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

Backbones, however, are worn inside, not outside.” Returning to the former theme:

      Invention, then, cannot afford to lunge out wildly. If it goes far beyond the known, or at least the suspected principles of its age, the reader no longer has common ground with the writer... There is plenty of this kind of thing where the author has got himself into such a state of utter confusion that he falls back on aggressively tough remarks of great stupidity leading to a series of pointless fights to keep things going, and, unfortunately, it is this kind of thing also that has now come to be commonly thought of as the pattern of science-fiction.

      The object, then, of an annual Fantasy Award is to pick out the best exercises of controlled imagination—imagination working from data or theory within accepted limitations—work in which the writer has thought honestly, written carefully, and refused to abuse the logical implications of his theme.

      Up next, in 8, is Wilson Tucker’s “Science into Fantasy,” which points out that yesterday’s apparent science in SF (about Mars and Venus, e.g.) is today’s fantasy, and so are some of the assumptions in contemporary SF, like the physical ease of space travel. (“The daily visit to the water closet is another ingenious booby-trap.”)

      The Guest in 9 is J. T. McIntosh, whose “Something New Wanted...” is considerably more incisive than his stories of the time. “My experience of science fiction is that you, readers and editors of science fiction and fantasy magazines, are not really very keen on anything new, no matter what you say.” So how do we get new ideas? “...[S]omeone puts them in a story which does not go very far, but which is at least published somewhere. It comes in last or second-last in the magazine’s reader-rating, if any... Someone else sees the story and decides that it’s a good story gone wrong, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be used again the right way this time.” I.e., more conventionally. And so on. “You get what you deserve—but more than that, you get what you want. That’s why there are so few new ideas in science fiction.” McIntosh includes himself in this discussion, asking “is there anything new about these?” of a list that includes his One in Three Hundred. He does claim to have had a new idea once, but he won’t say what it is—he hasn’t been able to sell it, but still hopes to figure out how someday.

      §

      In other developments or non-developments, outside advertising continues at a low level. Most of the ads are house ads, which are growing: there are two-page spreads for Nova bookplates and big splashes for the Nova Science Fiction Novels, which fell flat despite big plans. (Five of them—including James Blish’s Jack of Eagles, Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels, and A.E. van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher—made it into print.)

      There is an ad in 7 for The Globe Tavern. It appears that proprietor Lew Mordecai, for whatever reason, left the White Horse for the Globe, so: “Habitués of the White Horse agree that sentiment goes deeper than panelled walls and, together with Mr. Mordecai,” have shifted the London Circle meetings to the Globe. A full page is devoted to this! Either that’s dedication, or the ad was free, or advertising space was really cheap in Science Fantasy. There’s also an ad for a “Fantasy Secretary”—apparently not a double entendre in that innocent age—who “will type, correct, and lay-out your Science Fiction story, technical article, etc., ready for you to submit to British and American professional markets.” And, most promisingly, half the back cover of 8 is an ad for the Royal Air Force Flying Review. New revenue frontier? No; this ad did not recur.

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

1717. Pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.

      4: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 4 (ISSUES 10-12)

Volume 4 (issues for September and December 1954 and February 1955) starts with two innovations: One is a new cover artist, Partridge, who quickly flew the coop. That’s no great loss. 10’s cover looks stiff and cluttered and the use of color is unimaginative compared to the usual Quinn.18 The other change is a story title and author on the cover. Since 3, the first Carnell issue, there had been no lettering on the cover other than title, issue designation, and price. There is a new printer, F.A.H. & Son of London being replaced starting with 11 by Rugby Advertiser of, you guessed it, Rugby.

      §

      Mike Ashley said in his Tymn/Ashley essay: “I don’t think there’s a bad issue from about 10 onwards.” Certainly in these issues the magazine definitely turns a corner. Though there is still material that is inane or trivial or both, overall the quality and the originality of the fiction is significantly improved and the magazine as a whole begins to read like something other than a collection of everybody else’s rejects.

The lead novelette honored on the cover of 10 is J. T. McIntosh’s “Five into Four,” and McIntosh’s thinking continues to rub me the wrong way.19 There’s a matter transmission accident, and five people set out from Mars to Earth but only four arrive. The negligent technician is brought up on homicide charges. But wait! The four lucky survivors all realize that they are subtly...changed. So the fifth traveler wasn’t lost. He was merely redistributed into the other four.

      Charges are dropped, since the alleged victim is still alive, sort of, and the survivors all commence new lives, the leaven of new personality being just what they needed. (There is no mention of any weight gain.) But the idea that a redistribution of matter would result in a redistribution of personality (or anything else other than a nasty explosion) is silly beyond words. It might be made to work in an outright fantasy, but not, as here, in any supposed context of science. Or as John Wyndham put it a few issues previously: “The unities of likelihood must be preserved to the best of the writer’s ability... Invention, then, cannot afford to lunge out wildly.”

      McIntosh also has the lead novelette in 11, “Live For Ever,” and here my beef is not so much with the premise (arbitrary and implausible as it is) but rather with its development. The secret of immortality is discovered, and it’s just a matter of modifying your ideas. If you can follow an argument, you can read the instructions in the newspaper and you’re in. (Too bad if your IQ is below 88, you’ll just have to die.) The story purports to follow the social consequences over a period of years, which initially feature more hate killings, not fewer, because it is now more worthwhile to kill an enemy, and more necessary to remove anyone who might be dangerous. There are more strikes and labor trouble, more traffic accidents, more people who won’t do their jobs, because now that everybody’s immortal, everybody is somebody and won’t be pushed around.

      But the violence eventually dies down because it’s mostly criminals killing each other and soon enough they’re mostly dead. The meek inherit. One can argue about how likely this scenario is, but the main problem is the author’s complete failure to address the other obvious and huge problems of humanity’s suddenly becoming immortal without becoming sterile: a population explosion starting very quickly and the precipitous collapse of the medico-thanatic-industrial complex with all its economic consequences. The complete neglect of these issues, in a story that purports to look panoramically at the results of immortality, is a vastly bigger plausibility problem than the flimsy starting premise, and a fatal one for me.

      The lead story in 12 (announced for 11, but postponed allegedly because of its length), is A. Bertram Chandler’s “The Wrong Track,” under the George Whitley pseudonym. This genial first-person story starts recursively at a session of the Circle of the Globe, the successor to the White Horse Tavern, and mentions John Carnell, Arthur Clarke, Peter Phillips, and Bertram Chandler as being in attendance. On the train home, the narrator and his wife feel odd, as if they are somehow facing or moving in the wrong direction. Trying to visualize things differently, they wind up in a series of parallel worlds. First the train is full of German newspapers and swastikas. They visualize themselves out of that and find themselves pulling into the Place de Trafalgar station (Napoleon won). Then