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1: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 1 (ISSUES 1-3)

By the time of its demise in 1967, the British magazine Science Fantasy had an international reputation as one of the better magazines in the field. (Under new editorship begun in 1964, it was also known briefly, from March 1966, as Impulse and then SF Impulse.) Its specialty is captured in its title: neither traditional science fiction nor routine fantasy, but a blend of both—even if many stories wavered from this hybrid goal and fell back into one of the more familiar categories. I read through the file of Science Fantasy and successors for the first time during the early twenty-first century, and this book records the journey.6 Executive summary: Pretty bad start. But the magazine improved, and eventually did live up to its reputation, and published much excellent work that might never have existed without Science Fantasy.

The magazine was published by Nova Publications, which by the time of Science-Fantasy issue 1 (dated Summer 1950) was, according to the back cover ad, about to publish New Worlds issue 8. The first two issues were edited by Walter Gillings (1912-79), who had previously edited Tales of Wonder and Fantasy (the UK 1946-47 magazine); the now better-known E.J. (John or Ted) Carnell (1912-72), already editor of Nova’s New Worlds, took over with the third issue.

The first two issues contain 96 pages plus covers, digest size (5½ x 7⅜ inches, to be precise), price one and sixpence. The cover stock has more of a matte finish than most of the digest magazines of its day.

The cover pictures are both quite well done in their modest way. The cover of issue 1, by Powell, is a pleasant view of Earth from the remains of the Moon in muted colors. The cover of 2, by Turner, is more striking and colorful, portraying a crowd of people with stylized angular faces, and several with stylized draped cloaks and/or hoods, who seem to be fleeing up a beach away from a craft of some sort at the shoreline, with an equally stylized raging sea behind it. It’s pretty explicitly derived from Japanese painting, and offhand I don’t remember seeing anything quite like it on an SF magazine. For that matter, I don’t remember seeing anything like the cover of 1 on an SF magazine before—space scenes are almost always more colorful and dramatic.7

The interior illustrations—including those by Turner and Powell—are thoroughly undistinguished, though they are also poorly displayed. They are small and do not seem to be well reproduced, though one can’t tell by looking what problems result from reproduction and sizing and what from the deficiencies of the original.

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At first, Science-Fantasy probably gave more of its total wordage to reviews and criticism than any SF magazine before or since except possibly the much later British Interzone. Indeed, on the contents page colophon (though not on the cover) it identifies itself as “Science-Fantasy, incorporating Science-Fantasy Review,” the latter title being Gillings’ fanzine or critical journal.8 The two issues feature respectively five and four “Articles and Reviews” whose nominal authors were mostly pseudonyms of Gillings (Geoffrey Giles, Valentine Parker, Thomas Sheridan, Herbert Hughes), though John K. Aiken (1913-90), who has a review article in each issue, was a genuine person, poet Conrad Aiken’s son, in fact.

Most of these are review articles, running around two pages, of several books that are related thematically or otherwise. For example, Aiken’s article “A History of the Future” in 1 reviews three books by Robert Heinlein, and his “The Charms of Space Opera” in 2 covers Nelson Bond’s Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman; L. Ron Hubbard’s The Kingslayer; George O. Smith’s Nomad and A Pattern For Conquest; and Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Port of Peril. (Bond—“approximately, the P.G. Wodehouse of science fiction”—comes out much better than Smith—“His dialogue is flat with a terrible flatness, despite the fact that no character ever says anything which cannot possibly be snapped, hissed, grinned, thundered, grimaced, chorused, laughed, exploded, wisecracked or snarled.”) These reviews are all perfectly capable and literate, but not very interesting at this late date given the familiarity or deserved obscurity of the subjects and the solemn tones and middle of the road opinions of most of the reviewers.

The other nonfiction items in 1 are Thomas Sheridan’s “The Battle of the Canals,” about the controversy over the existence of the Martian canals, and Herbert Hughes’ “The Djinn in the Test-Tube,” reacting to an article about SF by the celebrated scientist and humanist Jacob Bronowski (misspelled Brunowski) in the Continental Daily Mail. 2 features an article bylined Sheridan about the risks of Earth’s colliding with a comet, plus Valentine Parker’s “The Dawn of Space-Travel,” which rambles from a Hayden Planetarium show to the films Destination Moon and Rocket Ship X-M to the book The Conquest of Space.

Advertisements on the inside front cover of 1 are from Arkham House and the bookseller Postal Preview; on the inside back cover, from the Fantasy Book Centre; and on the back cover for New Worlds and Astounding Science Fiction (“Famed throughout the world!”—no doubt the British Reprint Edition or BRE). The headline of the Postal Preview ad reads “Now is the TIME to obtain some of the absorbing books reviewed in this magazine,” and the four time-travel books from one of the review articles are listed. This coordination between advertisement and the contents of the issue in which it appeared gives a hint of what a small world SF must have been in the UK at the time. The ads in 2 are similar to those in 1.

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The fiction...there’s the rub. The fiction contents of 1 include one novelette, “The Belt” by J. M. Walsh, and four short stories: “Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke, “Monster” by Christopher Youd, “The Cycle” by P. E. Cleator, and “Advent of the Entities” by E. R. James. 2 similarly contains one novelette, F. G. Rayer’s “The Ark,” and four short stories: John Russell Fearn’s “Black-Out,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Silence, Please!” (under the pseudonym Charles Willis) and “History Lesson,” and Norman C. Pallant’s “Martian Mandate.”

SF scholar Mike Ashley notes that some of this material was left over from the demise of Fantasy, Gillings’ previous magazine, a few years before.9 Frankly, much of it reads more like leftovers from the earlier Tales of Wonder or from Hugo Gernsback’s inventory. The lead novelette in 1, Walsh’s “The Belt,” posits that a planetoid sails by, causing the Moon to approach the earth and break up, its fragments becoming a Saturn-like ring, which, when the characters visit, seems to have resolved itself into a more or less solid object rather than a collection of fragments. The characters fly to it, walk around on it, and defend themselves from ravening moon worms with their electronic guns, and by spraying them with oxygen. This one seems straight out of the middle range of the 1930s Wonder Stories.

The lead novelette in 2, Rayer’s “The Ark,” smacks of a later but not necessarily better vintage (Thrilling Wonder Stories circa 1940?). The world has been done in by nuclear power which first causes “radioactive infection” and then, after the atomic piles are shut down, a volcanic period that mostly wrecks civilization. Humanity has become divided into the governing Intellectuals and the beaten-down and brutish Workers. Now a comet is on the way to shut down the whole show. What to do but build an Ark to ride out the cataclysm and start a new civilization with a few carefully selected survivors? The obligatory beautiful stowaway is very much present and chewing the scenery, as are all the other stereotyped characters, and the plot is ponderously melodramatic.

Neither story fits the Fantasy part of the magazine’s title. Both are examples of science fiction, although of a rather primitive kind more common decades earlier.

Most of the other stories are similarly old-fashioned—smoothly so, in the case of John Russell Fearn, or clumsily in the case of “Advent of the Entities,” a story as awkward and clichéd as its title, or “Martian Mandate,” which puts forth the exciting proposition that Atlantis was colonized by Mars. In this company the three stories by Arthur C. Clarke leap out as deft, urbane, and clever, especially “Time’s Arrow” (“History Lesson” being an extended gimmick, though a good one). “Silence, Please!” is bibliographically interesting. It is listed in Miller/Contento and probably elsewhere as one of the Tales from the White Hart,10 but Miller/Contento does not note that the story was very thoroughly rewritten after this magazine publication, preserving nothing but the basic idea and sequence of events. There is no spoor of the White Hart itself in this version.

So what exactly did Gillings think he was doing? It’s hard to say—apparently as hard for him as for anybody else. The first issue starts off with an editorial manifesto of considerable length but little discernible content. A sample:

If few had faith in an inner world [referring to the Hollow Earth], there were thousands who believed in 1835 that there was a world of green mountains and blue lakes in the moon...and of flying men! Richard Adams Locke’s science-fantasy, better known as The Moon Hoax, was presented in the New York Sun in such clever style that it seemed gospel truth—at least for a week or so. More recently, New Yorkers exhibited no less belief in Mr. Wells’ invading Martians, as dispensed by radio by Mr. Welles. And the flying saucers? Space-ships, and little men from Venus...? Truly, science-fantasy has a potency which does not always depend on its plausibility; for its dreams very often come true.

SCIENCE-FANTASY which is—intentionally—fiction. Science-fantasy which is—or might well be—fact. In this new magazine we shall be concerned with it in all its forms: with its significant ideas, its surprising prophecies, its sheer fictions, its evolution as a fascinating literature. We shall present both facts and fancies. Hence—SCIENCE-FANTASY.

Matters are not much clarified in the second issue, in which Gillings’ editorial, titled “Going Your Way,” starts with apologies for the irregular schedule, occasioned by a printing strike. 1 was Summer 1950 but there was no Autumn issue, and 2 is Winter 1950-51. He solicits the readers’ views, not to mention their stories, especially those of 3,000 to 6,000 words. As to his plans, he intends to enlarge the non-fiction content, to present the best fiction he can get but to have no “fixed policy,” and to “keep a careful eye to what [he] considers the proper development of this medium for an audience more concerned with literary quality than with the familiarity of authors’ names or mere extravagance of conception.”

Well, that’s an idea, and not a bad one as far as it goes. What is conspicuously missing is any explanation of how Science-Fantasy was intended to differ from its companion magazine New Worlds, and what the point was of publishing a second quarterly magazine rather than increasing the size and/or frequency of the established magazine.11 However, what if anything Gillings had in mind, other than his desire to be editor of an SF magazine, quickly became academic, since he was gone by the next issue, which did not appear for a year.

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The editorial in 2 announces an intention to “enlarge on” the non-fiction content. The “In the Next Issue” squib promises “Nemesis” by Arthur C. Clarke. A box in one of the reviews says “it is hoped” to continue “Fantasy Forum,” a letter column, and invites readers who have “any comments to make on the contents of this magazine or on any matters arising,” to send them on.

None of these things came to pass. The third issue of Science-Fantasy—Winter 1951-52, a year after 2—features no Clarke, no letter column, and no non-fiction except for a rather stiff “Guest Editorial” by Gillings titled “The Time Is Not Yet” noting with much verbiage and little explanation that he is out and John Carnell is now the editor. Gillings says, with customary vagueness: “[I]t has become evident that the plan of development I had in mind for Science-Fantasy can hardly be carried through successfully at this stage—for a variety of reasons, which it is hoped may not obtain once the magazine gets properly into its stride and the special features I envisaged can be introduced with the full effect of topical interest and critical value.”

So what actually happened here? Mike Ashley’s Tymn/Ashley essay refers to “internal disagreements” within Nova Publications and the fact that the board of directors decided it was “uneconomical to keep two editors.” Gillings lost the vote. What the internal disagreements were about is not recorded. But Ashley’s SF magazine history The Time Machines adds that the decision was “swayed to some extent by the fact that the design and make-up of Science-Fantasy were more expensive than those of New Worlds.” Why that should have been the case is not clear. A New Worlds issue (10) from midway between the two Gillings issues of Science-Fantasy has the same number of pages, the cover stock is slicker, page size and illustrations are larger and seem to be better reproduced. There’s even a photograph. I suspect that the main “internal disagreement” may simply have been that Gillings’ view of the field was hopelessly mired in 1939 or thereabouts, and Carnell was more forward-looking. Carnell maintained a tasteful silence in the magazine, and his later comments (in an interview reproduced in Philip Harbottle’s revised Vultures of the Void) pointed in two directions in consecutive sentences, first citing Gillings’ “finding it more and more difficult to devote as much time editorially to the magazine as he wished,” and then observing that Gillings’ above-quoted editorial “reads obscurely, and does little to emphasize the fundamental differences of opinion that were then contributory causes for his relinquishing the editorship.”

One of the minor mysteries of the transition is what happened to the promised Clarke story “Nemesis,” but it’s easily solved: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000) says that it is the same story as “Exile of the Eons,” which first appeared in Super Science Stories, March 1950, and then in Clarke’s first collection Expedition to Earth. Why was it dropped from Science Fantasy? Maybe because by the time it would have been published (even on schedule, sometime in 1951) it would already have appeared in the US magazine—though later on, Carnell published plenty of stories that had appeared in the US.

I suspect, however, that it was a casualty of regime change. “Nemesis” is a very old-fashioned story for Clarke, about a militarist dictator referred to only as “the Master” who flees defeat in war through suspended animation, and millennia hence encounters Trevindor, who was banished from the inhabited Galaxy for philosophical nonconformity (“in the whitely gleaming Hall of Justice,” no less, where he “stood proudly facing the men who had proved stronger than he.”) Trevindor kills the Master. This story is full of the posturing and sonorous diction of 1930s SF—though rendered with Clarke’s vastly greater skill—and is probably just the kind of thing the Carnelloids wanted to get rid of, however well done in this instance. (“The Master’s dreamless sleep was more than half ended when Trevindor the Philosopher was born, between the fall of the Ninety-seventh Dynasty and the rise of the Fifth Galactic Empire. He was born on a world very far from Earth, for few were the men who ever set foot on the ancient home of their race, now so distant from the throbbing heart of the Universe.”)

Other changes were made before the appearance of issue 3. New Worlds 10 has a list of authors to appear in that issue, and they include A. Bertram Chandler and “Robert Wright” (Robert Lowndes and Forrest J Ackerman), neither of whom actually appear. So here’s the new Science Fantasy: 96 pages, 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches, glossy but flimsy cover stock, paper that looks higher-quality to my untutored eye than in the first two issues, price two shillings.

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The most immediately striking feature of 3 is the cover by Reina Bull, which sounds pretty ordinary by genre standards in its elements but is rather bizarre in execution. It depicts a voluptuous, scantily clad woman being carried off into the sky by a caped humanoid cyborgesque monster, with futuristic cityscape in the background. It sounds like a typical Earle Bergey cover for Thrilling Wonder Stories, but it looks like what Bergey might have painted after a long night in an opium den with Hannes Bok or maybe Margaret Brundage. It has a sort of busy and overheated decadent quality to it that I don’t recall seeing on SF magazines elsewhere.

The cover of 4, the next issue, is of similar ilk though the use of color is less striking. Here a man is struggling in the tentacles of a mechanical monster, with more voluptuous, scantily clad women making stylized and futile gestures of distress. Bull did these two covers plus two more on New Worlds around the same time (New Worlds 11 and 18). The style of the latter is similar to the Science Fantasy covers but the presentation is altogether more wholesome, without the Weird Menace overtones. The Science Fantasy covers are well worth looking at.12

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That issue 3 cover, though, has nothing to do with any of the fiction contents, from which skynapped voluptuous women are conspicuously absent. All the stories are short items, with none flagged as a lead story except by their order on the contents page.

In John Wyndham’s “Pawley’s Peepholes,” gaggles of futuristic tourists suddenly start intangibly but visibly appearing in a small town. Solution: turn the town into a tourist attraction for people who want to gawk at the time travelers. It’s an American town, probably reflecting an earlier sale in the U.S. (a different version of the story appeared in Suspense, Summer 1951). Later the story was Anglicized (or re-Anglicized) for reprinting in the UK Argosy, as “A New Kind of Pink Elephant,” and retained the English setting in yet another revision in Wyndham’s collection The Seeds of Time. This plot is essentially the same as in Bob Tucker’s “The Tourist Trade,” though the stories were published close enough together (Worlds Beyond, January 1951, for the Tucker) that given the publication delays involved, it’s unlikely that one influenced the other.

F. G. Rayer’s “The Undying Enemy” is old-fashioned but not too bad if one makes the necessary allowances: the protagonist grows up underground under the tutelage of an old man. He has custody of the remnants of humanity who are in suspended animation, figures out how to disable the war machines that make the surface uninhabitable, and wakes everybody up to start the new world.

William F. Temple’s “Double Trouble” is a ponderous stab at whimsical fantasy about a man vexed by an entity whose job it is to give him bad luck, and his efforts to change his fortunes.

J. T. McIntosh’s “Then There Were Two” is a silly story about a man who gets himself duplicated by hanky-panky with a matter transmitter so he can commit murder and have an alibi. It does not threaten the primacy of Rogue Moon13 for use of this device (despite getting there much earlier) but is redeemed by its brevity and tightness.

E. R. James’ “The Moving Hills” combines a comic device (a man’s buddy is always talking him into things and getting him into trouble) with a complicated space exploration/alien contact plot, to completely self-defeating effect (but Colin and Brocky will be back, never fear). It collapses of its own uninteresting weight.

Characteristically slickly done, E. C. Tubb’s “Grounded” displays a man who wants to go to the Moon, but is always thwarted. It is revealed that the government can’t let anybody have the military advantages of getting there. Australian N. (for Norma) K. Hemmings’ “Loser Take All” features those staples of an earlier SF day, a Professor with no discernible academic responsibilities and his beautiful daughter, whom the protagonist would like to get next to, in a style that obviates the need for parody: “From the centre globe, the pilot’s compartment, a girl emerged, and his eyes strayed from Liza’s metal curves in favour of softer ones. [Liza is the spaceship.] Jane Lawrence was a brilliant mathematician and research chemist and, with a name and profession like that should have been a very studious and unattractive girl blinking owlishly through horn-rimmed glasses. However, she was not, and her construction and general lines left nothing to be desired.” The plot is an alien invasion, the denouement is we lose in the short run, but the aliens didn’t bring their women so they will have to intermarry with us, promising—wait for it—“the new Earth.”

None of these stories is particularly memorable by contemporary standards, though the best of them, Wyndham’s, is a characteristically well turned trifle. But there is nothing so archaic as in the first two issues. Even the Hemmings story is redeemed by its unconventional conclusion.

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There is a new and better lot of interior illustrators (Quinn, Clothier, and Hunter), though how much of the improvement is in quality and how much in presentation, I’m not sure (the illustrations are given more space on the page and the pages are larger, and the reproduction seems clearer). In any case, they are at best competent.

6. Bibliographic and historical information not from the magazine itself, and not otherwise attributed, is from the Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Index by Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento (“Miller/Contento”) and Contento’s Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections (“Contento”) (both on CD-ROM from Locus Publications); from Mike Ashley’s article on Science Fantasy in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines, edited by Marshall B. Tymn and Ashley (Greenwood Press 1985) (“Tymn/Ashley”); and from Ashley’s recent histories of the SF magazines, The Time Machines and Transformations (Liverpool University Press, 2000 and 2005). Occasional references to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction are to the Second Edition by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (St. Martins, 1995), the latest available at time of writing. Also notable is Philip Harbottle’s Vultures of the Void: The Legacy (Cosmos Books, 2011). This book, very much expanded from an earlier, long out of print version, is a survey of UK SF publishing which emphasizes book publishing (especially paperbacks), but also includes useful information on the Nova magazines, some of which we have referred to.

7. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm . That URL takes you to the main page and you’ll have to navigate from there, but how to do so is self-explanatory. Among this site’s virtues is an artist index. Another handy source—and probably easier to use—is http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.

8. These publications have been scanned and made available on the web at http://efanzines.com/FR/index.htm (visited 10/19/11).

9. Gillings confirms that the “main contents” of the first two issues of Science-Fantasy came from the Fantasy inventory, specifically referring to the stories by J. M. Walsh, John Russell Fearn, and Christopher Youd. Walter Gillings, “The Impatient Dreamers,” Vision of Tomorrow, August 1970, p. 31.

10. This series of related stories, purportedly told in a tavern by one Harry Purvis, was collected as Tales from the White Hart (Ballantine 1957).

11. Those more sophisticated in publishing matters than I have explained that publishing two magazines at longer intervals can be economically preferable to publishing a single magazine at shorter intervals, since in the former case the issues will remain on sale longer. But Gillings says nothing of this concern, if indeed it was a concern.

12. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. Bull was the cover artist for a number of UK paperbacks and illustrated several books, and the “saucy” magazines published by Utopian Press, in the late 1940s, but little seems to be known about her career—if any—after the Nova covers. See http://bearalley.blogspot.com/2010/01/reina-bull.html and http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/19524 (both visited 12/4/11) for what is known about her.

13. Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (1961).