Читать книгу Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 - Damien Broderick - Страница 11

4: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 4 (ISSUES 10-12)

Volume 4 (issues for September and December 1954 and February 1955) starts with two innovations: One is a new cover artist, Partridge, who quickly flew the coop. That’s no great loss. 10’s cover looks stiff and cluttered and the use of color is unimaginative compared to the usual Quinn.18 The other change is a story title and author on the cover. Since 3, the first Carnell issue, there had been no lettering on the cover other than title, issue designation, and price. There is a new printer, F.A.H. & Son of London being replaced starting with 11 by Rugby Advertiser of, you guessed it, Rugby.

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Mike Ashley said in his Tymn/Ashley essay: “I don’t think there’s a bad issue from about 10 onwards.” Certainly in these issues the magazine definitely turns a corner. Though there is still material that is inane or trivial or both, overall the quality and the originality of the fiction is significantly improved and the magazine as a whole begins to read like something other than a collection of everybody else’s rejects.

The lead novelette honored on the cover of 10 is J. T. McIntosh’s “Five into Four,” and McIntosh’s thinking continues to rub me the wrong way.19 There’s a matter transmission accident, and five people set out from Mars to Earth but only four arrive. The negligent technician is brought up on homicide charges. But wait! The four lucky survivors all realize that they are subtly...changed. So the fifth traveler wasn’t lost. He was merely redistributed into the other four.

Charges are dropped, since the alleged victim is still alive, sort of, and the survivors all commence new lives, the leaven of new personality being just what they needed. (There is no mention of any weight gain.) But the idea that a redistribution of matter would result in a redistribution of personality (or anything else other than a nasty explosion) is silly beyond words. It might be made to work in an outright fantasy, but not, as here, in any supposed context of science. Or as John Wyndham put it a few issues previously: “The unities of likelihood must be preserved to the best of the writer’s ability... Invention, then, cannot afford to lunge out wildly.”

McIntosh also has the lead novelette in 11, “Live For Ever,” and here my beef is not so much with the premise (arbitrary and implausible as it is) but rather with its development. The secret of immortality is discovered, and it’s just a matter of modifying your ideas. If you can follow an argument, you can read the instructions in the newspaper and you’re in. (Too bad if your IQ is below 88, you’ll just have to die.) The story purports to follow the social consequences over a period of years, which initially feature more hate killings, not fewer, because it is now more worthwhile to kill an enemy, and more necessary to remove anyone who might be dangerous. There are more strikes and labor trouble, more traffic accidents, more people who won’t do their jobs, because now that everybody’s immortal, everybody is somebody and won’t be pushed around.

But the violence eventually dies down because it’s mostly criminals killing each other and soon enough they’re mostly dead. The meek inherit. One can argue about how likely this scenario is, but the main problem is the author’s complete failure to address the other obvious and huge problems of humanity’s suddenly becoming immortal without becoming sterile: a population explosion starting very quickly and the precipitous collapse of the medico-thanatic-industrial complex with all its economic consequences. The complete neglect of these issues, in a story that purports to look panoramically at the results of immortality, is a vastly bigger plausibility problem than the flimsy starting premise, and a fatal one for me.

The lead story in 12 (announced for 11, but postponed allegedly because of its length), is A. Bertram Chandler’s “The Wrong Track,” under the George Whitley pseudonym. This genial first-person story starts recursively at a session of the Circle of the Globe, the successor to the White Horse Tavern, and mentions John Carnell, Arthur Clarke, Peter Phillips, and Bertram Chandler as being in attendance. On the train home, the narrator and his wife feel odd, as if they are somehow facing or moving in the wrong direction. Trying to visualize things differently, they wind up in a series of parallel worlds. First the train is full of German newspapers and swastikas. They visualize themselves out of that and find themselves pulling into the Place de Trafalgar station (Napoleon won). Then they wind up in a train full of gray and beaten-down people living under the mental domination of thuggish extraterrestrials whose strings are pulled by a central intelligence. Avoiding capture, the couple hook up with the underground, people whose minds can’t be dominated (mostly redheads, including the counterpart in this world of the narrator’s wife). They participate briefly in an uprising and help blow up the central intelligence, and are fleeing for their lives when they are precipitated back into Hounslow Central. This unpretentious and entertaining pulp adventure story is made particularly enjoyable by the contrast of outré incident and homely detail.

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The short fiction in these issues continues to get quirkier—not always better, but at least more interesting and less like imitations of the bottom of the rest of the market. 10 features John Wyndham’s “The Chronoclasm,” a clever, lightweight time travel story that I think might be the first much-reprinted story published in Science Fantasy after the Arthur C. Clarke stories in the first two issues. It is immediately preceded by Martin Jordan’s “Zone of Youth,” a peculiar story about a war between Youth (holed up in the Asteroid Belt) and Age, which for some reason makes me think of David Masson.

There is “Unborn of Earth” by Les Cole, a well-known fan of the time; this is the first of a dozen or so stories and articles he published in the SF magazines, under his own names and pseudonyms Les Collins and Colin Sturgis. It is a rather rambling story about extraterrestrials monitoring Earth scientists. The female passes for human, marries the main scientist they’re interested in, and is relieved from duty on grounds of pregnancy. And it gets more complicated from there. Again, not necessarily good, but a bit unusual. Also unusual for different reasons is Francis G. Rayer’s “Dark Summer,” which consciously or unconsciously recapitulates the plot of Lewis Padgett’s “Jesting Pilot” and anticipates Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress. E. C. Tubb’s “Bitter Sweet” is another of his sentimental mini-epics, this one about an old forgotten spaceman nostalgizing over his mothballed spaceship. John Ashcroft is present with his second story, “Stone and Crystal,” in which a sensitive young man rebels against a brutish future society, and loses.

Highlights of 11 are G. Gordon Dewey’s “The Tooth” (reprinted from Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1952), which is told in reverse chronology and whose characters find a wish-fulfillment device and figure out how to make good use of it; Tubb’s “The Enemy Within Us,” about a mental patient who says his body is out to get him; and Joseph Slotkin’s “The Mailman,” involving mail deliveries from the future and a cad who marries women for their money and contrives to kill them. Slotkin published ten stories in the SF magazines from 1953 to 1956, three of them in Science Fantasy, and then was gone. Also present: Richard Rowland’s “Where’s the Matter?”, about a crank inventor but not as funny as it should be; Eric Frank Russell’s “I Hear You Calling,” a lame vampire story; Francis G. Rayer’s “Co-Efficiency Zero,” a pleasantly earnest story about an alien cop from a world of extremely high temperatures who tracks down some malefactors from his home world, while helping and being helped by some human children; Sydney J. Bounds’ “First Trip,” about the first Martian colonist to return to Earth; and “Dimple” by John Kippax (pseudonym of John Hynam, 1915-74), Damon Runyon with a tinge of Amos ‘n Andy on Mars. Kippax had a career arc similar to several of the writers who became regulars: about three dozen stories 1955-61, without exception in Carnell’s magazines, Nebula, and Authentic, then a couple later in New Writings in SF. After that, nothing—another writer who seemingly had nowhere to go after Carnell’s era.

12, in addition to the Chandler lead story, includes Alan Barclay’s well-turned “The Dragon,” in which a man scouting out the post-nuclear countryside encounters a village whose people are much exercised about a dangerous dragon. He finds the dragon, who turns out to be a mutant of the sort he’s looking for, makes friends with it, and brings it back to the village to work for them. In E. C. Tubb’s “The Last Day of Summer,” a man who has passed the point where longevity treatments work is ready to be euthanized, and enjoys his last day; I think it’s the best Tubb story so far, and Judith Merril thought it worthy of inclusion in her first annual “year’s best” anthology.20

“Auto-Fiction Ltd.” is attributed to Wanless Gardener, which I assume is a pseudonym and suspect is also a pun (along the lines of “I’m quitting my day job”). A businessman and writer are in a bar, talking about how hard it is to get rich with a new idea. “Why not mechanize my trade?” suggests the writer. Discussion turns to cardboard plot-finders, the police identification system, etc. They start out with a card file and move to computers, with the author laying about him satirically. E.g.: “We’d be cutting out the three main time wasters: research, continuity, and inspiration.” Soon enough all the human writers have been driven out of the market and are turning to, e.g., “nihilinguistics” (“‘We nihilinguists,’ announced the Striped Monk, ‘have dispensed with all physical impedimenta, even language itself.’”) As the computer becomes more and more powerful the farce becomes broader and broader. Also amusing is “Free Will,” a sort of shaggy robot story by Australian Dal Stivens featuring a robot and the ghost of a robot.

Surprisingly, the least worthy stories in the issue are by William F. Temple and Brian W. Aldiss. Temple’s “Eternity” is identified by Mike Ashley in the Tymn/Ashley volume as the first Unknown-type fantasy to appear in the magazine (which I think is not quite right; its predecessor is Temple’s “Double Trouble” in 3, about the man haunted by the bad luck spirit.) In “Eternity,” people start sprouting halos, for no apparent reason, without visible correlation to their virtue. Eventually, everybody develops one except for the protagonist, whose life is consequently ruined. When the aliens in charge of the experiment get tired of it, everybody’s halo drops eight or ten inches and cuts their heads off. The idea is only workable as farce, but Temple treats it with earnestness, and then brings the story crashing down with a pointless ex machina ending. Aldiss’s story “Breathing Space” is a heavy-handed one about people who don’t know they are living in the remains of a moon base dominated by an out-of-control computer. There are rebels, bent on breaking out, who unfortunately succeed.

Overall, this issue 12 is the first one in which my reading enjoyment clearly outweighed my irritation. It’s also nice to look at. My appreciation for Quinn continues to grow. This cover in one sense is crude and ought to look muddy. But the more I look at it the more I appreciate the composition and use of color. It’s worth checking out, though this is one that doesn’t look quite as good on the screen as it does in the flesh.21

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The Guest Editorials skip a couple of issues but resume in 12 with Alfred Bester’s “What’s the Difference?”—between American and British SF, he means. It is odd to see this appear in Science Fantasy, since most of the talk about Britishness has been in New Worlds. Bester starts out by asserting that there is no difference in merit among writers, it’s all a matter of taste, but collectively....

The American and English cultures differ tremendously. We in the States are a nervous, high-strung people, anxious, insecure, generous but confused, painfully eager to get places but not exactly sure where we are going....

Our science fiction reflects this. It is nervous, high-strung, generous but confused. It is a painful striving for The Answers. We in the States want The Answer to Everything. It must be definitive, short and quick. Eternity must be explained in a sentence, our galaxy in a phrase, our place in it in a formula—and then off to other important Answers.

By contrast, the English culture revealed in its science fiction is “assured, relaxed, aware of its own value, conscious of a long, honorable history, and doubtful but not too alarmed about its future. It is too sophisticated, or at any rate too well-bred to run and shout.” Hence, says Bester, English SF’s quiet tempo, leisurely development, emphasis on character rather than action. “I have the feeling that it has been fabricated by a people who have forgotten the terrifying violence which we accept as everyday commonplaces in the States”; the “unmerciful warfare between human beings” that Americans take for granted “has long been bred out of English civilization.”

As a result, “American science fiction is exciting. To read it is like being cooped up in a room with an hysterical stranger.” But the bad news is its “devotion to The Answers”—defining God and man, ending war, perpetuating peace, and settling the fate of the cosmos. “American authors have a tendency to reduce life to round numbers.”

This is fine if you like tension and pat answers, but if you don’t, English SF will be more to your taste. “It is calm, slow, relaxed. It does not search for The Answers. It attempts to explore human behaviour, and brings to its exploration a mature sense of values and a confident courage. It makes a realistic appraisal of the future undistorted by the infantile dreams and delusions that afflict America.” But that’s a bug as well as a feature:

I have struggled through scores of English stories, chest deep in cliché, continually tempted to give up in disgust. Almost always I have been glad that I didn’t give way to the temptation because I have found, tucked away in the stereotype plot, a fresh and interesting idea. Just to balance the equation I might add that I’ve ripped through scores of American stories, enchanted by the air of excitement, only to be bitterly disappointed in the end to discover that they were all excitement and no idea.

18. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. Another disagreement from Broderick, who finds this rendering quite charming, in a comic strip way.

19. In fairness to McIntosh, I should add that the problems of plausibility and logic in his stories about which I repeatedly complain are much more pronounced in his stories for Science Fantasy. He contributed several much superior stories, and one excellent one, “Bluebird World,” to New Worlds during the 1950s, as described in volume 1 of our survey of that magazine, Building New Worlds.

20. Judith Merril (ed.), SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (Gnome Press, 1956).

21. See this cover at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.