Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967. Damien Broderick

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,