Читать книгу Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 - Damien Broderick - Страница 13

6: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 6 (ISSUES 16-18)

Science Fantasy continues along in the groove the magazine reached in the previous several issues, with uneven but interesting lead stories, a reliable contingent of capably done short stories (original and reprint), and an equally reliable contingent of the bloody awful in each issue.

Interior illustrations continue nondescript. Guest editorials have disappeared and there is no other nonfiction. Advertising has completely disappeared except for house ads. The price stays at 2/-, publishing remains at Derwent House and printing at Rugby Advertiser Ltd., and the schedule remains aspirational. It says “Published Bi-Monthly,” but the dates appearing unobtrusively in the lower right of the contents page say 11/55, 2/56, and 5/56, respectively. Another constant is the proofreading. There doesn’t seem to be much. In one story, for example, a character is “Deidre” or “Deirdre” depending on what page you’re looking at.

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Issue 16 starts out with another pretty striking Quinn cover depicting a couple of walls decorated with trophy human (and alien) heads.26 This illustrates the lead novelette, E. C. Tubb’s “The Wager,” an engagingly barbaric yawp about some decadent aliens dropped on Earth for a spot of urban sport hunting. Bad luck, they’ve picked the city where Gort, a member of the equally alien Guardians, is vacationing among the primitive Earthfolk. The viewpoint shifts among Gort, the bad guys, and the local police, and things move along quickly and bloodily in capable pulp fashion.

However, the outstanding items in the issue are two US reprints, C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” and Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” Interestingly, the former is credited as coming from Kornbluth’s UK collection The Mindworm and Other Stories (Michael Joseph 1955) and not from his previous Ballantine collection The Explorers (1954). Its original appearance in Worlds Beyond in December 1950 is not mentioned. The blurb to “It’s a Good Life” (first published a couple of years previously in Frederik Pohl’s anthology Star Science Fiction Stories 2 [Ballantine 1953]) hints that it’s a reprint but isn’t explicit.

In addition, there are three pretty good original fantasy stories. John Brunner’s “Death Do Us Part” is a clever and amusing Unknownish story about a ghost who wants a divorce. Equally lightweight and almost as clever is Duncan Lamont’s “The Editor Regrets...” in which a magazine editor receives a ms. titled “The Perfect Story,” which changes according to who’s reading it, and which always comes true.

“Heart’s Desire” by Niall Wilde (pseudonym of Eric Frank Russell) is about a nasty and unattractive Irishman who makes a deal with the Devil—excuse me, the Divvil—to make him irresistible to women. As usual in deal-with-the-Devil stories, he wasn’t careful enough about what he wished for. (This is the same story later published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1960, modestly revised, as “A Divvil with the Women.”) I am surprised to see that Russell was capable of controlling his own mannerisms long enough to bring off this pretty smooth stage Irish performance.

Bringing up the rear are John Kippax’s “Hounded Down,” another piece of tiresome whimsy and Runyon pastiche about Dimple, the Martian dachshund (“Cor stone me through an airlock I say,” etc.), and William F. Temple’s labored and tedious “Uncle Buno,” about a kid who has a Martian math tutor who also develops into the solar system’s greatest painter. The story bounces back and forth among nostalgia, moralism, irony and outright bitterness until it batters itself to death. But on the whole, I imagine the readers of 1955 thought they were getting their money’s worth from this issue.

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Issue 17 starts with one of Quinn’s worst covers, crude and stiff-looking, illustrating Brian W. Aldiss’s “Non-Stop.” 27 Aldiss didn’t think much of it either: he referred to “a cover illustration by Gerald Quinn, a cover to my mind as unconvincing as his enigmatic cover of orange shapes had been convincing” in Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s (Hodder & Stoughton 1990), chapter 8. (I can’t figure out what this “enigmatic cover of orange shapes” refers to.)

“Non-Stop” is of course the first cut at what became Aldiss’s first novel. It is much shorter—thirty-seven digest-size pages—and it’s quite interesting, in the sense of “may you live in interesting times.” Frankly, it grated on me like fingernails on a blackboard. You know the story: primitive people obviously living in a generation-spaceship. The protagonist and company rebel, leave their community, and find out they’ve actually been in Earth orbit for generations. Their culture is dominated by the “Teaching,” a quasi-religion based on the idea that people are despicable. (“You know what the litany teaches us, father. We are the sons of cowards and our days are passed in fear,” says the protagonist to the priest who is trying to persuade him to leave. So the priest tells him that it’s really cowardly to run away, and then he’s game to go.)

The revelation at the end is that they won’t be permitted on Earth, because they are an insane society, and are being kept alive on the starship only for study. The protagonist decides that he’ll give up any grander goals and just be a big shot in the insane society, but he’s thwarted in that too, and dismissed as “harmless” by the woman he aspires to. It’s well enough done but seems rather pointless and mean-spirited, reminiscent of the complaints people would make about the New Wave ten years later.

What a difference there is between this short version and Non-Stop the novel—like day and night, or more aptly, in Mark Twain’s phrase, the lightning and the lightning-bug. It’s not just a matter of length but also of attitude. Non-Stop is not a great novel but it’s a pleasure to read, full of incident and detail, free of the contempt for the characters that marred the shorter version. The Teaching is still there, but it no longer dominates. It’s now a minor element in the depiction of a society of some complexity, and it’s also explained away as originated by a crackpot. The characters are given considerably more depth. We learn the tragic history that has led to the present degenerated situation. And the end of the story carries a weight commensurate with the preceding events, rather than trivializing them and the characters as did the shorter version.

Maybe Aldiss matured enough in that interval that he no longer felt a need to prove himself superior to his characters. In any case, he seems to have found his way as a writer between the two versions. He says in his memoir The Twinkling of an Eye28: “Telling myself the story gave me great pleasure; I was absolutely sure of what I was doing.” That’s exactly how it reads. Of the earlier version Aldiss says only that he wrote it in late 1955 and Carnell told him: “Since I am short of material for Science Fantasy, I am going to publish your story, but frankly you are wasting a great idea on such short length. If you would like to turn the story into a novel, I will advise you and will try to sell it for you in the United States.” Carnell mustered more enthusiasm for the magazine blurb: “It is a great pleasure for us to present the first novelette by Brian Aldiss insofar as we believe that, like several other British authors, he has a long and successful future in front of him as a fantasy writer.” Well, now that I think about it, he doesn’t really say anything good about the story....

There’s nothing in 17 as good as the reprints in 16. The short stories range from the capably clever and amusing to the obligatory bloody awful. The US reprint in this issue is Judith Merril’s “Connection Completed” (from Universe, November 1954), a psi period piece. A telepathic guy is trying to hook up with a telepathic gal. Is it really she across the table from him, both of them trying to ask without really asking “Is it you?” It’s well enough done if you can accept the fantastic premise that people in such need wouldn’t just blurt it out, since if they were wrong they would only have embarrassed themselves before a perfect stranger. I suppose this reflects the more reserved social mores of the time (in fact, the story can and probably should be read as a fairly obvious allegory of sexual repression).

John Brunner, very quickly the seasoned professional, again has two stories, both smooth but minor. “The Biggest Game,” under the Keith Woodcott pseudonym, is about a professional philanderer and exploiter of rich women, who muses about their being the biggest game of all. Of course someone turns out to be hunting him. The even slighter “The Man Who Played the Blues,” under Brunner’s own name, is told by a semi-professional jazz musician to a police officer who is investigating the disappearance of Ribble, who sat in on piano with the band and played blues like nobody ever heard before, until a severe-looking man showed up, ushered him away, and made him disappear with some alien gadget. It probably seemed pretty hip at the time. Now it’s mainly quaint.

Probably the best of the lot is “Loouey,” by Alan Barclay, in which a London fixer gets wind of an apparent flying saucer landing and an alien on the loose, and learns that someone seeming to be the alien is holed up in a rural area racking up patents. So he and his muscle go to take possession, and get their deserved comeuppance. The story is told with great gusto and one gets the sense of an author having a really good time—not the case with most of Barclay’s other work, especially his stories in New Worlds.

As to the “bloody awful” category, they all have one thing in common: they jumped, they weren’t pushed. That is, they are not just ineptly executed but deeply misconceived. The least dire is John Mantley’s “Uncle Clem and Them Martians,” which appears to be a sort of pastiche of Henry Kuttner’s Hogben stories by a writer who can’t quite lose his stiff upper lip. Think of a Masterpiece Theatre remake of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The plot (bottom line, omitting the cameo appearance by Albert Einstein): Uncle Clem deduces that the menacing and seemingly invulnerable extraterrestrials are based on water soluble crystals inside an impervious skin that doesn’t feel pain, so he contrives to have their shoes lined with sandpaper and holes punched in them and then gets the aliens to walk through water.

Proceeding downhill, we have “Proof Negative,” by Trevor Staines (pseudonym of John Brunner), in which the mysterious stranger proves to be Santa Claus. Next is “To Touch the Stars” by Joseph Slotkin, blurbed: “Ever since life began the forces of Good and Evil have been delicately balanced in mortal conflict, yet few writers in recent years—except the late H. P. Lovecraft—have managed to capture the macabre setting.” Suspicions confirmed: the story is a Lovecraft pastiche, value added negligible. Somebody brings a peculiar old console radio to the weird radio repair man to get it fixed. The repair guy discovers that he’s got a direct hookup to the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. In fact, he gets taken right over, just like that nice Mr. Charles Dexter Ward, and is bent on bringing the Things over for tea. Sample: “There, before his uninitiated eyes, the green arm of ghastly perdition reaches around the yielding body of a glowing creature, half human, half unnameable monster, dragging it back with it through a shattering screen into the dread beyond.” Pretty eldritch, huh?

Of Len Shaw’s “Syllabus” Carnell blurbs: “During the past five hundred years the English language has changed out of all recognition—and is still changing. The following story could well be written in the twenty-first centry, perhaps by one erstwhile descendant of Will Shakespeare.” Well, you be the judge, here’s the beginning:

Scrinch open sleep-leaded lids, John Smith. Savour sunbeam-flooded morn. Survey marital bedchamber in preprandial hour’s pellucid clarity. Consider accoutrements of mid-class domesticity—off-white ceiling, vitreous walls, nylon drapes, deep-piled fibre-glass fitted carpet. Eye-caress dressing table, top a-riot with erotically containered beautician’s magi-products, brushes, combs and oh-so-common curlers.

Just goes to show that the sins of the New Wave were not the least bit original. There is a plot here, dimly visible through the undergrowth. Parents are supposed to sign their teen-age girl up for her irrevocable education and career path. She’s made and backed off several choices, now she’s fixed on marine zoology, except that Daddy keeps having dreams and visions of her being eaten by a whale. It turns out she’s really psi-talented and trying to hide it while manipulating herself out of any career choice, but now they are on to her and she will go into Advanced Psionics, like it or not. One is tempted to ask the author, “Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

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Issue 18 has a cover by a new artist, Terry (F. J. Terence Maloney), who did a number of covers for New Worlds from 1956 through 1958, but only this one for Science Fantasy—at least under his own name (see Chapter 8 for elaboration). It’s a pleasant enough alien landscape (reddish, so it must be Mars) with spaceship in the background.29 Closer scrutiny of the foreground shows several men in spacesuits standing around what looks like a flagpole, two of them in consternation, one of the two apparently shaking his fist. One could surmise that these intrepid space explorers are expressing rage and frustration that somebody else has gotten there first and raised their flag. Unfortunately, the title banner obscures whatever is at the top of the flagpole, if anything, and the third spaceman appears to be looking at his watch, so it is impossible to confirm this hypothesis. The cover doesn’t illustrate any of the stories, so there’s no help there.

The lead novella is John Brunner’s “This Rough Magic,” the best to date of his contributions to the magazine. The protagonist, hearing the sound of a good guitarist, walks into a Soho club that proves actually to be the locus of a sort of voodoo cult. He befriends the guitarist but manages to offend the cult leader, and finds himself on the bad end of various magickal gambits. With the aid of his intrepid semi-girlfriend, the guitarist, and the guitarist’s glamorous Jamaican witch-friend, he first tries to avoid and then to engage and defeat the magician. The story ends in a burst of quite well-turned melodrama.

There’s a lot that’s attractive about the story. The women characters are unusually prominent and well drawn for this era. The story is unusual for its time in its acknowledgement of the existence of black society in London. Brunner draws interestingly on the anthropology of magic and the story presents a point of view on it that’s unusual for fantasy (though not surprising for Brunner the rationalist), and refreshing to my taste: yes, magic is knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it should be preserved. It’s not neutral knowledge because it can only be used for personal gain. The sooner it’s forgotten and replaced by medicine, scientific agriculture, etc., the better off we’ll all be.

As with “The Man Who Played the Blues,” there are touches that now seem quaint, like Brunner’s slightly ostentatious hip knowingness (“Reaching behind him, he picked up the guitar again and played a little silvery run ending in the E minor seventh harmonics produced by half-stopping the strings at the octave fret and lifting the barre while they are still sounding”), and the careful articulation of good liberal views of the time (“I had a high respect for the negro race—it wasn’t their fault that they got themselves stranded on a continent whose climate was too equable and where game was too abundant for them to develop a technological civilisation.”) But he did push the envelope a bit, with his protagonist approving interracial marriages: “It’d solve all our racial problems if we all mixed up into one uniformly coloured species.” Then, at the end of the story, the white protagonist’s white semi-girlfriend, with whom he is hopelessly in love, turns up at his hospital room engaged to the black guitarist. But when she leaves, the glamorous Jamaican witch enters, and romance is clearly in the air. Not bad for 1956, probably unpublishable in the US then.

The story was expanded into Black is the Color (1969), a non-genre novel described as “a thriller involving black magic.” This version, however, is unequivocally fantasy—while the effectiveness of magic seems to depend to some degree on the victim’s belief in magic, it doesn’t depend on the victim’s knowledge of the particular magical acts.

The cream of the short stories is Brian Aldiss’s “The Failed Men” (a.k.a. “Ahead”), one of his best early stories, though it had never been anthologized, just reprinted in Aldiss’s collections, until it appeared in Broderick’s Earth Is But a Star. Far-future humanity has literally buried itself and gone comatose, for reasons unintelligible to anyone else, and time-traveling civilizations including ours have banded together to rescue them and start the species up again. And the rescuers are losing their minds. It’s as downbeat a story as anyone has ever written, but impressive and moving in its brief length. One might congratulate Carnell for appreciating a story so contrary to the conventionally cheery and positive assumptions of the genre, but in fact Aldiss recounts:

Carnell was honest down to the last half penny, and brought his magazines out regularly. He had no literary taste. When I submitted to him one of my best early short stories, “The Failed Men,” he wrote back saying, “This will make you laugh. I hated your story and couldn’t make sense of it but, since we were going to press and I was short by five thousand words, I shoved your effort in. Here’s the cheque.” I didn’t laugh. One wants appreciation as well as money. Particularly money on Carnell’s miniscule [sic] scale.30

Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody,” reprinted from Frederik Pohl’s anthology Star Science Fiction Stories 3 (Ballantine 1954), is certainly topical these days. A fellow finds a woman for sale for $4.95 in an airport vending machine. She’s manufactured from the cells of the winner of a contest to identify “the woman that every man wanted.” He needs information about her background but she won’t talk unless he buys her, at which point she persuades him he also needs the $19.95 accessory kit. He’s on a mission to figure out what has gone wrong with Athena, the computer that runs the factory that has started producing the Guineveres. (It was sabotaged by a disgruntled ex-manager whom Athena automated out of a job. The sabotage consisted of programming it to do something that would provoke its destruction, i.e. manufacturing Guineveres.) When he gets back to the motel where he has installed Guinevere, she is horribly aged—it’s planned obsolescence, intended to insure replacement demand, and he can get a nice trade-in on her if he wants. And that’s not all. The story flails out in several other directions as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of clear-the-decks satire from Williamson. It’s a mess, but a sharp and vigorous one.

Lan Wright’s “Wishes Three” is an Unknownish rehash of the “be careful what you ask for” theme, trivial but redeemed by lively writing, not always a feature of his work.

After those, it’s downhill as usual. Peter Phillips’ brief “First Man in the Moon” is merely inconsequential, while Julian Frey’s “Head First”—about some alien children enrolled in a school where the headmaster’s name is Wilmar P. Quagmire, which is probably all you need to know—is actively silly. (Frey was a penname for John Hynam, who usually wrote as John Kippax.) A more baroque sort of lameness may be found in John Kippax’s “Fair Weather Friend,” admittedly a merciful improvement over the Dimple the dachshund on Mars stories. Here the characters run a rainmaking operation in the United States—authentic local color is provided by a “sherriff” who says “Well I’ll be hoodooed,” and a farmer named Eb Doorbell. Their materials are being stolen by a time-traveling magician from ancient Egypt who needs to steal the thunder (as it were) of a competing rainmaker back home. The real-time rainmakers oblige him by providing him a new, improved rainmaking agent. His competitor, by the way, is named Noah.

In a similar vein is Dan Morgan’s “Beast of the Field,” in which a miserable man comes to a psychiatrist with the delusion that he is an alien. Of course, he is an alien, and he’s trying to track down another shipwrecked alien, and now he has. The psychiatrist admits that he’s the guy, but he doesn’t want to go home because the crash destroyed his telepathic centers and he’d be a cripple. So the investigator leaves him, saying, “Goodbye and good luck—Doctor Freud.” What next? Adam and Eve?

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

27. See it at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. As usual, Broderick disagrees, finding it quite pleasing.

28. Little, Brown, 1998, chapter XVIII.

29. See it at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.

30. Aldiss, “The Glass Forest,” http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/aldiss/html/glass_forest_4.html (visited 10/19/11).