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

fashion, but let’s call it genetic engineering) into a three-gendered species. There are males, females who are really neuter, and Vivippies—short for viviparous—who are sexy but usually dumb. Reproduction is mostly by decanting. Nonetheless males and neuter females continue to marry, for professional reasons. In other futuristic developments, the Martians subsist on food pills, though they chase them with roughage.

      When the Martians find Sheamus, a female anthropologist—a Vivippy but of Neuter status, it says—goes to check him out. She travels in a personal conveyance called an Immuny (for Immunity Suit) but is forced to abandon it when Sheamus tosses his ferret inside. Hence she is exposed to Earth’s air, which contains a substance called Aphrophon that tends to restore conventional sexuality, and of course she finds Sheamus the answer to her newly constituted maiden’s prayers. A subplot has them outwitting the Martians’ robot chaperones.

      Shortly thereafter, cruising around the local islands, they find Michael Doonan, who never intended to abandon Sheamus but got marooned. The reason Sheamus talks like a stage Irishman is that he was taught by one: Doonan is a former actor who mitigated his forced post-catastrophe retirement by child-rearing according to Synge and Yeats. “You’re the last Irishman,” he tells Sheamus. “And I made you.” And a bit later: “The last Irishman? Maybe the first. Maybe you never really existed before outside dreams.” This prematurely postmodern motif is not elaborated. The Martian female and Sheamus are eventually captured and brought back to the Martians’ dome, where they promote a rebellion and a hole in the dome that exposes the Martians to Earth’s air and leads to a jailbreak of Vivippies. At story’s end, the latter are preparing to scour the Earth for more surviving Earthmen, whom they deem fitter company than the etiolated Martian men.

      To what extent this confection was meant as a serious and responsible deployment of genre materials (oh, stop), and to what extent a lampoon—and of exactly what—is impossible to tell. One suspects some lurking agenda related to Irish literary and cultural issues; one might think of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, but, one hopes, not for very long. Or maybe he’s just having on the whole of SF. ”Sheamus” is expanded—considerably, by three or four times—from a story in the UK Argosy (January 1954), titled “Sheamus and the Immuny” and labeled that month’s “Science Fiction Choice.” That version is quite rudimentary, starting with the arrival of the Immuny and mainly concerned with the struggle to escape the robot chaperones, with no sign of Michael Doonan or the loftier themes of identity and the like. It is the first of several Jordan appearances in that magazine; he had one other story in Science Fantasy, discussed earlier, and several in Authentic Science Fiction, but was gone from the field after 1955.

      The lead story in 15, John Brunner’s “The Talisman,” rolls along very pleasantly, slicker and more assured than either “Sheamus” or “In a Misty Light,” as long as you don’t stop to notice that it doesn’t make any more sense than they do. Sinclair, a struggling professional artist getting by on book jackets and the like, finds a strange-looking egg-shaped piece of bric-a-brac in a junk shop, takes it home, discovers his artist’s block is gone and his book jacket is turning into a masterpiece. He invites Shirley, an art critic he knows, to come look, and she’s deeply impressed. That night he finds a dead man with a terrified expression in his flat, and the talisman gone. By morning he can’t remember what happened (though he is sure something did), but the art critic’s card reminds him.

      He calls the police and asks for the inspector who came the previous night. They’ve never heard of Inspector Forster or of Sinclair. Sinclair calls Shirley, who assures him he isn’t crazy. A policeman arrives with a message from Inspector Forster and is puzzled at the account of Sinclair’s call. Shirley recalls the poet Christopher Bacon, first promising, then a genius, and whose work suggests he had the talisman for a while. Might the dead man and the missing talisman imply there were two intruders, one of them frightened to death? Sinclair finds that even without the talisman his artistic gift is still enhanced. He’s painting “alien dream-pictures”; Shirley sees that he has also painted a portrait of Christopher Bacon, whom he’s never met but dreams about.

      Off they go see Bacon, who is now in a mental institution, writing things that no one can understand—but they can easily communicate with him. He had the talisman for a year, was thoroughly genius-ified, but can’t convey what he perceives. Sinclair tells him he should stop trying to recapture what he had with the talisman; the talisman has changed him and he can resume being a genius in real time. (Unfortunately Shirley only touched it briefly so she has to stay second-rate.) Exeunt omnes, wondering where and with whom the talisman is now.

      Here’s the problem: half the story (the disappearance of the talisman, the dead man, Sinclair’s disappearing-then-returning memory, the is-he-is-or-is-he-ain’t police inspector) is a collection of dead ends and false leads that distract and create the illusion of something happening, but do not actually advance anything in the story, while the other half is just too damn easy. It’s the sort of thing a more mature writer might have turned into a much better and longer story—as Brunner did, many times, later on.

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      The shorter fiction is an equally mixed bag, though definite trends are in evidence. There is much less earnestly amateurish science fiction, a generally lighter touch, a bit of outright fantasy, and several stories that are just about paradigmatic for the title Science Fantasy. For example, A. Bertram Chandler’s slickly turned “Late” (13) is about a man working by himself at an orbital research station. There’s some commotion on Earth, the radio goes dead, and his relief doesn’t show up. The research station started life as a space vehicle, so he manages to improvise and get back to Earth, which he finds deserted by humans. He’s missed the Last Trump and been Left Behind. This appeared later in the US as “Late Arrival” in Imaginative Tales, March 1956.

      Then there’s “Dear Ghost” by Alan Guthrie (pseudonym of E. C. Tubb) (15), which posits what amounts to relativity fatigue. You can only travel superluminally for so many hours before you turn into an invisible ghost, and that goes for your spaceship, supplies, etc., too. The protagonist is recruited on a quasi-suicide mission to deliver vaccine to a plague-stricken planet: he’s probably too close to his retire-by date, the ship’s pretty old too, but he rises to the quasi-suicidal occasion. Once embarked, he discovers that the ship is haunted, apparently by the ghost of a female pilot, whose picture is lying around, though it must be from a long time ago. After delivering the vaccine and being hijacked by colonists trying to escape, he “goes ghost” and finds her waiting. She’s a babe! Of course.

      Now for some outright fantasy. Helen M. Urban’s “Pass the Salt” (13) reads like what might happen if a 1953 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction were shipwrecked on a desert island and had no one to talk to but itself for several years. Sample: “He didn’t know she was a witch. There was no sign on the back. No mark on the forehead or witchlike actions to shout a warning. A nice sort of girl who was fire and some refrigeration and a lot of looks. Not too expensive. Not inexpensive either, but just tolerable to the paycheck.” He begins to suspect when she teleports the salt into his hand. Nonetheless he marries her. She gets annoyed when an old girlfriend calls him up, and casts spells she can’t undo, causing him to look so weird he can’t go out in public. So he listens carefully when she talks in her sleep and figures out how to cast a spell neither of them can undo making her invisible. Helen Urban had half a dozen stories scattered around the SF magazines—including Fantasy & Science Fiction—from 1955 to 1962.

      Less annoying but also less interesting is Douglas West’s “The Dogs of Hannoie” (15), about a man whose car breaks down in a remote small town, where they revere a pack of semi-wild dogs who are allegedly clairvoyant and howl at distant catastrophes. Here’s the harbinger: “Le bombe atomic, it is not good, no?” The dogs are howling at nuclear tests on the other side of the world.

      That’s about as outright as the fantasy gets. Everything else has at least a veneer of rationalization. Jonathan Burke, noticeably improved, is back with “The Adjusters,” a member of the same subgenre as Theodore Sturgeon’s “Yesterday Was Monday,” Damon Knight’s “You’re Another,” and Philip K. Dick’s “Adjustment Team”: reality is maintained by a bureaucracy of dubious competence. Here it’s the Ministry of Adjustment, which alters the