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

“American authors have a tendency to reduce life to round numbers.”

      This is fine if you like tension and pat answers, but if you don’t, English SF will be more to your taste. “It is calm, slow, relaxed. It does not search for The Answers. It attempts to explore human behaviour, and brings to its exploration a mature sense of values and a confident courage. It makes a realistic appraisal of the future undistorted by the infantile dreams and delusions that afflict America.” But that’s a bug as well as a feature:

      I have struggled through scores of English stories, chest deep in cliché, continually tempted to give up in disgust. Almost always I have been glad that I didn’t give way to the temptation because I have found, tucked away in the stereotype plot, a fresh and interesting idea. Just to balance the equation I might add that I’ve ripped through scores of American stories, enchanted by the air of excitement, only to be bitterly disappointed in the end to discover that they were all excitement and no idea.

18. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. Another disagreement from Broderick, who finds this rendering quite charming, in a comic strip way.

19. In fairness to McIntosh, I should add that the problems of plausibility and logic in his stories about which I repeatedly complain are much more pronounced in his stories for Science Fantasy. He contributed several much superior stories, and one excellent one, “Bluebird World,” to New Worlds during the 1950s, as described in volume 1 of our survey of that magazine, Building New Worlds.

20. Judith Merril (ed.), SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (Gnome Press, 1956).

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

      5: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 5 (ISSUES 13-15)

      Dated April, June, and September 1955, respectively, issues 13-15 confirm the impression of a magazine that has largely settled down in physical format and has also hit a stride in content—albeit a quirky and unpredictable stride, occasionally suggestive of the Ministry of Silly Walks. The magazine stays at 2/- and 128 pages. The advertising is limited to house ads except for about a third of a page in 13 and 14 for the Fantasy Book Centre, much reduced from their full back cover ads in earlier issues. The interior illustrations remain undistinguished, some reasonably competent and some pretty lame.

13 leads off with Quinn’s least interesting cover so far, a spaceship against a background of two-thirds-full Mars. Quinn’s weakness is precision of detail and his strengths are a pleasing balance of form and selection and vividness of color. This one plays to his weakness, looking overall pretty stiff and crude (look especially at the shadowed part of the planet and the terminator).22

14’s cover is uncharacteristically cluttered, of interest mainly for the trivial reason that the male figure in the foreground is said in a brief note to be a self-portrait of Quinn, who—like the protagonist of the story illustrated—is an Irishman.23 (More of that later.) In 15 he is back in form with a much better composed and more interestingly colored picture of an artist (clearly another self-portrait) at his easel, which also is another example of the recursive theme becoming common in this magazine: in the foreground is a stack of copies of Science Fantasy. They are all the same nonexistent issue of Science Fantasy, and moreover they bear the same cover painting that the artist is executing on his easel.

      §

      The lead novelette in 13—one of the longest the magazine has yet published, running fifty-two pages—is “In a Misty Light” by Richard Varne. This is a sort of proletarian space opera that reads like a truncated Ace Double, pretty entertaining if you don’t mind that it makes no sense at all.

      Sands is mourning his lost Laura, who mysteriously disappeared. An Earth spy on Mek, Sands receives from an extraterrestrial femme fatale a secret to be brought back to Earth (we don’t know what it is, it’s in a recording capsule), just before the secret police bust in and kill her. Sands escapes and stows away in a stolen spacesuit in the hold of an Earth-bound spaceship. When the cargo is loaded he is buried in grain. The Meks try to search and detain the ship, the Terran Consul gets in their way, the ship takes off. It apparently does not occur to Sands that it would have been simpler to give the Terran Consul the secret capsule.

      The Meks are in hot pursuit and eventually overtake the Earth ship, the Terrans resist their boarding, people are killed. Sands knows the Meks will find him in the cargo hold, so he skulks around the tailfins until he has an opportunity to shoot them. Meanwhile the Terran captain, who has been exposed as a coward and is humiliated, leaps across the void with a quantity of explosives and blows up the remaining Meks and their ship. It occurs to the now much reduced Terran crew that they have paid a pretty big price in deceased working stiffs to keep this man alive; just what’s in this information capsule worth getting excited about? So they put it in the information capsule reader. It’s the secret of immortality. Sands is quite chuffed. He ought to get a pile for it from the government.

      Back on Earth, he wakes naked in a gravityless metal sphere, and learns that the government doesn’t really need the secret of immortality. They’ve had it for 900 years and suppressed it because of its adverse effects on human evolution. Only a few can be trusted with immortality, and they join Earth Intelligence and are sterilized. That happened to his lost Laura; Sands, too, accepts the treatment. Then they tell him that Laura was extensively modified and sent to Mek to become...the agent who gave him the capsule with the secret of immortality, and was shot down in front of him. Fade to black. (“Consciousness went.”)

      Now wait a minute. Why did this secret agent disguised as an extraterrestrial summon the person she must have known was her old boyfriend to hand him a useless and superfluous secret to carry on a perilous journey back to an Earth government that already has it and is trying to suppress it? Ring Lardner had a line for it: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

      There is a recursive motif in this story too. When Sands goes to meet the mistress of disguise, the password is “Null-A” and she answers “Korzybski.” Later on, one of the characters utters the epithet “Great Ghu.” Could the whole thing be a spoof? If so, it’s beyond poker-faced.

      The lead novelette in 14 is a horse of a more florid color, “Sheamus” by Martin Jordan. Sheamus lives by himself, except for his ferret, and for all he knows he is the last human surviving. Michael Doonan, who reared him, has disappeared. A Martian describes the ridiculous catastrophe that has befallen the world:

      “It’s certain,” Dardanus was saying, “that the cobalt bomb, so incontinently exploded twenty-five years ago in the Pacific Ocean, robbed the planet of its atmosphere for at least thirty minutes. There’s no need for me to recall the causes—superheating of the ionosphere, followed by elevation of the heavier atoms and a partial band of vacuum encircling the globe. It’s possible that at least half the molecules existing at that time reached escape velocity and were lost into outer space....”

      Sheamus is an Irishman. We know this because the author tells us and also because Sheamus talks like this:

      “Now it’s a woman entire, all white and warm where a man seeks, and enough love in her, would make you sing for all with the taste of one only hour. And so fixed on a man’s comfort, with the table’s ribs boned white by the scrubbing and pots ashine better than beacons. Fine and busy she is, greeting a man with lips so clinging and red, you’d think she’d lain all day idle with wishing, yet there’s a stew on the hob to twitch the stone nose of the Bellacragh itself.”

      Sheamus has never actually met a woman, though he has made a clay figure of one (portrayed on Quinn’s cover), which is the only audience