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

the true state of affairs while attending a SF convention in Manchester, and met Lees, who had coincidentally checked into the room across the hall while stopping to visit a friend en route to a journalistic assignment.

Also interesting are a couple of pretty good stories by J(onathan) F. Burke (1922-2011), “Detective Story” in 7 and “Once Upon a Time” in 8. The former is a good-natured private eye spoof (“Jackson and I were on Mars at the time. We had been dealing with that grisly little business that was known on the telecasts for a week or two as The Case of the Corpse in the Canal. It was all tied up—the case itself, I mean: the corpse was too widely distributed ever to be thoroughly tied up, though we had done our wretched best.”) The latter is about a couple of kids from a benign and enlightened psi-powered future who get whisked into the paranoid and manipulative past (still our future) by somebody there trying to compose avant-garde music on his electronic instrument. It’s sort of at the intersection of “Mimsy were the Borogoves” (Lewis Padgett)17 and “The Skills of Xanadu” (Theodore Sturgeon), and very pleasant.

      Brian Aldiss appears in 9 with “Criminal Record,” his first published story (not first sold) in the SF magazines, about some old record buffs who come upon a police recording about a criminal “smoof” accused inter alia of “timesliding,” and who make the mistake of placing an advertisement inviting the smoof to drop over. It is inconsequential but clever and well executed. Arthur Coster—who had two stories in the Nova magazines, and is the pseudonym of Richard deMille, who had four stories in assorted other magazines—contributes “Family Secret” (9), which in its way anticipates the Whitley Streiber school of alien abduction accounts, except it is the abductee’s wife who wields the rectal thermometer. Captain Semper, of the Air Force Flying Saucer Investigation, has bad dreams: he keeps waking up in the body of Omarpeff, who seems to be an alien crew member in Earth orbit (so the hints suggest) and is under interrogation for espionage, until his superiors finally believe him and sort of exorcise him. The story oscillates cleverly between the nightmarish and the domestic sitcom-ish. This, and Aldiss’s story, and the two Burke stories, display the kind of quirkiness and idiosyncratic voice for which Science Fantasy eventually became known.

      What is surprising in these issues is how unimpressive are the stories by writers who had big reputations at the time. E. C. Tubb has one fairly trivial story, “Unfortunate Purchase” in 7 (a kid buys what he says is a heat ray at a junk shop, dad sees whatever it is needs fixing, and it is a heat ray—a story much like Aldiss’s except less lively), and one silly one, “Occupational Hazard” in 9 (spacemen commiserating in a bar about their wives being pregnant—space travel makes you sterile).

      John Christopher’s “Death Sentence” in 7 starts as a sort of police-procedural about a space murder committed by the protagonist, but the real story is that in the absence of capital punishment, murderers are sent into the past, and he arrives just before the start of nuclear war. It’s well written enough, but gluing these pieces together doesn’t make them a story. A. Bertram Chandler’s “Six of One” (9) is a protracted pun story with a long windup and not much delivery.

      And J. T. McIntosh’s “Beggars All” (7) is another story that convinces me that either McIntosh had a thought disorder, or I do. Space explorers arrive on a planet where colonists have been isolated for centuries living hand to mouth. They beg piteously for whatever technological boons might be available, incurring the Earth folks’ disdain. Meanwhile, there’s a beautiful female crew member (named Pretzel, for no discernible reason) for whom the ship’s commander has the hots, but he has suffered what he thinks is humiliating rejection. There is a revelation of why the colonists behave as they do which is then connected up with the romantic dilemma and its solution in a way that is as utterly uninteresting as it is strained and tenuous.

      The remaining stories in these issues are mostly reshufflings of familiar material at various levels of competence. There is a pod of space epics. Lan Wright’s novelette “The Conquerors” (8) starts out in the territory of John W. Campbell’s “Forgetfulness” and Eric Frank Russell’s “Metamorphosite”: space explorers land on a planet of Sirius and find a road with a good-looking young woman sitting by it. She escorts them to her father’s house, where our boys learn that (handwaving) certain elements in the atmosphere destroy metal, so the natives have developed along very different lines from us. They teleport, don’t really have bodies but just make the humans think they do, and have already infiltrated Earth. But unlike the usual outcome in this subgenre, muscle wins out: one of the Earth humans reveals that their spacedrive, which is too big and heavy for their hosts to teleport, is decomposing fast, soon to blow up half the planet unless the aliens play ball with us. It is charmless but competently executed. The first of two stories by Margaret Lowe, “The Shimmering Tree” (8), takes place on a Venus mainly populated by poisonous plants. Exploring Earthfolk are disappearing, either not to return or to come back babbling about the “shimmering tree,” which turns out to be hypnotic and to enslave its catch. The protagonist gets away, but wonders if he really did get away as he awaits return to Earth. Smooth matter-of-fact writing mitigates the clichés, the protagonist’s rescue by his pet dinosaur aggravates them. Less well done is Peter Hawkins’ “Haven” (9), as clumsy and overlong as his earlier “Outsider,” about some Earthfolks who find an inhabited planet after their warship blows up; it will take a long time to get back to Earth and the war, and the question is which of the crew members will desert and go native and which will go back. The contrived ending spares the duty-bound captain from the choice.

      “The Trojan Way” (7) by Francis Richardson (pseudonym of Lawrence Edward Bartle & Frank H. Parnell) is a smoothly written piece in which the characters flee Earth’s velvet-gloved totalitarian Welfare State (sic) for a distant planet, cleverly avoid detection and repatriation, and then come to a pointless bad end. Francis G. Rayer’s “Space Prize” (8) is another tiresome exploit of the canny space trader Mactavish. P. W. Cutler’s “Take a Letter” (8) is an epistolary story involving a supposed government agency sniffing out extraterrestrials and a supposed solid citizen who is helping them out; whatever shred of cleverness it displays is smothered by excessive length and archness of tone and gimmick.

      There are two contenders for Prize Bummer in these issues. John Ashcroft, who had ten stories and a guest editorial in Carnell’s magazines and their nearest competitors, Nebula and Authentic Science Fiction, appears with his first story, “Dawn of Peace Eternal” in 8. This is an overwritten variant on “and then I woke up”—our hero is a captive of the terrible alien Thruna, but at the end we learn he’s really in a mental institution, and it’s just been mostly destroyed in a nuclear war. W. P. Cockcroft, a veteran of Wonder Stories, Tales of Wonder, and the 1939 fanzine version of New Worlds, contributes his last story, “Last Man on Mars” (9): an explosion kills everyone but the astronomer protagonist, who sits in his observatory drinking whiskey and listening to classical music and getting crazier with isolation, until a spaceship from Earth crashlands and the one surviving crewman lasts just long enough to tell him that war has started up on Earth again and that’s it for space travel and our hero’s prospects. It’s just as bleak as Ashcroft’s, but less noisy.

      §

      The Guest Editorials continue, and now they are beginning to display a bit more substance than before. John Wyndham is the Guest in 7 with “The Pattern of Science Fiction.” The blurb notes that Wyndham is “yet another member of the International Fantasy Award panel,” and I wonder if this is a talk he gave at an IFA function. He starts by mourning the low repute of the field and its name, though it’s hard to tell whether his complaint is more about perceptions of the field or the reality of large amounts of bad material. But some are keeping the faith. Which is?

      Well, primarily, perhaps, that [stories] keep the rules... One of them is that a tale must proceed from its premise with adequate reason and logic... [I]n the imaginative story there must be a wholeness and a logic which is not cut across either by silly assumptions used simply to make a situation more exciting, or by silly inventions called up on the spur of the moment just to get the characters out of a jam. The unities of likelihood must be preserved to the best of the writer’s ability.

      Now there is a nice line that articulates a point of