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5: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 5 (ISSUES 13-15)

Dated April, June, and September 1955, respectively, issues 13-15 confirm the impression of a magazine that has largely settled down in physical format and has also hit a stride in content—albeit a quirky and unpredictable stride, occasionally suggestive of the Ministry of Silly Walks. The magazine stays at 2/- and 128 pages. The advertising is limited to house ads except for about a third of a page in 13 and 14 for the Fantasy Book Centre, much reduced from their full back cover ads in earlier issues. The interior illustrations remain undistinguished, some reasonably competent and some pretty lame.

13 leads off with Quinn’s least interesting cover so far, a spaceship against a background of two-thirds-full Mars. Quinn’s weakness is precision of detail and his strengths are a pleasing balance of form and selection and vividness of color. This one plays to his weakness, looking overall pretty stiff and crude (look especially at the shadowed part of the planet and the terminator).22

14’s cover is uncharacteristically cluttered, of interest mainly for the trivial reason that the male figure in the foreground is said in a brief note to be a self-portrait of Quinn, who—like the protagonist of the story illustrated—is an Irishman.23 (More of that later.) In 15 he is back in form with a much better composed and more interestingly colored picture of an artist (clearly another self-portrait) at his easel, which also is another example of the recursive theme becoming common in this magazine: in the foreground is a stack of copies of Science Fantasy. They are all the same nonexistent issue of Science Fantasy, and moreover they bear the same cover painting that the artist is executing on his easel.

§

The lead novelette in 13—one of the longest the magazine has yet published, running fifty-two pages—is “In a Misty Light” by Richard Varne. This is a sort of proletarian space opera that reads like a truncated Ace Double, pretty entertaining if you don’t mind that it makes no sense at all.

Sands is mourning his lost Laura, who mysteriously disappeared. An Earth spy on Mek, Sands receives from an extraterrestrial femme fatale a secret to be brought back to Earth (we don’t know what it is, it’s in a recording capsule), just before the secret police bust in and kill her. Sands escapes and stows away in a stolen spacesuit in the hold of an Earth-bound spaceship. When the cargo is loaded he is buried in grain. The Meks try to search and detain the ship, the Terran Consul gets in their way, the ship takes off. It apparently does not occur to Sands that it would have been simpler to give the Terran Consul the secret capsule.

The Meks are in hot pursuit and eventually overtake the Earth ship, the Terrans resist their boarding, people are killed. Sands knows the Meks will find him in the cargo hold, so he skulks around the tailfins until he has an opportunity to shoot them. Meanwhile the Terran captain, who has been exposed as a coward and is humiliated, leaps across the void with a quantity of explosives and blows up the remaining Meks and their ship. It occurs to the now much reduced Terran crew that they have paid a pretty big price in deceased working stiffs to keep this man alive; just what’s in this information capsule worth getting excited about? So they put it in the information capsule reader. It’s the secret of immortality. Sands is quite chuffed. He ought to get a pile for it from the government.

Back on Earth, he wakes naked in a gravityless metal sphere, and learns that the government doesn’t really need the secret of immortality. They’ve had it for 900 years and suppressed it because of its adverse effects on human evolution. Only a few can be trusted with immortality, and they join Earth Intelligence and are sterilized. That happened to his lost Laura; Sands, too, accepts the treatment. Then they tell him that Laura was extensively modified and sent to Mek to become...the agent who gave him the capsule with the secret of immortality, and was shot down in front of him. Fade to black. (“Consciousness went.”)

Now wait a minute. Why did this secret agent disguised as an extraterrestrial summon the person she must have known was her old boyfriend to hand him a useless and superfluous secret to carry on a perilous journey back to an Earth government that already has it and is trying to suppress it? Ring Lardner had a line for it: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

There is a recursive motif in this story too. When Sands goes to meet the mistress of disguise, the password is “Null-A” and she answers “Korzybski.” Later on, one of the characters utters the epithet “Great Ghu.” Could the whole thing be a spoof? If so, it’s beyond poker-faced.

The lead novelette in 14 is a horse of a more florid color, “Sheamus” by Martin Jordan. Sheamus lives by himself, except for his ferret, and for all he knows he is the last human surviving. Michael Doonan, who reared him, has disappeared. A Martian describes the ridiculous catastrophe that has befallen the world:

“It’s certain,” Dardanus was saying, “that the cobalt bomb, so incontinently exploded twenty-five years ago in the Pacific Ocean, robbed the planet of its atmosphere for at least thirty minutes. There’s no need for me to recall the causes—superheating of the ionosphere, followed by elevation of the heavier atoms and a partial band of vacuum encircling the globe. It’s possible that at least half the molecules existing at that time reached escape velocity and were lost into outer space....”

Sheamus is an Irishman. We know this because the author tells us and also because Sheamus talks like this:

“Now it’s a woman entire, all white and warm where a man seeks, and enough love in her, would make you sing for all with the taste of one only hour. And so fixed on a man’s comfort, with the table’s ribs boned white by the scrubbing and pots ashine better than beacons. Fine and busy she is, greeting a man with lips so clinging and red, you’d think she’d lain all day idle with wishing, yet there’s a stew on the hob to twitch the stone nose of the Bellacragh itself.”

Sheamus has never actually met a woman, though he has made a clay figure of one (portrayed on Quinn’s cover), which is the only audience for the quoted remarks. Shortly he meets the Martians, who have set up shop on Earth. But these Martians originated on Earth, and have been transformed over 200 years by the thin Martian atmosphere (in Lamarckian fashion, but let’s call it genetic engineering) into a three-gendered species. There are males, females who are really neuter, and Vivippies—short for viviparous—who are sexy but usually dumb. Reproduction is mostly by decanting. Nonetheless males and neuter females continue to marry, for professional reasons. In other futuristic developments, the Martians subsist on food pills, though they chase them with roughage.

When the Martians find Sheamus, a female anthropologist—a Vivippy but of Neuter status, it says—goes to check him out. She travels in a personal conveyance called an Immuny (for Immunity Suit) but is forced to abandon it when Sheamus tosses his ferret inside. Hence she is exposed to Earth’s air, which contains a substance called Aphrophon that tends to restore conventional sexuality, and of course she finds Sheamus the answer to her newly constituted maiden’s prayers. A subplot has them outwitting the Martians’ robot chaperones.

Shortly thereafter, cruising around the local islands, they find Michael Doonan, who never intended to abandon Sheamus but got marooned. The reason Sheamus talks like a stage Irishman is that he was taught by one: Doonan is a former actor who mitigated his forced post-catastrophe retirement by child-rearing according to Synge and Yeats. “You’re the last Irishman,” he tells Sheamus. “And I made you.” And a bit later: “The last Irishman? Maybe the first. Maybe you never really existed before outside dreams.” This prematurely postmodern motif is not elaborated. The Martian female and Sheamus are eventually captured and brought back to the Martians’ dome, where they promote a rebellion and a hole in the dome that exposes the Martians to Earth’s air and leads to a jailbreak of Vivippies. At story’s end, the latter are preparing to scour the Earth for more surviving Earthmen, whom they deem fitter company than the etiolated Martian men.

To what extent this confection was meant as a serious and responsible deployment of genre materials (oh, stop), and to what extent a lampoon—and of exactly what—is impossible to tell. One suspects some lurking agenda related to Irish literary and cultural issues; one might think of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, but, one hopes, not for very long. Or maybe he’s just having on the whole of SF. ”Sheamus” is expanded—considerably, by three or four times—from a story in the UK Argosy (January 1954), titled “Sheamus and the Immuny” and labeled that month’s “Science Fiction Choice.” That version is quite rudimentary, starting with the arrival of the Immuny and mainly concerned with the struggle to escape the robot chaperones, with no sign of Michael Doonan or the loftier themes of identity and the like. It is the first of several Jordan appearances in that magazine; he had one other story in Science Fantasy, discussed earlier, and several in Authentic Science Fiction, but was gone from the field after 1955.

The lead story in 15, John Brunner’s “The Talisman,” rolls along very pleasantly, slicker and more assured than either “Sheamus” or “In a Misty Light,” as long as you don’t stop to notice that it doesn’t make any more sense than they do. Sinclair, a struggling professional artist getting by on book jackets and the like, finds a strange-looking egg-shaped piece of bric-a-brac in a junk shop, takes it home, discovers his artist’s block is gone and his book jacket is turning into a masterpiece. He invites Shirley, an art critic he knows, to come look, and she’s deeply impressed. That night he finds a dead man with a terrified expression in his flat, and the talisman gone. By morning he can’t remember what happened (though he is sure something did), but the art critic’s card reminds him.

He calls the police and asks for the inspector who came the previous night. They’ve never heard of Inspector Forster or of Sinclair. Sinclair calls Shirley, who assures him he isn’t crazy. A policeman arrives with a message from Inspector Forster and is puzzled at the account of Sinclair’s call. Shirley recalls the poet Christopher Bacon, first promising, then a genius, and whose work suggests he had the talisman for a while. Might the dead man and the missing talisman imply there were two intruders, one of them frightened to death? Sinclair finds that even without the talisman his artistic gift is still enhanced. He’s painting “alien dream-pictures”; Shirley sees that he has also painted a portrait of Christopher Bacon, whom he’s never met but dreams about.

Off they go see Bacon, who is now in a mental institution, writing things that no one can understand—but they can easily communicate with him. He had the talisman for a year, was thoroughly genius-ified, but can’t convey what he perceives. Sinclair tells him he should stop trying to recapture what he had with the talisman; the talisman has changed him and he can resume being a genius in real time. (Unfortunately Shirley only touched it briefly so she has to stay second-rate.) Exeunt omnes, wondering where and with whom the talisman is now.

Here’s the problem: half the story (the disappearance of the talisman, the dead man, Sinclair’s disappearing-then-returning memory, the is-he-is-or-is-he-ain’t police inspector) is a collection of dead ends and false leads that distract and create the illusion of something happening, but do not actually advance anything in the story, while the other half is just too damn easy. It’s the sort of thing a more mature writer might have turned into a much better and longer story—as Brunner did, many times, later on.

§

The shorter fiction is an equally mixed bag, though definite trends are in evidence. There is much less earnestly amateurish science fiction, a generally lighter touch, a bit of outright fantasy, and several stories that are just about paradigmatic for the title Science Fantasy. For example, A. Bertram Chandler’s slickly turned “Late” (13) is about a man working by himself at an orbital research station. There’s some commotion on Earth, the radio goes dead, and his relief doesn’t show up. The research station started life as a space vehicle, so he manages to improvise and get back to Earth, which he finds deserted by humans. He’s missed the Last Trump and been Left Behind. This appeared later in the US as “Late Arrival” in Imaginative Tales, March 1956.

Then there’s “Dear Ghost” by Alan Guthrie (pseudonym of E. C. Tubb) (15), which posits what amounts to relativity fatigue. You can only travel superluminally for so many hours before you turn into an invisible ghost, and that goes for your spaceship, supplies, etc., too. The protagonist is recruited on a quasi-suicide mission to deliver vaccine to a plague-stricken planet: he’s probably too close to his retire-by date, the ship’s pretty old too, but he rises to the quasi-suicidal occasion. Once embarked, he discovers that the ship is haunted, apparently by the ghost of a female pilot, whose picture is lying around, though it must be from a long time ago. After delivering the vaccine and being hijacked by colonists trying to escape, he “goes ghost” and finds her waiting. She’s a babe! Of course.

Now for some outright fantasy. Helen M. Urban’s “Pass the Salt” (13) reads like what might happen if a 1953 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction were shipwrecked on a desert island and had no one to talk to but itself for several years. Sample: “He didn’t know she was a witch. There was no sign on the back. No mark on the forehead or witchlike actions to shout a warning. A nice sort of girl who was fire and some refrigeration and a lot of looks. Not too expensive. Not inexpensive either, but just tolerable to the paycheck.” He begins to suspect when she teleports the salt into his hand. Nonetheless he marries her. She gets annoyed when an old girlfriend calls him up, and casts spells she can’t undo, causing him to look so weird he can’t go out in public. So he listens carefully when she talks in her sleep and figures out how to cast a spell neither of them can undo making her invisible. Helen Urban had half a dozen stories scattered around the SF magazines—including Fantasy & Science Fiction—from 1955 to 1962.

Less annoying but also less interesting is Douglas West’s “The Dogs of Hannoie” (15), about a man whose car breaks down in a remote small town, where they revere a pack of semi-wild dogs who are allegedly clairvoyant and howl at distant catastrophes. Here’s the harbinger: “Le bombe atomic, it is not good, no?” The dogs are howling at nuclear tests on the other side of the world.

That’s about as outright as the fantasy gets. Everything else has at least a veneer of rationalization. Jonathan Burke, noticeably improved, is back with “The Adjusters,” a member of the same subgenre as Theodore Sturgeon’s “Yesterday Was Monday,” Damon Knight’s “You’re Another,” and Philip K. Dick’s “Adjustment Team”: reality is maintained by a bureaucracy of dubious competence. Here it’s the Ministry of Adjustment, which alters the past to improve the present, except there is always collateral damage. The two main characters meet cute at the Ministry’s Complaints Department. Their respective spouses have disappeared as a result of the Ministry’s adjustments. Getting no satisfaction, they eventually get married to each other. One of the original spouses reappears as a result of another Adjustment by the Ministry. The farce isn’t quite as broad as it could be but overall it’s a pretty amusing story. Burke also has the Guest Editorial in 13, to which we’ll return.

In a similar vein of metaphysical lampoon, but decidedly stranger, is “Double Act” by Howard Lee McCarey (pseudonym of Richard Rowland, who had a few other stories in Science Fantasy and New Worlds) (14), which starts out with Dockett and Kroyd performing a dismal comedy act. They are arrested, charged, and convicted of “F.B.S.—Fell Below Standard.” (“Their script-writers were sent last week; good job too if you ask me.”) They are sentenced to time travel, choosing the future, and find themselves walking across an endless plain, until they see a bunch of people suspended in the air, performing normal activities except that they are not visibly clothed and, e.g., the chairs they seem to be sitting in are not visible. They accost someone who says, “Go away! I don’t wish to see you!” and is suddenly clothed. Later he says “Excuse me while I change” and his baggy trousers go from mauve to deep pink while a hat of curious design appears on his head.

Eventually Dockett and Kroyd find their way to Reception, where they learn to make things (and, indeed, people) with their thoughts. They move into a town full of similarly talented people and play a lot of golf on imaginary courses, getting younger. They feel a compulsion to go back to Reception, which turns out also to be Departure, and then find themselves children, back in our world, talking about what they want to be when they grow up. If there’s a subgenre for this, it’s represented by Gene Wolfe’s “Forlesen.” Shaggy metaphysics? This one would fit into the imaginary anthology Great SF And Fantasy About The Metaphysically Absurd, along with Howard Schoenfeld’s “Built Up Logically,” Frank Belknap Long’s “To Follow Knowledge,” and James Blish and Virginia Kidd’s “On the Wall of the Lodge.”

At the other end of several spectra is E. R. James’ “Smoothies Are Wanted” (13), an earnest and labored psi story. In the future, telepaths will be used as labor relations officers, nicknamed “smoothies” because they smooth things over by figuring out what the contending parties really are after. This one, like Richard Varne’s story, is hampered by ultimately making no sense at all. The Mars colony is threatened by a wildcat strike of the men who make the air. The smoothie’s efforts to head it off are hampered by another unknown telepathic presence. But it turns out he’s fighting himself (“You’ve been a schizoid—two people in one.”), though he manages to pull it together in the end and keep the air circulating. So what happens? He (or they) gets a promotion, not a psychiatric leave. Nonetheless this is an improvement over James’ previous efforts, which were pretty boring reshufflings of clichéd material. This is a more readable story with a fairly original idea.

Equally earnest but more polished is James White’s “Dynasty of One” (15), in which the immortality treatment only works for people who can tolerate an intense heightening of conscience.

Recursive themes keep popping up. Here’s “Mossendew’s Martian” by John Kippax (13), a sort of “Don’t Look Now”24 variation about an astronomical artist who gets a chance for a big score doing effects for a Moon landing movie. He can’t possibly get it done on time, but a man he meets in the bar says he can help and produces some really fine fake Moon photos very fast, except of course they aren’t fake. At the end of the story it’s casually revealed that this contact was made at the Globe Tavern, where London’s SF crowd was then hanging out.

A different kind of recursion appears in Gavin Neal’s “Reluctant Hero” (14), in which the author of the Rocket Brydon books, films, and comic strips goes to the Moon and is made the butt of practical jokes by the crew, but saves their bacon in the end.

E. C. Tubb appears in all three issues, with “Poor Henry” (13), a sour-tasting misogynist domestic-in-space about a poor sucker whose selfish and manipulative wife leaves him to be eaten by Martian sand-ants; “The Agent” (14), a variation on “To Serve Man”; and “The Predators” (15), a novelette about advertising types whose cynicism keeps Earth out of the Galactic Empire. These display capable professionalism but no particular charm. Tubb also has a Guest Editorial in 14.

Wilson Tucker is in two of the issues with “My Brother’s Wife” in 14 (previously in Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1951) and “The Job Is Ended” (from Other Worlds, November 1950) in 15. Both stories are well turned and both are about women who prove to be something different and altogether more repellent than they appear. Draw your own conclusions. Tucker, too, had his Guest Editorial in 8, discussed above.

Other stories not accounted for include John Kippax’s “Special Delivery” (14), another of his egregious Damon-Runyon-on-Mars stories featuring the narrator’s dog Dimple and his black friend Satchmo; Kenneth Bulmer’s pleasant enough “Psi No More” (14) (find the poltergeist? She’s working for you); “Hilda” (14) by W. B. Hickey or H. B. Hickey, depending on where you read (it’s really H. B., and this story about a literal-minded robot was in Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1952); John Brunner again, as Keith Woodcott since he had “The Talisman” under his own name in the same issue, with “No Future In It” (15), a clever story about a fake wizard who accidentally summons a time traveler, the title story of Brunner’s first story collection (by Gollancz in 1962 and Doubleday in 1964); and Charles E. Fritch’s inane “Birthday Present” (15).

§

These issues of Science Fantasy contain two Guest Editorials and, wonder of wonders, a letter column. The editorial in 13, “Ever Been to Uranus?”, is by Jonathan Burke who, consistently with his practice, wants to get the science out of science fiction, or at least out of his face. After ploughing through technical material, he says,

I found—as did so many others—that I preferred good writing to equations, and imaginative situations to extracts from text-books. Who cared whether the hero wore a space suit on Mars or not? Myself and my colleagues [whom he doesn’t identify] no more demanded full mechanical details of a space ship than we demanded a potato-by-potato account of farm life in a Thomas Hardy novel. Liberation of the imagination was the essential.

Indeed, Burke complains of a bad review of one of his books which cited the fact that the characters did not wear space helmets on Mars. “To which I can only reply that Dante does not refer to the inhabitants of Hell as wearing asbestos suits. And in Dante’s day scientists had pronounced views on the literal existence of Hell.” He goes on to cite editor Carnell for telling him “People can’t live on Uranus. We know that,” and his own lack of enough temerity to ask Carnell if he had ever been there. After more mockery in this vein, he says sales of SF are falling off because

[t]here are no human beings in science fiction...their behavior is governed by gadgets and plot gimmicks.... What goes on in the hearts and minds beneath those space suits? [The reader] is not told. And who can maintain enthusiasm about the actions of depersonalized space suits walking on alien worlds? ...Perhaps we had better forget about space travel for a while. Certainly if the intelligent reader is to be drawn back once more to science fiction instead of permanently rejecting it, he must be offered work that is mature artistically rather than ploddingly accurate according to the current scientific theories.

Clearly a man ahead of his time. Which is not to say he is entirely right.

In 14 we have E. C. Tubb’s “Follow My Leader,” a different but familiar brand of polemic: SF has lost its sense of wonder! Or as Tubb puts it: “I do not regret the mutation of those early stories into the far better written and presented ones of today, but one thing I do regret. I regret the variety and loss of vision, the touch of the impossible and the incredibly wild concepts.” But now? “Now authors seem to write for the sole reason that they want to sell.” That is, they “study the market” and send editors more of what the editors have (or a particular editor has) been buying. “How many magazines now give the impression that all the stories have been written by the same man? ...Exaggerated? It wasn’t so long ago that a top-line American magazine chose to warn all authors that a certain type of story would no longer be accepted, no matter how well-written.” (This is presumably a reference to John Campbell’s notice that he was tired of atomic doom stories.25) Contra Burke, Tubb says: “True, science is catching up with us all the time, but what of it? Science fiction is a form of prophecy and we should be the last to grumble because of the increasing demand for accuracy.” Even fantasy must follow its inner logic.

Tubb cautions: “Don’t misunderstand me here, I am the last to advocate sex or sadism as the means to liven up the stories. Science fiction has so-far remained clean, let’s keep it that way. There is nothing clever or desirable in taking advantage of the freedom of the field to exploit our own wish-fulfillments, erotic dreams, and frustrations.” (J. G. Ballard’s first publication, “Prima Belladonna” in Science Fantasy 20, is about eighteen months away—the beginning of the end, in Tubb’s terms.)

In 15, we find “Dear Editor” by “The Readers,” which comprises one long and one very long tirade against Jonathan Burke’s editorial. The introductory note indicates that Burke’s editorial “touched off some spirited replies” and it’s only fair to let the readers have a say. The very long tirade is by none other than Helen M. Urban of Hollywood, California, author of “Pass the Salt” in 13, the militantly cute one about the man who married a witch. Here, however, she takes up the cudgels of scientific accuracy, taking a passing side-swipe at the reference in a John Kippax story to the “dark side” of the moon and energetically explaining to Burke that spectrographic analysis is quite sufficient to demonstrate that you would need a space suit on Mars. And further: “Burke! Part of the fun of writing s-f is thinking about the details which you denounce.”

Burke’s other assailant is Ed Luksus of Gary, Indiana, who says: “I’ve read enough of this ‘take the science out of science fiction’ to gain an ill temper. Messrs. Crossen and Tenn have been answered on this side of the Atlantic by the question ‘What science?’ I choose to query Mr. Burke in the same manner. The last story with any science in it was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement which was serialised in Astounding Science Fiction two years ago.”

22. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.

23. Broderick finds it far more interesting than that, one of Quinn’s best covers.

24. Reference is to the much-anthologized story of that title by Henry Kuttner.

25. Campbell wrote in response to a reader’s letter in the September 1948 Astounding Science Fiction: “We have specified to our authors that the ‘atomic doom’ stories are not wanted, for precisely the reasons you give.” Reader W. N. McBain had complained: “People are getting atomic warfare thrown at them from all angles these days. I for one am heartily sick of it. You are no longer a prophet crying in the wilderness. I’ve been reading enough of this type of story to have a reasonable idea of what ravening energies lie in the heart of the atom, and I want a bit of pure escapism.”