of the story might have lain - rapidly develop into what are in effect magical powers. The two most thoughtful and mature novels in this subgenre are probably Children of the Atom (1948-50 ASF; fixup 1953) by Wilmar H. SHIRAS, which incorporates the classic story "In Hiding" (1948), in which an extremely intelligent boy attempts, in self-protection, to behave just like any other child, but is discovered, and The Fourth "R" (1959; vt The Brain Machine) by George O. SMITH, in which the intelligence of a 5-year-old has been trained artificially by a machine which reinforces learning mechanisms in the brain. Both books deal sensitively with the contrast between intellectual maturity and emotional immaturity, and are surprisingly plausible in their scenarios of ways in which superintelligence might show itself in action.Two other relevant stories from the 1950s are C.M. KORNBLUTH's "The Marching Morons" (1951), a vividly unpleasant story of a future which has become polarized between morons and geniuses, the former in much greater numbers because the middle classes know more about contraception (an interesting not-very-hidden assumption here), and The Black Cloud (1957) by Fred HOYLE, in which a cloud-intelligence in space indirectly kills scientists who try to take on board its entire knowledge of the universe, their human intellects being too fully programmed and inflexible to cope with the new data. Something similar happens to the people in the film FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) who subject themselves to the intelligence-raising machinery of the Krel.A number of stories have hinged on the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS under an imagined future law which states that the worlds of intelligent beings must be either left alone or at least treated with great care. Thus the measurement of alien intelligence becomes a question of politics. H. Beam PIPER's Little Fuzzy (1962) is of this kind, as is Joseph GREEN's Conscience Interplanetary (1965-71 var mags; fixup 1972), though Green does not really develop the potential of the theme. Perhaps the most interesting novel about surveying the nature of alien life and intelligence is Naomi MITCHISON's MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN (1962).Other variations on the intelligence theme include: Olof JOHANNESSON's Sagan om den stora datamaskinin (1966; trans as The Big Computer: A Vision 1968 UK; vt The Tale of the Great Computer: A Vision 1968 US; vt The End of Man? 1969 US), which is actually a history of intelligence, written in the future, seeing human intelligence as an evolutionary step towards machine intelligence; "The Planners" (1968) by Kate WILHELM, about the acceleration of the genetic transmission of intelligence in apes; and "Eurema's Dam" (1972) by R.A. LAFFERTY, about a genius whom the author disingenuously describes as stupid. This last story is one of a long line of genre-sf yarns about idiots savants who construct various marvellous machines and theories without having the least idea about what they are doing. A major work on the evolution of intelligence is Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968), a highly structured novel which describes, through a series of recurrent images and thematic leitmotifs, an experiment in drug-induced raising of intelligence among deserters and conscientious objectors in a prose whose increasing richness and difficulty reflect the ever-increasing intelligence of the narrator. Oscar ROSSITER's Tetrasomy 2 (1974) is a black comedy about a young doctor in whom a sudden acceleration of intelligence is catalysed by a vegetable-like superbeing; the doctor's inability to use his improved mind with any social sang froid poses a problem not generally considered in this type of story.The question of intelligence testing comes up in many UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS, and is analysed interestingly in "Intelligence Testing in Utopia" by Carolyn H. Rhodes in EXTRAPOLATION, Dec 1971. Among the works she discusses in which this theme is central are The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917; vt The Apostle of the Cylinder) by Victor ROUSSEAU, Player Piano (1952; vt Utopia 14) by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) by Michael YOUNG, The Child Buyer (1960) by John HERSEY and World out of Mind (1953) by J.T. MCINTOSH.Two sf novelists whose work consistently speculates on the nature of intelligence and the various directions in which it may evolve are Frank HERBERT and Ian WATSON, both heavily committed to the possibility of some form of transcendent intelligence. In Herbert's work the theme is seen most clearly in the Dune series and in The Dosadi Experiment (1977), though it appears in all his novels. As with van Vogt, however, it is not always clear exactly how his "other" intelligences operate. With Herbert, much depends on enigmatic hints and clues, as if he knew more than he's telling; this is reflected in his plots, which combine abstruse metaphysical speculation with conspiratorial, cloak-and-dagger manipulations in a sometimes confusing way. Nonetheless, Herbert has at times evoked the difference of evolved intelligences with great feeling. Where Herbert hints, Watson analyses and chips patiently away at his recurrent theme, approaching it from a slightly different angle in each of his novels of the 1970s and in some later ones. Unlike those sf writers who seem to fear the thought of a transcendent intelligence, Watson desires it, while recognizing how such an evolution may be quite alien to our present selves. Bringing to bear an impressive arsenal of analytic tools taken from ANTHROPOLOGY, CYBERNETICS, LINGUISTICS, PSYCHOLOGY, semiotics and neurology, he is ready to tackle ambitious projects; in particular he has attempted, with partial success but sometimes drily, to evoke the feeling of a supermind whose processes are more lateral, analogizing and synthesizing than sequential in the traditional mode of human logic. Examples can be found in The Embedding (1973), The Martian Inca (1977) and Alien Embassy (1977). Similarly, Damien BRODERICK's The Judas Mandala (1982; rev 1990) is notable for the intellectual arabesques produced by its evolved intelligences, hovering just this side of comprehensibility.In the 1980s the intelligence theme became less important in genre sf, though Stephen KING's The Tommyknockers (1987) has a lively if pulp-style treatment of a popular notion in sf - that contact with aliens or their artefacts may cause a rapid evolution of our intelligence - most famously evoked in the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). In King's novel the artefact is an ancient spacecraft dug up in Maine. Robert SILVERBERG's At Winter's End (1988) features a FAR-FUTURE primitive tribe whose apparently human intelligence is the result of an experiment in primate evolution. In The Divide (1990) by Robert Charles WILSON a man whose superintelligence was created by a hormonal experiment during his childhood attempts to cope with his alienation by splitting his mind; this creates two wholly different personalities, one apparently average. But generally the emphasis of 1980s sf has shifted away from intelligence examined in isolation towards the nature of consciousness and the workings of the mind in general. This is one of the recurrent themes in Greg BEAR's work. His Blood Music (1985) has a transformation of humanity brought about by intelligent microorganisms, and Queen of Angels (1990) envisages a society in which most people are "therapied" by molecule-scale machines made possible by developments in NANOTECHNOLOGY; the same book features direct exploration/mapping of the mind and its subroutines, consciousness alteration through vodoun ("voodoo"), and the growth to self-consciousness of an AI.The idea of biological engineering of the mind appears also in Geoff RYMAN's The Child Garden (1989), in which almost the whole of humanity is educated by the direct importation of tailored DNA into the brain through viral infection. Ironically the heroine, who is immune to viruses, is very intelligent, and the book makes an important distinction between knowledge and intelligence, emphasizing how the conventional "grammars" of thought create a conformism antipathetic to true creativity. In this case (and often, no doubt, in the real world) education can muffle intelligence. [PN] INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARDS UK awards, made annually 1951-7 (not 1956). The idea came from four UK enthusiasts, including John Beynon Harris (John WYNDHAM). The IFAs were presented to the authors of the best fantasy or sf book of the year, with a second category for the best nonfiction book likely to be of interest to sf readers; the nonfiction class was dropped after 1953. Winners were selected by a panel of prominent sf personalities; from 1952 the panel was international. The award took the form of a trophy. Once the HUGOS had been successfully launched, some of the raison d'etre for the IFAs was gone, but in their time they were given to some excellent and imaginatively chosen works, most of which would have had almost no chance of winning any of the major US AWARDS. The first IFA was presented at the 1951 UK sf CONVENTION, the last at the London Worldcon in 1957. [PN]1951Fiction: George R. STEWART, EARTH ABIDESNonfiction: Willy LEY and Chesley BONESTELL, The Conquest of Space1952Fiction: John COLLIER, Fancies and GoodnightsNonfiction: Arthur C. CLARKE, The Exploration of Space1953Fiction: Clifford D. SIMAK, CITYNonfiction: Willy Ley and L. Sprague DE CAMP, Lands Beyond1954Theodore STURGEON, MORE THAN HUMAN1955Edgar PANGBORN, A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS1957J.R.R. TOLKIEN, Lord of the Rings INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, Nov 1967 and June 1968, published by Galaxy Publishing Corp., ed Frederik POHL. The interesting idea of reprinting stories from all over the world - authors ranging from Arkady STRUGATSKI ( RUSSIA) through Hugo Correa (Chile [ SOUTH AMERICA]) to Damien BRODERICK ( AUSTRALIA)-sadly but unsurprisingly met with no success. [FHP/PN] INTERNATIONAL STORYTELLER STORYTELLER. INTERPLANETARY ROMANCE PLANETARY ROMANCE. INTERZONE UK magazine, current, #1 Spring 1982, small- BEDSHEET (A4) format, saddle-stapled, continuously numbered, on slick paper from #41, Nov 1990, quarterly to #24, Summer 1988; bimonthly to #34, Mar/Apr 1990; monthly thereafter. IZ was first published and edited by a collective made up of John CLUTE, Alan Dorey, Malcolm EDWARDS, Colin GREENLAND, Graham James, Roz KAVENEY, Simon Ounsley and David PRINGLE. This group shrank: James left after #2, Edwards after #4, Kaveney after #7, Clute and Dorey after #10, and Greenland after #12. From #13, Autumn 1985, the only editors were Ounsley and Pringle, although some previous editors continued to act as advisory editors. Since #25, Sep/Oct 1988, when the magazine went bimonthly, the sole editor (and publisher) has been David Pringle, who had been from the outset, along with Edwards, one of the two major figures behind its publication. IZ had reached #95 by May 1995. Begun as an idealistic exercise by a group of fans and writers at a time when the UK had almost no market for sf short stories, it has grown into by far the most distinguished UK sf magazine since NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY. In appearance and content it is a fully professional magazine,although its comparatively low circulation (by US standards) of around 4,500 requires it to be classed as a SEMIPROZINE in HUGO voting.IZ published perhaps too many downbeat stories in its early issues, hoping rather too obviously to revive something of the feeling of Michael MOORCOCK's NW and its NEW-WAVE glories. However, it slowly developed - certainly by 1985-6 - a real personality of its own. From #13 (Autumn 1985) Nick Lowe has contributed a sophisticated film-review column; from #16 (Summer 1986) John Clute has been the featured and inimitable senior book reviewer. Since then the nonfiction component has continually improved: a second book-review column by Paul J. MCAULEY was added from #23 (Spring 1988), and Mary GENTLE has reviewed with increasing frequency, as have, more recently, Chris Gilmore and Gwyneth JONES. Good interviews have appeared regularly, as well as literary and market analysis in the interesting Big Sellers series; Wendy Bradley began (and later ceased) to review, amusingly, both tv shows and fantasy fiction; David LANGFORD began to publish monthly a condensed version of ANSIBLE, his well-known news-oriented FANZINEand Charles PLATT and Bruce STERLING (separately) contributed occasional columns of (deliberately) controversial polemics.All of this gave the magazine a good bone structure on which the skin and musculature of the fiction could be adequately supported. It has slowly become clear that this one magazine, despite its slender resources and comparatively small readership, has been largely (if not solely) responsible for catalysing a second new wave of UK sf. Its younger UK authors have included Paul J. McAuley, Steve BAXTER, Keith BROOKE, Eric BROWN, Richard Calder (1955- ), Neil FERGUSON, Nicola Griffith, Simon D. Ings (1965- ), Ian Lee (1951- ), Ian MCDONALD, Ian R. MacLeod, Kim NEWMAN and Charles Stross, among many others, coming in to join already established writers like Brian W. ALDISS, J.G. BALLARD, Barrington J. BAYLEY, M. John HARRISON, Gwyneth JONES, Garry KILWORTH, Keith ROBERTS, Brian M. STABLEFORD and Ian WATSON. Australian Greg EGAN has been an especially notable contributor, as has, though more seldom, the Canadian Geoff RYMAN. Good US contributors have included Greg BEAR, Michael BLUMLEIN, Scott BRADFIELD, Paul Di Filippo, Thomas M. DISCH, Karen Joy FOWLER, Richard KADREY, Geoffrey A. Landis, Pat MURPHY, Rachel POLLACK and Michael SWANWICK.This represents, so far as UK sf writing is concerned, a spectacular upturn in both the quality and the quantity of sf by new writers, after long years of near-stagnation in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is not so much the UK writers' uniform brilliance - they are by no means always brilliant - as the sense of vigour and community they arouse by their regular appearance together in this magazine; this is what has revitalized UK sf, and incidentally encouraged the starting up of many other small UK semiprozines in IZ's wake. Pringle as editor has occasionally, and somewhat unfairly, been accused of playing it too safe and commercial in recent years, after publishing much experimental fiction early on. More commonly he is regarded as having got the balance between SOFT SF and HARD SF, the experimental and the old-style fast-paced narrative, about right. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, IZ has been intelligently eclectic.Both cover art and interior art have been of uneven quality. The most notable artist consistently associated with Interzone - he was Art Editor for a time - is Ian MILLER. In Oct 1994 IZ merged with the small-press magazine SF Nexus, with the result that Paul Brazier, editor of the latter, became graphic designer for IZ. The result, according not just to the elderly and conservative, has been a design of striking ugliness in the name of modernism. [PN]See also: INTERZONE: THE ANTHOLOGY. INTERZONE: THE ANTHOLOGY UK anthology series, mainly reprint (from the magazine INTERZONE), part original, 5 vols to date. These are Interzone: The 1st Anthology (anth 1985) ed David PRINGLE with John CLUTE and Colin GREENLAND, The 2nd Anthology (anth 1987) ed Pringle with Clute and Simon Ounsley, The 3rd Anthology (anth 1988) ed Pringle with Clute and Ounsley, The 4th Anthology (anth 1989) ed Pringle with Clute and Ounsley, and The 5th Anthology (anth 1991) ed Pringle with Clute and Lee Montgomerie. Original stories have appeared in #1 (1 story), #4 (3 stories) and #5 (2 stories), their authors including Geoff RYMAN and Cherry WILDER. [PN] INVADERS, THE US tv series (1967-8). A Quinn Martin Production for ABC TV, created by Larry COHEN. Prod Alan Armer. Writers included Don Brinkley, Dan Ullman, Jerry SOHL, Robert Collins. Dirs included Joseph Sargent, Paul Wendkos, Sutton Roley. 43 50min episodes. Colour.Roy Thinnes stars as a man who has witnessed a landing by ALIENS in a UFO but is unable to get anyone to believe him. The aliens, from a doomed planet, are trying to take over Earth by infiltration: able to take on human form, they can be distinguished only by the odd angle of their little fingers; when dead their bodies evaporate leaving only a pile of ashes, so lasting proof of their existence is almost impossible to establish. The rigid formula - in each episode the hero discovers and foils a new alien plot, but remains unable to convince the authorities - meant that there was little variation, and the series was cancelled after the second season. Larry Cohen, whose idea the series was, later became celebrated for his low-budget independent films, usually, as here, featuring an ordinary man facing horrible incursions on the one hand and an uncaring, unimaginative or conspiratorial establishment on the other. Perhaps TI came too late: it belonged, in spirit, to the PARANOID sf version of the Communist-spy scares of the 1950s, as in Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Puppet Masters (1951), the tv serial QUATERMASS II (1955) and the film INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956).Two short series of books based on TI were published in the USA (3 books) and the UK (4 books). The 2 to appear in both series are The Invaders * (1967; vt The Meteor Men UK as by Anthony LeBaron) by Keith LAUMER, #1 in the USA and #2 in the UK; and The Halo Highway * (1967; vt Army of the Undead US) by Rafe BERNARD, #1 in the UK and #3 in the USA. Invaders #2 in the USA was Enemies from Beyond * (1967) by Laumer; #3 and #4 in the UK were The Night of the Trilobites * (1968) and The Autumn Accelerator * (1969), both by Peter LESLIE.Two further ties to the series were hardbound juveniles, Alien Missile Threat * (1967) by Paul S. Newman, and Dam of Death * (1967) by Jack Pearl. [JB/PN] INVADERS FROM MARS 1. Film (1953). National Pictures/20th Century-Fox. Dir William Cameron Menzies, starring Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Leif Erickson. Screenplay Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). 78 mins (82 mins in Europe). Colour.A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of THINGS TO COME (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's eyes we see ALIENS from a UFO take over the minds of everyone in a town, beginning with the boy's own parents. The army moves in, there is an underground battle and the aliens are defeated. The boy wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream . . . but then he once again sees the UFO land behind his house. (Extra footage was shot for the European print to substitute for the all-a-dream ending, which it was felt would be unpopular; more recent prints have combined both versions.)Although IFM was cheaply made, Menzies produced - through the use of mildly expressionistic sets (reinforcing the dream idea) and a camera placed to give us a child's-eye view - a powerful sf metaphor for the loneliness and alienation of a child whose world seems subtly wrong. The image of human bodies concealing incomprehensible and menacing alien motives was, in its PARANOIA, an important one in US sf cinema, especially during the 1950s Communist-spy phobias.2. Film (1986). Cannon. Prods Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus. Dir Tobe Hooper, starring Hunter Carson, Karen Black, Timothy Bottoms, Louise Fletcher. Screenplay Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby, based on original. 99 mins. Colour.Disappointing (although astonishingly faithful) remake by a director more at home with exploitation horror movies. The more sophisticated special effects (Martians created by Stan Winston) and the updating of the setting serve only to throw the original's flaws into high relief. What carried eerie conviction on the small screen becomes merely silly on the big one, especially as Hooper's direction sinks into near-incoherence in the pacing of the finale. The best bits, unsurprisingly, are straight from the HORROR genre: possessed parents chewing horribly burnt bacon, a malicious schoolteacher eating a live frog, etc. [PN/JB]See also: INVASION; MONSTER MOVIES. INVADERS FROM THE DEEP STINGRAY. INVASION Futuristic fiction in the UK was given a tremendous boost by the success of George T. CHESNEY's clever piece of propaganda, The Battle of Dorking (1871), which put the case for army reform and rearmament by offering a dramatic illustration of the ease with which the UK might fall to an invading German army. This became the foundation-stone of a subgenre of future- WAR stories whose history is described in I.F. CLARKE's excellent Voices Prophesying War 1763-1984 (1966). Significant exercises in similar alarmism published in the run-up to WWI included The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) by William LE QUEUX, The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine CHILDERS, The Invasion of 1910 (1906) by Le Queux and When William Came (1913) by SAKI. P.G. WODEHOUSE's early novel, The Swoop! (1909), was a parody of the subgenre. The invaders were usually German, but stories of French invasion were frequently used as cautionary tales against the folly of building a Channel Tunnel, such as Max PEMBERTON's Pro Patria (1901). UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE was to a large extent an outgrowth and elaboration of this kind of fiction; and a crucial CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH was made by H.G. WELLS in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), which imagined that an invasion of the Earth by technologically superior ALIENS might appear to Britons in much the same light as the eventually genocidal invasion of Tasmania by Europeans had appeared to the luckless Tasmanians (see alsoThe WAR OF THE WORLDS ). Although it was (very narrowly) anticipated in some respects by Kurd LASSWITZ's Auf zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two Planets 1971), Wells's novel was far more influential in making the role of invader central to the fictional image of the alien for the next half-century.Mundane invasions remained fairly commonplace in UK fiction between the wars, although the fear of occupation per se was outweighed and largely superseded by the fear of the aerial bombardment which might be its prelude; in the UK such stories far outnumbered stories of alien invasion, although there were some notable examples of the latter: G. McLeod WINSOR's Station X (1919) and Bohun LYNCH's Menace from the Moon (1925), as well as the Martian invasion included in Olaf STAPLEDON's future history LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930). This general dearth of alien-invasion stories is understandable. Separated from continental Europe by a mere 22 miles, the UK was especially vulnerable to the threat of invasion - and Britons understood how narrowly such a fate had been averted in 1588 and again in Napoleonic times.The USA was far less vulnerable to such anxieties - although they found expression in such novels as Thomas DIXON's The Fall of a Nation (1916) and Floyd GIBBONS's The Red Napoleon (1929), as well as in various lurid accounts of the "Yellow Peril", including Parabellum's (Ferdinand GRAUTOFF's) Bansai! (1909), Philip Francis NOWLAN's Buck Rogers stories (1928-9) and the series begun by Arthur Leo ZAGAT with "Tomorrow" (1939) - but in general the possibility of alien invasion probably seemed to US citizens not too much more remote than the probability of invasion by another nation.Early pulp melodramas of alien invasion include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (1925), Nictzin Dyalhis's "When the Green Star Waned" (1925), Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Moon Maid (1926), Edmond HAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929) and John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Invaders from the Infinite (1932 AMZ Quarterly; 1961). An interesting story by P. Schuyler MILLER in which the "invasion" is by spores rather than sentient beings is "The Arrhenius Horror" (1931), a theme which he recapitulated in "Spawn" (1939); a later development of it was Jack FINNEY's The Body Snatchers (1955; vt Invasion of the Body Snatchers), filmed twice as INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Alien-invasion stories quickly became a staple of the specialist sf pulps, and Campbell went on to conduct a sober and rather peculiar analysis of the idea of alien conquest and the subjugation of humankind in four of his "Don A. Stuart" stories: "The Invaders" (1935), "Rebellion" (1935), "Out of Night" (1937) and "The Cloak of Aesir" (1939) - stories somewhat at odds with his later conviction that humanity was destined to get the better of any and all alien species. One of the side-effects of this later human chauvinism was Campbell's de-emphasizing of alien-invasion stories in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION - it is surprising how few such stories appeared in ASF in the decade separating The Dark Destroyers (1938 as "Nuisance Value"; 1959) by Manly Wade WELLMAN from "Late Night Final" (1948) by Eric Frank RUSSELL, even though such stories could certainly (as did both the examples cited) champion the human against the nonhuman. Joseph J. MILLARD's The Gods Hate Kansas (1941; rev 1964) is a notable example from elsewhere.A sparse but interesting line of stories featuring invasions launched from UNDER THE SEA runs from Owen Oliver's antique "Out of the Deep" (1904) and Eden PHILLPOTTS's The Owl of Athene (1936) to John WYNDHAM's The Kraken Wakes (1953; vt Out of the Deeps US) and Murray LEINSTER's Creatures of the Abyss (1961). These often bring the typical features of mundane and alien invasion stories into uneasy combination.Hypothetical Asian invasion continued to crop up occasionally in GENRE SF - as in Robert A. HEINLEIN's Sixth Column (1941 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; 1949; vt The Day after Tomorrow) and C.M. KORNBLUTH's Not this August (1955; vt Christmas Eve UK) - although they were easily outnumbered by attempted and successful conquests of a more exotic kind, even if most of these were featured in the less prestigious magazines. Invasions came not only from outer space but from other DIMENSIONS, as in Murray LEINSTER's "The Incredible Invasion" (1936 ASF; 1955 dos as The Other Side of Here), from the microcosm, as in "Invaders from the Atom" (1937) by Maurice G. Hugi (1904-1947), and eventually from the future, as in Invasion from 2500 (1964) by Norman Edwards (Terry CARR and Ted WHITE). Among the more bizarre alien invasions is Fredric BROWN's "The Waveries" (1945), in which electrical energy-beings hijack our airwaves. Despite the sobering conclusion of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, in which lowly bacteria must compensate for human impotence, confidence in human ability to repel alien invaders sooner or later always ran high in pulp sf, one lone man occasionally being adequate to the task, as in A.E. VAN VOGT's "The Monster" (1948). In some stories, of course, humans are themselves the alien invaders of other worlds, and works of this kind (which rarely appeared in ASF) were often fiercely critical of such human follies as racism and imperialism; examples range from Edmond Hamilton's "A Conquest of Two Worlds" (1932) through Robert Silverberg's Invaders from Earth (1958 dos) and Downward to the Earth (1970) to Ursula K. LE GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972 in Again, Dangerous Visions ed Harlan ELLISON; 1976).From their earliest inception, stories of invasion featured a paranoid anxiety that the invaders might already be lurking undetected in our midst. William Le Queux was an indefatigable propagator of the notion that a Fifth Column of German agents was already in the UK, preparing to play its part in open conflict, and many US Yellow-Peril novels likewise featured Fifth Columnists. This kind of PARANOIA could be taken to extremes in sf, where aliens could easily be credited with the power to masquerade as humans. The notion was understandably attractive to low-budget film-makers, and it was extravagantly deployed in the magazines and in the CINEMA during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the early Cold War period. The new wave of paranoid alien-invasion stories was launched by Murray Leinster's The Brain-Stealers (1947 Startling Stories as "The Man in the Iron Cap"; 1954) and Ray BRADBURY's "Zero Hour" (1947), but it really hit its stride with Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951), quickly followed by INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), Eric Frank RUSSELL's Three to Conquer (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). By this time, however, the comic potential of alien invasion was being more widely exploited, too, in such works as Fredric Brown's Martians Go Home! (1955) and Richard WILSON's The Girls from Planet 5 (1955). The possibility of benign invasions was considered, notably by Arthur C. CLARKE in CHILDHOOD'S END (1953), by Algis BUDRYS in "Silent Brother" (1956) and (somewhat perversely) by Theodore STURGEON in The Cosmic Rape (1958).By the 1960s the alien-invasion story appeared to be old hat, fit for cynical display in such stories as Thomas M. DISCH's The Genocides (1965), in which humans are relegated to the status of irrelevant vermin, and his Mankind under the Leash (1966; vt The Puppies of Terra UK), in which they become pets; or surreal parody, in such works as Keith LAUMER's The Monitors (1966) and Philip K. DICK's and Ray NELSON's The Ganymede Takeover (1967); or romantic nostalgia in such works as Robert SILVERBERG's Nightwings (fixup 1969). Serious treatments of the theme were rare: William BURKETT's Sleeping Planet (1965) and Piers ANTHONY's Triple Detente (1968 ASF as "The Alien Rulers"; exp 1974) do not quite qualify, although Gordon R. DICKSON's The Alien Way (1965) and John BRUNNER's The Day of the Star Cities (1965; rev vt Age of Miracles 1973) might. More recent attempts to revitalize the theme have been relatively few in number; by far the most determined and most successful is Footfall (1985) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE, a conscientiously controlled melodrama. Other notable examples include Jack CHALKER's Dancers in the Afterglow (1978) and the "invasion" subplot of Gregory BENFORD's Across the Sea of Suns (1984).A notable theme anthology of early genre stories is Groff CONKLIN's Invaders of Earth (anth 1952). [BS/DP] INVASION Film (1966). Merton Park/AIP. Dir Alan Bridges, starring Edward Judd, Valerie Gearon, Yoko Tani, Lyndon Brook. Screenplay Roger Marshall, based on a story by Robert Holmes. 82 mins. B/w.This interesting UK film tells of two humanoid aliens who crash-land on Earth outside a country hospital. It turns out that one is a prisoner of the other. Further aliens, members of an extraterrestrial police force, arrive and demand that the hospital doctor hand over the prisoner; when their request is refused they place an impenetrable FORCE FIELD around the hospital, but are finally outwitted by the protective doctor. Bridges creates a powerfully strange atmosphere despite a very small budget. [JB/PN] INVASION EARTH 2150 AD DALEKS - INVASION EARTH 2150 AD. INVASION OF ASTRO-MONSTER GOJIRA; RADON. INVASION OF PLANET X GOJIRA; RADON. INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS Film (1973). Centaur/Sequoia. Dir Denis Sanders, starring William Smith, Anitra Ford, Victoria Vetri, Rene Bond. Screenplay Nicholas Meyer. 85 mins. Colour.This softcore erotic movie - perhaps inspired by The WASP WOMAN (1959) - has deservedly developed a minor cult reputation for the outrageousness of its tacky if typical exploitation premise, that SEX is death. A woman becomes a nymphomaniacal but sterile "queen bee", and conscripts housewives and other women to join the group; they are covered with jelly and irradiated, and emerge as beautiful human-seeming ALIENS, wearing dark glasses to conceal their insect eyes. They kill their male victims through repeated induction of orgasm. The story hinges on the murder investigation. Part parody, the film is intermittently amusing and arguably perversely proto- FEMINIST. Meyer went on to cowrite The NIGHT THAT PANICKED AMERICA (1975), to write and direct TIME AFTER TIME (1979), to direct STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982), to direct The DAY AFTER (1983), to cowrite STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986), and to cowrite and direct STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1992). He has also written excellent Sherlock Holmes pastiches ( Sir Arthur Conan DOYLE.) [PN] INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS 1. Film (1956). Allied Artists. Prod Walter Wanger. Dir Don Siegel, starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Carolyn Jones, King Donovan. Screenplay Daniel Mainwaring, Sam Peckinpah (uncredited), based on The Body Snatchers (1955) by Jack FINNEY. 80 mins. B/w. PARANOIA was the dominant theme running through much sf cinema of the 1950s. Nowhere was it better realized than in this subtle and sophisticated movie, directed by B-film veteran Siegel, about vegetable pods from outer space that turn into emotionless replicas of human beings, in the process replacing the usually sleeping originals. Whether the film reflects right-wing paranoia about a secret takeover by communists or left-wing paranoia about the increasing power of the McCarthyists has been much argued; either way, the theme is loss of individual identity and of human feeling. The original downbeat ending, in which the pods are victorious, was diluted by the addition of a prologue and epilogue set in hospital, the latter showing the authorities finally believing in the existence of the pods. These scenes are often cut in modern prints. The film has been very highly praised: it is possibly the most discussed B-movie in the history of US film, and was the first of many 1950s sf films to be remade.2. Film (1978). Solofilm/United Artists. Dir Philip Kaufman, starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum. Screenplay W.D. Richter, based on the Finney novel. 115 mins. Colour.This unusually interesting remake shifts the emphasis from political to sociological, from cohesive small town to alienating big city (San Francisco), where it is more difficult at the best of times to tell who is a pod and who isn't, a point made by the psychiatrist (Nimoy). The script is witty, making satirical points about Californian society in the late 1970s, so intent upon development and change that becoming a pod is almost a logical next step. Kaufman's direction is confident, but sometimes too ominous. [PN]3. A second remake was BODY SNATCHERS (1993), (which see).See also: CINEMA; INVASION; MONSTER MOVIES. INVASION OF THE FLYING SAUCERS EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS. INVENTION DIME-NOVEL SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EDISONADE; MACHINES; SCIENTISTS; TECHNOLOGY. INVENTION OF DESTRUCTION VYNALEZ ZKAZY. INVISIBILITY The fantasy of being able to make oneself invisible is a common childhood daydream. As with all such daydreams, literary treatments of the theme tend to be cautionary tales; the three-decker novel The Invisible Gentleman (1833) by James Dalton is the most extravagant example. No good comes of it in such early sf stories as Edward Page MITCHELL's "The Crystal Man" (1881), H.G. WELLS's classic The Invisible Man (1897) and Jack LONDON's "The Shadow and the Flash" (1903), though C.H. HINTON was unconcerned with moralizing in "Stella" (1895). Almost as common as stories of being invisible are stories of confrontation with invisible adversaries, in which feelings of fear and insecurity with no immediate and obvious cause are dramatically symbolized. Many stories in this vein inhabit the borderland between supernatural fantasy and sf; notable examples include Fitz-James O'BRIEN's "What Was It?" (1859), Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887), Ambrose BIERCE's "The Damned Thing" (1893), George Allan ENGLAND's "The Thing from Outside" (1923), H.M. Egbert's The Sea Demons (1925; Victor ROUSSEAU), Edmond HAMILTON's "The Monster-God of Mamurth" (1926), H.P. LOVECRAFT's "The Dunwich Horror" (1929), Eric Frank RUSSELL's Sinister Barrier (1939; 1943; rev 1948) and Murray LEINSTER's War with the Gizmos (1958). Invisibility is a staple of cinematic special effects, displayed to good effect in the classic The INVISIBLE MAN (1933) - based on Wells's novel and borrowing some inspiration from Philip WYLIE's The Murderer Invisible (1931) - but not so well in its inferior sequels, and with varying success in 3 tv series, all likewise called The INVISIBLE MAN , featuring invisible crime-fighters and secret agents.In more recent sf, invisibility - sometimes more metaphorical than literal - is usually deployed symbolically. An invisible manned bomb-carrier is featured in "For Love" (1962; vt "All for Love") by Algis BUDRYS. In Damon KNIGHT's "The Country of the Kind" (1956) and Robert SILVERBERG's "To See the Invisible Man" (1963) criminals are "exiled" from society in that people simply refuse to see them, so that they suffer agonies of loneliness; the notion is inverted in Gardner R. DOZOIS's "The Visible Man" (1975), in which other people become invisible to the outcast. The idea of unnoticed communities existing in the interstices of everyday society is developed by Fritz LEIBER in The Sinful Ones (1950 Fantastic Adventures as "You're All Alone"; exp 1953; rev 1980) and Christopher PRIEST's THE GLAMOUR (1984). Stories in which people fade from original inconsequentiality into literal or metaphorical invisibility include Charles BEAUMONT's "The Vanishing American" (1955), Harlan ELLISON's "Are You Listening?" (1958) and Sylvia Jacobs's "The End of Evan Essant" (1962). More extensive and elaborate accounts of the existential politics of individual invisibility can be found in H.F. SAINT's Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987), filmed as MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992), and Thomas BERGER's Being Invisible (1988). A pseudo-technological essay at achieving invisibility is depicted in The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT (1984). A theme anthology is Invisible Men (anth 1960) ed Basil DAVENPORT. [BS] INVISIBLE AGENT, THE The INVISIBLE MAN . INVISIBLE BOY, THE Film (1957). Pan/MGM. Dir Herman Hoffman, starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone. Screenplay Cyril Hume, based on "The Invisible Boy" (1956; vt "The Brain Child") by Edmund COOPER. 90 mins. B/w.In this well written and made film for children, a 10-year-old boy (Eyer) assembles a ROBOT from pieces brought back from the future by a time-traveller, and ends up with Robby the Robot, who had won the hearts of audiences in FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956). Robby comes under the influence of a malign, fully aware supercomputer - probably the first such in movies - and somewhat irresponsibly makes the boy an INVISIBILITY potion. More importantly, he helps the COMPUTER - which is planning to conquer the world - by implanting electronic receivers in the brains of prominent men, but redeems himself at the end when he ignores the computer's command to kill the boy and instead destroys the computer, with the implicit moral that machines shaped like men are more trustworthy than machines shaped like MACHINES. [JB/PN] INVISIBLE MAN, THE 1. Film (1933). Universal. Dir James Whale, starring Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, Henry Travers, William Harrigan, Una O'Connor. Screenplay R.C. SHERRIFF, Philip WYLIE, based on The Invisible Man (1897) by H.G. WELLS. 71 mins, cut to 56 mins. B/w.This excellent black comedy tells of a scientist who discovers a drug that causes INVISIBILITY but whose side-effect is megalomania. Wearing black goggles over a face wrapped in bandages, he is memorably menacing. After a series of crimes he is trapped by police (his footprints in the snow betray his presence) and shot, slowly regaining visibility as his life ebbs away. Whale's direction is full of his usual idiosyncratic touches, with much humour derived from baffled minor characters. John Fulton's special effects are very sophisticated for the period, and were widely imitated. One of the most successful Wells adaptations, this made Claude Rains a star almost purely on the basis of his mellifluous voice. TIM is archetypal in its not-unsympathetic portrait of the SCIENTIST as over-reacher - it contains the much-copied line: "I meddled in things that Man must leave alone."2. Universal's progressively inferior and silly variations on the theme - not true sequels - were The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman (1940), The Invisible Agent (1942), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). Over 30 other films use the invisibility theme, some crediting Wells's novel as a source.3. UK tv series (1958-9). ATV. Created and prod Ralph Smart, starring the voice of Tim Turner. 2 seasons, 26 25min episodes. B/w. In this un-Wells-like version, the unfortunate hero divides his time between seeking an antidote for his condition and fighting crime. Lisa Daniely and Deborah Watling played the hero's sister and niece.4. US tv series (1975-6). Universal TV for NBC. Created and prod Harve Bennett, Steve Bochco. Dirs included Robert Michael Lewis, Alan Levi, Sigmund Neufeld Jr. Writers included Bochco, James D. Parriott. 1 season, 75min pilot plus 12 50min episodes. Colour.David McCallum stars as a scientist who discovers a way of turning himself invisible but cannot regain visibility. A plastic-surgeon friend makes him a skin-coloured mask identical with his pre-invisibility face. The pilot episode concerns his attempts to keep the formula from the military; in later episodes the plots revolve, tepidly, around his work as a secret agent.5. The above series had mediocre ratings, so in 1976 Universal replaced McCallum with Ben Murphy, changed the title to Gemini Man, and started the story again from the beginning. 1 season, 75min pilot plus 11 50min episodes (only 5 broadcast by NBC). Colour. Murphy plays a secret agent who can control his invisibility with a wristwatch-like device, but can remain safely invisible for only 15 minutes a day. This version flopped, too, and was cancelled before all completed episodes were shown. The producer, Harve Bennett, was having greater success elsewhere with The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN . [PN/JB] INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS, THE The INVISIBLE MAN . INVISIBLE MAN'S REVENGE, THE The INVISIBLE MAN . INVISIBLE WOMAN, THE The INVISIBLE MAN . ION DRIVE A common item of sf TERMINOLOGY derived from a theoretical means of ROCKET propulsion. Chemically fuelled rockets are hampered by the necessity of carrying large burdens of fuel. Other systems, including the ion drive, propose using much lighter fuels, compensating for the decrease in the mass available for propulsion by ejecting it at correspondingly higher velocities. Ions (charged particles) can be accelerated to enormous velocities using a magnetic field, and so would seem an ideal fuel. Also, since all elements can be ionized (albeit with varying degrees of difficulty), ion-drive rockets could theoretically make use of pretty well any substance to hand. Although an ion drive would produce only a small acceleration because of the relatively tiny masses involved, this could be maintained for months or years, so that very high terminal velocities could be achieved. The first tests in space of such a system began in 1971 with the SERT (Space Electric Rocket Test) satellites; the propellant was ionized mercury and the electric power was derived from solar cells. [PN] IONNESCU, DEMETRIU G. [r] ROMANIA. IRELAND, DAVID (1927- ) Australian writer whose A Woman of the Future (1979 US), his best known work, depicts a bizarre but positively conceived future which his protagonist finds congenial. City of Women (1981 UK), on the other hand, presents a FEMINIST vision of separatism whose ending befits its Alice in Wonderland style, as the vision turns out to be the hallucination of a lonely woman. Archimedes and the Seagle (1984), a fantasy, presents the memoirs of a dog. [JC] ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE US DIGEST-size magazine. Quarterly from Spring 1977, bimonthly from Jan/Feb 1978, monthly from Jan 1979, 4-weekly from Jan 1981. Published by Davis Publications; ed George H. SCITHERS Spring 1977-Feb 1982, Kathleen Moloney Mar 1982-Dec 1982, Shawna MCCARTHY Jan 1983-Feb 1986, Gardner DOZOIS Mar 1986 to date. IASFM was sold to Dell Magazines, part of the BANTAM/ DOUBLEDAY/Dell publishing group, early in 1992; the first redesigned version under the new management was Nov 1992, and the title became at that time Asimov's Science Fiction. (This Encyclopedia will continue to use the abbreviation IASFM, since ASFis already in use for ANALOG.) The magazine had reached #231 (Vol 19, no 6) by May 1995.Asimov was named as "Editorial Director" of this sf magazine, which was titled to take advantage of his popularity; the first 3 issues featured his photograph on the cover, and he contributed a great many chatty editorial articles. IASFM was commercially successful - at least relative to other sf magazines - from the outset, though its contents under Scithers's editorship were on the whole light and undemanding. However, it continued to mature, especially under McCarthy and then Dozois, until by the mid- and late 1980s it was clearly the most accomplished and vigorous magazine on the US market, with an extraordinarily high number of its stories nominated for, and winning, various awards. Through the 1980s its circulation was similar to, although in most years somewhat lower than, that of the market leader, its sister publication Analog ( ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION), which Davis Publications had bought in 1980. The circulations of sf magazines generally dropped steadily during the 1980s, and again in the 1990s, so even IASFM, by a long way the best of them, limped along with about 69,000 in 1994 (75,000 for Analog), down from almost 109,000 in 1978.IASFM is popular with fans. Scithers was awarded the HUGO for Best Professional Editor in 1978 and 1980, McCarthy in 1984, and Dozois in every year from 1988 to 1993; all of these are effectively awards for the magazine. New writers who have made their debuts in its pages, or at least had much of their early work published there, included, under Scithers alone, Barry B. LONGYEAR and S.P. SOMTOW, both of whom, in successive years, won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for best new sf writer of the year. Hugo- and NEBULA-winning stories have been Longyear's Enemy Mine (1979; 1989 chap dos), "Fire Watch" (1982) by Connie WILLIS, "Hardfought" (1983) by Greg BEAR, "The Peacemaker" (1983) by Dozois, "Speech Sounds" (1983) by Octavia E. BUTLER, "PRESS ENTER" (1984) by John VARLEY, "Bloodchild" (1984) by Butler, "Twenty-four Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai" (1985) by Roger ZELAZNY, "Fermi and Frost" (1985) by Frederik POHL, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1985) by Robert SILVERBERG, "Portraits of His Children" (1985) by George R.R. MARTIN, "Gilgamesh in the Outback" (1986) by Silverberg, "R&R" (1986) by Lucius SHEPARD, "The Girl who Fell into the Sky" (1986) by Kate WILHELM, "Eye for Eye" (1987) by Orson Scott CARD, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" (1987) by Lawrence WATT-EVANS, "The Blind Geometer" (1987) by Kim Stanley ROBINSON, "Rachel in Love" (1987) by Pat MURPHY, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988) by Willis, "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" (1988) by Geoffrey A. Landis,"Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another" (1989) by Silverberg, "Boobs" (1989) by Suzy McKee CHARNAS, THE HEMINGWAY HOAX (1990) by Joe HALDEMAN, "The Manamouki" (1990) by Michael D. RESNICK, "Bears Discover Fire" (1990) by Terry BISSON, STATIONS OF THE TIDE (1991) by Michael SWANWICK,"Beggars in Spain" (1991) by Nancy KRESS, "A Walk in the Sun" (1991) by Geoffrey A. Landis,"Danny Goes to Mars" (1992) by Pamela SARGENT,"Even the Queen" (1992) by Connie Willis,"Barnacle Bill the Spacer" (1992) by Lucius Shepard and"The Nutcracker Coup" (1992) by Janet KAGAN. This density of award-winning is without precedent in sf-magazine publishing, and says much for Dozois's editorial discernment and skill. Indeed, if Dozois can be criticized at all, it is perhaps on the grounds that he chooses stories first for their literary quality and only second for their generic positioning: IAFSM may in the 1970s have been a HARD-SF magazine, but under Dozois it has on the whole been quite the reverse, with many of the stories being only marginally sf or fantasy (so that sometimes IASFM can look like The New Yorker), being as little bound by rigid generic expectations as was, say, NEW WORLDS under Michael MOORCOCK. In the case of Dozois, this does not seem to have brought about any substantial backlash from conservative readers, though the magazine's circulation cannot be said to be in rude health.The nonfiction features of IASFM have ranged through, inter alia, editorial musings by Isaac Asimov, an excellent mathematical column by Martin GARDNER, book reviews by Baird SEARLES - later joined by a separate and very energetic books column from Norman SPINRAD - literary articles by James E. GUNN in earlier issues, poems by various hands, notably Robert FRAZIER, and a games column ( GAMES AND TOYS) by Matthew J. Costello. [PN] .See also: JAPANA short-lived companion magazine in BEDSHEET format was Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine, designed to capture the feeling of the old-time sf adventure pulps. It ran for four quarterly issues Fall 1978-Fall 1979, with Winter 1979 omitted. ISAAC'S OUTPUT By the time of his death in 1992, Isaac Asimov had published more than 450 books. This amazing output included not only science fiction novels and stories, but also anthologies and children's books.While it took him 30 years to publish his first hundred books, the second hundred followed after only a decade, and a third hundred came just five years later.As his career rocketed, Asimov began to write about science literature, histor y...and anything else that interested him. He was also a college professor and an intrepid public speaker.Many feel that Asimov became the voice of science fiction. At the very least, he communicated his enthusiasm and converted a growing mass audience to the joys and challenges of SF. ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD, THE Ian CAMERON; LOST WORLDS. ISLAND OF DR MOREAU, THE Film (1977). Cinema 77/AIP. Dir Don Taylor, starring Burt Lancaster, Michael York, Nigel Davenport, Barbara Carrera. Screenplay John Herman Shaner, Al Ramrus, based on The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H.G. WELLS. 98 mins. Colour.In this slow-moving and trite remake of ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), a young castaway (York) on a remote ISLAND learns that Dr Moreau (Lancaster), resident SCIENTIST, is carrying out experiments to give animals human characteristics; some of the resulting hybrids live in the jungle and worship Moreau as a god. Unlike the novel and the first film, where the hybrids were cruelly created by vivisection, these are formed by GENETIC ENGINEERING; thus this version's Wellsian references to the House of Pain become puzzlingly irrelevant. The novelization (so much for Wells!) is The Island of Dr Moreau * (1977) by Joseph Silva (Ron GOULART). [JB/PN] ISLAND OF LOST SOULS Film (1932). Paramount. Dir Erle C. Kenton, starring Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Kathleen Burke, Bela Lugosi, Alan Ladd, Randolph Scott. Screenplay Waldemar Young, Philip WYLIE, based on The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H.G. WELLS. 72 mins. B/w.Though somewhat altered from the Wells original, and adding such Hollywood touches as a seductive Panther Girl, this memorable film incorporates much of the novel's moody atmosphere. A young man is marooned on an ISLAND where he is found by his fiancee and where the leering, whip-cracking Moreau (Laughton), by means of vivisection and other cruel medical techniques, is trying to turn animals into men. (Wells disliked the depiction of his twisted idealist, Moreau, as a sadist.) The pathetic beast-men - rendered with first-rate and often horrific make-up - are kept in check by their belief that Moreau is a god. But, when they see him murdering his human assistant and thereby breaking one of his own commandments, their fear of him dissolves and they carry him off to the House of Pain - the laboratory where they were all created - and wreak bloody, surgical vengeance. A remake was The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977). [JB] See also: MONSTER MOVIES. ISLAND OF MUTATIONS L' ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE. ISLAND OF TERROR (vt Night of the Silicates) Film (1966). Planet/Universal. Dir Terence Fisher, starring Peter Cushing, Edward Judd, Carole Gray, Eddie Byrne. Screenplay Alan Ramsen, Edward Andrew Mann. 89 mins. Colour.This is one of the 3 films with an sf theme made for Planet by Terence Fisher, best known for his HORROR movies, of which this, despite its sf trappings, is one. (The others are The EARTH DIES SCREAMING [1964] and NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT [1967].) Giant mutated viruses, the product of cancer research gone wrong, get loose on a small island and kill their victims by sucking their bones out of their bodies. There are some well choreographed shocks. As the monsters, which look like animated piles of porridge, can move only slowly, it is unclear how they overtake their prey. [JB/PN] ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT. ISLANDS Islands play a crucial role in imaginative fiction, providing geographical microcosms in which the consequences of various types of scientific or political hypotheses may be incarnated and made available for inspection by visitors from the world at large. An archetypal island venue is ATLANTIS, mentioned as early as the time of ancient Greece by the philosopher PLATO. Many an island has played host to a UTOPIA, including Thomas MORE's Utopia itself (1516 in Latin; trans 1551), Austin Tappan WRIGHT's Islandia (1942) and Jacquetta HAWKES's Providence Island (1959); not very many have harboured DYSTOPIAS. Islands also feature extensively in SATIRE, notably those displayed in Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Although rarely fantastic, the islands featured in ROBINSONADES are also of some significance in the history of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. Islands are the natural refuge of weird lifeforms in many early fantasies of EVOLUTION, including William Hope HODGSON's "The Voice in the Night" (1907). An island was the natural "laboratory" for the daring scientific experiment carried out in H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), the prototypic island-sf story and the significant inspiration of such later works as S. Fowler WRIGHT's The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), the 1940 title story of Adolfo BIOY CASARES's The Invention of Morel and Other Stories (trans 1964), and-of course - Brian W. ALDISS's Moreau's Other Island (1980; vt An Island Called Moreau US). A very different experiment - an attempt to produce super- INTELLIGENCE (by somewhat fraudulent means) in a child cut off from the world - is carried out on M.P. SHIEL's The Isle of Lies (1909). An artificial island is featured in Jules VERNE's L'ile a helice (1895; trans as The Floating Island 1896; vt Propeller Island).Early pulp sf made considerable use of islands in its thought-experiments. Notable weird lifeforms are featured in "Fungus Isle" (1923) by Philip M. Fisher and in "Nightmare Island" (1941) by Theodore STURGEON. Even more exotic fauna appear in Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Land that Time Forgot (1924), Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "Proteus Island" (1936) and Edmond HAMILTON's "The Isle of Changing Life" (1940). However, the scope for the deployment of undiscovered islands in fiction shrank dramatically during the early part of the century, and although such defiant-minded authors as Lance SIEVEKING, in The Ultimate Island (1925), would not be put off, most writers transferred their more extravagant thought-experiments to remoter locations. Apparently innocuous islands continued to be used, however, as bases for the hatching of nefarious schemes in many NEAR-FUTURE thrillers, ranging from Edmund SNELL's Kontrol (1928) to Ian FLEMING's Dr No (1962), and for such social experiments as those carried out in Aldous HUXLEY's Island (1962) and Scott Michel's Journey to Limbo (1963). Extraterrestrial islands play a significant role in many sf stories about watery worlds, notably the floating islands of VENUS in C.S. LEWIS's Perelandra (1943) and the "islands" thrown up by the sentient ocean in Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970).The symbolic significance of the word "island" has maintained its prominence in stories which treat artificial satellites, SPACE HABITATS, asteroids, planets or even galaxies as islands in the void, and it continues to supply neat titular metaphors to such novels as Raymond F. JONES's This Island Earth (1952), filmed as THIS ISLAND EARTH (1954), Marta RANDALL's Islands (1976) and Bruce STERLING's ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988). A series of particularly ingenious metaphorical changes have been rung by Gene WOLFE in "The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories" (1970), which has been assembled with "The Death of Dr Island" (1973), "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978) and "Death of the Island Doctor" in The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). Exotic robinsonades continue to be written, often ironically; examples include "The Terminal Beach" (1964) and Concrete Island (1974), both by J.G. BALLARD.Because islands supply a strictly delimited space, rather like a stage set, in which a plot may develop, they are ideal for certain kinds of narrative exercise. Even if it were not for their specific "laboratory function", therefore, they would have a significant continuing role to play in sf. Recent works illustrative of this role include Hilbert SCHENCK's A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982) and Chronosequence (1988) and Garry KILWORTH's Cloudrock (1988), in which an atoll is left high and dry after the surrounding ocean has vanished. The Galapagos islands, which played a crucial role in guiding Darwin to the theory of evolution by natural selection, are afforded a key symbolic role in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's bitter futuristic fantasy Galapagos (1985). [BS/DP] ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE, L' (vt Island of Mutations; vt Screamers) Film (1978). Dania-Medusa/New World. Dir Sergio Martino (and Joe DANTE, US version only), starring Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Richard Johnson, Beryl Cunningham, Joseph Cotten (and Cameron Mitchell, Mel Ferrer, US version only). Screenplay Martino, Sergio Donati, Cesare Frugoni. 99 mins, cut to 91 mins. Colour.This is a wild Italian schlock picture, seemingly inspired by the flop The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977). In 1891 a shipwrecked doctor (Cassinelli) encounters a tribe of man/fish hybrids, created for sound ethical reasons by a mad SCIENTIST (Cotten) but being exploited by a vintage Victorian villain (Johnson) to recover the sunken treasures of ATLANTIS. A heroine strutting in riding boots (Bach) and the villain's voodoo priestess mistress (Cunningham) play roles in a demented story which contains an immensely enjoyable collection of Boy's Own CLICHES. For US release (as Screamers) the film was slightly recut by Roger CORMAN's New World and given a much gorier prologue dir Joe Dante, with guest stars Ferrer and Mitchell - neither a stranger to Italian exploitation - being chomped by MUTANT leftovers from Humanoids from the Deep (1980). [KN] ISRAEL Israel's traditional orientation towards the West, the initially UTOPIAN character of Zionism - partly inspired by founding Zionist ideologue Binyamin Zev (Theodor) Herzl's polemic Der Judenstaat (1896; trans as The Jewish State 1946) and short novel Altneuland (1902; trans as Old-New Land 1947) - and the country's adherence to its own form of democracy ought to have made it a promised land for speculative literature. But, despite the seminal influence within the genre of Jewish writers and editors, sf has never attained more than marginal stature within Israel.Survival in this pressure-cooker region has stunted the capacity of many Israelis to contemplate alternate realities. Indeed Hebrew, the new lingua franca of Israel, seems ill suited to sf. Unlike Yiddish, whose rich cadences nourished the dreamlike imageries of an Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), modern Hebrew is leaner and less fanciful. Redeemed from a language hitherto used for liturgical purposes, it was also more limited, early on, in its ability to describe TECHNOLOGY. Indeed, merely agreeing a Hebrew term for sf (initially mada dimioni ["imaginary science"] and ultimately, in the late 1970s, mada bidioni ["science fabrication"]) severely challenged the semantic abilities of Israel's small sf community.In the 1950s, brief forays by publishers tantalized would-be fans with a few Hebrew translations of novels by Robert A. HEINLEIN and Fredric BROWN before ending in bankruptcy. So too ended three plunges into sf magazine publishing with Mada Dimioni (1958, 13 issues), Cosmos: Sipurei Mada Dimioni ["Cosmos: Stories of Science Fiction"] (1958, 4 issues) and Flash Gordon (1963, 7 issues); none published work by local authors. The only Israeli sf writer of note in this period, Mordecai ROSHWALD, had his apocalyptic novels Level Seven (1959 UK) and A Small Armageddon (1962 UK) published abroad; neither was translated into Hebrew, and Roshwald, whose work is unrecognized in Israel, eventually settled in the UK.The election to power of the Likud bloc in 1977 heralded a period of consumerism in Israel that permitted a brief boom in sf. Encouraged by young Israelis' new spending power and by the success of such films as STAR WARS (1977), publishers embarked upon ambitious schedules of mostly translated sf. By the onset of the long recession following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, nearly 200 of the classic books of modern sf had been translated.Of several new sf magazines, few survived long, but Fantazia 2000 merits special notice. Launched in 1978, it nourished a group of local writers and a small, vigorous fan community during its 44-issue, six-year life. Among its writers was Hillel Damron, author of the critically well received Milchemet Ha'minim ["The War of the Sexes"] (1982), set in a post- HOLOCAUST underground colony where a society of sexual equals devolves into full-scale subjugation of males.Before the Lebanon War, Israeli sf tended to be reticent on POLITICS, but the 1982 watershed altered this. Another Fantazia graduate, David Melamed, whose first collection, Tsavua B'Corundy ["A Hyena in Corundy"] (coll 1980), contains stories with little immediate relevance to Israel, powerfully recounted in his third novel, Ha'Halom Ha'Rivi'i ["The Fourth Dream"] (1986) - unequalled for its nightmare tones if not for its narrative drive - the travails of an Israeli refugee in Germany after a NEAR-FUTURE fall of the Jewish state.Melamed's dystopian excursion followed two other landmark works. In 1983 the prominent left-wing columnist Amos Kenan published Ha-Derech L'Ein Harod (1983; trans as The Road to Ein Harod 1986), which postulated a NEAR-FUTURE military takeover of Israel. It was not his first speculative novel - that being the more surreal Shoah II ["Holocaust II"] (1973) - but it was the only Israeli sf novel ever awarded a peace prize by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Although the book embraces well known sf and TECHNOTHRILLER tropes, Kenan vehemently denied its genre roots, no doubt because of the Israeli literary establishment's low esteem of sf. A second significant DYSTOPIA was written by the established novelist Binyamin Tammuz (d1990): Pundako Shel Yermiyahu ["Jeremiah's Inn"] (1984) is a broad comic SATIRE about an Israel taken over by religious zealots. A grimmer version of the future is Yitzhak Ben-Ner's Ha'malachim Ba'im ["Angels are Coming"] (1987), in which world atomic apocalypse has spared Israel, but by the 21st century life within the theocratic state is characterized by street violence, persecution of the secular minority and widespread alienation.Zirmat Ha'hachamim ["Genes for Genius, Inc."] (1982) and Luna: Gan Eden Geneti ["Luna: The Genetic Paradise"] (1985) by geneticist Ram Moav, about GENETIC ENGINEERING of humans, inspired accusations of fascism on the part of the author, who had written the two books while terminally ill. Ruth Blumert's Ha'Tzariach ["The Turret"] (1983) is a fantasy reminiscent of Mervyn PEAKE's Gormenghast trilogy.Israel is not an important centre for sf film-making. The most notable foreign production has been Menachem Golan's low-budget, post- HOLOCAUST feature America 3000 (1985; video release only), dir David Engelbach with a cast of comely Israeli and US Amazons. Poet and avant-garde film-maker David Avidan directed Sheder Min Ha'atid (1981; vt Message from the Future) in English about future humans visiting present-day Israel; it is execrable. Ricki Shelach's James BLISH-influenced short film Ishur Nehita ["Permission to Land"] (1978) tells of a visiting alien. Both films may have reflected that SENSE OF WONDER inspired among Israelis by the visit of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat. The 1989 adaptation, shot in English, of Amos Kenan's 1983 novel as Freedom: The Voice from Ein Harod failed to achieve Western distribution. Directed by prolific producer/director Doron Eran and shot for $2 million, Freedom was one of the most expensive films ever produced domestically, but suffered from the Israeli army's refusal to donate the use of military materiel; the peculiar lead casting of US actor Anthony Peck and Italian model Allesandra Mussolini (grandaughter of Il Duce) also detracted from its believability. In 1990 the Israeli film-maker Avi Nesher wrote and directed a Los-Angeles-shot $7 million technothriller, Nameless (vt Timebomb), as yet unreleased.A small body of sf criticism emerged in the 1980s, the first regular column outside the sf magazines being Sheldon TEITELBAUM's in the Jerusalem Post (1981-5). Orzion Bartana, a professor of literature at Tel Aviv University, published Israel's first critical book on sf: Ha'fantazia b'siporet Dor Hamdina: Fantasy in Israeli Literature in the Last Thirty Years (1989). The vagaries of the sf scene are discussed in "Sociological Reflections on the History of Science Fiction in Israel" ( SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES Mar 1986) by Nachman Ben Yehuda, a Hebrew University sociologist and early contributor to Fantazia 2000. [ST] ITALY To trace an Italian sf tradition is not easy, because of the well established split in Italy between scientific language and "literary culture". It is of doubtful relevance to read DANTE ALIGHIERI's great poem La divina commedia (c1304-1320 in manuscript; trans as The Divine Comedy) as a sort of sf journey; Dante used his theological allegory to create a world that in terms of medieval consciousness was perfectly real. It may be more fruitful to consider as PROTO SCIENCE FICTION the chronicle of Marco Polo's marvellous voyage to India, China and Japan, Milione ["One Million Stories"] (1298): the meeting of the Venetian merchant with the alien Eastern world does have the flavour of a First Contact. In his Le citta invisibili (1972; trans as Invisible Cities 1974), Italo CALVINO rewrites Marco Polo's work as a Borgesian catalogue of mysterious and fascinating towns, conceived by an endless imaginative process. FANTASTIC VOYAGES and UTOPIAN landscapes are the most effective contributions of Italian literature to the development of a genre that would eventually merge into sf, as in the Renaissance poem Orlando Furioso (1506) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), based on the mythical history of Charlemagne and his Paladins. In this the palace of the wizard Atlante is a bewitched place of unrequited desires and bitter delusions, and the knight Astolfo, in his search for the brain of mad Orlando, rides on the wings of the Hippogriff to the Moon, where he visits a large valley, the land of forgotten dreams and wasted passions.A century later the philosopher Tommaso CAMPANELLA evoked the City of the Sun, whose utopia is after the political ideas of PLATO. The male inhabitants have abolished private property, own all in common (women included) and believe in natural RELIGION, not in historical Christianity. This tale, first written though not first published in Italian, was Citta del sole (written 1602-12; 1623 in Latin as Civitas Solis; trans in Ideal Commonwealths 1885 as "The City of the Sun").In the 18th century - the Age of Reason, but also of a keen interest in exotic worlds - Italian culture enthusiastically hailed the satirical-fantastical mood of Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735) and VOLTAIRE's Candide (1759). Among the manifold imitators of Swift (and of his French disciple, the Abbe Desfontaines [1685-1745]) was the Venetian-Armenian Zaccaria Seriman, whose lively account of the fantastic voyage of a British hero is Viaggi di Enrico Wanton alle terre incognite australi ed ai regni delle scimmie e dei cinocefali ["Enrico Wanton's Travels to the Unknown Lands of the Southern Hemisphere and to the Kingdoms of the Monkeys and of the Dog-Headed People"] (1764). Although issued in French, Giacomo CASANOVA's huge novel Icosameron (1788) was partly drafted in Italian. Beyond its encyclopedic farrago of scientific and philosophical meditations, Icosameron establishes a well known imaginative pattern: two young protagonists (brother and sister) discover an underground world where total harmony rules the lives of the Megamicri ("Big-Littles").Italian Romanticism was not deeply involved in the industrial and scientific upheavals of the 19th century. There was no Italian equivalent of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818; rev 1831) or of the Faustian short stories of Edgar Allan POE and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE. (The main literary problems of Italy were connected with the struggle for national independence, achieved in 1861, and the need for a common language.) All the same, the major Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), inspired by the example of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), did deal with the relationship between the scientific and the literary imagination, as shown in the fabulous scenery of some of his Operette morali (coll 1827; preferred trans Patrick Creagh as Moral Tales 1988 UK). One of the most fascinating operette is the dialogue between the anatomist Federico Ruysch and his mummies, reborn at the beginning of a new cosmic cycle.Although Italy had neither a Jules VERNE nor an H.G. WELLS, the end of the 19th century did offer a minor literature of extraordinary journeys into the future, such as the utopian world explored in L'Anno 3000: Sogno ["The Year 3000: A Dream"] (1897) by Paolo Mantegazza. The enormously popular Emilio Salgari (1862-1911), creator of the Malayan pirate Sandokan, also published futuristic tales such as La meraviglie del duemila ["The Marvels of the Year 2000"] (1907).Fantasy, both in the GOTHIC form and in the sphere of the wonderful and the whimsical, appeals to the modern Italian reader much more than the cognitive rhetoric of GENRE SF; this is certainly why Giacinto Spagnoletti, a well known scholar of Italian literature, has labelled native sf "neo-fantastico". The tradition is a long one. Outstanding examples of fantasy appear in the fin de siecle works of the so-called "Scapigliati" ["The Dishevelled Ones"], a Milanese cultural movement fighting against tradition and provincialism; in the "metaphysical" fiction of Massimo Bontempelli (1884-1960), whose Eva ultima ["The Ultimate Eve"] (1923) was inspired by De Chirico's painting; and, more recently, in the hallucinatory world of Dino BUZZATI's short stories and his novel of military life in a forgotten fortress, Il deserto dei Tartari (1940; trans as The Tartar Steppe 1952).Critics detect a "true" sf production in Italian only from the period after WWII. Much of this specialized sf was arguably not culturally Italian, in that it was heavily influenced by the US-UK canon as enthusiastically presented by publishers, notably the Romanzi di Urania series published since 1953 by Arnoldo Mondadori under the editorship of Giorgio Monicelli (inventor of the neologism "fantascienza" for "science fiction"). Even today some of the younger Italian authors, especially those groomed by the main Italian sf-publishing house, Editrice Nord, employ traditional US-UK sf formulae, sometimes with the addition of fashionable brushstrokes taken from J.R.R. TOLKIEN or Jorge Luis BORGES: Luigi Menghini and Vittorio Catani are examples.But a more Italian trend has been advocated since the 1960s by a group of writers who, while basically accepting the formulaic conventions of sf, emphasize the need for psychological insight, a "human" perception of the alien and a (somewhat sceptical) moral probing into the triumphs of technology. Among them Lino Aldani - an accomplished and witty storyteller, as in Quarta dimensione ["Fourth Dimension"] (coll 1963) - Sandro Sandrelli, Inisero Cremaschi and Gilda Musa are certainly worth mentioning. All four cooperated in the clever monthly review Il Futuro ["Future"] (1963-4); this and other Italian sf magazines (notably Gamma in the mid-1960s and Robot in the mid-1970s) were short-lived and, except for Il Futuro, had to rely heavily on US-UK material. Other novelists from the 1960s and 1970s, employing mainly formulaic devices, are Roberta Rambelli, Ugo Malaguti, Gianni Montanari, Roberto Vacca - one of the very few with a scientific background, author of Il robot e il minotauro ["The Robot and the Minotaur"] (1959) - and Vittorio Curtoni, who is also the author of an informative history of modern Italian sf, Le frontiere dell'ignoto ["Frontiers of the Unknown"] (1977).Unquestionably, the proper tool for Italian writers to use in combining the scientific imagination, on the one hand, with the subjective universe(s) of fantasy, on the other, is the short story, as is evidenced by such representative anthologies as I labirinti del terzo pianeta ["The Labyrinths of the Third Planet"] (anth 1964), ed I. Cremaschi and G. Musa, and Universo e dintorni ["Universe and Surroundings"] (anth 1978), ed I Cremaschi.In the 1980s the emergence of a group of young women sf writers in Italy confirmed an international development. Daniela Piegai, perhaps the best of them, creates in Il mondo non e nostro ["The World is Not Ours"] (1989) a technological version of KAFKA's castle, whose inhabitants are entrapped in a sort of temporal vortex, unable to return to the external world.Contemporary non-genre Italian sf exists: some of the best of those postwar novelists usually thought of as MAINSTREAM WRITERS have shown a highly original imagination in handling sf themes and symbols. A mad astronaut is imprisoned in a living starship in Tommaso LANDOLFI's Cancroregina (1950; in Cancerqueen and Other Stories coll trans 1971 US); the achievements of scientific progress are ironically explored by Primo LEVI in Storie naturali ["Tales of the Natural World"] (coll 1966), whose contents make up part of The Sixth Day (coll trans 1990 US); wandering on an untouched Earth from which mankind has suddenly disappeared, a solitary survivor lives his grotesque and suicidal loneliness in Guido Morselli's posthumously published Dissipatio H.G. ["Disappearance of the Human Race"] (1977); the impact of the scientific imagination, and the history of science, help shape the fantastic narrative of Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; trans William Weaver as Foucault's Pendulum 1989 US) by Umberto ECO. One outstanding sf writer - although he did not like to be referred to as such-was Italo CALVINO, as when he shaped his complicated web of scientific fables and myths in Le Cosmicomiche (coll of linked stories 1965; trans William Weaver as COSMICOMICS 1968 US). Contemporary non-genre sf seems obsessed by theological and religious themes. In 1994: La nudita e la spada ["Year 1994: The Nakedness and the Sword"] (1990), Ferruccio Parazzoli builds up an anti-Catholic coup-d'etat in a grim, NEAR-FUTURE Italy, while in Ascolta, Israele ["Hearken, Israel!"] (1991) Ugo Bonanate creates an ALTERNATE WORLD where Judaism is the only Western religion, early Christian communities have been wiped out, and the Gospels are buried in a hidden place until their sensational discovery by a team of astonished international scholars . . .Italian cinema inclines more towards HORROR than sf but, hovering between the two, a few quite good Italian films play on the theme of cosmic catastrophe, as in La morte viene dallo spazio (1958; vt Death from Outer Space; vt The Day the Sky Exploded), dir Paolo Heusch, and Il PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI ["Planet of the Soulless People"] (1961; vt Battle of the Worlds; vt Planet of the Lifeless Men), dir Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti). Another sf/horror blend, TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO (1965; vt Planet of the Vampires), dir Mario Bava, was in some ways a predecessor of ALIEN (1979). More commonly, Italian sf films exploit already successful foreign films: CONTAMINATION: ALIEN ARRIVA SULLA TERRA (1981; vt Contamination) mimics Alien; 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX (1982; vt 1990: Bronx Warriors) owes a lot to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981); and L' ISOLA DEGLI UOMINI PESCE (1978; vt Island of Mutations; vt Screamers) seems inspired by The ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1977). Possibly the one real contribution of Italian cinema to sf lies in the field of satire and parody, exemplified by Tinto Brass's Il disco volante (1964; vt The Flying Saucer), Elio Petri's La DECIMA VITTIMA (1965; vt The Tenth Victim), based on a story by Robert SHECKLEY, and Mario Bava's DIABOLIK (1967; vt Danger: Diabolik).Italian sf criticism is stronger on the utopian tradition and modern DYSTOPIA than it is on GENRE SF, owing perhaps to the activities of Vito Fortunati, founder of the Centre for Utopian Studies in Bologna, and to the publications of A. Monti and C. PAGETTI on H.G. Wells and of D. Guardamagna and S. Manferlotti on Aldous HUXLEY, George ORWELL and Anthony BURGESS. A handful of critics deal with contemporary sf: C. Pagetti with Il senso del futuro ["The Sense of the Future"] (1970; rev edn projected), F. Ferrini with Che cosa e la fantascienza ["What is SF?"] (1970), S. Solmi with Saggi sul fantastico ["Essays on Fantastic Literature"] (coll 1978), which includes his seminal essay on sf published in 1953, R. Giovannoli with La scienza della fantascienza ["Science and Science Fiction"] (1982), S. Salvestroni with Semiotica dell'imaginazione ["Semiotics of the Imaginary"] (1984), on Russian sf, A. Caronia with Il Cyborg ["Cyborgs"] (1985), on the artificial human in sf, O. Palusci with Terra di Lei ["Herland"] (1990), on the female imagination in sf, and F. La Polla on sf cinema and tv. [CP] IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA Film (1955). Clover/Columbia. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir Robert Gordon, starring Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue, Donald Curtis. Screenplay George Worthing Yates, Hal Smith, based on a story by Yates. 77 mins. B/w.In this MONSTER MOVIE a giant octopus is affected by atomic radiation - as so often in the genre - and goes on a destructive rampage, attacking San Francisco and demolishing various landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, before being destroyed by an atomic torpedo. The film, unimportant in itself, marks the beginning of the long partnership between producer Schneer and special-effects supervisor Ray HARRYHAUSEN, who was limited here by the small budget: his animated octopus, for instance, has only six tentacles. [JB/PN] IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE Film (1953). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake. Screenplay Harry Essex, based on a screen treatment by Ray BRADBURY. 80 mins. 3-D. B/w.This was Arnold's, and Universal's, first venture into the sf/ HORROR genre; it was also the first sf film to exploit a desert location (here the Mojave Desert), and the first 3-D film released in wide-screen format. Research by Bill WARREN, in Keep Watching the Skies! Volume 1 (1982), shows conclusively that much more of Bradbury's original treatment was used than for many years had been thought the case, and that Bradbury's creative input was greater than screenwriter Essex's. This is a genuinely alarming film about an ALIEN spaceship that crashlands in the desert. The shapeshifting aliens, more frightened - it turns out - than inimical, and needing assistance to repair their ship, begin duplicating local inhabitants. Not quite a classic, but historically important, ICFOS is a well made, moody film. The human-duplication theme was to become a cinematic CLICHE ( MONSTER MOVIES; PARANOIA). [PN/JB] IT CONQUERED THE WORLD Film (1956). Sunset/American International. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN, starring Peter Graves, Lee Van Cleef, Beverly Garland. Screenplay credited to Lou Rusoff, actually by Charles B. Griffith. 71 mins. B/w.This film only just survives its ridiculous monster (cone-shaped with fangs) and the usual hurried air of a Corman production, but there's plenty of interest in the tale of an idealistic but weak scientist (Van Cleef) who brings a Venusian to Earth, where it proceeds to let him down badly by embarking on conquest. The scheme (Earth people reduced to subservient zombies by the bites of small batlike things generated by the monster) is foiled by another scientist (Graves), and there is a subtext about loss of individuality and emotion similar to that in the better-known INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (also 1956). [PN] IT HAPPENED HERE Film (1966). Rath/Lopert. Dir Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo, starring Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Fiona Leland, Honor Fehrson. Screenplay Brownlow, Mollo. 99 mins, cut to 93 mins. B/w. ALTERNATE-WORLD stories are rare in sf cinema. This UK film is an exception; it shows what might have happened had Nazi Germany successfully invaded the UK ( HITLER WINS). Shot in a realistic, documentary-like style, it is a remarkable achievement when one takes into account that it is virtually an amateur film, made over a period of years by Brownlow and Mollo working mainly at weekends and using nonprofessional talent. Its release date, 1966, is three years later than the copyright date. Sadly, it was never widely shown. [JB] IT LIVES AGAIN (vt It's Alive II) Film (1978). Larco/Warner Bros. Prod and dir Larry COHEN, starring Frederic Forrest, Kathleen Lloyd, John P. Ryan, John Marley. Screenplay Cohen. 91 mins. Colour.This sequel to IT'S ALIVE (1974) has the MUTANT child's father from the previous film warning another young couple that the pregnant wife may also produce a mutant baby and that the government is systematically terminating all such pregnancies, even though he has learned that the monsters will respond to parental affection. There follows a continuing clash between, on the one hand, the group determined to save the babies and, on the other, a government group - including another father of a mutant baby - equally determined to kill them. Apart from being a devastating study in marital stress, the film also asks (but does not answer) questions of an sf kind about the possible purpose of this apparently horrible mutation. Primarily, however, the mutants symbolize the way in which families and society as a whole can be torn apart by diversions from the norm. Like most of Cohen's films, ILA is deeply subversive of the conventional social pieties. The exploration of these ideas is continued in the further sequel, It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986), which blends schlock horror with extraordinary sensitivity in Cohen's typical but unsettling manner. Here the mutants have been isolated on an island contaminated by radioactivity, two of them producing a child of their own, while once again a father (Michael Moriarty) has to come to terms with his abhorrent role as star in a media freak show. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES. IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A PLANE! IT'S SUPERMAN! SUPERMAN. IT'S ALIVE Film (1974). Larco/Warner Bros. Prod and dir Larry COHEN, starring John Ryan, Sharon Farrell, Andrew Duggan, Guy Stockwell. Screenplay Cohen. 91 mins. Colour.A MUTANT baby (the mother has taken a new drug) kills all the medical staff in the delivery room and leaps through a skylight to go on a rampage, killing a woman, a milkman and several policemen. Although the plot is evidently ludicrous, as a witty, low-budget MONSTER MOVIE IA is more than satisfactory. The baby, wisely presented in a series of fast, almost subliminal shots, is disturbing because it does what all babies do - crawl around on the floor. Far more disturbing is the transition from seeing the baby as monstrous menace to seeing it as somebody's child. The father (Ryan), who joins the hunt, tries unsuccessfully to protect his offspring in a curiously moving though absurd climax set in Los Angeles' storm drains, deliberately evoking the finale of THEM! (1954). The two sequels are IT LIVES AGAIN (1978; vt It's Alive II) and It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986). [JB/PN] See also: CINEMA. IT'S ALIVE II IT LIVES AGAIN. IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE IT LIVES AGAIN. IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE Film (1958). Vogue/United Artists. Dir Edward L. Cahn, starring Marshall Thompson, Shawn Smith, Kim Spalding. Screenplay Jerome BIXBY. 69 mins. B/w.In this largely mediocre film there are good, tense moments. The crew of a spaceship returning from Mars discover that "something" has stowed away: a monster which attacks crew members (for their blood and soft parts) and stores their bodies in the ship's ventilation system as future snacks. The survivors are slowly forced to retreat, section by section, as the seemingly invulnerable creature takes over the ship. An effective build-up of suspense takes place so long as the monster is kept vague and shadowy. The ending (the crew don spacesuits then asphyxiate the monster by draining the craft of oxygen) is one of several plot similarities to the later ALIEN (1979), but I!TTFBS itself cannot claim great originality, being reminiscent of A.E. VAN VOGT's (uncredited) "The Black Destroyer" (1939). [JB] IVERSON, ERIC G. Harry TURTLEDOVE. IZBAVITELJ YUGOSLAVIA. |